-
Tunes of Glory, Fifty Years later
Having seen Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, featuring Alec Guinness and the impeccably dappered and incisive Dennis Price with the usual suspects of English black comedy of the Fifties — Peter Sellars, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker, et al, Jane and I have become dazzled by the Guinness portrayals. In 1958 I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai on the big screen in Manhattan with my teenage chum, Stan Edelman. Ironically we had gone into the city to see Mike Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days and were very disappointed to find that tickets were sold out; however, we decided…
-
“As a Goy, I Say that Jews are Cool.”
Ner Tamid is a local Reform congregation in Green Valley Ranch, Henderson, Nevada. Indeed, Green Valley is named after the Greenspun family that has made a considerably favorable impact on the local community. Green Valley is named after the Greenspuns. I cannot explain to you the differences between Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative or Orthodox Jews because they all sing to their god like Tevye. A Reform synagogue,as I have experienced it, is more liberal in its approach, more open, perhaps to diversity. I went to an Orthodox synagogue between 1950 to 1953, learned Hebrew, Jewish history, was religiously conditioned, and sang from…
-
I Have One Day to Live
I will finish the week, the month and go on to 2011, but I pose this to myself, for one day I will have one day to live. Regardless of the sickness, be it cancer or a stroke, there is the day before that. And if I were to be in on the hoax that is life, that is death, what might I do with that day. It is a damn hard test to task one self. Let us agree that I will not run amok in the streets of Henderson, Nevada; I will most likely call my son, talk to…
-
A Speculative Sharing, Make of It What You Will
Across the spastic reaches of the void, convulsive and coughing tears of rent space, a laryngectomy of time, we come in. We plunge through, like a finger probing a hole. And after we are in, we are a raving neonate unknown to itself, years away from any kind of contemplation and self-observation. We come in without registering. Between is life and then we exude out. We bleed from the laryngectomy, hemmorhage from the throat. Diddling. It is all diddling with ourselves. The brightest of us who are not solely ruled by intellect realize after years of earth living that meaning,…