Itzhak.

I've been around the advertising business literally my entire life, which includes the few years I spent with my father, Stan Tannenbaum and my Uncle Sid Tanenbaum. They rose from fatherless Jewish ghetto boys growing up in Depression-era Philadelphia, to the top of the amerikan ad industry. 

My father started as a copywriter at Kenyon & Eckhardt in 1954, rising to Chairman of the Board by the time they guillotined him in 1978. Sid was also a copywriter. He founded what became Philadelphia's largest ad agency, Weightmann, Inc.

I never achieved the heights of either Sid or Stan, but along the way, I was "great adjacent." I worked with a handful of agency Hall-of-Famers: Rosenfeld, Sirowitz, Gargano, Tesch, Hayden and Chris Wall (though I don't think he was actually ever enshrined.) I also worked with and am still friendly with Marshall Karp, who was my first ECD and is now a best-selling novelist. 

On the directorial side, I shot a lot with Tony Kaye, with Errol Morris and with Joe Pytka. I spent a lot of time on set with Sir Ridley. 

When I was with these luminaries, I did a lot of observing and not so much talking. The main thing you notice, if you're really in their working with such people is their joy.

Sure, they might groan and moan. They might massage their temples and grunt that they're getting to old. They might delay their arrivals in the morning and speed their departures at night. When they've accumulated the mammon they were working so hard to get, they might take the occasional long weekend at the beach, or throwing a stick for the dog.

But the one thing all these people all had in common was an electric love for what it is they did. They had joy. And were surprised and exhilarated by the inevitable missteps that they somehow turn into little fillips of magic. Like a great ballplayer, they find a way to go deep against gravity and still shift their weight and make the throw to get the runner. Most important, they're not blasé about what it is they can do. They're thrill and surprised by it. Even if it's just the nutty juxtaposition of two words never put together before, or two piece of film that are incongruous but that somehow, for all their disconnectedness, bring forth a story in an eye-brow raising way.

On Saturday evening, though I had a cold for all the ages, my wife had piled about seven old comforters into the front seats of my 1966 Simca 1500. Since we got the car some two decades ago, and despite the many ministrations of Lothar, my Toms' River-based mechanic, who is considered by many to be the best Simca-man in the world, the heater has worked not a lick. So, as a blizzard was threatening and the mercury in the thermometer was slinking into hiding, we piled into the old machine to add another hundred to the four-hundred thousand on the odometer. We headed up to the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, CT.

Hartford is like the ad industry. It was once a glorious place full of wealth, opportunity and optimism. Today, the city is a small island of marble-clad state buildings (it's Connecticut's capital) surrounded by surplus military vehicles re-purposed by the local police to keep out the encroaching mayhem of the every-growing black and brown ghetto.

But, as the seat of much of the amerikan insurance industry, there's an effort now and again by that industry to keep the city alive for the same purposes that cities have always lived. For art, culture, community. You'll see corporate logos strewn amid the decay. That makes CEOs feel better about not paying their taxes.

The Bushnell itself is a 3,000 seat theater of the old style, with an art deco ceiling, artwork glorifying the seven muses, and giant bronze sconces you'd expect to see in Paris, or outside of a Victoria's Secret in Palm Beach. Hartford also has "the Athenaeum," complete with diphthong and works by Caravaggio, Orazio Gentileschi, Bernardo Strozzi, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and René Magritte as well as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 

At the Bushnell we spent the evening with Tel Aviv-born violinist Itzhak Perlman. He told the story of his life. His birth just as WWII ended in Mandatory Palestine. His first forays into music. His parents' poverty. Being stricken with polio (look for Polio 2, coming soon to cities near you.) And the development of his musical genius and his joy in playing, learning, entertaining and teaching.

Perlman showed this clip of a one-minute appearance of his on the kids' television show Sesame Street. It's probably close to half-a-century-old. Evil forces in amerika are shutting down Sesame Street--and most of what was good in the world. It's essentially the banning of all laughter because you don't get the joke.

There's more "christian" love in the Sesame Street clip, and more management wisdom and more "how to do great work" than you'd get from a thousand panel discussions and Seth Godin books and pontificators. 

There's more joy, and laughter, and trying, and triumphing than you might find in Shakespeare, Verdi or Moby Dick. It's about a minute long. 

It's one of those things life can teach you if you're not talking all the time and if you're open to being taught.

Joy. Oh, boy.