Life on the Bubble What is a bubble? On the one hand a bubble is a globe-shaped amorphous item with a gas inside of a liquid formation. If you had to live on a bubble, it would be a very tenuous existence for sure. A bubble can also be a situation where market prices are unsustainable and artificially high. That’s an economic term usually applied to situations that cause many people to make a…
Pseudo Back in 1999 lots of funny things happened. It was very much an end of an era for me. I was the end of a twenty-three-year career, with all the incumbent ups and downs, with my primary employer, Bankers Trust Company. We sold ourselves to Deutsche Bank for $93 per share and all got lots of money from our pent-up options and restricted stock. Some of us got our walking papers, some got…
Road Show Last night we went to New York City Center for a performance of Steven Sondheim’s musical Road Show. This is a twenty-year-old version of a story which has been produced under various names like Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold!. While we thoroughly enjoyed the show, it had little to do with the production and almost everything to do with good music/singing and the captivating story of the life and travails of the Mizner…
A Persian Goodbye I always wanted a to be an architect. That came to a screeching halt the first week of freshman orientation when this student magazine was slid under all our dorm room doors on which it showed the earning power of all the major professions. Veterinarians were at the top and architects were at the bottom. I had not applied to the school of architecture, but as an engineering student, I still had…
Clubbing I know what you are thinking, no matter how much I do or don’t know about this guy, he is definitely not the clubbing sort. But wait a minute, things change and people change. Clubbing takes many forms, but all have much in common as well. He skipped the Reb Blazer and The Loft in the 70’s, he avoided Studio 54 in the 80’s, never went to Elaine’s in the 90’s, and the Blue…
The Week of Living Dangerously In 1965 he was your foreign correspondent in Jakarta covering the political machinations of a desperate dictatorship in decline. He looked a lot like Mad Max back then and his squeeze, Sigourney, was his reminder of the power and yet fleeting nature of empire as she tried to use the British Embassy as her base station. Those were the days when you had a whole year to play out…
Triangulating Friendships Last night Kim and I had drinks and dinner with an unusual kluge of friends. They themselves are not unusual, but the connections are a bit complicated. Tricia worked for me in 1981 in the early days of Bankers Trust. She was fresh out of school and both impressionable and eager to learn about the world. Her husband Sam, who came along years after Tricia and I had parted ways, came to…
Getting Robbed I had a message on my phone last night from a woman I recognized as an old college friend Rob’s ex-wife. I hadn’t spoken to her for years. I called her knowing something meaningful was up. I had spoken to Rob a few months ago and he did not sound at all well. I told a mutual friend that he sounded like he was 90 years old and feeble at that. At…
Breaking Up is Hard to Do Do many of us even remember the days when our telephonic voice choices were AT&T and nothing more? The telephone invention is like most great inventions, the early pioneers working on such a device fade by comparison to Alexander Graham Bell, who patented the device in the U.S. in 1876. History rewards the commercializers of great inventions. Just ask Thomas Alva Edison. Bell fancy-stepped his way into forming…
Suffering Succotash My first recollection when I thought of this title was Snagglepuss, the pink, high-falutin, well-dressed cat who thinks of himself as a great thespian (Thay that with a listhp). But Snagglepuss was the cartoon character who most often said, “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”, with a slight Bronx accent. And who can forget his stage-craft with the phrase I find I use all the time, “Exit, stage left!” But Snagglepuss had no appetite for lima…