Love Letters Live

Jesus and Other Lovers? Irresistible. I cannot think why Netflix or someone is not all over this with a series in the works. Judy Theo Lehner tells her story here about Jesus and Other Lovers; An Intimate Memoir of a Catholic Nun – her story and the name of her book. Oh,...

After watching Love On the Spectrum, Jake thought he would like a chance to say what he wanted to find in a romantic partner. Jake is an exceptional fellow with definite ideas of what it takes to make a relationship good. And, he knows what he wants. He knows he is creative; he likes...

Prima Ballerina Janet Sassoon is so much more than that. She is a rare combination of stunning exotic family history, unstoppable  passion and diligence, and a first rate cook with a collection of time-honored traditional middle-eastern recipes. Add to that her significant talent at the piano. Her Baghdadi Jewish community is the...

  America is facing an emergency. With a momentous election around the corner, a tsunami of new laws across the country make it difficult if not impossible for some people to vote. Perfectly eligible voters being denied the right to vote, blocked from their duty to vote for lack of a governmental issued photo...

Shulamit Sofia MSW is getting older. Well, we all are, and at exactly the same rate.  But she has a head start on some of you and has learned a thing or two to pass on about how to live life best for the rest of the road. Shulamit gives us a blessedly cheerful picture...

Janna Barkin had the good luck to knew she had a transgender child because that child made it so clear to her from the time he was little. She knew he was always her son despite what presented at his birth. But transgender can be confusion-filled  and family members left sometimes fearful from lack of understanding....

When Irena Smith's  son was diagnosed with autism she got right to work calling on the same innate wizardry she detailed in her recent book The Golden Ticket showing college applicants how to find and express their best selves. It is easy to expect our children to be, as Irena says, some variation of...

What does it take  to get children into top universities without damaging families, without scandal, jail-time, debilitating tension and humiliation? What roles should parents play? What makes the best college essays? All good questions. And here to talk about those issues is Irena Smith, a long time college admissions counselor and author of The...

Emilio Palame has turned his prodigious talents to the production of the upcoming movie Forty-Seven Days With Jesus. Emilio is a musician with a stunning history of accomplishment as pianist, composer, arranger and many years as Peggy Lee's musical director. He has a long history as a highly regarded actor, director and writer as...

Author Barbara Rose is the author of many books in which deeply held honesty is kind of a central character all its own. She has always been fearless in expressing herself with candor, wit, and a chummy indifference to whether people like what she says or not. She seems to delight in saying things that most people...

Michael is a third-generation psychic who has performed in 24 countries and 49 states. He was the magician for the Pittsburgh Steelers. One relative was Stalin's mentalist, his psychic advisor. And, he performed for the Saudi royal family, the princess of Jordaqn and a few Russian oligarchs as well as members of the Secret Service and even...

Donnie Demers has had a charmed life with a loving family, childhood performing, and success after success until the multi-platinum record days in France. His began playing the piano at the age of four, but his first entry into performance was when he became the poster child for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and joining his aunt, a...

America's first gay disco, a Los Angeles club that saw over a thousand gleeful men a night dancing at Studio One where gay men could feel safe being themselves. Leaving this history to memory is risky; memory fades and when those carrying the clearest of impressions pass away, there is no on to turn to for...

Walking tours can reveal hidden mysteries and secrets. So does finding a staggering motherlode of information in 8,000 family letters she found all written in the early 1900s. More mysteries and secrets to share. Nancy Botkin leads tours for WALK SAN FRANCISCO sometimes up lesser known paths sometimes up lesser trod paths. But, either...

  It can change human existence for the better, but in the wrong hands has the potential to be deadly and could put an end to life on earth. “The New Roaring Twenties,” by Paul Zane Pilzer and Stephen Jarchow, available now at book-stores, is a fascinating guide to surviving and prospering in our...

Actor Michael McHale faced and triumphed over two enormous challenges in his life; a T-cell count of 4 and finding out who his birth father was. Michael's life has been more complicated than most people could imagine. For some mysterious reason Michael recovered from AIDS. When he found out he had only 4 T-cells, he...

Reverend Steve Pieters has survived AIDS for decades. He was the first gay man with AIDS to be interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker, and says that he has been amazed at how those 25 minutes he spent with Tammy Faye have reverberated through his life, more than almost anything else he has done. He says so many...

The Valley of the Moon Music Festival in Sonoma California is so unique that it is hard to know where to begin. Ditto regarding the president of its Board of Directors Kimberly Blattner who was not raised with classical music but whose passion for it now has guided much of what she does. She says that...

Love laundry? Christian Sanya turned it into a very lucrative business to fulfill her long standing dream of owning her own laundromat. She works in a science lab, but wanting to augment her income she thought of offering to fold laundry. People came running in droves, and soon enough she was doing the whole laundry load for...

Samantha Brenner has learned a lot about dating because she has been dating with her heart and her eyes open for many years now. Different in her 20s than now in her 30s? You bet. She brings to her works in a business world the same strong focus on the human element that she brings...

Remember Roy Rogers and Dale Evans? Julie Rogers Pomilia does and is here to tell us their reality and what it was like growing up as their granddaughter. Roy and Dale were the biggest Western duo to hit the screen in days gone by. No one like them. Actually. Their reach and...

When the Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge and Executive Producer Penni Wilson join forces with other major talents, this year's result is Kryptonite, a very short movie with the feel of a full length feature. A movie that has left so many people wanting more, wanting a series, wanting to stay in touch with the two main characters...

Do we remember the bullies in our lives forever? Adam Sherman is back to talk about bullying and kindness and the lasting power each of those holds. To be living as a youth on the autism spectrum can pose conquerable challenges, but facing bullies should not be one of them. How Adam dealt with friends who turned against...

Photographer Johanna Siegmann has documented the love between people and their pets in her beautiful, lavish, fun-filled book of incomparable images of notable people with their pets. And, February 20th was Love Your Pet Day. Well, really what day is not? What do you know about a person with a pet. Lots!  People with their...

Terri Jay, a medium, a medical intuitive, an animal communicator (yes, a horse-whisperer), author on the subject and so much more. She takes her ability as unremarkable, sees no real mystery in it, simply, as she says, picks up on higher vibrations or frequencies  Her conviction is that everyone is born with the same capacity for...

The Middle East Peace Process is alive and well in the hands of School Principal Mohammad Kundos, his colleagues, students and their parents. While governments are sputtering along trying to bring an end to hatred among conflicting factions, Mohammad Kundos, a Muslim from a religious family spends his days at Hand In Hand school fostering understanding, love and...

Rescuing old, stray, abandoned and sometimes abused dogs is what Sherri Franklin does. She is on duty every day finding them loving homes, saving them from euthanasia, providing the most loving and tender hospice care to minimize their suffering. And, if she cannot find an adequate and compassionate foster home quickly, well, she takes them into her...

Living Beyond Normal An Autistic Autobiography is more than Adam Sherman's life story. It is, as he says, a story bigger than he is. With honesty and candor he takes on the task of vanquishing the many misconceptions of autism. What drove him to write this book was sudden connection of Black Lives Matter...

When a boy on the spectrum and his teacher were unable to understand each other, what should the teacher have done?  Steve Spitz, the one neurodivergent boy in his class has some valuable thoughts on this. Granted, Steve was in grammar school decades ago when a student whose mind seemed to be wandering left teachers in a...

The LGTBQ community in good hands with Jill Baker as she focuses on gender, transgender and HIV wellness. A family nurse practitioner for 20+ years, Jill works as a primary care provider, which means she is authorized to prescribe medicines and take care of her own patients. Pressure on doctors to see so many...

Times change, and language changes to reflect it. Janna Barkin, author of He Has Always Been My Son, talks about the importance of using the pronouns that people choose to reflect their gender identity that may differ significantly from the gender they were assigned at birth. Janna tells us what it is...

  Alison Hitchcock wrote over 100 letters to a man she barely knew. They met at a yoga retreat and did not really connect until they were next to each other in a headstand and, oops, a simultaneous bodily function took over. Friendship sealed. Alison, not one to cook meals, wanted somehow to cheer up...

“It's a girl!” came the proclamation at the birth of Janna Barkin's second child. Her 5 year old daughter disagreed. Janna Barkin, author of He's Always Been My Son, talks about raising her transgender son. Unconditional love for this beautiful child, of course, but more than that. We live in a constantly changing world where gender...

Steve Spitz knew early in his life that he differed from the other children in school. He learned differently, he processed in atypical ways, his mind wandered in class. That he grew up with a devoted family who loved him unconditionally was a blessing that softened the edges of challenges, yet it was only a short time...

Gordon Goodwin is a Grammy winner, composer, arranger, pianist, saxophonist, actor, founder and bandleader of Big Phat Band, popular radio personality, 4 time Hollywood Bowl performer, conductor for Johnny Mathis, worked with Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Christiana Aguilera, John Williams, Ray Charles. You may be tempted to ask “where does it end?” Don't bother...

Before the days of matchmaking sites and online dating, there were personal ads in newspapers. Rose Taibbi, to keep her mind occupied while waiting to go to the wake of a dear friend, picked up a local newspaper and looked at the personals. She crossed off everyone but  two and, baffled as she was at why she...

Receiving a heart that saved his life, Steven Taibbi lives every day in profound gratitude and wanted to include the donor's family in his life. His donor David Jason Jocobo, a healthy 36 year old man, father of four, suffered a brain aneurysm and collapsed in front of the family, dying just three days later. The family...

Color one of the most important facets of our lives and sometimes our defining identification. The colors we wear, what does it say about us? What color gets our heart rate up and probably feels like love? Do parents still tell teen children what colors they may not wear? Lee Rosenberg, high-school art teacher is back with some...

Steven Taibbi was born with a hole in his heart and has earned a stunning distinction; one he never asked for. Operated on right after birth, by the age of six he became the first person to live through two open hearts for ASD repair. Throughout his life he was told repeatedly that he had maybe only a year...

Teaching art to high school students may be more than you think. If you add into the lesson plans some physics, chemistry, discovering new talents, patience, and triggered memories, well, you have just entered Lee Rosenberg's art class. Long ago and far away I had heard that good teaching is something like 90% entertainment. I believe that. Lee's...

Feeling blue, anxious, needing something to cheer you up? Heaven knows the world is pressing down on us all with glum news. Good news is the release of a movie that, admittedly, will not change the world, but it is sure to make you smile from way down deep. The Knights of Swing, about a teen swing-band of...

A 12 year old runaway girl, homeless and facing indescribable danger and misery is now in her 3rd year of law school. And, she is not the only one to have gone through the Jeffrey Sitcov's Doors of Change and come out, yes, changed. Too many children have had to flee home to save their lives; they have...

As Passover is around the corner, Rabbi Peretz Mochkin dives right into the complexities of shedding various kinds of slavery that keep us from being as much as we can be. He talks about leaving the mental constraints of slavery; can people leave limitations foisted upon them?  Then there is relating instead of interacting and what that means personally...

Hint: he is the biological son of the sitcom mother of Ron Howard. Yes, Happy Days, and good for you and good for him as happy days there were. Pleased to present Jim Meskimen, an exceptional man you probably know him from more places than I could count on the fingers of four hands. The truth is because Jim...

Has the internet damaged our ability to trust what we see before our very eyes. You think it is Tom Cruise chatting on a Youtube? Think again. Maybe it is. Maybe not. Peter Katcoff, president of the Marin Philosophical Society, talks about loss of trust caused by the internet. People in positions of authority are lying, and lying...

With a war going on right now that has the potential to threaten the entire world in myriad ways, I know that legions of us have sent donations to help the people of Ukraine now facing horror after horror. Not to minimize countless political atrocities against people taking place daily, it's just that this one was a reminder to me...

How much damage has the internet caused humanity? Plenty in ways both personal and universal. Peter Katcoff, with a slew of degrees, teaching experience and as current president of the Marin Philosophical Society, has a solid feel for societal changes and what they mean for us. The news, of course, is not all bad even though it becomes clearer...

Judy Tenuta is kicking cancer's stage 4 ass! You may know her as The Love Goddess, Aphrodite of the Accordion, Singer, Comedienne supreme, stage actress performing in the Vagina Monologues and Menopause The Musical.  She has appeared in specials on HBO and a stint on General Hospital and is the first female stand-up comic to win “Best Female Comedian”...

The incomparable Noah Griffin (not a figure of speech here) has just been elected to the Tiburon Town Council. Although newly elected, he is no newcomer to Bay Area political life. He comes to this position with quite a history of accomplishment; a Harvard law degree, years of work with and for well-known and respected politicians including SF mayors...

What is the purpose of school administrators? Good question. Larry Strauss, teacher and well-known fiction author talks about what it takes to be a first-rate teacher, how and why teachers can fail, and the value of going above and beyond the basics – yes sometimes you have to break the rules to let your students know that, in...

Donna Russo is the main character of Donna On the Go, her original web-series about a young woman with two non-related disabilities that cause some challenges, some difficulties and, yes, some laughter. With a childhood diagnosis of two conditions that may have stopped most people from achieving goals that were dearly held dreams, Donna forged ahead on the path...