MALIBU, 1965
Jane Fonda, 28 years old, in a photograph taken by Dennis Hopper, at Malibu in 1965. Thanks to Vanityfair.com.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SPIRIT OF THE RULES?
For all those who said that baseball had no precedent for overruling the blatantly erroneous call of umpire Jim Joyce and validating the perfect game that Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had so obviously pitched, please travel with me back to Yankee Stadium on the sultry afternoon of July 24, 1983, when a two-run home run …
LAST CALL AT MARYMOUNT MANHATTAN
Thanks once again to my friend Lewis Burke Frumkes for inviting me to appear at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference. This was my third and unfortunately final year at the event, because the school has decided after sixteen years to close the program because it needed the space. Too bad; the conferences were very stimulating, …
BOOM BOOM BEACH
I had the good fortune to spend three days last week with friends Jim and Lisa at the oceanfront condo at Cocoa Beach in Florida, talking politics and watching playoff basketball (tough, exciting wins by eventual losers Magic and Suns) and contemplating the vista presented here. Hot and humid all day; ocean breezes, such as …
STILL MISTRESS OF HER DOMAIN
We have been quite worried about our old dog Vicki. For the last couple of weeks, she has been limping, a hobble that just showed up after a long and pleasant walk in the woods. No big deal, we’ve been thinking, and it would show signs of lessening, and then she would bound off the …
A MCCRACKEN GOOD YARN
I had a delightful time yesterday meeting with McCracken Poston, a lawyer and former state legislator from Georgia who told me a warm and delightful story about, of all things, a murder case he tried a decade ago. He and I are going to work to try to turn it into a book. McCracken and …
CCTV AND NEW YORK’S SUBWAYS: NO PANACEA
Squired by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a ballyhooed visit to the main control room of the London Underground last week, and came away favorably impressed with the ability of the Tube’s management to use its CCTV system to monitor events on any and every station and platform in the system. …
THE BLOOMIN’ MICHAEL GROSS
A belated thanks to my friend Michael Gross, who came up to Briarcliff a couple of Sundays ago. The Garden Club was having its annual Arts Abloom Festival for the benefit of the library, and Michael was the special celebrity guest, reading from his book Rogues Gallery and signing copies. Michael enjoyed his sojourn into …
PITCHING UNDERHAND TO ELENA KAGAN
When I was an editor at Spy a couple of decades ago, we used to run an item called The Spy List, which was almost invariably a simple set of names that were connected by–well, that was for the reader to figure out, or to speculate upon. Basically it was a way we could print …
THE BROAD STREET BULLIES ARE ON THE LOOSE
Ginny and I spent a pleasant hour Monday night watching the HBO documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-seventies, the famous Broad Street Bullies, whose adventures Ginny and I much enjoyed. Indeed, some of the footage was a little like seeing home movies. The famous fog game in the Cup Finals in 1975? That …