14 September, 2026 0 Comments

The Things We Don’t Know Are Important

September 14, 2026 By Leave a Comment

I recently came across a new book by retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal.

Hertling began writing the journal for his two young sons while serving in the Gulf War. He was given orders and the intelligence briefing was grim. His unit could lose 50 percent of its personnel. Can you imagine?

Hertling wasn’t sure he would come home. So he started writing down the things he wanted his sons to know if he didn’t.

That’s a pretty powerful premise.

Not a will. Not instructions about money or possessions.

A record of what a father believed mattered.

The book got me thinking about the things I would want to tell the people I love. What I would tell my children.

And the things I wish I had understood earlier.

Hertling’s lessons aren’t particularly complicated. Character matters. Trust matters. Family matters. Service matters. Be courageous. Admit your mistakes. Pay attention to the people around you. Don’t confuse success with a meaningful life.

But one idea hit me particularly hard:

Don’t spend so much time preparing for the future that you fail to live in the present.

That lesson got to me; I’ve spent a lot of my life looking ahead.

I would describe it as ambition. Drive. Restlessness.

And I’m proud of some of what that produced. I worked hard. I took risks. I built things. I went into business. I got into politics. I pursued opportunities. I cared deeply about doing things that mattered.

But there was a cost to all of it. Perhaps that’s inevitable but at the time I never did the math.

I never asked myself  whether it was worth it.

I was always thinking about what was next.

And sometimes “what’s next” became more important than “what’s now.”

I didn’t fully understand that until I thought about my children.

There was a year when I spent a concentrated amount of time with my daughter, Samantha.

She was little. My ex-wife’s job demanded crazy hours, so Samantha spent her days in childcare and I spent mine in a newsroom.

But the early evenings were ours.

I fed her dinner.

That’s the memory.

There were no profound conversations. She was too little for that.

She was just cute.

So was our enormous golden retriever, Magnum, who would sit nearby, waiting patiently for the inevitable scraps to fall from the high chair.

It became a ritual.

Samantha eating dinner.

Magnum waiting.

Me feeding her and trying to make her laugh.

Nothing particularly remarkable happening.

I even filmed some of it with an old-fashioned video camera.

I’m glad I did.

Because now, years later, I understand something I didn’t understand then.

That was the good stuff.

Not the important meeting.

Not the next opportunity.

Not the next campaign.

Not the next accomplishment.

Dinner.

A little girl being cute.

A giant golden retriever waiting for a scrap.

An ordinary evening.

I never had that same concentrated year with my son when he was little.

I went into business. It was a struggle. Then I got into politics, and politics was consuming.

There was always something that needed to be done.

Something important.

Something urgent.

Something next.

And then my son grew up.

You can’t slow it down.

That’s the part I wish somebody had explained to me.

You can work harder tomorrow.

You can take another opportunity.

You can start another business.

You can run another campaign.

You can accomplish another thing.

But you can’t ask your child to be eight again.

You can’t go back and have the Tuesday night you missed because you were chasing something that seemed so important at the time.

That’s not an argument against ambition.

I don’t regret being ambitious.

It served me well. Ambition helped shape my life. Some of the things I’m proudest of probably wouldn’t have happened without it.

But I wish I had understood earlier that ambition and contentment aren’t opposites.

You can want more from your life and still appreciate the life you have.

You can be ambitious about tomorrow without being impatient with today.

That’s something I didn’t always know how to do.

Hertling’s book has me thinking about another of his ideas: that legacy isn’t simply what you accomplish or leave behind. It’s what you leave in other people.

I’ve spent a fair amount of my life thinking about what I would leave behind.

Maybe I should have spent more time thinking about what I was leaving in people.

The kindness.

The conversations.

The example.

The memories.

The dinners.

The ordinary Tuesdays.

Those things don’t show up on a résumé.

They don’t win awards.

Nobody gives you recognition for them.

And maybe that’s the irony.

I spent years chasing recognition.

What I really wanted, I think, was to know that I mattered.

But the older I get, the less interested I am in being recognized and the more interested I am in being remembered by the people who actually matter.

Not for the titles.

Not for the accomplishments.

Not for the things that seemed so urgent at the time.

Maybe just for being there.

For the dinners.

For the laughter.

For the ordinary moments that didn’t seem like much when they were happening.

Because those moments were happening to us only once.

And you can’t slow it down.

You can’t get them back.

So maybe that’s the lesson I’m taking from Hertling—and from my own life:

Don’t stop reaching for what’s next.

Just remember to look at what’s in front of you while you’re doing it.

Because someday, what’s in front of you will be behind you.

And you’ll realize it was the thing you should have been paying attention to all along.

7 September, 2026 0 Comments

Summer Winds

September 7, 2026 By Leave a Comment

A picture perfect late summer day  Portland, Maine.

For the first 22 years of my life summer was my favorite season.

Then I moved to Florida.
Now winter is my favorite time of year. Very few things in this world beat winters in South Florida. Cool breezes, bright sunshine, few gray days. And oh, those palm trees. They are not only aesthetically pleasing, they make a statement: welcome to paradise.
Still, my relationship with summer became complicated when I moved to Florida in July 1987.
When I lived in New York, I got used to hibernating during the winter months.
Summer was what I lived for: no school, no alarm clocks, days spent with my friends playing tennis and one wall racquetball, days at the beach with a boom box and nights spent under street lamps with neighborhood kids just passing time and goofing off. Shorts and t-shirts, summer songs, summer romance and muscle cars. (I had a friend who thought an AMC Pacer was a muscle car. It wasn’t. )
Ahh…summer.
But when I moved to Florida, things flipped. Summer was when I hibernated. Winter is when we rediscovered the outdoors.
It took a few years to get used to this new paradigm.
This summer, I made it a point to sneak away to Maine where I rediscovered my love of summer.
It’s been a busy season of life. My work at the Carl Angus DeSantis Foundation ramped up just as my playwriting took off with my first Off Broadway production. Now I say that as if there may be more coming. Who knows, but a guy can dream right?
Anyway, it’s been busy and I felt a need to reset, to step away, spend time with family and recharge.
Step away is a relative term. Truth is, I never stepped away.
I remain connected to the office, my email, my zoom calls, my office computer and all the rest. But merely changing where I took those calls and answered my emails did me a world of good.
I’m fortunate to have a supportive team at the office who made this possible. There is nothing like working with a team that makes you feel seen and appreciated. I’m a very lucky guy. The team I work with is stocked with intelligent people with big hearts. That’s not only an advantage for our work in philanthropy but it has filled my heart as well.
I believe that we do our best work when we make room for people to bring their whole selves to the job.
That means we listen closely to their insights and recognize that they are also people with children, elderly parents who need them, outside interests that make them who they are and individuals who need a change of scenery here and there.
Anyway, coming to Maine in August allowed me  to open the windows and shut off the air conditioning. It enabled me to take long walks in the woods, to explore the rocky coast and soak up the charm of small New England towns.
As a result, I fell back in love with summer, spent precious time with my dad and his significant other, enjoyed a long weekend with my sister and spent quality time with my amazing wife.
I wrote a little. Less than I thought I would and less than I hoped.
As mentioned, I stayed connected to the office and our grantees but I ditched the alarm clock, listened to music, read and spent time outside just breathing.
I’m fortunate to be able to do this.
I know others can’t. But if you can, please consider it.
And if you can’t, maybe there are small things you can do to recharge and renew.
Music, a walk, a good book. Nothing radical necessary . Life is rich. It’s also fragile and finite. Make the most of the quality time remaining.
31 August, 2026 6 6 Comments

Summer Songs Linger On

August 31, 2026 By 6 Comments

Boston’s debut album conceived and recorded in a basement.

I’m an avid listener of “Behind the Song” a podcast devoted to the fascinating back stories behind some of the greatest songs ever written.

I never miss an episode.
The host, Janda, is a Chicago radio personality who really knows her stuff. She also happens to have the best radio voice I’ve ever heard. Check it out to see what I mean.
Anyway, a recent episode focused on the year 1976. Turns out the bicentennial was a landmark year in music as well as a special time in American history.
I was 12 years old that year. And I remember the tall ships coming to New York, flag bunting everywhere and a sense of unity and patriotism.
We were post Watergate, post Vietnam, post energy crisis and dealing with inflation and what Jimmy Carter referred to as malaise.  But I don’t remember that as much as I remember the pageantry and the good feelings behind a landmark anniversary.
I also remember the music.
And the podcast brought it all into sharp relief.
Amazingly, the music released 50 years ago still resonates with me now that I am approaching my Social Security years.
What is about music that endures?
After all, I’m not into much that I liked when I was 12. Sports, for sure. Dogs, definitely. But I’m no longer reading what I read back then: Mad Magazine, the Chronicles of Narnia, Encyclopedia Brown. I’m not watching Laverne & Shirley or the Six Million Dollar Man and I’m not longing to buy a pitch back, the ultimate piece of sports equipment back in the day.
I’m also not playing Boggle or marveling at my friend’s Stretch Armstrong toy. Do you remember Stretch? He was the hit of ‘76, a latex action figure filled with corn syrup that could stretch up to four feet.
Nope, Stretch is no longer compelling.
But Boston’s debut album, Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” and Tom Petty’s first album are still on my playlists.
Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, Hotel California by The Eagles, Frampton Comes Alive and Aerosmith’s Rocks—all released in 1976 and all still in heavy rotation. If you were there, you  can’t forget those songs.
What is it about music? Why do these songs linger?
 I have a theory.
Music attaches itself to our memories. We associate certain songs with eras of our life and moments in our culture.
So Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” with its soaring vocals and big guitars just  fits the bicentennial feeling.
And Hotel California fits the ennui of the post Watergate era.
Back then, I remember the adults in my life lamenting the scandal in Washington. But viewed in hindsight, Watergate showed the power of accountability and the importance of a free press.
Senators from the president’s own party held him to account and ushered him out. Woodward and Bernstein, backed by a legendary editor Ben Bradlee and a brave publisher Katharine Graham wrote stories that outraged Americans and inspired a generation of journalists to follow their lead.
A dozen years later, I was one of those reporters motivated by All The President’s Men.
Today, we have a scandal every day. We forget last week’s outrages and we never  hold a member of our team accountable. We just plow through. We just double down.
There are no shared facts, one side’s outrage is celebrated if it manages to annoy our enemies.
As for the press, we no longer trust the Fourth Estate. A scenario I find sad, dangerous and unsettling.
But the music endures. It rises above the rancor and division.
We can agree on Bob Seger’s brand of Midwest genius. How he captures  the excitement and drama of young love.
Night Moves—trying to lose those awkward teenage blues. That’s specific and universal. We all had those blues. All of us  remember them.
1976 was also the year of “American Girl”. The opening lines just nail it.
“Well, she was an American girl
Raised on promises
She couldn’t help thinkin’ that there
Was a little more to life
Somewhere else
After all it was a great big world
With lots of places to run to”
Yes!
Universal themes. The smallest lens. That’s the power of music. The words, the riffs, they are timeless and enduring.
Thank goodness.

24 August, 2026 6 6 Comments

Don”t Plant Your Bad Days

August 24, 2026 By 6 Comments

“Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me – choke those little bad days. Choke ’em down to nothing.”
~ Tom Waits
I’ve been listening to The Beatles song “When I’m 64” since I was 8 years old.
Back then, 64 seemed a million miles away. Heck, even my Bar Mitzvah seemed way off in the distance.
Childhood is a time of endless summers, long stretches between Christmas break and Spring Break and dreams of what you’ll be when you grow up.
My friends and I would sit in our rooms or shoot hoops in our driveways talking about becoming lawyers, doctors, center fielders and pro tennis players. The possibilities were endless even if the probabilities weren’t.
After all, there are not too many center fielders who can’t hit a curveball.
When the Fab Four sang about whether they would still be needed when they were 64, they were decades from that time of life. Today, the two surviving Beatles are in their 80s and the two late Beatles never made it to 60, never mind 64.
The protagonist of their timeless song was portrayed as doddering, wondering whether they would still be worthy of a valentine or a bottle of wine.
I’m going to be 62 this week. Fortunately , I don’t have those concerns. I’ve been lucky in love and I’m pretty sure if I asked nicely, my wife would join me with a glass of wine, if not a bottle.
The 60s are an interesting decade. In many ways I feel at the top of my game. I can draw on forty plus years of career experience and that’s been helpful as I’ve reinvented myself yet again this time as a philanthropy exec/playwright. That’s quite an interesting combo if I say so myself.
At 62, I feel I’m still evolving, still learning and still discovering the joy of new experiences.
And yet, I can feel age creeping up. I feel good, but there are days when I have aches and pains and my energy level and desire to run around has significantly diminished.
Instead, at the end of a hard day at work, I dream of my easy chair and playing with my two dogs. My idea of an exciting Saturday night is a quiet early dinner and Netflix.
But I still have aspirations; for the foundation I co-lead and for my playwriting which has been a joyous and collaborative experience. Both were complete surprises proof that as you age can discover, grow, learn and hopefully make a difference.
After a dozen years in business post Delray politics, philanthropy has enabled me to return to community work in a different and much less stressful way. I didn’t see any of it coming.
Six years ago, I struggled to survive a vicious bout with Covid. While I never stopped fighting, I remember feeling for the first time in my life that I may not survive. Isolated from loved ones, I had lots of time to think about my life.
What did it add up to? Did I do my best? Was I good to people? Did I contribute? Was I a good dad, son, husband, brother, friend etc?
As the virus attacked my lungs, those thoughts gave way to mere survival. Just keep breathing I thought. One gasp at a time.
When Covid finally let me go, I went back to the deep thoughts. Many patients I went in with at the time did not come out. Why did I make it?
I suffered what my friend the late Delray police officer Skip Brown called “survivor’s guilt “ and what a counselor told me was PTSD, common for people who spend extended time in the ICU.
I was thrilled to be home with my family. But something felt off, it’s hard to describe.
Gradually, the fog lifted and my strength returned with the help of physical therapy and my own desire to heal.
I resolved at the time to make whatever quality time I have left matter.
In the subsequent years, I’ve taken Tom Waits’ advice. I do not “plant “ bad days. And I have them.
I have a restless mind, it’s hard for me to shut off completely. I’m also a terrible sleeper. So when I wake up in the wee hours my mind will often engage.
And most times it wanders to my worries. I know I am not alone. I try and feel what I’m feeling but I don’t let myself stay in those dark places. Like most people my age, I have the usual share of stressors—aging relatives and friends, health conditions in my circle that scare me and the usual concerns about my kids, our country and our world.
I know I am not alone. And that’s why I share my thoughts in this space. When I had Covid, when I was able to,  I shared my experience on social media. It helped connect me to my community. That community healed me. I was also hoping to educate those willing to listen.
It wasn’t political. It was testimony.
Since then, I have lost many important people in my life.
Close friends gone to soon from cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease.
A woman I loved like a second mom, civic heroes and mentors and a man who changed my life and entrusted me to help lead his philanthropy so that his generosity and kindness could benefit people for generations to come.
These losses sting. You never quite get over them and honestly I don’t want to.
Because I’ve learned that death ends a life but it does not end a relationship and these wonderful people will continue  to shape and guide me for the rest of my days.
As I grow older, there are sure to be other losses. I dread that unavoidable part of life.
But love and loss focus me. I’m still open for growth and experiences. Still open to loving and learning and more appreciative of the good things in life than ever.
The love of a good woman.
The comfort that we’ve raised good kids.
The warm embrace of a family.
The joy of friends old and new.
The adoring gaze of my two adorable dogs.
I love Florida winters and the Maine coast.
When I type End Of Play, I feel a sense of accomplishment. When we call a grantee with good news it’s a thrill I can’t describe. There’s nothing like saying we believe in you, here’s some resources to bring some good into a world that needs it desperately.
And when I find that easy chair at the end of the day it feels like home.
17 August, 2026 0 Comments

Remembering Tommy John

August 17, 2026 By Leave a Comment

 

 

 

 

Tommy John said goodbye to his fans recently.
The legendary pitcher issued a statement through the New York Yankees thanking fans for their support through the years. It was a touching statement from a class act.
Yesterday, August 15, we learned that he passed. He was 83.
To baseball fans of a certain era, the name
Tommy John conjures up memories of a terrific sinker ball pitcher who could be counted on to eat innings and win big games.
I was a big fan. John played on my favorite teams during a golden era in the 70s. Reggie, Thurman, Bucky, Sweet Lou, Sparky, Goose and Louisiana Lightning. Those were some special years.
They called it the Bronx Zoo, but Tommy John always seemed above the drama of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner. He just took the ball every five days and did his job getting hitters to hit ground ball after ground ball.
In the early 70s, Tommy John would have a pioneering surgery on his arm that saved his career. The procedure,
performed by the legendary Dr. Frank Jobe, would be named after Tommy  and would be used to save the careers of countless other pitchers at every level of the game.
John became the first major leaguer to come back after tearing his ulnar collateral ligament. An astonishing 35 percent of MLB pitchers have had the surgery at some point in their careers.
But Tommy John was more than a surgical procedure to his fans.
He was a workhouse who got by on savvy and movement because his injury robbed him of velocity.
Watching him pitch was akin to observing an artist at work. He would change speeds, paint the corners of the plate and more likely than not he would induce hitters into hitting an easy ground ball out.
Yes, power pitchers are exciting.  But there’s room for people like Tommy John. They are fun to watch.
He pitched 26 seasons in the majors finally hanging up his cleats at the ripe old age of 46. Only Nolan Ryan pitched more years.
After his career ended, he went into broadcasting, coached a bit and also ran a nonprofit dedicated to suicide prevention.
A New York Times profile called him a good natured family man.
That’s pretty good isn’t it? A good life. Tommy John lives in Bradenton, Florida. I read that he stopped watching baseball in 2019 because he no longer recognized the game he spent a good part of his life playing.
Tommy John was from another era. A good era.
I love 70s and 80s baseball. It was a fun time to be a baseball fan. I still think the game is wonderful and I admire the athletes and marvel at what they can do. But things have changed.
Throwing 100 miles per hour is common these days.
It’s impressive (although it tears those ligaments with regularity) but I miss the days when Tommy John and Luis Tiant and Jerry Koosman took the mound and worked their magic through guile. They were pitchers, not throwers and they were special.
Very special.
It’s not easy seeing your childhood heroes age. In your mind’s eye they remain forever young. Only they are not. And neither are we.
Thanks Tommy John. You are a class act. Goodbye and thanks for the memories. I hope there’s a field of dreams on the other side of this life and that we’ll see you throw that sinker again.

10 August, 2026 2 2 Comments

Where Have All The Stories Gone?

August 10, 2026 By 2 Comments

Is it me, or is there nothing on TV these days?
Yeah, yeah I know I should be reading, writing or learning to play Mah Jong like half the planet seems to be doing.
Truth is, I am reading and writing but I’m also eager to lose myself in a good movie or streaming series.

I have the usual array of pricey services: Netflix, Apple TV, HBO, Prime. Something happened to my Hulu account. I don’t know what. I’ve  given up on trying to get it back.

Regardless, I can’t find anything to watch. I don’t want to be terrorized, I don’t want a documentary about a serial killer and I don’t much care for the endless array of derivative stories that mine the Super Hero canon.

Nothing wrong with them,  but I just want to lose myself in a story, a romantic comedy or a well written drama.
There was a time, a few years back, when I had the opposite problem. Too many things to watch, not enough time. I think they called that era “Peak TV”. They may as well call this era Bleak TV.
Anyway, I found a station called Tubi, that has old shows and old movies.

So I decided to dive back into some old favorites to see if they held up.

I started with Neil Simon’s “Goodbye Girl” and “Chapter Two” both starring Simon’s ex-wife Marsha Mason.
Marsha was great. The movies were OK. The Goodbye Girl held up better,  but Chapter Two was lacking something. I can’t quite name it.

Then I tried “State and Main” by acclaimed playwright David Mamet, a terrific writer not such a terrific guy. Mamet has become irascible as he’s aged. I suppose that’s understandable. But State and Main didn’t hold up. Only two characters to root for out of a large cast of creeps.  It just wasn’t enough.

Wanting to feel better, I spent a rainy evening watching Dudley Moore in Romantic Comedy. It was…not very good.
Then I turned to “Love and Death” with one of my favorites Diane Keaton. Yes, I know it’s a Woody Allen film and it’s not politically correct to watch but I was feeling nostalgic. Love and Death held some sentimental value for me. It was the movie I took my first ever date to see at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove Long Island in 1975.

I was in 6th grade, the new kid in school and a very nice young woman named Sue took pity on me. We went to the movies with her older sister and her boyfriend who drove. Sue and I sat in the back seat and watched them kiss at every red light.

That behavior continued throughout the whole movie. They didn’t see a single frame. I sat in my seat frozen, staring straight ahead as Sue waited for me to hold her hand, or put my arm around her. I couldn’t.

I arranged for a friend to meet me at the theatre. I made several excuses to leave the movie and seek advice from my friend in the lobby. He had no wisdom to offer.
Just some raisinettes. To this day, on the rare occasion when I go to the movies, I always try to buy those chocolate covered raisins—a genius invention that all these years later I still find irresistible.
But I digress.

Love and Death was unwatchable. Diane Keaton was magical.
Still, optimistic I turned to an old favorite “No Way Out” an early Kevin Costner vehicle that also stars one of my favorite actors Gene Hackman.
I remember this film as being extraordinary. My memory was… wrong.
It felt very 80s, complete with annoying synthesizer music and some serious holes in the plot.
Sigh.
I give up. For now.

I haven’t lost my faith in old movies. But I think I have to be a little bit more discerning. “The Godfather”, “Unforgiven”, “All The Presidents Men,” “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid,”  “American Graffiti”,  and “Good Will Hunting” hold up well.

Still, while I love those movies I long to be swept away by something new.
A modern day “When Harry Met Sally” or a new buddy movie with stars that gel like Newman and Redford.
That would be something.
Come on Netflix. Come on HBO. You can do it.
Meanwhile, any suggestions?

3 August, 2026 16 16 Comments

Say My Name

August 3, 2026 By 16 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.

 

 

 

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