There Is No Place Like Aum (or, Broadway)

Good Grief!

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The little round headed kid and his dog.
Charles M. Schulz

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"I'm trying to get my life together."

This was the subject heading of a blanket e-mail I received the other day, due to the fact that I signed my name to a mailing list 2 years ago. I really have to be more careful about signing up for things.

And, I hope that you can figure your life out. (Or, have a really good time trying!)

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'” — Charlie Brown, "Peanuts"

"If you feel that you are not enlightened, you can always try to be." — Harish Johari (Friggin' brilliant, HarJo!)

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Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin': Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (Singer: John Raitt), Oklahoma!

I Got the Sun in the Morning: Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin (Singer: Doris Day), Annie Get your Gun

Tomorrow: Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin (Singer: Andrea McArdle), Annie

Put On a Happy Face: Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams (Singer: Dick VanDyke) Bye Bye Birdie
(Buy: Greatest Hits of Broadway)

Ruth Bernhard, Photographer, R.I.P.

Classic Torso, 1952, Gelatin silver print, 1976
Ruth Bernhard (October 14, 1905 - December 18, 2007)

"I allowed life to give me presents. And everything just sort of happened the way it was supposed to happen. I did not pursue anything. It more or less pursued me."

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Ursula 1000: Kinda' Kinky
(Buy: Ursula 1000: Kinda' Kinky)

(You can read about, and see more of, this wonderfully inspired (and inspirational) womans' photography — from a 2004 exhibition — at the John Stevenson Gallery — as well as her obituary from The New York Times.)

Dawaun Kassan Morgan (December 17, 1983 - June, 30, 2005)

Marshall Point Lighthouse, Maine
Date: Summer 1995

Not all anniversaries are celebratory events.

Dawaun was only 9 years old and living in Newark, New Jersey when I first met him. After a drive by shooting injured a friend of his, his brave, single mother, packed some suitcases and moved her family to Maine. For the next 12 years I would come to love of him like a son. As he became a teenager, and then a man, he was a rugged individualist (well, he was when he was a kid, too) who liked to do things his own way and would call when he had to, unless you called him first. I guess that's just like a son, isn't it?

He will be always missed, and never forgotten.

Winston Grennan and the Ska-Rocks Band: Savior (Buy It!)