Suprise Me

Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones — Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965   As a teenager I participated with the Quakers to ban the bomb. I celebrated the March on Washington and survived Mississippi Freedom Summer. I learned to play blues and folk… Read More

While watching TV last week, I was absent-mindedly scrolling though Instagram, “liking” random photos of British royalty and Patriots, equally. Somehow, I must have liked and followed something called “julianedelmanofficialfanpage”. If it really was his fan page, it would have been marked with a blue checked circle, as is every account of a famous person,… Read More

What was I doing with this new scheme? Was I planning to…settle down? Read More

My younger son was in nursery school at the time and his best buddy, Dugan, thought her name was “Fleabee”, to the amusement of us all. Read More

With some people it requires advancing years to bring a niggling sense of mortality. Read More

B. Smith I was so sorry to learn of the recent death of restaurateur Barbara Smith at age 70 after a decade-long and very public battle with Alzheimer’s.   She and her husband chronicled their years living with the disease in their book Before I Forget. I had followed Barbara’s career since she was a… Read More

When did Halloween evolve into such a huge deal? I have a hard time remembering much about Halloween from my childhood. Perhaps that’s because I am trying to recall memories from 65 years ago. Once, I asked my mother what costumes I wore for Halloween, and she informed me that it really wasn’t that important… Read More

Members of my family share a long and celebrated history of playing for royalty and heads of state. We are not exactly court jesters, but we come close. My Buckingham Palace event is one more gig on a long list of fancy-pants musical soirees. Read More

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. Read More

I took a course on Northern Renaissance painting with Professor Ludovico Borgo in my last semester at Brandeis. For our final project, we had to write a research paper on a painting from that era that we could visit in person. We had to analyze the provenance of the work, history of restorations, and research… Read More