Annie Andersen thought that she was pretty bad, but when she was cast in the Oxygen Network’s hit reality television series Bad Girls Club, she realized that there’s bad — and then there’s really bad. Annie shared a few of…
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Mistakes Were Made: Cookie DuBois, “Space Dracula”
Do you believe that some cosmic force holds us accountable for all of our past behavior? That if we’re good, we’ll be rewarded, and if we’re bad, we’ll be punished? “Mistakes Were Made” storyteller Cookie DuBois’s story, “Space Dracula,” made…
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Under the Influence: John Durbin, “From the Ground Up”
I can’t remember the last time that I made a New Year’s resolution, but I imagine that it had to do with something trivial. Maybe I resolved to lose a few pounds, to spend more time reading or to save…
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Chuck Smith, “Squirrel, Interrupted”
The line between dedication and obsession is thin. Sometimes, we’re quite far over on the obsession scale; and looking back, we’re not quite sure how we became obsessed with something like, say squirrels. This week, we wanted to take a…
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New ‘Round Here: Randall Ross, “The Articulated Dream”
The idea of a permanent home – a place that becomes a part of your identity – has always felt totally unnatural to me. It’s hard to imagine early humans having any desire to “settle down,” what with everything that…
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New ‘Round Here: Limbert Fabian, “Relocation Experiments”
What if you met a beautiful person at a party, swept them off of their feet and the two of you eloped to a remote city in Mexico with 121 churches and wild packs of chihuahuas roaming the streets? “New…
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Brush With Fame: Judy Williams and Orson Welles
Even as we enter the final stages of preparing for our third live event, “Under the Influence,” Sara and I are beginning to dabble with ideas for our fourth event (I know, it’s awful, we can’t help ourselves!). That event,…
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New ‘Round Here: Pamela Raintree, “Signs”
On January 31, 1996, professional sign painter Pamela Raintree pulled into Shreveport, Louisiana in a battered Datsun station wagon, with $1.20 in her pocket and a quarter tank of gasoline. Her plan was to get to the Gulf of Mexico…
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Mistakes Were Made: Chris Kirkley, “Tinker and the Saturday Night Car”
In rural communities, the automobile isn’t a convenience, it’s a necessity. We depend upon our cars and trucks for survival and begin to regard them almost like family members, since there’s no public transportation and the commute to work often…
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Mistakes Were Made: Brad Campbell, “The Real Dill”
Vacations, in my experience, are never what you want them to be. We front-load these brief respites from our working lives with so many expectations that they could never possibly meet them all. “Mistakes Were Made” storyteller Brad Campbell’s “The…
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