Now You See It… This weekend was family weekend for us here in New York. On Friday we warmed up by going for our annual holiday party at The Metropolitan Club. This is an annual event put on by our friends Alan and Nancy Zakon, who make their home in Key Largo, Florida, but keep their Metropolitan Club membership for their visits to New York City. I worked briefly in the mid-1990’s with Alan,…
The Politics of Coping We had dinner last night with the husband and son of one of Kim’s old Los Angeles friends. Neither of us knew them very well, but there was history and they were in New York on business, so we met them for dinner. What we did know about this man was that he was in commercial real estate and that he was from Orange County. Normally, that would not make for…
Another Farewell Back in 2002 I went to Las Vegas to see Cher in her farewell tour. It was a fabulous show with Cyndy Lauper as an energized opening act. Cher had a schtick at the beginning of the show where she said she had been a “fricken’ Diva” for forty years and that she had killed it in that role. This was classic Cher show of extreme self-confidence, the sort of thing only a…
Stand-up Comedy If you’ve seen the movie The Aristocrats, you know how demented comedians can be. The Aristocrats “joke” is purposefully lewd and disgusting. In fact, the joke perpetuates and magnifies the crudeness and pushes comedians to try to out-do each other with more and more sick imagination. It does not help burnish the image of the profession. I’m sure one of the biggest challenges for new comedians is to know where to draw…
The Pain of Free Will As part of my obligatory SAG/AFTRA movie viewing to help Kim with her nomination work, I have now viewed thirty-six of the fifty-four screeners we have been sent. That represents exactly two-thirds of the stack and I have another eighteen or so to get through. I have been doing a bit of binging this past weekend to play catch-up. I watched The Mustang, Parasite, Marriage Story, Cliffs of Freedom, Etruscan…
See the U.S.A. In seventeen days we will get in our leased Mercedes Benz 450 GLS, loaded up with luggage, the dog (and his dog seat…complete with seatbelt) and my Audible book files. We’ve done this before a few times, the biggest reason being that its the only way to get the dog cross-country. I like driving, so this is not something I dread. The last time we did this, we did it in three…
Giving Thanks I am tempted to write a Thanksgiving post in the usual manner all about counting our blessings and remembering all that we have versus most other people. I sort of thread that theme through my normal writing anyway, so I am inclined to take a very different tack today. I am sitting in an office overlooking New York Harbor with all its splendor of the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazano Bridge. It…
Shutting Down for the Holidays There are two times a year when everyone can be certain that nothing will get done. One is the dog days of August. When I lived in Italy fifty years ago (did I just say fifty? Wow!), if you took ill or had a toothache in the middle of August, you might just as well fly back to New York for treatment. I recall that the only emergency room…
The Gathering We are moving house across the country in less than a month from now. The actual moving van event is more like two months away, but we are leaving with the dog in tow to drive to California in twenty-three days. Driving to California sounds so Beverly Hillbillies or National Lampoon Vacation. We aren’t piling up the truck with a rocking chair. There is no planned visit to Wallyworld and not likely…
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In 1969, at the end of what seemed like a very long decade that began with great optimism and economic strength, the world was drifting into what would become the era of the stagflation of the 1970’s. We had shaken off all of our dreams of the pie-eyed sixties with Woodstock and the Apollo 11 moon landing. We were the racing dog that had caught the mechanical rabbit. We stood…