June 3, 2025 • 52 mins
Is there liberation in letting go? In this thought-provoking episode, Dian Griesel engages in a candid conversation with Bob Morris, acclaimed author of Assisted Loving and Bobby Wonderful, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times and NPR's All Things Considered. Known for his insightful and often humorous explorations of family, relationships, and the human condition, Bob delves into the profound concept of "giving up" — not as a sign of defeat, but as a pathway to joy and personal growth.
In this episode of the Silver Expedience Perception Dynamics podcast, hosted by Dian Griesel aka Silver Disobedience, Dian sits down with Bob Morris, renowned writer and columnist for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Recorded at the iconic Manhattan Center, the discussion delves into Bob's experiences with family dynamics, personal challenges, and his journey through highs and lows in his writing career. They explore the often fine line between giving up and acceptance and how singing played a transformative role for both Bob and his brother. The conversation touches on themes of personal growth, societal expectations, and finding new paths for fulfillment and creativity. This episode is both thought-provoking and inspiring, offering deep insights into the human experience.
For more about Bob Morris and his work, visit his website at thebobmorris.com. Books? Here!
Whether you're contemplating a life change, seeking deeper contentment, or simply curious about the paradox of finding joy through letting go, this episode offers valuable insights and heartfelt anecdotes that may inspire you to rethink the art of surrender.
Please SUBSCRIBE! I’m Dian Griesel, Ph.D. aka @SilverDisobedience I am a perception analyst, hypnotherapist, author of books and a Wilhelmina model & creative who works both sides of the camera. For 30 years I have helped my clients to achieve greater understanding as to how perceptions impact everything we do whether personally or professionally. Text to book an appointment: 212-825-3210
I share inspiring and actionable ideas for free via my podcast, on my website: DianGriesel.com and also on my social media accounts which you might like to follow.
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi there, I'm Diane Grissell. I'm also known as Silver
Despedians to a lot of you. This is the Silver Despedians
Perception Dynamics podcast. And today we are recording in
iconic Manhattan Center. So this is a real honor to be
here. I have a great guest today and
you have probably read at least one thing he's written, if not
(00:23):
many or any of his regular columns that have appeared in
the New York Times, The New Yorker, Town and Country or any
of his books, of which there areseveral.
What I really like about my guest, who is Bob Morris, the
Bob Morris if you're looking first website is that he really
(00:46):
tackles and drills down on family relationships and
dynamics in such a thought provoking way.
I can't wait to just have a freeform discussion with him for the
next bit. So TuneIn and get comfortable.
This is going to be really good unless you're on a treadmill
walk and enjoy it and enjoy thisepisode.
(01:07):
Bob, Thank you. Thank.
You, Diane. Bob, you really drill down on
people, dynamics, humans, human interaction in such a way that's
so fascinating to me and self reflective.
Where does this come from in you?
(01:28):
Self reflective and also self deprecating.
Yes, you know, writers who do well, especially in the
nonfiction realm, which is what I've done memoirs and I had a
first person column in the Times.
The main thing is honesty. People know it when they see it,
(01:50):
and often honesty means embarrassing revelations about
yourself. You know, one of the columns I
read that you wrote, which I wanted to share with everyone in
the world when I read it, was about getting pulled over for
drunk driving and how you started it.
You know your belligerence, youranger, your.
(02:11):
Yeah, how dare they. I was barely over the drinking
limit. Yes.
And it was it, you know, and yougot to that self reflective
point in it. Yes, yeah.
And that it's unfortunate that people who Google me or look at
the Bob Morris will see that I was in jail for drunk driving in
(02:35):
San Diego. Well, you know, I think plenty
of us could have been, you know,but we didn't get caught.
And you know, but you reflected on it in such.
A. An eye opening way.
Yeah. And if there are writers out
there, there's a lesson in all of that, which is there's a
little arc to that. You know, it was in the New York
Times op-ed pages. And you know, there's there's a
(02:58):
story there of somebody pissed off.
How did these cops find me? They didn't get me at my car.
I probably would have had a caseagainst them because they
accosted me and handcuffed me after I'd left the car, which I
don't think they could do. And I was like, how dare you,
you know, and what are you wasting your time?
And why is San Diego spending all this money?
You know, apparently there were helicopters following me for my
(03:21):
5 minute drive from the bar to my hotel and on very, you know,
empty streets. So it for all these reasons I
was like, Oh my God, this is a how dare they?
You know, I didn't quite say, doyou know who I am?
But you know, when hours later, after finally getting thrown in
(03:46):
a cell, it started to fill up inthe course of the night with all
these men, the situation was terrible.
I remember being mad about that.Like, I didn't even know how to
make a phone call because the instructions were unclear.
The toilet was overflowing. It was COVID time, and people
(04:06):
were not wearing masks properly.And I was still pissed off.
And then over the course of what, 16 hours being stuck with
these guys, I started to realizenone of them had the money for
bail to get out. They, you know, they were call.
I, you know, the phone is right there in the cell with you.
(04:27):
And I heard them like they were calling their father and so
ashamed or they were calling their ex-girlfriend and trying
to work out, you know, and and also then you start to hear what
they had done to get thrown in jail.
You know, one guy got thrown in jail because he was he fell
(04:49):
asleep in the backyard of his former girlfriend who had a
restraining order against them. But another one was driving the
car where his friend got out of the car and robbed a bodega.
You know, another one had drugs and it went for like 16 hours.
They gave us a Bologna sandwich.I didn't know what was going to
(05:13):
happen. You lose complete control of
your authority, especially as a person that's always been able
to be in control. You know, in my socio economic
bracket, you don't you're not face what like for example,
immigrants are facing right now or even people depended on
Medicaid or people dependent on other healthcare, women
(05:38):
reproductive. So you know, I was just used to
being privileged and I started to hear all these people's
stories. And when finally I got my call
through, I called a friend rightdown the road in San Diego and
(05:58):
she bailed me out for 2500 bucks.
And the rest of the guys in my cell heard this.
And I'll never forget, like several of them said, your
friend bailed you out. Like they couldn't believe that
there was a guy among them who had that, who had access to that
money that I could pay her back for.
(06:20):
And in the course of that and finally getting out, it was very
sobering about the system and, and the fact that these this
jail cell was so disgusting and these people are treated so
badly. And they have, you know, a lot
of them didn't do terrible things.
(06:42):
But it's always almost 24 hours overnight in jail with a bunch
of other people in an overflowing toilet on top of it.
Unless you have a question on top of it.
Then the system forced me into two courses, 2 online courses,
(07:03):
which were set up like military martial law situations.
You had to zoom at a certain time.
If you were one minute late, youdidn't get credit for attending
and you had a $35 fee and you had to go on the phone for hours
to rearrange another zoo meeting.
(07:24):
And I remember I was late one day because it was the Jewish,
it was Yom Kippur. And I had been to like, say that
for my parents memorial, you know, and I was late and that I
was punished. You know, you could not.
It was a very, very military situation run by a former
(07:45):
addict, which, and this is apparently how these former
addicts are, once they get sober, they get really tough
with you. And I started to realize that
she had tremendous trouble, thiswoman who I hated, you know, who
was running this group for like God knows how many 20 weeks or
something. It was horrible.
(08:06):
If God forbid, my Wi-Fi was down, I'd miss a course.
It was so nerve wracking. And I started to realize she was
having really big problems with her teenager, and I think her
dog had died. And I realized that there was,
(08:27):
in all her toughness, a true love of helping and trying to
get people to really give up drinking or to really not drink
and drive again. Now a lot of these people, in a
similar way to the people in jail, were having to take the
(08:50):
bus to work because their their licenses had been revoked.
They had to stop work to attend this meeting, like in some
closet in their place of employment at time it was.
It was incredibly it was much harder on them than on me.
(09:12):
Now I'm curious, you, you talkedabout the loss of control.
How do you parallel the loss of control that you experience with
that, with your career? You know, yes, as a writer.
Yes, well, that's a hefty transition.
(09:38):
We like to get right into the meat of it here, Bob.
Well, ultimately with this driving thing, I came to realize
that I couldn't have control of the situation and in my opinion
didn't matter. I think that in a writing
(10:00):
career, you also, there are certain things that writers
can't control, and one of them is the culture and what it's
hungry for, what it wants, what will be received when you
publish a book. But if you go back from that,
you also then have to wonder what a publisher is looking for.
(10:29):
And I think we're all aware of the shift in interest in various
ways. Probably there's a certain
interest right now in the topic of data and probably tyranny,
you know, based on the situationwe're in right now with the
government or I, you know, obviously the culture of around
(10:55):
DEI is up for a lot of conversation.
A lot of black authors are doingreally interesting things that
I've been done before and publishers want them.
OK, what they might not be looking for, unless you're
brilliant and David Sedaris or Sebastian younger or, you know,
(11:21):
in a pop level, James Patterson,what they're probably not going
to look for right now is a olderwhite man.
I just agree with you, you know,I unless you're brilliant, I.
I, I'm going to tell you why I disagree with you because I, I
(11:42):
have to, I have to put a time out on that one, not not time
out with the cameras. Why I, I think, I think society
is always shifting. I think the extremes in life and
form the middle. So you know, there's always
these extremes, but the pendulumalways comes back into this
middle area. And like 2 of like one of your
(12:02):
books was assisted loving and, and these are some, you know, 2
year older books, but they really spoke to me.
And the other one was last wordswith your parents.
And they probably really hit me because my mother was remarried
twice after her 50 year marriagewith my father and her her
(12:27):
second husband died within threemonths after their honeymoon.
And it would devastated her, devastated her.
She was the only person my mother was ever with besides my
father. And then she met someone else on
Valentine's Day. They dated for a year and they
got married and were married for14 years before she died.
But the last two years, three years before she died, had a lot
(12:48):
of very intense conversations with her, more than I had ever
had during my life. And when I was reading these
books, and I think about these books, and I think we have an
aging population. Now, I know sometimes you don't
want to rewrite what you've written, but you had such
insights. And we have an aging population.
(13:10):
We're getting older. We have parents getting older.
And I think about the legacy lessons that you draw upon and
do it so well. I'd want to know more about what
you can pull out of anyone. Well listen at the risk of
(13:30):
undermining your lovely response.
Don't you dare. But I'm, you know, I'm going to
just because I wanted, I like, Ilike the opportunity to be
honest about things. Yeah.
So that first book, which was about my, it's called assisted
loving True Tales of Double Dating with my dad is a good
(13:51):
premise. It's, you know, basically my dad
was also married 50 years. He wanted to be in love.
He turns to me, maybe because I know how to dress, you know,
maybe because I was the single gay son, not the other son who
was married with two children running a big business.
He, he, he knew I was not readily available, but that he
(14:17):
could, he could nudge me into getting involved, let's put it
that way. And he wanted help on dating.
So, I mean, originally I called that book Pimping for my Dad
because I was like trying to find women for him partly, and
this is the unacceptable part ofit, I didn't want him with just
(14:42):
anybody. I wanted somebody acceptable to
my taste level. Right, I think.
And he was a sweet guy who was not a snob.
He was an educated man, a lawyerand a judge.
But he was a slob. He was terrible table matters,
but a wonderful guy. But he could have dragged
(15:04):
anything into our family. He could have, you know, he
wasn't so picky. So I became the Screener.
I even tried to procure women for him if I heard somebody had
a single mom from a nice family.We all kind of like a little
(15:24):
dating help, you know, that person who knows us well enough
that's going to go out and find that mate, of course.
It's easier. Simultaneously, I was going to
say I was single myself and sortof almost resigned.
I was cynical. It wasn't the time of of apps
yet, but it was a little bit of that in the culture.
(15:46):
It's just I had talked myself into realizing that a life alone
was not a crime and doable with lots of friends and lots of a
big career. And but in the course of seeing
how much he wanted love and how he threw himself into it, I fell
(16:10):
in love myself. So it's sort of a double.
There's a whole, it's a double love story.
And, you know, I ended up marrying and he ended up with
somebody. And of course, it was very
attractive to all the networks. All wanted meetings.
And you know, Oh my God, it's like all kinds of people, major
(16:31):
people made adaptations that forpilots and it never got made.
When the book came out, I was onfresh air for an hour twice with
Terry Gross on the radio. It got all kinds of great
reviews and everything. And this is back to your topic
of control, Diane. It didn't sell this book that a
(16:56):
lot of people still remember andhad.
I was so lucky to have all the attention, all the media, all
the interest from Hollywood. It didn't go anywhere and the
book did not earn back my advance.
I think it needs a relaunch. And, you know, it was very, I
(17:19):
suffered at that, you know, and you keep trying.
And I thought to myself, well, it just didn't catch the wind.
It didn't catch the wind that would sail it into financial
success. Now you can say what you want
(17:40):
about that, but as I'm older now, I think I understand it
better. I'll tell you another story
about control. Around the same time I wrote
that book, I was asked to ghostwrite the book for this
beautiful actress, Diahann Carroll, who was the first black
actress to have a sitcom on NBC.She was a Broadway * Richard
(18:05):
Rodgers wrote a musical for her called No Strings.
She was the black woman on Dynasty, the black bitch,
Dominique Deveraux on Dynasty. She was a star and and and
revered. You know, her friends were
people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and Miles Davis
and and she lived a superstar life and was beautiful.
(18:27):
When I was working on this book with her, it came out it won the
NAACP Image Award. It hit the bestseller list for a
week or two. It didn't do gangbusters.
And when it came time for a yearlater to come out in paperback,
we were doing an interview for TV or something.
(18:49):
And I said, you know, Diane, what you do is you, you know,
you hire a private publicist andyou set up a whole nother tour
about this book. And she says to me now, Bob, you
have to know when the public hasspoken.
And I sort of thought about thaton Election Day this year.
(19:14):
I sort of had to understand thatwhat the people want is what
they want, and you can't necessarily force them or make
them. Now, if that's a terrible,
terrible bit of advice to a young person who's got a book
(19:36):
and should do everything that heor she can to get it out there,
set up every event, do everything you can, but to me,
control and the the ease of justrecognizing no matter what I do
right now, is this an uplifting conversation?
(19:59):
No, but. It does bring me to something
that I have been thinking about lately, which is the art and the
joy of giving up. Like knowing when you can stop
(20:21):
being the bird flying against the glass and give yourself a
break. That's an intriguing, deep and
profound statement because giving up and letting go are
very different things that, to me, often get confused.
(20:43):
Tell me more. I didn't.
I don't know what you mean. When I think of giving up, I
think of I'm done, I'm quitting,I'm never doing this again.
When I think of letting go, to me it's a rewrite of how I think
using writing analogy. I'm saying to myself, I am going
(21:05):
to do this for me. I know there are other critics.
I'm going to make sure I'm finding joy in what I'm doing,
that I'm having fun with it, that maybe it's a whole new
topic that interests me. And I'm going to explore that
without necessarily thinking of the end consequence.
(21:28):
Because sometimes when you startsomething, if you're just
focusing on how much you're intoit, the thing, it's like the
pieces of the puzzle start to fall together.
Like earlier we were talking andyou said, you know, you, we were
talking about singing and, and Iwant to get into this.
You mentioned you had a brother who had a stroke that couldn't
(21:49):
speak, but singing changed his life again.
I think that's a very moving story.
I want to know more. I know people who have had
strokes. I would love to figure out a way
to get through to them. We have more people that are our
age in this country right now than any other age, you know,
(22:09):
are aging up. We're so and strokes are
becoming more prevalent. And when you see someone have a
stroke, it's it's debilitating. So I would think it's not giving
up, it's letting go of the perceived notions that other
people are going to have, letting go of the expectation
because. Expectation it and.
(22:31):
We, you know, we do stuff and wehave so many expectations of
what are the response going to be, what's the result going to
be and there that's a lot of misery often in that.
OK, let's talk about that for a SEC.
There was a book called On Giving Up that came out last
year by the psychologist philosopher Adam Phillips, an
(22:53):
Englishman, quite a popular author.
It was a small book and it was rather academic for me, but at
the time I was going through a lot of discomfort, changing what
my goals were. One of the things that stood out
(23:18):
from the book On Giving Up was that he talked a little bit
about on giving up bad things like cigarettes or booze or
compulsive gambling, which was not something I was interested
in. But he talked about that in
context of giving up things thatwere just making you
(23:47):
disappointing you or making you anxious or unhappy.
And he thought that the public might think of that as not
failing as much as transitioning.
And I like that idea. Now, the contrary of that would
be what the great writer Samuel Beckett said.
(24:08):
And I think this might have beenaddressed also to writers, which
is fail once, no bother, fail again, fail better.
That's a good one. I love it.
Can you? However, can you fail once?
No bother, fail again, Fail better now?
(24:29):
This is not where I'm at anymore.
I'm not interested in failing atall anymore.
And that is probably privilege of being 67 and being
comfortable enough financially that I don't have to get a job,
you know, at Walmart. But my story about giving up
(24:59):
sort of does has to do with singing and my brother and my
marriage. And the reason I've been
thinking about it is all when COVID started, I had a
particularly dramatic time. My brother who had had a stroke,
(25:20):
my Big Brother, my successful, very paternal, fraternal, bossy
Big Brother who loved me. I was his only brother.
I had a stroke, and it took awayhis ability to speak.
And while his wife and his son were pushing him in therapy and
(25:42):
physical therapy, it just wasn'tcoming back.
It was not coming back. And I could see it and I knew
it. And he was miserable.
Being shuttled, you know, to this therapy and that and the
speech and how frustrating aftera year and it's not coming back,
you know, for a man who still had complete control of his
cognition, right? I mean, I could read to him from
(26:05):
the New York Times and he, we'd laugh at stuff going on, you
know, So he just sort of gave upeventually.
And what I realized was even though he couldn't speak at all,
he could sing. And that was in our family.
Since we were babies, we had a mother who sang to us.
You know, we still remember the Yiddish lullaby she sang.
(26:28):
Our father loved to harmonize. We would have, Passover stated.
We would sing through the whole thing.
I did little shows in the livingroom.
We sang in the car at the top ofour lungs.
We sang in the backyard. Music was this universal
consciousness for us. And when my brother gave up on
(26:53):
the speech and his wife and son,I think sort of backed off, I
came in and we sang and he fortunately had a piano.
I have a ukulele. It's all we did.
And you might think that somebody who had a massive
stroke, who was a paraplegic in a wheelchair, but who still
could think, would give up. But in his case, no, you know,
(27:18):
he was right at home exactly where he was.
But it was, I think taking the expectation, like you said, of
getting speech back and getting back on his feet and getting out
of a wheelchair and taking that away and giving up on it
actually did give him a nice fewyears at the end.
(27:40):
Do you think it's like arguing semantics?
If I say, is it giving up or is it accepting?
Because I love the Serenity Prayer and whenever somebody's
having trouble in anything, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous made
a famous. But I just think it's such a
good prayer for everybody. Accepting what you can't
(28:00):
control, right? Yeah.
You know, because when you accept something, new
possibilities just to me seem toappear.
Yeah. Yes, that's that's you know,
'cause. You stop pushing the boulder
uphill. I can't push the boulder uphill.
You got it If I stop. So yeah, expand on that.
Well, I mean, I was going to saythe boulder uphill situation is
(28:21):
and you know, again, like this is the opposite of a self
promotional video that I'm goingto look like some hotshot author
with a million balls in the air and this project or that.
I mean, the truth is I started to think of all the plays I had
written that that had runs off Broadway or in regional
theaters, but they never got further.
And that's a boulder. And this musical that I wrote
(28:43):
and this cabaret show that I wrote with a boulder right now,
I just finished writing a one man show for the actor George
Hamilton. And it was a fantastic process
and he's got an amazing life. But I don't really think now
that we're done with it, he's 85.
I don't know that he's going to want to do a one man show.
So talking him and said that's another boulder.
All these boulders I'm looking at now at the bottom of a Canyon
(29:06):
and maybe flowers are starting to grow on them and birds are
nesting on them. But there's like a whole so many
things I wanted to do. You know, recently I was fooling
around with a producer because Iwanted to talk about, I wanted
to do a cheeky, well, a podcast,but starting as an Instagram on
pills. So I did this thing called pill
(29:28):
talk, you know, and I was havingsuch a good time with it.
But, you know, because I think people have shame around their
pharmaceuticals and, you know, meds.
Like if I did a podcast, it would be called Pill Talk and I
would invite people on and I'd say, what meds are you on?
And then our conversation would go like this.
So anyway, that was another boulder.
(29:48):
I mean, it's just like console is constantly doing projects,
right? With the goal, not creative
satisfaction as much as taking my talents and my humor and
trying to get something out in the world the way you've gotten
this out in the world, for example.
So anyway, all the boulders, pushing the boulders up the
hill, The biggest boulder that Iwas pushing up a hill for many
(30:13):
years was my marriage. I was married to a fantastic
guy, very literary, very funny, incredibly supportive, who
really helped me like write, getmy books, get myself together as
an author, but had serious issues.
(30:34):
And when it became clear that hewasn't loving me anymore and no
matter what I did, it wasn't going to change, of course, I
suffered because like at the ageof 60, you know, one I didn't, I
(30:55):
didn't want to be single again. I didn't want that.
I didn't like the idea of givingup our shared country house, the
dog that we shared. There was so much I didn't want
to give up and I held on to it. But all signs were indicating
that, you know, he'd lost that love and feeling, you know, you
(31:16):
know, and when finally push cameto shove and something kind of
threatening was happening, that made me move out.
And this was like, I think the day after COVID was declared in
New York State. You know, I'm a lucky guy.
I have people who like me. And so I had a couch to stay on
(31:38):
on Long Island in this town where I spent a lot of time.
And then another, somebody else gave me their house and and then
I found a really nice place to live.
And as the weeks went on, I realized that giving up on this
was bringing out all the love and all the good feelings I had
(32:05):
accumulated through friendship and good relationships, right?
And I thought, oh, my God, I'm not a terrible person.
A lot of people enjoy what I have to offer.
And I had to release myself and give up on marriage.
Now, that's a very common story.I think in my particular case, I
(32:29):
moved into this little cottage in the dark of, like, you know,
March. It was very quiet area.
It was very cold that that year 2020, but there was a little
instead of a kitchen table, there was a bar in this little
cottage where you would eat stools and a bar.
(32:50):
And I looked at it and I thought, piano, I want a piano
in this dark little cottage in the middle of the winter.
I want to bring back into my life what gave me such joy as a
child and as a little boy, playing the piano for my parents
(33:12):
and doing shows with my girl cousins in the living room for
holidays and singing and learning new songs.
And I remember looking and looking to find a piano small
enough that wasn't going to be adisaster when I went to
Connecticut to buy it, you know,and find out it was a waste of
(33:33):
money, time. And I was walking up our country
lane and this young friend of mine is biking pass and he stops
and he goes, hey, Bob, do you need a piano?
Because I thought of you. And I know that you wanted one
in the house you lived in with your husband, but I knew there
(33:55):
wasn't room. I have it in storage in
Patchogue. Come take a look.
And it's and it was small and ofall things, this piano fit under
my bar instantly. And almost the moment that
happened, we figured out how to sing with all the I very
(34:18):
talented neighbors. And they were all of course, had
nothing to do. And we had porches and heat
lamps and we'd sing songs. Sometimes I would, oh, and I
would zoom on the piano with my brother, who was in a nursing
home, and we would sing. I mean, I have recordings of him
singing You Are My Sunshine withme.
And I formed a band, something Ialways wanted to do my whole
(34:41):
life, but I knew I was never good enough to really do that,
especially in a city like New York.
Well, we did it, you know, he rehearsed.
I, I don't know if we opened allthe window.
I mean, singing is a very dangerous thing to do during
COVID. It's a, it's a super spreader,
but we did it. Nobody got sick.
And because I had given up on this marriage where first of
(35:05):
all, I couldn't even have a piano in that little the house I
lived in with my husband. But B, the time, the need to
express the love that maybe can go into a relationship was going
into this relationship with music and people that wanted to
sing. And so within a year, one of my
dreams, you know, just to be able to choose the songs for a
(35:27):
band to sing and write the harmonies and rehearse enough
and then have a very, very receptive audience happened, and
it's still happening now, more recently, you know, this topic
of singing, which interested me tremendously because of my
(35:47):
brother's story and how we sang right to the end, I mean.
Which is just remarkable. Is there a medical like research
that's singing and overcome? Lots of things.
Oh, but you can't speak, but youcould sing.
Yeah. I mean, that's just.
Remarkable. You have a science background,
I'll tell you. I'll tell you about it a little
bit. And I don't think it's news, but
(36:08):
some interesting things about how people whose left side are
affected, which effects languageand I think other area areas
too. But when you sing.
You. Are rhythmically throwing
(36:29):
yourself into something that overrides the issue of words,
like a single word and its meaning.
So that's one thing that happens, another thing that
happens and. Are there any books on that?
Yeah, there are, there's, there's, there's work out there.
I was not, I was not on to anything new in thinking about
(36:50):
wanting to write about why we sing.
Another thing that happens, of course, as you've read, is that
Alzheimer's patients and dementia people, what singing
does for them is it triggers memory because they associate
(37:11):
this song, what a wonderful world with a time when they may
have been in college or something.
And, and so it, it releases a different, it releases them from
the concerns of the present and it throws them back in the past,
which is very helpful, you know,for people.
(37:35):
And then of course, with their kids who are all freaked out
because their parents have lost their mind across the board.
If they sing to them, it will bring them into the present.
I thought that with my brother, singing brought him into the
moment, into the present. And not only that, but in his
case, the guy was such an opinionated, powerful man when
(38:01):
he was well. And I think that this let let us
know he wanted us to know he wasstill there.
And that's how he did it. And that's how we did it.
And there was nothing else that he got a kick out of as much as
that. I mean, he had, you know, we bag
(38:21):
on pots and pans and, you know, and then and then the other
thing about it is that it made me and this was the case with my
dad in my second book when he was unwell and he really needed
a lot of entertainment. And it was the perfect job for
me, for both my brother and my dad is to be the entertainment,
(38:43):
to be the transgressive, funny, play songs by ear, sit at the
piano at the assisted living place and, you know, make a fool
of myself. Oh, there people were looking on
and my dad was singing at the top of his lungs.
And so and So what I, what I always advise when you're in a
situation that is overpowering and, and and frustrating with a
(39:09):
loved one who's unwell and is probably not going to get
better, is to figure out how thebest time you can in their
presence because that will pay off.
So for instance, when my ex who loves social media was going
through this with his 95 year old mom, I suggested that he
(39:34):
like bring his iPad and introduce her to the world of
Facebook and Facebook messaging and get her granddaughters who
she loved onto the iPad on Facebook and talk.
And like, you know, it was like all of a sudden she was thrown
into the world of the future, you know, that she didn't know.
And he loved it because he was sort of being the DJ and he was,
(39:56):
you know, and I loved seeing that and he was very grateful
for that. And and I think talking about
all of these things, taking careof people who really need you
and figuring out a way to find your muse again without
(40:18):
expectation does come when you get to the point where you give
up. And it's not so sad.
I have so many friends that say,oh, Bob, you're such a talented
writer. You know, you shouldn't give up.
And, you know, you need to do another book and all.
Well, you know, I tried to do a book on singing.
I have a very good agent and he couldn't sell it to a publisher.
(40:44):
The numbers on my books weren't so good, right.
And I realized, you know, I'm, Iprobably will go back and figure
out how it will work. But if you don't sell a lot of
memoir, you're probably not a publisher's not going to jump.
If your, your sales figures aren't good, they're not going
(41:05):
to jump to another one. And so I have to figure that
out, you know, or I can do what I've been doing, which is just
have the best time in the world doing something new, which in my
case is working on another musical show to perform on Long
Island. And I'm in a songwriting class
with a bunch of very talented songwriters in West Hampton.
(41:28):
And, you know, other people findtheir way into painting or
poetry groups. And I know this probably, you
know, young people would roll their eyes and be disappointed
in me because a lot of young, younger writers and editors look
up to me, you know, because whenthey were very little, I was in
the New York Times every week. And, you know, I had a big
(41:51):
presence in the the style section of the Times, and I had
a personal voice. And somehow I broke through and
had an audience. And so people are disappointed
that I'm fooling around writing songs that they're never going
to hear, you know, But I think that.
How do you know they're never going to hear them?
Now don't you lay your expectations on me, Diane.
(42:13):
No, no expectations. Just a just a question, you
know. How do you know?
How do I know? Because I'm not going.
That's not what I want to do with them.
All I want to do is sing them tomy songwriting group and play
them at my next gig in two weeksin an Italian restaurant with my
little band. That's you know.
I think that's how Billy Joel started.
(42:34):
And look at what happened, you know, just wasn't he sitting in
an Italian little Italian restaurant with a bottle of red
and a bottle of white and, or actually in Cold Spring Harbor
in a bar which my older brothersand sisters remember and, you
know. He was probably all 20 years
old. I, I, you have to respect the
(42:57):
release and of the experience ofletting go.
You know, I think that the trickis to stay engaged.
And so that's really, I think what I might be talking about,
about taking up singing and engaging my brother in, in
singing. And the trick is to stay
(43:20):
engaged, which is. Probably why I push back on the
word of letting go, you know, because I don't think it's
letting go. I think it's accepting.
I think it's acknowledging. I think it's again, it could be
(43:41):
semantics. You know, you write books, you
I'm sure you debate a word, one word versus another and how is
it going to be interpreted? But you're shifting into new
things. You're making room.
You're you're making room for new possibilities.
Yes, yeah. Now we happen to be sitting in
(44:07):
the middle of the most ambitiouscity in the world.
Certainly in London. People are ashamed of being
ambitious. You know, they the last thing
they respect is somebody self promoting and you know, same
thing in Paris. They have a different way about
(44:31):
accruing power. And here my discomfort in this
transitioning in New York is that it really is a city that's
all about what you're working on.
I will go out tonight and peoplewill say, what are you working
(44:52):
on? And, you know, 10 years ago, I
would have said, well, I'm work.I'm thinking about the topic of,
of singing. I want to write a book about why
we sing across cultures and emotionally and why, why it
means so much, you know, and I would talk about that and I'd
say, you know, and I'm publishing this piece in the
(45:13):
Times and, you know, being flownoff to Europe, you know, I mean,
they that is what is social currency in my world in New
York, what you're working on now, you know, I'm sure there
are people who are working in other areas like that.
(45:37):
People don't want to hear about when you, but when you have a
byline and a slightly public following, then people want to
know that you're doing somethinglike that right now.
Can you imagine if I said, well,I just finished a song I really
like about my dog? If I go to my event tonight at
Joe's Pub, you know and well, I.Don't know I'm.
(46:01):
I'm old enough to remember a song.
Me and you and a dog named Blue.Oh yeah, so or Boo, whatever the
dog's. Name Bojangles on a dog.
You know they're no, but you know what I mean.
It's just like it doesn't, it's a it's a transition of what
people can expect. You know, you were, you were
looking at my maybe looking at my bio or reading about me a
(46:25):
little bit, you know, saying, oh, it must be uncomfortable,
like leaving a very glamorous nightlife, you know, and having
a decent ethical compass, right,to be moral, but also be
socially ambitious or whatever it was that you very wisely
(46:45):
discerned. Well, I'm not so socially
ambitious anymore because I'm not invited, right.
And so I can be, I can admit that, Oh, it would be nice to be
invited to that black tie dinner.
You know, I'd be really nice. Right now, I'm obsessing about
trying to get a preview of the new Frick, which just the Frick
(47:05):
Museum just got renovated, you know, or the opening night of,
you know, the next big musical, which is what I used to do, not
because I was so special, but because I had a column in The
New York Times, right. So, you know, people are very
transactional in this town. Now.
(47:26):
The expectations of having that kind of life are, let's put it
this way, I'm better suited to be a bigger fish in this little
town on Long Island called Brookhaven then.
I mean, I would never ever play the songs that I play with my
band in the city, right? So you have to adjust like you
(47:48):
say. And there's fun in that.
You know, it's, but it's also, you know, admitting I'm not what
I had hoped I would be right now.
And believe me, when you live inNew York and you grew up around
David Sedaris and Candace Bushnell and a friend of mine
(48:10):
who has another musical opening on Broadway and another friend
who just is doing a documentary for HBO, you know, it's it's a
particularly accomplished group.And all my friends are
accomplished. They write best selling books,
you know, and we all enjoy each other and I'm proud to know
(48:30):
them. But I'm not accomplished that
way. Did I do something with my life?
Sure. You know, I made my parents very
proud. You know, my small town
librarian mom and my small town lawyer dad.
You know the their sons who accomplished things in business
and in my case, a small media career, publishing career.
(48:55):
You know they were proud. But no, on the big picture, I'm
not famous. I'm not that rich.
I'm not rich. And you know, I don't have
another book to pitch to you. Yeah, and that's where we are.
And that's what you want to always say is yet.
Well, I believe in acceptance and if you accept where you are
(49:17):
now without any expectations, I believe possibilities unfold.
If if I'm when I'm in a state ofconstant acceptance and I mean,
or constant challenging myself, possibilities might be less
likely. But the more I get into the mode
of, well, this is this is where I'm at today.
(49:38):
And all I have to do is wake up and you know, interview Bob and
I have no idea what's happening next because that's pretty much
how life is unfolded. I have no clue.
And I think I have a clue. I think I can control, I think I
can decide what's going to happen next.
And that's been proven false more times than it's been proven
(50:01):
true. So you're saying just I think I
I think I agree with this. Like you get up with something
to do. My bad days are when I don't and
I waste time. That's quitting.
Zoom scrolling or, you know, notthat I dislike napping or that
I, I think it's valuable, but, you know, the better days are
(50:25):
when I do something as little asfinishing a song or figuring out
the chords to a song, because you never know.
Or pitching. You know, I pitched my New
Yorker editor the other day and immediately got rejected.
But I did it, you know. That's all that counts.
Right and. Because that thought is now out
in the universe, and you have noidea when that editor may say 1.
(50:50):
Excuse me. It was great talking to Bob the
other day. I got another idea for him.
Yeah, or two. I didn't think that was a great
idea then, but now that I've hada cup of coffee, you know, or
now that I'm in a. Better.
I think it's worse. Well, yeah, well, it could be.
I don't want this to end, but weare up with our time.
(51:13):
What do you like? That here I I have acceptance
for the fact that we're out of. Time and I'm bummed we're going
to have to talk about this again.
Your wisdom, What were you goingto ask?
I said we're just going to have to do this again because I like
your insight. Yeah, I'll come back when my
next book is out, Diane. I don't know.
Maybe it's going to be your nextsong.
Maybe it's going to be that playwith George Hamilton.
(51:35):
Yeah, I don't know, George. A lot of possibility.
That's. Right, George?
Well, thank you. This has been really great.
Yep. I'm inspired.
That's what it's about, right? Yeah.
Thank you and you inspired me. I'm Diane Grissel.
This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics
(51:57):
podcast. My guest has been Bob Morris,
the Bob Morris if you want to look up his website and there's
going to be all kinds of links so you can find him his books.
I highly recommend you check outany of his articles as well as
books because they are great. They're very thought provoking
and that's what this is all about.
So thank you, Bob. I really appreciate your time.
(52:18):
A. Pleasure.
Thank you, everybody. Again, we've been recording at
Manhattan Center and I'm going to encourage you all to
subscribe and share this with your friends.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day week, see you
next time.
Hi there, I'm Diane Grissell. I'm also known as Silver
Despedians to a lot of you. This is the Silver Despedians
Perception Dynamics podcast. And today we are recording in
iconic Manhattan Center. So this is a real honor to be
here. I have a great guest today and
you have probably read at least one thing he's written, if not
(00:23):
many or any of his regular columns that have appeared in
the New York Times, The New Yorker, Town and Country or any
of his books, of which there areseveral.
What I really like about my guest, who is Bob Morris, the
Bob Morris if you're looking first website is that he really
(00:46):
tackles and drills down on family relationships and
dynamics in such a thought provoking way.
I can't wait to just have a freeform discussion with him for the
next bit. So TuneIn and get comfortable.
This is going to be really good unless you're on a treadmill
walk and enjoy it and enjoy thisepisode.
(01:07):
Bob, Thank you. Thank.
You, Diane. Bob, you really drill down on
people, dynamics, humans, human interaction in such a way that's
so fascinating to me and self reflective.
Where does this come from in you?
(01:28):
Self reflective and also self deprecating.
Yes, you know, writers who do well, especially in the
nonfiction realm, which is what I've done memoirs and I had a
first person column in the Times.
The main thing is honesty. People know it when they see it,
(01:50):
and often honesty means embarrassing revelations about
yourself. You know, one of the columns I
read that you wrote, which I wanted to share with everyone in
the world when I read it, was about getting pulled over for
drunk driving and how you started it.
You know your belligerence, youranger, your.
(02:11):
Yeah, how dare they. I was barely over the drinking
limit. Yes.
And it was it, you know, and yougot to that self reflective
point in it. Yes, yeah.
And that it's unfortunate that people who Google me or look at
the Bob Morris will see that I was in jail for drunk driving in
(02:35):
San Diego. Well, you know, I think plenty
of us could have been, you know,but we didn't get caught.
And you know, but you reflected on it in such.
A. An eye opening way.
Yeah. And if there are writers out
there, there's a lesson in all of that, which is there's a
little arc to that. You know, it was in the New York
Times op-ed pages. And you know, there's there's a
(02:58):
story there of somebody pissed off.
How did these cops find me? They didn't get me at my car.
I probably would have had a caseagainst them because they
accosted me and handcuffed me after I'd left the car, which I
don't think they could do. And I was like, how dare you,
you know, and what are you wasting your time?
And why is San Diego spending all this money?
You know, apparently there were helicopters following me for my
(03:21):
5 minute drive from the bar to my hotel and on very, you know,
empty streets. So it for all these reasons I
was like, Oh my God, this is a how dare they?
You know, I didn't quite say, doyou know who I am?
But you know, when hours later, after finally getting thrown in
(03:46):
a cell, it started to fill up inthe course of the night with all
these men, the situation was terrible.
I remember being mad about that.Like, I didn't even know how to
make a phone call because the instructions were unclear.
The toilet was overflowing. It was COVID time, and people
(04:06):
were not wearing masks properly.And I was still pissed off.
And then over the course of what, 16 hours being stuck with
these guys, I started to realizenone of them had the money for
bail to get out. They, you know, they were call.
I, you know, the phone is right there in the cell with you.
(04:27):
And I heard them like they were calling their father and so
ashamed or they were calling their ex-girlfriend and trying
to work out, you know, and and also then you start to hear what
they had done to get thrown in jail.
You know, one guy got thrown in jail because he was he fell
(04:49):
asleep in the backyard of his former girlfriend who had a
restraining order against them. But another one was driving the
car where his friend got out of the car and robbed a bodega.
You know, another one had drugs and it went for like 16 hours.
They gave us a Bologna sandwich.I didn't know what was going to
(05:13):
happen. You lose complete control of
your authority, especially as a person that's always been able
to be in control. You know, in my socio economic
bracket, you don't you're not face what like for example,
immigrants are facing right now or even people depended on
Medicaid or people dependent on other healthcare, women
(05:38):
reproductive. So you know, I was just used to
being privileged and I started to hear all these people's
stories. And when finally I got my call
through, I called a friend rightdown the road in San Diego and
(05:58):
she bailed me out for 2500 bucks.
And the rest of the guys in my cell heard this.
And I'll never forget, like several of them said, your
friend bailed you out. Like they couldn't believe that
there was a guy among them who had that, who had access to that
money that I could pay her back for.
(06:20):
And in the course of that and finally getting out, it was very
sobering about the system and, and the fact that these this
jail cell was so disgusting and these people are treated so
badly. And they have, you know, a lot
of them didn't do terrible things.
(06:42):
But it's always almost 24 hours overnight in jail with a bunch
of other people in an overflowing toilet on top of it.
Unless you have a question on top of it.
Then the system forced me into two courses, 2 online courses,
(07:03):
which were set up like military martial law situations.
You had to zoom at a certain time.
If you were one minute late, youdidn't get credit for attending
and you had a $35 fee and you had to go on the phone for hours
to rearrange another zoo meeting.
(07:24):
And I remember I was late one day because it was the Jewish,
it was Yom Kippur. And I had been to like, say that
for my parents memorial, you know, and I was late and that I
was punished. You know, you could not.
It was a very, very military situation run by a former
(07:45):
addict, which, and this is apparently how these former
addicts are, once they get sober, they get really tough
with you. And I started to realize that
she had tremendous trouble, thiswoman who I hated, you know, who
was running this group for like God knows how many 20 weeks or
something. It was horrible.
(08:06):
If God forbid, my Wi-Fi was down, I'd miss a course.
It was so nerve wracking. And I started to realize she was
having really big problems with her teenager, and I think her
dog had died. And I realized that there was,
(08:27):
in all her toughness, a true love of helping and trying to
get people to really give up drinking or to really not drink
and drive again. Now a lot of these people, in a
similar way to the people in jail, were having to take the
(08:50):
bus to work because their their licenses had been revoked.
They had to stop work to attend this meeting, like in some
closet in their place of employment at time it was.
It was incredibly it was much harder on them than on me.
(09:12):
Now I'm curious, you, you talkedabout the loss of control.
How do you parallel the loss of control that you experience with
that, with your career? You know, yes, as a writer.
Yes, well, that's a hefty transition.
(09:38):
We like to get right into the meat of it here, Bob.
Well, ultimately with this driving thing, I came to realize
that I couldn't have control of the situation and in my opinion
didn't matter. I think that in a writing
(10:00):
career, you also, there are certain things that writers
can't control, and one of them is the culture and what it's
hungry for, what it wants, what will be received when you
publish a book. But if you go back from that,
you also then have to wonder what a publisher is looking for.
(10:29):
And I think we're all aware of the shift in interest in various
ways. Probably there's a certain
interest right now in the topic of data and probably tyranny,
you know, based on the situationwe're in right now with the
government or I, you know, obviously the culture of around
(10:55):
DEI is up for a lot of conversation.
A lot of black authors are doingreally interesting things that
I've been done before and publishers want them.
OK, what they might not be looking for, unless you're
brilliant and David Sedaris or Sebastian younger or, you know,
(11:21):
in a pop level, James Patterson,what they're probably not going
to look for right now is a olderwhite man.
I just agree with you, you know,I unless you're brilliant, I.
I, I'm going to tell you why I disagree with you because I, I
(11:42):
have to, I have to put a time out on that one, not not time
out with the cameras. Why I, I think, I think society
is always shifting. I think the extremes in life and
form the middle. So you know, there's always
these extremes, but the pendulumalways comes back into this
middle area. And like 2 of like one of your
(12:02):
books was assisted loving and, and these are some, you know, 2
year older books, but they really spoke to me.
And the other one was last wordswith your parents.
And they probably really hit me because my mother was remarried
twice after her 50 year marriagewith my father and her her
(12:27):
second husband died within threemonths after their honeymoon.
And it would devastated her, devastated her.
She was the only person my mother was ever with besides my
father. And then she met someone else on
Valentine's Day. They dated for a year and they
got married and were married for14 years before she died.
But the last two years, three years before she died, had a lot
(12:48):
of very intense conversations with her, more than I had ever
had during my life. And when I was reading these
books, and I think about these books, and I think we have an
aging population. Now, I know sometimes you don't
want to rewrite what you've written, but you had such
insights. And we have an aging population.
(13:10):
We're getting older. We have parents getting older.
And I think about the legacy lessons that you draw upon and
do it so well. I'd want to know more about what
you can pull out of anyone. Well listen at the risk of
(13:30):
undermining your lovely response.
Don't you dare. But I'm, you know, I'm going to
just because I wanted, I like, Ilike the opportunity to be
honest about things. Yeah.
So that first book, which was about my, it's called assisted
loving True Tales of Double Dating with my dad is a good
(13:51):
premise. It's, you know, basically my dad
was also married 50 years. He wanted to be in love.
He turns to me, maybe because I know how to dress, you know,
maybe because I was the single gay son, not the other son who
was married with two children running a big business.
He, he, he knew I was not readily available, but that he
(14:17):
could, he could nudge me into getting involved, let's put it
that way. And he wanted help on dating.
So, I mean, originally I called that book Pimping for my Dad
because I was like trying to find women for him partly, and
this is the unacceptable part ofit, I didn't want him with just
(14:42):
anybody. I wanted somebody acceptable to
my taste level. Right, I think.
And he was a sweet guy who was not a snob.
He was an educated man, a lawyerand a judge.
But he was a slob. He was terrible table matters,
but a wonderful guy. But he could have dragged
(15:04):
anything into our family. He could have, you know, he
wasn't so picky. So I became the Screener.
I even tried to procure women for him if I heard somebody had
a single mom from a nice family.We all kind of like a little
(15:24):
dating help, you know, that person who knows us well enough
that's going to go out and find that mate, of course.
It's easier. Simultaneously, I was going to
say I was single myself and sortof almost resigned.
I was cynical. It wasn't the time of of apps
yet, but it was a little bit of that in the culture.
(15:46):
It's just I had talked myself into realizing that a life alone
was not a crime and doable with lots of friends and lots of a
big career. And but in the course of seeing
how much he wanted love and how he threw himself into it, I fell
(16:10):
in love myself. So it's sort of a double.
There's a whole, it's a double love story.
And, you know, I ended up marrying and he ended up with
somebody. And of course, it was very
attractive to all the networks. All wanted meetings.
And you know, Oh my God, it's like all kinds of people, major
(16:31):
people made adaptations that forpilots and it never got made.
When the book came out, I was onfresh air for an hour twice with
Terry Gross on the radio. It got all kinds of great
reviews and everything. And this is back to your topic
of control, Diane. It didn't sell this book that a
(16:56):
lot of people still remember andhad.
I was so lucky to have all the attention, all the media, all
the interest from Hollywood. It didn't go anywhere and the
book did not earn back my advance.
I think it needs a relaunch. And, you know, it was very, I
(17:19):
suffered at that, you know, and you keep trying.
And I thought to myself, well, it just didn't catch the wind.
It didn't catch the wind that would sail it into financial
success. Now you can say what you want
(17:40):
about that, but as I'm older now, I think I understand it
better. I'll tell you another story
about control. Around the same time I wrote
that book, I was asked to ghostwrite the book for this
beautiful actress, Diahann Carroll, who was the first black
actress to have a sitcom on NBC.She was a Broadway * Richard
(18:05):
Rodgers wrote a musical for her called No Strings.
She was the black woman on Dynasty, the black bitch,
Dominique Deveraux on Dynasty. She was a star and and and
revered. You know, her friends were
people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and Miles Davis
and and she lived a superstar life and was beautiful.
(18:27):
When I was working on this book with her, it came out it won the
NAACP Image Award. It hit the bestseller list for a
week or two. It didn't do gangbusters.
And when it came time for a yearlater to come out in paperback,
we were doing an interview for TV or something.
(18:49):
And I said, you know, Diane, what you do is you, you know,
you hire a private publicist andyou set up a whole nother tour
about this book. And she says to me now, Bob, you
have to know when the public hasspoken.
And I sort of thought about thaton Election Day this year.
(19:14):
I sort of had to understand thatwhat the people want is what
they want, and you can't necessarily force them or make
them. Now, if that's a terrible,
terrible bit of advice to a young person who's got a book
(19:36):
and should do everything that heor she can to get it out there,
set up every event, do everything you can, but to me,
control and the the ease of justrecognizing no matter what I do
right now, is this an uplifting conversation?
(19:59):
No, but. It does bring me to something
that I have been thinking about lately, which is the art and the
joy of giving up. Like knowing when you can stop
(20:21):
being the bird flying against the glass and give yourself a
break. That's an intriguing, deep and
profound statement because giving up and letting go are
very different things that, to me, often get confused.
(20:43):
Tell me more. I didn't.
I don't know what you mean. When I think of giving up, I
think of I'm done, I'm quitting,I'm never doing this again.
When I think of letting go, to me it's a rewrite of how I think
using writing analogy. I'm saying to myself, I am going
(21:05):
to do this for me. I know there are other critics.
I'm going to make sure I'm finding joy in what I'm doing,
that I'm having fun with it, that maybe it's a whole new
topic that interests me. And I'm going to explore that
without necessarily thinking of the end consequence.
(21:28):
Because sometimes when you startsomething, if you're just
focusing on how much you're intoit, the thing, it's like the
pieces of the puzzle start to fall together.
Like earlier we were talking andyou said, you know, you, we were
talking about singing and, and Iwant to get into this.
You mentioned you had a brother who had a stroke that couldn't
(21:49):
speak, but singing changed his life again.
I think that's a very moving story.
I want to know more. I know people who have had
strokes. I would love to figure out a way
to get through to them. We have more people that are our
age in this country right now than any other age, you know,
(22:09):
are aging up. We're so and strokes are
becoming more prevalent. And when you see someone have a
stroke, it's it's debilitating. So I would think it's not giving
up, it's letting go of the perceived notions that other
people are going to have, letting go of the expectation
because. Expectation it and.
(22:31):
We, you know, we do stuff and wehave so many expectations of
what are the response going to be, what's the result going to
be and there that's a lot of misery often in that.
OK, let's talk about that for a SEC.
There was a book called On Giving Up that came out last
year by the psychologist philosopher Adam Phillips, an
(22:53):
Englishman, quite a popular author.
It was a small book and it was rather academic for me, but at
the time I was going through a lot of discomfort, changing what
my goals were. One of the things that stood out
(23:18):
from the book On Giving Up was that he talked a little bit
about on giving up bad things like cigarettes or booze or
compulsive gambling, which was not something I was interested
in. But he talked about that in
context of giving up things thatwere just making you
(23:47):
disappointing you or making you anxious or unhappy.
And he thought that the public might think of that as not
failing as much as transitioning.
And I like that idea. Now, the contrary of that would
be what the great writer Samuel Beckett said.
(24:08):
And I think this might have beenaddressed also to writers, which
is fail once, no bother, fail again, fail better.
That's a good one. I love it.
Can you? However, can you fail once?
No bother, fail again, Fail better now?
(24:29):
This is not where I'm at anymore.
I'm not interested in failing atall anymore.
And that is probably privilege of being 67 and being
comfortable enough financially that I don't have to get a job,
you know, at Walmart. But my story about giving up
(24:59):
sort of does has to do with singing and my brother and my
marriage. And the reason I've been
thinking about it is all when COVID started, I had a
particularly dramatic time. My brother who had had a stroke,
(25:20):
my Big Brother, my successful, very paternal, fraternal, bossy
Big Brother who loved me. I was his only brother.
I had a stroke, and it took awayhis ability to speak.
And while his wife and his son were pushing him in therapy and
(25:42):
physical therapy, it just wasn'tcoming back.
It was not coming back. And I could see it and I knew
it. And he was miserable.
Being shuttled, you know, to this therapy and that and the
speech and how frustrating aftera year and it's not coming back,
you know, for a man who still had complete control of his
cognition, right? I mean, I could read to him from
(26:05):
the New York Times and he, we'd laugh at stuff going on, you
know, So he just sort of gave upeventually.
And what I realized was even though he couldn't speak at all,
he could sing. And that was in our family.
Since we were babies, we had a mother who sang to us.
You know, we still remember the Yiddish lullaby she sang.
(26:28):
Our father loved to harmonize. We would have, Passover stated.
We would sing through the whole thing.
I did little shows in the livingroom.
We sang in the car at the top ofour lungs.
We sang in the backyard. Music was this universal
consciousness for us. And when my brother gave up on
(26:53):
the speech and his wife and son,I think sort of backed off, I
came in and we sang and he fortunately had a piano.
I have a ukulele. It's all we did.
And you might think that somebody who had a massive
stroke, who was a paraplegic in a wheelchair, but who still
could think, would give up. But in his case, no, you know,
(27:18):
he was right at home exactly where he was.
But it was, I think taking the expectation, like you said, of
getting speech back and getting back on his feet and getting out
of a wheelchair and taking that away and giving up on it
actually did give him a nice fewyears at the end.
(27:40):
Do you think it's like arguing semantics?
If I say, is it giving up or is it accepting?
Because I love the Serenity Prayer and whenever somebody's
having trouble in anything, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous made
a famous. But I just think it's such a
good prayer for everybody. Accepting what you can't
(28:00):
control, right? Yeah.
You know, because when you accept something, new
possibilities just to me seem toappear.
Yeah. Yes, that's that's you know,
'cause. You stop pushing the boulder
uphill. I can't push the boulder uphill.
You got it If I stop. So yeah, expand on that.
Well, I mean, I was going to saythe boulder uphill situation is
(28:21):
and you know, again, like this is the opposite of a self
promotional video that I'm goingto look like some hotshot author
with a million balls in the air and this project or that.
I mean, the truth is I started to think of all the plays I had
written that that had runs off Broadway or in regional
theaters, but they never got further.
And that's a boulder. And this musical that I wrote
(28:43):
and this cabaret show that I wrote with a boulder right now,
I just finished writing a one man show for the actor George
Hamilton. And it was a fantastic process
and he's got an amazing life. But I don't really think now
that we're done with it, he's 85.
I don't know that he's going to want to do a one man show.
So talking him and said that's another boulder.
All these boulders I'm looking at now at the bottom of a Canyon
(29:06):
and maybe flowers are starting to grow on them and birds are
nesting on them. But there's like a whole so many
things I wanted to do. You know, recently I was fooling
around with a producer because Iwanted to talk about, I wanted
to do a cheeky, well, a podcast,but starting as an Instagram on
pills. So I did this thing called pill
(29:28):
talk, you know, and I was havingsuch a good time with it.
But, you know, because I think people have shame around their
pharmaceuticals and, you know, meds.
Like if I did a podcast, it would be called Pill Talk and I
would invite people on and I'd say, what meds are you on?
And then our conversation would go like this.
So anyway, that was another boulder.
(29:48):
I mean, it's just like console is constantly doing projects,
right? With the goal, not creative
satisfaction as much as taking my talents and my humor and
trying to get something out in the world the way you've gotten
this out in the world, for example.
So anyway, all the boulders, pushing the boulders up the
hill, The biggest boulder that Iwas pushing up a hill for many
(30:13):
years was my marriage. I was married to a fantastic
guy, very literary, very funny, incredibly supportive, who
really helped me like write, getmy books, get myself together as
an author, but had serious issues.
(30:34):
And when it became clear that hewasn't loving me anymore and no
matter what I did, it wasn't going to change, of course, I
suffered because like at the ageof 60, you know, one I didn't, I
(30:55):
didn't want to be single again. I didn't want that.
I didn't like the idea of givingup our shared country house, the
dog that we shared. There was so much I didn't want
to give up and I held on to it. But all signs were indicating
that, you know, he'd lost that love and feeling, you know, you
(31:16):
know, and when finally push cameto shove and something kind of
threatening was happening, that made me move out.
And this was like, I think the day after COVID was declared in
New York State. You know, I'm a lucky guy.
I have people who like me. And so I had a couch to stay on
(31:38):
on Long Island in this town where I spent a lot of time.
And then another, somebody else gave me their house and and then
I found a really nice place to live.
And as the weeks went on, I realized that giving up on this
was bringing out all the love and all the good feelings I had
(32:05):
accumulated through friendship and good relationships, right?
And I thought, oh, my God, I'm not a terrible person.
A lot of people enjoy what I have to offer.
And I had to release myself and give up on marriage.
Now, that's a very common story.I think in my particular case, I
(32:29):
moved into this little cottage in the dark of, like, you know,
March. It was very quiet area.
It was very cold that that year 2020, but there was a little
instead of a kitchen table, there was a bar in this little
cottage where you would eat stools and a bar.
(32:50):
And I looked at it and I thought, piano, I want a piano
in this dark little cottage in the middle of the winter.
I want to bring back into my life what gave me such joy as a
child and as a little boy, playing the piano for my parents
(33:12):
and doing shows with my girl cousins in the living room for
holidays and singing and learning new songs.
And I remember looking and looking to find a piano small
enough that wasn't going to be adisaster when I went to
Connecticut to buy it, you know,and find out it was a waste of
(33:33):
money, time. And I was walking up our country
lane and this young friend of mine is biking pass and he stops
and he goes, hey, Bob, do you need a piano?
Because I thought of you. And I know that you wanted one
in the house you lived in with your husband, but I knew there
(33:55):
wasn't room. I have it in storage in
Patchogue. Come take a look.
And it's and it was small and ofall things, this piano fit under
my bar instantly. And almost the moment that
happened, we figured out how to sing with all the I very
(34:18):
talented neighbors. And they were all of course, had
nothing to do. And we had porches and heat
lamps and we'd sing songs. Sometimes I would, oh, and I
would zoom on the piano with my brother, who was in a nursing
home, and we would sing. I mean, I have recordings of him
singing You Are My Sunshine withme.
And I formed a band, something Ialways wanted to do my whole
(34:41):
life, but I knew I was never good enough to really do that,
especially in a city like New York.
Well, we did it, you know, he rehearsed.
I, I don't know if we opened allthe window.
I mean, singing is a very dangerous thing to do during
COVID. It's a, it's a super spreader,
but we did it. Nobody got sick.
And because I had given up on this marriage where first of
(35:05):
all, I couldn't even have a piano in that little the house I
lived in with my husband. But B, the time, the need to
express the love that maybe can go into a relationship was going
into this relationship with music and people that wanted to
sing. And so within a year, one of my
dreams, you know, just to be able to choose the songs for a
(35:27):
band to sing and write the harmonies and rehearse enough
and then have a very, very receptive audience happened, and
it's still happening now, more recently, you know, this topic
of singing, which interested me tremendously because of my
(35:47):
brother's story and how we sang right to the end, I mean.
Which is just remarkable. Is there a medical like research
that's singing and overcome? Lots of things.
Oh, but you can't speak, but youcould sing.
Yeah. I mean, that's just.
Remarkable. You have a science background,
I'll tell you. I'll tell you about it a little
bit. And I don't think it's news, but
(36:08):
some interesting things about how people whose left side are
affected, which effects languageand I think other area areas
too. But when you sing.
You. Are rhythmically throwing
(36:29):
yourself into something that overrides the issue of words,
like a single word and its meaning.
So that's one thing that happens, another thing that
happens and. Are there any books on that?
Yeah, there are, there's, there's, there's work out there.
I was not, I was not on to anything new in thinking about
(36:50):
wanting to write about why we sing.
Another thing that happens, of course, as you've read, is that
Alzheimer's patients and dementia people, what singing
does for them is it triggers memory because they associate
(37:11):
this song, what a wonderful world with a time when they may
have been in college or something.
And, and so it, it releases a different, it releases them from
the concerns of the present and it throws them back in the past,
which is very helpful, you know,for people.
(37:35):
And then of course, with their kids who are all freaked out
because their parents have lost their mind across the board.
If they sing to them, it will bring them into the present.
I thought that with my brother, singing brought him into the
moment, into the present. And not only that, but in his
case, the guy was such an opinionated, powerful man when
(38:01):
he was well. And I think that this let let us
know he wanted us to know he wasstill there.
And that's how he did it. And that's how we did it.
And there was nothing else that he got a kick out of as much as
that. I mean, he had, you know, we bag
(38:21):
on pots and pans and, you know, and then and then the other
thing about it is that it made me and this was the case with my
dad in my second book when he was unwell and he really needed
a lot of entertainment. And it was the perfect job for
me, for both my brother and my dad is to be the entertainment,
(38:43):
to be the transgressive, funny, play songs by ear, sit at the
piano at the assisted living place and, you know, make a fool
of myself. Oh, there people were looking on
and my dad was singing at the top of his lungs.
And so and So what I, what I always advise when you're in a
situation that is overpowering and, and and frustrating with a
(39:09):
loved one who's unwell and is probably not going to get
better, is to figure out how thebest time you can in their
presence because that will pay off.
So for instance, when my ex who loves social media was going
through this with his 95 year old mom, I suggested that he
(39:34):
like bring his iPad and introduce her to the world of
Facebook and Facebook messaging and get her granddaughters who
she loved onto the iPad on Facebook and talk.
And like, you know, it was like all of a sudden she was thrown
into the world of the future, you know, that she didn't know.
And he loved it because he was sort of being the DJ and he was,
(39:56):
you know, and I loved seeing that and he was very grateful
for that. And and I think talking about
all of these things, taking careof people who really need you
and figuring out a way to find your muse again without
(40:18):
expectation does come when you get to the point where you give
up. And it's not so sad.
I have so many friends that say,oh, Bob, you're such a talented
writer. You know, you shouldn't give up.
And, you know, you need to do another book and all.
Well, you know, I tried to do a book on singing.
I have a very good agent and he couldn't sell it to a publisher.
(40:44):
The numbers on my books weren't so good, right.
And I realized, you know, I'm, Iprobably will go back and figure
out how it will work. But if you don't sell a lot of
memoir, you're probably not a publisher's not going to jump.
If your, your sales figures aren't good, they're not going
(41:05):
to jump to another one. And so I have to figure that
out, you know, or I can do what I've been doing, which is just
have the best time in the world doing something new, which in my
case is working on another musical show to perform on Long
Island. And I'm in a songwriting class
with a bunch of very talented songwriters in West Hampton.
(41:28):
And, you know, other people findtheir way into painting or
poetry groups. And I know this probably, you
know, young people would roll their eyes and be disappointed
in me because a lot of young, younger writers and editors look
up to me, you know, because whenthey were very little, I was in
the New York Times every week. And, you know, I had a big
(41:51):
presence in the the style section of the Times, and I had
a personal voice. And somehow I broke through and
had an audience. And so people are disappointed
that I'm fooling around writing songs that they're never going
to hear, you know, But I think that.
How do you know they're never going to hear them?
Now don't you lay your expectations on me, Diane.
(42:13):
No, no expectations. Just a just a question, you
know. How do you know?
How do I know? Because I'm not going.
That's not what I want to do with them.
All I want to do is sing them tomy songwriting group and play
them at my next gig in two weeksin an Italian restaurant with my
little band. That's you know.
I think that's how Billy Joel started.
(42:34):
And look at what happened, you know, just wasn't he sitting in
an Italian little Italian restaurant with a bottle of red
and a bottle of white and, or actually in Cold Spring Harbor
in a bar which my older brothersand sisters remember and, you
know. He was probably all 20 years
old. I, I, you have to respect the
(42:57):
release and of the experience ofletting go.
You know, I think that the trickis to stay engaged.
And so that's really, I think what I might be talking about,
about taking up singing and engaging my brother in, in
singing. And the trick is to stay
(43:20):
engaged, which is. Probably why I push back on the
word of letting go, you know, because I don't think it's
letting go. I think it's accepting.
I think it's acknowledging. I think it's again, it could be
(43:41):
semantics. You know, you write books, you
I'm sure you debate a word, one word versus another and how is
it going to be interpreted? But you're shifting into new
things. You're making room.
You're you're making room for new possibilities.
Yes, yeah. Now we happen to be sitting in
(44:07):
the middle of the most ambitiouscity in the world.
Certainly in London. People are ashamed of being
ambitious. You know, they the last thing
they respect is somebody self promoting and you know, same
thing in Paris. They have a different way about
(44:31):
accruing power. And here my discomfort in this
transitioning in New York is that it really is a city that's
all about what you're working on.
I will go out tonight and peoplewill say, what are you working
(44:52):
on? And, you know, 10 years ago, I
would have said, well, I'm work.I'm thinking about the topic of,
of singing. I want to write a book about why
we sing across cultures and emotionally and why, why it
means so much, you know, and I would talk about that and I'd
say, you know, and I'm publishing this piece in the
(45:13):
Times and, you know, being flownoff to Europe, you know, I mean,
they that is what is social currency in my world in New
York, what you're working on now, you know, I'm sure there
are people who are working in other areas like that.
(45:37):
People don't want to hear about when you, but when you have a
byline and a slightly public following, then people want to
know that you're doing somethinglike that right now.
Can you imagine if I said, well,I just finished a song I really
like about my dog? If I go to my event tonight at
Joe's Pub, you know and well, I.Don't know I'm.
(46:01):
I'm old enough to remember a song.
Me and you and a dog named Blue.Oh yeah, so or Boo, whatever the
dog's. Name Bojangles on a dog.
You know they're no, but you know what I mean.
It's just like it doesn't, it's a it's a transition of what
people can expect. You know, you were, you were
looking at my maybe looking at my bio or reading about me a
(46:25):
little bit, you know, saying, oh, it must be uncomfortable,
like leaving a very glamorous nightlife, you know, and having
a decent ethical compass, right,to be moral, but also be
socially ambitious or whatever it was that you very wisely
(46:45):
discerned. Well, I'm not so socially
ambitious anymore because I'm not invited, right.
And so I can be, I can admit that, Oh, it would be nice to be
invited to that black tie dinner.
You know, I'd be really nice. Right now, I'm obsessing about
trying to get a preview of the new Frick, which just the Frick
(47:05):
Museum just got renovated, you know, or the opening night of,
you know, the next big musical, which is what I used to do, not
because I was so special, but because I had a column in The
New York Times, right. So, you know, people are very
transactional in this town. Now.
(47:26):
The expectations of having that kind of life are, let's put it
this way, I'm better suited to be a bigger fish in this little
town on Long Island called Brookhaven then.
I mean, I would never ever play the songs that I play with my
band in the city, right? So you have to adjust like you
(47:48):
say. And there's fun in that.
You know, it's, but it's also, you know, admitting I'm not what
I had hoped I would be right now.
And believe me, when you live inNew York and you grew up around
David Sedaris and Candace Bushnell and a friend of mine
(48:10):
who has another musical opening on Broadway and another friend
who just is doing a documentary for HBO, you know, it's it's a
particularly accomplished group.And all my friends are
accomplished. They write best selling books,
you know, and we all enjoy each other and I'm proud to know
(48:30):
them. But I'm not accomplished that
way. Did I do something with my life?
Sure. You know, I made my parents very
proud. You know, my small town
librarian mom and my small town lawyer dad.
You know the their sons who accomplished things in business
and in my case, a small media career, publishing career.
(48:55):
You know they were proud. But no, on the big picture, I'm
not famous. I'm not that rich.
I'm not rich. And you know, I don't have
another book to pitch to you. Yeah, and that's where we are.
And that's what you want to always say is yet.
Well, I believe in acceptance and if you accept where you are
(49:17):
now without any expectations, I believe possibilities unfold.
If if I'm when I'm in a state ofconstant acceptance and I mean,
or constant challenging myself, possibilities might be less
likely. But the more I get into the mode
of, well, this is this is where I'm at today.
(49:38):
And all I have to do is wake up and you know, interview Bob and
I have no idea what's happening next because that's pretty much
how life is unfolded. I have no clue.
And I think I have a clue. I think I can control, I think I
can decide what's going to happen next.
And that's been proven false more times than it's been proven
(50:01):
true. So you're saying just I think I
I think I agree with this. Like you get up with something
to do. My bad days are when I don't and
I waste time. That's quitting.
Zoom scrolling or, you know, notthat I dislike napping or that
I, I think it's valuable, but, you know, the better days are
(50:25):
when I do something as little asfinishing a song or figuring out
the chords to a song, because you never know.
Or pitching. You know, I pitched my New
Yorker editor the other day and immediately got rejected.
But I did it, you know. That's all that counts.
Right and. Because that thought is now out
in the universe, and you have noidea when that editor may say 1.
(50:50):
Excuse me. It was great talking to Bob the
other day. I got another idea for him.
Yeah, or two. I didn't think that was a great
idea then, but now that I've hada cup of coffee, you know, or
now that I'm in a. Better.
I think it's worse. Well, yeah, well, it could be.
I don't want this to end, but weare up with our time.
(51:13):
What do you like? That here I I have acceptance
for the fact that we're out of. Time and I'm bummed we're going
to have to talk about this again.
Your wisdom, What were you goingto ask?
I said we're just going to have to do this again because I like
your insight. Yeah, I'll come back when my
next book is out, Diane. I don't know.
Maybe it's going to be your nextsong.
Maybe it's going to be that playwith George Hamilton.
(51:35):
Yeah, I don't know, George. A lot of possibility.
That's. Right, George?
Well, thank you. This has been really great.
Yep. I'm inspired.
That's what it's about, right? Yeah.
Thank you and you inspired me. I'm Diane Grissel.
This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics
(51:57):
podcast. My guest has been Bob Morris,
the Bob Morris if you want to look up his website and there's
going to be all kinds of links so you can find him his books.
I highly recommend you check outany of his articles as well as
books because they are great. They're very thought provoking
and that's what this is all about.
So thank you, Bob. I really appreciate your time.
(52:18):
A. Pleasure.
Thank you, everybody. Again, we've been recording at
Manhattan Center and I'm going to encourage you all to
subscribe and share this with your friends.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day week, see you
next time.
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