Seeking relief from the utter domination I suffered not only at the hands of the women in my family (mother and two sisters) but also at school (for a time the only male teacher was Mr. Bishop); my friends at LeConte Junior High School offered me something that was, for that time, an underdeveloped yet […]
I’ve been in the Natural Foods business for years, 16 of them in fact. It’s changed a lot; it’s become a lot more mainstream – now going to places like Whole Foods is for a lot of people like going to the mall. But it wasn’t always that way. Health Food stores used to be […]
I worked hard and saved all my money to get into Pratt Institute. Even so, the vast majority of the tuition I had to funnel into that Brooklyn school of art and engineering was paid for by bank loans. Delayed a full semester by months of paperwork, I was pretty excited to get there in […]
I moved to New York to go (presumably) to Art School but as far as plans I hadn’t really figured anything out. I decided to just go there anyway and stay with my brother in Brooklyn, either forever, or temporarily, until something, some plan, coalesced. I arrived in June of ’87 armed with a 4-foot […]
Driving past another dead Blockbuster Video the other day made me think in general about the deaths of locally owned video stores a decade earlier and then, more specifically, the death of my own little store in Brooklyn. Far from celebrating the possible karmic backlash represented by the retail failure of a large company like […]
It’s a well-known fact, and even a hoary cliché (which is I guess itself a cliché) that New York City is a gathering place for creative people who want to express themselves in a larger, more fertile setting. But there are places even within New York where that matriculation of talent is even more refined, […]
Living in Hollywood with a single mom who was trying to support herself and her three kids was hard; especially with all of the kids in school and a mother that was, by necessity, not home much of the time. Lucky for us, and due to our close residential proximity to Hollywood Boulevard, Uncle Mann […]
Going into a new school in a new city, state and way of life was not without its challenges, particularly for a 12 year old. Luckily, and almost right off the bat, I acquired the services of a motivational coach. Seeming to perceive my need, fellow student Shawn was obviously attracted to the pathos I […]
When the Oscar’s come around I always think about how different that area used to be when I lived there. The Kodak Theater is the site of the Oscar Awards and has been for 10 or so years. A visit back there 3 years ago was surprising for me because the only thing I remembered […]
Even at a very young age I knew I wanted to be multilingual, or at least bilingual. Having finally learned enough of my own language, by the 8th Grade I was able to take a foreign language class. I chose Spanish, mostly because I had several friends I could practice with. But I was already […]
One show marked the beginning of what we could call ‘modern times’ in TV entertainment. That show is, of course, “The Greatest American Hero.” Agent Bill Maxwell, played by Robert Culp, took the baton in the great zeitgeist relay race that marked the beginning of “military industrial complex” as entertainment. After many years, most of […]
