It was a very good year

hen I was 17, my high school French teacher, Dana Danforth, a mentor in style, wit ("If you can't laugh at life, you're fucked.") and facial hair, turned me away from Sinatra before I'd even heard The Voice.

When I was 21, the Smoothest Man Alive, Jiorgis Kritsotakis, introduced me to Puccini (Bergonzi, Tebaldi & Serafin; Callas, De Stefano & De Sabata), Lebanese women, Greek slang and Old Blue Eyes in St Andrews.

And now, at 35, I can say, hell, I can bellow, "It was a very good year."

For it has been a rather good year. Two series of children's books. Three screenplays. New friends in new towns; old friends in old towns; new friends in old towns. Unfinished conversations picked up. The start of a grant writing career. A November moustache. A glass of Brunello on the house. Three welcome homes in three different places.

No, not every bottle poured sweet and clear. The dregs of the past two vintages continue to give this year's a bittersweet finish, but now they are more minor flavor notes, not skunked cans of beer.

More importantly, this is the year I cleared my throat; the year I danced with strangers; the year I filled out.

And yes, Frank, it was also a good year for small town, city and blue-blooded girls...

The Fund

ears ago investment groups started socially responsible investing (SRI). These funds invest solely in companies that have green policies, treat their workers well, practice fair trade and only feed their unicorns whole-wheat Lucky Charms. As of 2010, investors had poured $3.07 trillion into such funds (the global economy for 2011 was $69.99 trillion).

Shortly after SRI appeared so too did not-so SRI. And they called them sin funds. Sin funds invest in tobacco, weapons, alcohol and refuse to invest in any company that does not adhere to strict North Korean labor laws. A fast and loose smart-ass argument could be made that any dollar not in a SRI fund went the other way.

As people put their money where their hearts and beliefs are, this got me thinking about investing as an emotional endeavor. Naturally, I then took emotional investing to an extreme. You know, for fun.

Investors take comfort in products that have been around a long time. Traders make money off of volatility. What's the most volatile emotion that you can think of that's been around forever?

Love.

And so I wrote a screenplay about an investment group that starts a Love Fund and the public's reaction to it.

On Deck: Is love a limited or an unlimited good? A sloppy love story told around the one good Chinese micro-brew.

Skyfall

ne of the few things my Dad and I shared, one of the few things he passed on that I accepted whole-heartedly as a kid, was an affinity for James Bond. It didn't hurt that Bond stories surround the family; how Bond played on the waiting room TV as Pop waited for my birth; how the family who shared my mother's room during my sister's birth were the Goldfingers; how I got my middle name.

Daniel Craig has played Bond since my father's passing in 2007. Pop and I didn't like the look of him as Bond from the get-go. Stocky, brutish, blonde. Where once we had an outside chance of being mistaken for Bond if in a tux spotted at a distance by someone with the eyesight of a retired boxer, now we definitely didn't stand a chance. So it wasn't hard watching Bond movies after Pop passed because the visual connection was lost.

That is, until Skyfall...and the Aston Martin DB5.

I've heard audiences laugh, I've heard audiences scream, but I had never heard an audience oooh until the DB5 appeared to the surprise and delight of a packed house. Hell, I knew it was coming and it still got me. Sure, it took me back to the old Connery movies, but it also took me back to classic car shows Dad and I attended at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut where we'd take Polaroids of each other leaning up against someone else's Aston. When it appeared in Skyfall, I couldn't speak.

But after the movie, all I wanted to do was speak. For the first time in a long time I wanted to call my Dad. I wanted to talk to him about the movie. About what a great job they did bringing back classic characters, cars and the riff to the one song he ever learned how to play on the guitar. Talk to him about Scotland, the Bond exhibit we saw there, the Bond exhibit we missed in NYC the first time he ever took me into the city as a kid only to end up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibit on medieval chivalry. To hear his corny Connery impersonation. That's a Smith and Wesson and you've had your six. And to listen to the former mechanic tell me - once again - that for as beautiful a car as the DB5 was, my Mom's old early '90s Toyota Camry could out-handle it. (The DB5 had no power steering.)

With the exception of the occasional baseball post, I try not to veer too far from this blog's primary focus. But from one aspiring writer to the one who came before, consider this post an epistle in far more legible print than any of the letters either of us ever wrote to each other.

Project Update: Finishing up the third screenplay of the season (no, it's not a prequel to Citizen Kane). Will go for four before New Year's. Reviewing the final layout of Cookie-Wise Pablo.