Suprise Me

Every Easter Sunday my mother dressed me, a Jewish child, in my best finery, fancy bonnet and all.  My older brother was discouraged from  going to  the local basketball court in his sweats and sneakers. The   unspoken message we were being taught was one of my mother’s cardinal rules of conduct called  a “shanda… Read More

Leap Day is a once-every-four-years astronomical anomaly in the calendar, meant to sweep up the few extra minutes accumulated over the intervening years and set the calendar straight again. It happens to coincide with our presidential election years and I’m sure is a pain for people born on this particular day. When do they celebrate?… Read More

Did that woman know how her simple act of kindness turned our entire situation around? Read More

Grad Night             1968. Disneyland hosted an all-night grad night for high school seniors in South California. About twenty classmates and I dropped LSD for the first time, on the bus to The Magic Kingdom. The little pills were called Blue Flats. Pharmaceutical. Word was they were made at UCLA.… Read More

My dad was a genuinely nice guy. He worked a lot when I was young, but we became very close when I went off to Brandeis and he left the auto industry. Ironically, we had more time to talk then. As many in my family knew, there was nothing one couldn’t say to him. He… Read More

Woodstock, the original, and re-created Read More

How they made their way in this strange place to find my great grandfather, with no money and speaking no English, I have no idea. Read More

Doctors and patients: the body politic. Read More

My Aunt,  Dede Allen I’ve always been very proud of my aunt Dede Allen.  Movie buffs may know her as a stellar film editor and a pioneer in what had been a male-dominated craft. Dede worked her way up in the film business,  starting as a production runner at Columbia Pictures,  then editing commercial and… Read More

We are lucky to own a home on Martha’s Vineyard. This paradise island, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, has been settled since the early 1600s, and been a vacation destination since the 1800s. Comprised of six distinct towns, we own a historic colonial, the Holmes Coffin House, built in 1829 in the village… Read More