dennis – Page 3 – Dennis C Merritt

The Journey

I’ve just started playing with an iPad and Apple Pencil, drawing stuff using the program Procreate. I signed up for a FaceBook group of Procreate beginners.

There appears to be a philosophical thread, where someone will have gone to great pains to create a picture that looks photographic in its detail and ask for comments, and others will comment that what’s the point if it looks like a photograph. It should have some of the artist’s own soul in it.

Based on my own beginning experience, that view point is based on a misconception of what a picture is all about. It’s the process of making the picture that’s fun.

It solving all the little puzzles of how to use the tools to render this part of the image and that. These pictures take literally hours of work. It’s not about the finished picture, it’s about the enjoyment the artist had working on the picture.

I’m thinking it’s always been that way. The first cave artists were trying to make the deer as realistic as possible, and enjoyed the puzzle of how to do that with a charred stick. As did Rembrandt with his portraits.

Writing Well

A personal journey from reading about database to writing about jazz on a baritone ukulele.

My Path

If you were involved with computers in the 1970s you would be impressed with the name James Martin. He was big then, but fame is so fleeting, even programmers today don’t know of him. However, then, he used to get $20,000/day consulting for large companies on software strategies, and was a prolific writer on all things computer. He supposedly made more money selling text books than any other text book author.

I was the kid good at math and hated English. This led to a programming career in my 20s, working in aerospace. When I was around 30 I decided to leave aerospace and work in the commercial sector, for a company selling mainframe database software. (Late 1970s.)

I didn’t know anything about database technology, so I bought James Martin’s book on database. A large book. I was ready for a slog, but instead, it was like reading a best selling novel. And database knowledge just seemed to osmose into my brain. I was amazed, how did he do that?

That book got me interested in the challenge of writing about technical things. I saw a similarity between trying to logically structure software code to solve a problem, and trying to logically structure sentences and paragraphs to explain a topic. I started to dabble in articles for trade magazines and the like, all about a software niche, Prolog, I was doing as hobby.

40 – time for a midlife crisis, I had abandoned the commercial software companies and had decided to make it on my own. It wasn’t going well. I was almost out of money and ready to crawl back to the commercial world when my son crashed my car (nobody hurt) with surgically precise damage that got me a check from the insurance company for the total, which I didn’t need to spend on the car, and provided me funds for another month.

Then, and here comes the too coincidental to be a coincidence part, a fellow I’d known back in my aerospace days noticed I was doing some writing, and asked if i wanted to work for James Martin. Turns out James Martin had spun off a bunch of other writing products and needed writers for them.

So I started doing contract work for the James Martin Report writing in-depth papers on various IBM technologies and ghost writing a magazine column for him.

It was all about the illustrations

He told me that there was a direct correlation between the number of diagrams in a text book and the sales of that book. But it wasn’t just that he had illustrations, it was that they were how the book was written.

(I’ve always been fascinated by how writer’s creative styles affect their work, like Wodehouse used to make three story lines on pieces of paper tacked around the walls of his cabin and then look for ways to have them intersect, and if you read his books, well yes that’s exactly what happens, and Elmore Leonard coming up with characters and then putting them in situations to see what they do, instead of having a plot, and in his books the characters are memorable but you never remember the plots. Like that…)

James Martin had a bunch of folding tables in a big room in his large house in Vermont. (He had bought it from Larry Bird’s Celtic teammate, Kevin McHale, who had designed it for a tall person, as James Martin was.) He drew diagrams, charts, pictures on pieces of paper and laid them out and organized them on these tables. If anything wasn’t clear, he’d add more pictures.

(Hmmm, I bet the large spread out physical work space let him work with the big picture a lot more easily than someone sitting in front of a computer screen, double hmmm, I bet that explains Wodehouse’s ability as well…)

(Triple hmmm, total digression, these are thoughts just popping into my head, not part of what I was trying to say, but Wodehouse has been called the best writer of English language fiction, and James Martin has been called the best writer (he’s English as well) of English language textbooks, and both used large scale spaces to lay out their works before setting pen to paper.)

Then Lillian, his red-haired girl friend who used to be married to someone who worked for the Shah of Iran and was kicked out in the revolution, would computerize his drawings, and then he would write the words that glued it all together.

I went back and looked at some of his books. There was never a page without some chart or diagram on it.

When he told us how he wanted the articles in the report written, he had a series of basic diagrams that he wanted us to fill in for the particular technology we were covering. These diagrams had differing relationships of visual elements that would illustrate the layers and connections between elements of a technology.

And the structure

He also had an overview architecture that we followed that solved the problem of how to talk about interconnected bits of technology and drill down on one bit without fully explaining the other. It added two steps to the classic, tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them structure.

The technology document sections were: 1- abstract, a paragraph, 2- executive overview, a one page discussion of the technology, 3- overview, three-five pages describing all the components of the system and how they related, and only then, 4- a 30-50 page detailed dive into the technology, including examples of use worked out, and 5- a summary.

That detailed overview made it possible to write the deeper details referencing bits of the technology that had not yet been covered in depth. Did that make sense? So if A is related to B, then because the relationship is laid out in the beginning, the in-depth analysis of A can refer to B before B has been described in detail. And of course there were diagrams that had A and B visually related.

My Ukulele Book

And, so now around 70, retired mostly from software, and trying to learn about music, I discovered the Baritone Ukulele and started playing with chords, and decided to write the book. As you can see, it’s lots and lots of diagrams that tell the story and mostly they came first. But yes, I care about the words too and did go over them many times. At a parent-teacher function my son’s English teacher noted that there’s no such thing as good writing, only good re-writing.

Self Reliance and BLM

A rather conservative thinker in our area wrote an editorial in our paper a while back about an argument he had with a millennial. His point was people should be self-reliant and not ask for government handouts. These were my thoughts on the matter.

Mr. O’Rourke wrote a thought-provoking My Turn column, maybe a month or even two ago. He talked about a debate he’d had with a millenial friend and he made the point that people shouldn’t whine and ask for handouts, but instead rise up and do what it takes to carve out a living for themselves. It is classic Emerson, and I must say I totally agree with him. Ironically though, I suspect it is exactly individuals who exemplify his ideals that have lead to the national discord that might have fuelled his millenial friend’s opinions.

Since moving to Western Mass. I’ve met many of the self-reliant individuals he describes. The rural nature of this area doesn’t provide a wealth of economic opportunity, yet the people here take care of themselves. They make art for the tourists, do landscaping, sell wood, work the farms or tap our maples for syrup.

There are the owners and employees of independent businesses, like restaurants, shops, and car repair garages, and those who commute to Greenfield to work in the medical industry, or a bit further south to work in the universities. All self-reliant people working with what’s here. And those that want something different, well just as Mr. O’Rourke suggests, they go to our colleges and move to places that support high tech, big business or mass entertainment.

I like to think that I exemplify his ideals as well. I was raised in a middle class suburb of New York, Levittown. It had excellent public schools that I took advantage of to get into an Ivy League school, which my parents could afford back when tuition wasn’t so crazy. The contacts I made there led me to a career in software development, my own small company and my retirement in Shelburne Falls. I worked hard, and my hard work, while not making me rich, led to a satisfying and comfortable life.

I’m thinking Mr. O’Rourke’s debate with the millenial was about Black Lives Matter.

I compare my path in life with George Floyd’s. For one, it was only years later that I learned Levitt, who built Levittown, wouldn’t sell to Black families, so that particular path would have been closed.

From what I’ve read, for people who grow up in neighborhoods like George Floyd’s, there aren’t local schools that lead to good colleges. Even if there were, it’s unlikely his parents could have paid the bill.

But lack of education aside, there’s plenty in Western Mass. who fend for themselves cutting wood, waiting tables, making syrup.

What, then, are the similar opportunities for an enterprising young person in the inner city? One who exemplifies Mr. O’Rourke’s ideals? One for whom welfare handouts can’t answer the drive to succeed, to make something of oneself?

Drugs, prostitution and petty crimes are some. These are where self-reliant individuals can turn to make their own way in the world. Gangs, the equivalent of corporate America for the inner city, provide both support and a livelihood, organizations where through hard work one can rise up and get ahead.

It’s those enterprising, self-reliant Blacks from the inner city who take advantage of these opportunities that wind up in conflict with the mostly white police.

There are currently something like two million young Black men in our prisons, at a cost in the billions to our society. These aren’t lazy welfare cheats who were looking for a government handout. These are men who wanted to make their own way in the world, who took advantage of the economic opportunities available to them.

Wouldn’t we be better off if all that self-reliant, Emersonian energy had been channeled into more socially productive areas? Wouldn’t a great start be to provide equal educational opportunities to all? To stop funding public schools with real estate taxes, and instead fund them on a state level so everyone gets the same quality education? To get rid of the concept of “good school districts” available only to those who can afford to live in them?

And shouldn’t college be affordable as well, and health care available to those who don’t work in corporate America?

These aren’t handouts for those who don’t want to work, but rather investments in the futures of those who do. I’d rather see us spend billions on education than incarceration. I’d like to see us tap into that self-reliant human spirit which is, as Mr. O’Rourke points out, the very essence of America.

Dad’s War Diary

Here’s a digest of my Dad’s War Diary, including photos and maps.

Empathy for the Right

My self selecting circle of Face Book friends are overwhelmingly against Trump. Many ask, how can anyone still support this guy?

I, personally, don’t like him. But I like to try to understand different points of view. I have some sympathies with conservative political views, and the few Trump supporters I know are not xenophobic neo-Nazis, but intelligent reasonable people.

So this is me attempting to explain how I think Trump supporters might think, and why they can continue to support him, to the tune of around 40% of our country.

More than anything else, I’d say a Trump supporter, like many others, is sickened by the way our politicians all seem to be bought, how government does not work for us. Every time he did something that pissed off the career politicians, I’d say Yay Trump!

Trump supporters are probably on the conservative side of the spectrum. Not necessarily evil gay bashing, white supremacist conservatives, but people who would prefer a government that supports personal freedoms, is smaller rather than bigger government and one that is fiscally responsible.

Such a person would have for years been offended by the liberal bias in the main stream media. (And it’s real, I have some conservative roots and the bias can be really annoying.) So they would get their news from Fox News, which, like the other main stream media, is NOT fake news, but news, like the other main stream media, presented with the unavoidable bias of it’s owners.

Every time Trump did something that got the liberal media all up in arms, I’d say Yay Trump!

A Trump supporter might very well hate the ACA. (He might call it ObamaCare, but Obama wanted either national health, or totally individual free markets. Instead he got Congress’ terrible kludge that kept the insurance companies happy.)

The basic facts of this issue are simple. If we want to subsidize the cost of insurance for those who can’t afford it, then someone else has to pay for it.

The Trump supporter might very well be one of those people. A healthy young person working in the building trades, just barely making ends meet, deciding not to buy health insurance, and then being forced to so others could buy it? That would burn my ass too. (I don’t care though, I’ve got Medicare, shouldn’t everyone?)

The Trump supporter might have a growing small business. A lawn business that’s getting close to 50 employees, but can’t grow his business because if he gets 50 he’ll have to become an expert in, not only lawn care, but health care benefits. And incur the added costs. That would frustrate me too.

So, when Trump says he’s going to kill ObamaCare, I’d say Yay Trump!

When Congress wasn’t able to kill ObamaCare, see first paragraph on disdain for government, I’d be really frustrated with our government, so when he decides to dismantle it himself, I’d say Yay Trump!

A Trump supporter might like to see a healthy environment, but might very well think things have gone too far. Spotted owls? Fairy shrimp? Stopping real work from getting done? The kind of work those who work with their hands outdoors do? Every time Trump rolled back some of those ridiculous rules, I’d say Yay Trump!

A Trump supporter probably sees through the liberal’s constant idea that all these benefits we want to give people will be free, because we’ll tax the corporations. The Trump supporter might very well realize that if government adds an expense to a corporation, the corporation will still follow it’s soulless economic algorithm of ensuring income exceeds expense by a certain percent, and compensate for the added expense by either increasing the price of products, or cutting jobs and or salaries.

Taxing corporations is really just a way to tax the people without them seeing it, making the corporation work as tax collector.

The Trump supporter, a working person, probably realizes that everyone’s financial situation is either directly or indirectly dependent on the wealth created by corporations.

So every time Trump loosened a restriction on corporations, I’d say Yay Trump!

Depending on where they live, Trump supporters might have watched their neighborhoods change over the years. They might not be the xenophobes they’re painted out to be, but might feel that there’s more and more Spanish being spoken. Well some immigrants are OK, but we have laws to control our growth through immigration, and all those people just flaunting the rules, sneaking into the country, and then being catered to by the liberals?

Every time Trump clamped down on illegal immigrants, I’d say Yay Trump!

Internationally, a Trump supporter might think that our government has gone out of it’s way with foreign aid, and special trade deals, and would see more and more work moving to cheap labor markets and be really tired of having taxes pay to benefit countries other than our own. Why do we have to give up so much for, say the Paris Climate Accord?

Getting out of it? Yay Trump!

And what about what’s happening on college campuses, the ridiculous extremes of political correctness? Dis that stuff? Yay Trump!

And Football! Come on, this is the Trump supporters place to get away from all the issues above, to get away from the divisive politics of our country, to get away from the non-stop news of, say police killing black people. And now some athletes want to bring politics into this one sacred place, to use it for some more of the consciousness raising bullshit that the liberal media tries to force feed us all the time?

Call them out on it. Yay Trump! Oh and is the liberal media having a cow over it? Double Yay Trump!

But for me? I can’t stand the guy. I simply don’t like his personality, the way he does business. But more than anything else I hate how he’s taken all of the issues above, political issues that reasonable people could discuss, and used them to tear the country apart. I’d like to see dialog on these issues, how to fix health care? How much environmental regulation?

But every time he drives another wedge… Boo Trump!

Law and Order

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups…”

I was just starting up with a new girl friend who had a third floor walk up apartment in Charlestown MA, which had a reputation as a tough town.

She told me that not too many days ago she had been raped in her apartment. An actual real home invasion sort of rape. The guy had climbed up the fire escape and came in through a window and used a kitchen knife he found to threaten her.

It was the sixties, things moved fast and I wound up staying over with her. After we had gone to bed we heard something in the hall. We thought it was her cat, but then the guy appeared in the bed room door.

He had a cowboy style bandana mask on his face, and his junk hanging out. Instead of a knife, he was brandishing a knife sharpener he had found in the kitchen. I was naked and stood up and looked at him. He looked surprised and asked me what I was doing there.

I was scared but tried not to show it. I told him if he left now there would be no trouble. He thought for a moment, and then seemed to agree. He left.

We then realized that he had been in the apartment the whole evening, hiding in a closet. We had been out, and we’d come home, he was already inside. Shudder.

We called the police and the uniformed officers didn’t seem to have ever seen any TV about policing. They handled, with their bare hands, the knife sharpener and just casually looked around and really didn’t seem to take note of anything.

The two detectives were different. They said their name fast and we always referred to them as Mike&Jimmy. They too didn’t seem to care much about evidence, but acted like they were on a mission.

A couple of days later they said they were pretty sure they knew who did it and asked us to come to the police station to identify the guy. They had had him called in on a phony excuse about his driver’s license. He was standing in line. Mike&Jimmy pointed him out.

A chill went up my spine. Although I never saw his face, I knew it was the guy. My girl friend felt the same way.

Mike&Jimmy took us to their office. They showed us a picture of the guy. Then they said, here’s a book with a bunch of pictures. Go through it and pick out his photo.

We did. (TV crime viewers will know this was, of course, an illegal identification.)

They told us when we got to court we would be asked if we did the identification by looking at the book of photos first. We should testify that that is what happened.

There was a back story. This guy had been involved in a number of rapes in the town. One of the most recent was of a nine year old girl. Mike&Jimmy had the guy, had the girl’s testimony and were ready for trial.

Then the parents of the girl decided she couldn’t go through the trauma again, and moved to Baltimore before the trial.

So Mike&Jimmy had no option left but to leave the guy on the streets and wait until he struck again. When he did, that was my girl friend.

They did not want to let him go again, which is why they made sure they got an identification from us, which is why they told us how to testify.

We met with the prosecutor. He also knew exactly what was going on, and we rehearsed how the questions at the trial would go. (Witness tampering, also illegal.)

It turns out this guy was borderline functioning with an IQ of around 70. He was assigned a public defender. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect he was also in on what was happening.

The judge read the charges. The guy was charged with “ravaging and carnally knowing” the defendant.

We were asked the questions on identification and the incidents, and gave our answers. Sounded bad for the guy.

The defense was an alibi. The guy’s cousin said how wonderful he was and how he had taken his nephew to a Red Sox game that day. When asked if she remembered who they played, she confidently said yes. The Tigers, and the Sox won 2 – 1.

The prosecutor was showing a little glee, as he asked for a recess while they located and brought in a special witness, the scheduler for the Red Sox.

Turns out the Sox were on the road that day.

In the summary arguments, the last statement by the public defender was “… and we heard she had cats. I ask you, where were the cats?”

He was put away for seven years.

But still, we couldn’t go into the apartment without first checking every possible place a person might be hiding. It became a ritual. For at least five years, we couldn’t not search where we were living as that fear of a home invasion stayed with us.

So my question is, did we do the right thing? Did Mike&Jimmy? The prosecutor?

Years later I was watching the OJ Simpson trial. Testifying about the glove which might have been planted, detective Mark Fuhrman described how police, detectives, prosecutors and witnesses often worked together on evidence to make sure they put the bad guys away.

He was ridiculed as people said: the prosecutors and the detectives working together to fix a case? No way.

All I thought was, way.

Libertarians vs. Progressives

Our local paper, the Greenfield Recorder, had recently published an op-ed piece advocating a libertarian approach to the pandemic. This was my op-ed published a short while after.

It was refreshing to read John Blasiak’s My Turn a while back, and to see all the dialog he stirred up. It advocated, as many probably know, a pure Libertarian approach to the problem. The Libertarians stress individual responsibility and rights with minimal government intervention. (Like they don’t want the government telling them whether or not they can use marijuana, have an abortion, or own a gun.) They harken back to thoughts such as those expressed in our own Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance.

Here’s what I really like about Libertarians — they are genuinely interested in what they believe is best for the people of this country. You might argue with their vision, but their concern is the best life for the individuals in our country.

The Recorder has a lot of My Turn essays supporting a Progressive agenda. Universal health care, college education for all, things like that.

Here’s what I really like about Progressives — they are genuinely interested in what they believe is best for the people of this country. You might argue with their vision, but their concern is the best life for the individuals in our country.

Both groups want a government by the people, for the people. Not one bought and sold by the interests of the super rich.

You know what I don’t like about the Republicans and the Democrats? Ideally they might echo Libertarian or Progressives views, but they don’t. Both parties are dependent on the wealthy donors who support their elections. We are where we are today through a sequence of alternating Democrat and Republican administrations that serve those donors.

Consider health care. Millions are winding up uninsured as they lose their jobs during this pandemic. Why? Even though we elected a president, Obama, in large part because he promised to fix health care, and even though the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, we’re still stuck with the big business of group insurance and the world’s most lucrative, for the health providers, medical system in the world.

Obama recognized the value in either a Libertarian or Progressive approach. He didn’t care if we went to individual free market insurance (Libertarian where everyone buys their own in a free market, like we do with say car insurance) or nationalized health (Progressive like maybe Medicare for all). Either would be better. But of course, Congress didn’t do either and instead got the health insurance lobbyists to write up legislation that sort of promised the insurance companies wouldn’t be as cruel as they used to be, but they’d still be in charge, and still make plenty of money with which to fund elections.

Note that a laid off individual today would still have their insurance if they had bought their own individual insurance (Libertarian) or were covered by government insurance (Progressive).

I would love to see a Congress filled with Libertarians and Progressives, debating the best way to run our government, reaching compromises based on competing views of what is best for the people. Without their main priority being who will fund their next election.

Ranked choice voting can take us there. Make it OK to have Libertarian and Progressive candidates. To hear their voices in the debates (neither Gary Johnson, Libertarian, or Bernie Sanders, Progressive, were heard in the last presidential debates). To be able to freely vote for either without feeling as if the vote was “wasted.”

Represent Us is one organization fighting for ranked choice voting.

Breast Cancer, AI, the Military and More

My ideating friend, Abel Viageiro of Mozambique, was pondering the ways technology could be used to better handle pandemics. Which reminded me of some work my small company, Amzi!, was involved in back in the late 1990s.

War Fighter

The work was for a part of the Army involved in medical technology, and was called the “war fighter” project. The idea was that you put intelligent devices on soldiers that could monitor various health aspects, and then communicate to a local net so that the commanding officer could see the data, which could then be aggregated at different steps and sent up the chain of command. (This was how Abel was thinking, using the Internet of Things and other network ideas.)

The data would be used for various things, one being triage, knowing which soldiers were not going to live, and which had a good chance of survival. The other being that the commanding officer would know the health status of his immediate command, who was still in fighting shape, who wasn’t. Other general health data, such as fatigue, would also be aggregated so higher up the command they would know which units would be most effective to deploy in combat.

Where did we fit in? We were a vender of tools for adding AI rules in network environments. These would aid in the decision making up and down the chain of command.

That project ended, at least for us, prematurely when our sponsor, Fred, in the military died. I don’t know anything about whether the project went to completion or not, or if anything like it is being used today.

Military Spending in the Clinton Years

Fred was also the sponsor of an earlier project that we did complete. It was an online, breast cancer decision support system that helped thousands of women understand and navigate through the course of treatment for that disease. It won us an award from the Smithsonian and the Washington Post said it was the only Internet application worth anything at the time. This was in the 1990s.

Why was this work done for the military? There was a lesson in politics in the project. It was part of how Bill Clinton fulfilled two contradictory campaign promises: 1- reduce military spending and 2- not reduce spending on our military. He did this in part by defunding a center for cancer research and giving those contracts to the Army. So Fred, in the military, was getting funding for non-military work on cancer.

The project was also a lesson on internal politics. These were Fred’s pet projects, which he nurtured and saw through. When he died, ironically of cancer, a brain tumor, nobody else stepped up to take over “his” projects. So the funding stopped. He was a bit of a cowboy, an outside-the-box thinker (for the 1990s) and no-one else in his area quite had his vision.

Marketing AI in the 1990s

We got involved with Fred as the result of our work trying to capitalize on integrating two relatively new (1990s) technologies, AI and the Web. We had developed a product we called WebLS (Web Logic Server) that was an easy to use tool that allowed developers to encode decision making rules into a Web site. (for online diagnostics, sales recommendations, advice giving, etc.)

We were going to make our fortune selling these at $99 each. We had ads in all the right places. And we waited. We didn’t get a single sale, not even a single inquiry. It seemed nobody cared.

Except Fred. He was the only one who saw our well-placed ads and saw the tool’s potential, as eventually realized in the breast cancer system.

It always seemed strange to me, WebLS didn’t generate a single $99 sale but led to a number of years of government contract work that, while not making us rich, definitely contributed to the retirement I’m currently enjoying.

And Now for Something Completely Different

To be clear about the breast cancer system, we were not experts in breast cancer treatment. We developed the software framework for the system, which was then used, with our help, by medical experts to encode the actual knowledge the system provided. In other words, we understood AI and the Web and worked with others who understood breast cancer treatment.

As part of that work we were in interviews with the various specialists that might be involved, such as surgeons, ontologists, radiologists, psychologists and others.

It was all very technical and somewhat dry, but the interview with the psychologist at Walter Reed made a big impression on me, given my fascination with mind/body health issues (see Reflection).

He said (this is just that one psychologist’s opinion at the time) that the women who had breast cancer fit a similar psychological profile. They had emotionally given totally of themselves for the lives of people close to them, their husbands, children, parents, etc. Those who reacted to the disease by making changes in their lives, paying more attention to maybe their own needs, had a much greater chance of survival than those who didn’t.

I did, by chance, get a second opinion on this a number of years later. I had just casually met a doctor who was involved in cancer research at Duke University. I had asked about what he did, and in a relatively dry and boring way he was relating to me some of the medical research he was doing.

It occurred to me to see what his reaction would be to my story of the psychologist. I didn’t expect his reaction. He suddenly lit up, became very animated and said, yes, yes, that’s it exactly, said how important it is to change the way one’s living in order to survive, and went on to tell me of his wife’s work that was very much involved with that side of it.

These ideas are scary, nobody wants to hear them. Dry medical information is much more comforting. The psychologist never explained his emotional profile idea to a patient directly, but instead tried to gently steer them towards new paths or attitudes in life.

And so, interesting anecdotes about the mind/body connection, in particular about breast cancer. But today the march of science has made it not as relevant for breast cancer. Today, most people survive breast cancer, so not such a big deal. I know a number of these women. One, a nurse, after being diagnosed said just cut these puppies off and let me get back to work. She’s doing fine.

Qualifying for the Boston Marathon

I like to brag that I once qualified for the Boston Marathon. Anyone who knows anything about that race is impressed. One needs documented fast times in one or more previous races to simply get to the starting line. That’s how it is now, and has been for quite some time.

But back in 1968, to qualify all you had to do was send in $5. I did that.

Now I had been running some, and thought I would do OK, but I spent the Saturday/Sunday before the always-on-Monday race climbing. So when my alarm went off at 8:00 AM Monday morning I was faced with two choices.

1 – get up, drive out to Hopkinton and then run 26 miles back into the city, or

2 – go back to sleep, wake up later, make a big pancake breakfast, and go out and enjoy watching the race.

I made the logical choice.

My Professional Dance Career

Back in the 1970s in Cambridge Mass. a recent Harvard MBA graduate had an idea for a business. Serious dance lessons for non-serious dancers. Instructors that taught jazz and ballet dancing in studios with wood floors and mirrors and bars. But for ordinary people.

He called it “The Joy of Movement Center” with a number of studio locations through out the city. It was a huge success, all sorts of people signed up to learn the sort of dance serious dancers did, including my wife and I.

We thought we were a pretty good dancers, what knowing how to do the Mashed Potatoes and all, and were fairly athletic 20 year olds at the time, so we signed up for Intermediate Jazz because, clearly, we were past beginner.

Huge mistake! There were 5 6 7 8s coming at us faster than we could process, and isolations and moves and complex choreography. We quickly developed a lot of respect for serious dancers.

Our instructor had a professional dance troupe, “Becky Arnold’s Dancing Machine,” and she’d just lost one of her male dancers. Male dancers were hard to find and she needed a replacement for one number in her show and I showed some promise.

So she asked me to be in her show.

Well what a trip, of course I said yes. And she worked with me on the moves and the choreography but I had such a hard time remembering the sequences, and even when I did, well I got the moves but probably not with the pizzazz I should have.

Then came the night for our performance, at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston. It was lightly attended, but still, there was an audience. I made it through all the moves, so no great embarrassment, but that’s probably all I can say.

Becky came up to me after the show and gave me $5, my share of the gate. And told me I wouldn’t be needed any more.

But still, that makes me a professional dancer, right?

Epilog — We remained friends with Becky and her husband, and took a number of other courses with other instructors and enjoyed them all. But then, sigh, people, there were arguments between the young business guy who started it and the instructors and battles over money and the whole thing fell apart.