Clubbing I know what you are thinking, no matter how much I do or don’t know about this guy, he is definitely not the clubbing sort. But wait a minute, things change and people change. Clubbing takes many forms, but all have much in common as well. He skipped the Reb Blazer and The Loft in the 70’s, he avoided Studio 54 in the 80’s, never went to Elaine’s in the 90’s, and the Blue…
Triangulating Friendships Last night Kim and I had drinks and dinner with an unusual kluge of friends. They themselves are not unusual, but the connections are a bit complicated. Tricia worked for me in 1981 in the early days of Bankers Trust. She was fresh out of school and both impressionable and eager to learn about the world. Her husband Sam, who came along years after Tricia and I had parted ways, came to…
Getting Robbed I had a message on my phone last night from a woman I recognized as an old college friend Rob’s ex-wife. I hadn’t spoken to her for years. I called her knowing something meaningful was up. I had spoken to Rob a few months ago and he did not sound at all well. I told a mutual friend that he sounded like he was 90 years old and feeble at that. At…
Suffering Succotash My first recollection when I thought of this title was Snagglepuss, the pink, high-falutin, well-dressed cat who thinks of himself as a great thespian (Thay that with a listhp). But Snagglepuss was the cartoon character who most often said, “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”, with a slight Bronx accent. And who can forget his stage-craft with the phrase I find I use all the time, “Exit, stage left!” But Snagglepuss had no appetite for lima…
The Lost Weekend The 1945 Billy Wilder movie The Lost Weekend stars Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. It is about a four-day bender taken by a chronic alcoholic and it explores the depths of a wounded human soul. I too just had a lost weekend or sorts. I am not a drinker, so alcoholism is not my vice. Back in 1968 at the age of fourteen, I traveled to Italy with my family…
One Small Step for Man The other day at lunch several similarly aged Baby Boomers and I sat at lunch playing “where were you when.” The first trick is to figure out the events of our lives that rose to the occasion. JFK getting shot in 1963 is the baseline and everyone could remember. We all missed on Martin Luther King and The RFK assassinations in 1968. The next one was the moon landing in…
The Long and the Short of It We have all heard about the UN report that gives us a dozen years to take corrective action before the climate change battle is irretrievable lost. That report, while falling on seemingly deaf Trumpster ears, has made the EU sit up and get even more serious than they have been about addressing the root causes of things like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Running a business called Low…
Unlikely Bedfellows I arrived at Cornell University in 1971 with an army jacket and a duffle bag. I had not led a conventional suburban life, and I was not entering college in a traditional middle class American manner. I had hitchhiked from Cleveland, where I had spent the summer learning about sociological research studies at Case Western Reserve University and learning that rivers in the United States were so polluted that they could, indeed,…
Getting Smaller I was watching an obscure little film from 1993 called Indian Summer. It had a great cast with Alan Arkin, Diane Lane, Matt Craven, Bill Paxton (RIP) and Kevin Pollak. It is another Big Chill movie with a summer camp twist. I am sure many can relate to the ensemble of characters and roles, not to mention the reminiscences of summer camp summers past. At one point in the story, there is a…
Chasing Fireflies I read a report by The Farmer’s Almanac, a strangely vestigial but somehow authoritative reference point on things both naturalistic and Americana, that fireflies were at risk of being eradicated by a combination of pollution (both pesticides and light pollution) and the civilized landscaping of our properties. I do not pretend to know what the firefly does for us ecologically, but these Lampyridae are bioluminescent reminders of things past. That bioluminescence during…