Not a Celebrity Book, Not a Hollywood Book: a Very Different Book


This piece is not about my “celebrity” book nor is it about my Hollywood Memoir. It’s about neither my TV commercial production book nor my divorce & remarriage love story.

It’s about Facebook.

“I Sing the Body Electric”, Walt Whitman’s poem from Leaves of Grass written in 1855 comes to mind.

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them

I doubt that Walt was envisioning Facebook, the internet or even electricity, for that matter, but read that again with Facebook in mind. Interesting, no?

Mark Zukerberg is often reviled in print, on TV, in newspapers and on the web for many things but – if I may borrow from and invert the Bard – I am not here to bury Caesar but to praise him. Young Mark and his team have created a wonder-full thing; flawed, yes but still wonderful.

Like many of my fellow codgers I pretty much ignored his creation for several years. I had a page but almost never went there except for an occasional birthday greeting. Then I published a book. My marketing guru (the brilliant Don McCauley) taught me how to use Facebook for publicizing my writing. That was the opening of a new window on to my old world.

FB Friends

A Random Selection

Not only did I reconnect with many “lost” friends and colleagues, I’m learning things about them, seeing other sides of them and sharing with them in an extraordinary variety of ways. Many of my old colleagues from film crews, and my acting days, folks with whom I was friendly but didn’t really know have revealed political, philosophical and spiritual (as opposed to religious) sides I never knew existed. I wish that when we were working together I’d taken the time to truly get to know them but I didn’t.

Thank You, Facebook!

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