The Denial of Death: Why we run from the inevitable
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The chief embalmer of a busy funeral home recently remarked, “No matter how often I do this procedure, I am always struck by how we end up here on the table by ourselves. We are in a single file line, we all die alone.” The cornerstone of human existence is its temporal nature. “None of […]
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Nostalgia: The Powerful Taste of Long Ago
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The Madeleine Tea Cake is the most renowned pastry in world literature. When Marcel Proust’s narrator in Remembrance of Things Past began eating the sponge cake after it had been dipped into warm tea, a flood of memories was released—a watershed of seven volumes, 1.5 million words. Here is that celebrated moment: “As soon as I […]
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Mank on Netflix explores the mysteries of Citizen Kane
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After Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 1941’s Citizen Kane, the wunderkind Welles sent this letter to his collaborator: “Dear Mankie, Here’s what I wanted to wire you after the Academy Dinner: ‘You can kiss my half.’ I dare to send it through the mails only now that I find it […]
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Even Experts Can Be Fooled By Silent Heart Attacks
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Bill Schaffer, a retired Emergency Medical Technician, did not recognize the symptoms of his heart problems. The stabbing pain in his back was something Schaffer thought a chiropractor could address. The indigestion was just part of being 57 years old. Then, one weekend, reality hit like a lightning strike: “I started feeling funny prior to […]
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When Riddle and Ronstadt Made Beautiful Music Together
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“Who is Linda Ronstadt?” That was the question Grammy/Oscar/Emmy winning arranger Nelson Riddle asked when he hung up the phone after a conversation with Peter Asher, Ronstadt’s manager. It was May of 1982 and Riddle was no longer at the top of his game: his best years, those times when he and Frank Sinatra were recording […]
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