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Myrna Loy Versus the Third Reich 

by William Burton McCormick

1938, Berlin

Irma Sauer could not sleep. Speaker-amplified Russian voices penetrated her apartment’s walls, the Slavic words slipping under the door and through the vents to disturb her modest dreams. Four o’clock in the morning and Irma had been tossing and turning all night, listening to those gathered in the next room watch an advance copy of Sergei Eisenstein’s historical epic Alexander Nevsky on the Cinema Club’s projector. Irma had given up and gone to bed after the second showing. Asked her husband Otto, the organizer and projectionist, to turn down the volume for safety’s sake. Yes, Eisenstein was a genius. The world acknowledged that brilliance after Battleship Potemkin. But Eisenstein was also a communist. And it was risky to watch the films of communists too loudly in Berlin. READ MORE

Desperate House Wines

by Marilyn Todd

Benjamin Hardcastle didn’t know much about women. If he had, he wouldn’t have invited his wife, his girlfriend, and his estranged daughter to spend the weekend in an obscure vineyard in the southwest of France. Leastways, not all at the same time.    

He might also have warned them that this wasn’t any old obscure vineyard in the southwest of France. It was his. He’d bought it with the proceeds of his lottery win and wanted them to share his excitement.

Unfortunately, investments was another flair outside Benjamin Hardcastle’s sphere of expertise. As a small, independent supplier of wines to local restaurants, there was a reason why Le Château d’Aphrodite was going cheap. Ravaged by the COVID crisis, when restaurants closed for months, putting many out of business in the process, the vineyard was in deep, dark, dire financial straits. And it didn’t help that the closest thing Benjamin knew about winemaking was how to open a bottle. READ MORE