Columns
Time Out: What My Kids Can Learn from Their Kids
By Cara Garretson
Politicians have so much to teach us, but these days it's the children of the pols who are making the headlines and teaching valuable lessons to our youth.
Movie Reporter: The Most Important Film of the Year
By Phil Boatwright
If you pass on Waiting For Superman because it's not about the superhero from Krypton, you'll skip the year's most significant film.
Here’s a Thought: Opening Act
By Taylor Mason
For those of you not familiar with how I roll: I’ve been a comedian for 25-plus years and been an “opening act” for a variety of performers. Some highlights. ...
Movie Reporter: A New Solution for an Old Problem
By Phil Boatwright
If you are familiar with my efforts as a film reviewer, you know how I feel about the use and abuse of language in the media. That makes TVGuardian and Phil Boatwright a perfect fit.
Here's a Thought: Death by Cancer
By Taylor Mason
My sister-in-law passed away last Thursday, felled by cancer after a seven-year battle. She was a dignified, lovely, inspiring wife and mother who beat the odds over and over again.
Here’s a Thought: The Jersey ShoreJuly 28, 2010
By Taylor Mason
She hated California. The weird June clouds and the freaky floods and the teeming underclass and the southern California “lifestyle” that’s akin to living in another country. I had dragged her to the west coast from suburban New Jersey, and she went along because she married me and we had a young son and she wanted to support me and my career and my blind ambition. Three years and another child later, the earthquake of 1995 was the back-breaker. “I want to go home,” she said. “I hate living here.” We were in the living room of our comfortable two-story home in Thousand Oaks, the one near the mountains, on the peculiar cul-de-sac with the neighbors we never saw. Never. The earthquake had just ended. We were crouching under the archway between the living room and the dining room. She had the 2-year-old and I was holding the 4-year-old. It was two o’clock in the morning. It was time to be honest. It hit me in kind of a rush, as if I had actually gotten a part in one of the myriad of movies I had auditioned for, where there is a flashback scene and the hero/protagonist sees his past in a rush of short video cuts that culminate in an epiphany, a stark realization that things had not been right for a long time and the character in the story was just seeing the truth at this moment. She had come with me but she never wanted to. Within a month I had booked myself into a comedy club in New Jersey (Catch A Rising Star in Princeton – it’s still there! I played it last month!). I called my mother-in-law, who went with me to look at houses. The second house we came to she walked in the front door, looked at the living room and big window that opened to the front yard and told the real estate agent, “We’ll take it.” The agent said, “Do you have a check?” My mother-in-law looked at me and said, “Yes, we do.” I wrote it on the spot. For the next few summers we rented houses on New Jersey beaches (They call it “the shore,” here. As in, “We have a house down the shore.” That’s the vernacular) and invited friends and family to stay with us. Fun days of sun and swimming and body surfing and bar-b-cues. Evening walks to the ice cream store for a cone, and then a walk back to the summer house. My father had a knee replaced the year before he died, and he came with my mother to spend a week. Doctors had told him not to go swimming, but he walked into the surf with me and we threw the boys around and laughed and had what he would call “a big time.” I moved my mother here from the Midwest when she could no longer live alone, and we had her stay with us for a summer even though she was stuck in a wheelchair. She tried to wheel it down to the water one afternoon by herself, and we caught her half-way across the beach, teetering on the sand, the kind of story that lives on and becomes bigger than life as the years go by. My wife has rented a house on Long Beach Island this summer, for two weeks. We’re all looking forward to the vacation on the Jersey Shore. I wouldn’t know anything about the MTV show “Jersey Shore.” Two years from now it will be forgotten. But we’ll still be going down the shore. See you there.
Taylor Mason is a comedian, a musician, a ventriloquist, writer and gadget freak. And his new book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ventriloquism
And also check out Taylor's blog and recent Here's a Thought columns:
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is available at the link below! He has headlined every major comedy club in the United States, and has played Carnegie Hall and The Sydney Opera House in Australia. He has been part of two Emmy-winning television programs, including his children’s TV show, “Taylor’s Attic.” He is featured in comedy DVDs "