Not many updates around here lately … and that pattern will continue for awhile.
However I have been pretty active on Twitter (or X as Elon has rebranded it) and you can follow me at @jeffbrokaw2013.
My plan for the next few weeks or months is to write there instead, once or twice per week, using the “thread” concept, plus of course reposting things of interest and a few replies here and there (I don’t do much interacting on Twitter).
TV shows come and go, into and out of our lives — likewise so do the people in them. Most shows only last two or three seasons, maybe six or eight if they are really popular. It’s a very transient world in that way.
It’s a very rare show that lasts a decade or longer.
And then we have Wheel of Fortune and specifically Pat Sajak who hosted the show for 41 years until his retirement this year . His final show aired last Friday.
Pat Sajak became a legend because he is so likable and funny and unassuming and naturally at ease with random strangers that, over time, you as the viewer start to think of him as almost a friend. A guy you are happy to see on the screen. Every night. For over 40 years.
Here is his farewell message.
Classy, selfless, genuine.
I loved watching the show and so did my whole family. Time marches on I guess and there will be reruns and a new guy in the fall and I’m sure he’ll be fine.
One thing he won’t be is Pat Sajak.
Background here.
I’m not sure how the details matter a whole lot now, because he’s gone and what difference does it really make?
But just to note them for the future….
He’s been very ill for several weeks and we’ve been blessed and amazed that he hung on as long as he did.
He became reclusive — very odd for him, as a social and friendly cat — and completely stopped eating for two weeks or more.
Then suddenly one Sunday he was revenous, and for a week or ten days continued to eat regularly, although not much. Mostly broth and gravy in the food, since he had difficulty and pain while chewing.
Then last Thursday he became very reclusive again and would not eat or drink.
Then very early on Saturday morning he started bleeding out from his mouth, and this time it would not stop, and I knew this was going to be the end for him.
I tried, we tried, to comfort him in his hour of need, just to be with him and allow him to pass peacefully as possible. It was not as peaceful as one would like.
He passed away at 6AM Saturday morning. We took his body outside on the deck while the birds were chirping.
He always loved to watch the birds.
He’s friendly and chill. He likes people and will let anyone pet him. Like a dog, in many ways.
Of course he likes sitting in boxes, and bags. Every cat seems to like this, and for us it’s endlessly entertaining. Put a box on the floor, wait a couple minutes, and he’s sitting in it. Just looking at you like “ha, look what I did!”
Anyone who has ever had to write anything for anyone can gain something from these videos and the books they are drawn from.
Personally I have been through both of these journeys — to write well, and writing to learn — separately from these books.
Writing to learn, I discovered quite by accident, is the best reason to write, at least for me. Now I write to amuse and inform myself, I write to learn by researching and tying threads together, and I write to organize thoughts and test my own assumptions about a topic. It’s quite energizing and I feel like I understand a little bit more around the world around me every day.
You have to understand a topic to write clearly about it. If you find you have trouble writing about it, you probably don’t understand it well enough quite yet. That means go back and learn more, and then come back to the writing.
Of course a secondary goal is to entertain readers enough that they want to come back next time. But I find that, for me, if I flip the goals around and make that the primary goal, the magic goes out of it.
Writing to Learn
Top notch advice, all of that.
Then there’s the one thing every single human wishes they could do better: write well.
Believe it or not, everyone can become a much better writer by following some rules and being disciplined about cutting out unnecessary words. Use active voice and present tense. Eliminate long words when short ones will do. Etc.
Clarity is king.
It’s more of a craft than an art, and that means everyone can learn enough to be better.
Only prodigies can sit down and just write once and be done with it. Jack Kerouac famously did that with “On the Road”, writing the whole thing on a single sheet of rolled up paper. Put that out of your mind; it does not work like that.
Here’s how it does work. On Writing Well.
I have not read either of these books, but know the concepts within them very well.
Born on this day, March 25, in 1947
It’s easy to take an amazing artist like Elton John for granted, but he’s been a legend for 50+ years now and his music was a big part of my musical education as a teenager.
To pick just one year from his peak in the 1970s, these three songs are all from 1973, when he released two albums, “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. Both reached #1 in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Three singles reached either #1 or #2 in the US, and a fourth reached #12.
It was a pretty solid year for him.
Always one of my favorite Elton John songs, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, live at Dodger Stadium, 1975.
Just Elton and piano, bringing the beauty of the melody of “Daniel” to the forefront.
I love the way he says “sure” without hesitation and just sits down to play this masterpiece that means so much to the guy in the audience as a tribute to his long gone dear friend.
For me the real difference maker was the quality of the album cuts, like “Blues for Baby and Me”. All of his albums in the early- and mid-70s had several such quality songs.
I could go on and on and on — we’ve only covered songs from 1973 here!
A description of Elton John’s musical legacy from Wikipedia.
John has more than fifty top-40 hits on the UK Singles Chart and US Billboard Hot 100, including nine number ones in both countries, as well as seven consecutive number-one albums in the US. He has sold over 300 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He is the most successful solo artist in the history of the US Billboard charts. His tribute single to Princess Diana, "Candle in the Wind 1997", a rewritten version of his 1974 single, sold over 33 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling chart single of all time. In 2021, he became the first solo artist with UK Top 10 singles across six decades. Among John's numerous awards, he is one of 19 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, five Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards, and a Tony Award. He also won two Golden Globes, a Laurence Olivier Award, and the Kennedy Center Honor. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and is a fellow of The Ivors Academy. He was knighted by Elizabeth II for services to music and charity in 1998 and was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2020, being invested at Windsor Castle in 2021 by the Prince of Wales.
Seven consecutive number one albums.
His YouTube channel is chock full of great videos, and well worth digging into.
Crime of the Century from 1974
Most bands, even top bands with excellent musicians, only have one or two really, really good albums in them — and for Supertramp, formed in 1970, this is definitely one of them.
The singles “Dreamer” and “Bloody Well Right” had some success but several other songs either received airplay on AOR stations or should have, such as “School” and my favorite, “Hide in Your Shell”.
The album itself sold very well in Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany, and hit #38 in the US.
“Hide in Your Shell”
The band had struggled to hit their stride in years prior, due to shifting lineups and trying to create a defining sound, both of which changed dramatically in 1973 when they found the lineup that worked and when one of the co-leaders and main songwriters Roger Hodgson started using electric piano to fuel his creativity. This album is the result.
Seemed to work pretty well.
Hide in Your Shell, School, and Dreamer were all written by Roger Hodgson. Turns out he had written a lot of great material a few years earlier, when he was 19, including Dreamer and two of the best-known songs that the band would not record until several years later for Breakfast in America (the title track and “The Logical Song”).
This interview with him is well worth reading. It shows that he already had formed a lot of pretty mature views for a 19 year old.
His lyrics work especially well for teens and young adults who are starting to question their place in the world. That’s exactly where I was when this band was popular in the late 70s, and this album in particular bings to mind a very specific time and place in my life, and pleasant memories with one particular friend, who loved this band and this album in particular.
“School”
R.I.P. Gerard Vanderleun
One of my favorite people whom I’ve never met passed away a few days ago, and I’d like you to know a little bit about him.
His name was Gerard Vanderleun and he wrote a “blog” — but it was far more than that — that he called American Digest. He gave it a tagline: “Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith”.
For 20+ years he created true art in written form that entertained you, delighted you, made you laugh and cry, consecutively and even at the same time. He told stories, reflected on life and its beauty, wonder, mystery, and absurdities. He noted his own metamorphosis as he traveled through life, especially spiritually and politically.
But he loved the visual too — he took photos, he discovered and showcased photos by others, he linked to fascinating videos. On 9/11 he lived in Brooklyn and watched the towers fall, and then over the next several months he took 10,000 photos in New York City to document the aftermath.
And he really liked people. He wrote often about his parents, his brothers, his marriages, his friends … and his estranged daughter that he never stopped loving. It came through in his writing, loud and clear.
What he didn’t do was write about news or politics or much of anything current, with very rare exceptions. His site was therefore like an oasis in the desert, a welcome break from the relentless emotion-triggering that the internet turned into long ago.
Some people have a gift and they use it perfectly to make the world a better place, and he did that exceedingly well.
His ability to string words together in unanticipated and clever ways, to paint pictures in your head, to tell stories, to make you feel things, was as good as anyone alive or dead. I learned many things about communicating in written form just by reading his work.
SO many times I would arrive at the end of another of his wonderful essays and just think “wow … now that was a piece of writing!”
The ways that he inspired and encouraged me over that 20 years … this is impossible to put into words. I discovered his blog by chance way back in 2002-3 when he somehow found my little unknown blog and left a comment there, probably as a result of his seeing a comment of mine somewhere else.
Reading him improved my own writing, to summarize it in a few words.
However it happened, my life was enriched by his efforts, many many times over the next 20 years, and I am very thankful.
My suggestion to you: carve out a few minutes from the usual daily routine and read a few of his essays. A list of just a few of my favorites is below but his website — still around for awhile but time waits for no one — spans 20 years, and out of all the millions of personal websites that have been built over that time this is one of those special few that deserves to live forever in a museum, if such a thing existed.
But as for me, I can do a little something to memorialize him on this site, as a personal note of deep gratitude and to recognize his legacy.
The Man Who Loved Not Wisely But At Least Twice
Watching the 1963 Chicago Bears Season Highlights video I discovered recently brought with it warm memories of watching Bears football with my dad on Sunday afternoons in our family room during the 1970s and early 80s.
Watching the Bears together was our thing, a bonding activity we shared; in fact he’s the one who got me started on it in the first place.
I still have it. There it is, on the right. It’s one of my few treasured possessions.
We started watching every Bears game together when I was 11, in the 1970 season, and I have many fond memories of sitting in our family room on Sunday afternoons in that decade and into the early 80s —with the dark blue indoor-outdoor carpet and the green L-shaped couch — watching a mostly inferior team lose most of their games, but with some great individual players, especially Butkus and Payton.
Fourteen Sundays per year … we suffered through a lot together. Ask any Bears fan from the late 60s through the early 80s.
Just for some context, in 1969 they went 1-13, tied with the Steelers for worst record in the NFL, and so the NFL flipped a coin to determine who got the #1 draft pick. The Bears lost that too, and the Steelers picked future Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw, and by the mid-70s they were winning Super Bowls (four in six years) with him along with the many other great players they drafted after him. Bears fans noticed all of this, of course.
During the Walter Payton years starting in 1975 they gradually improved and made the playoffs in the ‘77 season with a 9-5 record — but in the first round they faced the eventual Super Bowl champions, the widely-hated Dallas Cowboys, and of course got destroyed 37-7. This is what it was like to be a Bears fan in that era — the occasional bright spot (making the playoffs after years of failure) followed immediately by crushing disappointment. Suckers!
Then in 1979 they made the playoffs again, at 10-6, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles 27-17, due to turnovers mostly, but a horrible phantom illegal procedure call that took away an 85 yard run by Payton didn’t help.
During those years our favorite player was, obviously, Walter Payton, but strong safety Doug Plank was not far behind because of hits like these.
Some Walter Payton highlights from probably his greatest individual season, 1977.
By the early- and mid-80s when they gradually became pretty good, it was finally more “the thrill of victory” than the “agony of defeat”, and they finally began to beat very good teams, the royalty of the league.
One memorable game was November 4, 1984 when they played Oakland in one of the most famously brutal hard-hitting games in NFL history, and beat them 17-6.
Then I remember well when we watched together as they won their first playoff game, beating the Redskins in those ‘84 playoffs, which was essentially their coming out party.
Next up, the NFC Championship against San Francisco. They lost 23-0. It was an absolute thrashing. But they did win a playoff game, so … progress. Patience, grasshopper.
Little did we know how fricking great the following season would be, when the 1985 team ran roughshod through the league, going 15-1 and destroying first the Giants and then the Rams, shutting them both out.
Then in the ultimate celebration of the end of an era of futility, we watched Super Bowl XX together, when that ‘85 team destroyed the Patriots 46-10.
That was SO much fun as a Bears fan, and it was a form of therapy for us to be together watching it. After years of frustration, including some really bad teams, then slowly getting better only to lose in the playoffs, I cannot even imagine a bigger turnaround, and a bigger display of total dominance to just put an exclamation mark on the whole post-1963 era, than that 1985 playoff run.
Watching this brought warm memories of my dad because watching the Bears together was our thing and he liked to talk about this team from time to time.
1963 Chicago Bears Season and Championship Game Highlights, narrated by Jack Brickhouse
So many big names from Bears history in the video — but instead of imagining what they looked like on the field making big plays, and trying to picture it in your head, you can watch them actually doing it.
Willie Galimore, Rick Casares, Billy Wade, Ronnie Bull, Mike Ditka, Johnny Morris, and Joe Marconi on offense, among others. Examining the 1963 NFL team stats shows that the offense was solidly middle of the pack in both rushing and passing and played a conservative ball control style with the fewest turnovers in the league, by a large margin (25, compared to 30 for the next best 49ers) with just 14 interceptions.
Wade, Marconi, and Ditka made the Pro Bowl that year, and after watching the video, you’ll know exactly why. Wade was athletic with quick feet and an accurate arm, and consistently among the league leaders in various passing numbers in that era, Marconi an absolute bruiser at fullback, and Ditka was Wade’s favorite target, dominant from his debut in 1961 when he was Rookie of the Year and then making All Pro from 1962-66.
And some of those blocks Ditka makes … whoa nellie! That guy was a football player.
On defense, Doug Atkins, Bill George, Joe Fortunato, Larry Morris, Richie Petitbon, Bennie McRae, Dave Whitsell, J. C. Caroline, Rosey Taylor, Ed O’Bradovich, among others.
The defense used pressure to shut down the opponent’s offense and force turnovers.
In 14 games the defense:
Absolute dominance.
29 is a lot of picks among just 4 players, and I have to wonder how many times in NFL history a group of any four starters have reached that number.
Here’s the pro-football-reference.com summary of their season with stats.
Some things I learned from looking at team and individual stats: Wade was an excellent quarterback who was consistently among the league leaders in various passing numbers in the early 60s, Ditka was an immediate factor, dominant from his debut in 1961 when he was Rookie of the Year and then making All Pro from 62-66 (this is every season with the team). George Halas was Coach of the Year, and George Allen was a defensive assistant and then defensive coordinator the next two years before moving on to the Rams and later the Redskins as head coach.
Links of season leaders for the 1961-65 era:
Finding the energy to post just twice this month and seven times last month means that I’m essentially taking the summer off, as it turns out. Wasn’t planned, it just happened.
When I return it will be in a somewhat different format and schedule (working through some ideas now).
See ya soon!
Zac Brown Band, “Homegrown”
I’ve got everything I need
And nothing that I don’t
The song stands on its own but the best thing for me is that lyric which is actually great life advice, if you’re looking for it.
It took me about 5 decades to realize it — or maybe to turn into one — but I am a minimalist (or “minimalist-adjacent”) who likes less stuff around me for better mental and emotional health.
But the process of living your life, especially raising a family, brings a constant flow of stuff in the front door, and after a couple decades the “it might be useful someday, put it in the basement” system stops working and you suddenly realize that “something new comes in, something old goes out” is far superior.
The only thing I would care about saving in a house fire — after family and pets of course — is photos. Everything else can be replaced.
But we have SO many photos … and most of them just sit in boxes in a dark closet 24x7x365.
So I ask myself, what good are they, like that? Who does that help? What value are they adding to our lives? Almost zero.
Photos are only useful when you look at them. This is obvious but it raises an important point: the time that these photos spend sitting in boxes is a series of missed opportunities.
Each of us only has so much time here on this planet — opportunities missed are opportunities lost.
Little did I know as a kid listening to Elton John in the early and mid-70s that I was getting a master class in melody writing, arrangement and piano.
One great example is “Tiny Dancer” which grew an entirely new audience in the 2000s because it was used in a key scene in “Almost Famous”: the band is near a breakup and in constant conflict and might not even finish the current tour, for the usual reasons: personality conflicts, power struggles, strains of life on the road, etc. Then this happens …
That’s very powerful storytelling, combining music with visuals to show everyone on the bus growing closer in the span of 3 minutes just from singing together … it makes me both smile and tear up every time I watch it.
Rick Beato gives a music expert’s opinion on What Makes This Song Great.
It was never a hit single because it was over 6 minutes long, and makes us wait two and a half minutes for the chorus — but there were lots of great songs that were too long for Top 40 radio.
Official video from the Elton John channel:
If you have ever spent any time in an auto parts store you have seen the bewildering array of additives, cleaners, and other potions for fuel, oil, transmission, power steering, coolant, hydraulic brakes, etc.
Maybe some of them even work — who knows? I sure don’t, and generally steer clear of magic solutions of every kind … it’s in my DNA, I can’t help it.
But for some reason one day last year I spent like 20 minutes looking at these products, figured “why not?”, and bought some Marvel Mystery Oil and added it to my fuel for a few weeks (on my 2007 Honda Accord V6).
It’s supposed to clean your fuel system, heads, valves, etc, along with increasing MPG. It seemed to help with mileage, but I didn’t check it that carefully, so I could very easily be mistaken on that.
This guy tries it on his lawnmower, along with a well-known competing product, Seafoam. He even hooks up a compression tester — but this is a little over my head since I don’t know how to interpret the results. Too little is bad, but so is too much, I think.
Seafoam vs Marvel Mystery Oil
Compression testing a lawnmower with some interpretation of the results — the numbers are specific to the motor, which makes sense. These numbers are published by the manufacturer.
An overview of compression testing and what it diagnoses — but for a car, not a lawnmower.
Last night it was a beautiful Spring evening so we used our fire table at our new digs for the first time.
For our listening pleasure and for reasons unknown I called up “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on Spotify. As albums go, this is one of my oldest “friends”.
I got this when it came out in 1973, and played it all the time for a couple of years. Classic album, classic cover.
Obvious hits all over it, but there are several unknown gems, like “Harmony”.
My mom loved music and dancing and so my young childhood years are filled with many warm memories of fun songs and happy music filling our space and time.
One of my favorite memories, in fact, now that I think back on it.
She’s gone now, two weeks today in fact, and I find that revisiting some of this music makes me both happy and sad at the same time, if that is possible to imagine. That’s just how that works, I guess.
Trini Lopez Live at PJs from 1963 — “America”
Same album, “Bye Bye Blackbird”
Her initials were “PJ” so “Live at PJs” held special meaning.
The whole album is full of fun, upbeat, danceable, singalongs like these, plus his relentless driving rhythm guitar and charisma and energy — it can be streamed here on YouTube.
Al Hirt, “Java”
Al Hirt, “Tansy”
I just listened to the whole thing front to back for the first time in at least 50 years. Still great. The whole album can be streamed here on YouTube.
Ever since I watched “Mad Men” during its original run I have wanted to watch it again, from the beginning, to fill in more of the details I had missed due to starting in season 2, or 3 (or maybe it was late in season 1).
But it wasn’t important enough to pay for the privilege. Then recently I discovered a way to watch it for free (see end of post for details).
This show is so unique and I like almost everything about it: the early 60s vibe and visual details, the straight ahead no-nonsense dialogue, the classic men’s look of suits and ties and white starched shirts, the focus on adults doing adult things in an adult world, the peek into the old school Madison Avenue advertising world, the period piece feel with glimpses of New York City and therefore America at its cultural peak during the transition from the Eisenhower 50s to the JFK early 60s, before the decline that started with the JFK assassination in 1963 and continued with Vietnam, social unrest, riots, more assassinations, Watergate, impeachment/resignation, rampant inflation, etc.
I suppose whether that was a cultural peak or not is up for debate. Feels that way to me.
One of the many solid actors on the show is Robert Morse, who played Bert Cooper, one of the owners of the advertising firm, and who passed away on April 21 at age 90.
He was a bit of a character, an oddball really, especially for a managing partner. But this served as a useful counterweight to the relentless intensity of the Don Draper character.
Morse originally made his name by starring in the 1961 Broadway hit play How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (and winning a Tony Award for it), and in 1967 played the same role in the film version.
This Mad Men scene is hardly typical of the show, or Bert’s character, or Don’s. But it’s memorable and remarkable because it is so different.
To watch it for free, create an account with IMDBtv and watch on the IMDBtv app or via Amazon Prime Video (which includes IMDBtv).
We’re moving out of state next week and as a result our life has been a little chaotic recently.
Boxes everywhere, always more stuff to throw out, calling utilities and insurance companies and movers, organizing changes to every service imaginable.
In some ways that extra layer of chaos, change, and uncertainty is a good thing to distract us from the vague sense of dread that we are all starting to feel, increasing little by little as the days pass. It’s not paralyzing, but it’s there.
Right now, at 7:44am on Wednesday April 20, we’re at exactly T - 7 days on the countdown.
We all know that the move itself is the best thing we can do for our own future and important things like being close to family and a lower cost of living and a more secure future. We’ve talked about it a lot, my wife and two (remaining) adult children and me, and we are 100% on board with the goal and long-term benefits of moving away from our longtime home base.
But the things you know in your head sometimes fight with your emotions, which have a stubborn undeniable power over your world.
To add to all that, our two young adult sons will stay behind — one has already moved out but lives nearby and the other will live with him for the Summer — meaning that my wife and I become empty nesters at the same time we move 3 and 1/2 hours away. Still, this is good for them, and they know that, and need that and want that.
We’ve lived here for 22 years, raised our three kids here, made friends here, put down roots here. We’re “dug in” as the Kevin Kline character explained to his friends in The Big Chill.
But now we’re choosing to dig in somewhere else, where the future lies, for multiple reasons.
The next few months will be a challenge for all of us in multiple ways, and there will be some tough days and unexpected emotions that bubble up out of the blue, but out of such challenges we learn and grow and sometimes find unexpected delights too.
If you’re not on the path towards the future you see, what are you doing?
Jason Sudeikis is Ted Lasso, an American football coach with a relentlessly positive can-do attitude and a “down home” demeanor who talks a mile a minute and smiles 24x7 — and also somehow gets hired to coach a British soccer team despite zero knowledge of the sport.
The reason for that has to do with the new owner, a divorced woman named Rebecca who becomes owner as a result of the divorce and wants to make the team as horrible as possible to get back at her ex. Rebecca might need a life coach, not just a soccer coach.
It’s really an ensemble cast with several supporting characters, all of them developed and explored in some depth over the two seasons released so far, and almost all of them very likable. Except Nate. You’ll see why if you watch it.
It’s my favorite type of show: comedy with real human stories woven into it. Like real life: comedy and tragedy all mixed up in a stew.
His quotes have become one of the centerpieces of the show. Here’s a list of 65 Ted Lasso quotes from which I pulled a “Top Twelve” of my own below.
Since he’s a coach, the main themes are leadership and putting the team first, but he delivers them with self-deprecating humor so it hits a little different.
This video shows examples of his leadership.
Some of the best scenes from season 1.
He does a few quotes in every show and at first they catch you off-guard because they seem so random and odd but after a few episodes you start looking for them in anticipation.
Top Twelve Ted Lasso Quotes
Secondhand Lions from 2003. Here is the trailer.
Sometimes you watch some movie you’ve never heard of and wonder why it isn’t much more widely known and admired, this is one of those.
Set in the early 60s, it stars both Michael Caine and Robert Duvall as a couple of crazy old (and apparently rich) uncles who take in a young boy relative (played by Haley Joel Osment) — whose mother manipulates and abandons him — and teach him what being a man is really all about: courage, honor, sacrifice, and virtue.
The story is timeless and classic — it feels like it was lifted straight from the 1950s — and you grow to like the characters you’re supposed to like and dislike those you’re not.
The uncles have led quite the adventurous life, if we can believe all their stories — we’re never quite sure, and various people float rumors about their past and where they got their cash, but then we slowly realize it doesn’t really matter if a story is strictly 100% true or not if it inspires people and captures their imaginations and teaches them about what they should aim for and what is important in life.
Family-friendly, with life lessons and humor and larger-than-life characters. Did I mention that Robert Duvall and Michael Caine are in it?
Quote from the Robert Duvall character “Hub”:
"Sometimes, the things that may or may not be true, are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are good, that honor, courage and virtue mean everything, that power and money, money and power mean nothing, that good always triumphs over evil, … that love … true love never dies."
Here’s that scene.
A wonderful tale, masterfully told, with excellent acting all around, and a real throwback to when movies instilled valuable life lessons.
It’s available to buy or rent on YouTube and Amazon along with other ways to watch it, and does play on cable occasionally (that’s how I first saw it about 10 years ago).
Links