Archives for October 2010

You’ve got these perfectly okay pair of boots. They’re not exactly killer fashion items, but they’re not so bad that you wonder why oh why did I ever lay out good money for them, time to put in a call to Goodwill.

They’re, y’know, okay.

In fact, they have this tantalizing core of unfulfilled promise. They’re like that dreaded checkmark on your elementary school report card: Needs Improvement.

Karen’s just okay boots, before a spur of the moment transformation

So the other day, Karen dropped into my office and as we kibitzed about this and that she rooted around in one of the piles of oh-so-necessary-stuff on my desk and came up with a pair of English riding spurs. Originally, they belonged to my Aunt Pearlie who used to be an avid rider, but she passed them on to me when, years ago, I took up riding.

Karen studied the spurs for a moment, looked at her just okay boots, then leaned over and strapped on the spurs.

“How do they look?”

I asked Karen to walk around a bit.

She did her version of America’s Next Top Model cat walk.

“Brilliant! I think you should tuck a little black whip into your belt to complete the look.”

Oddly enough, Karen thought that might be a bit, um, excessive.

Anyhoo.

The lesson here, kids, is never give up because you never know when a pair of just okay shoes can be transformed, Cinderella-like, into a haute fashion feast.

Same boots, adorned with my Aunt Pearlie’s English spurs. I still think Karen should carry a leather riding crop to complete the look.

Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and meaningful Shabbat.

In March 1923, future Hollywood star Norma Shearer and her mother Edith arrived in Los Angeles. Norma had just signed a five-year contract offered by Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder of Hollywood.

In an unpublished memoir, Norma Shearer (1902-1983) vividly recalls her first day at MGM:

We were sitting in the reception room wating to see whomever we were supposed to see when a very polite and modest young offiice boy came through a small swinging gate. He held it open for us, smiled, and said nothing. In we went. He followed us and opened a door down the hall. We found ourselves in Mr. Mayer’s office, which was large and luxurious. To our amazement the young man went around the big desk and sat down behind it. I thought to myself, He’d better get out of that chair before someone comes in! Then he started pressing buttons on that big, shiny desk. Now he’s playing games, I thought. He’d better stop fooling around or Mr. Mayer will come in and fire him. He looked so handsome. I didn’t want that to happen.

Just then Mr. Mayer did come in. The young man stood up calmly and introduced us to him. Then two other gentlemen came in, moving-picture directors named John Stahl and Fred Niblo. They bowed, shook hands with us, and went out. We soon suspected that the young man who had greeted us could not be an office boy. And indeed we soon learned that he was Irving G. Thalberg, Hollywood’s so-called “Boy Wonder.”

Irving Thalberg, just 24 years-old, sickly and frail, yet hauntingly handsome, was already blazing a trail as Hollywood’s most brilliant and visionary producer.

Irving Grant Thalberg, 1899 – 1936.

Shearer and her mother are impressed by Thalberg’s confident demeanor. And his Jewishness marks him as an exotic object of desire to Norma, a wide-eyed Catholic from Montreal, Quebec.

And when we left the studio, Mother asked me, “Did you see those eyes?”

“I should say I did. What eyes!”

Later that day it occurred to me that I had seen the most beautiful face on a young man that I would ever see. Mother told me that he was a Jew and perhaps that was why he was so beautiful.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you married that nice young man!” she said.

Shearer had a quickie conversion to Judaism right before the Sept 29, 1927 wedding ceremony performed by rabbi to the stars, Edgar F. Magnin. MGM’s Boy Wonder and the Queen of the MGM lot remained devoted to each other until Thalberg’s early and tragic death in 1936, age 37.

This is the man who promised that under his watch there would be no red states, no blue states only the United States. This is the man who vowed to rid Washington of old style politics. This is the man who positioned himself as the great uniter. This is, insisted the dopey MSM, America’s first post-racial President.

Of course, Obama’s campaign posture was a community organizer’s cynical strategy lifted straight from Rules for Radicals, the Alinsky playbook.

In fact, Obama is the most divisive President in modern times. His politics are best characterized as Chicago-style thuggery. As a race hustler, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright have nothing on Obama’s shameless and shameful pimping of the Latino vote.

And finally, Obama does not recognize political opponents, decent Americans who do not wish to see America transformed to European style socialism.

No, Obama sees enemies.

This language is not just un-Presidential, it’s the rhetoric of a bitter and desperate demogogue.

Seraphic Secret has long maintained that Obama is self-absorbed, petulant and thin-skinned; in clinical terms, a narcissist. Recently, a profile in The New York Times characterized Obama as someone who automatically assumes that he’s the smartest man in the room.

Which makes him the man in the room who suffers a profound lack of wisdom. A fatal flaw in those who wield great power.

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

Just a reminder of what a true and effective leader looks like.

Now let’s hear from Marco Rubio on American exceptionalism. Contrast Rubio’s optimism and belief in America’s special mission in the world with Obama’s tedious post-modern sensibility that views this great land as just another chunk of colonial soil.

The firing of Juan Williams—with whom I usually disagree, but have always respected—by NPR is notable, not because a liberal has been thrown under the bus by leftists, this is par for the course for the predatory left.

Most important is the leading role played by CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood front, in the firing of Williams and his harrowing demonization.

CAIR, a Hamas supporting, sharia-yearning mob disguised as a Muslim civil rights group, are in the midst of merging with the American left in their jihad against America.

Thus, it’s no surprise that Kieth Ellison, (Democrat, naturally, MN) and the Muslim Brotherhood’s man in congress, has stepped forward and attacked Williams, a decent and honest liberal, in the most vile manner, calling Williams un-American and bigoted.

And you thought Orwellian thought and language was a fictional construct.

Keith Ellison’s haj to Mecca was financed by the Muslim American Society, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. His job is to make dhimmitude part and parcel of leftist ideology.

We are at war with the hydra-headed monster of radical Islam.

And if it’s open season on a man like Juan Williams—he’s getting Palined—well, this indicates a major escalation in the jihad against and within America.

Memo to liberals: Unless you toe the party line regarding Muslim supremacists—the Ground Zero Mosque is their most visible battleground—you will be targeted for destruction because the left always devours its own.

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How I Married Karen

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About Me
Robert J. Avrech
Los Angeles, California

I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

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