Flute Choir Ends Oasis Season This headline ran on Tuesday. I can’t stop looking at it. It soothes me. Portland Pie Company is coming!!!! Holy moly! People got leg-humping happy about this news. Portland Pie Company is one of those places that my wife tells me I love even though I have no clear recollection […]
Mark LaFlamme
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Mark LaFlamme: Feed your head
Dude, vote for me At the Democratic State Convention last week, I ran into a nice lady in the parking lot who claimed to be running for one office or the other on the hemp platform. In fact, she had ground up her platform, sprinkled it into paper and twisted it into the fattest and […]
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Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
Street Talk: The casket, the keg and Lynyrd Skynyrd
Rusty was always specific when it came to funeral planning. “Man,” he’d say, whenever the topic of mortality arose at the midnight end of a pit party — which was like, always. “When I go, screw the flowers and all of that sad stuff. Put a keg on the lower lid of my casket and […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
How about some sympathy for the column writer?
Red faced Got a message from a nice lady who enjoyed my Wednesday column “Sympathy for the Dope Sick.” Such gushing praise. It went like this: “I usually can’t even make it halfway through your columns. They’re silly, stupid and they don’t make any sense. Not good. But this one was.” Aww. I’m blushing. You […]
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
Street Talk: Sympathy for the dope sick
The aching is intense and it is everywhere. It’s there in your legs, humming like a million angry volts. It’s in your back, too, a constant band of pain you can’t put out of your mind for even a few seconds. It’s hard to say which is worse, the roaring ache in your bones or […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
The runaway hair and other capers
Tell it like it is Heard a police call the other night during which some downtown ne’er-do-well was reported to be acting strangely in the narrow dark between tenement buildings. The first cop to arrive in the area totally dispensed with the legal mumbo jumbo and tedious 10 codes and reported that the shady suspect […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
We're going to need a bigger boat
April showers The last time I complained about dreary, wet, gloomy, lousy, rotten, vaguely fish-smelling April weather, the day the column ran it was sunny bright and T-shirt warm. Clearly, I have powers you mortals can’t even comprehend. You don’t even know, man. So in hopes of sparking another warm, sunny weekend for us all, […]
Posted inbPlus, sj-web
Paul Baribault: A writer's life
Almost from the very beginning, Paul Baribault knew what he wanted to do with his life. And so, with big dreams dancing in his head, he announced his plans to his high school guidance counselor. It could have gone better. “I said, ‘I’m going to be a writer,’” Baribault recalls of that long ago conversation. […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Street Talk: Don't mess with Jesse
The very moment I heard Jesse’s name uttered at the scene of the crash, I knew I had a big story on my hands. It is news when anybody gets hit by a car, but this was Jesse Kontoes lying there in a heap on the cold, slushy street. This was a local icon. A […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Talk of the town: Say it like you mean it
He went that-a-way A police foot chase one recent night came to an end right next to the Wendy’s drive-through window on Center Street in Auburn. See? This is exactly why, if I was a crook, I’d keep a red-headed pigtail wig and some fake freckles as a disguise. As it turns out, I already […]