2018 is looking to be a good year for small business. My personal definition of “a small business” is an owner-operator doing between $1M and $75M a year. I do not pretend to know the trends outside this group. The following are the small business trends that seem to be emerging in 2018: 1: Small […]
I am, by profession, an ad writer. I tell stories about people and products and services. You do, too. But because I get paid for it, I spend a lot of time considering – and measuring – the impact of stories. Some of the stories I’ve told have made people an enormous amount of money. […]
A pleasant surprise is the beginning of delight. You surprise and delight your family by listening to them. You surprise and delight your friends by being interested in what they say. You surprise and delight your customers by giving them your full attention. That’s why everyone likes you. Ray Bard is the ringmaster of untamed quotes, captured […]
Indy Beagle brought me an electric fan and a hammer. The fan is to blow away the smoke. The hammer is to shatter the mirrors. You hear a lot of talk these days about transparency and engagement and the Zero Moment of Truth. My friend Dewey Jenkins says the most dangerous statement a stock broker […]
Fifty years ago, an 18-year old songwriter named Laura Nyro asked, “Can you surry? Can you picnic?” Laura Nyro didn’t tell us HOW to surry. She just asked if we could do it. Then she instructed us to, “Surry down to the stoned soul picnic. There’ll be lots of time and wine, red-yellow honey, sassafras […]
I was worried Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t be the same this year without Uncle Alfred. Every year for as long as I can remember, when the time came for each of us to name something we were thankful for, Uncle Alfred would tell his famous Story of the Shoes. “Your mother was six and I was […]
The world of online marketing was rocked so hard this summer that it almost fell to its knees. Some really big names in online marketing had the courage to announce that online customers are more likely to buy your products if they’ve heard of your company and feel good about it. Dumbfounded, I spoke to […]
We are alert to danger because our survival depends upon it. But there is more to life than danger. There is singing. And looking at the sky. And chewing on a blade of grass. Have you done any of those things recently? They call to you from beyond your window. Walk outside. Sing a song. […]
In 2018, I will continue to fade from sight. By the end of 2019, I hope to be completely transparent. This has been my goal since May of 2000. If the founder of an organization remains vitally involved until the day they are no longer viable, the organization they founded will cease to exist within […]
Dale Earnhardt, Jr will make 21.4 million dollars this year. He is the world’s one hundredth most highly paid athlete.1 But don’t assume pro athletes make a lot of money. The sad truth is that the top 10 percent – the star athletes – receive more than 90 percent of all the money paid to athletes. If […]
Your body doesn’t have a single immune system; it has a bundle of them. And the most powerful of these systems is the one that rejects foreign tissue. This is why doctors do everything they can to suppress it during transplant surgery. That suppression doesn’t always work. When the cells of your body detect an […]
Characters in books and movies and TV shows are magical. They make us laugh and cry and hold our breath as they take us to a vivid elsewhere. Conflicted, exaggerated, accelerated characters live in a world more interesting than our own. And it is a world we like to visit, even if it’s only 30 […]
The object of conformity and compliance is to bring the best of the past forward. A person can achieve expert results by following in the footsteps of an expert. The old ways are often the best ways. But you, my strong-willed friend, are a nonconformist; a renegade, a rebel, a misfit. One of “those” people. […]
“I was told that repartee heightens the attention of an audience.” “Is this going to be like that time you told me about ambergris?” “What do you mean?” “There I was, minding my own business, when you started telling me how the most expensive perfume in the world comes from whale puke. Like I needed […]
(1.) Adrenaline is a neurotransmitter that increases blood flow to the muscles during times of excitement and creates involuntary recall of events. When there is adrenaline in the blood, you are more likely to remember the moment. This is why advertisers try to make their ads sound exciting. (2.) Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter that produces […]
Real experts in online marketing rarely use the phrase “going viral,” because it has no agreed-upon definition. Instead, they talk about “Discovery Content” and “Community Content.” To understand Discovery Content, just look at anything posted by BuzzFeed or any of the other organizations whose principal income is generated by the companies who sponsor their clickbait.1 But […]
Whittington said it. Eisenberg endorsed it. The waitress distracted us with a question of her own. I somehow knew to capture that moment with a photo. Our conversation never made it back to Daniel’s idea that every life has a theme song, but later that day I carried his wandering thought to the Worthless Bastards […]
Everyone agrees that Henry Leverseege would have become much more famous had he lived beyond 29. But even though he died young, his paintings hang in museums across England. There is only one of them in private hands. Mine. 🙂 Henry was born in 1803, the year that Thomas Jefferson famously negotiated the Louisiana Purchase […]
I consider myself to be the luckiest person on earth. And I can tell you of several specific moments in my life that would convince you of it. Being lucky is a choice I made. Because the truth is that I could just as easily tell you of other moments in my life that would […]
Ivan and Alvina are in their early 20s. Ivan was born and raised in Bulgaria. Alvina, in Siberia. When Alvina sees Ivan playing keyboards in a café on the Black Sea, they become pen pals. And then they fall in love. And then they get married. They dream of moving to the west. Canada says […]
The door to immediate action is easily kicked open by the steel-toed boot of urgency. If you want people to take immediate action, you’re going to need a credible shortage. A shortage of product. “Only 11 remain!” A shortage of time. “Sale ends Saturday at 6PM!” A shortage of capacity. “Only 128 seats are available!” […]
1. Freeze-frame each moment when something rocks your world. 2. When you cry or become frightened or get angry or laugh or are overwhelmed by a sense of wonder, reverse-engineer what just happened. Ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? How did they do this to me?” Was it something in the sequence of […]
When you’re trying to transfer a thought or a feeling to someone else, the impact of your communication will be determined by the following equation: How big is the thought in your mind, or the feeling in your heart? How quickly can you transfer it? The Law of Impact (or force,) documented by Isaac Newton, […]
I always look forward to my lunches with Ray Bard because he teaches me valuable things. He doesn’t intend to teach me things; it just happens. Our short lunches last 3 hours. Our record is 6 ½. Ray is my publisher. During our most recent lunch, Ray said – and I’m inclined to agree with […]
You hear a lot of talk these days about how no one listens to the radio anymore. Interestingly, the people who make these claims offer no evidence beyond the fact that commercial free music can be obtained through online streaming. This reminds me of that famous malaprop by Yogi Berra, “No one goes there anymore. […]
Exactly three hundred and thirty years ago – roughly ten generations of parents and children ago – the French explorer La Salle, searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River, was murdered by his own men. We were experiencing dysfunction among supposed team members. In Virginia, a panicked Nicholas Spencer of Westmoreland County provides Virginia […]
Every successful person has a blind spot. Here’s what often happens: You have a unique approach, a particular process, or a special emphasis. It separates you from your competitors. Your commitment to it makes you successful. So far, so good. You found a way to be different and it made you a success! But now […]
I’m in a strange mood. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ve been contemplating things unsaid. Deeds undone. Symphonies unfinished. The reality of mortality has shown up as a hole in the light, a silhouette on the horizon. And its whispering voice has led me to compile a list of unfiltered thoughts that seem to me, […]
A world of absolutes is a tidy world, but narrow. The wider world must make room for things that are not. “Make room for things that are not.” I wrote about that last week, didn’t I? We cling to absolutes, I think, because they give us the illusion of stability in a world of constant […]
We live in a universe of paired opposites. Proton and electron. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Rise and fall. Male and female. Day and night. What you embrace does not define you nearly so much as what you exclude. I’m speaking of self-definition. EXAMPLE: One person says they love cars made by Ford. Another […]
Others judge you by the outcomes you achieve, but you judge yourself by your intentions. You judge yourself as God does. This is why I like you. You have no power over the vagaries of your circumstances; to be in the right place at the right time is not a matter of skill, but of […]
People are being caught off guard by the quirky tale of Sunshine and Poobah. Evidently, reading it cover-to-cover is a much different experience than reading it one chapter at a time. This funny little book is rapidly gaining a life of its own. This is the backstory of how – like Frosty the Snowman – […]
Boring, ineffective ad campaigns are almost always the result of data-worship. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” He was talking about using data to make predictions. Amos Tversky, one half of the Nobel Prize-winning duo* of Kahneman and Tversky, renowned for their discovery […]
According to all the cognitive neuroscientists, the essential gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds. Here’s a shocker for you: the written language was developed only to make the spoken language permanent. In fact, the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. […]
England, 1890 – Barely 5 feet tall on his tiptoes, 30 year-old Jimmy was a pen pal of 40 year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author of Treasure Island, during the final years of Stevenson’s life when he lived on the island of Samoa. The two never met, but if they had, they would doubtless have […]
What do you value? Are there things for which you would be willing to suffer humiliation, rejection, and financial loss? These are your deep core values, your non-negotiables. It’s important that you know what they are. A person without non-negotiables is a person without passion. But it’s also important to know your negotiables. A person […]
On the day he died, long ago, a man said, “In this world you will have trouble.” I’ve never had reason to doubt him. Money trouble Work trouble Relationship trouble Legal trouble Health trouble Family trouble Tax trouble You don’t get to choose whether or not you will have trouble. But you do get to […]
Our nation is changing, of course. Things aren’t like they used to be. Famous clothing brands are at historic lows and major retailers are closing hundreds of stores. In 2016, 2,056 stores closed their doors. The worst year on record is 2008, when 6,163 stores shut down. Brokerage firm Credit Suisse says in a just-released research report, “Barely a […]
Michael Jordan wasn’t a perfectionist; he was an improvisationist. That’s why he was hard to stop. A perfectionist knows exactly what he’s going to do. He plans his work and works his plan. The only problem is that because he knows, the defender knows, too. It’s easy to anticipate what a perfectionist is going to do. […]
Ask a businessperson or a marketing professional, “What is branding?” Go ahead. Go do it. I’ll wait… Did they mention the importance of a having a logo? Did they talk about the consistent use of a chosen group of “brand” colors and a particular font and layout and look and feel? Have you done what they told […]
People read books for the strangest of reasons. I recently read a book about a female aviator in Africa in the 1930s. I have no interest in aviation. I have no interest in Africa. But it was a great book. I began reading it after I stumbled onto something Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1942 letter to […]
Business Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by at least two distinct identities or dissociated personality states that show up in a company’s behavior. BPD emerges when unrelated teams work independently in the areas of (1.) Advertising (2.) Web Presence (3.) Sales Training. If a person encounters your ads, then visits your website, then comes to […]
There are two kinds of advertising. The goal of the first is to make yours the company the customer thinks of immediately and feels the best about when they – or any of their friends – need what you sell. This is called a “relational” ad campaign. It works better and better with each passing year. […]
Four words have echoed in my head for several days. “Not everyone. Not always.” Why do such thoughts leap sparkling like swordfish from the dark waters of the mind? I can’t be sure, but I suspect my heart is responding to all those authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” with misguided certainty. They whisper […]
Hi, everyone! My name is _____________________. Because Wizard Academy appreciates your generous donation to help keep Chapel Dulcinea open, free and beautiful, I’m going to take you on a 4-minute walk to Wizard’s Tower, where we’ll enter the underground art gallery, then go straight up to the Star Deck where I’ll tell you a 2-minute story, then […]
I’m experimenting with radio in a way that, for me, is new and different. Many of those who understand what I’m doing won’t agree with the fundamental premise of my experiment. But that’s not what worries me. I’m concerned about those who will agree and then attempt it – and fail. I believe they’ll fail […]
We encounter “meta” most often in the word metaphor. We create metaphors when we see the same pattern in two, unrelated things. Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” But Shakespeare wasn’t […]
If you don’t understand the title of today’s memo, just ask a 12 year-old boy. (If you didn’t grow up in the South, your 12 year-olds may be more familiar with “He who smelt it, dealt it.”) With a title like “The Smeller’s the Feller,” does it surprise you that today’s memo is about a tried-and-true management tool? […]
Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them. If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs. We can intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones. All […]
Some lessons we never learn. For me, the familiar face of failure hangs like a Royal Portrait above the grand staircase of my social behavior. Lest my meaning be obscured by that flowery metaphor, I am simply stating for the record – before God, the world and you – that my greatest recurring mistake is that I often […]
“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5 words telling us? Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t need a Buddha head?” Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? […]
I was in the middle of a storm at sea last week when my lover, wife and partner of 40 years spoke some wisdom into my life. She said, “Tell me what happened, step-by-step, play-by-play.” So I did. She said, “Honey sometimes when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you think you’re being clear when you’re […]
Bad ads are about you, your company, your product, your service. Good ads are about the customer and how their sun will shine brighter, the air around them will glitter with magic, and the stars in their darkness will twinkle more richly if they choose to bring you into their world. I’m going to hire […]
People would rather be angry than bored. Anger is a form of excitement. That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it? But if you can choose, choose laughter. “Man is the laughing animal…” 1 Anger is dangerous and crying is much less fun. I’m talking about storytelling and communication. I’m talking about books and movies. I’m talking […]
Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published The Three Body Problem. His math is still used by NASA today. In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another. Gravity is a useful […]
I still call it Christmas. I’m told you’re not supposed to do that any more. You’re not supposed to do a lot of things. Forget the religion called Christianity for a moment. Ignore the historical blunders of Christians. I’m talking about Christmas. Those opening few sentences are going to land me in real trouble unless you […]
I was 16 during the winter of 1974. Ted was 52. We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma. I was known as “Schoolboy.” Standing near the heat of the coffee pot waiting for the horn to signal the end of our break, Ted would tell stories about World War II. Those stories […]
When Kermit Roosevelt was fifteen, he shared a book of poems he admired with his father, the President of the United States. As an encouragement to Kermit, his father sent a lengthy review of that book to The Outlook, an important publication of the time, saying, “There is an undoubted touch of genius in the […]
1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings. “The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.” “The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.” Bug is nonspecific. Ant is specific. “…moved along the ground” is mildly specific, but not vivid. “…crawled between the blades of […]
Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey. We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet. If this dirt-covered rock we occupy was the size of a standard schoolroom globe covered with a coat of varnish, the thickness […]
You bought it for 50 cents. You sold it for a dollar. You made 50 cents. What was your percentage of profit? You could say “100 percent” because the 50-cent profit you made is equal to your original investment of 50 cents. But if we look at it from the basis of your selling price, […]
Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive? Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a direct-response television campaign he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy. That ad campaign began as a $100,000 experiment. Ronny told me he’s currently spending nearly a million dollars a […]
A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers. They wanted me to talk about Pendulum, the book we published in 2012. Specifically, they wanted me to explain how we knew four years ago exactly what would be happening right now. […]
It seems to be a fundamental law of the universe that a thing cannot exist without its opposite. Negatively charged electrons revolve around positively charged protons. Male and female. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Seedtime and harvest. Every good thing exists in a state of duality. A voice spoke into the darkness, “Let there […]
The statesman, according to Wikipedia, “who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism,” was Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). I was unaware of this until I stumbled upon it while searching for the origin of the famous statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” […]
Science is the study of objective reality. Art is the study of subjective reality. Subjective reality is perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction. We’ve spoken of this before, but I think we need a refresher: Electromagnetic waves exist regardless of whether you perceive them. They […]
Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction. He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had. Rockwell showed my generation a fictional America and we believed in it. I […]
September 17, 1787: When George Washington saw the Constitution of the United States of America finally adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of Don Quixote de La Mancha.1 According to MountVernon.org, “this seventeenth-century Spanish […]
I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing. Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it difficult to accept and believe these compliments. I say this because 70 percent of our population suffers from […]
Sunlight is composed of red, green and blue light waves. Combine these together and you get white light. Remove the red from white light and you will no longer be able to see red in anything illuminated by that light. Red will no longer exist. Remove the blue and you will no longer see blue. This […]
Each of us likes to think we believe what we believe because the evidence dictates it. But if that were true, wouldn’t each of us believe the same things? We call one person a romantic and another a realist, and we secretly think the realist to be more valuable, do we not? Labels are powerful […]
Why do old songs pop into our heads? Unheard for decades – and often a song we never even liked – there it is, filling the echo chamber of the articulatory loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association areas of our brains. “…smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kannnng-aroo, now don’t tell meeeeeeee I’ve […]
The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” – Niels Bohr, physicist “The test of a first-rate […]
Time and Money are interchangeable. We can always save one by spending more of the other. Time and Money are interchangeable. We prize the one we feel to be in short supply. Time and Money are interchangeable. We burn them both like the wax of a candle. What is patience if not the quiet, dark burning […]
Most people associate The Power of Myth with the 1988 PBS television series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, or with the accompanying book of that name. But it was John F. Kennedy who spoke of the power of myth with the greatest clarity and insight. The occasion was his 1962 Commencement Address to the graduates […]
His gifts didn’t prove that he was rich. His gifts proved that he cared. And the smallness of his gifts proved that I could afford to care, too. My long friendship with Percy began exactly 30 years ago when I saw him on the cover of a magazine as it lay on a coffee table […]
The reason people write poorly is because they read too many blogs, tweets, news stories and Facebook posts. As you read, so will you write. Maxwell Rotbart. the son of roving reporter Rotbart, asked me to name 10 books he should read. When I asked the purpose of this reading, Maxwell said, “I just want to […]
She stood silently on the cracked asphalt, her summer dress billowing in the breeze, the calm at the center of the storm that was spreading across the country. Around her swirled police officers and demonstrators that had blocked Airline Highway in Baton Rouge to denounce the death of Alton Sterling, shot by police outside a convenience store. Many protesters […]
Like most men, I’ve long been fascinated with women. But if we look beyond the physical differences, what is it that defines “woman”? Research reveals a series of definitions so conflicted that I believe anyone who attempts to define “woman” is certain to be criticized. But when has that ever been an impediment to a […]
People have been asking me to explain symbols lately. Symbols are a language of the unconscious mind. This is why our dreams are full of them. A person sits alone in a rowboat on the ocean at night, looking up at the stars. That symbol – whether expressed visually or in words – speaks to us of spirituality […]
I scribbled my original “Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Marketing” on a hotel bar napkin in Portland, Oregon in 1997 and then presented those mistakes in a seminar the next day to 800 people. The following year it became an important chapter in my first book, The Wizard of Ads. Happily, that book went on […]
Indiana Beagle is the spirit of curiosity, exploration and adventure. His twin sister Intuition is the beagle of my Destinae trilogy and the mother of Faith and Hope. Intuition is wordless but Indy can speak. Intuition came to life in June, 2001, during some early morning laughter with Princess Pennie. There is a beagle in our brain,” […]
When I was a boy, I wanted an older brother. Not just a year or two older, but six or eight or ten years older. I wanted to be able to ask him things and trust the motives behind his answers. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to accumulate seven older brothers who speak […]
Loren L. Lewis always said, Never play another man’s game. Always have a game of your own.” In the advertising business, RFP means “Request For Proposal.” In other words, some big company wants you to dance for them. They want you to sit up and beg like a dog at the dinner table. I’ve never […]
“Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.” The wit of these 7 words is rooted in the fact that the second sentence is an anomaly – an unexpected intrusion into the oft-repeated idea that silence is golden. The anomaly is then brought to closure and resolved in the mind of the listener. Duct tape is, in fact, silver. […]
If the pendulum of the West continues as it has for 3,000 years, our current “We” generation will zenith in 2023. Frankly, I’m looking forward to getting past that zenith and heading back the other way. The early part of a “Me” generation is a beautiful thing. But then again, so is the early part […]
Chronic dissatisfaction is the price of progress. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are famous for never being satisfied. Always pushing, driving, demanding, questioning, never slowing, positively perfectionist. But is it wise to look at them as role models? What’s the value of pushing and driving if you can never be satisfied? These questions occurred to me as […]
Hungry people look for food. Sad people look for hope. Ambitious people look for opportunity. Oppressed people look for escape. But if food is available and you are neither sad nor oppressed and your ambition is – for now at least – satisfied, you are contented. Contented people look for entertainment. The company that wins more […]
In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” But day after day, week after week, month after month, things that are “merely urgent” keep me from doing what is truly important. What? That’s been happening to you, too? On Tuesday, Vice Chancellor […]
When his classmates at Wizard Academy dared him to do it, Garrison Cox rewrote the opening section of the Declaration of Independence to make it more easily understood. According to Garrison, Thomas Jefferson’s original was written at grade level 19.5. That’s a college education plus 3-and-a-half years of grad school! Garrison wrote his first revision at […]
A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods.” – Dennis Miller We think everyone else sees what we see. How could they not? And we think everyone would believe what we believe if only we could explain it clearly. […]
The Internet rose to its full height in 2005 and cast a bright shadow across the land. It became our newspaper, our telephone book, our encyclopedia and our primary mailbox. Whole categories of advertising where swept away by that tsunami. Radio suffered the least damage of all the major media. She has proven to be far more […]
Do what people expect you to do, say what they expect you to say, and you will quickly lose their attention. Nothing new… nothing surprising… nothing different. This is the essence of boredom. And it’s exactly what most advertisers put in their ads. And then there is a second group of advertisers who insert a series […]
Let us suppose that this everyday world were at some one point invaded by the marvelous.1 According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, such an event “requires a distinctive mode of organization—what sociologists call an art world. In art worlds, artists (musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers, cartoonists, and so on) gather in inspired collaborations: […]
YOUNG ONE: “Master, does success go to the clever one, or to the lucky one?” MERLYN: “Success is sometimes discovered by the clever one, and occasionally by the lucky one, but it is most often laid hold of by the determined one.” YOUNG ONE: “Will you teach me to be determined?” MERLYN: “Determination is dangerous… […]
Wizard Academy is now 16 years old. If we could find her birth certificate, we’d take her down to the DMV to get her driver’s license and then she could sport about town in Rocinante (above,) the only vehicle she owns. They grow up so fast. When Wizard Academy is 30, I’ll be 72. At least […]
Standing in the corner of a dark theater, Joe listens as melancholy, majestic music rises from the orchestra pit to soar high above the spotlights. Joe has been hired to write lyrics for a musical play about Don Quixote. The first lyricist – the famous poet W.H. Auden – has been fired because his lyrics were downbeat, defeated […]
Facts are stacked like bricks to become a tower. Do you see it? But a story is a wave that takes you on a journey and leaves the memory of the tower far behind. Facts are solid. Stories are seductive. You will find the facts in the paragraphs below. You will find the stories in the rabbit […]
Agnes De Mille once wrote, “No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.” Agnes was right about most of us, but she was completely wrong about Herbert. Herbert sculpts and paints. Abstract expressionism is his thing. “It’s like jazz,” he says. “Art is a feel. I […]
Pressure, pressure, pressure unspeakable then BANG the world breaks open and a plateau pops up from solid rock, creating a fabulous view of the land below. That’s what happened in Central Texas. That’s what happens in life, too. But we’ll talk about that in a minute. Wizard Academy straddles the Texas escarpment, a magical place […]
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