Curley Qs
Book Archive - May to Sept 2023
Just down Main Street from Mystic Pizza above the Yellow Brick Mall, I wrote ads and catalogs to sell books.
The Ed(Curley)itor kept an index card for every book he read for pleasure: Title, Author, Synopsis, Publisher on front; why he liked it on back. In memory of Ed, here's some Curley Qs.
For september 2023
His Book
Tabloid City
Tabloid City
Tabloid City
Tabloid City
Tabloid City
by Pete Hamill
Novelist/Journalist Hamill gifts us with a gritty noir crime story with as many characters as fill the first eight pages of a typical New York City daily tabloid.
I chose this 2011 title to read again and cite for September as a tribute to decent and honest work this Labor Day.
This story is folded and wrapped as tightly as I used to tuck together and rubber band the one hundred and twenty copies of Newsday I delivered six days a week as a kid—my first introduction to the workplace.
Tabloid City is cast in the milieu of journalism threatened with the closing of a newsprint edition in favor of an all-electronic daily. Hamill heralds the hard-boiled work of scouring the streets of the city, and the raw open lives of its vulnerable citizens and notorious denizens, in the relentless pursuit of facts and truth—and the profession of communicating that reality to a faithful and trusting readership.
Just as he was all his journalistic life, Hamill the novelist is very intrigued by, and wants to honor, hard working people and their fate.
The cast of characters in Tabloid City includes, among many others:
> An aged artist-poet too blind to paint or read.
> An illegal immigrant office cleaner fired by the economic turndown of the recession.
> A journalism student, with unanswered resumes, who's waiting tables in the interim.
> An aspiring news reporter working his biggest story as his newspaper folds.
> A legendary city editor losing dear friends and a legacy job overnight.
> A Muslim NYC anti-terrorism detective bereft by his wife’s murder he must work to solve, for which his estranged militant son may be a suspect.
> A wheelchair-confined US veteran of two post-9/11 tours of desert duty negotiating the sidewalks of Gotham—homeless, angry, armed and seeking revenge.
> And too many others to catalog here—but who enrich the story and the plausible deniability of their fated connections and crossing paths that lead up to a startling climax.
Tabloid City
Author Interview
Hamill’s eye, ear, and writing style render all these characters into personalities who find themselves in a New York staggered over a decade by reverberations from trade center jetliners and Madoff trading jetsetters—down but not quite out for the count.
What Hamill so tangibly gives us this month of Labor Day is a taste of the job and a feel for the work. He structures for our consideration an enterprise that, at one and the same time, is fashioned by the newspaper women and men who do the work and that reciprocally serves to provide an environment that molds these craftspeople, individually and communally, into a relationship of purpose and meaningfulness.
As a tribute, Hamill reminds us of the legions who have gone before the characters in the novel by invoking—by name—many of New York City’s notable writers, editors, reporters, columnists, press operators and denizens of the journalism community he has known and worked with during his storied career.
I’ve twice now peeled back this engrossing tale page-by-page, all the while smelling the coffee and tobacco, the ink and whisky of the newsroom and the city beat. Both times the adrenaline of chasing down a story for an impending deadline has been transferred to the excitement of finding out what happens next, minute-by-minute, in the 48-hour news cycle set in type between the book’s covers.
This month I find myself surprised again, as I was back in 2012 when I first read Tabloid City, that the freshness of this page-turner hasn’t left my fingertips smudged by the afternoon edition’s ink.
© 2011 Little, Brown and Company, New York NY
Author Interview
Pete Hamill & Jimmy Breslin
Author Interview
Pete Hamill on Tabloid City
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/135837089/tabloid-city-spins-a-thriller-from-the-newsroom
Readers who are not familiar with living in New York City and its newspaper scene in its heyday in the second half of the last century will find the article and radio interview with Pete Hamill from NPR’s Fresh Air program quite fascinating.
This 2011 interview was occasioned by the publication of Tabloid City.
Two Giants of the Tabloids
Pete Hamill & Jimmy Breslin
Pete Hamill & Jimmy Breslin
These twenty minutes spent listening to the author is a stimulating addition to your experience of reading Tabloid City.
The change in journalism from that time to 2011 receives a telling description during the interview. Hamill’s reflections on the difference between journalism and fiction writing as he experienced them, and in general, are fascinating for readers and aspiring novelists.
So are his insights about drinking and creativity, some from his quintessential autobiography,
The Drinking Life.
Pete Hamill & Jimmy Breslin
Pete Hamill & Jimmy Breslin
Pete Hamill & Jimmy Breslin
In 2019 HBO released a documentary about two of the most notable tabloid journalists in the history of New York City, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.
Its title is
Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.
The Atlantic magazine featured an article and review of the movie in its January 30, 2019 issue. It is available on line at the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/breslin-and-hamill-deadline-artists-review/581527/
Breslin and Hamill:
Deadline Artists
The documentary features Breslin a little more than Hamill, but does both of them balanced justice.
Three outsized characters that share top billing with them are:
journalism and the new writing style Hamill and Breslin brought to the tabloids,
news stories of the 1960s through to the turn of the century,
and the people of New York City these two men heralded.
The film provides lessons in history, the lives and work of these two men, and the craft of writing stories and columns they practiced, honed, and left as a legacy to the next generation of newspaper and e-journalism practitioners.
The opening paragraph of the article in The Atlantic sums up why Labor Day is an appropriate time for this website about reading and writing to focus on Hamill’s novel and journalism:
“Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill represent, various interviewees attest, the last of their kind: journalists writing for and about the working man, self-educated voices for New York’s disenfranchised, reporters who also sometimes managed to be poets.
My short Stories for September
Two Stories I Wrote
Two Stories I Wrote
Two Stories I Wrote
Reception
Two Stories I Wrote
Two Stories I Wrote
Left behind by the wedding party and relatives attending the reception, she is nameless to them now. And so, for us also. She remains a pronoun, never named. All we know of her is her work product. Beautifully calligraphied place cards for a table at which she will not be seated. Craft divorced from the craftsperson. Implausible and impossible. How sad. Except for her self-worth that carries her above it all—within the dignity of her work.
Work Ethic
Two Stories I Wrote
Work Ethic
S ________ is all we know him by. His impersonal ethic of “work first and only” deprives him of any more specific recognition. S______ for the curves in the road between home and work. S _____ for the speed of rushing from one thing to the next, without giving us a feel for his prioritization of either end of that travelog. S ______ for slaughter without sympathy.
For August 2023
Her Book
The Lost Wife
The Lost Wife
The Lost Wife
The Lost Wife
The Lost Wife
A NOVEL
by Susanna Moore
Susanna Moore has written several cutting-edge novels. This one takes its sharpness from the currency of the issue—how cultures can choose to clash or coëxist—and the heroine’s (Sarah’s) counter-cultural perceptions and attitudes.
Contrary to the prevailing 1852 governmental, military, and societal abhorrence of the Dakota Sioux tribe, Sarah understood and defended the indigenous people’s position that they were betrayed into poverty and abandoned to likely starvation because the US reneged on its treaty obligations.
Through her extensive research and reading, author Moore fills in Sarah’s back story beginning in Providence (RI) as an abused spouse, right through her runaway journey via the Erie Canal and various overland routes to Minnesota.
Re-named Sarah Brinton for the sake of the novelization and to allow room for the author’s creative imagination, the story stays very true to the essence the real-life Sarah Browne Wakefield.
In an interview with podcaster Zibby Owens, Ms. Moore described her dual motivation for retelling this story: her heightened identification with outsiders and her anger at witnessing how poorly women have been, and continue to be, treated by society and many times even by those closest to them.
Interviewer Owens could not resist remarking that the book was written during Ms. Moore’s Covid-caused captivity in her New York City home. Ms. Moore’s gentle remonstration underscores her sensitivity that hers was a choice, whereas many women captives over time do not have such an option to exercise. I found it an unplanned insight into the mind and heart of the author.
============
[ Zibby Owens's podcast on Fathom is
Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books ]
The Lost Wife
Her Inspiration
The Lost Wife recounts Sarah’s six weeks of almost always being on the move with her captives, often running barefoot or moccasined, while carrying her infant daughter and leading her four-year-old son by the hand, through the tall prairie grasses of Minnesota, to keep up with the mobile Dakotas, either avoiding or hiding from either federal troops or rival tribesmen.
Her story reveals many of the lifestyle ways of the Dakota Sioux, as Sarah assists her captives to keep herself and her children alive, in hopes of rejoining her missing husband. Ms. Moore lets us see Sarah working side-by-side with the older tribal women long into the night to prepare food, to feed warriors returning after nightfall or getting ready to ride off before dawn raids. The book draws vivid verbal pictures of the way tepees were erected and deconstructed and required for living on the plains, and how they were the physical embodiment of family organization within the tribal camps, and the Dakota Sioux social structure and recognized norms of acceptable behavior.
All throughout the novel, Moore skillfully makes sure we readers palpably internalize Sarah’s anxiety at being rejected by other Caucasian and mixed-race captives—at the same time she fears her life threatened by rival tribesman detesting her protection by friendly Sioux, who are returning kindnesses Sarah and her physician husband showed them in prior years.
Author Moore creates an honest empathy for her character. She presents a woman who lies—if only by omission, her character concedes—about her past in the east in order to settle out west and who is believed she is whom she says she is. Only ironically to discover, at the end of her captivity, that when she finally tells the truth of her ordeal, no one will believe her. The novel intensely conveys the heartache Sarah suffers as she tries and fails to save Chaska, her Sioux protector, from the vengeful military hangman’s noose and likewise confronts her lingering reputation as a traitor and willing accomplice in the Sioux uprising.
© 2023 Alfred A Knopf
New York, NY
Her Inspiration
Six Weeks in Sioux Tepees
Her Inspiration
19th century photo of
Sarah F Wakefield
(public domain
as on Wikipedia)
Six Weeks in Sioux Tepees
Six Weeks in Sioux Tepees
Six Weeks in Sioux Tepees
A Narrative of Indian Captivity
Second Edition
by Sarah F. Wakefiled
I was so captivated (ironically enough) by Susannah Moore’s novel that I needed to pursue the historical eponym at the center of her tale. Historian and author June Namais has provided an extensively documented book built around a reprinting of the second edition of Sarah Wakefield’s first-person narrative of her captivity and its aftermath. Reading this account is astounding, in two regards. First, it is amazing to read such a fluid and fast-moving story written in 1864 that is still fresh, urgent and modern. Second, it is startling to discover how Ms. Moore has created such a faithful retelling of not just the facts of the captivity, but the feelings of this actual experience in her twenty-first century novel.
1864 Memoir
Six Weeks in Sioux Tepees
Six Weeks in Sioux Tepees
I recommend that anyone as taken by Ms. Moore’s novel as I was, should pursue this original text, in this edition, readily available as an eBook for most electronic readers.
Students of Americana, indigenous peoples of North America, and societal treatment and self-identity of women will find Ms. Wakefield’s narrative and Ms. Namais’ annotations and introduction absolutely spell-binding.
© 1864 Argus Books and Job Printing Office
as presented in© 1997 e-Book Edited, Annotated, and With an Introduction by June Namias. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK
============
Ms. Namais is also author of:
White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier
MY SHORT STORY FOR AUGUST
What I Wrote
What I Wrote
What I Wrote
The Letters
What I Wrote
What I Wrote
Captivity narratives are not found in the sole domain of the nineteenth century in the USA, nor are they limited to the North American milieu.
This month's original short story, The Letters, is set in 1979 in New York.
A family of three can not understand why they have been subjected to kidnapping and ransom demands.
What I Wrote
They find themselves caught between an unspecified assembly of terrorists sympathetic to the Middle East and a disgraced FBI agent with a super-ego and a need to prove he is still an apex level law enforcement agent.
Are the Dwights's choices to rely on their own family instincts going to save them or prove fatal?
More for a wonderful summer
July 2023
I fundamentally believe that if we only had the capacity for good, and we only had the tendency toward hope, then these realities—good and hope—would be less valuable.
Good and hope are essentially valuable only because there is a possibility for evil and despair.
I see things in pairs—and set out decades ago to construct Tails and Heads accordingly. That story collection bears witness to the belief that we choose good and hope and prepare ourselves to express them, by the way we live our lives up to those moments in life when we have to opt for the good and for hope. That's what the stories portray.
To demonstrate this recently, I named two short story collections for you this summer season—one last month I found wanting and one this month I wanted to find, and did. Last month’s stories were all debut publications by “emerging” writers. This month's book has some new writers and some “masters.”
My paired original short stories this month were envisioned as brief partners to finish my collection—stories 23 and 24 of the once-conceived bound book. As with the rest of the pairs of stories, the first is a Tails Tale of failure and the second is a Heads Tale of success; where failure and success are defined, respectively, as not opting for good and hope, or for choosing the good and hope. The order of Tails or Heads is flipped from the norm so the good and the hope are what prevail in the end, and initiate a new beginning.
Happy reading. Enjoy your summer.
Happy summer 2023
Best 2022 Short Stories
What They Wrote
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES - 2022
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES - 2022
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES - 2022
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES - 2022
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES - 2022
Stories Selected by
Andrew Sean Greer, editor
with Heidi Pitlor
The twenty stories in this month's book were first published in magazines and literary journals between January 2021 & 2022.
That was the same year the ten stories in last month’s collection debuted—a total of thirty contemporaneous stories.
I’ve already commented on last month’s. I was saddened by that book—as I often am by my Tails
Tales.
This month’s selected book makes me feel better—as my Heads Tales usually do.
Contributing Writers
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES - 2022
Introduction & Foreword
The twenty stories selected from USA and Canadian Magazines were by these writers:
Leslie Blanco
Yohanca Delgado
Kim Coleman Foote
Lauren Groff
Greg Jackson
Gish Jen
Claire Luchette
Elizabeth McCracken
Alice McDermott
Kevin Moffett
Gina Ochsner
Okwiri Oduor
Alix Ohlin
Kenan Orhan
Karen Russell
Sanjena Sathian
Erin Somers
Héctor Tobar
Meghan Louise Wagner
Bryan Washington
Introduction & Foreword
My Reflections on Writing
Introduction & Foreword
Here’s two articulate statements of why I liked this collection, quoting the book’s foreword and introduction.
Foreword
- Heidi Pitlor
“Great writing obliterates cynicism. In the hands of a writer comfortable with their own vulnerability, voice, and humanity, lassitude tends to fall away.’
Introduction
- Andrew Sean Greer
The language in which it is told.
I want to repeat that because it’s something so easily lost in our conversations about storytelling. We are rightfully interested in what the story is about, but equally important (and mostly unexamined) is the language in which it is told.
Because being a good storyteller is more than having a good story; we all know this. It is knowing how to tell it. The right words for this story. That is what I want to celebrate in the authors of this collection.”
In their own words ...
My Reflections on Writing
My Reflections on Writing
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
The Contributors’ Notes section of this book is a treasure chest for readers and a goldmine for writers to mine.
All twenty of the short story writers share the background of how their stories came about.
I decided to do the same this month, in my section below.
My Reflections on Writing
My Reflections on Writing
My Reflections on Writing
There is a moment in one of the stories that makes me think about writing as a pre-and-post-occupation.
In her story “The Souvenir Museum,” Elizabeth McCracken describes a young man’s (Leo) reflections on his trip to museums in Denmark with his mother:
A splinter of Viking armor was more interesting than the whole suit, to Leo . . . entire objects told the entire story, and therefore belonged to everyone. Looking at a piece of a thing, he might think, deduce, discover something nobody ever had, which was all he wanted in the world.
I underlined this and came back to it at story’s end. Reading this made me think it was a great description of what I feel about writing of things that catch my eye—on someone else’s pages,
of people that I meet and see, and the glories on the palate of God’s great earth.
My short stories for July
Embers
Bedtime Story for Campers
What I Wrote
At the end of my high school years, I was fortunate to journey in my red Volkswagen
with my brother—from NY’s Long Island up through the north country to Montreal
(caught a Montreal Expos game at the old Jarry Park),
back through upper Maine and through Fort Kent into the Atlantic Provinces. Nova Scotia was gorgeous.
We drove in one day on the return trip from Peggy’s Cove (NS) to the easternmost point in the USA, Quoddy Head, ME;
in the fog and rain.
It was crossing Maine that we drove in at dinnertime hoping to camp out in the woods. We asked the property owner, “What does it take to camp here overnight?” He opened his kitchen screen door and intoned, while chewing supper: “One dollar and sixty-three cents.”
Later that night this story took place.
Bedtime Story for Campers
Bedtime Story for Campers
Bedtime Story for Campers
This second campfire tale is a total fabrication.
No lie.
Fabricated from interwoven threads of our family history. Fabricated out of alloyed experiences that bond together our faith, our love, our heritage. They are as strong as structurally elegant, implanted, titanium joints.
From backyard sleep outs—even the one that started in a tent and ended up, during a thunderstorm, in a van—to a Boy Scout High Adventure week in the Great Smoky Mountains,
I’ve been blessed over the years to be in the great outdoors with our youngest son.
For June 2023 - Short Stories for Summer Reading
Their Work
Best Debut Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize
Best Debut Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize
Best Debut Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize
Best Debut Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize
Best Debut Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize
Catapult publishes the bound book of stories each year in September, so I am again “behind a year” with this selection.
The format of the book gives you an editor’s note from the publication in which the story first appeared.
I find it intriguing to learn the editors’ rationale for picking a certain submitted story for publication to begin with, and secondly decide to present
it as the one their magazine or literary journal has chosen to offer PEN America
for consideration as a “best-of-the-year.”
The final hurdle these stories cleared was being chosen from among all those “bests” by the Dau Prize judges.
The book’s informative Introduction provides you with insights into what’s in store for you, the scope and variety of the twelve stories.
A list of participating source publications is provided for interested readers—and other, yet-to-be-discovered, “emerging writers.”
These dozen stories are as diverse in genre, locale, theme, temperament, style, and interest as the authors are themselves.
Protagonists and antagonists abound:
Attending a friend’s wedding during civil strife in a caste-driven society.
Pursuing performance art as a creative or vandalizing act.
Grieving a parent’s death while coping with a first job and sexual initiation.
Struggling with Chinese heritage and American identity on a first visit to China.
Coming of age through clandestine, rebellious arson in drought-stricken Australia.
Achieving excellence at a local bowling alley to escape a divorce-stressed home.
Deserting an unsuspecting husband away on a solo camping weekend.
Succumbing to a brutalizing zoonotic fantasy and becoming a chicken.
Trekking to photograph exotic locations and discovering a toxic wasteland.
Spiraling into anorexia lustily amid dominating and eventually dehumanizing sex.
Pursuing physical beauty as an-end-itself that can only conclude in ugliness.
Time-traveling to experience life along a shrinking, then expanding universe.
Best Debut Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize
Reading this book made me extremely sad. The prevailing world view of these writers is largely egocentric nihilism. What is stunning to me is that so many editors and judges found these to be the best stories they could find. I am left wondering to where it is that these creative wordsmiths are emerging. Hopefully out of wherever they
inhabited while these short stories were being dreamed and crafted.
As I have a few times in the past, this book is set forth as a cautionary tale and not
as a recommendation of excellence.
Edited by
Yuka Igarashi
Sarah Lyn Rogers
Judges
Sabrina Orah Mark
Emily Nemens
Deesha Philyaw
The 2022 Winners featured in
this volume are:
Edward Salem
Erin Connal
Yasmin Adele Majeed
Patch Kirschenbaum
Oyedotun Damilola Muees
Catherine Bai
CK Kane
Cal Shook
Preeti Vangani
RZ Baschir
Seth Wang
Emma Shannon
A short author bio of sorts follows each story.
june 2023 - Three stories of action and adventure
My Stories
My Stories
My Stories
Three stories offer homage to a classic collection from 60 years ago --
Great Tales of Action and Adventure (1963)
edited by George Bennett
Fire
My Stories
My Stories
Can an eleven year old boy save his father and brother from a raging North Sea winter storm,
while mourning his dear
grandfather who dies trying?
June 2023 - 1
Air
My Stories
Water
How does a ruthless 17th century oriental pirate survive an ocean-going exile, with his siblings' blood and that of countless mariners on his hands?
June 2023 - 2
Water
Three Writing Styles Fit the Characters & Stories
Water
Will a deep space species preservation mission succeed in finding a new world to colonize
in a distant galaxy's glorious blue watery planet?
June 2023 - 3
Three Writing Styles Fit the Characters & Stories
Three Writing Styles Fit the Characters & Stories
Three Writing Styles Fit the Characters & Stories
FIRE - Short sentences mirror an 11 year-old's fragmented thoughts, memories, and deeds -- since he's not yet mature enough to see things together in perspective.
AIR - Longer sentences, some run-ons, to reflect the constant movement in the oceanic setting. Nothing happens on land to offer stability and the pirate's clothing billows constantly in the breezes.
WATER - Varied sentence lengths for shifting moods to pace how our world looks to alien eyes desperate for a new home. Long held hopes raised and dashed by unexpected surprises and sudden fears.
Elemental Series
Three Writing Styles Fit the Characters & Stories
Three Writing Styles Fit the Characters & Stories
The fourth mate of this series was presented in July of last year (2022).
Earth tells the story of a contemporary Mayan whose existence is threatened by a southern California gang war.
Though there are different paradigms for what constitutes the elements in today's sciences, the classical mediterranean philosophies looked to earth, air, water and fire. These four stories worked around that model, with apologies to 2023 Disney films and scientists laboring long hours with plasmas and other new and exotic forms of energy.
May 2023
My Story
Class Reunion
Class Reunion
Class Reunion
Class Reunion
Class Reunion
A distracted driver almost runs down Bill Stokes outside New York City’s Penn Station one late September morning in sunny 1988. Recently divorced Gloria Riding, driving her old family station wagon, construes the accidental meeting to be providential. She was hoping the illusive Stokes, long unheard from or even about, would somehow show up the next day for their twenty-year class reunion she will host at her Connecticut home.
Class Reunion
Now she could just give him a ride. Neither of them was ready for the fraught day ahead. Nor could either have imagined what lay ahead in the long night that followed.
FOR MAY
His Book
Chances Are . . .
Chances Are . . .
Chances Are . . .
Chances Are . . .
Chances Are . . .
by Pulitzer Prize Winner
Richard Russo
Russo introduces us to his “three musketeers,” Lincoln, Teddy, and Micky. These three mid-sixty-year-old friends meet at Lincoln’s family summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard in 2015.
It has been forty-four years since their college graduation. All three men reminisce about their absent co-ed friend, Jacy, the most socially-entitled fourth side of their friends' square. All three collegians had a crush on Jacy during the school years at their Alma Mater, the fictional Minerva College in Connecticut.
We learn Jacy went missing at the end of the four seniors’ post-graduation summer of ’69 weekend gathering at the same island retreat, also then owned by Lincoln’s family. The men’s love for Jacy, and the decades-long unsolved disappearance, undergirds the entire tale.
Russo takes us from Jacy’s sorority house where all three undergrads worked the food service, to the night of the first Vietnam War era draft lottery in 1969. With three different fates, prescribed by low (Mickey), middle (Lincoln) and high (Teddy) draft numbers, the adult lives of the trio followed disparate and separate paths. The novel opens as they arrive on the island for their twenty-first century reunion, having not seen one another for several years.
Chances Are . . .
Reunion Films
Chances Are . . . eventually reveals Jacy’s fate, with reader-engaging twists and turns.
The novel, however, remains focused on bearing witness to the vagaries and constants of life-long associations, graced with the blessings and rewards of evolved friendships. At story’s end, readers close the book awed by the kind of camaraderie this class reunion has an unwavering way of resurfacing in the capable hands and mind and pen of this Pulitzer Prize-wining author.
© 2019. Alfred A Knopf, New York NY
Reunion Films
Reunion Films
Reunion Films
Richard Russo is no stranger to film. He has written screen scripts and has had novels scripted by others into successful films and TV mini-series. The reunion season also brings to mind many people’s favorite, or begrudgingly recognized, iconic movie treatments of reunions.
They run the gamut of genres. There’s John Cusack and Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), with a great cameo by Dan Aykroyd. Perennial favorite Alan Alda causes many film fans to reminisce about Same Time Next Year (1978), with Ellen Burstyn or The Four Seasons (1981), with Carol Burnett. And most of the Baby Boomers I asked this month to tell me what film came to mind cited 1983’s The Big Chill and its all-star, breakout cast.
When I polled Gen Xers, they picked Firefly Lane and Taye Diggs’ The Best Man franchise,
Reunion Films
Reunion Films