Posted by: donfried on: April 16, 2009
When I was still working for a living, I was on the road pretty much Monday through Friday, 40 or more weeks a year. My job was selling large, multi-national Information Technology Services outsourcing deals, usually in the $500 million and up value range, and sometimes in the multiple billions of dollars. Deals like those [...]
Posted by: donfried on: March 6, 2009
I was listening to NPR on the car radio while I was driving to the theater tonight for my last performance as Darwin in the Lincoln/Darwin plays. There was a piece about Hillary Clinton exchanging gifts with her Russian diplomatic counterpart. It seems she tried to give him a “reset” button, as a tongue-in-cheek fillip [...]
Posted by: donfried on: December 22, 2008
I’m busy working on my “Postville” play these days (I’m on page 50). See “They’re Hijacking My Play.” So I’ve been neglecting writing new posts. In the meantime, here’s something you may find amusing. It’s based on something that really happened to me — in Madrid, not Milan, but I switched it to Italy because [...]
Posted by: donfried on: December 8, 2008
For nearly all of my working life, I was seriously at the mercy of other people. And what wasn’t at the mercy of other people was, to an absurd degree, subject to luck (fate?). Yes, I taught English as a Foreign Language for a couple of years, and in the classroom I had at least [...]
Posted by: donfried on: December 6, 2008
One of the biggest cultural shocks in living overseas was the realization that I wouldn’t be required to live forever, and to be young and beautiful all that time. Here in America, the prevailing impression is that everything is under your control. If you just eat right, take the right vitamins and herbal supplements, exercise [...]
Posted by: donfried on: December 4, 2008
I guess it’s natural to yearn for things you can’t have, and my yearning for a beard goes way back. I was fairly late going through puberty, and even when it finally arrived I wasn’t all that good at it. So while my high-school and college friends were all displaying manly five-o’clock shadows and growing [...]
Posted by: donfried on: December 3, 2008
Following on from yesterday’s post, I should tell you that Rhonda and I were in Teheran in 1974 teaching English to Iranian soldiers. This was in the days of the Shah, and Iran was buying a fleet of attack helicopters from Bell Helicopter. Rather than teaching the Bell instructors Farsi, it was decided to teach the [...]
Posted by: donfried on: December 2, 2008
Thanks for inspiring these memories, Amber. I grew up in the suburbs thinking that the animals which supplied the meat that we ate all grew neatly inside of Styrofoam containers with Saran wrap covers and price labels. I never though about it much, but I suppose I expected that if I ever went to a [...]
