3 August, 2026 14 14 Comments

Say My Name

August 3, 2026 By 14 Comments

So I premiered a play Off Broadway recently.

That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Excuse me for a moment… I did it! Sorry, thanks for the indulgence, I’ll try and behave from here on out.

 

Say My Name opened at the AMT Theater as part of the 10th Annual Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, and I’m still trying to process everything I felt that week. I don’t think I’ll ever forget those three performances.

 

A Play That Wouldn’t Let Me Go

 

I wrote Say My Name about a year ago, and it’s gone through more drafts than I can count. It began as a ten-minute play called Press Conference, which won a few contests along the way and is still licensed in that form by Tiny Scripted, a distribution company.

This was a story I couldn’t quite let go of. The characters kept talking after the curtain came down on the 10-minute version, so I expanded it into a full-length play and brought it to Working Title Playwrights in Atlanta for development.

 

That process reminded me of something I believe more every year: writing may begin alone, but good writing rarely stays that way. A good play requires collaboration; people who help you wrestle with the work, talented artists who help you bring it from the page to the stage.

Throughout the process, I’d send pages written on my phone or in my mancave at home.  My collaborators, first in Atlanta, later in New York City, asked hard questions. I’d process the comments and then rewrite. Then we’d do it all over again. It’s the kind of collaboration that keeps a writer honest, and it’s why I seek out thoughtful partners whenever I can. Writing is solitary work. It doesn’t have to be lonely.

 

A great dramaturg knows when to challenge you and when to step aside. He or she pushes you toward a better version of your play without ever forgetting that it still belongs to you.

 

But once a playwright hands over a script, something remarkable happens.

 

It stops being my play.

 

It becomes our play.

 

That may be my favorite part of theater. That’s when the fun begins.

 

Words that lived for months inside one person’s imagination suddenly belong to actors, designers, directors, stage managers, technicians, and eventually an audience. Every one of them finds something you never knew was there.

Say My Name tells the story of a 15-year-old boy who was shot and killed outside a school dance. I wrote the play to honor the memory of Jerrod Miller, a 16-year-old who was shot by a rookie police officer in 2005 outside the Delray Full Service Center. I was mayor at the time.

The tragedy left a hole in my heart and the hearts of many, many others. The loss has also been largely forgotten by many, something that didn’t sit right with me. I wanted to write something that forces audiences to stop and consider the names that scroll by on TV screens when violence occurs. It is not Jerrod’s story per se, but it is a composite of too many young lives lost in this country.

I sent it in for consideration to the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, a prestigious event that celebrated its 10th year in 2026. It was chosen and I was thrilled to lead off the festival which runs through August at the AMT Theatre in the heart of the NY’s theatre district.

I was fortunate to work with visionary Director Reena Dutt who saw things in the script that I hadn’t seen myself. Every conversation we had, every adjustment she suggested, every staging choice she made ultimately strengthened the play. It’s a rare gift to trust someone so completely with something so personal.

 

Working mostly from Florida, I leaned heavily on our extraordinary stage manager, Lauren Linsey, who somehow managed to make the distance disappear with grace, kindness, and remarkable organization.

Then there was the cast.

Watching actors breathe life into characters who had existed only in my head for more than a year was one of the great privileges of my life.

 

Acclaimed stage and screen actor Tim Redmond brought intelligence and warmth that audiences immediately embraced. Eric Ruffin told me he had read the script more than a hundred times and every ounce of that commitment showed in a performance filled with quiet gravity and extraordinary compassion. Veteran actor Guiesseppe Jones gave Reverend Clayton exactly the presence I had imagined when I first wrote him.

 

Jennifer Laine Williams did something I’ll never forget. Audience members told us afterward they had expected to dislike her character. Instead, they found themselves understanding her—perhaps even rooting for her. There may be no greater compliment an actor can receive than making people reconsider their own assumptions.

 

Imani Jones brought enormous tenderness to her role, often leaving audiences in tears. Craig Cartwright embraced one of the play’s most difficult characters with remarkable courage. Richard Yarrell III’s voice, by more than one account, was simply heavenly. And Amanda Bailey captured my heart on our very first Zoom encounter, became exactly the spiritual heartbeat I had imagined for the ancestors guiding Eric’s character Marcus. Her voice alongside Richard’s created moments I’ll never forget.

Actors are remarkable people. Impossibly dedicated, smart and passionate, they can make even a newbie like me look good.

 

The Hours Nobody Sees

 

People see opening night.

They don’t see the months that come before it.

For me, rehearsals began after my workday ended; night after night from seven until eleven, weekends included. Most of my work happened over Zoom before I finally joined everyone in New York for final rehearsals and tech. I was so happy to be with these people, even for a few hectic days. I savored every moment. It still feels like a dream.

There is something wonderfully surreal about the creative process. One evening you’re discussing where a scene should go and rewriting a speech alone at your desk. A few months later you’re watching an actor deliver those same words to a silent theater full of strangers, and they’re wiping away tears.

When the house lights dimmed on opening night, I realized there was nothing left for me to do.

For months I had rewritten scenes, questioned every choice, and obsessed over every page. Suddenly the play belonged to the people onstage—and to the audience sitting in the dark. For the first time since typing “END OF PLAY,” I was simply another audience member.

 

What You’re Actually Chasing

 

People sometimes think theater artists chase applause.

Applause is wonderful.

But that’s not really what we’re after.

When a play truly works, you can feel something move through the room. You hear people laughing or crying together. You feel something that can’t be described, energy, emotion, connection to a story. Then the lights come up, and nobody rushes for the exits. They linger in their seats. They gather in the lobby. They continued conversations they weren’t having two hours earlier on the sidewalk with the actors and each other.

That’s exactly what I hoped this play would do.

The cast got a standing ovation which they richly deserved for immersing themselves in their roles and telling a story that is important. The tears, and the generous applause were deeply moving, but the moments I’ll remember most happened afterward. I collected dozens of audience comment cards over those three performances. Nearly every single one praised the extraordinary work of the cast, the direction, and the production itself. More importantly, people wanted to keep talking. They debated. They reflected. They asked questions.

That was always the goal.

To help people feel something.

To help people think and remember.

And maybe, just maybe, to help them talk to one another again.

 

Full Circle

 

What made the experience even more meaningful was looking out into the audience and seeing people who had been part of this journey long before opening night.

Friends traveled from far and wide to support me.  A wonderful group from Delray Beach made the trip north as well, a reminder that while this play opened in Manhattan, it carries a great deal of Florida with it.

More people than I can count have told me they hope this story finds a larger audience.

I hope it does too.

If it does, I hope this same creative family is standing beside me again. I can’t imagine a better group of artists, or a more compassionate group of human beings, to continue telling this story.

At its heart, Say My Name asks us to do something both simple and impossibly difficult: to truly see one another, to love one another, and to remember our shared responsibility to serve and protect each other.

Reflections

Ten years of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival.

And somehow I had the privilege of opening its tenth season.

I still catch myself saying it out loud every now and then, just to make sure it’s real.

I premiered a play Off Broadway.

That’s still a sentence I never thought I’d get to write.

I hope this story inspires you to try something you never thought possible.

 

27 July, 2026 2 2 Comments

Faith Not Hope

July 27, 2026 By 2 Comments

 

I wasn’t expecting anything from the podcast.
I rarely do.  It was background noise  — something to fill the drive, maybe I could learn a thing or two.
And then Brian Quint said something that made me reach for the volume knob.
He runs a theater company in Canada called Nightswimming. Cool name. I’m thinking it may be named after one of my favorite REM songs. Quint never said.
But he did say he runs a theater of faith, not hope. He didn’t elaborate much, at least not right away. He didn’t need to. The distinction landed before the explanation did.
I’ve been turning it over ever since. I’m not sure why. These kinds of things have been happening to me lately. In a world of noise, I get signal. For just a moment.
I think the word hope was what landed for me.
Hope, I think, is what most of us run on. It’s the fuel of the aspiring playwright, the unfunded foundation initiative, the relationship that needs one more good year to find its footing. Hope is useful. It gets you out of bed. But there’s a fragility to it — hope depends on something coming through. Someone returning that email. Someone saying yes.
Hope is, at its core, a negotiation with the future.
Faith is something else. Faith doesn’t wait for the outcome to justify the act. Faith doesn’t need someone else to say yes.
It says: this is worth doing because I am doing it. Not because of what it might become. Not because someone decides to take a risk on your idea.  The doing is the arrival. The doing is the point.
I think I’ve spent most of my life working from hope when I thought I was working from faith. The difference turns out to matter.
I write. A lot. Plays, essays, a stray poem. I have screenplays in a drawer, book ideas in folders. I love writing. Even though it’s hard. Even though, at times, it has broken my heart.
These days I’m writing plays.
I have for three years now, with a seriousness that crept up on me slowly and then all at once. Most of them have not been produced. Some have had readings. A few have found small stages. One just got produced  Off Broadway, which still surprises me when I say it out loud.
But here’s what I know: I wrote them anyway. All of them. Not because I had a production lined up or an agent waiting or a theater that believed in me. I wrote them because not writing them felt like a kind of dishonesty. Like I was withholding something I owed — to the work, to myself, maybe to the people the plays were secretly about or the ones I long to touch with a story that may have  meaning.
That’s not hope. Hope would have quit by now. Hope would have done the math. Hope would have figured out that it is hard to make it. I started kind of late, I’m learning on the job. I have
a lot of ground to make up and a finite amount of fuel in the tank.
Yes, hope would have thrown in the towel. But I haven’t. And I won’t.
That’s faith.
I co-lead  a foundation. We try to put resources into communities and institutions and ideas that we believe can matter. A lot of that investment lands in uncertain soil. You make the gift, you trust the people, you let go. In many cases, you don’t get to know how it turns out, not really, not on any timeline that satisfies the part of you that wants proof. Philanthropy, done honestly, is an act of faith dressed up in spreadsheets.
When we started our philanthropic journey we made a pilgrimage to see David Odahowski. He runs the Edythe Bush Foundation in Winter Park.
Dave has been called the “Dean of Florida philanthropy “ a title he has earned.
We were the rookies coming to see the veteran. The first thing Mr. Odahowski said to us was that we would never solve any of the issues we were seeking to impact.
That diagnosis, struck me. I had hope we might solve a problem or two.
But I understand what he was saying. The message was delivered with care through the lens of experience.
But the more I sit with it (and it has been a year) the more faith I have that we will make an impact. We will change lives. We will help people and communities.
 We make a daily choice to keep showing up for the things and people we’ve  decided are worth showing up for don’t we?
Brian Quint probably wasn’t talking about any of that on that podcast. He was talking about theater. But faith, once you start pulling on it, doesn’t stay put. It led me down so many paths. Paths I happily walk.
I don’t know much about Nightswimming. Is it named after my favorite REM song?
 I looked them up after the podcast ended. A small company. Developmental work. The kind of theater that exists in the margins of the industry, which is often where the most honest work gets done. What struck me wasn’t their catalog. It was that they had named their posture. They had decided, out loud, what kind of company they were going to be — not in terms of genre or aesthetic, but in terms of orientation. Faith, not hope.
That takes courage. Hope is easier to defend. Hope sounds reasonable. Hope has a plan.
Faith sounds reckless until you realize it’s the only thing that was ever actually holding you up.
I’m not ready to abandon hope entirely. I don’t think that’s what Quint was suggesting either. But I want to be more honest about which one I’m operating from on any given day. Hope can masquerade as faith for a long time before you notice the difference. Hope says I’ll keep going as long as there’s a chance. Faith says I’ll keep going.
Full stop.
I write. At the foundation we give.
I’m someone who has chosen, over and over, to bet on people and places and ideas that don’t come with guarantees. I think I’ve been a person of faith longer than I’ve had the word for it.
Thank you, Brian Quint. I wasn’t expecting anything from that podcast.
Turns out I should have had more faith.
20 July, 2026 2 2 Comments

In Defense of Getting Lost

July 20, 2026 By 2 Comments

In my office there’s a drawer full of dead ends.
Half-finished plays. Scenes that seemed brilliant at midnight and embarrassing at breakfast. Openings for columns that never found their second paragraph. A few big civic ideas that got as far as a legal pad and no further. For years I thought of that drawer as a graveyard — evidence of all the times I set out for somewhere and didn’t arrive.
I’ve come to believe I had it exactly backwards.
Here’s the thought by author Seth Godin I want to put in front of you, and I’d suggest reading it twice: Don’t curse the dead ends and the failures. They’re the key element of the work you’re doing. We find our way by getting lost. Anything other than that is called reading a map.
Kindly sit with that last line. It’s doing some heavy lifting. Because a map, when you think about it, is just a record of where somebody else already went. Maps are wonderful things — I don’t want to romanticize being lost on a highway late at night — but a map can only take you to places that exist. If the thing you’re after doesn’t exist yet — a play nobody has written, a story nobody has told, a version of a town nobody has built — then there is no map. There can’t be. The territory hasn’t been surveyed because you’re the one being sent to survey it.
Which means the wrong turns aren’t the interruption of the work. They are the work.
I learned this first as a writer. Every playwright knows the experience of following a scene confidently for ten pages before realizing it’s a cul-de-sac — the characters have nowhere to go, the energy has drained out, you took the wrong exit three pages back. The temptation is to treat those pages as waste. But they’re not waste. They’re reconnaissance. You now know something about your play that you could not have known any other way: you know where it doesn’tgo. And nine times out of ten, somewhere in that dead-end scene is a single line, a gesture, an image — the thing you were actually digging for, buried in ground you’d never have turned over if you’d stayed on the path. The failed scene isn’t the opposite of the finished play. It’s the tuition.
I learned it again in public life. Cities are the ultimate argument against map-reading. Every town has a shelf of master plans, and every honest person who has served in local government will tell you the same thing: the plans that worked were the ones that left room to get lost. You try a pilot program and it flops — but the flop teaches you what the neighborhood actually wants, which is never quite what the consultants’ map said it wanted. You back a project that dies in a 3–2 vote, and two years later the fight it started produces something better than the original idea. The failures weren’t detours from the town’s progress. They were how the town found out who it was.
The trouble is, we live in an age that has declared war on being lost. GPS reroutes us before we even feel the wrongness of a turn. Algorithms serve us more of what we already liked. Career advice comes bulleted and optimized: five steps, proven path, guaranteed arrival. We have built a civilization of maps, and we wonder why so much of what it produces feels like a place we’ve already been.
Meanwhile, everything genuinely new — every original book , every real reinvention, every town that became more than a strip of chain stores — came from somebody willing to wander off the surveyed grid and burn some daylight in the weeds.
I want to be careful here, because there’s a cheap version of this idea and I’m not selling it. “Fail fast” makes failure sound painless, and it isn’t. The dead ends cost real things: months, money, confidence, sometimes relationships. Getting lost is frightening precisely because it’s real — because for a stretch you genuinely do not know where you are, and no one can tell you. I’ve had those stretches. I’ve hated them. Every one of them, without exception, is where the work changed.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to, and I’ll leave it with you rather than answer it: when was the last time you let yourself get lost — genuinely lost, no map, no reroute — in anything that mattered to you?
If the answer is “a while,” the drawer full of dead ends is waiting. Mine is right here. I used to think it was a graveyard.
Turns out it’s a trailhead.
13 July, 2026 6 6 Comments

Leading With Empathy

July 13, 2026 By 6 Comments

I went to The Lord’s Place last week in West Palm Beach.

The visit left a deep impression.

It was a busy weekday, The Lord’s Place headquarters in West Palm Beach  was teeming with people looking for food, shelter, help and compassion.

These are our brothers and sisters; people we seem to ignore or pretend not to see. Some live in cars. Some live in bushes. Some work, some need work. All struggle.

My work for the Carl Angus DeSantis Foundation enables me to see a great many aspects of Palm Beach and Broward counties. Each week is an education.

One day I’m meeting with world class scientists trying to understand their research into Alzheimer’s. The next day I’m learning about children who have been abused or trafficked. In the morning I meet with people trying to save neighborhoods and an hour later I’m listening to someone trying to explain how AI might wipe out some jobs and create others and what we might do about it to prepare people for an uncertain future.

Philanthropy is fascinating.

It reminds me of my journalism days —you learn a little about a whole lot of things. And each day you must shift. This must be either really good for my brain or I’m shortening my shelf life– I can’t tell.

All I know is every night I find myself telling my old friend Carl what I’m learning and how his generosity is changing lives. Oh how I wish he was here to see it. I have faith that somehow, he knows. Somehow, he knows.

One of the best things about the job is I get to tell Carl’s story to prospective grantees. His tale is an only in America saga of an ambitious dreamer who worked hard, took big swings and found incredible success in business.

If you Google him, you’ll see he made the Forbes list as an octogenarian. It was not something he sought or relished. I had to talk him into the interview with the magazine and I agreed to stand beside him when the reporter called and asked him to talk about his entrepreneurial journey which started by selling parakeets and ended with him building substantial businesses including Rexall Sundown, a vitamin company and Celsius, a global beverage company. Along the way, he treated everyone in his path with kindness and generosity. Me included.

I tell friends that I could live 10 lifetimes and not run into anyone like Carl. But I did and he changed the trajectory of my life. He gave me adventures and experiences I never dreamed possible.

Billionaires are not the most popular people in our society these days.

And for good reason in too many cases.

People of good conscience can smell greed and sycophancy from a mile away. People with compassionate hearts and long views don’t like phonies. Personally, I can’t stand them. These people have let us down. History won’t be kind.

The measure of a good life goes far beyond the number of zeroes after your net worth. It goes far beyond $55 million weddings and whipping out a chain saw to brag that you cut critical aid to poor children whose lives depend on it.

Yes, these folks have the right to spend their money as they please, but that doesn’t mean we should excuse them from their obligations to others. After all, they were blessed by a system that paved the way to riches. Personally, I don’t begrudge anyone their success. But I also don’t believe that anyone is self-made, we all need a hand up. All of us.

I’ve never been a zero sum kind of guy.

I think America is so dynamic, so unique that we can take care of our own. We can enable talented entrepreneurs to create great wealth, and we can provide a path forward for those who need it. We have the resources. Do we have the will? Do we have the heart?

My friend Carl was different from the folks I just described. Generosity was his essence. And it’s still alive and doing a lot good in our community.

In many ways, his best work remains ahead of him.

We were told that by an early advisor to the foundation. I believe it.

But I wish Carl was here to see it.

So what’s holding us back from meeting the needs we see all around us?

Too many people who matter are lacking empathy. They would rather attack and belittle then sit down and solve the great challenges of our time. We’ve made it too easy for our political figures (I can’t call them leaders) to sling bombs at each other. We ought to demand that they wrestle with problems rather than sit around creating memes and spewing lies.

When I went to the Lord’s Place I saw human beings in need getting help.

If they need to sleep because sleeping outside in the heat and on the ground is damn near impossible they are given time to do so.

If they need medical attention, spiritual support or help with their mental health they get it.

If they need job training, it’s provided.

I was impressed.

Years ago, during my newspaper days, I interviewed Brother Joe Ranieri, founder of the Lord’s Place. At the time, I was in awe, not something that a reporter was supposed to be. But Brother Joe was quite a guy. My friend Carl would have liked him.

Last week, I came back much older wearing a different professional identity. Brother Joe is gone. But his spirit lives on.

Carl DeSantis is also gone. But his generosity lives on. I have a feeling that their stories are far from over.

I also have a feeling that one day America will fulfill its promise. To be a beacon, a nation that celebrates compassion, generosity and grace.

 

 

 

6 July, 2026 8 8 Comments

Retired Old Men Eating Out

July 6, 2026 By 8 Comments

The wonderful cast and director of The Romeos. From left, Matthew, Shelly, Kathryn, Gary and Peter.

Imagine this.
You invite people to a beautiful, historic space with plush chairs, great sight lines, professional sound and lighting and ask them to listen to a wide variety of stories told by a talented team of writers, actors and directors whose only goal is to inspire and entertain.

There are no screens. No ear buds. No algorithms and no cell phones.
Instead, you’re asked to lean in and pay attention–all at the same time, together.
That’s the magic of theatre and when it comes together, when the actors are clicking and the storytellers are doing their job you get swept away by the experience. And when it’s over, you have something to talk about, something to think about. You will have laughed, you may have cried but you will depart feeling human again, part of a community that enjoys the immense pleasure and value of storytelling.
That’s theatre. And that’s what the Playwrights Festival at the Delray Beach Playhouse delivers year after year.

The 7th annual Playwrights Festival recently wrapped on a scorching hot Sunday afternoon.
A sold out weekend ended with my play The Romeo’s closing the festival.

Afterwards, the playwrights gather on stage for a talkback. The audience asks questions, share their thoughts and for a few golden moments we get to shine.
It’s a heckuva feeling my friends.

But then you get to walk through the theater greeting audience members, actors and stagehands because nobody really wants to let go just yet.
For the performers and playwrights the nervous tension has been released.
There’s a feeling of “we did it” permeating the air. It’s not easy to get up on a stage and try to transport an audience for 10-15 minutes—the length of the plays featured by the festival.
It’s not easy to write dialogue either, unless you’re Nora Ephron or Neil Simon.

Most of us mortals sit staring at blank screens trying to wrestle an idea into something coherent through trial and a whole lot of errors.
To see that work come to life through the talents of gifted actors shaped by visionary directors is a feeling that is indescribable. It’s worth the labor. Every time.
But there’s risk involved. Delicious risk because you never know if what you’ve written is any good until you hear it out loud or as theater people say “on its feet.”

I wrote “The Romeos” after a weekend family reunion where my brother in law Paul talked about “retired old men eating out.” Get it. Romeo’s.
At the time, I didn’t know it was a thing. All I knew, was that it was a great concept for a play. So I got to work. Now that I have a little experience and have met several actors I find myself writing with those actors in mind.

For the Romeos I imagined my friends Shelly Pittleman and Peter Salzer in two of the lead roles.
I saw Shelly as Frank, a widowed plumber grieving the loss of his wife Marie. And I saw Peter as Morty, a health conscious accountant.
We needed a third character so I created Sid, a retired English teacher and poetry aficionado who is also a romantic and a bit of a ladies man.
I put them in a diner on 441 and imagined that they met weekly in the same booth where they were ably waited on by Jessica, a younger waitress with aspirations and wisdom forged by hard won experience.

If I am to be honest, this one came easy. A first draft was done in about an hour. I saw the characters clearly. I had the set up, and I think I knew what life lessons I was hoping to convey in a quick s few pages.
Now all I needed was for it to be funny and touching. No problem.

Yeah right.

The truth is sometimes writing comes easy, it just flows and sometimes, most of the time, it’s a slog of self doubt. You search in vain for magic and you wrestle with a feeling that it’s lacking that certain something you just can’t put your finger on.

For me, and other writers I’ve spoken to, we live for those flow moments when the words just appear from some mysterious place. But we also relish the struggle because we have faith that the struggle will make us better. When you struggle and solve the riddle it’s a great feeling. It’s also a great feeling when the characters cooperate and write for you.

The Romeos was the latter feeling for me. I heard Peter and Shelly. And when we cast Gary Eggers as Sid and Kathleen Shelton as Jessica they slid into the characters I imagined.
I can see myself writing with them in mind in the future.

The next step is to turn your script over to a talented director in this case the remarkable Matthew Schenk.
Matt and the cast made it sing.
And then, it’s over.
It’s performed and it vanishes.

That’s the cruelty and the grace of live theater. It’s not a movie. You can’t rewind it. You can’t stream it at midnight in your pajamas. You were either there or you weren’t. And if you were there– if you were in that room on that Sunday afternoon, then you own something that no one can take from you and no one else will ever have. Your version. Your experience. The way that particular line landed in your particular chest on that particular afternoon.

A film is a recording. A book is an object. A play is a séance.
You summon something into the room. It lives for a few minutes. Then it goes back to wherever it came from. And you sit there in the dark after the lights go down and you think: “was that real”?
It was real. It was a Sunday afternoon in Delray beach and it was real.

I’ve written a number of plays now. Some of them have been produced, some of them live in drawers, some of them are still becoming whatever they’re gonna become. But I will tell you this; nothing, nothing compares to sitting in a theater and hearing an audience laughing at the line you wrote alone on your phone at two in the morning. Nothing compares to the actor who finds something in the words you didn’t know was there, a pause you didn’t write, a gesture you didn’t imagine, a take that elevates a line and creates a magical moment.
Once you turn a play over to a creative team, it’s not your play anymore. It becomes our play and that’s my favorite part because the team takes the writing to places you never imagine.

The Playwrights Festival does something that almost nobody does anymore. It bets on new work. It bets on the unknown. It says; we don’t know if this piece is going to work, but we’re gonna put it in a room with real actors and a real audience and find out together. That’s not programming. That’s faith.
And as festival co-creator Marianne Regan reminds audiences, this work matters because we are creating the theater of tomorrow. We are building the canon in our own humble but sincere way.
We are also building community.
The festival sells out. In the middle of summer, the so-called slow season.
But there’s clearly a hunger for stories and live performance. There’s clearly a desire to get together and experience something live and in person with our friends and neighbors.
If I could, I’d live in that world.
It is hard to leave it.
I noticed that people linger. They want to talk to the actors and playwrights and each other. That’s so beautiful.
But eventually we leave, the curtain goes down, the lights go off. The actors go back to their lives.
That’s theater.
You build a world. You fill it with people. You let strangers into it for a few minutes and then you strike it, pack it up and carry it home where nobody can see it but you know it’s there.
The Romeos lived for one afternoon in Delray beach.
The imaginary booth is gone. The props are in a box somewhere.
Frank and Morty and Sid and Jessica are back in the script, where they live, waiting for the next time someone gives them a room, a light, and an audience.

29 June, 2026 4 4 Comments

My Friend The Pioneer: A Personal Tribute

June 29, 2026 By 4 Comments

Linda, her brother Howard, Scott and me at the U.S. Open celebrating our 50th birthdays.

My friend Linda Cohn announced her retirement from ESPN last week after 34 incredible years.

Because she’s been an important trailblazer for women in sports journalism, Linda’s announcement was big news.

But long before Linda Cohn became a household name — before the record 5,500 SportsCenter broadcasts, before the National Sports Media Hall of Fame, before she was the most prolific anchor in ESPN history — she was my friend Howie’s older sister. His cool, very cool, big sister. I’ve always admired her.
Linda was a terrific athlete, had a great sense of humor and impeccable taste in music and never made us feel like we were in the way.

Howie (now Dr. Howard Cohn) and I were born a week apart. So, we often celebrated our birthdays together with a visit–accompanied by our good friend Scott– to an amusement park near Amityville off the Long Island Expressway.

Amityville became better known for a horror movie bearing its name, but to us it was home to a place full of rides and arcade games. Linda or her dad would often drive us.

She also took us to concerts. One memorable show was the Doobie Brothers at Nassau Coliseum.

We scored great seats because Howie and Linda’s mom worked as a store nurse at Macy’s. Her office was next to what I think was called the “ticketron”, which meant we had an “in” to score tickets to the best shows of the day. Billy Joel at the Garden, Foreigner and Johnny Winter also at the Garden, Styx at the Coliseum. It was the 70s, and rock ruled the land.

 

My memories of Linda from those days are vivid. She knew more about sports than anyone, loved the Knicks, Rangers, Mets and Giants, played goalie on an ice hockey team and was an awesome tennis player.

Yes, Linda was cool. She also had a great laugh, put up with our jokes and never seemed to be annoyed when forced to hang out with us. And folks, we could be annoying.

One time, we went to see Beatlemania at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. We went with Linda and my friend’s Scott’s big sister and probably somebody else. Being young and foolish, we wanted some distance from these older women, so we sat in another car on the Long Island Railroad on the way to Penn Station.

When we heard the conductor announce Penn Station, we got off the train, only it wasn’t Penn Station. It was the stop before. The big sisters watched in horror as the train pulled away with us standing on the podium. Eventually, we reunited in the actual Penn Station. I don’t remember their reaction, but I think they were forgiving. I’m also pretty sure we stayed together until we returned safely to Stony Brook.

There were more trips and experiences. We went to Central Park when John Lennon was killed in 1980 for the vigil. That was unforgettable.

We also visited SUNY Oswego, where Linda played on the hockey team and studied broadcast communications.

My memories are her always laughing with us.

That’s the thing about knowing someone before they become someone.

You carry a version of them that the world never gets to see. The Linda Cohn who became a pioneer for women in sports journalism is the same person I watched grow up — or rather, the person who watched us grow up, shepherding a bunch of younger kids around Long Island with the patience of someone who probably had bigger things on her mind already.

She started at WALK-AM/FM in Patchogue N.Y. in 1981, covering news and sports. By 1992 she was at ESPN, and the rest is television history. But numbers don’t really tell the story. What Linda did was simply show up, every night, and treat sports like it mattered — because to her, it genuinely did. As mentioned, she was a former college hockey goalie. She wasn’t performing enthusiasm. She had it.

For those of us who spent decades watching SportsCenter, Linda was the constant. Generations of kids fell asleep to her voice recapping the late scores. And quietly, without making a crusade of it, she was showing a generation of young women that the anchor desk belonged to them too.

She said it herself, in her retirement statement: “What I’m most proud of is that my career lasted long enough for me to see little girls grow up watching SportsCenter, enter this business and succeed in it.”

That’s the whole thing, right there.

At a Queen concert in Sunrise, Florida.

 

 

When Howie and I turned 50, Linda did something I’ll never forget. She treated us to a sports weekend in New York City, access to the ESPN box at the US Open, sideline passes for a Giants preseason game (we were a few feet from Tom Brady and he waved to her), up close at a Mets game. It was one of those weekends that reminds you how lucky you’ve been with the friends you’ve collected across a lifetime. She could have made arrangements for us and said have fun, but she came with us instead. We got to hang out and joke all weekend. It was a magical time.

The teenager who drove us to concerts became the woman who changed what sports television looked like. But she never seemed to forget where she came from, and she never stopped bringing people along with her.

In recent years, we attended a Queen concert in Sunrise (just like old times) and met for dinner at La Cigale in Delray Beach.

There are texts, mostly during football season, where all of us lament life as Giants fans.

We share photos of people we used to know, poke gentle fun at the world and follow each other on social media.

Recently, Linda did a great podcast with Rich Eisen as part of his series “That was SportsCenter.”  Don’t miss it, it’s awesome. Here’s a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hGFBz5iv7k

Linda has met all the legends in just about every sport. Walking around NYC with her was a trip. She was stopped for photos etc., and my friend Scott photo bombed every single one.

And we laughed. How cool is that?

Linda, congratulations on a career that mattered. You earned every one of those record setting broadcasts and inspired a generation of women entering sports journalism. Wow.

And thanks for the rides too. Can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds.

22 June, 2026 6 6 Comments

Walk Like A Man

June 22, 2026 By 6 Comments

My father Sandy.

There’s a Springsteen song I keep circling back to this time of year.

Not one of the anthems — not “Born to Run,” not “Thunder Road.” A quieter one, off  the album Tunnel of Love, called “Walk Like a Man.”

It’s about a son standing at the threshold of his own grown-up life, thinking about the man who taught him how to stand. Bruce isn’t singing about a hero in the comic book sense. He’s singing about a father. About a boy who watched his dad move through the world and then spent the rest of his life trying to match the stride.

That’s the song I’d play for my father, who turned 88 last week.

My dad was a pharmacist. Had his own store — Maple Pharmacy in Smithtown, N.Y.

If you’re under a certain age, you may not understand the importance of an independent pharmacy, because we’ve mostly traded it away, although Maple Pharmacy still exists, the oldest pharmacy in that corner of Long Island.

During my dad’s career, the independent pharmacist wasn’t a clerk behind a counter. He was a fixture. He knew your name, your mother’s name, which kid had the ear infections and which one couldn’t take penicillin. He was the guy you called when the baby spiked a fever at ten o’clock at night and you weren’t sure whether to panic. Half medicine, half ministry. People walked in scared and walked out feeling better because people like my dad came around the counter and gave them comfort.

“The baby is going to be just fine.”

“Put this on and the itch will go away.”

“Don’t worry, but you need to have that looked at.”

When I was born, my dad, still newly wed and 26 years old, owned a store in Whitestone, Queens. He and my mom lived across the street. I was told that customers would knock on their door late at night seeking medicine.

It was a lot for a young man. A lot for a new dad and a new husband. But my mother used to tell me that my father was kind to everyone.

That’s my father.

What I remember growing up was the steadiness. He went in every day and did his job well. He worked long hours under fluorescent lights, trapped behind a counter filling prescriptions the old-fashioned way, with a mortar and pestle. The mortar is the heavy bowl and the pestle is the blunt club shaped tool that he used to grind and mix the concoction. It was pretty cool. This is before medicines arrived pre-packaged.

While the store was busy—people coming in for greeting cards, magazines, toiletries and assorted stuff– my dad was usually alone behind the counter. He told us that he longed to be out front where you could kibitz with the customers rather than in back filling prescriptions and typing out labels (the hunt and peck method). This was before computers and mail order pharmacies, before chains ruled the landscape and back when doctors would call in prescriptions.

I don’t know how he kept it all straight. But he did.

He didn’t do it for applause — there wasn’t any. There’s no parade for the man who fills the prescription correctly, who locks up every night, who comes home and is fully present for his wife and his kids.

Although I will say that when my dad came home, my mother made sure his newspaper was near his chair and that my sister and I weren’t doing anything loud or wild. We had a dog named Tina, a Beagle dachshund, who behaved like a person. She would keep his chair warm until he arrived. When he walked in, she greeted him and followed him back into the den to stand guard.

Tina got hit by a car one day. Happened right in front of me. I was playing football on the lawn when a kid opened the fence and Tina took off chasing a cat. A lawn truck coming down the street swerved to avoid the cat and hit our dog. I can still see the scene in my mind.

We put Tina in a cardboard box and my mother called my dad at the pharmacy. He came home and I went with him to the vet, all the while praying she would be ok. She looked peaceful, as if she was sleeping. I will never forget when the vet said she was gone. That night was the first time I ever saw my father cry. I will never forget that either. I was 9 years old.

My dad is a strong person. I’ve seen him overcome obstacles that would have crushed another person. Along the way, I watched, I’m not sure he knew that, probably not. But I watched and I absorbed daily lessons.

How he treated my mom. How he was supportive of my sister. How he visited neighbors suffering from cancer. How he honored and taught us to love and adore our grandparents who came here fleeing tyrants, sacrificing everything so we could have a better life.

I watched him tackle handyman projects, build a business, join a pool club so we could run around and play during endless summers. I watched him come home every night directly after work, never stopping for a drink with the guys like many other fathers did.

He took us on modest but super fun vacations, made sure I could take tennis lessons during the winter months because I had shown some promise and didn’t say a word when I lost interest in high school and moved on to other things namely girls, friends and old Mustangs.

I saw him get up every day, work hard, treat everyone well and repeat for a lifetime.

We don’t hand out medals for that. Maybe we should. Because that quiet, unglamorous reliability is the actual load-bearing wall of a family and a community. Everything else — the institutions, the civic life, the trust we keep complaining we’ve lost — it all rests on people like my dad, doing the right thing when no one’s keeping score.

That’s the kind of hero I want to write about this Father’s Day.

Not the loud kind. The everyday kind. The men who built a good life one ordinary, faithful day at a time, and never thought to call it heroism because to them it was just what you did. It was what his father did after coming to this country in 1920 with no money, no knowledge of English and no one to help him. His son, my dad, went to an Ivy League school and built a successful business and a happy family. That’s the American Dream. Work hard, do the right thing and you shall be rewarded. We ought to ask ourselves if that’s still the case. And if not, why not? What can we do to restore that beautiful promise?

As mentioned I studied my father when I was a kid.

I watch how he carried himself. How he handled life. What he did with his savings. How he derived pleasure from family, a fish tank and a set of tennis (now golf and bocce).

And I’m still studying him now, in my sixties, except now I understand the assignment. The Springsteen song gets at it exactly: you watch your father walk, and you measure your own steps against his, and the great hope of your life is that if your dad is a good man, you turn out to walk a little like he does.

Don’t get me wrong, my dad isn’t perfect (but he was darn close). No good father in any honest story is. But he was constant, and I’ve come to believe constancy is the rarest thing we’ve got. Anyone can be good on the big days. He was good every day.

So, here’s to my father and to all the quiet men like him — the ones who showed up, did the right thing, loved their people, and asked for nothing back. The everyday heroes. The ones who taught us how to walk like man.

I can still picture the store, my dad behind the counter, people lined up for a word of advice. I can still see us as at the pool club, me small, trailing him toward the tennis courts, taking two steps for every one of his, trying to keep up. I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep up.

15 June, 2026 0 Comments

Culture Is Essential Civic Infrastructure

June 15, 2026 By Leave a Comment

Marjorie Waldo hosts an excellent podcast exploring all aspects of arts and culture.

I love podcasts.
They keep me company every morning when I get ready for the day. They accompany me on long road trips and I count on them for information and ideas.
But appearing on a podcast is a whole other ballgame.

You just never know how it’s going to shake out. I’ve done a few over the years—a Springsteen related pod called “That One Lyric”, Kate Volman’s terrific podcast on creativity and a few related to city government, leadership and philanthropy.
I’ve always enjoyed the experience but it can be daunting.

Recently, I appeared on the Arts Garage’s excellent podcast called “Culture Under Fire.” I never miss an episode because they are all so good. The host, Arts Garage CEO Marjorie Waldo, is terrific. She’s  smart, engaging and passionate about all things culture. She has a wonderful voice and is a great interviewer—which is a skill I appreciate and admire. I think of her as the local Terry Gross or Sam Fragoso. If you know, you know. If you don’t check out Fresh Air and Talk Easy.
Back to Marjorie.

When you are one of Marjorie’s guests, you are in good hands. You forget you are on a podcast, you get swept up in the conversation.
I’ve known Marjorie for a lot of years now. Prior to her decade at the Arts Garage, she ran a charter school in Delray Beach that served as training ground for young people interested in automotive repair.
The school was the brainchild of Johnny Pun and Fred Glass who used to work for our Police Department.
Johnny and Fred attended a city commission goal setting session back in the day. They came with an idea to start a charter school that would teach kids automotive repair skills.
We thought it was brilliant and the Commission invested in the idea. I’m pretty sure it was the first time in Florida that a Police Department opened a charter school. We took pride in being innovative in those days.

Marjorie served as principal at the school and I admired her combination of administrative skills and passion for the mission. So when she was selected to run the Arts Garage I was
thrilled. For the past decade, she has done a remarkable job.
Let’s linger on that for a moment.

She stepped into to a turnaround situation at a politically fraught moment and knocked it out of the park. That’s not easy to do.
She’s provided stability, vision, fiscal discipline and leadership. She’s also a true believer in the power of the arts to transform communities.

I believe culture is essential civic infrastructure. The arts drives economic development, brings us together and offers quality of life benefits that sometimes can’t be measured but also can’t be denied.
Marjorie and her great team have made Arts Garage an important, integral and inclusive asset for not only Delray but also the region. A vast array of artists and patrons are grateful.
I’ve come to understand that communities thrive when special people show up and dig in. That’s what Marjorie has done; with heart, soul and a willingness to take some artistic risks.
We are better for all of it.

Working in the arts has never been an easy task.
Money has always been tight. It’s about to get even tighter. Donors have a vast array of worthy causes to chose from so the competition for grants and gifts is fierce.
Into this terrain, Marjorie and her small team happily venture.

In a time of screens, AI, division, algorithms and estrangement, culture is more important than ever.
It’s one of the very few things we can experience , in real time, together.
That’s worth a whole lot.
A few days ago, we traveled to Sarasota to see the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s new play “Lady Disdain.”
Lauren has been America’s most produced playwright for five of the past seven years. In short, she’s a rock star.
I got to know her through my recent adventures in theatre. When she invited me to the premiere, I jumped at the chance.
We sat next to Lauren and the amazing director Sean Daniels to see their vision come to life. It was remarkable to see their joy as they experienced à large crowd hang on every word and every action on stage. Nobody was on their phones. We were in the moment together. It was wonderful.
The best art challenges us to think, feel and hopefully talk to each other.
The Arts Garage provides this service several times a week. It is invaluable.
Check out the Culture Under Fire podcast available on all your favorite platforms. You won’t regret it. Here are some links.

To Listen on Spotify or Apple:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0jziadv0kM4rIQhsUDGxJo

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-20-stagecraft-statecraft-the-politics/id1834281851?i=1000771836508

To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8giQFEHgfk

8 June, 2026 3 3 Comments

Carrying The Dream Forward

June 8, 2026 By 3 Comments

Award Winner Emmanuel “Dupree” Jackson.

When people remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they often think about the dream.

 

But Dr. King was more than a dreamer. He was an organizer, a strategist, and a builder. He believed that lasting change happens when people are empowered to lead, serve, and lift up their communities.

 

That legacy lives on in Delray Beach through the work of my friend  Emanuel “Dupree” Jackson Jr. Recently, Dupree was honored by the National Education Association with the

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award. The award is given to leaders who emulate Dr. King’s leadership and philosophy.

The recognition is a very big deal. A national award! I can’t imagine a more deserving honoree.

I’ve been watching Dupree for years now. He’s a special person and a special leader.

As founder of the Emanuel Jackson Sr. (EJS) Project, Dupree has dedicated his life to creating opportunities for young people. Named in honor of his late father, who instilled in him the values of education, service, and community, the organization has become one of the most impactful youth development programs in Palm Beach County and a national model.

 

The Carl Angus DeSantis Foundation is proud to support EJS because we believe in investing in people who are making a lasting difference in the communities they call home. Few people embody that mission more completely than Dupree.

 

For more than a decade, EJS has helped over 5,000 young people build brighter futures through academic support, mental health counseling, leadership development, workforce training, and paid internship opportunities. But the organization’s impact extends far beyond the services it provides.

 

EJS creates spaces where young people can have honest conversations about issues affecting their lives. Participants learn about history, current events, civic engagement, and the responsibilities that come with citizenship. They are encouraged not only to understand their communities, but to help shape them.

 

Through participation in City Commission meetings, engagement with the Delray Beach Police Department, and direct interaction with civic and business leaders, young people gain firsthand experience in leadership and public service. They learn that their voices matter and that they have the power to make a difference.

 

One of EJS’s signature initiatives, Purpose Pays, offers youth ages 14 to 18 compensated work experiences, and professional development opportunities. Participants earn income while learning teamwork, communication, initiative, project management, and workplace responsibility. The program reinforces a simple but powerful idea: opportunity creates confidence, and confidence creates leaders.

 

Anyone who knows Dupree knows his commitment goes well beyond programs and statistics. He organizes neighborhood beautification projects, sponsors after-school tutoring, and leads educational trips that expose young people to history and African American culture. For many participants, these experiences represent their first opportunity to travel beyond their immediate surroundings and see a larger world of possibilities.

 

More importantly, Dupree shows up.

 

He shows up for young people who need encouragement. He shows up for families looking for support. He shows up for a community that believes deeply in the potential of its next generation.

 

His personal motto—”Bout Dat Action”—is more than a slogan. It is a philosophy of service. It reflects a belief that meaningful change requires commitment, consistency, and a willingness to do the work every day.

 

That is why his recent recognition with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award feels so fitting.

 

Like Dr. King, Dupree understands that dreams matter. But he also understands that dreams become reality only when people are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

 

For years, he has been doing exactly that—helping young people find their voices, discover their purpose, and realize their potential.

Delray Beach is better because of it.

Check out the EJS Project. It will give you hope for the future. https://ejsproject.org/

 

 

A Teachable Moment

I had an odd experience recently, that I thought I would share because the story contains some lessons that I think may be helpful.

I subscribe to a real estate blog that I usually find interesting. It includes a video summary that covers what’s happening in South Florida.

Recently, when it showed up in my inbox it had a provocative headline referencing an “old” Delray mayor embarking on a real estate project.

I thought, “Which of my predecessors is taking on a project in such a challenging environment—high interest rates, inflation, labor issues, and more?”

Then, I read the story, and I realized they were referring to me. Only they were using the name of a work colleague, who never served as mayor of Delray Beach.

Many things about the story were inaccurate, starting with the names.

As a former journalist, this kind of stuff nags at me. I don’t get mad, just annoyed.

Now the blogger is not a reporter, he’s a real estate broker. But still, come on folks. Two minutes of checking via Google would have cleared up a few very basic things.

I shrugged it off ( even the reference to being “old” rather than being referred to as a former mayor) but then I clicked on the video which implied that the misnamed old mayor used his political influence to get the project approved. There were a few snarky remarks, a bunch of innuendo and the impression that this is how it works—elected officials serve so they can monetize their office.

Well, I’d like to say that’s never true, but I can’t. However, it’s not true for every elected official. And it’s not true for me.

I don’t use my former position to get favors from city government. There are five elected officials in Delray, I know four of them, have never met one, have never talked to another, and the remaining three I don’t talk to unless they call me, which is rarely if ever. I am friends with Commissioner Judy Mollica. Our friendship predates any thought of her running for office.

In addition, I barely know anyone who works at City Hall these days. The folks I worked with are long gone.

It’s nothing personal. I’m at a different place in life. I wish them all well. Go forth and build a better Delray. It’s someone else’s turn now and has been since 2007 when I was termed out.

Don’t ask me about parking. Don’t ask me about beach renourishment. Don’t ask me about the Coco Market.  I am no longer current. And when it comes to development, I have one piece of advice: follow the rules.

I sent an email to the blogger/real estate guy clarifying the facts. A few hours later I got a response from his “content manager” assuring me the blog was corrected and it was. The content person also said that associated materials were also corrected. But the video is still floating around, which isn’t cool.

I bring this up because I think it’s what they call a teachable moment.

We miss local journalism, done well by people trained in how to obtain and verify facts. I am not saying that the press is perfect, they’re not. They make mistakes, there are biases (reporters are human) but there used to be curation and fact checking. I miss that.

I listen to a podcast called Top of Mind Florida which is co-hosted by former Channel 5 anchor Michael Williams and long time Palm Beach Post political writer Brian Crowley. It’s on all the usual platforms and I highly recommend you check it out. What makes it stand out  is the perspective these two veteran journalists bring to the subjects they cover. They know Palm Beach County, they know Florida, they know about life and it shows in the questions they ask and the context they bring to the podcast.

Journalism is the only profession named in our Constitution and it’s at risk. Democracy really does die in the darkness.

Now, I am not saying that a real estate blog that made a mistake is a threat to Democracy. But I am saying that facts matter.

On a recent visit to Chicago, my colleagues and I sat down with the president of the legendary MacArthur Foundation in his incredible office in the famed Marquette building.

John Palphrey is an impressive person. A great grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. A man who has taught at Harvard, written books, ran an elite educational institution and now is making a big mark in philanthropy around the world.

I asked Mr. Palphrey where his foundation’s investments made the most impact. His answer surprised me.

“Local journalism” he said without hesitation. He saw an immediate impact via investment in supporting local news.

It was an interesting answer. And one that surprised me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what he said that day. I heard a similar sentiment during a recent visit with the head of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

On another note, there’s a business lesson in how you handle mistakes, which do happen. You own them and you correct them, personally. I wrote to the real estate blogger. I got a kind response from the content manager. That’s a missed opportunity.

When I screw up, which I do from time to time, I try to take responsibility, learn from my mistakes and personally apologize. I don’t outsource that part of my life.

Often, in life and business, it’s not the mistake that matters, it’s how you handle it.

 

1 June, 2026 10 10 Comments

To All The Dogs I’ve Loved Before

June 1, 2026 By 10 Comments

Gracie

Dogs.

Can’t live without them.

At least I can’t.

I’ve had a dog in my life since I was 4 years old—that’s more than a half century of mutts, mixes, rescues and retrievers. There’s been a cat or two along the way, two birds, hamsters, gerbils, a snake and my son’s bearded dragon. Hopkins was an acquired taste, but a good chap, nonetheless.

But the one constant has been a dog. Thank goodness for those four-legged love bugs.

I happen to believe that dogs are enjoying a “moment” these days.

Social media has made dogs stars. In fact, one can make an argument that the biggest beneficiary of social media is the dog, with cats also benefiting from the exposure on YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook. Cats seem to rule Blue Sky, the new platform developed after X went full toxic waste dump.

But dogs, those furry, funny, fantastic creatures–well they are a cut above in my opinion.

We have two at present.

Gracie, a five year old golden retriever and Emmitt, a five year old chihuahua/lion mix whose temperament would have made him a great heavyweight boxer. Unfortunately, he’s an MMA fighter trapped in a tiny body.

Still, when he and his 65-pound sister go at it, we worry about Gracie getting hurt. In true golden form, Gracie puts up with a lot and never complains. Many a time I have come into the living room and found Emmitt hanging by his teeth off of Gracie’s lip or ear. She of course seems amused by it all. I’m convinced that if humanity got a dose of Golden Retriever DNA we’d never have a war, or even a bad day.

If you look up “good” in the dictionary it wouldn’t surprise me if it had a picture of our beautiful golden girl.

Still, Emmitt has his charms. First, he’s adorable with soulful brown eyes that look at us with gratitude. He’s fiercely loyal and loves us a whole lot.

Diane rescued him three years ago after his owners were murdered in a horrendous 4th of July tragedy in Texas. A Maine based rescue drove across the country to get him and a few other abandoned dogs and we were fortunate to be chosen as his new family. They rescue us too, you know.

Diane and our son Sasha met the rescue caravan on the Maine/New Hampshire line and after a few days rest and relaxation in Portland they made the long drive back to Delray to meet Gracie.

It was love at first sight for all of us.

Emmitt

Randy was rescued by Animal Rescue Force.

That’s how it is with dogs and very few other things in life. We have a mystical connection to our pets.

People have commitment issues, romances ebb and flow, we gain and lose friends, but once a dog sets its eyes on you it’s game over. The love is instant, deep and eternal.

Only ‘eternal’ is just a few years. Yes, dogs don’t live long enough and when you lose one it stings. Last week, three of my friends lost their dogs. My heart aches for them. It’s a real and enduring loss.

I still think of all the great ones I’ve lost along the way—Tina who was struck by a car right in front of me, Rusty and Snowball who lived long lives and saw me through from grade school to college and beyond, Magnum a magnificent golden who loved my children and endured “dress up” and endless games of fetch and Casey who was said to be shy but who warmed up as soon as she left her foster home. She jumped in the car with our family and never looked back.

Casey’s description on the Everglades Golden Retriever Rescue website played ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” when you clicked on it.  We did and we had a marvelous run which included lots of visits for pup cups at Kilwin’s downtown.

During Casey’s reign, Diane adopted Randy, another feisty chihuahua from the Animal Rescue Force, a wonderful nonprofit that used to set up shop in the CRA parking lot during Delray Affair.

I remember meeting Randy for the first time. He bit me. But within days it was all good. That cool chi was with us for almost two decades.

When it came time to let him go. The wonderful Dr. Jim Grubb came to the house. I couldn’t bear to watch. I’m not proud of that, but I just couldn’t. We said our goodbyes and I walked outside speaking to the heavens and asking that they take care of my brave little guy. Dr. Grubb always sends a card that talks about the Rainbow Bridge. I figure it’s true, because if anyone would know, Jim would. We will see our friends again—waiting for us on the other side of the bridge.

We added another rescue named Sophie who was found running the streets of Miami. We loved Sophie a lot. She was killed one day while on a walk in our neighborhood by an unleashed dog. For months, I couldn’t go down that street. I think about little Sophie often.

After that devastating incident, Randy helped us welcome Teddy, another golden rescue (thank you Golden Retrievals) and Teddy…well he became a Facebook legend. Cancer took my soul dog too young, but I still see his handsome face when I reach for my phone. He’s my screensaver. A life saver too. That dog was something special.

They all are.

After Covid, which was almost lights out for me, I asked Diane if she would consider another golden.  I just feel happiest when there’s a golden in my life.

She agreed. And soon puppy Gracie joined us. She makes us happy—every day. I’ve never seen a sweeter dog. She loves everyone.

I’m moved to write this after a hectic month of travel without our dogs. I miss them horribly when I’m gone. But when we came home, we’re greeted like The Beatles at Shea Stadium.

Yes, dogs are a major responsibility. They require love and attention. They shed and they feel very entitled to your meals. Goldens are like Velcro, there’s no privacy with a golden around. Everything brought into the house is sniffed, scrutinized and checked to see if it’s edible.

Mail gets shredded. Stuffed animals get eaten and everyone who comes to visit is fair game for lots of affection or in Emmitt’s case barking.

It’s all a joy.

And oh, so short.

Now if only I can figure out how to get this duo to like the long car ride from Florida to Maine.

Here’s a poem that says what I just tried too much better than I can.

By Billy Collins

 

As young as I look,

I am growing older faster than he,

seven to one

is the ratio they tend to say.

 

Whatever the number,

I will pass him one day

and take the lead

the way I do on our walks in the woods.

 

And if this ever manages

to cross his mind,

it would be the sweetest

shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

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