Whose Father Do You Think Would Be Madder? Back in the days before political correctness was the necessity it is today, I heard my redneck Chairman (RIP) comment about a married couple who worked for us that came from different ethnic backgrounds. It is one of the funnier yet most biting comments I have ever heard that effectively denigrated two ethnicities all at once. I am hesitant these days to repeat the comment except in…
The Motorcycle Show I have a long history over the past twenty-five years with the New York Motorcycle Show. It is always held at the Jacob Javits Center on the West Side and it is in the winter, either in December like this year or in January, as in the past. There is nothing unique about the venue, convention halls are all mostly the same. The amazing thing isn’t that the venue looks like it…
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…
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…
Life as an Outline In my story of several days ago I wrote of the sense of end of days as we approach yet another decade turning point. That got me thinking about the beginning of decades and what they have tended to portend. As I have reflected, I have found that there does, indeed, seem to be a pattern of optimism and new beginnings that accompany the start of a new decade. This may…
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…