So the way my father used to tell it, my parents’ second date went something like this:
My father was positively smitten after his blind date with my mother, and wanting to spend as much time with her as possible made sure that the activity for date number two was an all-day event. This being Salt Lake City in the 1950s, a day of skiing was just the trick. He picked her up, and together they made their way up the winding Wasatch switchbacks in his new Ford Crestliner. At some little town along the way, probably Solitude or Brighton, my father pulled off the highway for gas and got… well, let’s just say he got turned around.
“The Second Second Date Story.” — Tod Kelly, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen
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He talked for a while about how difficult the first year after his divorce was and how it affected his work. “For one, I couldn’t really talk about my wife anymore. Not that I was ever really talking about her, exactly, but now I couldn’t do that at all; I couldn’t talk about the woman I was divorced from. She deserves her privacy. But that meant I had no idea where I was going to get material. It was like, ‘Oh, shit, there goes my act.’ ” He didn’t really go into why his marriage ended, except to say that they hadn’t been making each other happy for a while and finally had to admit it was done. “I just sat in my pajamas for like two years,” he said. “And I was nothing for my kids. And then eventually I climbed out of it and was just like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t fuck around like this.’ I focused on the kids, and they saved my life. I thought, ‘Everything’s based on them now.’ “
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Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,486 words)
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Oral history of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights.” “I was really worried. Connie and Kyle developed a very flirtatious, precocious relationship right off the bat. And Kyle, of course, is married. They announced they were going to drive to Austin together from L.A. to move out, and I threw myself in front of that bus. I said it was a horrible idea for multiple reasons. They ignored me. Connie dismissively told me she knew what she was doing and she didn’t need my advice. I was convinced they would be having some torrid affair by the time they reached Santa Fe and Kyle’s marriage would be over by the time they got to Austin. I was wrong about that, thank God.”
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Published: Jul 14, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,580 words)
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“Ever since I was 19 or 20, I knew that I would want to give myself over to one person in a formal way,” said Brandon A., who had been in two previous gay relationships lasting more than a year before meeting Brandon L. “And it didn’t even really matter to me if the politics of the world were going to bend in my favor so that my marriage was considered legal. Legal or not, I was going to have a commitment ceremony in front of the people who matter to me. I’ve always been oddly traditional about that.”
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Published: Apr 27, 2008
Length: 32 minutes (8,196 words)
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In 1918, during the fourteenth year of their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt, age thirty-three, discovered that Franklin, age thirty-six, was in love with her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Long afterward, Eleanor told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life. Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them.
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Published: Jun 9, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,117 words)
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Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows.
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Published: May 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,411 words)
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Until five years ago, Mel Gibson was one of the best-loved and best-paid talents in Hollywood, not to mention one of the town’s few real family men. How to explain the foulmouthed, violent bigotry that has since burst into public view, making him an industry pariah, even as his 26-year marriage imploded? With the help of Gibson’s friends—and his movies—Peter Biskind delves into the roots of a star’s divided life.
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Published: Feb 23, 2011
Length: 31 minutes (7,910 words)
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The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly
“He was part of [Blagojevich’s] inner, inner circle, about as close to the sun as you can get.”
Those days were gone. Now Kelly was holing up on and off in this trailer near 173rd and Cicero. His marriage was on the rocks—he was shacking up in a downtown condo with his girlfriend, Clarissa Flores-Buhelos, a married woman two decades his junior. The feds had indicted him three times in two years; he had pleaded guilty twice, and he was slated to go on trial with his old pal Blagojevich on the third set of charges. A decade or more of prison loomed. In fact, Kelly was expected to turn himself in within a few days. “My life is over,” he had admitted to reporters four days earlier, in a rare unguarded moment before the press.
By Bryan Smith, Chicago Magazine (2010)
City/Regional Magazine (CRMA) Award nominee
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(City Magazine (CRMA) Award nominee.) “He was part of [Blagojevich’s] inner, inner circle, about as close to the sun as you can get.” Those days were gone. Now Kelly was holing up on and off in this trailer near 173rd and Cicero. His marriage was on the rocks—he was shacking up in a downtown condo with his girlfriend, Clarissa Flores-Buhelos, a married woman two decades his junior. The feds had indicted him three times in two years; he had pleaded guilty twice, and he was slated to go on trial with his old pal Blagojevich on the third set of charges. A decade or more of prison loomed. In fact, Kelly was expected to turn himself in within a few days. “My life is over,” he had admitted to reporters four days earlier, in a rare unguarded moment before the press.
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Published: May 1, 2010
Length: 27 minutes (6,925 words)
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