Last week in Walgreen’s I ran into an old pal, Mike Shene. Then again, he’s a hard guy to miss, since he stands about 6-foot-5-inches in his stocking feet. Mike and I go way back. He lived in Bloomingdale, where he went to grade school. Then for seventh grade he came to Petrova, which is ...

One of my favorite jazz singers is Dinah Washington, and my favorite song of hers is “What a Difference a Day Makes.” It’s a romantic ballad (maybe even a shlocky one) about how the day before Love Found is completely different from the day after. But the difference ‘tween one day ...

We magicians are a hugely varied lot. We come in all shapes, sizes, ages, ethnicities, proclivities and anything else you can think of. In fact, we seem to have only two things in common. One, of course, is we’re all skilled and shameless liars. The other is we do not, to a man or woman, ...

One of the only college subjects I had an aptitude for was philosophy. Then again, I had a wonderful teacher, Reverend George Easter. Aside from being brilliant, he loved the subject, loved teaching and communicated both to his students. That said, my two semesters with him were hardly ...

If anytime during a specific 53 years at Paul Smith’s College you’d mentioned the name Eileen to anyone there, they would have immediately known who you meant. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone — teacher, student, administrator or staff — the whole shmeer. Eileen was Eileen ...

Five years ago my life underwent a drastic change that divided it into two distinct periods — BC and AD. BC stands for Before Cooking. AD stands for Aristocratic Dining. The BC label is objective — I really didn’t cook five-plus years ago. On the other hand, the AD label is, to put ...