Playhouse

From The Christmas Donut Revolution: 

10:00 AM. Normally, by mid-morning, the drive-thru business had subsided to the point where one person could handle it. This was no normal morning. Word had somehow gotten out about the pay-it-forward streak, and it had attracted a disparate group of eager, curious, quixotic, suspicious, and conspiratorial folks, all wanting to see it for themselves. The chain entering the drive-thru continued with a steady queue of five or six vehicles, sometimes as many as eight, so that cars turning into the strip mall from southbound on Cleveland Avenue got stuck in traffic, blocked by the backlog waiting to get into line. Passers-through asked questions like, “Who’s idea was this?” “What’s the catch?” or, “Can I get a rain check?” They made comments like, “Powerto the people!” “One thing leads to another,” and, “No good deed goes unpunished.” The left saying things like, “Peace out!” “Keep it Real!” “Laissez les bonne temps roulez,” or singing, “Happy trails to you, until we meet again….”

From Halloween from the Other Side: 

Delphyne arrived at the scene of the Nightmare Bash in her hearse, dubbed the “Vampmobile.” The driver—a creepy clown dressed in a limo driver’s jacket and cap, wearing a polka-dotted onesie—inched the vehicle through the swarm until parking curbside in front of the All Hallows’ Eve Shoppe. The driver hustled around to open the rear doors, then knelt one knee. Delphyne emerged from the hearse, blowing kisses and waving her arms triumphantly over her head, and the crowd reciprocated by blowing back kisses and chanting her name. She parted the crowd with a flick of her hand and walked toward the store entrance, where she paused, pivoted, and pointed directly at Solomon, as if there were a laser beam between her fingertip and his heart. She wagged her finger at him to come forward.

From Upside Down Independence Day:

Professor Rosco Alolo entered from the double doors at the rear of the room. The students, expecting him to come in via the door in the front, turned their heads in unison. He tapped his beachwood, raven-headed cane. The students looked up and followed him with their eyesas he descended the aisle between tiered rows of seats mumbling “well, well, well.” As he stepped into the open space at the front of the room, he stretched his arms over his head so that his oversized African print sweater hung over him like a tent. It was a gesture he’d borrowed from street preachers. He allowed the class to absorb his aura, then addressed them, “You people are too well behaved to be writers.” 

From Murder by Valentine Candy:  

Handcuffed and accompanied by a guard, Huck entered a cell on the other side of the window. He half smiled at her while the guard unlocked the restraints.
In a baggy gray prison jumpsuit, he looked like he’d lost weight, even though it’d been just over twenty four hours since his arrest. He’d pulled his hair back
and tied it into a stubby ponytail. He sat across from Tati, and she pressed one hand on the glass window between them. It was something she’d seen people do
on true crime TV shows. She had also seen movies where women pressed their breasts against the window, flashing their titties as proof of their love. Tati 
wondered if she could slip one breast out of her bra discreetly enough so nobody other than Huck could see.

From Thanksgiving, Thanksgotten, Thanksgone: 

Mazie reserved her unmitigated scorn for the media, marketers, and entrepreneurs who designed the Black Friday scam. Year after year, these barons of capitalism incited buyer frenzy by promoting “out-of-this-world sales” and “once-in-a-lifetime savings,” etc. And every year they added some new wrinkle to the enterprise by offering even greater but more elusive rewards. 

Hence, Wowzathon. The rules were simple, but subtly insidious. Everybody competed against everybody else for a singular grand prize. Upon entering the store, all shoppers would receive a clue, which if solved would lead them to a particular item for sale in the store. It could be anything, from a backyard swing set to a pair of tweezers, and everything in between. By correctly presenting that item to a cashier for purchase, they would get a second clue. At each stage, fewer of the
clue-bearing items were available in the store, so, by design, competition would become more personal, and more fierce. Only three contestants (or teams of contestants) could advance to the last round. To win the grand prize, the contestant must solve the final riddle and make the appropriate purchase. The victorious shopper would win anything they wished for compliments of Wow-Mart, not to exceed one million dollars in value, or to violate Ohio law or Wow-Mart’s code of ethics. The contest ended whenever the grand prize was won or at sunrise, whichever came first. Current employees of Wow-Mart were ineligible.

From New Year’s Eve 1999: 

Celeste dove onto her knees before the exalted one and bowed. “Praise be I AM, the Infinite Mindware,” she said.

“May you be worthy of the Singularity,” Master Desiderata responded, then added, “I thought he would never leave. Yak, yak, yak.” 

Celeste remained on her knees but lifted her head and slowly raised her eyes until her gaze settled on his visage. Master Desiderata covered his face with his hands and peeked at her from the cracks between his fingers, then he opened his palms like window shutters and chortled “peek-a-boo.” Celeste’s tension vented in an involuntary chuckle. For such an exalted man, Master Desiderata wore his holiness lightly. With dimpled cheeks and effervescent blue eyes beneath his tonsure, he looked like an elfin monk. His oversized raiment was large enough for a parachute, loosely draped over his torso, with its tie-dye double rainbows starting beneath his collar, wrapping under his arms and across the shoulder blades, then around to his ribs where the colors burst into a triskelion symbol. He tugged on the cords around his waist and stood across from her. “Get up, stand up,” he said.