Cate Edwards was interviewed on “Today” this morning. Cate is the eldest daughter of John Edwards and the late Elizabeth Edwards. As I watched the interview, I was tremendously impressed with her poise and her ability to convey how she felt while giving the bare minimum of a reply, such as when Savannah Guthrie asked her about Rielle Hunter, the woman her father had the affair with.  Cate answered very politely, but her eyes were screaming “Trailer trash!!”

God knows there’s no shortage to choose from, but I don’t know if a politician ever let me down more than John Edwards. With his youthful good looks and his emphasis on social justice, he had a Kennedy-esque air about him and I loved that he represented my home state, North Carolina. He had ideas that I really agreed with and seemed almost destined to be president. And then, well, then, he fell into the honey trap. As we see politician after politician fall, I honestly do think that is the difference between men and women. We don’t see female politicians getting into these kinds of scandals. Every time it happens, I’m torn between why we care at all (since it’s someone’s private life) and anger that the man just couldn’t keep his pants zipped, especially when he has so much to lose. As usual in such cases, his lies about the affair and his paternity were way more disturbing than the actual affair.... though had I known that all it took to get a guy to fall for you was to walk up to him and say “You’re hot,” my life could have been a hell of a lot more interesting. 

I digress. While Cate had to spill about Rielle and her dad, the main point of her “Today” show appearance was to plug the Elizabeth Edwards Foundation. The mission of the EEF is to “educate, enrich, and empower” youth from low-income backgrounds through mentoring, public service, and community leadership. Today’s $10 goes to EEF. 

On a side note, I don’t know if I’ve ever been more proud of my hometown than when the cretins from  Westboro Baptist Church decided to protest at Edwards’ funeral for reasons that make no more sense than any of their other protests do. The service was at Edenton Street Methodist, a beautiful, 200-year old church in downtown Raleigh. Several hundred locals lined the streets around the church and linked arms to block the protesters and to pay their final respects for Edwards. 

March 29: Elizabeth Edwards Foundation 

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As I’ve written before, I love reading. I don’t spend nearly enough time reading books for as much as I love to do so. I really hate that there are so few physical bookstores left. Just like getting lost in a record store, browsing through a book store has always filled me with a dizzying delight, overwhelmed at all the possibilities at my fingertips. 

Last summer, I went to the mountains with some friends. We’d hike and then we’d spend part of the day all sitting on the huge, wrap-around porch together reading in rocking chairs or in the hammock. We were all reading our own books, but we were all doing it together. It felt like great together time, even though we weren’t talking. There was total contentment in our silence, punctuated only by turning pages (remarkably, we were all reading actual books, none of us was on a Kindle or some other time of iReader.)

Yesterday, I finished my book club’s March selection, “The Fault In Our Stars” by John Green. It’s a young adult novel that came out last year, but it is still doing very well (so much so that I don't think it's gone to paperback yet) and for good reason. It’s terrific. The story is told through the eyes of Hazel, a 16-year old terminal cancer patient, and her relationship with her parents and her boyfriend, 17-year old Augustus, who has lost his leg to cancer, but is in remission. 

The story has some twists that never strain credulity. Even though I saw  only one of them coming, the others didn’t seem implausible when they arrived.  The teenagers seem wise beyond their years —which isn’t a stretch given they are dealing with adult issues— but they don’t always have the perfect quip and they very often act their age. Their parents, who are dealing with the horrible threat of losing their children, come across as sympathetic and authentic. 

There’s awkwardness and sadness and joy and reality and humor. I’ve read nothing else by John Green, but I certainly will if his other books even approach the magnificence of this one. 

I was reading through his acknowledgements and he thanks a young girl, Esther Earl, who died of cancer and namechecks the charity her family has started in her honor: This Star Won’t Go Out. Esther was 16 when she died of thyroid cancer and it’s clear from reading her story that she deeply influenced Green as he crafted Hazel, in not only her spunky personality but in her cancer experience. On This Star Won’t Go Out’s webpage, her parents write about Esther and her 16 years and end the post with “Rest In Awesome, Esther!”  Wow...

TSWGO.org offers financial assistance to families who have a child with cancer. Since its founding in 2010, TSWGO has helped more than 50 families and distributed more than $100,000. I always find it incredible when a family takes its own pain and turns it into a way to help others going through the same thing.  I think if I had lost a child, I’d still be struggling to get out of bed every day. 

March 10: This Star Won’t Go Out (TSWGO.org)

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About a year ago, some friends and I started a book club. I’ve been in and out of them for probably 20 years and I wanted to begin a new one to force me to read at least one non-work related book a month.

It’s tough to gather people together given everyone’s very busy schedules, much less find the time to read the book, especially if it’s more than 100 pages, and doesn’t come with pictures and large print. Just kidding about the last part, but there have been times when I’ve held the book in my hand (I’m old school like that, though I now have a Kindle), leafed through how many pages it is and felt a sense of dread since I inevitably wait until the last minute to start.  

We rotate picking books and the best part is reading a selection that I would never have chosen on my own. For example, last month’s book was 1997's “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman.  The National Book Critics' Circle Award winner is about a Hmong child with epilepsy in Merced, Calif., a conclave for Hmong following their exile from Laos. The book explores the culture clash between the Hmong way of treatment (all ailments are spiritual) and western medicine, which narrowly focuses on the illness and not the holistic picture.  The print is small and the book is dense and it turned out to be one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. There are no villains, only people with good intentions, and yet, as we know, those can wreak just as much havoc as those who deliberately do damage. The subject of the book, Lia, died last year at 30.

I’m about to finish this month’s pick, “The Fault Is In Our Stars” and I’m grabbing the kleenex. It’s technically a Young Adult novel, but I sure wasn’t reading stuff like that when I was 14. 

One of my favorite people in the book club is a woman named Dalet, who is such a voracious reader that she’s usually already read any book that we pick. I don’t know where she finds the time because her life is very full, yet she makes reading a priority because it nourishes her soul and imagination. She knows that reading a great book takes you to places that you can’t go otherwise, even with a passport. It inspires you and widens your world view, even if you never leave your living room. No matter what your economic or social status, we all take off on the same adventure when we hold a book in our hands. 

To quote Dr. Suess, whose birthday many schools are celebrating this week, "Oh, the places you'll go!"

Dalet volunteers with Reading to Kids, an organization dedicated to instilling a love of reading in underserved kids.  On the second Saturday of every month, nearly 800 kids and 340 volunteers gather to read at seven Los Angeles elementary schools. But Reading to Kids’ outreach extends far beyond those children: according to its website, in its 14 years, Reading to Kids has donated more than 20,000 books to school libraries and given more than 113,000 books to children who take part in the reading clubs. 

So this Chooseday Tuesday’s $10 goes to Reading to Kids. I’m going to look into volunteering with them and will let you know what happens. They need volunteers for this Saturday. In the meantime, I have a book to finish. 

March 5: Reading to Kids

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Today would have been George Harrison’s 70th birthday. I never met him, but I felt like I did. 

My editor in chief at Billboard, Timothy White, was close to Harrison, as he was with several other music superstars from his days at Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone.

White was a titan in the world of consumer rock journalism by the time he came to Billboard in the early '90s and he rocked our trade magazine’s boat in ways both good and bad. He was a very complex person, whip smart and fascinating, yet there were people on staff that he treated unfairly due to his own very human shortcomings. Despite some initial skirmishes, he was great to me in many ways, including promoting me to Billboard’s West Coast Bureau Chief in 1998. It was after I relocated from New York to Los Angeles that we became much closer, in part because he worked very late the nights that he was in New York (he commuted every week from Boston) and would often need an ear. I would be the only one to call since everyone in the New York office had long departed and I was working late in Los Angeles as well.  

One of the greatest honors I received at Billboard was when he asked me to serve as his editor on a few pieces, including an in-depth interview he conducted with George Harrison that ran in early 2000 after he'd spent time with Harrison at his residence, Friar Park. I remember being terrified. It was pretty easy to set Timothy off with some unsuspecting comment, plus his writing could be a little longwinded, but I realized if he was asking me to edit him, he really wanted my opinion. So I gingerly, but confidently, suggested a number of changes, all of which he agreed to or, if he didn’t, had a very good explanation as to why not. We were on the phone at some absurd hour-- maybe 11 p.m. my time/2 a.m. his time and it was an extremely easy, congenial, collegial endeavor that I enjoyed immensely. Editing that story and one of his Music To My Ears columns about the Blues Brothers remain two of my most precious memories of Timothy. Instead of boss and employee, we were two writers hashing through a story about a man dear to both of us: to him personally and to me as a fan.

Harrison died Nov. 29, 2001 at 58. What none of us could have known was that seven months later, Timothy would be dead too after suffering a fatal heart attack in the elevator at Billboard's New York office after coming back to lunch with his best friend and his family. He was only 50. 

I should probably save this for the anniversary of Timothy’s death in June, but I will never forget that day. The Los Angeles office was having its company picnic and Howard Lander, Billboard’s then publisher, called me to tell me that Timothy has collapsed (at that point, we didn’t know he’d died). He told me to send my staff to the picnic (which was in the office backyard), but that I needed to stay by the phone. About 20 minutes later, he called me to tell me that Timothy had passed and that I need to write his obit since Timothy had the unfortunate timing of dying just as we were going to press. With no time to even process what had happened and still in shock, I had to go tell my staff and then I had to try to sum up his life in 1000 words in 60 minutes, including that he was leaving behind 10-year old twins. 

I rarely think of George Harrison without thinking of Tim, which prompted me to tell this tale. 

In honor of Harrison, today’s $10 goes to Harrison’s Material World Foundation, a non-profit he started in 1973. According to the organization’s website, the Foundation encourages “the exploration of alternate and diverse forms of artistic expression, life views and philosophies as well as a way to support established charities and people with special needs.” In some ways, that perfectly sums up Tim.

Feb. 25: The Material World Foundation

Why I started this blog

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