Not only does Tom Nolan run a tight ship of an R&B band playing nearly 60 gigs a year, but he also happens to be a dedicated educator.  Tom has worked as a Dean of Students at the prestigious Crossroads School in Los Angeles, for nearly 30 years.  Add to his CV the fact that he has a killer voice, covering some R&B standards with muscle and grit, and crooning his own memorable tunes, like Redheads and Red Wine.  

I did a three-part interview with Tom as we wandered through the charming canals of Venice, CA.  In the first he discusses his origins and motives...

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In the short week I spent in Amsterdam last autumn, I approached four Amsterdammers and asked them one simple question...  What's it like being over 50 in Amsterdam? I was charmed by their responses.

Lovely, open people all.  I wonder, would I get the same reception in L.A.?  Well, maybe if I spoke Dutch...  

Which I'd be happy to learn, just so I could live in that wonderful city on the sea.  Wish I had a clone!  Or another 100 years!

Yes, Larry really knows how to play, but more importantly, Larry really knows how to emote, and how to help you energize your ability to do so as well. This is at the core of his workshop, ‘Masters of Self-Expression.’  Does the name sound a bit outlandish, abstract? Yet Larry, together with the program’s founder, Dan Fauci, and their talented faculty, brings it down to earth. The workshop’s goal is to help us discover the path to a deeper, more meaningful expression of our true selves. Their methods range from highly entertaining to terrifying and are almost always exhilarating.

The oldest scar on my body is a thin white line on the under right side of my lower lip that marks where I jumped into the pool at the age of five and hit my face on the deck as I completed a perfect 180. I don’t recall if there was blood in the water, but I remember a beautiful woman in the changing room lamenting that I would be scarred for life. She was right.

There are the two perfect ridges, barely legible now, that traverse my lower abdomen marking my only planned surgery: a double hernia at the age of six. I remember the night before in the hospital, standing on my bed unable to sleep, spying...

Somewhere in my forties, raising a kid at home and trying to keep an art career afloat, I came to the sobering realization that life is 90 percent maintenance. Now this is a percentage that varies of course, depending on the size and density of the flack field one is traversing, but I would peg that amount at rarely under 85 percent.

In my parenting era I found myself hamstrung between my career goals and the obvious stay-at-home mom stuff like shopping and cooking, tackling school issues and supervising homework, setting up play dates and music lessons and, of course, chauffeuring.  On top of that, I was...

I recently read a book called The Big Shift, by Marc Freedman, which I highly recommend for anyone looking to alter their idea of what it means to grow older in the 21st century, and learned that Freedman had founded a group called Encore, a non-profit organization “dedicated to supporting people whose “second acts” contribute to society’s greater good." Then in 2005, Encore created the Purpose Prize, which The New York Times called “The MacArthur genius award for people who develop a second career as social service entrepreneurs.” "The nation’s only large-scale investment in people over 60 who are combining their passion and...

My Friend Len died not long ago. And then he wasn’t dead anymore. “Being dead isn’t so bad,” he told me sitting 20 feet from where he croaked in a Sausalito café along the waterfront. I want to say he deadpanned. But that would spoil the ending. 

Len’s in his late 60s. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford. He taught journalism at San Francisco State University for many years. He was no average professor type. He was universally regarded as the toughest teacher in the department and suffered no fools, gladly or with no gladness. In his fit 50s, when he could have just paid a lot of attention to the hoards of comely...

Phil Winick, 87, founder of the Fluky's hot dog restaurants, died Wednesday in Louis B. Weiss Memorial Hospital.  Mr. Winick served up hot dogs in Chicago for more than three decades.  After retiring in the late 1960s, he was inducted into the Vienna Sausage Co.'s hall of fame... Chicago Sun Times obituary

Ambrose Bierce once defined a lawsuit as, "a machine that you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage."  In a sense the same can be said of obituaries.     

When my father--a lawyer, not a sausage maker--died suddenly some thirty-five years ago, the firm...

How many times can you lose your mother? This phrase repeats itself in my head.  It is not a metaphorical question. My mother has had Alzheimer's for almost 15 years.  

My own journey alongside her illness has led me through strange territory.  Mostly unguided, mostly alone.  The one phrase I encountered in my occasional inquiry into the nature of the disease still resonates - that for those closest to the individual, there is a phenomenon which is akin to a succession of little deaths and, for each one, an attendant period of mourning.