Still, if my alternative subjects today are flag-burning, an Iraq exit strategy, Santorum vs. Casey, or next year’s mayoral race, I’d rather tell you about Winston. He’s way more interesting.
Getting Winston was the suggestion of a long-ago girlfriend. I’d never had a dog and was leery of the responsibility. In fact, I decided to bring him home only when the breeder told me he was born on Christmas. But that’s not the real divine intervention.
This is: Soon after, the girlfriend was gone and my wife entered the picture. She too had a cocker, named Rudy. We quickly established that Rudy and Winston were brothers, having been bought from the same breeder at the same time. But Winston’s Christmas birth was thrown into doubt when my wife told me the breeder, thinking she was Jewish, told her that Rudy was born in the middle of Hanukkah!
Winston was to become a walking advertisement for managed care. For a while, he was a regular at the Penn vet school ER, making me wish I hadn’t scoffed at a brochure offering health insurance for pets during his first visit. During his life he’d require eye surgery, a urethrotomy, and a hip realignment by the nation’s foremost dog orthopedist after he was hit by a truck. He also needed emotional therapy for separation anxiety, not that I think even Blue Cross has a plan that would have covered that.
There was also the afternoon he cornered a baby bunny in our backyard. He had it in his jowls and must have panicked when I shouted, because down the hatch went the bunny. This too necessitated a trip to Penn, where on X-ray, the bones of Brer Rabbit were discernible.
And those were the real problems, not the false alarms. Like the night he woke me from a dead sleep with what I thought were convulsions. Imagine my embarrassment over at Penn when they told me he had a severe case of the hiccups.
My love for him was such that I went to great lengths to try to breed him. That too was an eye-opener. First, my wife and I took him to a dog show at Ludwig’s Corner, naïvely thinking we’d match our prized possession with someone else’s.
But the dog Nazis at the show demeaned the length of his ears, the shape of his nose, and the size of his belly. So we implemented Plan B: a personal ad titled “Sleepless in Philadelphia” giving an honest approximation of his physical attributes. That too was a loser. No replies.
Finally, we found an evangelical Christian from Lancaster who said she’d let Winston have a go with her Tootsie, as long as WE paid $1,200. Praying that Zvi the banker wouldn’t find out, we made the deal. Then fate dealt Winston a most unkind blow.
Two weeks before his date with Tootsie, we were down the shore and noticed he wasn’t peeing. A quick trip to the vet revealed he had a kidney stone in his bladder, or as our then 6-year-old daughter put it, “Winnie has a rhinestone in his platter.”
I’m left with lots of other memories, too, most still too raw to revisit. They’re no substitute for not having him at my feet when the time comes to plan my next day’s radio show or write my weekly column, but my life was greatly enhanced every day of those 16 years that Winston was at my side.
AFTERWORD
I never had a dog growing up. My father was supportive, but my mother held a veto that she exercised throughout my childhood, although she too came to love Winston. He was, as I describe, my first dog, but certainly not our family’s last. In fact, there was a time when under our roof, we had four kids and four dogs, or as I liked to say, 10 beating hearts in one home. Checkers was our white lab and she lived a full life to age 14½. Mr. Lucy is our miniature dachshund, who is at my feet as I type this note. Floyd, a companion dachshund for Mr. Lucy, met an untimely demise because of my lack of awareness when driving my pickup truck out of our driveway one weekend. The thought of that day still pains me. Over the years, many have asked how Mr. Lucy got his name and I want to share that story here.
Mr. Lucy was a birthday gift from me to my wife in honor of her 42nd birthday. Her birthday is in December, and this one came just months after the tragic passing of one of our close friends, the Honorable Jay C. Waldman, a federal judge based in Philadelphia. So now you are wondering, “Why would you name a dog ‘Mr. Lucy’ for a man whose name was not Mr. Lucy?” Fair question. First let me tell you a little about Jay.
I met Jay C. Waldman when I was a summer legal clerk at the law firm of Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish, and Kauffman, after my first year at Penn Law. I was the lowest man on the firm’s totem pole and spent most of my time performing rudimentary legal research. Jay C. Waldman, in contrast, was at the top of the firm’s food chain, having just joined the firm—as a partner—after leaving his post as counsel to Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh. I think it says a great deal about Jay that he was open to a friendship with a person who was then so far from being his professional equal. Politics was the initial basis of our relationship. We both craved political action. His experience was at a much higher level than mine. Over the years, we became very close.
Jay died on May 30, 2003, after a valiant battle with cancer. His passing left many of us, including my wife, Lavinia, and me, devastated. At the time of his death, he and his wife, Roberta, were two of our closest friends. We ate together every week for the last 15 years of Jay’s life and vacationed together as well. In fact, Jay married us in 1994. We’d invited all our friends to a party we billed as an engagement affair, but at 10 P.M., Lavinia went into a changing room and put on a gown, and when she came out, we shocked the crowd by having Jay, in his role as a federal judge, preside over the surprise ceremony.
He was a brilliant man. Jay, we liked to say, was able “to see around corners.” That’s why his political and personal counsel was always in demand. He was not only Dick Thornburgh’s right hand, including during the Three Mile Island scare, but also Rudy Giuliani’s long-standing confidant. The two had known each other since their days as young prosecutors in the Justice Department, and I think we can credit Jay for Rudy’s run for mayor as a Republican. I don’t rely on Jay in saying this; I rely on Rudy’s recollection as presented in his book, Leadership (2002).
At the time of his death, Jay was a U.S. district court judge (appointed by Ronald Reagan) who had been appointed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals by President George W. Bush but not yet confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In an odd but appropriate twist of fate, in 2004 President George W. Bush nominated Paul S. Diamond to the federal bench, effectively enabling Paul to fill Jay’s position. Paul Diamond was also a former Dilworth partner and one of Jay’s close friends. Paul used to be a frequent guest of my radio program on legal matters, whom I invited because of his acerbic wit, but he decided to stop doing the show when he realized he might one day require Senate confirmation and that what plays in the morning drive might not play in the hallowed halls of the Senate. Too bad for me. He was a great radio guest, and I would always introduce him as “my smartest friend.”
Jay C. Waldman’s send-off was quite an event. I had the privilege of serving as the master of ceremonies. Those who eulogized Jay included Governor Dick Thornburgh, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Senator Arlen Specter. Another speaker had been a friend of Jay’s since childhood, a lawyer named Daniel Shapira. Believe it or not, this is where Mr. Lucy comes in. Danny Shapira is a gifted orator. He stood in front of a packed funeral home auditorium and told poignant and humorous stories about life with Jay. One of the best concerned a childhood poker game involving a young Danny, a young Jay, and an old-timer in their neighborhood named, you guessed it, Mr. Lucy. I couldn’t do the full story justice here and I don’t know that it’s all that appropriate for me to do so, either. Suffice it to say that Mr. Lucy might not have been the most honorable poker player. What I do know is that Jay was the sort of fellow who liked to live life below the radar. For that reason, we didn’t want to give our new beloved pet his moniker, but we did want to pay him tribute with our new family member. So, to honor Jay in a style with which we thought he would approve, we called our new friend Mr. Lucy and think fondly of Jay when we are in his company, every day.
As Paul Harvey would say,
now you know the rest of the story.
ROGER WATERS:
THE PINKO IN FLOYD
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, September 21, 2006
FOR THE SECOND TIME IN MY LIFE, I’m writing a column about Pink Floyd. Specifically, about the man I’ve always considered to be the brains of the band: Roger Waters. The first time I wrote about him was 26 years ago when I was a high school senior at Central Bucks West in Doylestown and editor of the school paper, the Chatterbux.
Back then, I was one of the lucky few to see Pink Floyd perform The Wall, live at the Nassau County Coliseum on Long Island, New York. My review earned me an invitation to the principal’s office. I was encouraged to write a retraction on the grounds that I’d promoted a band whose lyrics the principal associated with drug use.
It was a moment straight out of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.” “We don’t need no education” indeed. I told the principal to pound sand. Maybe even called it a matter of “free speech.”
For three decades, the Floyd has never left my playlist.
In fact, I have done what I call “the cycle” for every Floyd and Roger Waters recording, meaning I bought it in all forms in which it was released: album, 8-track, cassette, and CD. I once made a London taxi driver take me to the Battersea Power Station just so I could photograph the image that appears on the cover of my favorite album, Animals. No one was more pleased when the band reunited to headline at Live 8. And in the never-ending debate among Floyd fans on David Gilmore vs. Rogers Waters, I’ve always sided with Waters.
My affinity for Waters has always been in spite of his politics. Chalk that up to spending too much time studying song lyrics back in the day when they printed such things. I thought rock stars had all the answers.
Fast-forward 25 years.
Last Wednesday, I sat in the front row for a Roger Waters performance at Madison Square Garden. (The same show came to the Tweeter Center in Camden Saturday night.) The crowd was diverse, but mostly like me: white middle-aged guys with receding hair and expanding waists.
It should have been a night to have a few beers and enjoy the soundtrack of my life. Instead, I sat there in my expensive seat and heckled the guy whose music I know by heart.
Waters’s politics are no longer just liberal; they’re over the top.
I was expecting the line about “incurable tyrants and kings” when he sang “Fletcher Memorial Home,” and I knew there’d be references to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
What I wasn’t prepared for was a photo montage featuring Osama, Saddam, and George W. Bush. Especially not two days removed from the anniversary of September 11 in the city where the most death and destruction occurred.
I’m sick and tired of entertainment types arguing a moral equivalency between our president and the Butcher of Baghdad and the architect of 9/11.
It’s not that I object to the criticism of the president or his policy. But Waters and others lose all credibility when they treat Bush and bin Laden the same way. And that was before Waters announced he was beginning the “controversial” part of the show.
I held my breath as he introduced “Leaving Beirut” with a long-winded story about his teens. Then came:
Are these the people we should bomb
Are we so sure they mean us harm
Is this our pleasure, punishment or crime
Is this a mountain that we really want to climb
The road is hard, hard and long
Put down that two by four
This man would never turn you from his door
Oh, George! Oh, George!
That Texas education must have f——you up when you were very small.
This is Waters’s ridiculous ode to some guy who gave him a lift and a meal when he was hitching in Beirut at 17. According to the logic of his lyrics, because he received this courtesy, we’re supposed to overlook the murder of innocents at the hands of radical Islam, including the close to 3,000 who died almost five years to the day, and just blocks from where I was hearing him sing.
I couldn’t take it anymore. “Go visit Ground Zero!” I shouted from the front row. He heard me, and proceeded to avoid our corner of the stage except to oblige a hottie who wanted to take his picture with her cell phone.
Then the pig came out.
I refer to a giant inflatable pig, a hallmark of many Floyd shows, and the symbol of my aforementioned favorite album. Only this time, the pig was a billboard for Waters’s twisted priorities. “Habeas Corpus Matters,” it said, among other things. How appalling. I wondered how many in the New York audience had lost relatives or friends in the 9/11 attack and now were witness to his call for more rights for the murderers?
A certain bald fan watching from the front row as Roger Waters performs Dark Side of the Moon live at Madison Square Garden, on September 13, 2006. Photo by Paul Lauricella.
“Go visit Ground Zero,” I yelled again.
Roger Waters still has free-speech rights. Bald, bespectacled, and willing to shell out for a front-row seat, so do I.
AFTERWORD
Time for another mea culpa. Roger Waters toured North America in 2017, during which time I had the opportunity to spend a few hours in his company and came away with a more nuanced understanding of his thinking than I’d gleaned from the front row. Of course, he would say that only means I hadn’t been paying close attention all those years I’d been listening to him and reading his liner notes.
Before hitting the road, Waters was interviewed by Jon Pareles for a New York Times “TimesTalk” in Midtown Manhattan. Waters was on the verge of releasing a new album—Is This the Life We Really Want?—and embarking on the tour he dubbed “Us + Them.” He showed footage of a recent performance in Mexico City with virulently anti-Trump images and made clear that both the album and the tour would have significant political overtones:
Unfortunately, we’re all forced to think about current events because we feel the impact of current events. We could go on about your nincompoop president all night. It might be somewhat redundant; he’s doing a good job on his own without any of us interfering in his condemnation of himself.
As I listened, I wondered whether Waters worried about his ability to sell seats in red states, and when it came time for audience questions, I stood up and raised the issue. He responded: “You know, just because it’s a red state, and it’s apparently very conservative, Kansas City, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a viable resistance to this administration in that city.”
He also noted that he’d be playing “a bunch” of Pink Floyd songs for which there was great audience attachment, including the song from the legendary Dark Side of the Moon album for which the tour had been named.
“Us and Them” from Dark Side of the Moon, you know, “with, without, and who’ll deny that’s what the fighting’s all about.” You can’t get any more contemporary than that. . . . We better start working together cohesively or we’re all fucked.
I wrote a Sunday Inquirer column predicting that the tour would be the most politically charged of the summer season. By then I had re-evaluated my treatment of Waters eleven years earlier:
Five years post 9/11, I wasn’t bothered by the idea of presumed terrorists sitting in Guantanamo Bay without having been charged with a crime. . . . At the end of the Obama administration, 41 men were still held at Gitmo out of the 779 people imprisoned there since 2001. Of the 41, 31 were being held without charges. That’s not right. We’re better than the status quo.
I ended the column saying: “Sometimes listening to great music means listening to someone whose message makes you uncomfortable.”
The column made clear that while I still had political disagreements with Waters, that which separated us had narrowed. And I wasn’t finished exploring the outlook of a singer-songwriter whose solo projects and work as the chief lyricist for Pink Floyd I’d been listening to since my teens. I soon made contact with Fran DeFeo, Waters’s longtime publicist, and asked to interview Waters fo
r CNN while he was on tour. She was very accommodating and invited me to do so in Miami, where Waters was performing on July 13 at the American Airlines arena. The plan was for me to interview him at his hotel the night before the show, and then to have a CNN crew shoot some B-roll of me watching Waters do a sound check the night of the show, preferably as he rehearsed with local school kids who would participate in a dance routine during “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”
The afternoon of the interview, we met by happenstance in an otherwise deserted gym at the Mandarin Oriental, where we both were staying. I’d never have known the fit and trim Waters was 73 to see him working out with a trainer and his body man. A few hours later, he sat for my 30-minute interview in a hotel room CNN had cleared out for the occasion. I asked whether he was concerned about alienating longtime fans with his virulent anti-Trump message.
”It would be a lot easier to be on tour if I weren’t doing any of this, if I didn’t have opinions,” he said.
When I asked him what he might say to someone looking for escapism rather than politics at a rock concert, he was quick with the reply: “Go see Katy Perry.”
I was pleased with the interview and only sorry that because of time constraints, we could not play it all. With commercial breaks, it would have filled the entire hour (which would have suited me just fine, but not CNN). I enjoyed being in his company and even when we disagreed on subjects like the “war on terror” (I’m using scare quotes because when I said that phrase, he bristled), I still found him to be civil, bright, passionate, and engaging. I left thinking I could have spoken to him for hours more about politics. Unbeknownst to me, I’d soon get that chance. Twice.
The next day, the afternoon of the Miami show, DeFeo told me that the Miami Beach Parks Department had just canceled the participation of its Teen Club in Waters’s show that night. The adults had decided to deny the kids the opportunity to perform a dance routine they’d been rehearsing because the adults had determined that Waters was anti-Semitic, a charge that has long dogged the rock star. The story of the cancellation was quickly gaining steam in the blogosphere. So as I sat watching Waters perform his sound check from the fifth row of an otherwise empty basketball arena that seats 21,000, I suggested to DeFeo and Kate Watkins, who works with Waters’s manager, that they allow me to record a brief response to the cancellation on my iPhone that I would post on my Facebook page. After they consulted with Waters, he agreed. By now, the doors to the arena were opening, the show was 90 minutes from starting, and my eldest son had joined me at the venue. The two of us were ushered backstage so that I could ask Waters about the abrupt cancellation of the kids. Sean Evans, Waters’s videographer and the director of the extraordinary 2014 documentary movie The Wall, recorded our conversation. Waters seemed to relish the controversy and was very eager to set the record straight. “Peeved” is probably the word that best describes his mood. He said that in every city, he goes out of his way to recruit kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to perform with him and that this was first time there’d been a cancellation.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 13