“Next Year” is Now!
If this is a dream, please don’t wake me. I’m still in absolute shock. In a welcome break from the nightmarish reality show billed as the Presidential election, the Chicago Cubs delivered the feel-good story of the year– their first World Series Championship since 1908. And everyone, it seems, has a Cub connection at the […]
The Greatest
It’s hard to find appropriate words to describe Muhammad Ali. Along with the Beatles he was the “Fab Five” of most important people to me during my Wonder Years, besides my parents and grandparents. Not since John Lennon’s assassination in 1980 have I been so saddened by a celebrity passing. I can’t say I was […]
Out of Africa
Elephant love, as practiced by these passionate pachyderms I met in the bush of South Africa– does life get any sweeter? Unfortunately they didn’t, um, consummate the moment—now THAT would be a picture! I just returned from a month in a continent of miracle and wonder, so much more than I can begin to express here. […]
Long Live the King
There aren’t many people who are instantly tagged by their initials, but the King of the blues, B.B., is certainly one of them. But it wasn’t always that way. Slamming around in teenage garage bands in the Sixties, like most kids, I knew nothing about “real” blues– the kind played by black people before I was […]
The Day the Music Lived
Don McLean’s “American Pie” pronounced Buddy Holly’s sudden 1959 death as “The day the music died.” Perhaps so, but nobody my age will forget 50 years ago today when it came roaring back to life with the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. We kids and our families were still reeling from another unforgettable event, President Kennedy’s assassination […]
Do Good, Get Stuff
I have what I call a “10% Solution”: I donate 10% of my earnings from musical performances and author programs to charity. I typically try some new causes each year; and while many seem extremely worthwhile, others seem to exert their greatest energy trying to get more money from me. I recently ran across The Hunger Site […]
My Main Squeeze
As you undoubtedly know if you’ve turned on your computer or TV (or less likely, picked up an actual newspaper), today is the first anniversary of the Newtown Massacre that killed 27 people (including the murderer’s mother), most of them elementary school kids. There is little I can say to elaborate on this monumental tragedy. Newtown […]
Pocket Rainbows
I walked into my home office on this sunny morning wishing I was greeting the day with my dog Otis at our nearby lake, not trudging to the computer to crank out a white paper. Something stopped me in my tracks: tattooed on the back of my hand was a luminous rainbow. It was then I saw […]
Silent Morning
It’s a white Christmas morning on my little cul-de-sac behind the Cheddar Curtain, thanks to a blizzard five days ago that registered as the second-highest 24-hour snowdump in Madison history. I’m flushing out the cobwebs with coffee after attending an old-fashioned midnight service with all the celebratory trimmings with my neighbors at their cathedral-like church. […]
Travelogue: Nazare’, Portugal
My wife and I recently returned from three glorious weeks in Spain and Portugal. Far from the gloom and doom of economic reports from the EuroZone, both nations seemed to be vibrantly chugging along with a smile. The only frenzied behavior we saw came at happy hour at the tapas bars. And if happiness translates to […]