Life Lessons Learned at Bris

Sometimes the best part of living in LA is leaving it, and if the best excuse you can find is to attend the bris of a friend’s friend’s baby, then so be it.

This weekend a very sweet little boy named Gideon sacrificed his foreskin so that I could spend some time in San Francisco. Actually, it had nothing to do with me, but I was very happy to take the opportunity to get out of dodge (and visit my dear friend, Splendora editor, Karen Bard).

And while I was walking through the mist-filled streets, shivering in my LA-appropriate open-toed shoes, I was reminded of some very important things: the world is vast, there are infinite possibilities for what to do within it, life is beautiful, short, and sometimes painful, and all that really matters is connecting with people we love and perhaps creating a little legacy to leave behind.

When you are living in Hollywood, it is very easy to become a solipsist. There are times when it seems that perhaps your mind, and this crazy business, are the only things that exist. For a writer this is an easy trap to fall into - especially if you’ve been obsessively trying to finish a screenplay for months - so getting away, and seeing that life is going on outside of you, is key.

And so I want to take this opportunity to send a little "thank you" to my friend who thought it would be a good idea to invite me to a barbaric religious ritual which makes very little sense (but was very well catered), because the significance of sharing in a young boy’s first rite of passage was more therapeutic than expected.

The moyel of the story… sometimes a little bris can go a long way. 03.30.2007