The Kindness of Strangers Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and after a successful Broadway run with Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter, it was turned into a critically acclaimed film in 1951. While the film retained Brando and Hunter as Stanley and Stella Kowalski, it replaced the Toni-winning Tandy with Vivien Leigh. Leigh had won an Oscar for best actress for Gone With the Wind in 1939, and sure enough,…
Air in the New Normal Thirty years ago when I used to travel to Mexico City on business, I can remember the difference between the normal days and the days when the air miraculously cleared and you would see the lovely distant mountains that surround the D.F. (As it is called). I don’t know the percentages of normal smoggy days and crisp, clear, high-visibility days, but I bet there were not more than one in…
Best of Friends Today is a funny day for me. It’s funny for several reasons and business-as-usual for other reasons. The day was scheduled to be about waking up to breakfast with our friends Gary & Oswaldo, who came down for a visit from L.A. yesterday and stayed overnight, followed by attending an orientation event at University of San Diego for new teaching faculty and then heading up the coast to Dana Point for an…
A Twenty Year Time Capsule I stumbled across this story I wrote twenty years ago in rapt self-reflection. I find it interesting and worth sharing exactly because it was written in 2001, when the world was a very different place…at least from my vantage point. I have added [bracketed updated notations] as appropriate. I stand here at age 47 as a man in trouble. I believe my greatest assets are my ability to be candidly…
It’s Not About Justice, It’s About Peace We had dinner last night with two friends who have moved here from Phoenix. The overriding topic of the evening was about family relationships that have gone off the tracks. The similarities of our experiences, both cases involving animosities between in-laws and mutual senses that the basis for the animosity is much deeper than the superficial tipping-point incidents, were startlingly similar. One of the funnier similarities was that…
The Natural If you like baseball and if you like Robert Redford, I would hope that you’ve seen the movie The Natural. It’s a 1984 classic that has a great supporting cast with Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Bassinger, Barbara Hershey, and Wilford Brimley. It tells the faintly Twilight Zone-like story of a rookie who has an athletic gift (embodied in a magical bat hewn from the timber of a lightning-struck tree that somehow symbolizes…
House of Sand and Fog Do you remember the 2003 movie House of Sand and Fog staring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly? It is a tragic story of how people who believe their position in righteous and just lose sight of the risks that confront them and instead play for the win at all costs. In this case, Kingsley is doing what’s right for his family as he tries desperately to recoup from his downfall…
Broadway on the Bay Our friend Matthew has been with us for a few days in the middle of Phillip’s whirlwind tour of all the Western upscale properties in the hotel portfolio of his new employer (a large household hotel brand that has been a part of our lives for decades and for whom Phillip plans to take sales to the moon and back). Mostly we have been showing him our very limited world of…
Come On Get Happy A few years ago when I was a Director of CARE, the International Relief and Development Agency, based in Atlanta, I took the opportunity to go to see World of Coca Cola. I had not clue what it was all about, but I knew that part of it involved the story of the famous Coca Cola formula and that it was the corporate museum of one of the oldest multinational companies…
Reminding Myself Every Day It’s hard these days to not think about the good and the bad in people. The polarization of political views is inextricably caught up in a series of values that cut very deep into all of our consciousness. Regardless of which way you lean, it is clear your angle of lean has increased a great deal of late. You may not have changed your beliefs at all, but the chances are…