SST Blog

9/19/18   Today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. The idea is to fast and spend the day confessing all your sins of the previous year, and ask God for forgiveness. Catholics can do this at Confession whenever they want, but Jews must suffer with their guilt for an entire year before being absolved. For Catholics, the priest speaks for God and bingo! You’ve got a clean slate. But for Jews, how do we know God is listening or that he is in the mood to absolve us? Maybe our sins were so terrible that even He can’t...

9/9/18   I read in the paper this morning that a new Playboy Club will be opening in New York on 42nd Street. It’s been about 30 years since the last one closed. The waitresses are now being fitted for their retro bunny suits and ears. Weird, right? Immediately my creative wheels started turning—is America’s sexual awakening the stuff of a Broadway musical?   It must have been around 1970 when either my father took me to the Playboy Club on 59th Street for dinner one night. I was in college and was oblivious to the women’s movement except for...

8/28/18   After watching last night’s episode of Better Call Saul on TV, I was feeling how great it is to be alive. This show delights me in so many ways. I love the characters. It’s no easy feat to make murderers loveable, but here we are. I feel everyone’s humanity. The group therapy scene where Mike calls out one of the others for mourning an imaginary wife blew me away. Could there be a sharper metaphor for how we all lie to create our public image, and how when someone has the courage to say that the king isn’t...

8/22/18   Last night I had a dream that I was at a school board meeting and made an impromptu speech advocating introducing the great works of art to children rather than watered down versions or inferior books, plays, movies, and music from the pop world or that are specifically designed for children. Let’s just say that the response was extremely negative.    When I woke, I tried to remember how young I was when I was exposed to the real thing. Yes, like other kids I had Golden Books and Golden Records, but I also had my mom playing...

  8/20/18   I suppose it might seem ironic that a composer/arranger/author would be espousing the Zen bliss of living in the moment, but maybe not. Lately I’ve been thinking about the impermanence of everything we know and existence itself. This started when I took my granddaughters to the Hayden Planetarium a few weeks ago. It’s hard to contemplate the immensity of time and space of the universe without seeing ourselves as nearly completely meaningless on that enormous canvas.   I’ve been thinking about re-writing my will, and of what becomes of my music and other belongings after I’m gone....