Screening Screeners You’ve heard me mention going to a list of premiers and getting the opportunity to see many of today’s greatest stars on stage. So far, we have managed to get seats in the front row for every premier we’ve attended so we feel like we’ve gotten up close and personal with Rene Zellweger, Danny Boyle, Richard Curtis, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Ray Romano, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, Tom…
Sunshine Came Softly In 1966 I was twelve and had just moved from Bitter cold Wisconsin to bitter cold and snowy Maine, all in the month of February. Donovan, the folk/jazz/psychedelic/rock/pop singer from Scotland was breaking into the United States music scene with his Sunshine Superman album. The strange and lilting voice of the Highlander has always struck me as the quintessential voice of the Sixties. Maybe it was the cadence or the melody. …
The Ferrari Effect Last week I wrote a story about cancer. It used a little movie called The Art of Racing in the Rain to develop the theme that life is fragile and fleeting and that everyone needs to learn how to operate under the inclement conditions of life. The story is told through a golden retriever named Enzo, as in Enzo Ferrari. And sure enough, the main protagonist ends up becoming a test track…
The San Francisco Treat Several months ago I happened to ask my wife to make some Rice-A-Roni for me for dinner. Neither she nor her brother (who was helping with the cooking) took the request literally and they ended up making rice with some spices and other additions that seemed to them to be a far fresher and more interesting dish than anything that might come out of a box. Rice-A-Roni was invented sixty years…
Coloring Outside the Lines What we learn in kindergarten is supposed to stay with us and help us for the rest of our lives. As best I recall, we weren’t doing geometry in kindergarten. We were learning how to socialize. That means getting along with others and behaving ourselves under the guidance of authority. I can’t prove it, but I suspect there was some coloring going on during kindergarten. It makes perfectly good sense to…
The Land of Plenty Kim and I are spending the weekend in the wine country north of San Francisco Bay. What an unusual place this is, and I mean this whole area in general. To begin with, California enjoys a history that seems so much richer than much of the rest of the country. This was the place of the largest mass migration in history. It has been called “the land of milk and honey”…
A Free-Standing Facility I was listening to a television advertisement for a private cancer clinic. I find it mildly distressing that there is a need for specialized cancer centers, but the need must exist if someone has spent the money to make cancer treatment a for-profit enterprise. I’m not sure what it says that these centers need to advertise. Do people with cancer want to be pitched? Isn’t cancer the infamous C-word which is not…
An Abundance of Pleasantries Yesterday I got all wrapped up in slavery and today I am struck by the importance of finding pleasure in everyday tasks and interactions. I think of this because many of the slaves depicted in the Harriet movie I discussed yesterday made it a point to be pleasant people who went about their labors every day with a smile on their face and the pleasure of being alive and otherwise in…
Slaving Away While I am no archeologist or anthropologist, I think it’s agreed that man as we know him (homo sapiens) has existed for some 300,000 years. If we conservatively consider a generation as lasting an average of thirty years, that means there have been 10,000 generations of humans. If I stretch Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of expertise using the 10,000 Hour Rule, one might suggest that the human species should have learned a thing…
The Master of My Fate It is sometimes difficult to say what is ordinary and what is extraordinary. I was watching the movie Invictus, which is the story of the South African Rugby World Cup Championship in 1995 as inspired by Nelson Mandela, the then new president of South Africa. Besides the obvious and extraordinary performance by the South African Springboks, the real understory is about the perseverance of Nelson Mandela and the black…