Posts Tagged ‘Family & Friends’
Night Revolves On Invisible Wheels
Katie met Fabrizio as a child when she traveled to her father’s hometown in the Italian Alps. Thirty years later, Katie and Fabrizio reconnected at a relative’s wedding. Six weeks later, Katie and Fabrizio stood in a snow-swept cove of Central Park exchanging vows. Abbi and I stood in the wings, huddled together against the…
Read MoreShe’s My Niece
My college band, Smokey Junglefrog, released its third and final album, “She’s My Niece,” concurrent to our disbanding on May 15, 1993. The title of the album was borrowed from a birthday card my bassist, Paul Perreault, had given me. The front of the card was a mixtape with a collection on niece-oriented songs: She’s…
Read MoreWarning: Candy Canes Create Crazy (Adorable) Kids
Like most decisions, it was made quickly and without any sense of ramifications. Fast forward three hours. The air is filled with the sound of Christmas music, and the smell of baking cookies. Candlelight casts warmth across a room full of familiar faces. Down the hall, five adorable children under five-years-old are bouncing on our…
Read More“A Holiday Benefit, Vol. II” Release – Photos
“A Holiday Benefit, Vol. II” Rehearsal
My primary assignment was bartender, but I also played the role of backing vocalist, reporter, photographer and tambourinist. Most of the “A Holiday Benefit, Vol. II” gang got together to rehearse last night: Chris Abad, Tony Maceli, Jaime Allegre, Casey Shea, Jamie Leonhart, Bryan Dunn, Deena Goodman, Rosi Golan, Derek James, Dov Rosenblatt and Amber…
Read MoreBoo! (Or, Crossing The River Styx In Costume)
My favorite Halloween was at the end of my least-favorite year. I was ten-years-old. My parents were separated, soon-to-be divorced (saw that comin’, right?). My mother was in Washington, DC. Chris and I were with our father in Oak Park, Illinois. It was, as I’ve written before, a particularly dark, confusing and chaotic time. In…
Read MoreGoodnight Two Timing Blues
You’re sitting in a windowless, fluorescent-lit conference room on the seventeenth floor of a Midtown corporate headquarters reviewing the network’s Q4 Programming Calendar when it dawns on you. You’ve promised your best friend, a guy you’ve known since you were ten-years-old, that you’d meet him in back home for his induction into your high school’s…
Read MoreBest M*therf*ckin’ Crew Ever
Hangin’ with the best m*ther*ckin’ crew ever makes me the luckiest m*ther*ckin’ dude ever. I mean, I don’t wanna’ overstate anything, but tens days ago, I was laid out on a slab of stainless steel, shaved, intubated, swabbed with iodine, and incised. Tonight, I was stompin’, singin’ and scissor kickin’. But tonight wasn’t about me.…
Read MoreBee Season
For a few hours before my whole emergency appendectomy ordeal, an entirely different health issue was at hand. Pun intended. See, I like fire. Always have. Just ask our former neighbor, Ron Wells, who nabbed my brother, Christofer, and I behind the hedges with a can of gasoline, a box of matches and a few…
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Hollywood feeds on its young. To celebrate the thirty-seventh anniversary of my birth here, then, is not without irony. To be away from home and enduring what is typically the most challenging week of the year only added insult to injury. I woke, fittingly, to AT&T’s oft-heard ringtone, a sound that prompts dozens of my…
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