Dear PR/Marketing People Sending Me Pitches for Father’s Day, Etc.

Let me help you. Please.

I had your job before, making cold calls and email pitches. It sucks. Allow me to make your life easier.

Unless you are offering to pay me a decent wage (see #SwifferDads campaign) to write about your product or brand, or you are offering to give me a pricey and/or sexy product (think Bluetooth headphones, flat-screen TVs, sports cars, lots and lots of tasty alcohol, etc.), just save yourself the time and effort.

I have no interest in running your high-res photos of celebrity dads giving their kids BPA-free high colonics.

Rite of Spring – The Big Dance Recital

Front and center in 2011

This past weekend was the Perfect Storm of Uncool events: my birthday (not one of note, though my increasingly creaky back says otherwise), Mother’s Day and Li’l Diva’s annual dance recital. I write about the latter in this piece, which first appeared a year ago in Stamford Magazine.

It’s the heart of spring, a special time with weather warming, flora blooming and vacations approaching that ignited me so as a child but as an adult reduces me to ash.

Field trips to Cove Island, to Dorothy Heroy Park and – gasp – to “The City.” School concerts. School plays. Daily rehearsals for said concerts and plays. Little League practices. Little League games. Going back to the Little League field to retrieve a jacket left in the dugout. Funny how perspective changes when you go from kid to your kids’ chauffeur.

#SwifferDad Cleans Up with Modern Fathers

The following is sponsored by Swiffer, which provided the featured cleaning products as part of its #SwifferDad campaign.

When My Love and I first shacked up, we'd tried to spend every Saturday morning cleaning the condo. Vacuuming. Scrubbing. Disinfecting. That was just the corner of the closet where we tossed my used underwear.

Take Me Out to the … Tennis Courts?

My daughter rarely cries.

A week ago, though, after I picked her up from high school tennis practice, she sat in the minivan and sobbed.

She had made the varsity tennis team, not just as a freshman but as a 15-year-old who really had only held a racket in earnest for about six months.

Li’l Diva’s coach just told her she needed to be in uniform and ready to play in the next day’s match. And in the one on Monday. This Monday. As is today.

The Li’l Diva in her orange and black best, ready to hit the courts.

She Had “A Face Like a Prostitute”

Now THAT’s a headline!

It’s in quotes but I didn’t say it. It was one of the “The Moms” from the WPIX Ch. 11 Morning News who I sat in with earlier this year on a segment about how old girls should be before they are allowed to wear makeup.

This is one of those rare “live” appearances by me in which:

1) There were no technical screw-ups. Although it was taped a week in advance, it was shot “live” in one take. I credit my three co-hosts who all know what they are doing. Note the sympathetic pat on the back one of them gives me.

2) I don’t seem totally panicked. I’m sure sitting in the green room for 40 minutes watching moronic dudes lose paternity tests on “Maury” made talking about Li’l Diva wearing eyeliner seem like a breeze.

Here it is:

What d’ya think? I have a face for radio and a voice for print, right?

Catch as a Catcher Can

Spring training came early for my little baseball player.

By “early,” I mean a few days before Halloween when he started a two-month clinic at a local sports academy. Not sure what I mean by “little.” Excitable is nearly 5-foot-6 and has mistakenly played in my Size 11 cleats before.

He’s following my footsteps in another way. He’s going to be a Little League catcher.