95 Piccadilly

By Shane Gilreath September is Suicide Prevention Month.  It’s a cause close to my heart. Suicide is an unspoken pandemic that claims many lives and leave families reeling and ever changed in the aftermath.  My family is among them. The organization, To Write Love on Her Arms, has a social media meme for the month…

By Shane Gilreath Sunday morning, as I stared out at the Carolina coastline, the sun’s beams peaking over the horizon to awaken a new day, a Lady Gaga lyric from the film “A Star is Born” kept playing in my head: “every time we say goodbye, baby, it hurts.” For most people, it’s not necessarily…

By Shane Gilreath As a writer, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing the late Chelsi Smith, Miss Universe 1995, and Teresa Scanlan, who, at 17, became the youngest Miss America in a century.  The latter seemed hesitant to answer questions after agreeing to do so, which I never understood, as I eased myself into the…

By Shane Gilreath New age Colombian poet, Carlos Andres Gomez, wrote that “I am tired of men hurting women and each other and themselves.” If I may be so bold as to use a modern word, I was triggered. It is a particularly noxious trait to assume that male-ness is universally toxic and mindlessly excuse…

By Shane Gilreath The American writer, Donald Westlake, said “the trouble with real life is, there’s no reset button.”  While I accept its absolute authenticity, I find that to be a hard pill to swallow, and while mistakes might make us grow along life’s journey, they also make us shiver with pangs of regret and…

By Shane Gilreath A millennium ago, when a senior in high school, my senior class prophecy was that I would anchor the evening news. More specifically, as a personal goal, was to be behind the anchor desk at a much earlier hour for NBC’s Today Show, despite what might be described as a face for…

By Shane Gilreath I was thinking today of the words of the late Gatewood Galbraith, a perennial political figure in the commonwealth, who once told me that every generation needs to be tested, in the ways of the preceding ones, and with each passing year and societal tantrum, I understand more and more his words.…

By Shane Gilreath The older I get, the more aware I am of the passage of time. Not solely because of squeaky knees and my newfound reading glasses, but because I think there’s a semblance of grieving for yesteryear in a way that even surpasses lost youth. It’s a reality that has been reflected countless…

By Shane Gilreath A celebrated quote from Rudyard Kipling hangs over the tunnel entering Centre Court at the All England Club in Wimbledon, England: if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. It seems the perfect reminder, as generation after generation of the game’s greats move to…

By Shane Gilreath Over the weekend, I re-watched the HBO series, “The Gilded Age,” which hinges on the clash between the old families of New York and the new money associated with the period the French called “La Belle Epoch.” Much like the French, America likes to see itself as a classless country, where people…