May 2024

Gabrielle Blair was  born in Kimberley, South Africa. When she transitioned from being a professional ballet dancer in London England and South Africa, she emigrated to Canada where she taught in various performing Arts Schools in Toronto until retirement. She is married with a son and two grand daughters. Now she spends six months of […]

Giving Credit Where Credit’s Due Each of us from time to time hears a phrase that has stood the test of time and mentally we connect the famous phrase to a specific person. However, many times we are misguided in that attribution. Following are several well-known sayings attributed to the wrong person. Odds are you’ll

Did You Know? Just thought you’d like to know. Gracias! E-mail: elojodellago@gmail.com

From the founding of the USA the issue of our rights was in the forefront. The most popular amendment of the United Sates Constitution, from the beginning, was about States Rights. People were afraid that the federal government would become dictatorial, like Britian had been just before the revolution, and they needed assurances that the

The challenge is to transfer autobiographical facts to the fictional page. This self-portrait writing method, autofiction for short, uses fictional devices and embellishments to reach a more nuanced emotional truth. The memoirist cannot elaborate like the autofiction writer because these non-factual additions are not in their factual toolkit. Events in my past can be so

“Halo everybody, Halo. Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair, so Halo everybody, Halo.” This scrap of memory from my dream has led me backwards in time to an early morning 70 years before. My dad is long gone, out to feed the cattle or survey the wheat crop, my older sisters have vanished

Recently I attended a management conference for the electronics industry. One of the key speakers was a futurist. He spent most of his presentation talking about the past and how understanding what happened before influences what is going to happen in the future. I surmised from that position he was saying that we keep making

The Simple Life I’ve tried to simplify my life since I moved back to Mexico 13 years ago. I still drive a secondhand, 26-year-old family van purchased from my sister Sandra and brought from Santa Monica, CA. I still wear secondhand store-bought clothes that my mother Rebecca used to bring me every July for my

We’ve all had them … some more private than others … some more traumatic … and some hilarious! I was eight years old, shopping with my mother in downtown Oklahoma City on Thursday evening when the stores stayed open until 8 p.m. We were walking down Main Street and the elastic on my panties broke

He was glad his wife had her choir. It gave her something to do other than telling him what he should be doing. She was gone from the house at least twice a week for practices, about three hours each time, longer if she had coffee with someone afterward. When they had performances, there were