The Fox had a proposition for the Chickens. “I couldn’t help but notice,” said the Fox to the chicken Chitty Council, “that you have to walk an unfair distance from your coop to the chicken yard, simply in order to avoid my den. I propose that we move your coop closer to my den so…
Author: gary1164
I'm an advertising executive and former actor/producer
Christians, Deists, and Atheists, Oh My!
200 years is a long time to keep anything going. Consider the world 200 years ago and you won’t find much that resembles the world today; not in the United States, anyway. 213 years ago the War of 1812 rocked our newly won sovereignty as residual resentments between our Union and Britain remained, and a…
Gilded Hollywood
Twenty two years ago I left Hollywood and moved back to the town where I grew up. Cedar Falls, Iowa, had not changed that much in the 28 years since I’d left in 1975, but it offered something my career out west could not: financial stability. The business of “Show” was never about being a…
Yesterday…all my troubles seemed so far away
Ten years ago I wrote an article about my experience with the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live (https://www.garyhasissues.com/2015/02/backstage-at-snls-40th/) . It got a lot of attention and was reproduced in several magazines as it seemed to strike a chord with people as an honest account of the show. I believe that came from the fact…
Red Dawn
Recently I posted something (above) a bit irresponsible. Trump’s expansionist rhetoric led me to criticize him for putting America into “the crosshairs of every other industrialized nation.” And while I believe it does and that it puts America “first” only in terms of risk, it’s an incomplete and naive point of view. It doesn’t contain an alternative in…
Sex, Lies, and Social Media
I’m not sure what compels me to write something this long. It is a rebuttal to 12 things a conservative writer posted about Trump policies and the liberal agenda. I found the post to be interesting insofar as it is an accurate description of the issues that Trump brought into office and of the ideology that supports him;…
Does this lie make me look fat?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall a lot of Trump’s campaign centered around immediately bringing down costs for Americans. Costs that he said were due to Biden’s “highest ever inflation” (it was, for the record, not the highest ever). In fact, Trump’s message of de-flation was so clear, most of the sarcasm from…
“With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!”
“Maybe there’s a God above, but all I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya. It’s not a cry you can hear at night, it’s not somebody who has seen the light, it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!” Leonard Cohen bemoaned the bitterness of love. Or at…
“I have a dream…”
On Martin Luther King Day we should recall his most enduring speech; the historic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in August of 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. King’s eloquent call for the end of racism in the United States, delivered to over 250,000 supporters, was a defining moment in the Civil…
California Dreamin’
When I was very young my cousin, Becky, moved to California. To this day, over 60 years later, I remember my awe at where she was going. California. Land of sun, beaches, oranges, golden opportunities and Disneyland. It seemed so magical and so far away. I dreamt of visiting her, imaging what it must be…