Feldman's Faves: May 13, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

Happy Mother’s Day to those of you who celebrated yesterday. It was a beautiful day for it.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch it and you want to re-live the magic of the 2023-2024 NCAA Women’s Basketball season I highly recommend Peyton Manning’s new project, entitled, “FULL COURT PRESS”, which follows the season from the perspective of Kiki Rice, Kamilla Kordoso and of course, Caitlin Clark.  There are those transcendent moments in sports (think “Joe Carter Homerun”, “MJ’s - The Shot”, “Crosby’s Golden Goal”, etc.) and this year’s season was one for sure.

BTW, it turns out that Taylor Swift has now updated her set list in the ERAS TOUR to include songs from her new album – Tortured Poets - so from the perspective of my children this is a brand new tour for which I have to find them tickets. PLEASE HELP ME AND MAKE IT STOP.

Finally, it’s hard to believe that our summer students are starting this week. Please join me in welcoming Sarah and Arjun to our section. I know they are eager to learn this summer so please do everything you can to involve them in your deals and integrate them into our section and into our firm..…once their training is done and they learn how to docket daily of course…..

This week’s theme is things that I thought I knew but I really didn’t.

FRIENDS, LOVERS AMD THE BIG TERRIBLE THING By: Matthew Perry –Matthew Perry was 54 years old when he tragically died last year.  The outpouring of grief and love for this man was truly remarkable.  I must admit, I was never a huge Friends fan but you had to be living under a rock in the time it was on air to not appreciate the juggernaut that it was in its time (and with Netflix creating a brand new generation of fans).  But Friends was only a small part (albeit the best part) of Matt Perry’s very interesting and tragic life. Perry lived a fast and fascinating life – his mom was a beauty queen and advisor to Pierre Trudeau, his dad was the Old Spice Guy, he was a tennis phemom as a kid and of course on of the biggest stars in the world (at one point being on the number one show on air and having the number one movie (The Whole Nine Yards). Perry’s struggles with addiction that started in his teen years is well known and well documented, but I had absolutely no idea of the extent of it until I read his book, which shocked me to the core.  As one reviewer notes, “When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani. In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.

I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match. As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?” Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities. Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.” The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”) Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life. “I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”

Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021. “I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated. Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.” Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.” So what inspired him to write a book? After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.” Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.” Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.” He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.” The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.” Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.” Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak. He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room. Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.” In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.” She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.” Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.” “A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.” Failed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said. Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said. When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.” Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.  “There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.” He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out.It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.” The world was lucky to have Matthew Perry for 54 years.  I believe he was a really good person that was very sick.  His life was both fascinating and tragic in equal measure. Yet another example of how you never really know what people are going through and a reminder to treat everyone with kindness and empathy as a result. Here is a good review from The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/07/friends-lovers-and-the-big-terrible-thing-by-matthew-perry-addiction

Spark & Fire: Fuel Your Creativity - Introducing: Offsite Adventures – My home away from home is New York City. I have spent more time in NYC than any other city in the world and it suits my personality and my vibe more than any place in the world.  So I feel that I really know the city well and there are very few surprises for me.  I used to work and live in Mid-Town Manhattan and often walked through Times Square to go to and from work.  What I didn’t know, is that every night Times Square turns into a live art show and really stops time. This PODCAST describes this amazing daily event that is open to the public and is just one of so many examples as to why NYC is awesome.  As the PODCAST itself notes, “From the team behind Spark & Fire, we're happy to share the first episode of Offsite Adventures, our newest show uncovering the gems, magical moments, and unique learnings in iconic business travel destinations. Three minutes before midnight in Times Square, one of the most trafficked commercial centers in the world momentarily transforms into a vibrant digital art installation, providing a refreshing pause for locals and tourists alike. It’s called the Midnight Moment, and you won’t believe how something so unexpected came together. In this episode, Janet digs into the history of this unique collaboration between the advertising and arts communities before experiencing it herself with innovative, boundary-breaking artist Shahzia Sikander.’https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-fire-fuel-your-creativity/id1544310633?i=1000652718665

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon