The Writer's Allman Brother for Friday, August 14, 2026

V-J Day
Danielle Steele
Steve Martin
David Crosby
Halle Berry
"Servetta Muta" by Brenda Coultas

Transcript

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And here's the Writer's Alman Brother for Friday, August 14th, 2026. It was on this day in 1945 when that sailor forcibly kissed a nurse in the street in New York, and someone else took a picture of it. At least one of those people was happy. Also, war, victory, something, something, we win something. It's the birthday of Danielle Fernandez Dominique Scheulein Steele, who's generated nearly as many novels as she has marriages and middle names. Born in 1947, she came flying across the delivery room floor when her father ribbed her mother's bodice open, sealing her fate as laureate of pectoral touching stories. Her father was a steelworker, i.e., he stole labor from the brewers in his elder's Loenbro factory. Remember Lowenbro? Two Umlauts. His mother was fancy too, the daughter of a diplomat who carried on his shoulder a Siamese twin. It was science. As a girl, Steele would steal into her parents' dinner parties, secretly write down all their friends' salacious stories for use later in her own diary, so that when she read it back to herself she could say, Wow, I really blacked out that night. At age twenty, she calculated how many dirty books she'd need to write in order to buy a swimming pool made of diamond studded dinosaur bones. The answer is she's still working on it. She'd have gotten there already if it hadn't been for supporting her four hundred biological children and two stepsons. When asked how long it takes to write one of her nearly countless bestsellers, she said three weeks. That doesn't seem like long enough, the interviewer said. She said Well, it's longer if I stop to get up and go to the bathroom. Who with Martin Short and Serena Williams has solved multiple murders and the building in New York in which they live not with each other, that would be gross. The three of them grew a following in a petri dish in one of their lavish apartments. Won't say which one. Selenium often plays the straight guy for the jokes of the quote old Scroats. Short, ironically, is the broadest of the three at forty inches, while Martin wears a sad satchel under his overpants, and a chapeau, which means hat, and dog, which means gravy bucket, phenom, egg salad, canasta painting. Lots of painting. Pot smoker David Crosby would have been eighty five today. He sang like a dancer, wrote a goat mustache all the way to Hollywood, and enjoyed the occasional heroine martini. In nineteen sixty eight he teamed up with Nash Bridges and Still Alice. They appeared at Woodstock as the bridge over Alice Cooperstown Water Main Cross Baronsea. They were joined one year later by Neil Youngblood, who stole everybody's girlfriend and challenged Crosby and Nash to a falsetto off, which ostracized all of their canine fans, made Crosby almost cut his hair. Thank goodness for amnesia. And Miss Halle Berry is sixty years old today. She can kick, stretch, and sell vaginal lubricant on her Instagram feed. To this day, the only black woman ever to win a best actress Oscar. She kinda lost her mind up there on the podium stage, reaching out as though to tearfully cup the cheek of Elijah. Wood made him nervous. He was twenty-one. Had seen that swordfish scene and was never the same. Who does hold a book like that? Here's a poem for today by Brenda Coultis entitled Cervetomuta. A body in Venice of water or flesh or other corporal matter to be a body in Venice, say Ezra Pound's body, surrounded by fir trees on San Michel. To be a body in Venice, pounding over the Rialto Bridge to arcades of glass horses and gondolier caps to be a body in Venice, eternally lying under glass in the nave of a chapel. To be the body, the body thieves stole, whose bones, hair and clothing are quartered and divided. To be the head of Saint Lucy, with her plate of eyeballs, the long stalks dangling and wet. To be the one who plucks the beards from the dead monks and who makes the effigies in wax To be the ones who pull out their own teeth to make the Christ's teeth. To be the pillars of bone sunk into clay, to be the foundation of paperweights and opera houses. To be a body in Venice engaged to the sea. To be a glorious and tawdry tourist. To be a body in Venice. Used without permission here on the Writer's Almond Brother, supported by actual pants, the real clothes that climbed onto the fire escape all by themselves. And sat on your plans. Till next week, be well, look at the fire, and eat a sheep.