Muhammad Ali lives in Phoenix part of the time and has made a tradition of showing up at St. Vincent de Paul’s dining room at Thanksgiving time. St. Vincent de Paul is an inner-city mission that feeds the homeless and those down on their luck. People come carrying their belongings in plastic bags and shopping carts. Before they eat, they pray, give thanks, and then leave quickly to retrieve their belongings — but not on the day Ali arrives.

Nobody knows when Ali is going to show up, but when he does he is immediately recognized; they greet him shouting, “Ali, Ali!” The greatest sporting icon of the 20th century no longer does his famous rope-a-dope shuffle; after more than a decade with serious Parkinsonism, he moves more slowly now. Ali looks gaunt, and he no longer speaks, smiling only with his eyes now, but unchanged is his love of mingling with and touching people. He embraces people wherever he goes; he feels their love and they feel his.

Ali hugs a guy who’s pants are falling down to his ankles, and the man says to him, “Thanks for coming Champ. You are the real thing.” Ali is the real thing and has been a man of truth when he changed his name, refused to go to war, and faced his disease. When I see Ali, I do not see a man whose glory days are over. I see a man who can still take over any room, who embraces everybody and makes people feel good. I see a man who on the outside looks fragile, but inside his light shines strong. I don’t see Ali shuffling . . . I see him dancing and spreading love on Thanksgiving.

I was surrounded by love on Thanksgiving: my children, grandchildren, friends and relatives. We each brought mouth-watering delicacies, gave thanks for our many blessings, and then made a point of doing Ali’s love shuffle. Moving slowly around the room I hugged everyone. They felt my love for them, and I felt their love for me, my eyes wet with Thanksgiving.



Spread Ali love shuffle hugs to all of your relatives on Thanksgiving. Mi Takuye Oyacin.

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In February of this year, Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer prize-winning columnist, author, humorist, and pundit, was dying of kidney failure. Not only was he on dialysis, but vascular problems necessitated the amputation of his right leg. He was told that if he chose to do nothing he would almost certainly die within weeks.

He moved into a hospice and used his last days to talk about “the topic no one wants to talk about, death.” But he didn’t die; a few weeks after he moved into final care, for reasons nobody seems to understand, his kidneys started working again. He wound up spending five months in the hospice; during this time he wrote a new book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye. It’s a helluva story about death postponed.

In the hospice reception room which he calls his “salon,” he received a parade of visitors from schoolmates to celebrities, including Ethel Kennedy, Ben Bradley, Russell Baker, the Queen of Swaziland, and the Commander of the Marine Corps. He schmoozed with them all and ate whatever he wanted — from McDonalds’ milkshakes, to the lavish food people brought him.

In his inimitable style that moves from serious to hilarious, he tells us what it’s like to look at your own “dirt nap.”

“It’s amazing how many people visit you if you’re in a convenient location and they’ve been told you’re going to die.”

“People love talking to somebody who isn’t afraid to discuss death, as a matter of fact some of them have such a good time they come back again.”

“Dying is easy, parking is impossible.”

“I have no idea where I’m going, but here is the real question: what am I doing here in the first-place”


This book will make you laugh and also think seriously about life’s realities. He talks about his rich life, his boyhood in an orphanage, his dreams, and his bouts with depression. He is planning to write a sequel . . . I’m cheering for him.

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I woke up the day after Election Day to be greeted by the ass-kicking, Bush-whacking result of a new majority in the House and Senate, and the resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. I looked at the bottom of my coffee cup for remnants of drugs before I allowed myself the ecstasy of feeling my withering faith in government restored. I don’t delude myself into thinking that Democrats will have fewer lobbyists, or that the wheels of government will move more quickly, but with new players I feel new life and hope for America.

Talking about my withering faith restored, it’s not only in America’s government, but also in believing that we may get greedy drug companies to change as well. “Big Pharma” has, until now, failed to provide low-cost drugs for treatable diseases like TB, leishmaniasis, hookworm, river blindness, bilharzia, and malaria (which is estimated to kill a child every 30 seconds). Since these are typically Third World diseases, there is no economic advantage for drug companies to produce them.

Dr. Richard Chaisson, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins, found that Moxifloxcin, a new antibiotic from Bayer, fights tuberculosis. TB afflicts 4.5 million people globally, but Bayer didn’t want to provide the drug because it threatened their bottom-line. But Dr. Chaisson made an independent application to the FDA to conduct human trials. The FDA not only approved it but offered him $1.3 million in funding. Bayer, shocked at this development, decided to support Chaisson too.

On another inspiring front, Dr. Victoria Hale launched a nonprofit organization to address the treatment of Kala Azar, a type of leishmaniasis that affects half a million people a year. Pharmacia, the creator of Paramomycin stopped making it when the drug fell out of favor in the West, even though it cured 94% of the people who suffered from the disease. An Indian firm, Gland Pharma, decided to manufacture the drug at low cost. The globalization of the marketplace makes it more likely that we will increase access to life-saving medicines.


From disgust with my government and corporate greed, I woke up last week with my withering faith restored. Now if we can only stop screwing elderly Americans and provide them with affordable drug coverage, I’d think we’d arrived at the second coming.

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I went to a Halloween party last week at Alwun House, my favorite community arts enclave in Phoenix. Now celebrating its 35th anniversary, Alwun has provided a venue for thousands of emerging and established visual and performance artists to be seen and encouraged. Alwun House celebrates Phoenix’s cultural diversity and builds a community of openness and tolerance.

Halloween parties at Alwun feature outrageous costumes and original entertainment by dancers, comics, musicians, and artists using every imaginable canvas to explore self- expression. This time, a Celtic dance group called Aretias (Warrior Women) performed a dance based on the choreographer’s experience of her mother’s death. As her mother lay dying, she saw a black crow flying by the window.

The program notes said Morrighan is the Celtic Goddess of Death, Battle and Resurrection. She flies across the battlefields as a black crow, taking the souls of warriors to the afterlife. The dance featured stunning warrior women, some in battle garb; a black-caped crow; and a full-bodied Rubenesque woman wearing a studded, leather bustier and a red string bikini. My first response was to gasp — it was a lot of flesh to unleash — and then I stood in awe at her courage. She danced with joy and abandon. The more she danced, the lovelier she became. She balanced a sword on her head and sensually oozed herself down to the ground. You could tell she loved to move by the joyful spontaneity of her expressions, a warrior queen who said, “Here I am!” Without liposuction, injections, or plastic surgery, she performed beautifully. The crowd went delirious when it was over; I stood for 3 ovations (in part to do penance for my initial swinish chauvinism).

The next day I read about Holley Mangold, a 16-year-old offensive lineman for her high school football team. Actually, Holley is a linewoman, the first girl to play in a high school football game in Ohio. She is 5’9”, 310 lbs, and her coach says she is meaner on the field than her brother Nick (whom he also coached and is now the rookie starting Center for the New York Jets). Off the field, Holley is described as carrying herself with the aplomb of a runway model, with shoulder length hair, burgundy nail polish and the outgoing personality of a cheerleader.

I love these warrior women and am grateful for the reminder that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and even if you don’t love everything you’ve got, you want to love who you are. Alwun House is one of the few places in my town where who you are can be celebrated and appreciated in all its diversity.


Support the Alwun Houses in your communities; they remind us how many ways there are to see beauty.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I went to a Halloween party last week at Alwun House, my favorite community arts enclave in Phoenix. Now celebrating its 35th anniversary, Alwun has provided a venue for thousands of emerging and established visual and performance artists to be seen and encouraged. Alwun House celebrates Phoenix’s cultural diversity and builds a community of openness and tolerance.

Halloween parties at Alwun feature outrageous costumes and original entertainment by dancers, comics, musicians, and artists using every imaginable canvas to explore self- expression. This time, a Celtic dance group called Aretias (Warrior Women) performed a dance based on the choreographer’s experience of her mother’s death. As her mother lay dying, she saw a black crow flying by the window.

The program notes said Morrighan is the Celtic Goddess of Death, Battle and Resurrection. She flies across the battlefields as a black crow, taking the souls of warriors to the afterlife. The dance featured stunning warrior women, some in battle garb; a black-caped crow; and a full-bodied Rubenesque woman wearing a studded, leather bustier and a red string bikini. My first response was to gasp — it was a lot of flesh to unleash — and then I stood in awe at her courage. She danced with joy and abandon. The more she danced, the lovelier she became. She balanced a sword on her head and sensually oozed herself down to the ground. You could tell she loved to move by the joyful spontaneity of her expressions, a warrior queen who said, “Here I am!” Without liposuction, injections, or plastic surgery, she performed beautifully. The crowd went delirious when it was over; I stood for 3 ovations (in part to do penance for my initial swinish chauvinism).

The next day I read about Holley Mangold, a 16-year-old offensive lineman for her high school football team. Actually, Holley is a linewoman, the first girl to play in a high school football game in Ohio. She is 5’9”, 310 lbs, and her coach says she is meaner on the field than her brother Nick (whom he also coached and is now the rookie starting Center for the New York Jets). Off the field, Holley is described as carrying herself with the aplomb of a runway model, with shoulder length hair, burgundy nail polish and the outgoing personality of a cheerleader.

I love these warrior women and am grateful for the reminder that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and even if you don’t love everything you’ve got, you want to love who you are. Alwun House is one of the few places in my town where who you are can be celebrated and appreciated in all its diversity.


Support the Alwun Houses in your communities; they remind us how many ways there are to see beauty.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here