365 Memories

Then there are the books that shock you. Really shock you. There's a book like this for me, a book by Shel Silverstein . It wouldn't shock me as an adult, and especially not now that I myself am a writer: I understand the desire to make sometimes drastic departures from your best-known material. (Plus, sometimes your best-known material doesn't even represent your best self, though I'm not saying one way or the other with respect to Silverstein .) We all have many facets to our personalities, many wells to draw from in our quest for creative expression. Today, I'm sure I'd love this large-format, coffee table book of drawings—or if not love it, then at least really appreciate it—and I hope my parents still have it in their personal library. I'm guessing that they do. But when I saw this book for the first time, I wasn't an adult. I was around ten or eleven years old, and the book in question, despite Silverstein's huge contributions to the world of...

OK, here's the story: first in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, my father worked for Playboy. In Chicago, it seemed like no big deal. Maybe my young age had something to do with it; certainly the Midwestern normalcy of Windy City operations also played a role. In Chicago, Playboy is business; in Los Angeles, it's THE Business (meaning Hollywood entertainment). We moved from Chicago to L.A. in 1979, so that my father could take on the position of Senior Vice President, Office of the Chairman. The Chairman at the time was Hugh M. Hefner; the "office" was his legendary mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood (though my dad actually did have an office in the boring-looking building on Sunset Strip, which I think no longer exists in that location). There are many stories-within-the-story, as you might imagine, but most of them are properly my dad's stories to tell and not my own. So, in this blog of firsthand memories, I will stick to my elementary-school view. And now,...

Sundays in Chicago, when I was young: elementary school age, Sunday school age. The mornings belonged to me and my father. Often in those years, he traveled for business during the week, and this made "seventh day" mornings all the more precious. On Sundays, we'd leave our family's Lincoln Park apartment early, dressed in church clothes, and head downtown. Occasionally we'd stop at my father's office in the old Playboy (Palmolive) building, which was the art deco, stair-step style skyscraper at the top of Michigan Avenue—the one with the beacon on top, sometimes called the Lindbergh beacon, that is now extinguished but that would, throughout my childhood years in the Windy City, shine like a lighthouse guiding nighttime traffic down Lake Shore Drive. I used to watch the spinning, searching light in the dark and know that this was where my father was; those evenings he worked late, I imagined that beacon of light still connected us and that this was what would ...