Last week at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, a few women were turned away at the entrance to the Festival’s red carpet gala; they weren’t wearing high heels. To most people, that would seem to be a rather extreme example of a restrictive dress code. Not unexpectedly, there were a number of strong reactions, most […]
Category Archives: Life in General
Stories–Part 3: Personal Narratives
“You can’t know what’s really happening in this loud, crazy world, or in a single human heart, unless we are fully present in the moment, and listen. We are the characters in the daily dramas that make up the moments of our life, and our days, and then all of history. Stories exist wherever we […]
Stories–Part 2: Telling Stories
I read a fascinating Fast Company article the other day, describing the emergence of a new position in the C-Suite of a number of large companies–that of Chief Storytelling Officer (CSO). While the article, written by Michael Grothaus, notes that perhaps the first person to hold the CSO title was Nelson Farris at Nike in […]
Stories–Part I: My Stories
I love reading, listening to and telling stories; I always have. I think we all do. From the time I was a small child I loved hearing bedtime stories. Even before I understood the symbols on the pages as letters of the alphabet, I tried to link together the drawings and pictures in my Little Golden […]
What’s a Hookah?
Frequent readers of this blog [that phrase is a bit of a conundrum, since I took a 15-month break from writing, and only got back to the keyboard early this month] know that I love words and wordplay. A while back we were driving along the road and I saw a sign on a shop called […]
If It’s Sauce for the Goose, Is it Gravy for the Gander?
At the end of the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, along with seven other 19- and 20-year old, testosterone-overloaded running mates from the Pittsburgh suburb where I grew up, I headed for the Jersey Shore. We piled into two cars and, armed with swim trunks, sandals, a couple of t-shirts, a few […]
Can We Take Two Minutes?
Last Friday I went with some friends to see Maroon 5 perform at the LA Forum. The band played to a packed house, and it was frenetic, lively and LOUD! The band played all of its hits [My favorite Maroon 5 song is “Maps“] and some new songs, going non stop for over an hour […]
Doing What Comes “Naturally”
I’m guessing you never heard of J.J. Cale. When he died this past summer at the age of 74, renowned guitarist Eric Clapton wrote on his Facebook page, “We’ve lost a great artist and a great person.” From 1971 to 2009, singer-songwriter J.J. Cale, known as one of the originators of “the Tulsa sound”–a loose amalgam […]
The Making of a Golf Professional
Lots of people find themselves in jobs or professions that, admittedly, they don’t like. The work simply doesn’t excite them. Maybe they do it because they feel that their job is where the money is. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As the noted professor and lecturer Joseph Campbell, wrote: “If you do follow […]
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar
A few years ago, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of a little book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, an introduction to philosophical ideas using jokes as a means to make the ideas come to life for the reader. Now, I’ve never considered philosophy to be a particularly amusing subject–in fact, […]