About a month into the second semester of my eighth grade speech class (in 1968), our teacher Mrs. Powrie had a heart attack and sat out the rest of the year. She was an older woman who ran the class pretty old school with lectures punctuated by our occasional speeches or other presentations. Pretty standard stuff if I remember correctly, and I really don’t remember much of the content of her class. I do remember her though, because a couple months previous my friend Carl and I were throwing snowballs at cars and hit one that turned out to be hers. Her husband stopped, got out and chewed us out while she glared at us from the passenger seat. I was all bundled up in my snow gear so I’m not even sure she connected this vandal with the kid in her class.

Anyway, all that just sets the stage for her replacement, a thirty-something man named Michael who would turn out to be a significant player in the next ten years of my life and its current ongoing trajectory. Where Mrs. Powrie had us giving individual speeches, Michael immediately put us into groups of four or five and told each group to pick a scene from a play to perform. (more…)

Drinking (and to a lesser extent drug use) to excess is a legendary, mythologized aspect of college life. As the Whiffenpoofs song says, “Let us drink a toast to all we love the best”. I had my own encounter with this “self-hazing” cultural tradition when I went off to my first year of college after graduating from high school in 1972.

During my senior year of high school, I followed the conventional programmed path, applied and was accepted to two colleges – the University of Michigan in my hometown of Ann Arbor and Western Michigan University, 100 miles west in Kalamazoo. Since I was interested in theater at the time (see “JLO”) I decided to go to Western, because I heard that they had a better theater department. Since my mom was a single parent with a limited income (basically child support paid by my dad), I managed to get a financial need grant and a little bit of a scholarship as well, which paid for a large part of the cost. (more…)

It’s March again, and the one time in the year I pitch my circle of family and friends for a donation to a worthy cause…

On Saturday, March 21 I will be riding my bicycle in a Bike-a-thon to collect pledges to support North Valley Caring Services (NVCS), a small community organization located in and supporting a very poor, at-risk, mostly Hispanic community just three miles east of where I live in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.

The Langdon/Orion Street neighborhood, where NVCS is located, is one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles, known for its gang activity, poverty, homelessness and dense population. North Valley Caring Services continues a herculean effort to help that marginalized community help itself. Their current programs include: (more…)