DAY 0 As with any trip, long or short, a lot of waiting is involved. It was once said by a world traveler (I can’t recall whether it was Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius, or Mark Twain), “Every great adventure begins with a miserable plane ride.” And so it was with the one-hour flight from Oakland […]

On January 19, 2023 Sharon and I will be leaving from Los Angeles (Long Beach, really) aboard the Island Princess for a round-the-world cruise. According to the information sheet, we will be sailing 34,500 nautical miles. But who’s counting? I’ve been very fortunate in life, and don’t really have any particular must-do items left on […]

If you ask a little kid the classic question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and the kid answers, “I want to be an optometrist,” you might drop dead on the spot. It just doesn’t happen. Well, hardly ever. (I can hear my optometrist friends laughing—at least three of my classmates […]

This rabbi gig. People have no idea what it’s all about. That’s the tag line that Catherine deCuir and I decided to use for our novel, The Rabbi Finds Her Way. I didn’t write it, and neither did Catherine. Our protagonist, Rabbi Pearl Ross-Levy, wrote it herself.  Other than two musical theatre pieces (which are more […]

As an alcoholic, I was a complete failure. I still remember the first time I got drunk. I was about seven or eight, and was with my parents and sister at the home of Aunt Gladys (my mother’s sister), her husband, Uncle Irv, and my cousins, Gil and Howard.  It was the Passover holiday, and […]

Many people who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and read the San Francisco Chronicle  in the 1970s and beyond probably remember a column called The Grab Bag. It was created by L.M. Boyd, and at one point appeared in nearly 400 newspapers.  I certainly read it (along with the comics). The column was a fast […]

Being a musician (or any type of artist, I suppose) adds a special burden to one’s life. It certainly has to mine.  An example of this dilemma was well-illustrated in an old Cathy cartoon I once read. As I remember it (I’m paraphrasing), she is interviewing a client, who says, “I’m not really a client—I’m […]

The Berkeley Repertory Theatre went through a period in the late eighties and early nineties where, if one or more of the actors onstage did not  appear nude, something must have gone wrong.  My wife Sharon and I were season subscribers, and I often wondered what these actors were like in real life. I didn’t have long […]