Any acknowledgments here must begin with my extraordinary agent, Laurie Fox. (And Anne Serling, who kindly steered me to her.) I never met an agent more supportive and encouraging than Laurie. Her exuberance for this project and her willingness, no insistence, on throwing herself into it 10,000%, continues to astound me. Work with her, sit back, and then just let the fireworks begin. She isn’t an agent. She’s an experience.
There are no words that I can properly assemble here to adequately thank all the brave, committed, imaginative contributors to this book, as well as those whose lunches didn’t quite make it. The task for everyone was not an easy one and was often painful, sorrowful, freighted with the burden of dredging up memories perhaps better left undisturbed. (Mine among them.) But everyone persevered. Even the merry, fun-filled lunches were tinged with a bittersweet tristesse, because, of course, there would be no more of them. But in each case, every lunch, we learned just a little something about the departed luncheon companion we might never have otherwise known. I hoped for these priceless nuggets at the project’s outset, and lo and behold, they materialized. Also, for better or worse, each contributor did, in a sense, get to have one more lunch, with their imagination.
On then to the cavalcade of names; the loving friends, the strangers, the numberless battalion of unselfish souls who took the time to connect me with many of the writers featured here. Thank you.
My special thanks, then, go to David Cashion, Jamison Stoltz, Cynthia Tocman, Sue Held, Leslie Citron, Sara Giller, Mildred Marmur, Charlie Piccirillo, Rhonda Racz, Joe Winogradoff, Mary Bisbee-Beek, Ronald Blumer, Monda Wooten, Maija Veide, Emily Farrell, Carolyn Feigelson, Peter Shapiro, Iris Johnson, Ivy Heller, Joyce Lapinsky Lewis, Margot Olshan, Rikki West, Alicia Tan, Sarah Robbins, James Kim, and Enzo.
Noel Coward, that brilliant rapscallion, wrote that: “You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.”
As these lunches show, it is then up to the living to go on learning.