COUPLES THERAPY

Season two of the Netflix series The Diplomat is a wonderful addition to season one and the writing of the show’s very interesting marriage of its lead characters is a true highlight. The addition of Allison Janney as the American Vice President is a very real plus as well. I recommend this series highly along with Nobody Wants This, a new romantic comedy series, starring Kristen Bell, the wonderful female lead from multiple seasons of The Good Place. Her co-star, Adam Brody, also does a fine job along with a delightful supporting cast, including the always marvelous Tovah Feldshuh. Like The Diplomat, Nobody Wants This is on Netflix.

Having now finished season two of The Old Man on Hulu I can commend that as well. The show features some terrific action sequences, convoluted spy plotting, and sharp dialogue, but it is the relationships that make the series soar. Jeff Bridges and Amy Brenneman as lovers, with Bridges and John Lithgow as life-long allies, fellow spies, and adoptive parents of Alia Shawkat. Jessica Harper and Janet McTeer move things along as current and former spouses to Lithgow, while Navid Negahban reunites as Shawkat’s “real” dad. I could reveal who Joel Grey is coupled up with but that would require a major spoiler alert, or, in the parlance of the CIA, if I told you, I would have to kill you.

I was disappointed with the new Ted Danson comedy, A Man on the Inside. The idea is strong enough, but the writing is lame, the pace is laborious, and just perhaps the absence of a strong co-star contributes to the demise of this well-intentioned Netflix series. Danson does his best, which should be plenty good enough, but I had to turn this off after two episodes. It really made my teeth hurt. Oh yes, Sally Struthers (Archie Bunker’s daughter in that famed series of yesteryear) has a nice, albeit small part and does well by it.

A Real Pain is a motion picture starring Kieran Culkin, the Emmy winner for Succession, and Jesse Eisenberg, who also directs. I got into a fair amount of trouble the last time I reviewed one of these third generation Holocaust movies and so I re-enter this arena with some trepidation.

I am sorry… I just do not have much of an idea what this movie is supposed to be or why anyone would take the time/trouble to make it. And Culkin? I had grown weary of his scatological speech patterns in Succession long before his “triumph” of the final season. Now I discover… this is what he does. He is playing that same “I don’t finish my sentences” character in this movie that paved his way to an Emmy in the HBO series… only this time in Bermuda shorts. Forgive me while I pass.

Black Doves on Netflix is an action spy series all about relationships with some terrific acting made all the more necessary by the really over the top plotting… even for an international spy thriller. The weird thing is that despite the extreme stretching of any kind of credulity at all, the thing works… really well… and it owes it all to this very solid cast who take their roles seriously and never once look at the camera to ask if any of us are following this thing. To the Producer’s credit, every so often, the show bounces backward in time to a partial flashback to sort of explain what the heck it was we had viewed twenty or thirty minutes before.

Keira Knightley is the principal lead (and one of the Executive Producers) in this series, and she is very credible in what really is a not very credible role. Her naïve husband (Andrew Buchan) gets my award for TV’s most sound sleeper, a quality which enables him to remain oblivious to all of his wife’s various shenanigans. Ben Whishaw is wonderful in supplying support as well as humor and a little romance.

I could not understand one word said by Sarah Lancashire as the very British boss of the spy team but, in the end, it really did not matter that I could not get my subtitles to work. Somehow, I managed to understand enough of her part in the plot to get by without her help. The remainder of the show’s ensemble is particularly good. I highly recommend this and, if I am wrong and you hate it, the good news is you will figure that out in the first hour of the series and you can turn it off with little time lost.

For something totally different, let me also recommend a tiny motion picture just released in theatres and on Amazon Prime, unhappily titled, My Old Ass.

It is a small, coming of age movie that deserves a better title. Maisy Stella, who is new on the scene to me, is particularly good. No pyrotechnics, nothing earth shattering. Just a sweet story, nicely told. Percy Hynes White is about as cute a leading man as his name might indicate. I think you will thank me for the recommendation.

That’s it from me for a while, I am off for the redux of last summer’s hernia surgery. Should give me lots of time for more TV bingeing.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

 

 

 

PARADISE LOST

The thing about referring to the place you live as “paradise,” is that everyplace else you find yourself… isn’t.

My current locale… far from my joy-filled home on Florida’s Fisher Island… is Southern California. My place of birth, home of the once mighty Trojan football team, the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world. Well, anyway, whatever else, it still remains the place of my birth.

I have been here in Los Angeles much longer than I intended or desired because that pain in my abdomen is not just the healing process of my hernia operation of three months ago; it is that self-same surgery gone bad and needing a do-over.

All that poking and prodding because of my complaints of continuing pain, and all those various physicians’ explanations that I would soon be fine, are now in the past. I must have the surgery again. Can you visualize my palms to face? My frustration with the medical establishment?

Of course it is different this time. Now there is scar tissue to deal with, plus the fact of failure the first time. This second surgery is going to take longer… and more fact findings will be required such as CT scans and cardiology clearances. This is not like before with 30 minutes of “twilight.” This is going to be three to four hours of anesthesia on an 87-year-old guy with a pacemaker.

I am easy about all of it. What upsets me is that I am in California and this procedure requires six weeks of inactivity post op; meaning that instead of returning to Miami and my Island Paradise before mid-December, I very likely will not be home until February.

I could go back to Miami and have the same team as before have another whack at my torso, but Fisher Island is under repair… and my building is going through major (read noisy and dirty) work with a resultant loss of privacy on my wrap-around deck and environs until the end of January. That unhappy fact, plus a plethora of funerals, is what brought me to California in the first place.

Is it any wonder that suicide comes to mind? Even as a fleeting thought? My body is betraying me, and at 87, there are naught but prospects drear. Do I really want to spend months of however much time is left on this planet in recuperation? The damp, grey clouds of California in the middle of winter, the all-that-is-left B-list lunches, the traffic, and the fact of everything out here being far away from everything else… including a parking place. It is a lot with which to cope.

Until it isn’t. I do not have a lot of skill sets, but among those I do possess is resiliency. A built-in tendency to bounce back.

It does not mean I don’t hate being out here on the west coast so much longer than I planned … especially at Christmas time. I am a Jewish kid, born in 1937 on December 23. That is 87 years of competing with Baby Jesus for attention at birthday time… something that is particularly tough in this part of the country where half my family are ardent Catholics.

My complexion is not the only thing around here that is green. Everywhere there are wreaths and decorated trees. The only thing that isn’t verdant is garishly crimson. This does not happen as much in The Sunshine State. Probably because the red and green combo clashes with the aqua and orange décor that dominates the neighborhoods of South Florida and my Island Paradise.

All that said, my mood is better. Markedly better. 24 hours of sulking and now my spirits have been revived. You may well ask how that is accomplished. By coming to view this catastrophe as opportunity, that’s how.

It came to me out of the darkness that there is the fact of my latest tome… an autobiography… languishing in my “to-do” file for months. Not a single word written since Spring, not one comma altered. The surgery, the cross-country trip, my general lack of motivation, let alone ambition, have conspired to have the book lie dormant.

My life story without the stuff already written in Cagney & Lacey… and Me (as ever, still available via Amazon or iTunes). It is appropriately enough entitled Life Without Cagney & Lacey and its conceit is that the reader has already devoured the aforementioned memoir and now wants to know what happened before and after that singular success.

It would all be so much easier if I were Steven Spielberg… or even George Lucas. Then, at least, I would figure there was an audience for such a book. I remain just enough of a producer to be concerned about box office receipts and just who this work is for.

What got me started on this opus was realizing that my life has been long enough to be of some interest. The pertinent question is to whom?

I have come to realize the trick is not to give a damn. 87 years later, it is my turn and a terrific way to fill days of recuperation (six weeks of them, to be specific) in a reclining chair with nothing better to do than complete those pages that I have spent a lifetime creating.

A nine-year-old washing dishes at a downtown restaurant, Yell King at the University of Southern California, three marriages, Frank Sinatra, Fess Parker, Daniel Boone, Paul Newman, Lolita, Steve McQueen, Paddy Chayefsky, Marlon Brando, Doris Day, David Wolper, Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett, Spelling/Goldberg, Ned Beatty, Marty Ritt, Jane Seymour, Tony Richardson, East of Eden, Christie, The American Dream, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill…

Just a few hundred pages between me and my Island Paradise.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

View from the West Coast

 

It is not because I am unhappy with the result. Not because I predicted the outcome more than once. No. I will not spend too much time on the recent national election because I have come to a place where I have seriously taken in the reality that such stuff is no longer about me… even when I want it to be… it just isn’t. Anymore.

I suppose I can take pride in having written more than once that America is a land where people watch TV and that Donald Trump… if nothing else… is good TV. What I didn’t see was much beyond the horizon of my own special Island.

Some of my readers might remember that even before The Donald came onto the political scene, I railed about the gulf between our economic classes being too wide and that it should surprise no one if it resulted in revolution.

The majority of my fellow citizens here off the coast of Miami and the Beaches vote Republican and they are mostly of an age and/or an economic class where that could arguably make sense (or, at least, might have in its day). But it is my own limited vision that I have put under scrutiny.

I sit on my Island where gasoline prices are not much of an issue… not directly. Hell, we don’t even have a place on the island that sells gas. My monthly dues have certainly increased… and once a year (maybe twice) the price of a hamburger on the Island is raised. That is more noticeable than the cost of a piece of sushi going up… I am none too sure why that is, but I think it is true.

My 401K has repaired nicely since Biden has been in office. The value of my unit on Fisher Island has soared. Medicare is great… covers just about all my needs. Hey, the economy is fine with this old guy.

I went to London earlier in the year. Everything there, from ice cream to hotel rooms, to theatre tickets, and (yes) petrol, was much more expensive than in the US. Biden/Harris must be doing a great job… right?

Obviously, folks … those out there off-Island… did not think so, and my view was proven to be myopic.

What can I say? I am not going to bust a gut over this… except, I have. That hernia surgery I had in mid-August did not hold and I need more surgery to repair what was done not so well in the first place. The good news? I am not a hypochondriac. My pain is real. The bad news? My pain is real.

The election, the aftermath, the failings of this nearly 87-year-old body are distracting me from such things as theatre… I turned down two potentially delightful trips to New York and have yet to see the latest version of Sunset Blvd. or the latest opening, A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical. I understand both are terrific. But you cannot take my word for it. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. At least for a while.

The about to be hernia operation #2 will take place here in LA which means a delay in my return to my Island paradise. It is just as well. My Island is undergoing major renovations and upgrades to stay ahead of government edicts and the rising seas. I hope to get back home sometime in January, meaning I will be forced to spend Christmas among folks I know who like that holiday a whole lot better than I.

I became aware of at least two box office hits, Deadpool & Wolverine and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and decided to be conscientious and prepare myself for giving these reviews by seeing a prequel to the Deadpool genre (the original Deadpool, for instance) and the first Beetlejuice … another one of those box office wonders I had never seen.

I didn’t like either one. Will probably not get around to watching Deadpool & Wolverine, let alone Beetlejuice Beetlejuice since I have herein debased my own credibility in this idiom. Millions… Billions maybe… have been spent by folks who love this stuff. I didn’t like sophomoric humor when I was a sophomore. Sorry. Go to the movies and judge for yourselves or, do what I am doing and keep watching MSNBC for clues.

The Diplomat (Netflix) is back for a second season. I liked season one, so I turned it on… have seen one episode. I intend to see more but I warn you… Do not do this without revisiting at least the last one or two episodes of season one to get you up to speed. These show runners are taking no prisoners and acting as if no time has passed since season one ended and season two began. Well, on screen … in their story… that is accurate. In actuality though… some of us have had lives and something like two years have gone by since the final episode of season one ended. I have friends who, because of the long wait, decided to watch season one all over again before diving into the new episodes. They liked it even better the second time. You might want to try that in lieu of Beetlejuice.

The Old Man is finally back for its second season on HULU and FX. Same thing applies here as it does to the above on The Diplomat but not as much. You have been warned.

The Academy channel provided me with the opportunity to view Three Daughters. Neither William Shakespeare nor Lear, his King, should fear replacement.

Amazon is presenting a post war English series, The Bletchley Circle, which I found wanting. The idea is worthy, the blatant sexism nicely introduced, but I have never seen so many women occupy so much screen time with so little sexuality. Even with an aching back, I missed that essential ingredient.

Scarlett Johansson stars in Fly Me to the Moon. It is either my aching back, my hernia, or Ms. Johansson’s semi-recent marriage but here again… even a superstar such as Ms. Johansson comes off as so much less sensual than usual… and this clever little movie suffers for it. I am going to blame the costume designer who went full bore (double entendre intended) to dress Ms. Johansson in the worst collection of 70s chic I have ever seen. It had to be deliberate. If Doris Day could look great in that kind of stuff why not Scarlett Johansson? Were I Mrs. Colin Jost, I would make it a standard clause in all future contracts that costume designer Mary Zophres not be allowed near any picture in which I had to appear wearing clothes.

Finally… in desperation… I turned on TMC and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. Not much to say, save for the fact that it is one of his best, that Barbara Hershey is sexier than all the best parts of all the above-mentioned women in all the aforementioned movies put together, and that Ms. Zophres might do well to study up Ms. Hershey’s look before damaging yet another movie.

Have you noticed what a better mood I am in when writing this stuff from my Island paradise? Just curious.

Loosening My Load

 

“Take it Easy,” the Eagles song by that 70s rock group with the lyric …standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, I’ve got seven women on my mind… came to this mind of mine just east of that southwestern town of the Eagles’ lyric. I was ruminating about a place to settle in from the ride that began later than usual due to my mid-afternoon departure from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

To be factual, the women on my mind totaled more than seven. It is what happens when you are on a cross-country road trip, well into your mid-eighties, have been married three times, fathered three daughters, and been gifted with a pair of female grandchildren.

I had yet to count any of the more prominent of the girlfriends I never found the time to marry (let alone visit) that might well have come to mind on this road trip which… has now… finally, ended.

The BMW is now in the driveway of my Studio City pied-a-terre in California’s San Fernando Valley, and my tweaked back has been elevated to the status of MRI worthy. I am caught up in the bureaucracy of the California medical establishment and may well have to wait a month or more for the imaging to land on the desk of a qualified physician willing to jab a drug-loaded needle into my spine.

There was never a plan to return via the blue lane highways to my warm Island off the coast of Miami’s famed South Beach. These trips of mine always end in California, around four weeks from when they began, with an additional four-to-six weeks tacked on for visiting friends, family… and… this year… giving eulogies. The BMW will then be loaded on a truck bound for the east coast where it will arrive in something less than five days while I fly home for the rendezvous with truck, car, and driver. Me? No need to ask. I have no desire to drive across the country in either direction in the month of December.

Today’s California session with an acupuncturist “took” better than usual, or perhaps it was my misreading of the clock and the resultant “extra” dose of the Hydrocodone pain pill. Whichever, I found myself reminiscing over this just-completed drive of mine. My return home to Fisher Island falls just before my 87^th birthday. That this last cross-country drive might well be exactly that… the last... should not surprise; yet, somehow, it does.

If, indeed, this trip is the last, then it was a good one. Never mind that the first third of the route was dictated by attempts at outguessing the unpredictable weather patterns of two of the decade’s greater hurricanes. Dealing with the storms’ subsequent impact on roads and their interconnecting communities also became a component, along with the quite predictable fact that driving across the Rocky Mountains in October… a full two months later in the year than any previous crossing I have ever navigated over that impressive range of mountains… might well present challenges never before encountered on any of my trips.

Those earlier journeys had all begun in Miami in July or August. There was no question that this October start… two months closer to the dead of winter… could make that Rocky Mountain crossing more demanding.

Eventually… if you are determined to go from sea to shining sea, winding up at the Pacific coast, The Rockies are something you must encounter and, although you might get an argument now and then from a Texan… the vastness of the West really begins mid-way during your automobile’s adjustments to the climb that makes up the essence of the Rocky Mountains.

No matter what route taken, for me there is nothing comparable to being behind the wheel of a powerful automobile, climbing westward over that vast mountain range outside of Denver, Colorado, and then descending into Utah, driving the breath of that state on a diagonal line into the southern tip of Nevada, and then on to Southern California’s Route 66…

Barstow, Kingman, San Bernardino...

There is nothing like Utah. It takes an ordinary guy like me and makes him believe that there is a God. There is just no way that dust and wind could have arbitrarily formed that incredible landscape. It has been decades since I went west without Utah as a major part of my road trip’s plan.

But this year would be different. The Rockies in October were intimidating, and so I elected to cross them as far to the south as I could and yet remain in the continental United States. It brought me, for the first time in over thirty years, to the Land of Enchantment: New Mexico… then onward through more of Arizona than I have traversed in over half a century.

It was remiss of me to ignore this landscape for so long. The shapes of the mountain ranges, the colors of the terrain, clouds, and sky. Simply breathtaking.

Winslow, Arizona had seemed a good place to stop en route from the fabulous Bishop’s Lodge by Auberge in Santa Fe, New Mexico while en route to the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.

La Posada, the historic last great railroad hotel built in 1930 in the center of Winslow, was full. There was (literally) no room at the inn.

The name of the hotel should have prepared me for that possibility long before the Eagles reference got me into midtown Winslow. Besides, I was humming the more age appropriate (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66, not realizing I had incorrectly inserted Winslow where the King Cole trio had written Flagstaff…

You’ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino…

It goes on, but my misrepresentation of Winslow brought me to the song where Winslow belonged. A Google search on the BMW quickly produced the right tune with the seven women of the lyric.

I did have dinner at La Posada and was more than happy to have done so. The next morning, I was on the road again, this time to Phoenix and an important birthday party for my very best friend at the splendidly detailed Arizona Biltmore.

Truth to tell, The Biltmore is not my kinda place. I generally have a rule that keeps me from staying at any hotel where the USC band can march through the lobby without being noticed. The Biltmore is a bit like that. Not my thing, but one does have to admire the attention to detail, if not scale. It is an impressive edifice and must have caused architect Albert Chase McArthur a lifetime of hurt that his fellow Arizonan, Frank Lloyd Wright, so often gets sole credit for McArthur’s work on this luxurious structure.

I was by now fully dependent on the shillelagh I had acquired last year in London for use as a cane. The good news is that the driver’s seat in the BMW was so comfortable that whatever pain I had was literally left at the auto’s door. A drive along the Mexican border and then slightly north brought me to my penultimate stop, California’s The Fairmont Grand Del Mar.

It was mostly wasted on this by then near-cripple. The Grand is another one of those country clubs in the style of a more affluent time with landscaping and vistas that challenged the architectural capabilities of the team that put the whole place together. The food was terrific, but my back was worse. My plan was to be in California for the month of November and I feared it might take that long to get me fully back on my feet.

Finally, some good news. A writer-pal gave me the name of her chiropractor and, although I had sworn off that aspect of the medical arts nearly half a century ago, I was in sufficient pain to willingly agree to an appointment.

Before that date came around, I re-entered the gentler art of the acupuncturist and Chinese medicine for the first time since moving to Florida in the 1980s. Those subtle treatments, and a steady supply of hydrocodone/acetaminophen, kept me ambulatory until yesterday’s visit with a Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine.

Chiropractic is different from regular medicine. It is more of an art form. If you have ever had the experience of crawling into one of these offices… and all but dancing out… you know what I mean. I haven’t been to one of these “artists” since my days of producing Daniel Boone in the 1960s. Around about then, one of those guys scared me bad enough that I never went back. Not until this week.

One visit and I can inform you that Dr. Martin Stites is the “real deal.” I did not exactly “dance out” of his office, but I could have. Thank you, Vivienne Radkoff, for the recommendation. I am smiling as I write this…  grinning, really. On my feet and ready for family and friends in Southern California at the end of what some think may well be my last road trip.

We shall see.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

On The Road Again

There are some blue notes from the road including not visiting friends in places such as Omaha, and various cities and towns in Texas. Choosing October to travel rather than August is another, since that fact alone forced me on a southern trajectory across the country not only for warmer weather, but primarily so that I could cross the Rocky Mountains at their lowest altitude. I did not want to risk running into snow, which in Colorado and points north can happen even in summer. 

I will make that crossing over the Rockies in the next 48 hours. Right now, I am chilling in a fabulous and luxurious resort in the mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico… trying not to let the thin air or my tweaked back get me down.

I have gotten ahead of myself. You last heard from this intrepid… and rapidly aging… traveler as I was preparing to leave Rosemary Beach in the Florida Panhandle. Normally, I would continue to go west to New Orleans and then visit with friends in Houston and another couple I have not seen in a very long time who reside in the beautiful community ofRound Top, Texas.

Hurricane Helene had decimated the West Coast of Florida, impacting on my initial plan of a drive up my home state’s West Coast; then, as I travelled, a new storm (Milton) formed in the Gulf bringing into question a drive along the Panhandle’s coast to New Orleans.

I decided---prematurely it turned out---to hightail it northward, away from the storm, into Alabama, and to revisit what I had remembered as the fabulous tributes to the Civil Rights movement in both Montgomery and Birmingham. It had been two decades since I visited the area with my eldest grandchild when she was a Black Studies Major at Oberlin College in Ohio.

I left Rosemary Beach that Sunday morning and stayed faithful to the country roads on which I love to drive. Alabama is beautiful, thecountryside pristine and replete with two-lane roads that are well paved.

The BMW cruised through Brantley which has a high school that appeared to be housed in a trailer. Brantley High School is for pre-K through 12th grade and the town, founded over a hundred and thirty years ago in 1891, still has not reached a population of 1,000. It is a long way from my birthplace in East Los Angeles, or my adopted home of Miami… and not only in miles. Even my Island paradise has more residents.

I was in Selma by late in the afternoon. It was all but deserted. I parked the car and took the time to walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

Onward to Montgomery which has improved dramatically in the time that has gone by since my last visit nearly twenty years ago. The bad news was that all the museums and historical tributes to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the Civil Rights Movement were closed by the time I got there that Sunday night; none would reopen until Wednesday.

The Legacy Sites did not exist when I last visited the Civil Rights Trail,but the reviews were so powerful I felt compelled to at least drive-bythem and was glad that I did. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in 2018, informally known as The National Lynching Museum, is an architectural wonder. Even as I peeked in through the gates of the nearby Freedom Monument Sculpture Park near the banks of the Alabama River where countless slaves began their journeys, there was more than a hint of the worthwhile visit within. It is unlikely this old guy will make it back there, but you should… with your children and theirs.

I moved on to Birmingham… often referred to in my youth as BOMBingham for all the terror brought down on that city’s Black population. I remembered the museum there as one of the most impactful I had ever seen. It too was closed until Wednesday. I walked across the street to Kelly Ingram Park which had left indelible images all those years ago with its lifelike sculptures of police attack dogs, power water hoses and other offenses against Black people. Unless my memory was playing tricks, this park is no longer the powerful visit that it was. Stuff happens in 20 years. Not all of it is progress.

Now, well into Monday afternoon, I drove south and west to Tuscaloosato see the campus of the University of Alabama. Absolutely gorgeous… and alive with young people everywhere making their ways across the multiple quads to seemingly innumerable numbers of beautiful brick buildings. 

Hot Springs, Arkansas was my next destination point. I had never been, despite multiple trips across the country, and the name only jumped off my map because of some vague recollection I had of the town being anescape from the trials of life in Chicago for Al Capone and Lucky Luciano in the 1930s.

There are a lot of tributes to the two mobsters in Hot Springs, which one must believe has seen much better days. I think “tacky” covers it today. I did not leap at the chance to try the baths. To give the place its due, the locals could not have been friendlier.

It was just after all this that I drove through a very tiny town in Arkansas called De Queen. Best chicken fried steak I have ever had and the best meal so far on this entire trip… admittedly a low bar on this kind of adventure, but still… the food was so good it is worthy of note: Ranch House Café of De Queen, 208 East Collin Raye Drive, Arkansas… just in case you find yourself in the neighborhood.

The drive westward across Oklahoma and then down into Albuquerque provided little amusement over the two days it required. I decided to reward myself and book the best room I could find in New Mexico’s largest city. I picked the historic Hotel Andaluz… built around the time I was born and the pride of Conrad Hilton who spent his honeymoon there with Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Once inside the Hotel I came to realize that I had stumbled into the city at a most propitious time… The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta was happening. There had been a cancellation… some dude from Florida could not make it because of Hurricane Milton. He had to give up his room. Apparently, that is how I had gotten mine. I also took his place on the bus that would leave the Hotel at 4AM the next morning to watch the ascension of the hundreds of hot air balloons that would begin in the pre-dawn hours and go on until about 9AM.

It was all very impressive. I have never seen anything like it and felt fortunate to have lucked into such an event. Back at the Hotel, later that morning, I napped with the intention of rising in time to watch the USC-Penn State game on the extra-large screen my hotel room provided. Good plan, but a failure with the Internet blacked out all TV in the entire area.

With a little help from the Hotel concierge, I was off to a distant sports bar in time to watch my Trojans go down to defeat… again. My passion for this team is being tested, but this season fits right into the time of loss I have been experiencing too often with friends and family. A tough year.

That is why I elected to spoil myself in Santa Fe. My trip is close to an end.  I will soon cross the Rocky Mountains and make my way to Phoenix and the Biltmore Hotel, of Frank Lloyd Wright fame. It is where, at the age of twenty-one, I spent my wedding night with my recently deceased first wife and where I will watch USC play its next game against another Big 10 rival. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

 

 

The Road Part I

Driving across the US of A in a fine automobile is one of my passions. When I was younger, it was something I did every even numbered year… tooling from Miami to Los Angeles over a three-to-four-week span, first in a Mercedes SL, then a Bentley Azure, next a Phaeton by Volkswagen, and then a Bentley Continental GTC. Now, I am on what will most likely be the last such trip of my life… this time in a BMW 740i.

The BMW is a bit of a step down in class, but it is extremely comfortable, a more than decent driving machine, and not at all bad looking. I know, I know, I have settled. There is nothing like driving the blue lane highways of America in a Bentley with the top down. The emotional and social experience cannot be replicated; although being pulled over for speeding in the Phaeton, and the first question out of the police officer’s mouth was to ask with awe what kind of car it was that I was driving was special… and memorable.

Enough about the past. By now most of you know what is meant by “the blue lane highways,” and why it takes me at least three to four weeks to make a drive that professionals do in three to five days.

On the trip, my idea of exercise is to enter a town via main street, drive to the end of the strip, park, walk back the length of the road to the diner I saw on entering, have lunch, then walk back to the car, climb aboard and drive on. Each trip is different, mostly these drives have been in the month of August, but this last adventure is an October surprise, and as such has some weather implications that have heretofore not impacted my plans.

Hurricane Helene flooded a lot of the back roads I had hoped to take on the western coast of Florida. Now that I have managed all of that with me and The Beamer in Rosemary Beach on the western end of the Florida Panhandle, Hurricane Milton has me rerouting northward. It is hard to take a hurricane with a name like Milton seriously… but I will.

My oldest grandchild will be proud when she learns I have decided to retrace some of the places she and I did together on our second road trip when she was a Black studies major at Oberlin College and leading me through Montgomery and Birmingham in Alabama.

That will get me out of harm’s way but also far from New Orleans and any chance of dropping in on pals in Houston, Round Top, Dallas, or San Antonio. More on that future stuff when it is in my past. For now, a brief report on where I have been.

To appreciate all of what follows you must understand that on any trip from Miami to Los Angeles the absolute worst part of the drive is the part involving getting out of the State of Florida.

I love my adopted home, but it has its flaws. A general lack of topography is one of them. Florida is flat and the routes in and out are long and boring. It doesn’t help that the worst drivers in the US have Florida license plates on their automobiles. The temptation is to stay close to the coasts, but those eastern coastal towns can really be tacky, traffic-y and generally an eyesore.

Once Hurricane Helene ravaged the Florida West Coast, I resolved to stay inland… to see the farms of Florida no matter how flat, and to finally get a look at Lake Okeechobee, the largest body of water in my home state and the second largest in the contiguous US.

I got to the lake and couldn’t see it. I mean, c’mon, it is reportedly huge. I could not see it, and the reason was that nearly a hundred years ago, there was a storm which created enormous flooding resulting in hundreds of fatalities. Better late than never, a berm was built around the lake’s perimeter all but eliminating any danger from the lake to surrounding communities.

Good for them, bad for the view. I took the better part of a day driving around that enormous thing determined to see some of that massive fresh water supply, and finally, via a small, unmarked road that took me to an honest to God observation deck, was able to do so. There… as far as the eye could see…. was Florida’s finest freshwater lake.

Exhausted I opted to spend the night at a hotel in Orlando. Boring, but theme parks are not part of my dream. I moved on…. drove in and around The Villages to see what all the fuss is about.

The Villages is Florida famous. A created community in the middle of nowhere, conceived and built by a genius entrepreneur of a developer. There are multiple Golf courses, polo fields, softball diamonds, tennis courts, pickle ball, manicured lawns, beautiful homes…. some bigger and more beautiful than others, but everyone impressive or semi-so in its own way. It is an authentic and popular adult community with a notorious social life and supposedly the highest rate of venereal disease in the country. I looked around, but only exited my car to buy gasoline.

Then on to horse country, Ocala, Florida. Reminiscent of the blue grass estates I have driven past in Kentucky… every bit as opulent and beautiful… even without hills. The next day I drove into Apalachicola in the Florida Panhandle. Charming. A town that used to be the oyster capital of the Stare that has all but died because of pollutants in their Bay is trying a comeback. The 19^th century homes and neighborhoods are lovely. I could live among em… there was even an occasional Harris/Walz sign.

I write you now from Rosemary Beach… one of my primary Florida destinations. A manufactured town in the western most part of the State that is Disneyland for grownups. I really like it, even if it is a movie set without the cameras. I first visited here maybe twenty years ago and thought seriously about buying then when it was only a fledgling community. Now it has fulfilled its promise.  

Northward bound tomorrow. More to come as the road provides.

 

Barney Rosenzweig