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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’ by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 1 – 6)
Today we continue our serialized audio journey through one of the great classics of detective fiction: The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux — presented here in the Vivid Press Edition.
First published in 1907, this novel gave the world one of its most enduring puzzles: a woman attacked in a room locked from the inside, with no possible means of escape for her assailant. No hidden doors. No passable windows. No explanation — until a brilliant young reporter named Joseph Rouletabille decides to find one.
If you’ve never read it, you’re in for something special. If you have, welcome back to one of the finest locked-room mysteries ever written.
In today’s episode, we bring you Chapters Seven through Ten.
Sit back, settle in, and enjoy “The Mystery of the Yellow Room” by Gaston Leroux. Narration provided by Wondervox.
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LGBT Senior’s Weekly Writing Prompt: The Life You’re Living Now
LGBTSr’s Weekly Writing Prompt
We spend a lot of journaling time mining the past. But what about the present? The life unfolding around us this week, this month, this season? Not who we were, not who we are or who we want to become.
Consider a few prompts that address the present we’re living in an write about one, more, or none of them!
- Your current relationship with time. Do you feel like you have enough of it? Where does it go? What are you giving it to willingly, and what is taking more if it than you want to spend?
- The work you’re doing right now. What feels meaningful? What feels like noise?
- Who you’re becoming. What is changing in you? What older version of yourself are you letting go of, or want to?
- Your body in the present tense: How are you sleeping? Eating? Moving? What is your body asking for that you keep postponing?
- The relationships currently shaping you. Who are you spending time with, and how do you feel afterward?
- What you’re avoiding—an honest look at the one thing or things staring back at you that you just don’t want to do.
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LGBT Senior’s Health Beat: A Bicycle Built for You – Bike Riding for Older Adults
Once upon a time we had two bikes in the garage at our New Jersey house we came to on weekends. Since moving here full time eight years ago, we’ve dropped it to a single bike that is rusting in a shed. After promising myself for several years that I’d get a new bike and start riding around the country roads just outside our door, I finally did it! Luckily it’s a used bike in good condition that was given to me by some friends. I’d mentioned I was going to buy one, and they said they had two they never use. Voila! We both have new bicycles, and when the weather finally cooperates I’ll be seen gliding around the back roads with a helmet and a smile. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at some sage bike advice.
There’s no age limit on the open road — just a few things worth knowing before you roll.
Maybe you haven’t been on a bike for a while. Maybe you saw someone pedaling through the neighborhood on a crisp morning and thought, “I used to do that.” Or maybe your doctor mentioned low-impact cardio and your mind went straight to that bicycle sitting in the garage, tires soft, waiting.
Whatever brought you to this decision, welcome. Getting back on a bike or starting for the first time is one of the genuinely good decisions we can make for our bodies, our moods, and our sense of freedom. And the good news is that bikes, helmets, and the culture around recreational cycling have all gotten a lot more welcoming to older riders. We just need to know where to start.
FINDING THE RIGHT BIKE
The single most important thing we can do is get the right bike for our bodies and our goals. Riding the wrong bike is uncomfortable at best and discouraging at worst.
Step-through frames are your friend. Traditional bikes require you to swing your leg up and over a high top tube. That’s fine when you’re 30. It’s a recipe for a tumble when your hips have other opinions. Step-through frames, once called “women’s bikes,” though they belong to everyone, have a low or absent top tube, making it easy to get on and off. No gymnastics required.
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LGBT Senior’s News on the Positive Side by Cora Berke
Cora Berke News on the Positive Side- by Cora Berke
“An optimist sees rainbows when there is rain.”- Debasish Mridha
On March 31, 2026, Gov. Brad Little of Idaho picked up a proposed bill on his desk and signed it; the bill was HB561. HB561 revised which flags could be flown on government properties, which included the US, state, city, and military flags. It also revised which flags were now prohibited. If a prohibited flag continued to fly, there would be a $2,000 penalty per flag per day incurred by the city in which it was flown. The Pride flag flying at the Idaho Capitol State House in Boise was now prohibited by Bill HB561.
The next morning on April 1, 2026, Bill HB561 was passed by Idaho’s House of Representatives, and the Pride flag was removed by the city.
Shortly after the flag was taken down, Mayor Lauren McLean, the first woman to be elected Mayor in Boise, released a statement.
“We will continue to celebrate the vibrancy of our community, the diversity of our residents, and our North Star of being a safe and welcoming city for everyone. Because the law includes a substantial penalty – one that would ultimately fall on the taxpayers of Boise to shoulder—I decided to take down the city’s official Pride flag. But let me be clear: Boise’s values have not changed, and they are not defined by any single action taken at the State House.”
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 22 -24 w/YouTube)
Welcome back to Fearsome Fiction, and to Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller.
When we last left Marshall, he was finding his footing in a New York City that was as thrilling as it was foreign — a city that moved faster than he did, that asked more of him than he expected, and that seemed to be keeping secrets at every turn.
In tonight’s chapters, those secrets begin to take on weight. Trent hands Marshall a small yellow envelope — a floppy disk he calls “insurance” — and refuses to say more. It’s the kind of thing a man hands off only when he’s afraid of what might happen to it. Or to him.
Marshall puts the envelope away and goes on with his evening, because what else do you do? You put on a borrowed coat, you navigate your first New York City subway ride — tokens and all — and you head to Chelsea for what you tell yourself is just dinner. And maybe something more.
What he finds at Leland’s apartment, though, isn’t dinner. It’s a little white pill and a great deal of persuasion. And with one small word — sure — Marshall James crosses a line he can’t uncross.
Chapters twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four. A disk full of secrets. A train into the dark. And the first of many falls to come.
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Savvy Senior: Understanding the Social Security Breakeven Age
By Jim Miller
Dear Savvy Senior,
I’m trying to figure out the best time for my wife and I to start taking our Social Security retirement benefits and would like to understand the breakeven age. What can you tell me?
–Strategizing Sam
Dear Sam,
As you approach retirement, one of the most important financial decisions you’ll face is when to begin collecting Social Security retirement benefits. A useful concept to guide your thinking is the “breakeven age,” which helps you evaluate the trade-off between taking a reduced benefit early versus a higher one later. Here’s what you should know.
SSA Waiting Game
The Social Security Administration allows you to start collecting your retirement benefits as early as age 62. However, your monthly benefit will be permanently reduced – about .5 percent each month – if you claim before your full retirement age (FRA), which is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. Conversely, for every year you delay claiming beyond your FRA – up to age 70 – your benefit amount increases 8 percent each year. Your benefit maxes out at age 70, so there’s no financial incentive to wait longer.
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Book Review: Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir, by Jayne Anne Phillips
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez“Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir” by Jayne Anne Phillips
c.2026, Knopf $28.00 208 pagesThree. Two.
One.
Not that your parents were counting, but to them, it seemed as if you were born one day and then you were off like a rocket. Off to college, a good life, the kind of adventure they never had. Time zoomed past while they gave you a good launching pad and then, as in the new memoir, “Small Town Girls” by Jayne Anne Phillips, they sent you out among the stars.
“Home” means something different to just about everyone but for Phillips, it’s “a small town, nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of north central West Virginia… where history is interspersed with family stories and myths.” It’s where everyone knew everyone else, where poverty lived next to solid middle-class, where kids played with one another outside as much as they could. It’s where Phillips grew up.
“We seem to have lived here forever,” she says, “even before we were born.”
Her hometown is the kind of place where there are parades on every holiday, complete with school bands and girls twirling shiny batons. Her mother taught at the local school, where Phillips attended after a summer of Bible school; once a week, she and her mother went to the beauty parlor, where Phillips loved the feminine mystery of the place but she got a pixie cut there once, and hated it.
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LGBT Senior’s On the Map: An Ultimate Road Trip – Wilmington, Baltimore, and Home (Part II)
After a wonderful time in Savannah we headed to Wilmington. As always, a ‘6 1.2’ drive turned out to be 8 hours. Looking at the distance and time required to get somewhere on a GPS map only applies to the hours you spend behind the wheel. There are bathroom breaks, gas breaks, and food breaks that all have to be added in. For that reason we won’t do a road trip again without adding a couple more days so that we don’t spend more than 4 hours driving. Live and learn.
The Drive North: Coastal Georgia into the Carolinas
Leaving Savannah, the route north along the coast is a different experience than the inland drive down. US-17 through coastal Georgia and South Carolina is older, slower, and richer in atmosphere than the interstate. You pass through small coastal towns, cross tidal rivers, catch glimpses of marsh grass stretching to the horizon. It’s the kind of driving that reminds you why people took road trips before the highway system made everything faster and flatter.
If time allows, the stretch through the South Carolina Lowcountry repays attention. The landscape here is haunting in the best sense — wide, quiet, shaped by water in ways that make the land feel provisional, like the marsh is always negotiating with the shore about where exactly the boundary should be.
Wilmington, North Carolina: Port City with a Lot Going On
Wilmington occupies a particular sweet spot — large enough to have real culture and energy, small enough to feel navigable and human. Sitting at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, it has the easy confidence of a port city that has been doing its own thing for a long time and doesn’t feel the need to explain itself.
The downtown riverfront is genuinely lovely — a walkable stretch along the water with the kind of mix of old buildings and new energy that a city gets right when it’s paying attention. The historic district holds its own against more famous Southern cities, with antebellum architecture and tree-lined streets that feel lived-in rather than curated.
Wilmington is also the gateway to some of the best beaches on the East Coast. Wrightsville Beach is minutes away, and even if your trip isn’t a beach trip, it’s worth a morning walk along the shore before you head north. The Atlantic here is warmer than you’d expect and the stretch of coast is uncrowded by the standards of the mid-Atlantic.
The city has a creative undercurrent — film production has been based here for decades, and there’s an arts and music scene that punches above its size. Give it time and it gives back.
Must Eat
We had what I consider the best meal of the trip at Sugo Italian Steakhouse, rightly considered one of the best restaurants in Wilmington,
Tucked inside the Hotel Ballast on the downtown waterfront, the restaurant is the creation of Ace and Jamie Alfalla, who relocated from Long Island to Wilmington in 2021 carrying decades of hospitality experience, and their New York roots are evident in every dish. The kitchen is led by Chef Thomas Calhoun, and the house red sauce — sugo being the Italian word for sauce — serves as the philosophical and culinary heart of the menu, anchoring everything from homemade lasagna to pollo parmigiana. The menu also features dry-aged steaks alongside Italian specialties like veal Milanese, carbonara, and an aragosta pasta with twin lobster tails. Guests can choose between the lively bar lounge with communal seating or the more formal main dining room with sweeping views of the Cape Fear River. Worth every penny, and it takes quite a few.
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The Twist Podcast Gets a New Video Promo
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LGBT Senior’s On the Map: An Ultimate Road Trip – Winchester, Roanoke, and Savannah (Part I)
By Mark McNease
The backstory on this is a little long, so I’ll just say the genesis of the trip was to meet up with two other couples in Savannah, John and Robert, and Jean and Cindy. I don’t like flying unless I have to, and doing it for a three-night stay wasn’t appealing. I suggested instead that Frank and I drive and turn it into a long road trip. Our travel companion Michael, who often goes on cruises with us, joined the fun, so last Saturday we packed up the car and headed off for an eight-nighter that included a stop in Winchester, VA, to have lunch with Michael’s cousins and his wife, then Roanoke, Savannah, Wilmington, Baltimore, and finally home. This part I: Winchester for lunch, then on to Roanoke and Savannah.
Lunch in Winchester
This looked like a really cool town and I wish we’d have more time to spend there. A fair was going on, and the central walkway was filled with vendors. I saw a tarot card reader I would have loved to get a peek at my future from, but we had to eat and get back on the road. It was a quickie, but worth it.
Water Street Kitchen sits right in the heart of historic Old Town Winchester, Virginia, where Chef Dan Kalber turns classic Americana into something worth going out of your way for. Drawing on locally sourced ingredients to ground the menu in the region rather than the generic. The setting is informal and relaxed, with a large menu at reasonable prices and generous portions, and a vintage interior and patio that make it equally good for a leisurely lunch or a full dinner.
