We were all Dolly when we were little - singing into one side of a hairbrush and teasing our hair with the other side and a full can of Aqua Net. We were Dolly before it ever meant butterflies and roller coasters. I remember watching the Porter Wagner show and thinking they made his sportscoat in VBS crafts; there were that many sequins out of control. The Porter Wagner show was the first place we saw Dolly, but it was only the beginning. She’s tenured now. All the other musicians came and...

We wanted our porch to fit in. We were conformists like that. We didn’t want the other porches pointing and laughing at our porch, causing his will to plummet, his joists to give way, and his boards to sag from lack of inclusion in the porch gossip sessions, and never getting invited to a porch sleepover. Porches are pretty important in the scheme of life and privacy. They’re the place you run to when you get a real phone call and you don’t want four other people acting as teleprompters with...

“And Peleg lived thirty years and begat Reu.” It turns out that most of the guys were having babies at age thirty in the book of Genesis. Serug, Reu, Eber, Salah – they were all thirty-something. Nahor was twenty-nine when he had his boy, which raised eyebrows I’m sure. Yeah, it just seems kind of normal, even thousands of years later, that they were having babies in those “thirty years” when the men were picking fantasy cantaloupe-throwing teams, eating hot wings right off the chicken, and...