Why Women Matter

I just finished reading, "Why Sinatra Matters". It was written by Pete Hamill. No one can depict men sitting in a smoke filled bar in New York, talking about sports and women, like Pete can. I felt as though I was sitting at the table with them. Did you ever watch something on TV, or read something, either a sentence, paragraph or an entire chapter, with a grin on your face and not even know it? That's what happened to me while reading the first chapter.

Hamill takes you to a rainy night in New York, sometime around midnight, inside a saloon on third avenue called P.J. Clark's. Sitting at the table with Pete Hamill is Danny Lavezzo, who ran the joint, William B. Williams, the New York disc jockey who coined the name for Sinatra as "The Chairman of the Board", Jilly Rizzo, one of Frank Sinatra's friends, Jimmy Cannon, one of the greatest sportswriters who ever lived and of course, Mr. Sinatra. Oh, and by the way, the jukebox is on. No need to tell you who  they were listening to. And the dialogue between these guys, you just have to read it.

For my Italian friends, read the entire book. If you like Sinatra, you will probably like him even more. If you don't like him, you will probably like him even less. For me, it was an insight into the Italian immigrant experience. I even found out that New York's elected Mayor in 1933, Fiorello La Guardia not only spoke Italian, but Yiddish as well. Why you ask did he speak Yiddish?, he spoke Yiddish because his mother did, she was Jewish! If you don't believe me, as Casey Stengel would say, "you could look it up".

One more thing about the book and then I'm done. When Frank left his first wife Nancy, and started seeing Ava Gardner, women did not like that. They obviously felt that Frank was abandoning the mother of his children for another woman. Frank's popularity amongst women then plummeted.  Understandably so.

Putting the book aside, but not the reason for the hurt that women felt for Nancy Sinatra, and all women who are either publicly or privately humiliated by their husbands, why do women stand up and applaud when Bill Clinton walks into a room. I just don't get it.

Which of course brings me to Sandra Fluke. I don't know how old she is, but from what I understand, she is still in college. So correct me if I am wrong. She wants the American taxpayer not only to pay for her birth control, she also wants the American tax payer to pay for sex change operations too. I would suspect that Miss Fluke may have doubled up on a dose of something here or there.

Mr. Sinatra, wherever you are, I think as an entertainer, you were the greatest of all time. As for you President Clinton, when you moved to the center, you did a pretty good job with the economy, but did you really not inhale or have sex with that woman?