American Renewal Fear And Loathing In A Mall Santa Uniform Spooky Laughs, Lusty Moms, and the Real Meaning of Christmas by James Bovard When I moved from the mountains of Virginia to Boston in 1977, it was just like the Beverly Hillbillies going to California except I didn’t have $80 million. I had dropped […]
In my wayward youth, I worked one season as a Santa Claus at a Filene’s Department Store in Boston. I wrote up that escapade for the Wall Street Journal in 2011. This piece is an outtake from Public Policy Hooligan – which includes some other details of that gig not fit for a family newspaper. The […]
I was sorting through the clutter on a kitchen desk this morning and stumbled across the letter reposted below. I wrote this shortly after my father had been diagnosed with the leukemia that would finish him off the following February. This was the kind of letter that it is easy to put off writing – […]
Technically, I was never an Easter Rabbit – at least not that I can remember. (Some Easter dinners involved way too much beer.) But when I lived in Boston, I served time as a Beatrix Potter promotion rabbit at a Filene’s Department store in nearby Manchester, New Hampshire. Except that the bizarre outfit looked more […]
There have been some screaming matches on Washington-bound flights between people coming for Trump’s inauguration versus the Women’s March the following day. A dozen years ago, I saw – well, maybe sparked – similar fracases on a flight from Washington to Dallas, Texas, two days after Bush’s second inaugural speech whooped up forcibly spreading freedom […]
The Northeast is getting whacked by a blizzard, bringing back memories of one of my favorite gigs when I lived in Boston in the late 1970s. Following is an excerpt from the Public Policy Hooligan chapter on “Playing Left Field in Boston.” That chapter begins, “My 1977 move to Boston was akin to the Beverly […]
Here’s a MP3 clip of a zesty December 12th interview on the Good American radio show talking about my gig as a Santa Claus. The host was Charles Rivers and it was broadcast on Cambridge/Boston’s WEMF Radio. We had a fine durn time. For the full story on the Santa gig and other misadventures, see Public Policy Hooligan.
