A crucial component of the storyteller’s craft is placing actions and details in a specific order. For most stories, this is pretty straightforward: start at the beginning, then tell the events in the order they …
November 5, 2019
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Stories by Micha Barnes
The Last Five Years: fragmented like Homer’s The Odyssey
Intimate Apparel: sewing your life savings into a quilt
There are inherent tensions between how we are documented and how we view ourselves. We can hear this any time we listen to our own voices in an audio recording. Is that what I really …
October 16, 2019
The way Lester Bangs loved it
“It’s just a shame you missed out on rock ’n’ roll,” a 1973 Lester Bangs tells an emerging music writer he’s taken under his wing, “It’s over. You got here just in time for the …
September 25, 2019
And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little: never-marrieds unite! Or don’t
What does society feel about unmarried people over the age 45? For most of our nation’s history, the majority of the population has been married, so the democratic question has typically been: how do married …
September 11, 2019
The Coast Starlight: journey over destination
Few modes of travel better exemplify the aphorism, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” than a train ride. America’s interstate rail system is neither faster nor cheaper than air travel, and if you take …
August 28, 2019
The scandalization of Steve Martin’s The Underpants
The German satire Die Hose, by Carl Sternheim, depicts the aftermath of a Dusseldorf hullabaloo surrounding a lady’s undergarments having fallen down, in public. Predictably, some men are scandalized by the perceived immorality of it. …
August 7, 2019
Whitesnake’s lonely street of dreams
“Hanging on the promises in songs of yesterday,” the verse goes, “I know what it means / To walk along the lonely street of dreams.” "Lonely street of dreams" is hardly great poetry, and it’s …
July 31, 2019
Dorothy’s alluring journey in the Wizard of Oz
Over the past century plus, a number of bright minds have interpreted Wizard of Oz through the lens of late 19th-century politics, suggesting Frank L. Baum’s 1900 book (along with its subsequent stage and film …
July 24, 2019
Summer showers with Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Old Globe
The Old Globe Theatre should probably be called the Old Globe Theatres. Three different venues make up the complex, two of them indoor. It’s the outdoor stage, the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, that hosts the …
July 3, 2019
Mel Brooks’ The Producers: a parodic and skewed risk-reward scenario
“Creative accounting” sets up the premise of the Mel Brooks movie turned musical The Producers, the story of two men who stage a Broadway musical designed to fail. The parodic idea is that the risk-reward …
June 26, 2019
Little Shop of Horrors: Roger Corman’s best B movie
Like the undercard of a title fight, a B Movie in the 1930s was the show nobody had come to see, but watched anyway because it was included with the price of the ticket. Thus, …
June 12, 2019