Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.

'Eyes Wide Open' took shape from two real life events straight from my own past. One was the sad suicide of my young nephew, a troubled kid, who was found at the bottom of a landmark cliff in central California. The second was a chance encounter forty years ago with none other than, ahem, Charles Manson!

It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.

It's really sad for me that in the United States the Latino community is losing its culture and language, especially among kids born here - a lot of them can't even speak our language.

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.