For the first time since high school – and the days of Reed, Frazier, and Bradley – I am a Knicks fan, for the simple reason that three of its starters – Hart, Bridges, and Brunson – are graduates of Villanova (like me – and the pope). But if not for them, I would find the team – thanks to its kindergarten of courtside millionaires – hard to stomach.
Dave Hyde – who was laid off this week after 36 years at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel – once wrote of running into Don Shula shortly after writing about his recently deceased wife. Shula thanked him for the column and then – as if he were a lineman who had just given a key block – tapped him on the butt and said, “Good job.”
Dave received better treatment from a Hall of Fame coach than he did from his longtime employer.
Sunday’s segment of the Mainly Mozart Festival took place at the Sanctuary of the Arts, across the street from Coral Gables City Hall. It was our first time in the hall, a high-ceilinged, quietly elegant white space that once served, or perhaps still does, as a Christian Science worship hall.
The program, titled “Boyd Meets Girl,” featured the cellist Laura Metcalf and her husband, the guitarist Rupert Boyd, who quickly informed us that there is very little music written for guitar and cello. But, undaunted, they had found pieces and arrangements that worked: two by Brazilian composers, one by a Norwegian, four by Bach, Ravel’s Pavane, two by Lennon & McCartney, and a reworking of Shenandoah by Caroline Shaw that was beautifully haunting, including the part for guitar. It made for a lovely hour or so of listening. The only negative was the fact that the audience, which didn’t fill the hall, was made up almost entirely of seniors. With tickets starting at $35, the concert was not out of the range of people closer in age to the musicians.
Yesterday I checked the Born on This Day feature in the Herald since it was also my birthday. I knew most of my fellow June Seveners – Liam Neeson, Prince – but was pleasantly surprised to learn that Dean Martin was also a member of the club. And they left out two people: the former tennis player Anna Kournikova and the Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk, who was born not only on the same day as I was but in the same year.
Yesterday we went to see Pressure, the movie about the Scottish meteorologist James Stagg who persuaded General Eisenhower to delay the D-Day invasion by one day because his calculations convinced him that the weather on June 5th would be too treacherous for a landing. The film was pure Hollywood – clichéd dialogue, over-the-top dramatization, a (fabricated?) clash of dissenting meteorologists – but it left me in awe of two things: the advances we have made in weather forecasting and the bravery of the men who took part in the operation. Archival footage toward the end of the movie showed troops storming the beaches, many of them getting shot down even before they reached the sand. I will think of them tomorrow with a renewed sense of gratitude.
I watched the CBS Evening News last night to see if there would be any mention of the firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes and, to my surprise, there was a long segment about it. It included excerpts from Pelley’s defiant statement about his dismissal, which has been well-circulated on social media, and a tribute to his long career as a correspondent for the network, with clips of him interviewing presidents and reporting from war zones. It ended with a personal reminiscence from anchor Tony Dokoupil, who closed with a heartfelt message of thanks.
This impressed me because in 2008 I was in a situation somewhat similar to Pelley’s (in a decidedly smaller media domain). I was laid off, not fired, for primarily financial reasons, but philosophical differences with management also played a role. (I wanted a Travel section that entertained and informed readers about the world; the editors had decided that even Travel needed to be “local and useful.”) I was in my mid 50s; Pelley is in his late 60s; and he is much better off financially. But the main difference was that, far from giving me a tribute, the newspaper acted as if I’d never existed, making no mention of my departure in my old section. For people who had been reading me for nearly two decades, I simply disappeared.