Lifetime Buddy About twenty years ago when Dustin Hoffman was 67 years old, I happened to hear him speak about one of the films he had just made. Perhaps it was Runaway Jury or Finding Neverland, but the point is that he was invited to talk about the film at the New York Director’s Guild Theater on 57th Street. I was a member of a DG Film Club that regularly heard from actors, directors and…
It’s Always Sunny in San Diego Life is temporarily back to normal around the hilltop. We are in between travels and yet still ten days until the Christmas hordes descend upon us. The decorations are 100% up outdoors and 95% done in the house, so we are as ready as we are going to be. The present wrapping is well advanced thanks to Kim and Melisa dedicating much of yesterday to the task. I too…
Fire And Ice Kim had her annual gala for Singnasium, the New York based cabaret singing school of which she is the founding and now outgoing President of the Board. I have told her dozens of times that as the head of the Board and not an employee, she should not be the President but rather the Chairperson of the Board, but that has all fallen on deaf ears. These are cabaret people after all…
Celebrating Life Human being like to celebrate. We celebrate births and deaths and everything in between. The biggest ones tend to be around marriage, holidays and the ubiquitous birthday celebrations. Many of us have occasionally grown weary of some of the celebrations. In a large work team, celebrating every person’s birthday and special events could take up an inordinate amount of time and resources so they are either foregone or done in bulk every month…
Losing a Friend Friends drift into and out of our lives all the time. I, in particular, am very aware of this phenomenon since I spent most of my early life moving from one locale to another as a trailing child to a globetrotting mother. My early years were spent in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica with an interregnum in such different places as Santa Monica and Ithaca. That more or less took…
Thanksgiving I have written many times about the importance of giving thanks for all we are fortunate enough to have in our lives. This is not a trivial thought or gesture, but rather a core belief in the importance of humility and the recognition that we all must be thankful for all the good things we have in our lives and recognize that while we can contribute to their existence, we are all, for the…
The Layers of Life Life goes on around us at all times whether we are paying attention or not. It is very hard to say how engaged we should be with every aspect of it at any given moment. I use the differences at the moment between my friend Mike and myself as an example. It is 8am and I am listening to Jose Diaz-Balart on MSNC while I am writing this story. When I…
Cashing the Check For my many years in senior management on Wall Street, friends would regularly tell me that I was too nice for Wall Street. That was a polite way of saying that I was a pussy and refused to treat people harshly. Don’t get me wrong, I have had to downstaff thousands of people over the years, but I also always gave people the benefit of the doubt and tried never to take…
Free Will This morning I read an interesting article about Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. He is a professor of biology and neurology who is an atheist who was raised as an Orthodox Jew in the heart of Brooklyn. He has spent his career studying the behavior of both primates and humans and has come to a rather bold conclusion. He believes there is ample evidence to prove that when it comes to man’s…
Getting Crazier We all know that American politics has been pretty crazy for about eight years now. Yes, that coincides with Donald Trump coming onto the scene of the American political landscape in a serious (I have a really hard time using that word to describe anything Donald Trump does) way. It does strike me that we are in the beginning of the eventual end to that reign of terror now that we are seeing…