December 2012 “Now that is what I call settling in and hitting the ground running,” wrote my friend Eric Vazquez on Jan. 13 when I announced on Facebook that I had been accepted as a member of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus after having been placed on the reserve list for a week. […]

March 12, 2012 At 7 this morning, along a six-mile round-trip loop from Asbury Park to Belmar, I ran between the sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean and the almost-full moon faintly silvery and on its descent in the brightening western sky. It was a beautiful and inspiring sight, and an apt metaphor for our […]

December 2011 In 1979 I read a novel, the title long gone from my memory, in which the protagonist, a young man living at home with his parents, drank a lot of milkshakes, fretted about his life in general and his lack of a romantic relationship in particular and, at the end of the novel, […]

Easton Mountain, Aug. 13, 2011 He saw Jesus in my eyes As we gazed and touched         that chilly afternoon We paired in workshop exploration         in a field of men My blue orbs locked on his brown As his thirtysomething fingers Assuaged my fiftysomething skin I palmed his […]

December 2010 … I started quiet and slow with no surprise. Then one morning I woke to realize I had a good thing going. That observation, paraphrasing a lyric by Stephen Sondheim, encapsulates my life in 2010 in several areas. It refers, for instance, to an early-January four-mile run in 10-degree frigidity that made me […]

December 2009 What started in 2008 as my timid re-emergence in the realm of public singing grew full force in 2009 into a series of unexpected musical highlights and one unexpected personal revelation. Certainly I had no idea that an offhanded remark I made at the end of a church choir rehearsal early in the […]

May 2009 Sometimes a singer, like an actor with a particular role, has to study and practice and mature before his abilities match the technical and emotional demands of a song. And sometimes synchronicity presents a gift of a performing opportunity when the singer is finally, if unknowingly, ready. And so it came to be […]

A look back at 2008 Hibernation to expansiveness, letting go to reclamation, wariness to open-heartedness — 2008 was a study in contrasts. My year started out with a January highlight of an almost five-hour hike with Bob Nelson in Stokes State Forest, a hike that began on icy roads and snowy paths in 30-degree weather […]