Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin

Send us Fan Mail David Gabriel is a young dancer on the rise as a soloist with New York City Ballet.  The love affair with dance began early.  Really early.  He started watching ballet videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov while growing up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  David was 2.  Not long after, the goal became “get to New York, “a dream he has realized.

Send us Fan Mail How many people have written for Sports Illustrated and the Harvard Law Review? Jamal Greene is one of the rare few.  His own story is compelling, growing up in a Brooklyn home that produced a constitutional law professor, Jamal, and a world-renowned rapper, his brother Talib Kweli.  Jamal’s experiences at Harvard, Sports Illustrated and Yale Law School eventually led him to teach...

Send us Fan Mail Did I think that I would read a 500 page book about lacrosse? Uh, no.  But if S.L.(Scott) Price is writing it, I’m reading it. Scott has long been one of our preeminent writers about people through the prism of sports, primarily during his more than two decades at Sports Illustrated.  There were more than a few chapters before he became a must read for so many of us.  There was an...

Send us Fan Mail It’s hard to imagine Judy Collins pursuing anything but a life in music.  Music and performing were in the air as she was growing up in Colorado.  There were classical piano lessons with her beloved teacher Antonia Brico.  And Judy’s father was a performer with a radio show.    But it was actually a broken leg in her teens that led Judy down the path to pursuing music full time. ...

Send us Fan Mail For some 20 years, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine.  He speaks the language and he understands the history of the region, making him the ideal foreign correspondent to report on the lead up to the Russian invasion in 2022 and the subsequent war in Ukraine.  This is not exactly what his folks had in mind when they emigrated from the former Soviet Union in the ear...

Send us Fan Mail A life in show business is not for the faint of heart.  It’s a rollercoaster of joy and disappointment, uplifting highs and debilitating lows.   But if you’re fortunate, a window of opportunity opens up.  And if you’re ready, the rest of your career and life can await on the other side. The window opened for Sydnie Christmas in 2024.  Rather, she opened the window with abandon, ap...

Send us Fan Mail   There’s a great line in the wonderful old film The Front; “it’s nice when nice happens to somebody nice.” That’s been the story around the National Hockey League this season, as Sam Rosen bids farewell after some 40 seasons as the television play by play voice of the New York Rangers.  He’s been saluted with standing ovations in arenas around the league.  Sam is understandably m...

Send us Fan Mail  Long ago as a film major at City College of New York in the 1970’s, Stanley Nelson found his passion.   We are fortunate that he did.  For almost 40 years, his films have told the story of the African American experience.  Be it Attica or Emmett Till, the Freedom Riders or the Black Panthers, his films speak with an eloquent voice and a captivating camera.   His production compan...

Send us Fan Mail Tom Chapin is still going strong at the age of 80.  There are performances and projects.  And there’s an appreciation for a life that has brought him experiences that extend far beyond the usual path of the folk musician: searching for sharks on the Indian Ocean, playing basketball at the famed Rucker Court in New York and being assigned a cool nickname to boot, his song being use...

Send us Fan Mail Those of us who follow the Middle East intensely, reading about it constantly, understand that our reactions are never dispassionate.   Peter Beinart knows this all too well.  For decades, his writing and television appearances have garnered plenty of praise and plenty of criticism, even vitriol.    And that reality won’t likely change with his new book “Being Jewish After The Des...

Send us Fan Mail How do you return to a normal life after experiencing pain, loss and then unbridled joy? Alsu Kurmasheva is a Russian American journalist who works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.  She was detained in her native Russia while visiting her mother in 2023 and later arrested on charges of “spreading false information” about the Russian military, charges that Alsu and Ra...

Send us Fan Mail Caroline Aaron knows from motherhood.   She’s a mom.  As an actor, she’s played plenty of moms, long before she got the mom role for which she is best known, Shirley Maisel in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”  She’s currently playing a mom in the off-Broadway show “Conversations With Mother.”   But her own mother’s story might be the most compelling of all: a Jew from Selma, Alabama w...

Send us Fan Mail Art seems to be imitating life for actor Gretchen Mol in her new film, the latest Ed Burns project, “Millers in Marriage.”  It’s not the plot of the movie, which covers three complicated and troubled marriages and relationships.  That does not mirror her life.  But Gretchen plays a character who is a middle-aged woman trying to figure out the next chapter, when Gretchen herself is...

Send us Fan Mail By his mid 50s Craig Taubman had already enjoyed great musical success in the secular and Jewish worlds, with his songs sung at synagogues and Jewish summer camps across the country.  But he felt the need to do more.  So he bought a building in downtown Los Angeles.  His initial proposal was shot down by his daughter.  Craig says she called it “the dumbest idea he ever had.”  Here...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine being at work, you make a decision and almost a million people react to that decision.  Immediately.  And in public.   Welcome to the world of Jon Heyman, a veteran baseball writer and reporter who is followed passionately on social media, especially X.  His pronouncements about potential free agent signings are followed like foreign policy announcements or Congressional h...

Send us Fan Mail Joy Sela is in the first stages of a career as a filmmaker.  Her first documentary, “The Other,” takes on a topic with so many elements: passion, emotion, history, geography, anger and loss.     The Middle East.     In the spirit of the great documentarian Albert Maysles, Joy Sela puts a mirror up to the many Israelis and Palestinians in the film and listens to their stories of he...

Send us Fan Mail Tony Pallagrosi uses one word frequently when talking about his career as a musician, promoter and musical entrepreneur: luck. Sure, a well-timed quitting of a garage band may have put him in a position to be able to join a great band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.  But there’s nothing lucky about the work that Tony and the team at Light of Day Foundation have done for 25...

Send us Fan Mail Some stories never leave you.  Like the admonition from Dr. Kathie-Ann Joseph’s aunt when her niece was admitted to Harvard; “You’re not lucky.  You worked hard for this.”   I first met and interviewed Dr. Joseph, a leading breast cancer surgeon and researcher in New York in 2007.  Her story, her message, her inspiration is just as profound all these years later.

Send us Fan Mail What is it about the power of a photograph: the joy, the passion, the emotion of one moment in time? For more than 40 years, Lynn Goldsmith’s photographs have made us smile, made us think and made us feel.  She is best known for her rock ‘n roll photographs, but along the way, she was a musician, a TV director and the co manager of a big 1970’s band, Grand Funk Railroad.  She purs...

Send us Fan Mail In his 20’s, Michael Giacchino had a love of movies and music and a job in marketing.  But he’d put himself in a position to succeed.  When the window of opportunity opened, he was ready.

Send us Fan Mail Imagine movies without music.  Impossible.  It’s part of the magic.  And Michael Giacchino creates that magic, in movies like Coco, The Batman, Ratatouille, Jojo Rabbit and his Oscar winner, Up.  A love of movies came early.  Michael was the kid in the neighborhood making super 8 films.  The love of music followed.  Eventually, his two loves met and thus a career was forged.  And...

Send us Fan Mail Ed Burns has mined his experience growing up in an Irish American family on Long Island over the course of his long career as an independent filmmaker, most notably in his breakthrough film The Brothers McMullen in 1995.  He has written thousands of words on the page that end up on the screen.   Now the words are staying on the page in his novel “A Kid From Marlboro Road.”  It’s h...

Send us Fan Mail   For some 50 years, Jeff Greenfield has written about political campaigns.  He’s reported on political campaigns.  He’s analyzed political campaigns for viewers on CBS, ABC and CNN.  And he was a young speechwriter on one of the most compelling campaigns in American political history: the 1968 Presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy that ended in Kennedy’s assassination.   So in t...

Send us Fan Mail   I first met Michael Byrne in the months after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.  Many parts of the New York area were still reeling from the hurricane.  Byrne was overseeing FEMA’s response to the hurricane and he was serving the city where he was born and bred, just as he did after 9/11 working for the Department of Homeland Security, just as he had working for the city’s Office of Emer...

Send us Fan Mail John Hodgman always makes me laugh, in his books, on his podcast and certainly during his long run on The Daily Show.  He makes me laugh in interviews as well, but he is also an extremely thoughtful interview, especially about his many and varied influences and how they melded together into the career he’s fashioned.   And so, there’s a part two of our conversation.  Besides, you...