Author Archives: S.L. Wisenberg

In 1847, at the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the Mexican War, soldiers from the Fourth Regiment Illinois Volunteers sneaked behind enemy lines and emerged with the Mexican commander’s leg. It wasn’t as grisly as it sounds: the leg was artificial and the general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, wasn’t wearing it at the time. […]

“When I die,” undertaker Edward Lynch told his sons, “you’ll know what to do.” And they did. The widowed Lynch’s heart gave out when he was vacationing in Florida with a friend. She called his children in Milford, Michigan, and two of the sons of Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors flew down with their embalmer’s […]

Short, white-haired, plainspoken Grace Paley is the patron saint–or the feminist, pacifist, leftist, Jewish matron saint–of those of us who believe in combining the artistic and the activist life. (Not that we necessarily do it, but we believe in it.) There’s the Paley whose last fiction collection was a National Book Award finalist, and the […]

In 1927, when American popular music was the rage in Europe, an acting student in Berlin decided to create a German version of the Revelers, a male vocal quartet from the U.S. That student, Harry Frommermann, had a strange and enchanting ability to imitate musical instruments with his hands and mouth, and he’d already written […]

Back between the two world wars was a great time to be a Czechoslovakian citizen. The republic had been born in 1918, headed by president Tomas Masaryk, who was not only a democrat but a feminist. Czech had become the national language, blossoming after its second-class status to German under the Austro-Hungarian empire. The new […]

These Parts/Appleton, WI

One day toward the end of the Bush era, Donna Blue called New York looking for the revolution. She had lost track of it sometime after her guerrilla theater days in the late 60s, when she had, among other acts of antiwar, dressed as a Vietnamese woman and wailed through the halls of the Capitol […]