Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Sirloin Porterhouse T-Bone Rump Roast '

My brother Sethie calls me up: "Did Mom call you?" "About Dad?" "Yeah. And the Dots." "I don't know if it's possible to be addicted to Dots." "So did you figure out why she thinks he's addicted to Dots?" "He buys them in bulk from the Mennonites. And he eats a whole box while he's driving." "Oh." "Yeah."

About half my Facebook Friends have the last name "Thomas." They happen to be my cousins. My prodigious uncles discharged a goodly number of little Thomases into the world wide web. Or maybe I just don't have a whole lot of other friends, thus increasing the proportion of Same Last Namers in my overall Facebook Friend pool. The Facebook is smart. As well as forward thinking. And interested in geneology for the purpose of bringing kinfolk together. It gave my Friend list the once over and must have noticed I have a thing for 15 - 25 year-old pisanos sporting the "Thomas" surname. A little notice popped up identifying "People I Might Want To Add to My Friends." Thus notifying me as to the whereabouts of my potentially long lost cousin, Michael Thomas:

I wear the same things pretty much every week. I'm not really what you'd call a clothes hound." -

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. ~ Claude-Adrien After the Nazis torched all those books in 1933, most Americans realized with horror that burning or banning books just because one group didn't like the storyline was censorship. And censorship is what separates democracies from fascist regimes. If you can't read what you want to read, you are a subject and not a citizen. Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?" ~ Joseph Henry Jackson How much must you fear an idea before you attempt to banish the thought from the planet? Do you think that just because you stick your fingers in your ears and go nah nah nah nah nah nah that the idea will curl up and turn to ashes? Do you think that you are protecting your children by shackling their brains and pretending that no one is gay or agreed w...

I have spoken to my great uncle Elliot a grand total of three times in my entire life and one of them was when I rocked the duties of Flower Girl at Ronnie's first wedding. Since Uncle Elliot had missed my Grampy's funeral last week, he drove up from Florida to pay his respects and visit my grammy , his sister. They would bond and reminisce . Speak Yiddish Pig Latin like they did when they were ten and think they're hilarious. Just to see how she was doing, I called up Grammy, who broke out her mad skills in slathering AWKWARD across an otherwise straightforward phone call. She asked me point blank if I wanted to say hello to my great uncle Elliot. Ummm . Sure. Uncle Elliot required little if any prodding to launch into a tale about his years at Radio City Music Hall playing in the pit orchestra. He'd watch the girls audition for the Rockettes . The first cut was a test. The Silver Dollar Test. They'd make the girls hold three silver dollars. One between their thig...

My grandfather's yarns string together all I know about his life. He always told the same stories. Just the facts. Using the same words, the same inflections. Any number of current events could trigger a hasty rocket launch into one of his memories. And once commenced, you would. always. be treated to the whole gantzeh megillah. A dozen years ago, Grampy maybe had twenty tales he'd rotate through. More recently, he winnowed the lot down to about five. He must have known we'd heard every one of them countless times before. But the past held so much more promise then any present-tense conversation ever could. My grampy liked to be the center of attention. Grampy escaped with his family from Romania after the Bolsheviks invaded and it became dangerous to be a Jew. He lived in the Lower East Side, eventually moving up to the Bronx. I got the feeling he was in a lot of street fights, but the fisticuffs always broke out in the space between his stories, so we never really got a f...