Wrongful Termination - Chapter 6

When their cab pulled up to the Garden, the first thing they saw when they got out was a ticket scalper. He was a tall, happy black man with a New York accent, wearing a crisp, Stetson cowboy hat and a red scarf.

“Rodeo tickets right here! Hundred dollars. Get your rodeo tickets here! See them white boys get thrown all around! Hundred dollars.”

“Where are the seats?” Robert asked.

“He’s funny Dad.”

“That’s right little man. I’m as funny as they come. I bet you don’t see a lot of funny men like me up where you live, ain’t that right boss?”

Billy just smiled up at him.

“The seats, where are they?”

“Mister, they so close, you can watch the bruises change colors on the cowboys' ass.”

Billy giggled. Robert took out his 100% tanned leather wallet Johnson & Johnson had given him for one of his job anniversaries, handed the man in the cowboy hat two hundred dollars and took the tickets.

“These better be great seats.”

“If they’re not, you can come back and make me live in Harlem.” He started laughing hysterically.

“Bye mister.” Billy smiled up at him and waved.

“Bye little man. Watch you don’t get any dust in your eyes.”

For a moment, Billy and the black man held a knowing stare.

Then Robert took his sons’ hand and they went inside.

Guilty pleasures Part 2: The Three Stooges

I'm just going to come right out with it. I don't care what you think: I loved it.

For the second installment in my Guilty Pleasures series - you can read the first one here - I've chosen everyone's (almost) guilty pleasure: The Three Stooges.

I've always been a Marx Bros. guy. But I've also always loved The Stooges. I've even been to a Stoogefest a time or two in my life. Don't judge me. And having just seen the movie, which is funny as hell, I can only hope there's a whole series of them planned.

The movie pays homage to the original Stooges short films by divvying up the action into chapters, right down to the original graphics and music. Is it stupid? Here's a clue: it has the word "stooges" in the title. But it's the perfect escape film, the very definition of mindless fun.

There've been many big names attached to this project. At one time, Benicio Del Toro was going to be Moe, Sean Penn was Larry and Jim Carrey Curly. For whatever reason, it didn't work out that way. And it's everyone's good fortune it didn't.

The cast they went with not only look like the Stooges, but they inhabit the roles with a disturbing ease. With the exception of Will & Grace's Sean Hayes as Larry, the mostly unknown cast (Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe and Will Sasso as Curly) does a stellar job of not only reincarnating the Stooges, but bringing them into the modern world.

There's a "kids don't try this at home with real hammers and sledgehammers" disclaimer at the very end of the movie that the studio lawyers clearly made the producers include. It's done in a humorous way, but if you give it even the tiniest bit of thought it's a sad statement about the times we're living in.

Anyway, I imagine there's not going to be any middle ground on this film. It's going to be a love or hate, all or nothing deal.

But for me, the best way to sum up my feeling is with those three little words.

Nyuck nyuck nyuck.

Let Titanic rest in peace

Yesterday my family and I went to see Titanic 3D. The wife and I, along with our great friends Dave and Maureen (yes, that Dave and Maureen) originally saw the movie on the second day of its release at the Village Theater in Westwood when it first came out. Because the Village screen is so big, it felt like we were actually on the ship - even at the end.

They've got to get that air conditioning fixed.

You may know, I'm not a fan of 3D. And in this particular case I'm not sure it added much. But at least it didn't distract from the movie.

As I write this, a 100 years ago the Titanic was already underway on its fateful voyage. It's still one of the great "what-if's" of history, like the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, the Challenger shuttle or 9/11.

The movie was better than I remembered. Love story aside (still a stroke of movie marketing genius on Cameron's part), it gives an unflinching glimpse of the sheer terror that must've gone on in the two hours it took the ship to sink.

When Kathy Bates as the unsinkable Molly Brown looks back at the sinking ship from her lifeboat and says, "God almighty," she's speaking for everyone in the theater.

There's currently a diving expedition company that, for $60,000, will take you on a ten-day cruise out to the site where Titanic rests, and bring you down to the ship in a submersible for an up close and personal look. There've already been couples who have been married down there.

How far behind can the floating gift shop be?

The unrestricted scavenging of artifacts and ship parts by unauthorized divers and treasure hunters has already taken its toll. I think it's wrong. For all the fascination, Titanic, like the Arizona that rests under Pearl Harbor, is a gravesite that deserves the proper respect and decorum.

Even though it only sailed once, it's not too late to give Titanic a second chance.

The hunger games

As you can probably tell from the giant rabbit in the center of the table (I call him Harvey - look it up), this was our Easter dinner table before the food arrived. Easter's a unique holiday in terms of food intake. Not quite as much as Thanksgiving or Christmas, but still shovel-worthy.

Of course, the two main ingredients in the Easter dinner are ham and chocolate (Ham & Chocolate - great band. Saw them at Hop Singh's in '92).

Now, I happen to have a very special relationship with both these food groups. Sad but true, as I wrote about here, I'm actually allergic to chocolate. Fortunately the effects are only weight-threatening and not life-threatening, so my allergy doesn't prevent me from enjoying it in small quantities.

No matter how many dozens of those little chocolate eggs I have, they're still small right?

As the only 100% Jew in the family (which may be why Easter always feels like dinner at Grammy Hall's house), the other item, ham, has religious implications and overtones. Or at least it would if I adhered to kashrut - the body of Jewish law that deals with what may and may not be eaten, and how it may or may not be prepared. When it comes to dietary guidelines, Judaism has a pretty strict food pyramid.

I guess "pyramid" was a poor choice of words.

Anyway, as you may already know from this post, I'm a big (and getting bigger) fan of pork products. They are simply delicious in a way that traditional Jewish foods like matzoh, gefilte fish, and borscht never will be.

So as I do every Easter, along with the rest of my Christian family, I celebrate the resurrection - of my allergies and my disregard of Jewish dietary law.

And I can't wait to do it again next year.

Wrongful Termination - Chapter 5

The rodeo was in town.

If you were driving down the Las Vegas Strip, past exploding volcanoes, pirate ships, the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, nine story Coke bottle and gargantuan flashing hotel signs, and if you were a stickler for detail, you might have noticed the limp flags hanging from light posts, lamely fighting a losing battle for attention. They read “National Rodeo Finals Oct. 15th - 24th, West Valley Center”.

Billy Delrogh noticed them. In fact, they were almost the only thing he noticed.

Seven years ago, when he was just five years old, Billy became a rodeo fan. His father, Robert, had been a senior vice-president of marketing at Johnson & Johnson in New York for most of his career. But when J & J hired a consultant to help them figure out how they could run more efficiently and profitably, one of their bright ideas was to offer senior management early retirement in a way they couldn’t refuse.

Which actually turned out to be O.K. with Robert.

In the last few years, he’d begun to notice his enthusiasm for New York dwindling. He was also having second thoughts about raising Billy there.

His debate was that while the city was the center of the universe, with its museums, theater, publishing and possibilities, it was also headquarters for the kind of perverse crime that lands on the front page daily, and urban paranoia that leaves you no choice but to walk with your eyes looking behind as much as ahead of you. Of course, September 11th had done nothing to improve that.

Besides, having Billy in a private school, which was the only real option in New York, was giving him a first class education but also shielding him from the very things the city had to offer.

So when the early retirement offer came down, Robert took it. He cashed in his stock options and profit sharing, and decided he was going to take Billy someplace new that had different things to offer.

Space is what he wanted one of those things to be. Despite the fact they lived in an extraordinarily spacious condo on Central Park West, Robert felt Billy should have the opportunity to grow up with a real yard to play in, instead of a cement balcony nine stories above traffic.

Before Sarah died giving birth to Billy, the condo had meant more to them than just a great place to live. Robert struggled for years as a mid-level executive at Johnson & Johnson, and Sarah had had to put up with an unreasonable number of late nights, missed holidays and family dinners with an empty place setting where Robert should have been but wasn’t. She’d taken a part time job as a cocktail waitress at a bar called Rendezvous in the east village just to help make ends meet. It was demeaning, and she grew weary deflecting nasty pick-up lines from drunken losers and losers trying to get drunk.

Persistence was what Robert had always told her. Make yourself indispensable to the company, they’ll see your value and they’ll reward you for it. And he was right. Eventually, they did. The title, the money, stock options, the corner office. All as a way of rewarding the fine work, and recognizing the contribution he’d made to the company’s bottom line.

What success meant more than anything to Robert was at last he’d be able to repay Sarah for her sacrifice. So they rewarded themselves with their dream condo, and the promise of a family to come.

It was exactly the kind of place people with rich fantasy lives imagine they’d live when they think about living in New York. But since Sarah’s death, it'd become a constant, sad reminder to Robert that he was raising his boy alone. While Billy was the most beautiful gift Sarah could have left as her legacy, the truth was that this oversized apartment, with their footsteps echoing on hardwood floors, the muted sound of the traffic coming in the weatherproofed windows, and the two of them rattling around in it only served to constantly remind him of the hole in his heart since she died.

In conversations they’d had while she was pregnant, Sarah always told Robert if anything ever happened to her she wanted him to show Billy things he wouldn’t normally be exposed to in the city.

The circus. The tall boats. The rodeo.

She wanted wide horizons for her son, and she wanted him to appreciate life beyond the cement and skyscraper world he was growing up in. Robert hated it when she talked about dying before he did. Each time she mentioned it, and she mentioned it far too often for a woman her age, he emphatically assured her she’d be around to watch Billy grow up, and see that he learned and saw everything she wanted him to.

It was an assurance he now felt foolish giving.

So, on the very day Billy turned five, a day each year that caused both great grief and celebration, Robert was perusing the New York Times. He turned the middle page of the sports section, and there it was. An ad for the Watkins Family Rodeo at Madison Square Garden.

Remembering his promise, he scooped up Billy, grabbed their coats, and they were off to a rodeo. In the middle of New York City.

He smiled up at Sarah as he closed the door.

Well shut my mouth

It's not brain surgery or rocket science, but some ad agencies would have you think it is.

I recently had to sign an NDA (a Non-Disclosure Agreement, sometimes called a confidentiality agreement) before this one firm would hire me for a freelance gig. It's become common practice the last few years. But here's my question: what exactly are they protecting?

If you work on a fast food account, you get asked to work on other fast food accounts. Same for cars. Same for airlines. Same for most categories. Like any profession (stops and laughs hysterically for using the word "profession"....okay, regaining composure...), leveraging your experience is what keeps you employed.

No one goes from one job to the next yakking about everything they did, saw, wrote and learned at the last one. You just assimilate it all into your own personal database.

Just like the borg, except without all that nasty face metal.

Agencies like to flatter themselves that what they do is so proprietary, their processes so innovative, that spilling the beans will cause them "irreparable damage and financial loss and hardship."

Here's the reality check: there are no beans to spill.

Every agency has a catchy name for their process. You say tomato, I say tom-ah-to. They're all doing the same things to win, keep and grow business. And the idea that your car client doesn't know what the other guys car client is up to is a sweet notion from a bygone era.

A copywriter friend of mine was fired from an agency because he had the unmitigated gall to post an ad he'd done on his website, along with all the other ads he's done. It's a common practice. But his agency blew a fuse, saying he was not only violating his confidentiality agreement but was trying to steal the business. Neither of which was true. To my way of thinking there are felonies and misdemeanors: if they were upset he didn't ask first, they should've reminded him to next time and moved on.

Here's the thing large agencies have in common with small ones: the level of paranoia, based on nothing, is genuinely frightening.

Does an account get stolen from time to time? Of course. Do employees get poached from one agency to another? Sure. But if either were genuinely happy where they were in the first place, it would be a lot harder to do.

The other thing about these agreements is there's usually a time period attached to them. Agencies don't want you to write on an account in the same category for 1, 2 or 3 years without getting signed permission from them.

Good luck with that.

In case you don't know, this is how I make my living. I can be writing on Taco Bell one day, and Del Taco the next. Or Land Rover and Chevy Tahoe. Southwest or Jet Blue. That's the nature of freelance.

Fortunately I know how to use the strikethough option before I sign one of these contracts.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I believe your word and honor are all you have, and if you sign a contract you should abide by it.

But some contracts, like the one on the back of your ticket in the parking lot, just aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

I'd tell you which ones, but I'm not at liberty to say.

Walk Away Renee

As you may know, in the past I've compared and contrasted versions of the same song. I did it for Tracks Of My Tears, Stand By Me, Secret Heart, and even a then-and-now comparison of Cat Stevens singing The Wind.

I do it for the sheer pleasure these songs, some classic, bring to the ears and the soul. I do it because there are great versions that don't get seen often enough and deserve to. I do it because it's exciting to discover new artists as they perform old favorites.

But mostly I do it because it's easier than thinking of a new post every day.

The Left Banke recorded the original hit, and their version is included here.

Sad and poignant, teary and nostalgic, melancholy and timeless, please to enjoy these versions of Walk Away Renee.