Before I was baptized at Westminster Presbyterian in upstate New York, I cried uncontrollably. When my parents asked what was wrong, I wailed that I didn’t want to be “bad-tized,” I wanted to be “good-tized.” I was three years old.

Crime: Overcooked pasta There are instructions on the package. They are not complicated, if you are a literate person. Honestly, you can just set a timer and walk away if you want to. Salt the water and set the timer, that’s all you have to do. I mean, stir occasionally, but only very occasionally. If I wanted flavorless mush of an indeterminate origin, I’d be in a Dickens novel right now. If found guilty of…

As an ex-pat kid in the 70's, nothing said America to me more than Texas. I misunderstood my mother's explanation of the American state. "There are cattle in Texas," she told me as we drove home from the international school in our Fiat station wagon, "and oil. There are great big oil fields with rigs." We lived in a semi-rural area of Switzerland, and our next door neighbors were dairy farmers, so I had close-up…

Alexis Coe’s past essays on women’s history for The Toast can be found here. Most recently: The Rise and Fall of Vivian Davis. At first, the intimacy between Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward seemed unremarkable. The well-to do young ladies met at the Higbee School for Girls in Memphis, Tennessee, at a time when romantic friendship was well-known and accepted. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called the non-sexual relationships “a rehearsal in girlhood of the…