One Thing or Another Podcast: An Interview with Author Ann Aptaker
It’s a great pleasure to welcome author Ann Aptaker for the latest One Thing or Another interview. Ann is the author of the Cantor Gold crime series, featuring the inimitable Cantor Gold. Ann is also an art writer for various New York clients, and an adjunct professor of art and art history at the New York Institute of Technology. Join us as we discuss writing, lesbian fiction, Ann’s career, her creative process and much more.
Lammy and Goldie winner, native New Yorker Ann Aptaker’s first book, Criminal Gold, was a Golden Crown Literary Society’s Goldie Award finalist. Her next book, Tarnished Gold (book two in the Cantor Gold Crime Series), was honored with a Lambda Literary Award and a Goldie Award, the only book in the Lesbian mystery category to win both awards for the same book. The third book in the series, Genuine Gold, won the 2018 Goldie Award. Book four, the recently launched Flesh and Gold, is the newest in the ongoing series.
One Thing or Another: Chew On That
By Mark McNeaseIt’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
“You can miss the color of someone’s eyes, or the shape of their nose, but a grin with no teeth dares you to ignore it.”
You know you’re getting older when half your teeth have abandoned you, leaving your mouth like homeowners who’ve found a better neighborhood. You want them to stay. You offer incentives (“No more sugar, I promise!”), but they leave anyway, wiggling their way from the root up until they either fall out or get pulled out by a dentist who’s been lecturing you for ten years to use an electric toothbrush.
One Thing or Another: Cruise Control (All Aboard!)
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
“There’s something very depressurizing about boarding a cruise ship. The daily, mundane, pressures of life that bear on you the rest of the time are suddenly lifted, falling away like a jacket let slip from your shoulders.”
Spending time on a floating hotel was never high on my wish list. I no more imagined going on a cruise than I imagined climbing the pyramids at Machu Picchu or hiking the Appalachian Trail. I didn’t have anything against them, they were just things other people did, feature stories in travel magazines I read when I was still flying by choice and not necessity. Then I met the man I’ve spent the last twelve years with, and cruising entered my life. That can happen when we enter relationships: if you enjoy the unexpected, meet the person of your dreams.
My first cruise was just three nights over a Labor Day weekend, out to some cay and back. I didn’t just like it. I loved it. Cruising quickly became a favorite way to vacation for me. I also like spending nights in hotels for some of the same reasons: no chores, no clean up, no appointments, unless it’s a massage or a shave/facial combination. Cruising is that times twenty, with the added bonus of feeling young at fifty-nine on a ship of retirees.
One Thing or Another: Not So Fast (Age and the Morning Routine)
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
I hope my morning routine hasn’t stretched to an hour when I’m seventy, and I certainly hope I can accomplish it unaided. I’m trying.
I used to be able to get up, shower, dress, and ready myself for another day faster than the opening theme song to the morning news. By the time the anchors announced the top stories, I was pouring my second cup of coffee and adjusting my tie, fully prepared to meet the demands of a stalled career.
How does anyone without superpowers accomplish this? Was there a phone booth in the bathroom, into which I hurried one minute and emerged from the next scrubbed and presentable? Or was it youth itself? A youth that extended into my fifties before vanishing into the mists of a morning routine grown longer by the year?
One Thing or Another: Not Worth the Weight
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia.
My Amazing Weight Loss Journey began five years ago. With great effort and dedication, I’ve managed to shed four pounds since that first fateful calorie count. How did I achieve this feat of negligible weight loss? I never thought you’d ask.
It all started with a now-defunct company called Lean Chefs. For a reasonable fee, they delivered a day’s worth of prepared food while we slept: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two yummy snacks. The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia. I would peer into the corridor first thing in the morning and there it was, a small black package at my feet, looking like something that might require a call to the bomb squad under normal circumstances. Inside it was the coming day’s food with an ice pack and an unspoken promise: eat these healthy provisions, and only these, and miracle weight loss will occur.
One Thing or Another: All Boxed Up
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Who doesn’t want to gaze at a baseball cap or coffee cup forty years after buying it and remember that special vacation?
How many boxes does it take to hold a life? It’s a question many of us ask when we find ourselves moving from one home to another. A home is in many ways who we are: that place where we’ve spent most of our time, where we’ve created identities linked to the rooms in which we sleep, eat and bathe, and where we contemplate our daily existence. Then a new phase beckons, a new adventure, and we see it all in front of us, boxed and packed to be taken by car, truck or hand cart to the next phase, the next identity with a few revisions.
One Thing or Another: The Kids Are Not All Right
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns …
Not long ago I was among those crusty older people who bemoaned and occasionally belittled younger generations for effectively forgetting I’d existed. As a sixty-year-old man (I tend to round up), I was embittered to know so many people even a decade younger did not share my memories of the devastation of AIDS, of my government’s indifference to that plague, of Madonna’s performance in a wedding dress at the Grammys, or of the celebration in the streets of West Hollywood following Bill Clinton’s election. It was, I insisted, a matter of preserving history, without admitting it was as much my personal history I wanted preserved as that of my country or tribe.