I knew where I'd surely find the great inauguration party: in that glorious Victorian cupcake of a ballroom where partygoers celebrated Abraham Lincoln's second swearing-in, up on the third floor of what is now the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. This year it was called the "Lincoln 2.0 Ball."...

I've always appreciated Norman Lear. His creation of "All in the Family" brought Archie Bunker into every American home at a time when we needed to come to grips with the divisions that plagued our nation. In the early days of my marriage, my father-in-law referred to me as "meat head." I wore the t...

It seems almost an invariable rule that when  book is made into a movie, the book is always the better of the two. Likewise, spin offs are seldom better than the originals.  I can think of some spin offs that were so bad that they were doomed from the start.  However, the rule is not ...