Unlike most of the people writing about him on the hundredth anniversary of his life, I actually met Orson Welles. As I stood to shake his hand, I do remember thinking, Wow, here I am shaking the hand of the…
Unlike most of the people writing about him on the hundredth anniversary of his life, I actually met Orson Welles. As I stood to shake his hand, I do remember thinking, Wow, here I am shaking the hand of the…
Even though they had already been hugely popular in North American newspapers for at least twenty years, King Features, the granddaddy of newspaper syndicates, is celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of a lost, all-but-forgotten art form: the comic strip. As…
Frank Sinatra will not attend his hundredth birthday this month. However, Frank was at his eightieth birthday party. I know because I was there with him. You might say I helped him blow out the candles. Mind you, we weren’t…
The Four Wives of the Sanibel Sunset Detective has just become available on Amazon. You can download an ebook copy immediately or pre-order the print version and have it on your doorstep when it is published November 21. For your copy of…
In Donald Brittain’s powerful 1978 television documentary The Champions, about the lifelong battle for Canada’s destiny between Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque, there is a shot of Trudeau being interviewed in the midst of the 1968 Liberal leadership convention. Days away from becoming…
Tree Callister and his old friend Rex Baxter were having lunch on the screened-in terrace at the Lighthouse Restaurant, just off Sanibel Island, when Rex said, “I’m getting married in the morning.” “The song from My Fair Lady by Lerner…
The black bulls are charging outside our apartment in Uzès. We are in this medieval French town to spend the next month experiencing the joys of Provence. Who knew about bulls? Les tauraux are part of the tradition and commerce…
The London of Dickens, the London of countless Masterpiece Theatre portrayals, the black and white London of the British movies of my youth—in other words the traditional London that tourists flock here to experience, that London is fast disappearing. At…