My first best friend …

I must be pretty desperate for content if I’m willing to share this photo with you. It’s me, at about two years old sporting the worst haircut ever! How could my mother do that to me? I particularly love that curl that seems to have a mind of its own. Reminds me of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

The day the picture was taken, I was being

Back to reality …

Don’t know if you’ve realized it, but for the last little while I have been making a real effort to think (and write) only about the positive: Pleasant memories, good times, gratitude and so on.

It’s worked, too.

The more I’ve concentrated on the upbeat, the less involved I’ve been in the Trump madness, the better my mood and my attitude have become.

But nothing lasts forever, I guess. The world isn’t rosy all the time and fake euphoria (like fake news) doesn’t do anyone any good. So I’m going to give in, vent for a minute, get it off my chest, and hope it’ll go away. Then

The good old days …

Just looking at this photo has brought back all kinds of great memories. It was back in the 90’s — ’93 I’m thinking — and I was at an Ogilvy worldwide creative directors’ meeting. Jim, who’s  in the shot with me, was the creative director in our LA office.

He and I had met a year or two earlier, in New York, at David Ogilvy’s 80th birthday bash. Which is a whole other story. We (Jim and I) got along like a house on fire and we became fast

I know you won’t believe me, but …

… as a kid I was painfully shy. I didn’t walk beside my mother, I crept along behind her. And if I could have crawled under her skirt, I would happily have done so. Seriously. For that matter I wasn’t a particularly outgoing adult for much of my life either.

Hard to believe when you look at this photo, I know, but it’s true.

I still get clammy palms when I think back to the first time I was part of a major creative presentation, to a major client. Huge client, presenting to the president and CEO and I was new to the account and the agency. Hell, I was new to Toronto.

To make matters worse, I’d had no presentation training,