Today is my birthday. Yesterday, I spent most of the day answering the last of the letters wishing me farewell from the New York Daily News, and good luck on whatever I was doing next.
Well, one of the things I'm doing next is right here, so thanks for reading this. I appreciate not only your presence, but your patience. It'll still be a few more days before we get the comments and emails and everything else sorted out - and, most likely, a few days after that before the final pages of the site, including the TV JUKEBOX and FEEDBACK areas, are ready for launch. But it's not for lack of effort, believe me, that we're still tinkering.
Besides, as I celebrate my birthday today, this website is only 10 days old. What can you expect from a 10-day-old, really? (Don't answer that. Now that I think about it, the logical answer to that question doesn't exactly lead to a flattering comparison.)
In addition to the website, another thing I'm doing next, courtesy of Lance Gould, editor of the Boston Phoenix and a very smart and nice guy, is to write the cover story of their issue that hits newsstands today - a story on Stephen Colbert and his brief but significant run for the presidency. It's the first of what I hope to be many TV stories I write for the Phoenix, as part of my own proverbial rising from the ashes.
And earlier this week, my Fresh Air producer, Phyllis Myers, was so intrigued by my recent blog review of the Marshall Herskovitz-Ed Zwick Quarterlife online TV series that she encouraged me to craft a piece for Fresh Air. Which I did, and which you can find by going to the READ ME HEAR ME page and working your way to my Tuesday report on the Fresh Air site.
So as this birthday arrives, I'm busy, happy and, when I'm working on this site (which seems to be almost all the time, right now), rejuvenated. It's hard to feel a year older when, all of a sudden, I can write whatever I want, any way I want, about whatever subject I want. My birthday present to myself, it seems, is an unfiltered voice.
A filtered voice, after all, might not ask this next question, which is: So what can you give me for my birthday?
But I have an easy, yet totally serious, answer. Here's what I would love as a birthday gift from you: Tell or email two, or two more, friends about this website and ask them to check it out and see if they like it.
Presto: If they're good and loyal friends, and do what you ask, traffic on my site will triple overnight. You don't even have to wrap anything. And when your birthday comes up... well, I'm open to suggestions. If our comments system is up by then, that is.
But I know, based on my emails and subscription lists, that someone has followed me here into cyberspace. And that, honestly, is the most wonderful gift of all.