Table top hockey had created the bug in my brother and I for simulated worlds of sport. The drama of athletic competition in the arena of team sports and the personalities involved, both the star players and the journeymen who filled out the roster, was real fodder for our imaginations. We took it a step farther, a step more abstract, with Big League Manager.

I was introduced to BLM (Big League Manager) Baseball by my best friend in 8th grade. It was the summer of 1968 and he had recently moved to Ann Arbor from St Louis Missouri, and we had met in school, having several classes together. We were two white kids with a list of things in common… (more…)

Our parents got us a tabletop hockey game one X-mas, with the 2’ by 3’ hockey rink and the players maneuvered forward and back by metal rods that you twist to pass and shoot. Though other friends of ours had such sets, my brother and I were the only kids in our circle that built an entire imaginary world around this venue.

It started with each of us creating our own professional hockey teams. Mine was the Cooperstown Cats and I had named players, two “lines” actually, for each of the six positions represented by the plastic figures on the tabletop set. My “A-Line” center was “Steve Scimitar” and his “B-Line” comrade was “Sonny Star”. Each player had his own personality, athletic ability, style and personal history on and off the ice. My team’s coach was the legendary former hockey great “Kitty McBee” and the team was owned by “Manfred J. Sedgwicks”, a cigar-chomping old-school sport franchise owner who happened also to be a cat, thus the team name. (more…)

My partner Sally, our kids and I have the dubious distinction of being banned for life from America Online after our son Eric racked up three terms-of-service violations in his early forays into online communities. Lucky for us AOL has plenty of competitors willing to let us renegades onto their competing web portal. (more…)

I’m still reading Jacques Barzun’s book “From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present”. It’s the last of the 27 books John Taylor Gatto recommended reading (at the end of his “Underground History of American Education”) to give the reader a better sense of the historic context in which the American education system developed. His premise is to do a post mortem on the “Modern Era” which he says began around 1500 with the decay of medieval culture and the revolutionary impact of the Protestant Reformation, and has presumably now ended as we transitioning into a new era. (more…)

In Junior High and High School English classes I was introduced to the work of Ray Bradbury, including his magical summer experience of “Dandelion Wine”. But when I participated in a multiple reading of “The Innocents” as part of a High School district forensic competition, our well received reading was upstaged by a very provocative well wrought reading of Ray Bradbury’s quietly apocalyptic “2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”, about what we would now call “smart house”, which was going through the motions of its daily automated routine even though ironically all the humans were gone due to some sort of unnamed cataclysm. (more…)

Popular music has been the soundtrack of my life. My brother and I played our favorite records of the moment over and over again. The radio was always playing in the car. In the words of Paul Simon or Motown there was much wisdom of life lessons that we heard over and over again, in the background, hypnotically at times slipping into the depths of our subconscious mind.

Nowhere do I recall this wisdom more than in the words of the Beatles. For many of my generation they were our musical “gurus”, constantly giving us a new bit of profound insight about the world and our human condition. Some examples I recall… (more…)

After much discussion and thought, my partner Sally and I decided to give our kids her last name rather than mine. We had pragmatic reasons for doing it, and we knew full well that we were breaking with patriarchal tradition, but we were caught by surprise by the consternation of my feminist mom.

When Sally was pregnant for the first time, we made every effort not to find out the gender of the baby until after s/he was born. Following the Jewish tradition of Sally’s family, we decided to pick a first name with the first letter of the person no longer alive that we wanted to honor. In this circumstance we decided that that person would by my father, Eric Zale, who had died in 1984, just after Sally and I married and two years before Eric’s first grandchild would be born. (more…)

As I get older, I am more and more amazed about the story of how my mother, Jane Roberts, decided to go to Ann Arbor. An unlikely odyssey in 1946 for a single young woman of 23, but one that started a chain of events that led to my birth. Thirty-two years later in 1978, I would embark on my own odyssey to Los Angeles, coincidentally at age 23 as well.

Based on her telling, Jane had had a childhood mixing idyllic joys and adventures with some difficult family relationships, particularly with her mother Caroline. Jane was the first of three children, her brother John just two years younger and her sister Pat born to an entirely different generation 14 years later. (more…)

I’ve just started reading a book called “From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present” by Jacques Barzun. Its the last of my three year long plunge into 27 books John Taylor Gatto recommended reading (at the end of his “Underground History of American Education”) to give one 10,000+ pages of context for the American education system. Barzun’s premise is to do a post mortem on the “Modern Era” which he says began around 1500 with the decay of medieval culture and the turning things upside down by the Protestant Reformation and presumably is now transitioning into a new era. Our so named “Information Age” I guess is the first act of this new era, and we can’t even begin to know how the era will be labeled five centuries from now. (more…)

Though our mom was a single parent, with limited financial resources, often battling depression, she still had the chutzpah and “outside the box” thinking to pull off (sometimes in collaboration with her friends, sometimes on her own) some pretty impressive projects. This adventure in particular I recall fondly, because it was my introduction, at age 14, to theater as a compelling institution that I would be soon diving into deeper myself (see “JLO”).

It was 1969 as I recall, and the now iconic rock musical “Hair” had previously opened on Broadway and was now playing in Toronto, Canada, about 300 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. Well my mom and my “Feminist Aunt” Mary Jane decided that our combined families should go see it. To keep the trip as economical as possible, they decided that we would all travel in my mom’s car. (more…)