Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1401019
56 I m ps e . o rg that Twilight Zone episode with my wife's to-do lists being the shoe that crushes my glasses. I'm also a guitar player with a pile of guitars longing to be played. Pre-COVID, I could play with friends. Isolation and free time have provided an opportunity to explore open tunings which lend themselves to solo playing. Retirement offers time to learn or relearn an instrument. Do it. You're never too old, except that pesky left-hand trigger finger thing has flared up in the last year. Dammit. I'm working on it. Look out Dino DiMuro, I'm coming back. Music has always been a passion. I started collecting records 50 years ago, switched to CDs when the promise of no surface noise lured me in and switched back to LPs when I realized they sounded better to me and were just more fun. My collection is kind of ridiculously big. I now have time to sit and just listen. Sitting and listening the only goal. So shamefully self-indulgent. Dan Fogelberg singing about some grocery store? Ha! I'm putting on that John Lee Hooker album where he does "T.B. Sheets" and "Boogie with the Hook" and I'm gonna play it loud. Get this, I have a blacklight in my music room, honest. Like all of you, I love film. Kind of a requirement. We live in a time where with a click of a button, you can watch just about anything you can imagine. Told everyone you've watched a lot of Bergman but didn't? Now's your chance. Liv Ullman is waiting, frozen in time, and as beautiful as you once were. Kurosawa too time-consuming and daunting? You've now got the time. Sit back, relax, walk through that door, embrace the subtitles. and see what Sergio and Lucas "borrowed." Turner Classic Movies has become a close friend. Rewatching Hawks, Hathaway, Huston. Hitchcock is a wonderful indulgence and that's just some of the Hs." Binge-watching series in this new Golden Age of TV is now a guilt- free pastime. Working as much as I did, I never watched The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and something called Game of Thrones. I just never had the time. I can see in my future actually watching The Crown that everyone was talking about. I'm now walking the dogs with regularity. We have become close. I think they love me. The cats, I'm not sure about although one of them has taken to laying on my chest and reaching out one paw to tenderly touch my chin. I might be imbuing it with qualities it doesn't have. It is after all, a cat. I've used that hard- earned swimming pool more in the last year than in the previous 10 years combined. Not just sitting by it in the evening shade but actual summertime daily swimming. I'm also cooking! With my wife still working, I've taken over preparing dinner, something she did for decades. Her fixing dinner Step Up post crew 2006. Back row L-R: Steve Bartkowicz, Buck Damon, Jon "JT" Taylor, director Anne Fletcher, picture editor Nancy Richardson, Chris Assells. Front row L-R: Nancy Kirhoffer, John Finklea, Christian Minkler, Unsun Song.