Yearly Archives: 2024

………………….I was still in high school when this picture was taken so it must have been 1965 0r 1966……..My brother Mauro, the oldest of three boys, is 7 years older than me. He’s 6’3″ to my 5’10″…. He had recently come back from his tour in the service when the photo was taken. He was stationed in Berlin, Germany during the cold war, and the Berlin Wall, while the Vietnam War was building up at the other end of the planet….My Mom in the middle was our rock…..I know for certain I would not have become the person I am today without her….She supported, and ENCOURAGED everything I ever did!…I thought the world of my brother when I was very young, but as we got older we had very little in common, and the age gap seemed to widen us. We weren’t very close…..It was when I got older, and started to work, and he married and had a family that our lives started to converge again. I loved his wife Kathy and I adored his blond, blue eyed children!………Today we are very close….We are all the family we have left. I depend on him for all the questions I have no answers to, and he always comes through for me. I speak to him almost every day…..even ask him when the next Yankee game is on….He put the “YES” app on my phone so I could find out for myself, but I still would rather call him and ask him…..Thank God for facetime!…..He’s very smart in ways that I never was. He was always great with math, and I had to go to summer school! He’s a tech and loves gadgets, and can fix almost everything!!!. To me it’s all a great mystery…but….he has always said to me….”you can push a pencil around a piece of paper like no other”………We are really two different sides of a coin, but we are brothers, and we love each other, and in the end that’s all that matters.

…………………….This is my brother John and me in front of our house on Long Island………..I would guess, since there are never any dates on the pictures, that I was about 5 or 6 years old which would make John about 10 or 11. He was the middle child with my brother Mauro being the oldest. There is an age gap, because my parents had another child between John and me. The baby was a girl who was full term, but was still born. They named her Grace………My parents waited a while before deciding to have another child. Then I was born on July 23, 1948…..I would be the last…..the baby……Growing up John and I shared a bedroom until he went to college….He was a great dresser and had terrific taste. When he would leave early in the morning for  baseball or basketball practice before school started, I would “borrow” his sweaters without his permission, and wear them to school…..He was a senior in High School and I was a freshman, and we were on opposite sides of the school so I was never worried he would see me….When I got home, well before him, I would neatly fold them the way he had them, and put them away…..He never knew……,He had a girlfriend when he was 13 years old and she was 14, so I rarely saw him. He was always at her house or was practicing one of the many sports he was involved in…..a true jock….He would come home for dinner, and then back to her house around the corner….then back home to sleep…….He was with her all through school, and after college they married. They had four children……They had a long happy life together…..He was a very happy go lucky guy with a wonderful smile, and the best head of thick hair when he was young!…He became a very respected physical education teacher and coach for many of the boy and girls teams in Garden City High School on Long Island……He was the type of person to let little bother him…..My brother John suddenly developed cancer, and died within two weeks after having a heart attack in the hospital….He passed away on February, 22, 2019…..He was 76 years old…….It was all so quick and  shocking to all of us….When I found out what happened he was already in the hospital and in a coma…..His son told he wasn’t going to make it…I was alone in the room with him when I said goodbye to him…..I don’t really know if he heard me……Some people do believe they can hear you…..I hope so……I told him I loved him very much………….It’s strange, because I never think of him as gone from this world…………….only gone away.

……………I usually don’t comment on, or review designers collections, but after watching the PRADA show on YouTube I couldn’t resist………YEARS AGO I used to love the Prada collection…and even wore Prada’s men’s clothes…but that was many years ago. Over the recent years there have been a few garments I have liked……but….in general the collections have been disappointing. to me….I was hoping the new Winter 2024 collection was going to surprise me in a good way….but in MHO it was a huge fail. I’m sure there will be those who do not agree with me, and will shout hosanna and cry about the beauty of the clothes that walked down the runway, and worship at the alter of Prada…..For me it was just UGLY….from the top of their heads to the ugly shoes they were wearing, and the bags they were carrying were all a BIG NO…..There was so much that was wrong it’s hard to call anything out that I thought was terrific. The skirts were ridiculous and the dresses were just shapeless sacks with bows or flocked flowers, or silly cheap looking streamers down the front. The jackets some will think were good, but for me they were just oversized straight boxes, and that’s the best I can say for them…Oversized jackets seem to show up on many runways, but other designers did them much better……..If I was forced to pick out something it would have to be the shirt sweaters that were layered under a few jackets, some very simple shrunken sweaters that were very generic, and could have come from China, and one black fit and flare coat that did stand out…….The rest was a forced disaster…….I do not think the collaboration of Prada and Raf Simons is a success, but then I never really liked anything….or few things Simons designed. He never seem to be at one house for very long before he was let go….perhaps there was a good reason for that?…..I guess Prada is just into strange ugly clothes…….However, you should watch the show on YouTube and decide for yourselves.

……………….Looking back…………..It was 1961,  I was 13 years old, and in 7th grade when I went to see my very first Broadway show with my BFF, Robert Guy Tirman…..”Bobby”….The show was…..”How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying”…..It was also the first time I went into NYC by myself….just Bobby and me…..Bobby’s mother had to call my mother to assure her Bobby knew how to get us into and back from the city without any problems. My Mom reluctantly said yes……so off we went….two starry eyed kids ready for the big city. I think I had only been in NYC maybe once or twice before to see the tree and skate with cousins at Rockefeller Center, always with an adult…….I remember first we went for lunch at a very popular touristy restaurant named Toffenetti. It was huge and right in Time’s Square. It had an escalator to the bottom level where we ate spaghetti….The restaurant is long gone….I felt so grown up in my shirt and tie, and best suit,. Then off we went to see the matinee show….I remember we sat in the lower box at the right of the stage. I had never been inside of a Broadway Theater, and I was mesmerized by everything!!! Then the lights went off, and the orchestra started the overture, and the curtain went up……and there he was……the STAR of the show……ROBERT MORSE!!!!!!!! I instantly was captivated by him…..he was just incredible…….I loved everything about the show….the stylized 60s sets and the colorful costumes. The cast headed by Mr. Morse, also had Michele Lee, Charles Nelson Reilly, Rudy Valley and Virginia Martin among so many other incredible singers and dancers……Bobby was a “Broadway veteran” as he had already seen quite a few shows with his family…but this was my first, and the first of anything will always be special…..It remains to this day one of my favorite of all time shows. After the show ended we rushed to the stage door, and waited and waited for Robert Morse to come out! Finally he did and we had this photo taken. I don’t remember how this picture happened, because I don’t recall either of us having a camera with us…..Sorry for the blurry faded image which over 62 years has only gotten worse…..It was a day I will always remember….Robert Morse was so nice to us, and I thought he was IT…the greatest!…I was to become a life long fan!…Robert Morse won the Tony award for his performance as well as the show for best Musical. It actually won a slew of awards!….He went on to revise his role as Pierpont Finch in the movie version which you can stream!…..The last thing I saw Robert Morse in on Broadway, years later in 1983, was “TRU”. It was a one man show and he played Truman Capote. The play took place in his apartment after he had written the tell all book “Answered Prayers”. Chapters of the unfinished book were published with his permission. It was a tell all book of the secrets told to him by his socialite girl friends, who he lovingly called “his Swans”…… This betrayal destroyed all of these friendships, and it destroyed him. Morse as Truman was brilliant, and earned him another Tony award……..Later in years he joined the cast of “Mad Men” for which he won an Emmy award…..It’s hard for me to fathom that the energetic powerhouse was 90 YEARS old when he passed away in 2022!!!!……….For me he will lovingly always be remembered as the adorable imp in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”……..What was your first Broadway show?

…………………..This photo was taken at one of the many black tie events that Jac and I, and Donna Karan and her husband Stephen Weiss attended….That’s me at the bottom left…………..EVERYONE loved Stephen! He was a man’s man, and an all around wonderful person. When Steve was around you felt nothing bad could possibility happen…….He had the best infectious smile and always made you feel good………..He met Donna on a blind date…..They married in 1983 after they both got divorced from their spouses…….Steven, first and foremost was a painter and a sculpture. However, he became more and more involved with Donna’s business, and became the co CEO of the Donna Karan Company…….They had a joined family…..Donna having one daughter with her first husband, and Steve having a son and daughter with his first wife………Steve was an artist at heart, and that was his first love…….He did amazing acrylic sculptures. He created these organic shapes in all sizes. Some could fit in your hand, and some were huge. He first made a clay prototype, and then would cut it in slabs from which he could calculate different sizes. Then he would create acrylic slabs in the shape of these clay pieces to the size he wanted. They were glued together with a special process. Then he would sand them until they were SMOOTH and CLEAR like glass…Some he did in color, but most were clear…..During this final process of sanding tiny particles of acrylic dust would fill the air. Steve always wore a mask, and when he moved to a bigger and better studio he had a much better air filtration system………but…….it was too late……..After years of breathing in the dust that was still in the air Steve got lung cancer. It was determined the cause of the cancer was the acrylic dust he inhaled all of those years……….He died on June 9th at the young age of 62…..Who would have guessed that the thing he loved best…..his life’s work….his art…..would in the end kill him………A talented, wonderful man left us all too soon…….He will always be remembered with love.