My father gets a gift from Mae Clarke.

One day when I was about 14 my father decided he needed to tell me a story about Mae Clarke’s pubic hair. According to my father, I was 14 and coming of age, and stories like this were important for me. They were part of becoming a man. So my father piled me into his 1949 Studebaker—a car he kept not because he liked it but because my mother didn’t and we went for a ride.

My father kept his Studebaker until 1977.

Mae Clarke, 1910-1992.

My father’s drives were a lot like my father’s moods—they were impulsive, almost autistic in their focus. He decided he wanted something, or wanted to do something and that was his complete focus until he got that thing.

Once it was salt-water taffy from the boardwalk in Atlantic City. It would start simply enough. “When I was a kid,” my father might say, “me, Herbie and Peacock used to hitchhike to Atlantic City and try to meet girls.” (This was the Atlantic City of the early 1940s—a lower middle class beach resort about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia where my father lived.) Twenty minutes later my father might say, “Damn, I loved the salt-water taffy they used to sell in those little shops along the boardwalk.” At dinner that night, after finishing his meal, he might belch, “You know what would cap off a meal like this one? Salt-water taffy.”

Then, the next morning he was still at it. “You know,” he might say “the salt-water taffy they sell around here is terrible. No flavor.” An hour later, he might turn to me and say, “I bet you never even had real Atlantic City salt-water taffy. Never had real salt-water taffy.” An hour after that he might utter, “Store-bought salt-water taffy is just like plastic. Not the real thing.” A little while after that it was, “It’s a tragedy, not having real salt-water taffy." Before long we’d wind up in his Studebaker, heading down to Atlantic City at 80 mph for salt-water taffy.

With him it was never a yen or a hankering. It was an obsession. Which of course brings me to my father and Mae Clarke’s pubic hair.

Clarke was a 1930s vamp, a putative film actress, the poor man’s “it” girl. Her most famous role was in “Public Enemy,” when she’s shacked up with Jimmy Cagney and Cagney violently pushes a half-grapefruit in her face. But even in that role, Clarke was uncredited. I guess you could say that even though the grapefruit scene made her somewhat iconic, Clarke never really crashed the big time.

From "Public Enemy," (1931). One of the 10 most famous scenes in film history.

By the time Clarke reached her 30s, she still got work, but bit parts and no film credits. Toward the end of her career she had a small part in the TV show “F Troop.” I guess that qualifies as bottoming out.

Like my father, Clarke was born in Philadelphia. Her real name was Violet Mary Klotz and It's safe to assert that she never really transcended her Klotzness. Despite looking pretty good in a tight sateen flapper-style gown and having had some critical success, she was really never anything but two-bit. She never became the star she wanted to be.

By the time my father started cavorting with women—say when he was around 18, Clarke was already crowding 40 and the bloom was off her rose. She had already been married and divorced three times and was spending less time in Hollywood as Mae Clarke and more time back in Philadelphia as the former Violet Mary Klotz.

My father starting dating Clarke around then. It wasn’t really dating to hear him tell it, because all they really did was schtup. That was the word my father used, schtup. “We’d schtup for hours,” he’d tell me, “have breakfast in bed the next morning, then schtup some more. Then I’d run off to school or to work and maybe not see her again for a month or so.”

There aren’t many 18 year olds who can be discreet when they’re schtupping anyone—much less a woman who used to be something of a film siren. My father couldn’t help but brag to all his friends that he was Mae Clarke’s gigolo. “Mae who?” they would ask, and my father would reply, “The blonde with Jimmy Cagney and the grapefruit in Public Enemy.” He’d then, to hear him tell it, break into his purported dead-on Cagney, “You know, I wish you was a wishing well. So I could tie a bucket to youse and sink ya.” And then he’d pantomime the smash.

At this point in my father’s story his Studebaker had just about reached the corner of Broad and Walnut in Center City Philadelphia. The Bellevue-Stratford stood there, still a few years before it became notorious for something called “legionnaire’s disease." The disease killed 29 American Legionnaires and sickened 182 others in 1976.

The Bellvue-Stratford. 1976.

“The last time Violet and I were together was right here. This was a grand place, a palace,” my father told me. “She said to me, I want you should always remember me and she gave me a sealed small blue envelope. It was too small for money—which I wouldn’t have taken anyway. I stuffed it in the inside pocket of my jacket and ran off to school without even opening it. I was late for class, and was more worried about getting there on time than the envelope. I always figured I’d see her again.”

My father pulled his Studebaker to a stop in front of the old hotel. Next to all the newer cars it looked old, beaten. “You know back in the 30s, the sex goddess of her day, Jean Harlow died suddenly when she was still in her twenties. Kidney failure or something. She was the original platinum blonde. More than anything else, Violet wanted to be Jean Harlow—Jean was the star in “Public Enemy.” The one Jimmy Cagney dumped her for.

Jean Harlow, 1911-1937.

“Now there were always rumors about Jean, gossip I guess. How she put ice cubes on her nipples before she’d shoot a scene. Or how she never wore panties. Or how she dyed her pubic hair platinum. Some pretty nasty ones about the number of lovers she had. And after she died, how she had given one of her lover's, some gangster, a lock of her pubic hair. That’s what Violet had given me. A lock of her pubic hair tied up with a violet grosgrain ribbon.”

We drove in silence pretty much the rest of the way home. My father was talked out. Me afraid to say anything.

When we reached our block it was already late. My father shut off the engine of the Studebaker to “let her coast home.” “Your mother,” he told me “found Mae’s gift in my wallet about fifteen years ago. She never said anything to me. Never asked about it. She just threw it out.”

He got out of the car, slammed shut the door and went up the walk. I sat there for a good twenty minutes in the dark.

Uncle Slappy invents the future.

As happens so often with me, last night I was visited once again by Dame Insomnia. This time she woke me not with a soft whisper and a gentle touch on my shoulder. This time she wasn't even a she. Instead, I was awakened by Uncle Slappy with a poke and an insistent "Boychick."

I am closer to Uncle Slappy than I am to anyone except my long-suffering wife. Thinking that perhaps there was a problem, god forbid, I hopped out of bed like a fire-fighter and walked with my arm around the old man's shoulder into our eat-in kitchen.

He sat in his chair, which is my chair, when he and Aunt Sylvie aren't around and I quickly brewed a pot of coffee. As I served him a cup, black, and a small plate of three cinnamon rugelach with raisins (never serve him rugelach without raisins) he spun his tale.

"I have it, boychick. Our ticket to easy street."

"Uncle Slappy," I admonished, "it's three in the morning."

"Ach," he spat. "No one told Henry Ford the time, the anti-Semite."

"What is it you have?" I asked, filling his mug.

"The answer to Bit Coin."

I looked around our kitchen and saw a rumpled edition of "Wired" magazine. I knew immediately I was in trouble. Uncle Slappy is likely to have read something about new technology and is even more likely to be completely baffled by it all.

"I'm surprised you even know about Bit Coin," I said. "I'm not even sure I understand what it is. And my guess is that in five years it will be nothing but a dusty memory."

"Nevertheless," the old one continued, "I have conceived something smarter than Bit Coin. It will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams of mammon."

"I'm a big fan of mammon," I said laconically.

"I call it BitStrami. An online currency based on the price of Pastrami. You've got denominations of 'forschpice,'" he said using the Yiddish word for appetizer, "schtickle," the Yiddish word for a nice bite, "and sandwich. Sandwich is pegged to the price at Katz's."

I yawned. Maybe a little too emphatically. "Genius, Uncle Slappy."

With that, he finished his coffee and trundled off into his bedroom, parting with these words: "It's meshugga, to talk about such things this late."

I noticed he grabbed "Wired" on his way out.

Uncle Slappy visits the Bronx.

Uncle Slappy just called, precisely as I asked him to. He and Aunt Sylvie left our apartment early this morning and what with the unseasonable cold and 45-mile-per-hour gusts, I wanted to make sure he and Aunt Sylvie made it home safe and sound.

“Boychick,” he began, “the Riverdale bus was like clockwork. But who wants to ride in a clock.”

“You made it up to the Bronx ok?”

“If anything can be ok after spending the whole day in the Hebrew Home for the Wretched with Sidney Lowenstein, we’re ok.”

“Thank god,” I said.

“There’s soup in the Frigidaire?”

Uncle Slappy has visited me about four or six times a year since he moved to Boca about five years ago. There has never once not been soup in the Frigidaire.

“Mushroom barley,” I answered “and chicken in the pot,” which is a noodle-ly concoction of broth, carrot spears, large pieces of chicken and of course noodles. It is, I believe, the only soup in the world which you have to eat with a knife and fork.

“A choice,” he mocked. “A regular Grossinger’s on 83^rd Street.”

“So how was Mr. Lowenstein? How is he adjusting to assisted living?”

“Ach,” the old man said. “Assassinated living. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enema.”

I’ve known Uncle Slappy for the whole of my 56 years. I can spot one of his monologues coming from a mile away. They’re a bit like a sandstorm in the desert. You can’t avoid them. All you can do is take cover.

“He’s recovering quite well, Lowenstein. Only last week when we came up here, we were quite worried about him.”

I didn’t feed Uncle Slappy a line. Instead I allowed my silence to be used as his timing. I have played his straight-man since my earliest days.

“We were worried about him. He had a triple overpass.”

This time I gave in.

“You mean ‘triple bypass,’” I pressed.

“No.” He paused. “Triple overpass. He got lost on the Henry Hudson Parkway.”

In the background I heard the old man slurp some soup. And with his usual impeccable timing, hang up the phone.

A ditty.

Mark Harris is a great writer that no one has ever heard of. He's most famous for having written "Bang the Drum Slowly." But to my mind that was just one of his peaks in a mountain range of work.

Harris' "Wake Up, Stupid," is to this day one of the funniest books I've ever read. Up there with the best of Joseph Heller, George MacDonald Fraser, Bruce Jay Friedman, or even early Philip Roth.

I've taken a ditty from "Wake up, Stupid" and rewritten it for me.

George Tannenbaum's obituary, George Tannenbaum denied.
"I amn't dead,"
George Tannenbaum said,
"And I won't be dead 'till the day I've died."

Dreams.

One thing I've always been able to do is work while I'm asleep. That's not to say I find empty conference rooms or doze at my desk. Work often feels like a leg of the Bataan Death March, but I've yet to actually slumber during a meeting.

No, what I mean is this.

When I'm in a throes of a project, it's a full-body experience for me. Even when my timesheet accounting ends, my mind continues tinkering. That continues when I roll into bed. It's not unusual for me to wake up with a manifesto written and eight or a dozen print headlines.

I've been doing for this for years and I've learned not to leave a pad by my bed. If the work is good, I'll remember it. If I've dreamed something like "A 3D printer is marshmallow cupcake," it usually falls out of my mind before I wake up.

Last night I dreamed of all sorts of things. No headlines, but a skein of future assignments where my work carries the day. To great acclaim.

I suppose this is a bit like a ballplayer working on his swing or a pitcher throwing endlessly, just honing his mechanics.

I also dream continuations of books I'm reading, blog posts, and chasing leggy blondes into the sea.

I suppose someday all of this, too, might come in handy.

An open letter.

Hello.

There are certain things I think I do better than almost anyone else in the world.

I can take a steaming pile of shit and turn it in to something good.

I can take something immensely complicated and make it simple.

I can make something profoundly prosaic and make it compelling, memorable and actionable.

Most of all, I can take mounds of confusing material and turn it into interesting copy.

We live in a world where we are inundated with literally thousands of paid messages a day. Yet if I asked you if you remember any, even from an hour ago, you'd likely say "no."

That's unfortunate. Wasteful. Futile.

And from a marketing point of view, nonsensical.

No matter what business you're in, no matter what medium you prefer to work on, I think adroit creative thinking can help your business.

If I didn't believe that, I'd quit the business.

I do believe that words and ideas matter.

I do believe I can make a difference to your business.

If you'd like to chat about it, contact me.

Thank you.

Getting religion in the Tempus Fugit.

Feeling like shit, not physically, physically I feel better than I have since before my summer's pneumonia and car wreck, but anyway, feeling like shit, last night I headed north looking for the warm incandescent glow of the Tempus Fugit. And perhaps a lesson or two in life.

I made my way up to 91st Street through the soft night air. The weather, at least for the time being, had shifted to spring. The snow which had transmogrified into a concrete-like piss-soaked tumoresque mounds of grey, was nearly all gone. The temperature, even at 3 in the morning, was still in the high 50s.

Whiskey jangled along at my side happily. Which is to say, she acted as she always does, as we always should, as if every endeavor is a great adventure in which something fantastical can be discovered or revealed. She treats even a routine trip to the dry cleaner as something magical, jumping up with her forepaws on the counter or weighing herself like a debutante on the step-on scale.

We navigated down the narrow hallways, up two flights of steps, around corners and through steel-fortified doors. Then we descended one more short staircase and we were there. We had arrived at the Tempus Fugit.

Whiskey assumed her position as I assumed mine, and in short order we were fully libated with our appropriate liquids. Clean cold water for Whiskey and a beautiful amber Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!) for me.

I took a long sip of my suds, put my glass down and took another, emptying it except for the inconsequential meniscus that remained. The bartender took it all in and pulled me another from a tap as worn as Babe Ruth's bat.

"A rough week, I surmise," he said. He's a bit like Sherlock Holmes, the bartender. He can tell your mood through subtle signs that other humans fail to notice.

"And it's only Tuesday," I laughed, draining glass number two.

He filled me presently and slid over a small wooden bowl of salted Spanish peanuts. I abjured as I always do and he began his evening's disquisition.

"I tell you this," he began, "not because you are a child of the Book, not because you are of the Mosaic persuasion, but because it startled me."

I said nothing, but nodded him to continue.

"Most of your tribe, like you, are not serious drinkers. The damage you do in a decade, in some rougher precincts is accomplished in an hour or so."

"I'm not much of a drinker," I admitted. "If it weren't for Pike's, I wouldn't drink at all."

Jews couldn't sell grain alcohol, so they resorted to this.

"It does have that honor," he said. "It tiptoes like a maiden and enlightens all it graces."

"Go on," I said. "You are a citizen of the world. Someone I would have thought was beyond startling."

"As I said, your tribe is notorious for not drinking."

"My father did his finest to reverse that standing," I said. "His stomach was a California wild fire, and he fought to extinguish it every evening."

"In 19th century Poland, as you know, Jews could not buy land. And because of some arcane curiosity of Polish law, the exportation of grains was illegal."

"That probably had something to do with the periodic famines they suffered."

He ignored that and continued.

"The rich landowners landed upon a solution. Make booze and sell booze. In short order, the Jews, prohibited from so many professions owned 85% of all the registered taverns in Poland. There was a Polish proverb in fact, 'The peasant drinks at the inn, and the Jew does him in.'"

100 years ago, 3/4 of the world's Jews lived in Poland and Lithuania. As many as 30% were involved in the liquor business.

"A short trip from there, I suppose, to the Warsaw ghetto."

He wiped the mahogany in front of him with his well-worn white terry.

"You're not trying to tell me you're a member of the tribe, are you?"

"I am," he said. "A member of the tribe that matters."

I laughed. "You mean those of us who don't take pictures of our food before eating it?"

Now, he laughed.

"I was thinking more of Dickens. 'Never be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices...and I can always be hopeful of you.'"

"David Copperfield," I asked.

"On me," he answered.

SXSW in the 15th Century.

I'm about 99.44% sure I'll never get invited to South by South West. But if I am employed by the time it rolls around next year, I might go to my boss and propose the following as a talk.

I will call it "The Century of Change."

And it will be about, not the late 20th Century and early 21st Century, but instead about a century that doesn't very often blip across our radar screens, the 15th Century.

The 15th Century?

Here's just some of the shit that, as the kids say, went down.

Movable type was invented. You think the PC is a big deal? You think Big Data deserves lineage? Consider Gutenberg. All at once the stranglehold of ecclesiastical learning was broken. Ordinary people had access to extraordinary learning. Literacy rates soared. Ideas spread. The world was suddenly a different place.

Ships were made ocean-going. New technology meant that the average size of a merchant ship tripled or quadrupled. This is the 21st Century equivalent of jet transport or broad band.

Vasco da Gama visited India and the Spice Islands. If much of the promise of our free-flowing digital world is the unprecedented speed of commerce and trade, consider Portuguese navigational prowess. Now instead of having to caravan spices and silks through Muslim lands, da Gama found a quicker, safer, more controlled way to feed Western Europe's hunger for cloves, pepper and cinnamon.

The Muslims waxed and waned. They won in 1453 in Constantinople and lost in Spain in 1492. However, the powerful tide against the Byzantines was finally reversed, and Islam in the West went in to remission until recent times.

Columbus in America. There is no current discovery on par with Columbus' arrival in the new world. Bit Coin, Pay Pal, Russian credit card thieves had nothing on the trillions and trillions of dollars of gold and silver that Columbus and his spawn brought back to Spain and Portugal. These riches pumped enormous amounts into the European money supply making the things Marshall Plan and America's recent economic stimulus look about as big as returning a deposit bottle.

These are just a few of the things that occurred in the 15th Century, top of my head, really. I hardly touched on that century's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace against the Turks, et al. I didn't touch on Asia, Russia or even the empires in America that were destroyed as they were discovered.

Instead I picked a few things that I think parallel our own era. The opening of new worlds. The ubiquity of new media. The spread of new technology and its influence. The rise of a new currency.

My counsel is as my counsel almost always is.

Stop breathing through your mouth and fulminating about the crazy pace of the world. It's exactly what people were barking about six centuries ago.

Instead get to the fundamentals of good communication. As Dave Trott enunciates, Impact, Communication, Persuasion.

Try to stay calm amid all the changes. Keep them in perspective. Instead of acting as if the earth is spinning off its axis, take a nice deep cleansing breath and say "I've seen this movie before."

It couldn't hurt and it may help.

Purim with Uncle Slappy.

This morning my wife and I woke up about half an hour early to straighten out things in our guest room. Like most guest rooms, I suppose, particularly those in cramped urban apartments, ours fills during the time it is non-guesting with the flotsam and jetsam of every day living.

Mail is the main culprit. And piles of it seem to be lodged into every spare inch in the room. I suppose if we were a little more organized or a little less busy, we would throw out the LL Bean catalogs as they arrive. Instead, we transfer them to our empty space until it is no longer empty. Then, when circumstances are ripe, we run through the mail like the Huns through Moldova, slashing, burning and pillaging as we go.

In any event, we tossed and tossed and tossed, decimating the unread and then we made the bed, adjusted the clock and aired out the room, all in preparation for the arrival of Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie, who are coming up by train from Boca to spend Purim with us.

As far as Jewish holidays go, Purim is not one of the heavy-hitters. It looms large when your kids are little since it's treated like Halloween and they get to dress up. But there is none of the garment-rending, chest beating and deep introspection that are attached to so many other Jewish holidays.

In fact, since Passover follows so closely on Purim's heels, I assumed Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie would delay their sojourn north for a month. But knowing Slappy as I do, he is likely to come up for both occasions.

My wife, ever the uxor, was up late last night concocting and constructing the symbol and favorite treat of the holiday, a "hat-shaped" fruit-filled cookie called a Hamentashen. The kitchen was neat as a pin this morning, unusual on even the best of days, and there were taped up corrugated boxes on the dining room table full of Hamentashen ready to be sent hither and yon to our hither and yon children. There were also, of course, a few stowed in the cookie jar, awaiting the arrival of Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie. They aren't officially "good" until Uncle Slappy proclaims them so, usually so obliquely he says only, "Not like Aunt Bluma's," which is to say, "good."

Aunt Bluma was a bad cook in the old country and a worse cook when she arrived here in America. She died some decades ago and has been remembered ever since as the woman who instigated the Jewish emigration from Europe to the US at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries. It was not the Cossacks or the pogroms or the abject poverty that drove people from the Pale and from the shtetls. It was fear of being downwind from Aunt Bluma's cooking.

Bluma got worse when she arrived in America primarily because she was able to use her rudimentary English as a bludgeon masquerading as an excuse. For instance, she made no distinction, when "following" a recipe between tablespoons, teaspoons, cups or pints. If a recipe called for 3 teaspoons of salt, she might just as well added 3 cups.

Aunt Bluma's specialty was a dish called Cholent, an uneasy dish, halfway between a cassoulet and building material. Cholent was invented to be served on Saturday night, once the Sabbath was over. Women like Aunt Bluma would place it in the oven on Friday afternoon, before Sabbath began. Over the course of 24 or 25 hours, it would slowly bubble into cardiac arrest.

There will be no Cholent at our apartment for Purim. My wife, like me, born old, has assumed the holiday chores for both of our families. In the past, she's made Chicken Kiev, but this year, I suppose in deference to the Ukrainian rebels fighting Putin's Cossacks, we might just order in a pizza.

All this is to say, Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie will be arriving on the Amtrak Palmetto, scheduled into Penn Station at around 4 this afternoon. From there, they'll cab up to my place and let themselves in with their key.

Uncle Slappy, if you're reading this, yes, the sheets are clean. There are towels and wash cloths in the second bathroom. There's also some coffee in the pot you can zap, and like I said above, a few Hamentashen, not like Aunt Bluma's, in the cookie jar.

English Kings on Advertising.

I don’t have a lot of knowledge about English kings. It’s one of those subjects I’d really have to bone up on if I ever make it to Jeopardy! I have a hard time telling the Plantagenets from the Anjous from the Tudors from the Stuarts.

Aethelred the Unready. Woefully unprepared for marauding Danes.

That said, one thing I really appreciate about English monarchies was what today we would call a “naming convention.”

A lot of their kings they didn’t just call by name, they attached a little epithet that really helps matters.

There was, for instance:

• ·      Ethelred the Unready
• ·      Harold Harefoot
• ·      William the Bastard
• ·      Henry the Young King
• ·      Richard the Lion Heart

And many more.

Think of how much easier life would be if we in advertising adopted this way of naming.

We could have:

• ·      Fred the Jargon Spewer
• ·      Margaret the Complication Maker
• ·      Alphonse the Ad Thief
• ·      Rob the Credit Stealer
• ·      Vernon the Cowardly
• ·      Ezra the Bombastic

I could go on for hours.