Cause Marketing

William F. Buckley, philanthropist, author, bon vivant and intellectual leader of American conservatism for more than 50 years, died a week ago today at the age of 82. He was also the father of my favorite American political satirist, Christopher Buckley . As evidence of his versatility, the old man wrote a darn fine series of spy novels himself, many of them set during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. I had exactly one personal experience with Buckley. Personal in the sense that I (along with about 1800 other people) watched him debate the towering American economist John K. Galbraith on stage at Symphony Hall in Phoenix, Arizona. I blogged about the experience on Nov. 6, 2007. As I wrote then, when Buckley started to lose a point to the physically-imposing Galbraith, he would back up to the curtains and start to make them sway, thereby drawing attention away from Galbraith. Even in the nonprofit world it’s a crowded marketplace for resources and attention. And like Buckley, there ...

I happened to catch a few moments of Gene Kelly and Van Johnson dancing in the 1954 MGM musical Brigadoon on television the other night. As was typical of Kelly’s choreography, when he and Van Johnson danced together their steps mirrored each other. And Johnson, who was a pretty good hoofer, acquitted himself very well. But still I couldn’t help looking first and most often at the immortal Kelly. Little wonder, I suppose. Gene Kelly was so talented, famously perfectionist, and a grindingly hard worker who somehow managed to make every step look fluid and easy. So much so that when the great Latvian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was considering defecting to the West during the bad old Soviet days, one thing that gave him pause was that all American dancers were as skilled as Kelly or Fred Astaire. Hah! (Baryshnikov once said of Astaire, “His perfection gives us complexes, because he’s too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity that’s hard to face.”) All that’s a given. Even though Van Joh...