Rita Mattia’s favorite outdoor summer Shakespeare festival brings drama to two very different communities in Richmond, Virginia.

Twins, twins and more twins play leading roles in this story about life in Baltimore in the early 1970s. And, Rita Mattia becomes a mother.

As a naive college girl, Rita Mattia gets her first look at racism in southern Maryland in the early 1960s. Nearly a half-century later, she figures out what really happened.

Romantic and other adventures unfold for Rita Mattia in a long hot New Jersey summer during the Cold War years. This story first appeared in “Trying Stuff.”

A circa 1962 quest in an ancient woody station wagon takes Rita Mattia and two college friends from Delaware to Vermont and back, yielding a weighty souvenir.

An amusing look at Rita Mattia’s spectacular babysitting fail, in midcentury New Jersey.

This continuation of her years in Baltimore, Maryland is a tribute to the inventiveness of Rita Mattia’s first husband, and to the gently insistent early 1970s music that she believes helped shape her generation.

The early 1970s in Baltimore, Maryland find Rita Mattia and her new husband living a hippie lifestyle among billboards, splinters, snakes and noisy neighbors. This story leads to the next ...

Explores an unusual three-generation Mattia family relationship, train trips, English sports cars — and a few of the many lakes of northwestern New Jersey. This story first appeared in “Trying Stuff.”

Warm and funny memories of a month-long Mattia family vacation spent on the highways and backroads of America, in a brand new 1951 Ford.