Dear Drama Observers, “Attempting to reason with a person who has renounced the use of reason,” wrote founding father Thomas Paine, “is like administering medicine to the dead.” My quicker and certainly less picturesque way to say the same thing is, “You can’t reason with an unreasonable person.” I talk a lot in these weekly […]
Dear Drama Observers, I just started a newly-released book that I can’t wait to finish. It’s called Love Your Enemies and was written by Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and soon-to-be Harvard faculty member. The Amazon promotional page for his book, in part, says the following: To get ahead today, you have […]
Dear Drama Observers, I’ve always loved the 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. (Yes, yes, I realize we’re way past Christmas, but stick with me here). Here’s a quick recap of the movie’s plot: In the small town of Bedford Falls, the Bailey family runs a struggling savings and loan institution. The Baileys are the […]
Dear Drama Observers, I wrote an article a few years back entitled, “Infecting Your Kids With Integrity” which I’ve posted a couple of times before in The Drama Review. I’m reposting it again today for two reasons. First, to be quite honest, I just flat ran out of time to write the new letter I’d […]
Dear Drama Observers, Almost everyone loves a good drama. As I’ve written so very often, dramas are fun to watch but not so fun when you’re in them. It’s one thing to sit in a theater and be enthralled by a grisly tale. It’s quite another thing to wake up in a pool of wetness, […]
Dear Drama Observers, We spent five wonderful years in Portland, Oregon where I did my graduate school training. As you know, it rains a lot in Portland. Even though we get more inches of rain per year here in Nashville, Portland leads the nation in the number of hours per year that it rains. In […]
Dear Drama Observers, As we continue to celebrate Black History Month, I thought I’d repost a letter that tells the story of a very special person in my history. She’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever known and to whom I owe a great deal. Enjoy. ******** I once heard someone say that if […]
Dear Drama Observers, The story is told—it may be apocryphal—of a wartime conclave between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. A number of items were on their agenda, but one stood above the rest. There was a crucial decision they had to make regarding the Allied war effort to defeat Nazi Germany. It was late at […]
Dear Drama Observers, There are a handful of educators who will never be erased from the hard drive of my memory. One was Miss Parnell, my fifth-grade teacher. I have two recollections of her I’ll never forget. The first occurred on a Friday afternoon in November of 1963. I was in the sixth grade and […]
Dear Drama Observers, I’ve become very intrigued of late with a concept called “motivated reasoning.” In his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, notes: “Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on “motivated reasoning,” showing the many tricks people use to reach the […]