Tuesday, April 1, 2014

EHUD, ARNOLD AND MY PICTURE GALLERY


Yesterday was a good day for justice in Israel, although it was the final blow to my admittedly anemic celebrity picture gala.  I'll sacrifice for a good cause, and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's conviction and hopeful exit from the public stage is a very good cause indeed.

I was involved in California politics for 30-plus years.  Virtually everyone with that kind of a record (yes, some would argue, sentence) has walls full of pictures of them with a panoply of politicians, officials, sports heroes, and Hollywood stars or wanna-be stars that the person met along the trails. 

Not me. For whatever reason, that picture gallery decorating approach never appealed to me.  My offices had pictures of sailboats, mountains,  and kids.  The stars were ones I never met:  Koufax, Drysdale, a circa 1920 Fenway shot.  I did have one of those famous pictures of the Big Three, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, at one of those once far-off locations that we only knew about because of 10th grade world history.

That was it.  My gallery consisted of my kids,  inanimate objects,  and mostly real famous dead guys.  Except for one.  I once accompanied the CEO of a client, a California start-up, to a conference featuring then Trade and Industry Minister Olmert and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The CEO, his wife, me, and one or two others had a picture taken with the Minister and the Governor. All smiles and happiness.

Even I, disinclined as I was to clutter the office with smiling pretend best friends, could not resist hanging a picture of me hanging with the celebrity action-hero governor of the biggest state in the Union and a future PM of The Promised Land.  What could top that?  A picture with Ben-Gurion?  Lady Gaga?

As we were arranging for the framing of the picture, it just seemed like the CEO, his wife, and the one or two others were cluttering things up, distracting from the real focus of the picture, extraneous.  My wife or the framer (not me!) suggested a little clip job was in order.