I’m watching The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
Duddy runs around, cutting corners, betraying everybody who loved him in his drive to get ahead.
He reminds me of myself. Everybody around me ends up feeling betrayed.
There’s a great line in the movie where Duddy tells his shiksa, “My grandfather? Why did you have to go to him for? He was the one person in the world I didn’t want to hurt.”
And the shiksa says, “And that’s why I went to him.”
Dennis Prager has been my hero since 1988. And when I managed to exchange some letters with him and even get a phone call from him, I was so proud. I was so chuffed. I was all swelled up.
The rest of my life was messy. I was a tad unorthodox. I cut some corners and I screwed around. And my mother said, “Somebody should tell Dennis Prager that you’ll betray him just like you did us.”
And then my girlfriend who became my ex-girlfriend went to Dennis Prager with her complaints. Everybody knew that was my weak point. When I’d do something a little unorthodox, they’d say, “What would Dennis Prager say about that?”
Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. It was time for me to write about Dennis Prager so everybody could feel betrayed and everybody could say, “See?”
For the last 14 years, nobody has said to me, “What would Dennis Prager say about that?”
