Author: Eric Dregni

“Wilbert! Wilbert!” his wife yelled at the top of her lungs toward the makeshift house behind the llama cage at Behn’s Game Farm in the tiny town of Aniwa, in northern Wisconsin. “He’s hard of hearing,” she explained. With a slight limp, Wilbert slowly emerged from the plywood building, looking as though he’d just awakened…

Katy is very proud of her pair of UPS brown socks. She bugged the UPS guy continually to bring her a catalog of all the UPS clothes she could order. Even after weeks of pestering, he never came through with this alleged catalog. One day, however, he handed her a brand new pair of heavyweight…

“Do you think you can make an all-star wrestler out of me?” I asked Sheriff and Shifty at Midwest Pro Wrestling in Maple Grove. They looked me over—I’m 5’ 9” and weigh only 155 pounds—and assured me, “Sure, just give us enough time. Size doesn’t matter anymore.” In fact, Terry Klinger (stage name “Sheriff”) is…

To avoid the static of a wool ski cap, I bought a black, small-brimmed fedora. My friends greeted me with “Hey mafioso!” An Italian friend of mine had the opposite reaction. “Hey Tex! Ciao Cowboy!” he said. Obviously, we have become a hat-illiterate society. John F. Kennedy wore a silk top hat to his presidential…

Hank Lederer is an “anticipatory thinker” who plots trends. From this plotting, he hopes to predict all the great (and not-so-great) things that might await us in the future, from cryogenics to extraterrestrial colonies. He is a futurist, and he is my tax accountant. Each spring when my kitchen table overflows with W-2s and 1040s…

“You can smell the underwear,” said textile curator Linda McShannock as she opened the door to the nation’s largest museum collection of panties, girdles, brassieres, and other unmentionables. We were two stories underground, deep in the heart of the Minnesota Historical Society, where the real rubber waistbands are slowly disintegrating. More than 3,500 historically significant…