Redneck Press: Home of TOUGH

I t was a party trick. Lila would lay out the Ruffles Barbecue chips with deliberation and speak in a perilous purr, a hypnotic cadence. Her soothsaying came without a hint of parody: an old acquaintance will transform your intellectual outlook; a chance encounter will lead to atypical sensual pleasure. She first did it at a cookout after Rebecca’s ex-boyfriend boasted that he could eat an entire family-sized bag in under two minutes. When he failed, Lila gathered the remains and began to divine the future in the contours and the grease of a chip. After that, Jordan insisted she do it at her keg parties. Jordan liked to get a half barrel of Coors Light, play music from when they were in school, and pretend to be nineteen. At university Lila had been odd and solitary. People found her witchy because she wore loose-fitting, black tops and made herbal tea in the common room microwave. She didn’t like parties or Katy Perry. Instead she listened to Stravinsky on headphones when she wal...

  You need a local radio station. It could save your life. Anybody who’s ever been sitting in the dark waiting for information, or just a friendly voice from a battery-powered radio can tell you that. What you probably don’t know is the friendly voice on the other end is just as grateful for you. Or that we really save each other. I’d known since the New York hurricanes…but it really hit home during a March ice storm in Vermont. By then, I was no longer a bigtime DJ surrounded by a full staff of production folks -- just one scrambling multitasker at the board: owner, engineer, producer, and talent for the all-request “love songs at night” show. Despite everything I’d survived to end up in the studio that Saturday night, I was a little on edge. Ice storms scare me in a primal way my husband’s cancer, my layoff, and our divorce hadn’t. The sight of those glazed power lines and glistening trees made my gut twist like almost nothing else could. It’s not that I’m a delicate ...