My wife has celebrated 28 birthdays since we met. Last year, we enjoyed a wonderfully intimate concert by banjo impresario Tony Trischka at the elegant, historic Elkins Estate, around the corner from our house. Two years ago, we spent a wonderful birthday in New York City. We went to a huge street festival on Sixth Avenue, wandered around …
After a full week of the draining drudgery of elementary school, there was nothing I liked better than spending Saturday afternoon at a movie matinee. I’d call up a bunch of friends from school and we’d hastily make plans to meet at the nearby Leo Theater or the Orleans, which was a little farther away. …
You know those time-lapse scenes in movies from your parents’ youth? The ones that show a montage of events beginning with a spinning newspaper hurtling towards the camera, stopping to display a significant headline splashed across the front page in big, attention-getting letters? How quaint and dated they seemed. Remember the boy on the street …
Racists are like the lowly cockroach – filthy, repulsive and filled with the endurance to have kept it going for thousands of years. You catch one skittering by in your peripheral vision every once in a while. Smoosh a cockroach and there’s always another to take it place. Always. I grew up in one of …
Continue reading ‘from my sketchbook: racism is alive and well’ »
This week’s Illustration Friday challenge word is “proverb”. “A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other. ” Several evenings ago, there was a family dinner at my in-law’s house. My wife and I attended, along with my wife’s younger brother, his wife and two …
When you’re a kid, dessert is always the best part of a meal. Who doesn’t love to find a package of Yodels in their lunch at school or have dinner followed by a chilled bowl of Jello or a slice of the cake you hungrily watched Mom bake and frost that afternoon? When I was …
This week’s Illustration Friday word is “atmosphere”. “Oh, oh, oh! Let’s go fly a kite. Up to the highest height! Let’s go fly a kite and send it soaring. Up through the atmosphere, Up where the air is clear, Oh, let’s go fly a kite!” Mary Poppins (1964) Beginning around 1938, a small Hollywood …
This is my third illustration for the Illustration Friday word “breakfast”. Here is the first one and here is the second. I get a kick out of seeing new parents cautiously checking the ingredient list on cereal. Not wanting to have their children ingest anything that would be harmful or contain empty calories, today’s parents …
“The horse I bet on was so slow, the jockey kept a diary of the trip.” — Henny Youngman I grew up watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I loved seeing the big name comedians like Rodney Dangerfield, Don Rickles, Shecky Greene (although I didn’t get a lot of his material) and the “King …
I have chosen a very unusual career. Im an artist. For most of my life, Ive had to explain exactly what I do and its never been an easy task. Everyone knows what a policeman or an accountant does. My father was a butcher; even vegetarians knew what he did. But, being an artist is …
