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Alec Baldwin for President by New York Times Best-Selling Author Michael Levin

The Left lacks a leader.

           Opposition to President Trump’s style and substance is widespread, online, in rallies, and in conversations.

           But there’s no one individual around whom progressives can coalesce.

           Why is that?

           Popular, charismatic leaders like a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama don’t come along every day.

           More to the point, Democrats have an extremely narrow bench.

           The public is exhausted with Hillary Clinton. She’s hardly the person to lead the progressive movement into the future.

           Bernie Sanders has barely been heard from since the election.

           Polls indicate that Elizabeth Warren may not even retain her Massachusetts Senate seat.

           So for the Left, who’s left?

           This isn’t a matter of idle speculation.

           Yes, there is plenty of grassroots activity on the Democratic side.

           You’ve got harassment of Republican members of Congress at their local town hall events, as Democrats take a leaf from the Tea Party’s playbook.

           Tom McClintock, a conservative California congressman, needed a police escort to get out of a constituent meeting.

           Impromptu rallies can sprout like flash mobs at the drop of an unpopular executive order.

           Unless someone can be found to harness the energy of the anti-Trump people, there will be dismay, righteous anger, Twitter wars, and a sighing and gnashing of teeth on a national scale.

           And as long as no such leader arises, the president will waltz to a second term.

           So we have to ask the question: Why isn’t there an individual who speaks for the Left?

           There are a few reasons.

           First, the Democratic leadership did its members no favors by hoarding power.

           On the national level, the Democratic National Committee all but stole the presidential nomination from Bernie Sanders. If the playing field had been level, he would have beaten Hillary Clinton easily.

           I believe Sanders would have run a much more organized and effective general election campaign, and we’d be seeing Larry David parodying President Sanders on Saturday Night Live instead of Alec Baldwin spoofing Trump.

           In the House, Nancy Pelosi and her cabal of fellow seventy-somethings cling to power, brushing back leadership challenges from up-and-coming Democrats, one or more of whom might have been that national leader the Left so desperately needs.

           In short, the Old Guard of the Democratic Party put their own egos ahead of principle, with the result that there is no next generation of leaders on the Left.

           The other problem that the Left perennially faces is that there is a wide, wide spectrum of political belief on their side of the aisle.

           Republicans come in two flavors: moderate and Tea Party.

           Democrats are more like Baskin-Robbins, with an extremely wide range of opinions, desires, and views.

           I don’t know how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each herded cats for eight years, but that’s what it’s like to get the Democrats to follow a leader.

           If you want further proof, take a listen to talk radio.

           The Reeps have had one primary radio voice for decades—Rush Limbaugh, with a deep bench—Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity.

           For the last twenty years, there has not been a single spokesperson on left-leaning talk radio capable of commanding a huge audience, because the Left is too fragmented.  

           You had Michael Jackson (the commentator, not the legendary singer) in Los Angeles from the 1960s to the 1990s, but Rush took away his ratings and left-oriented radio has languished ever since.

           Donald Trump proves you don’t have to have a background in politics to run for office. It helps if you’re someone a lot of people admire and trust, and it helps if you’ve been a star and in people’s living rooms for decades.

           So that’s why I’m proposing Alec Baldwin as the Democrats’ next presidential candidate.

           If he can’t unite the Left, who can?

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Hey American, Where Are All the Old People? by New York Times best-selling author Michael Levin

I FLY A LOT, AND MY MILES ARE ON AMERICAN, so I’ve seen their new flight safety video way too many times.

           The video supposes that we are too stupid to pay attention to anything that doesn’t have a lot of flashing lights and a solid backbeat.  

           You can actually watch it on YouTube—the link is  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb28mVZiJo.

The video has attracted more than 300,000 views, which proves that the chief problem with America isn’t Donald Trump; it’s that we have too much free time.

           It’s a music video, with a comely young woman dressed in a flight attendant outfit either from the 1940s or the fantasies of whoever designed the video, or maybe both.

           Her voice is Valley Girl–seductive as she marches confidently around a dreamlike mock jet interior, sometimes accompanied by two other adorable flight attendant babes, who smilingly assist her with her seat belt and other challenging tasks.

           My favorite moment is when she slides down the yellow emergency chute and sticks the landing, not a perfectly coiffed hair out of place.

           Yes, the video takes you through deployment of oxygen masks, location of life rafts, emergency lighting, and other such serious matters.

           Yet it does so in a way designed to attract and hold the attention of even the most ADHD of passengers.

           My favorite moment comes at the very end, when young Flighty suddenly finds herself surrounded by extras in various American uniforms, including a smiling, waving, gray-haired pilot.

They burst into wild cheers when she informs us that “great is what we’re going for,” surely one of the dumbest slogans in advertising history.

           This might be the first danceable safety video in the history of flight.

Unfortunately, everyone on the video, with the exception of the aforementioned comfortingly gray-haired pilot is, in New Yorker writer Roger Angell’s unforgettable phrase, “unforgivably young.”

           The faux flight attendants, the mock passengers, and the rest of the people shown are thin, attractive, well-groomed, and well-dressed twenty-something.

           It would appear that if you are older than twenty-seven, you are too old to work for American, unless, of course, you are that comfortingly gray-haired pilot.

           I hate to admit it, but I really love the video.

           It makes me feel young.

           Young and dumb.

           If you fly frequently on American, you no doubt recall the prior safety video, which consisted of a bunch of multiethnic “flight attendants”—I use quotation marks because I never saw any of these actual young ladies pouring actual coffee on an actual jet—presenting the same information.

           The problem is that they were just standing there, which is uninteresting, apparently, to the young.

           The women were quite beautiful. The funniest thing was to listen to the real flight attendants mocking the ethnic accents of the women who were cheerfully and earnestly teaching customers to buckle their seat belts.

           I don’t know why they got rid of that video, but then, I’m not in charge of American Airlines.

           I do think I had some small effect on their Advantage program years ago.

           I studied the program rules with Talmudic intensity and discovered that Buffalo was actually a legal stopover if you are flying between Los Angeles and Honolulu.

           I’m pretty sure you can no longer do that.

           I’ve already flown about 10,000 miles on American this year and will probably fly another 30,000 or 40,000.

           Which means that I will be watching that kinky new safety video a couple of dozen more times.

           Thank God for the smiling, gray-haired pilot in the last scene.

           Otherwise, I would think that American thinks that I’m just too old to fly.

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Should You Get A Medal For Taking Out The Garbage? by New York Times best selling author Michael Levin

In a word, no.

           When I got married and we had our first child promptly thereafter, all I could think about was how wonderful I was.

           Let me give you direct evidence of my wonderfulness.

           Every Tuesday night, I rolled the garbage carts down to the street.

           Every Wednesday afternoon, I rolled them back up to the side of the house.

           On occasions far too numerous to count, I put my plate in the sink.

           Sometimes I even scraped it off.

My socks seldom remained on the floor by the side of the bed for more than two days.

I know what you’re thinking.

I’ve set a really high bar for here.

            Actually, we all know that’s not true, and the person who knows it best is my wife.

           I’ve talked to other husbands about this, and we often resent just how little acknowledgement we receive for our token gestures of helpfulness around the house.

           We have come to the conclusion that we deserve medals for our self-sacrifice, decency, and, I’ll say it.

Courage.

           There should be the Distinguished Flying Cross For Taking Out The Trash On A Regular Basis.

           There should be a Service Medal for putting the cap back on the tube of toothpaste.

           There should be Oak Leaf Clusters for putting the milk back in the fridge.

           Stunningly, our wives disagreed with our assessment of our valor and enormous contributions to the upkeep of our homes.

           This difference in perception has led to many unhappy disputes.

           Worst of all, no medals were forthcoming.

           I’m going to respectfully suggest that you give your wife at some point soon a spa day, or better still, an overnight somewhere fun with her best girlfriend.

           You take care of the house and the kids for an entire 24-hour period.

           You shop.

           You cook.

           You put away.

           And while you’re at it, make the distinction between just putting things away and actually cleaning, a distinction lost on most of us men.

           The purpose of this vacation day for your wife is not just to show her how wonderful you are.

Instead, it’s to educate you as to just how much work goes into having a clean, well-organized, well-stocked home where the socks are in the drawer and food is on the table.

           When we were single, nothing was sexier to a woman than a guy with a nice car, a nice haircut, a nice plan for the evening, and a nice stack of cash.

           Once you’re married with children, the sexiest thing a woman can see is you folding your own socks.

           It’s understandable why we men feel downright gleeful whenever we do anything that smacks of contribution to the home.

           It’s because when we grew up, there was Mom, and when we were single, everything was a total mess (unless your girlfriend was coming over, in which case everything was spotless).

           Why does biology dictate who separates whites and colors for the laundry?

           If you do all this stuff already, more power to you.

           If you don’t, stop reading and go clean something.

           You will not get a medal, but you might just get something much better.

[New York Times bestselling author and Shark Tank entrepreneur Michael Levin runs BusinessGhost.com, a book ghostwriting firm.]

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MEET THE BOSS by New York Times best selling author Michael Levin

THE MOST IMPORTANT—AND TERRIFYING—BOOK I’VE READ in a very long time is Deep State by Mike Lofgren, and the only really bad thing about the book is that it’s very hard to argue with it.

You must read this book.

Lofgren was a staffer on Capitol Hill for decades, including a long stint for John Kasich, and went rogue—he actually had the temerity to explain exactly how America is governed.

The news is worse that you might have suspected.

Essentially, our country is led not by the people or the president or anything cute and arcane like that.

Instead, Wall Street, the military, and increasingly, Silicon Valley run the show.

That may not seem like new news, but the combined effect of these entities is deeply troubling in ways that most of us might never have suspected.

Why did we invade Iraq?

It had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. Instead, it was all about the fact that Saddam Hussein was planning to sell oil in a currently other than dollars.

That would have been bad for Wall Street, so the military stepped in and made sure that that didn’t happen.

Lofgren says that as long as Americans are more interested in what Kim Kardashian is doing than why we are secretly putting bases into practically every African country, the Deep State will get to have its way.    

Similarly, why did we overthrow Gaddafi?

Because he was about to commit the same sin—to sell his oil in a new pan-African currently, instead of dollars.

At the same time that we wiped out Gaddafi’s regime, and replaced it with a bunch of thugs who are arguably even worse, people in West Virginia had water so polluted that they had to drink bottled water for two months.

There’s always money to overthrow a dictator who is about to mess with the value of the dollar, even if there’s no money to ensure that water treatment plants in places like West Virginia are being inspected, which they were not.

And why are we secretly putting bases into practically every African country, essentially bribing dictators to let us protect them, in Lofgren’s formulation?

For the simple reason that the Chinese are moving into Africa in great numbers, and we want to maintain our ability to buy African oil, less the Chinese gobble up all of it.

President Obama, found himself captured, Lilliputian-style, by the Deep State mix of big dollars and bigger military. For all his talk about human rights and trying to be a different kind of president, Lofgren writes, Obama essentially got schooled by the incredibly powerful intelligence community.

Obama quickly learned that although he was technically in the driver’s seat, he was actually just a passenger in a vehicle controlled by the NSA and the CIA.

A measure of how deeply the Deep State managed to co-opt Obama, Lofgren writes, is the fact that when the King of Saudi Arabia died, Obama and practically every important American leader, past or present, dropped everything and flew to Riyadh for the funeral.

That’s because Saudi Arabia, which all supports Al Qaeda, ISIS, and helped sponsor 9/11, is a major recycler of American petro-dollars.  So despite the fact that they still behead people for adultery and sorcery, we cannot afford to offend them.

Bill Clinton? As a final act of obeisance to Wall Street, he deregulated derivatives in the closing moments of his second term.

He received more than $100 million in thank you notes for making speeches to Wall Street, which promptly turned derivatives into the underpinnings of the financial crisis that nearly took down the world economy in 2007.

Thanks, Bill.

George W. Bush? Don’t ask, Lofgren says. Dick Cheney was essentially his co-president, a puppet-master to Bush, who nonetheless claimed that he was the “decider.”

What about Trump, you may ask.

The Deep State was published a year ago, but a recent blog post by Lofgren suggests that Wall Street and the Pentagon are putting on their party hats, because Trump is a lay-down for both entities.

Silicon Valley is now a source of enormous money and, of course, information about each of us. So much so that the government spy agencies—the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI—could not do their jobs, collecting every conceivable piece of data on every American citizen—without the help of their friends at Apple, Microsoft, and so on.

Lofgren argues that we are a democracy in form only, and that the Deep State consisting of the military, key congressional leaders, Wall Street, and now Silicon Valley run the show, no matter who is in charge.

Deep State is so depressing that the average American will never go near the book, which is too bad, and which ensures that most Americans will remain average.

Our entire economic system is tilted in favor of feckless military contractors and unendingly greedy Wall Street types. So when we meet the new boss on January 20, he may have orange hair, but he’ll be the same as the old boss.

That’s because the real boss never changes.

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Is Lindsay Lohan Really A Muslim, And Why Should You Care? by Michael Levin

Word on the street suggests that Lindsay Lohan has adopted the Muslim faith.

Evidence includes a photo of her carrying the Quran, her deletion of all of her social media posts and the replacement of that language with an Arabic greeting, and a strange amalgamation of accents that she has adopted for going down the red carpet.

Her business manager or publicist denied that she has become a Muslim, which only fans the flames of rumor even further.

Here’s my take.

The worst thing that could ever happen to a human being is to become a child star.

Kids are just not built for the acclaim, the fame, the money, or the freedom that child stardom entails.

More often than not, they end up going to the dark side.

Think Miley Cyrus, betraying the trust of a generation of young girls by shaving one side of her head and turning herself into a sex symbol (of sorts).

And then there are the child stars who turn to alcoholism and drug addiction because they need something to replace the high that came when life handed them too much, too soon.

I remember watching America’s Got Talent this season and feeling my heart sink when Grace Vanderwaal won the contest.

Whatever her life had been like, now it would be Las Vegas, paparazzi, people

wanting to be her friend because she’s famous, and all the other things that are just perfect for any child.

Now comes Lindsay Lohan, and if I may perform a bit of armchair psychoanalysis, this is a young woman starved for attention.

Don’t I vaguely remember photos of her going commando as she eased out of a car somewhere?

Is there anything about Ms. Lohan that we don’t already know?

So in the endless quest for attention, her options were few.

Famous for motherhood? Sorry, but Angelina Jolie and the Octomom got there first.

Famous for caring about the environment? Sorry—Justin Bieber was driving a Prius back when your license was suspended.

Famous for getting sober?

Sorry. You’re about number ten thousand in the line of Hollywood celebrities who have sworn off booze and drugs.

So in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter, how can you command the attention of the world?

Spoiler alert: It ain’t with a new tattoo.

You adopt Islam.

There are thousands of books that Lohan could have carried through the streets of London without attracting the curiosity of the social media world.

Ah, but if you carry the Quran, all eyes are on you.

Similarly, there are so many deserving, poor, and suffering children here in the

United States who could benefit from the tender ministrations of a former child star.

But nothing will get your name in the paper like a trip to a Syrian refugee camp.

I have no personal knowledge of Lindsay Lohan, aside from having watched The Parent Trap with my nine-year-old two weeks ago.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of her commitment to her newfound faith, if indeed she has adopted a new religion.

My hunch is that she has married a spiritual search, no doubt prompted by the mixed blessing of too much too soon, with the celebrity sense of self-awareness and self-aggrandizement.

If you’re going to convert to a religion, don’t pick Catholicism or Buddhism and expect to be in the headlines.

To become a Muslim?

Days before Trump’s inauguration? Suddenly, you’re a walking People magazine cover.

The Muslim reaction, at least in social media, to Lohan’s apparent conversion has been positive.

And if it makes her happy or spiritually satisfied, more power to her.

But the Muslims should be wary.

Is she adopting a religion, or co-opting one, so as to get her name back in the headlines?

This may be the most cunning move by a former child star to stay in the limelight, or as she might now say, in’shallah.

New York Times bestselling author and Shark Tank entrepreneur Michael Levin runs BusinessGhost.com, a book ghostwriting firm.

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How I Personally Invented Fake News...Way Back in 1980 —by Michael Levin

Everybody is saying that fake news is a new phenomenon, an unwanted outgrowth of social media, WikiLeaks, and a gullible populace.

I know better.

That’s because I invented fake news, all the way back in 1980.

Let me explain.

It was mid-February. Pitchers and catchers had just reported to spring training, but talk of a baseball strike filled the news (such as it was then).

My buddy David and I were college seniors, about three months away from graduating. We were huge baseball fans and could remain friends despite the fact that he was a diehard Yankees fan and I was all about the Mets. And we thought, isn’t there something we could do to stop the strike?

After all, we are college students.

We hit on the idea of calling sports reporters at each of the newspapers representing the cities where major league baseball teams were located. Back then, there were only about two dozen, instead of the 50 or 70 major league cities today, if I have my facts straight.

We divided up the newspapers. Since Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet, I have no idea how we found the names and phone numbers of the newspapers. We probably got them out of the Almanac (if you’re under 30, look it up).

First, though, we called AP and UPI, and told them the same story we would tell each of the reporters—that the two of us were the cofounders of a nationwide stop the strike movement called “Fans Against Strike Talk” or FAST. We were planning a nationwide petition drive to convince labor and management could resolve their differences.

Responses on the part of the sports reporters ranged from skeptical to fascinated.

I guess at one point they had been college students, too.

The idea that two kids were trying to start a sports revolution from their dorm rooms was entertaining to them.

Back then, long distance calls cost 25 cents a minute, so David and I were clearly putting our money where our mouths were.

I had probably spoken to 10 or 11 reporters when I called the next one and he said, nonchalantly, “Oh, yeah. I just saw that come over the AP wire.”

Fake news was born.

Now that we had a wire service behind us, we called back all the other papers and told them to check the feed from the AP. We were legit. And practically every paper ran with the story.

Other baseball fans saw the stories and contacted us. In particular, there was a group called “Baseball Bugs of America” —you can’t make this stuff up—consisting of fans in half a dozen cities. They would carry our petitions at opening day.

The thing snowballed, and this was without the help of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any of those crutches that fake news creators lean on today.

Within a matter of months, David and I had amassed 22,000 signatures. So of course we did the only sensible thing—we went to Manhattan, located the East Side hotel where the negotiations were taking place, and invited ourselves in.

We met Ray Grebey, the chief negotiator for the owners, in the lobby, and tried to present him with the petitions.

“We don’t want a strike, either,” he told us. “Give that stuff to the Players Association.”

So we headed up in the elevator to the floor where the meeting was taking place in a hotel suite. Also in the elevator were Reggie Jackson and Mark Belanger.

I was fascinated by Reggie Jackson’s arms.  He was in a double-knit polo shirt, and his arms looked surprisingly normal. I was certain that he would be just jacked. He looked, well, normal.  But man, he could drive the ball.

We got upstairs, and for whatever reason, we were admitted to the negotiations. And there stood the god of sports labor relations himself, Marvin Miller, and he was in no mood for our collegiate nonsense.

Instead of giving us a nice pat on the head and telling us not to worry, baseball would find it’s way back to the stadiums and all would be well, he chose to give David and me a dressing down that still smarts to this day.

“You have no business being here,” he said angrily. “This is a negotiation between labor and management. You have no say in it. If you buy a shirt, do you think you have the right to go to the shirt factory and tell the owner how to make the shirt?”

The ball players, who had been watching Miller for a clue as to how to treat us, piled on. Jackson, Belanger, Rusty Staub, and the others basically told us that we were two of the stupidest people they had ever seen.

We left the petitions on the table and headed out of the room, with our tails between our legs.

But it wasn’t over.

Somehow, Good Morning America and Sports Illustrated had gotten a hold of the story. In May of 1980, three months after we had invented our “group,” we found ourselves on the set of Good Morning America, interviewed by David Hartman, a baseball prospect and therefore one with a personal interest in the story.

The morning we aired, I actually had a Latin exam scheduled. I called my professor from the St. Moritz Hotel, where ABC put us up, and told him that I wouldn’t be able to make the final because I was going to appear on national television.

He understood and let me take it the same afternoon.

Sports Illustrated called and ran a piece in the Scorecard section about our humiliation.  I had been reading that column reverently almost from the time I could form words into a sentence.

The other night, I went online to see if there was any record of Fans Against Strike Talk, since it had occurred in pre-Internet times. Remarkably, there were a bunch of stories that came up immediately, from all those newspapers we had hoodwinked back in February, 1980.

But the best part of all? Marvin Miller eventually donated his papers to a graduate school at NYU focused on labor history. One of the items, catalogued online and preserved for all time, consists of a box of petitions from Fans Against Strike Talk.

Did David and I hasten the negotiations? Doubtful.

But that, kids, is how fake news was born.  

(New York Times bestselling author and Shark Tank entrepreneur Michael Levin runs BusinessGhost.com, a book ghostwriting firm)

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For Tony Williams And The Urban Nutcracker, It’s All About Trust by Michael Levin

Tony Williams must trust me.

He must trust me a lot.

He trusts me so much that he let me appear in his Urban Nutcracker this past December at the Back Bay Events Center in Boston.

Williams has presented the Urban Nutcracker for 16 years, so it’s unlikely that I could have loused the whole thing up forever, but still.

Obviously I need to back up and explain a few things.

I’ve taken hundreds of dance classes over the decades—hip-hop, Latin, ballet, and so on. After almost every class, the instructor has singled me out and asked the same question:

“Is this your first dance class?”

Nureyev I’m not.

Still, I can move, and occasionally I can move gracefully. But Williams had never seen me dance, and indeed had never met me face to face prior to his agreeing to allow me to join the Urban Nutcracker cast.

That’s trust.

Williams, Boston Ballet’s first mixed-race dancer and the first African American to dance with that company back in the 1960s, founded the Urban Nutcracker in 2001.

He had just started a dance school in the inner city in Boston. Of the hundred kids who showed up, 20 were boys.

Williams had to figure out how he was going to get those boys on stage.

So he hit upon the idea of the Urban Nutcracker, which blended Tchaikovsky’s traditional music with hip-hop, Duke Ellington, doo-wop, and other musical genres more familiar to his charges.

Duke Ellington’s composition is, in fact, the Nutcracker Suite.

Urban Nutcracker has since become a Boston institution, moving from its original Dorchester home to the John Hancock Hall, also known as the Back Bay Events Center, where 13 performances take place each December, including an autism-friendly version and an LGBTQ edition as well.  

Ballet dancers, including professionals, perform ballet alongside the hip hop and tap dancers in the Urban Nutcracker—so it’s not just a hip hop or tap ballet.

I wrote a piece about the Urban Nutcracker in November, and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to go up on stage with all those kids and dance a little bit.

Williams liked the piece I wrote, so he agreed.

The first time I met him was at the first and only rehearsal I attended.

At the rehearsal, kids of all sizes and shapes were everywhere. But they were all focused, and they were all focused on dance. And they danced amazingly well.

My job was to somehow not mess the whole thing up.

At the rehearsal, a couple of the dancers took me under their wing and showed me where I would be standing, where I would be chassé -ing, and what other stage business I would attend to in my 20-minute guest shot during the first act party scene.

I would pose for a selfie with the rest of the group, be astonished at magic tricks, converse gaily with other guests, and, think of it, dance a little.

The night of the performance, I did not really have time for backstage jitters. I actually sing with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and we had just concluded our last performance of Holiday Pops an hour before call time for the ballet.

As I drove from Symphony Hall to the John Hancock building, where the theater is located, I changed out of my tux and into my costume for the ballet.  

Once at the theater, I found myself surrounded by kids who were all business. They knew what they were doing, they knew about their costumes and makeup, they knew where to go to warm up, and they knew where to wait for their entrances.

It was a well-oiled machine.

It was also a happy, lively, focused machine, but perhaps that’s the wrong word.

I’ll tell you exactly what I found: it’s a family.

The older kids look after the younger ones, and the adults are there to handle whatever concerns the kids have. There were very few adults compared to the massive number of young people ready to perform.

By this point, the performers needed little direction. They did what they needed to do, because of the trust that Tony had placed not just in me but in them.

That’s what’s so spectacular about the Urban Nutcracker—it’s not just a great show, as professional and endearing as any Nutcracker you could hope to see, with the added benefit of the varieties of music and dance that the word “urban” implies—hip-hop, jazz, and doo-wop, blending in seamlessly with Tchaikovsky’s score.

Tony Williams doesn’t just teach young people to dance.

He teaches them that they are trustworthy, and that they can trust themselves.

Is there a better lesson you could provide kids?

The show began, the familiar strains of the Nutcracker filled the theater, and I waited anxiously for my 15 minutes of not quite fame; more like being a backdrop.

And then it was time. My scene began. The dancers showed me where to go, and I hit the stage, knowing that a full house was watching, including my wife and kids.

I’m happy to say that I hit my marks and did everything I was supposed to do—be an extroverted and interested guest in the party scene, pose with the group for the selfie, be dazzled by the magic show, chassé to the couch, make small talk, and ultimately, exit appropriately.

Tony said I did fine.

I’m honored by the trust Tony placed in me, but now that I’ve been part of the Urban Nutcracker, I understand why trusting comes to naturally to Tony Williams.

It’s because trust turns out to be a phenomenal tool for getting results—not just on stage, but in the lives of the young people who have the benefit of coming under Williams’ care.

And if you’ll pardon the pun, for me, that’s what made this Nutcracker...sweet.

[booksandpublishing]

Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail

(and what it means for writers)

[booksandpublishing]

This escalated quickly in the wrong direction, hopefully the details help soothe worried fans.