You will be found on the YBR.

Optical illusions. Just parlor tricks to amuse and entertain us?

In the pen and ink drawing above, you see. And then again when you look at it you see. The amazing thing is you can see both (but not at the same time). There is no right or wrong. Or at least there shouldn’t be.

We are living in what I call optical illusion times.  You might see pain, suffering and death. Or you might see sacrifice, selflessness and courage. Then again you might see grave administrative mistakes. But then again, you might see political power used to benefit…all of us.

Having only 300 posts to my name since I started this blog one thing remains constant.  I keep following the yellow brick road. Over 70 years as a passenger on planet earth I can’t even see the Emerald City. And that’s a good thing.

Despite the fact that I don’t have enough followers to be considered as crowd and despite the fact that none of my posts have gone viral, I continue taking one step after another on the YBR. (Maybe the word ‘viral’ shouldn’t be used during a pandemic. Just saying.)

My drive or motivation always seems to come from pieces of life that don’t really go together until they all do come together and I understand what was going on in that old head of mine.

This afternoon my youngest son sent me a very old but classic puzzle. It’s called the Trick Donkey puzzle or what I call the Donkey Trick.

If you are game, print it out and follow the instructions.  It’s just the thing to make you totally bonkers during the quarantine.

I printed out the puzzle and followed the instructions.  My head was filled with questions and doubts.  The puzzle looked impossible. I It was a joke.  It was a waste of my time.  So after ten or fifteen minutes, i put it aside and had dinner.  After dinner I cleared my desk and placed the puzzle pieces down and didn’t think about how impossible it was.  I knocked down my walls of doubt. Wonder of wonder, without thinking about it, I didn’t solve the puzzle. It solved itself.  I let it happen.

That got me thinking.  We are living through a period of time that challenges us. It is filling us with doubt.  On the road to Oz we’re in the deep, dark part of the forest that is closing in on us.

It’s an optical illusion. We are alone. We are not alone. We are on the verge of despair. We see rays of light.

Dorothy’s journey to Oz eventually led her to the Wizard. He, too, was an optical illusion.  He looked powerful and scary. But when Toto pulled back the curtain, the great and powerful wizard of Oz was a humbug.

With a twister going on inside my head, I sought relief in a movie. For reasons that escape me, I watched The Great Debaters with Denzel Washington. (If you’ve never seen it, I heartily recommend it.)

The movie is really an optical illusion. It’s about the racial disgrace that polluted America during the depression. (Racism is and continues to be a pandemic.)  It got me thinking that no voice should go unheard.

In the end, the puzzle, the oppressive sense of pandemicism, and the movie all came together.

Every day we are on the yellow brick road we have opportunities to understand that we don’t take the journey alone.  We have opportunities to discover new and wonderful things about the power we have to make a difference.

I only hope that after the corona bug is put to rest that we don’t forget the lessons we (should) have learned on the YBR.

We are not lost. We will be found.

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Fear on the YBR. It comes in all forms…even in the shape of the Coronavirus.

Life for a kid growing up in the 1950s was not “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” or even “Lassie.”  That’s what my generation was led to believe, but the truth did not have a laugh track.  Early Baby Boomers were afraid of nuclear annihilation.

60+ years after the fact I still have nightmares about the monthly atomic bomb drills we had. With our heads tucked under our hands and our little bodies scrunched up against the wall we were preparing for the inevitable dropping of an atomic bomb.

Fear. It was part of our food chart, right between fruits and vegetables and protein.

Fear is what drives us to be less than human because it causes us to lose all sense of compassion.  Fear of the unknown was behind the Salem Witch Trials. Fear of taking a stand against tyrants is what led to the Holocaust.

Fear filled Dorothy’s slippers the moment she stepped foot on the yellow brick road. Fear of the Wicked Witch of the West haunted her on her journey to Oz. But, fear was not Dorothy’s undoing as it is for many of us. Dorothy wasn’t afraid of her fear. (That’s what I think FDR meant when he said “all we have to fear is fear itself.”)

The 9/11 attacks gave us something to fear, but as a people we didn’t let our fear get the best of us. Instead, we turned fear inside out and we discovered something magical. We discovered that what was dividing us as a nation was our fear.  It took a tragic incident to wake us up.

Today,  fear has once again reared its ugly head in the form of another deadly pandemic. It doesn’t matter a hoot that pandemics are a part of world history.  It doesn’t matter that the bubonic plague wiped out nearly 75% of the world’s population or that the Spanish Flu of 1918 eventually stole the life of 50 million people world-wide.  What matters is what is happening today…and along with the Corona virus fear is spreading faster than the germs of a sneeze.

There’s no denying that our nation is divided. There is no doubt that ignorance is what is fueling our fear. Our fear is getting the best of us. That does not mean to say we have no reason to be afraid of what COVID-19 can and is doing. However, our fear is making us turn into very ugly people.

It hasn’t happened yet, and I pray that it doesn’t, but our fear could drive us to turn savage. God knows what could happen between two people fighting over that last roll of toilet paper.

It reminds me of a Playhouse  90 television show I saw as a kid. It was called Alas, Babylon, and it was about none other than the dreaded dropping of an atomic bond.

The scene was burnished into my brain. People were in line at a grocery store.  It was pure pandemonium. The shelves were empty. People were beating each other up over food.  (The scene made me very sad.)

We are like Dorothy, but instead of dropping a house on a witch, the house has dropped on us and we are all crawling out from underneath the rubble. The look of fear is etched on our faces. We are beginning to fear that this is the end times.

I think we have to go back and see what Dorothy did. More importantly we have to remember that she didn’t do it alone.  She found friends with a common goal and marched arm-in-arm with them to Oz.  Even though she and her three traveling companions…and Toto, too, were filled with fear, they supported one another.

We need to do that.  That doesn’t mean we have to be care-free. We need to be cautious as cautious as the travelers were on the YBR when they were in the deepest and darkest part of the forest. (Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my. Rinse. Repeat.)  Dorothy had already embraced the Scarecrow (brains) and was filled with heart (the Tin Man), but she lacked the courage she needed to vanquish her fears.

It was fitting that the king of the forest had not yet discovered his inner courage because that’s what happens to us.  We never know how brave we can be until we come face-to-face with fear.

While we have to place our trust in the hands of scientists and “leaders,” we are not helpless.  We can relieve our fear by relishing the love that we share with family and friends. We can face this pandemic by using our head, heeding our hearts and finding the courage to do the right thing.  And what is the right thing?  Spreading kindness wherever we go. Don’t let this pandemic reduce us to savage beasts. Let’s all rise to the occasion and be kind to one another.  Don’t kill each other over that last roll of toilet paper. Figure out a way to meet each other’s needs.

Who knows, when this pandemic passes maybe we’ll all remember how kindness won the day and fear was sent packing.

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Time is not relative on the YBR.

(Every year around this time one of the characters from Oz delivers a college commencement address. This year the honor goes to Toto.)

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
– Albert Einstein

Lost – yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.
– Horace Mann

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

Esteemed Wizard, honored travelers on the YBR, and graduates.  Thank you for this great honor. It is a privilege to address you today as you prepare to step out on your own yellow brick road.

It’s all about time, isn’t it? While we have it in abundance, most of us squander it thinking nothing of how precious it really is. If time were an ocean and we were to dip our cupped hands in the sea and carry out the water we’ve collected, how much of it would be left by the time we made it back to the hole we had dug in the sand? That’s our life span. The distance between the shore and the hole. And even if you could hold onto every drop you scooped up, you’d quickly learn that the water would be absorbed by the hole.

You can’t collect time. You can’t save time. You can’t do something tomorrow with yesterday’s time. In fact, you can’t even do something in the next hour with time from an hour before. Time is the only thing that is past, present and future. During your four years at Emerald University your focus was on the future.  Everything you did seemed to be about what you were going to do…tomorrow.  Today, every class you took, every game you played and every conversation you ever had belongs to the past. Your shadow will follow you all the days of your life.

And although that is a truth, none of you are looking over your shoulders at your shadow. Your eyes are on the future. But what is the future? Is it something you have spent the last four years constructing like a child builds a sand castle at the beach?  And as all of you know, sand castle have a way of being defenseless against the elements. Does that hold true when you apply it to the sand castle you have been building in your mind?  The answer to that question is as much “yes” as it is “no.” It’s “yes” because even the best sand castle is subject to the vagaries of the sometimes cruel and harsh elements. It is also “no” because sand castles are made up of the same stuff that dreams are made of. And the funny thing about dreams is that they are often stronger than the forces that oppose them.

Remember,follow your dreams and never let them become a shadow that lingers behind you. Keep your dreams alive, but be prepared to let them grow as you grow. Don’t ever be a slave to them. Rather, embrace them and let them keep your spirit alive. Give them a life of their own. If you force a dream it’s like breaking a pet’s will, a concept I am familiar with.  And here’s another funny thing about dreams. They always don’t play out the way we think. New friends, new experiences…and especially new ideas have a way of reshaping your sand castle.

If I could give you anything today it would be the ability to appreciate how precious time is. Don’t take time lightly. But also don’t be so focused that time becomes a weight around your neck. Allow yourself to “waste” time the way you did when you were a kid and spent the whole day doing the “nothing” that only kids seem to be able to do. Make sure as you grow older you make room in your life for hours of glorious nothing.

I’d like to end by sharing the lyrics to a wonderful song written by Oscar Hammerstein II for the musical “Carousel.” The song was used to end the play when the graduation speaker gave some advice to the graduates:

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm
There’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on walk on with hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk alone

Members of the class of 2015, may your walk on the yellow brick road be filled with the joys that time has in store for you. Step lively. Step,lovingly.

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Are we going to hell in a handbasket on the YBR? I think not.

I rarely comment on the views of network or cable news shows, but after watching tonight’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, I am spurred to action and not because I disagree with the host, but because the episode was not really fair and balanced. In fact, it took a myopic view of the world when the host proposed that America is becoming a weaker nation because teenagers are smoking weed/grass/pot at a younger age in increasing numbers and also because Americans under 30 are abusing technology with an alarming number of young people sending more than 100 texts a day.

Host Bill O’Reilly went on to add that this was an indication that our youth are trying to avoid reality and that if they continue on this path we will never be able to compete with the Chinese. It appears that the young people of China are ready to deal with reality, while America’s young people would rather escape reality. (To Oz?)

I won’t argue the point of the nation becoming weaker because there are many indicators that today’s young people are maturing at a slower pace, but there is a bigger point that Mr. O’Reilly failed to recognize.

Reality?  I don’t want to embrace reality because what passes for reality today in a word, sucks!  We have a Congress operating at its lowest approval rating in decades. We have a growing number of people who are spending more time figuring out how they can scam innocent people, hack computer programs, lie, cheat and steal, etc.  We have scandals galore in the Catholic Church. We have an increasing number of people who hide behind race, creed and color to do whatever they want to do; we have people who believe a small portion of the public should be responsible for taking care of another small portion of the public.  We have movies, music and other forms of entertainment that not only pushed the envelope but have ripped a hole in it.

That’s reality.  Please, light me a joint!

And then there’s the other adult reality. Instead of people living balanced lives where work is tempered with a life outside the office, more and more adults are working 10, 11 and 12 hours a day six and seven days a week.  The average worker is umbilicallyconnected to the office via the internet and social media.  And it’s no longer an exception, it’s a rule and woe be the worker who doesn’t check his/her email a dozen times when home after a hard  day at the office, on weekends and on vacation.

This is the real world we want our children to enter?  Hey, join me for a joint.

And what the f*** about China?  China’s young people are embracing reality?  Chinese reality is about as far from real reality as I am from being mistaken for Brad Pitt!

China is not a bastion of free thinking. Mao may be dead, but the idea of a nation of billions of people who think the way the government tells them to think, is not reality. It’s a nightmare.

So, America’s young people are lost on the Yellow Brick Road, but you know what? We can’t blame them.  We have not given them much to look forward to have we?

It is going to take a revolution, but not a  military one to change the course of America’s ship. It’s going to take people who don’t pledge allegiance to a politically party or a specific denomination to stand up and speak out.

I guess you could say that “America is going to pot”, however you might consider the phrase.

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Close encounters on the YBR. You’ll never know who you might bump into: Marlo Thomas.

I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to how many people I have encountered over the years along the yellow brick road. Sometimes you encounter people you never expected to bump into let alone have an experience as brief as it might have been.

Before my memory fades to black, I want to share some of those encounters in no particular order.

Marlo Thomas

Of course I was familiar with her from her role as Ann Marie in television’s That Girl and I first saw her on Broadway in Herb Gardner’s Thieves (1974), but I did not encounter her until she was appearing in Andrew Bergman’s Social Security (1986) at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with the late Ron Silver, a talented actor and Joanna Gleason and Olympia Dukakis.

I met her during the rehearsal for the 40^th Annual Tony Award telecast. I was working in a minor capacity for producer Alexander H. Cohen relishing every minute of the process of putting on a major television event.

Ms. Thomas was the consummate performer. She had star quality. She didn’t have star attitude. And I had a chance to talk to her (briefly) while she was in the rehearsal studio with the other headliners for the show.

On the night of the Tony Award telecast I was “awarded” the position of helping get the cast from the Minskoff Theatre to the Tony Award party.

I was stationed in the area between 44^th and 45^th Streets when Marlo Thomas and her husband, Phil Donohue, came out of the stage door. She went one way and he started to go the other way. He told her their car was “this way.” Thomas shrugged her shoulders and as she passed me she said to me, “it’s the other way” and smiled. Less than a minute later they were walking back “the other way,” and I Thomas say to her husband, “I told you we were parked the other way.”

A few weeks after the Tony Award Show I was at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre where I was going to see Thomas in Social Security.  Thomas had agreed to meet me in her dressing room where she told me I could drop off a script I had written.

I knocked on her dressing room door and she told me to come in.  Her hair dresser was working on her hair. She had yet to have her make-up put on. She was wearing a robe…and she was eating an egg salad sandwich.

We talked for a few minutes. She took the script and I made my exit. I gave my ticket (the one I bought with my own money) and the usherette showed me to my seat in the nose bleed section. If I had been one more row back I would have been on the outside of the theatre. I thought that for people sitting in this part of the balcony they should have had flight attendants instead of usherettes.

The play was wonderful and Marlo Thomas was great. So was Ron Silver (1946-2009). I had a brief encounter with him during the Tony Award rehearsal. I rode on the elevator with him down from the rehearsal studio.  We had an abbreviated elevator chat.

A month after seeing her on Broadway I got a note from her agent saying that while Ms. Thomas enjoyed reading the play she was not interested in returning to the stage right away.

Oh, well.

Nonetheless I did get to meet someone who was nothing short of being an exemplary woman of grace, wit and kindness.

Marlo Thomas signed my informal Tony Award autograph book (right side). Also on this page: Lily Tomlin, Colleen Dewhurst, Charles Durning, Debbie Allen Nixon,  Jessica Tandy, Tony Randall, Rene Auberjonois and David Birney.  (Some close encounter stories about some of these actors to follow.)

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