By now, odds are, you’ve seen or heard about Dove’s “Real Beauty” sketches, in which women are asked to describe themselves for a sketch artist, and then compare those drawings to descriptions of them by another person. If not, here’s the video: It’s an interesting campaign, and one that clearly took a lot of time […]

Last weekend I was in a show that ran 3 nights. (that was the plan – it didn’t whimper out after 3 nights…)  It was a bunch of performers telling stories from their lives; I wrote a little about it before, and my wanting to be liked by the cool kid.  People had been pretty […]

I don’t write about it very often here, but I love running.  I genuinely love it.  I love what it does for me, sure – physically and mentally (my wife compares, rightly, the change in my mental energy after a run to how the dogs are after a big, long hike) – but I just […]

Times It Is Acceptable to Say, “That’s So Gay”: You’re trying to tell someone “That’s okay” and you have a pretty bad cold. Someone has just done a spot-on impression of actress Marcia Gay Harden, from Miller’s Crossing. You’re at a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. You’re trying to be supportive of a friend who’s recently embraced […]

When I was a teenager, there was the massive tome Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion.  It made me want to see Taxi Driver, and Casablanca, and The Godfather, and It Happened One Night; not because it seemed like you had to if you wanted to claim to like “great” movies, but because he made them […]

Times it is okay, and not okay, to use the term “Rock Star” to describe someone: “Sarah, you were a rock star at organizing that spaghetti-feed!” Not okay.  If you are involved with a spaghetti feed, you have ceased to be a star of rock. “You got that paperwork done, sorted and filed already?  You’re […]

You know what’s tough about being asked questions about your life?  If you can’t think of the answer, you feel old, true, and that’s no good.  But more than that, it’s that if you then think of another answer, it can’t make your life sound ridiculous. Case in point: Darla, the always charming and wryly […]

Hey, Happy Easter everyone!  Unless that’s not your thing, and then, I don’t know – happy end of Passover, perhaps, or happy beginning of Baseball season.  Happy… day. I got a head start on Easter this week – I had an easter egg hunt in the back yard!  It was just wonderful, good, old-fashioned fun. […]