All posts in category Uncategorized

Christmas Card 2022

For those of you who know me well, my Christmas Card is early this year! Some years it doesn’t make it out until March!

For those of you with whom I am more recently acquainted… Yes! I do understand that it is a very strange thing to receive a Christmas Card in February! (It doesn’t really ever go out as late as March… well, once maybe! 🙂 ) But it has become a bit of a tradition over these last few decades that it arrives in midwinter…

It is my wish to send a special gift – something from my heart – to celebrate the Joy of the Holiday Season, and to remind us to keep cognizant of the Spirit of Love and Kindness throughout the year! I am a great believer in the power of words. Since my teen years, I would collect quotes and stories about Christmas and send them out to everyone as my Christmas Card. Eventually, I began to write my own original stories. (This, as it turns out, takes even longer! 🙂 )

I am inspired by the experience of each Christmas Holiday Season and every year, I am stirred by its beautiful values. I love to celebrate and savor the time… I usually don’t get to baking until some mid-January weekend. I capture whatever bits of Christmas Magic I can throughout the winter and weave them into a story that I hope will delight you and lift your spirit whenever you may read it!

So, you may choose to dismiss this as, “Oh, that Crazy Guy is sending out Christmas Cards in February again!” or you may choose to receive it in the spirit in which it is sent: May you enjoy all of the Magic and Sparkle and Beauty of the many Gifts of Christmas (Peace on Earth! Good Will toward Everyone! Love and Kindness, Compassion, Generosity and Cheer! Wassail! Wassail!) Boy, oh Boy! Could we ever use more of those things now…

I hope that you will appreciate this years’ story: It is the story five brothers. Perhaps you have met some of them already. And it is about the importance, and sometimes the difficulties and challenges, of sharing the unique gifts we bring to the world!

So please, if you will, make yourself your favorite warm beverage – a Hot Cacao is always nice! – sit back this lovely day or evening, allow yourself a brief respite, and have a nice read, enjoying the magic, wonder and delight of “Five Brothers’ Unique Gifts…” (more…)

9 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on February 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Christmas, Uncategorized

Tagged Appreciate Everything, Carousel, Christmas, Christmas Card, Christmas Card 2022, Christmas Stories, Christmas Story, Death, Five Brothers' Unique Gifts, Gift Giving, Give Abundantly, Giving, My Fair Lady, Robert Browning, The Course in Miracles, the Void

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on February 12, 2023

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2023/02/12/christmas-card-2022/

Come As You Are

What A Glorious Day!

It has been a while.

It has been a very Full and Rich Year — Too Many Blessings to Count!

As LIVE THE QUESTIONS NOW continues to evolve, much of what we offer has been shifted to GRATEFUL READY OPEN WILLING.

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In thinking about Highlights of this past year, one that stands out is the talk that I got to do for FIND CENTER: COME AS YOU ARE.

I am including it here. May it either conclude this year for you in Gratitude and Appreciation for all that you have, or may it start the Coming New Year in Joyful Abundance and may you be inspired throughout the year, and our Lives, to spread generosity and Create Beautiful Things!

Enjoy!

2 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on December 31, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Gratitude, Journey, Kindness, Uncategorized

Tagged Broadway Casting Director, Come As You Are, Find Center, Findcenter, GRATEFUL READY OPEN WILLING, Gratitude, How to Live Gratefully, Living Gratefully, Look At Your Shoes, Meditation

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on December 31, 2022

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2022/12/31/come-as-you-are/

The First Day of My Life in a World Without Stephen Sondheim

Obama confers the Presidential Medal of Freedom upon Stephen Sondheim.

Yesterday morning, for the first day of my entire life, I woke up into a world without Stephen Sondheim. I cannot say that I like it better than the world I have known every day before that. It feels somehow bereft, stolen, less than, without…

Things looked pretty much the same. The Sun was shining

…”I think about you.”

There was Sky

…”I remember sky.”

The proletariat was going to and from the subway station

…”and another hundred people just got off of the train.”

So you see, it is woven into the fabric of my being how he helped me see the world.

…”Take me to the world that’s real. Show me how it’s done.”

Like so many legendary icons of Show Business, Stephen and I had a few direct contacts but he would not have known me. I do remember when he came to see Richard Maltby’s THE SIXTIES PROJECT. I was seated diagonally in front of him. He was so quiet and polite and unassuming, yet I could not keep my eyes from darting over my right shoulder.

Just to be in his presence…

…”All I know is, the minute you turn
And he’s suddenly there,
There won’t be trumpets!”

It got back to me that his only comment on the show was

(more…)

8 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on November 28, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Hal Prince Stephen Sondheim, Sondheim, Sondheim Lyrics, Stephen Sondheim

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on November 28, 2021

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2021/11/28/the-first-day-of-my-life-in-a-world-without-stephen-sondheim/

Living not in Vain

Our second Springtime since the pandemic began is in full bloom…

I once knew someone who kept a stack of poetry books in the bathroom – a busy man, when nature called, he would use the time to nourish his soul with the Magical Gift of Poetry, succinct, easily digestible, and sometimes in a moment, Life-altering. It always impressed me how poets – all writers really — could rearrange those same 26 letters of the alphabet over and over and over again to make us feel such a range of emotions.

A little over a year ago, we were all buzzing about.

We’d probably begun to hear about some virus, and at least in New York, we had survived SARS and MERS, and perhaps we’d seen some Folks from Asian countries on airplanes wearing surgical masks and thought something might be going on that affected people far, far away…

Most of us had no idea what was about to happen, or the scope of the journey upon which we had already embarked.

The Great World Shift had begun – we just hadn’t reacted to it yet or taken it seriously.

And here we are now over a year in, still wondering what we can do.

(more…)

2 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on April 10, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Community, Theater Life, Uncategorized, Writing & Creativity

Tagged Amanda Gorman, Asian-American Women, Black History Month, Coronavirus, Coronavirus Shutdown, Emily Dickinson, Gift Coronavirus, GRATEFUL READY OPEN WILLING, I Shall Not Live in Vain, John Donne, No Man is an Island, pandemic, Poetry, The Hill We Climb, Working, Zoom

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on April 10, 2021

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2021/04/10/living-not-in-vain/

Christmas Card 2020

It’s early this year, I know! For those who know me, my Christmas Card usually arrives sometime in February — but this year, we’ll break with tradition, and celebrate early! 🙂
The idea of sending this out after Christmas is in part to remind us all to celebrate Gratitude, Readiness, Openness and Willingness, and all the values of Christmas the whole year through… Perhaps this reminder is as much needed now as ever. We’ve all been through a lot this past year. One begins to wonder if there is any rhyme or reason to it all. This year’s Christmas Story invites us to consider another perspective on just how much of what we experience is the randomness of time and how much of it — well, as The Course In Miracles puts it, “What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?“ And so, inspired by that idea, I offer the following short story for a quiet January afternoon.
Perhaps you would like to make yourself a cup of hot chocolate, or bubbling herbal tea, or some delightful warm beverage, and take a few minutes to cozy up and enjoy this little story...

The Gift from the Cabinet with the Mullion Doors

by Arnold J. Mungioli

I could tell you what set it all in motion. I was there when the Youth arrived. He had a curiosity and a kind of insistence that comes from decades and decades of asserting one’s free will, and never appreciating the true gift that free will is – or life for that matter. I had never been a fan of free will, myself – not when given to those in the physical realm, anyway. I had always maintained to the Supreme Being that life on earth was too great a gift for a Soul to comprehend, let alone handle their own choices. It would inevitably lead to pain and troubles. It was someone from the physical realm – went by the name of John Keats — who once wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?”

(more…)

12 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on January 17, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Christmas, Uncategorized

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on January 17, 2021

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2021/01/17/christmas-card-2020/

CHRISTMAS 2020

I know. I have been unusually silent on here for Christmas time! There are so many wonderful things to be said about this magical holiday season of Miracles! And ordinarily, I cannot stop saying them!

2020 has been an exceptionally Magical year, giving us time to pause, reflect and reassess how we spend the precious little time we have on this Earth. This Holiday Season has very much followed suit. Shaking it up! Giving us a different way to look at things we have grown accustomed to doing some particular way.

For so many of us, the Christmas Season happens by rote. Every Year it’s the same: Shop, Decorate, Tree, Cards, Wrap, Ship, Family, Cook, Collapse… Nope – Not this Year! This Year we will need to find what is important to us and figure out how to hang on to that!

(more…)

6 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on December 30, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Christmas, Holidays & Celebrations, Recipes, Uncategorized

Tagged Barbra Streisand, Boxing Day, Christmas, Christmas 2020, Christmas Videos, Egg Nog Cream Cheese Recipe, Fifth Day of Christmas, fourth day of Christmas, God With Us, GRATEFUL READY OPEN WILLING, Matthew 1:23, Miracles, Shipping and Receiving, The Day Before the Night Before Christmas, The Grinch that stole Christmas, Twelve Days of Christmas

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on December 30, 2020

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2020/12/30/christmas-2020/

Sweetest Day

Today is Sweetest Day Celebrated the Third Saturday of October. As a kid growing up, I became enamored with the local Hallmark Card store that was on my walk to school. I became friendly with the family that owned it, and eventually worked there, decorating the windows or handling the register… I was probably 12 years old the first time I entered that store. It was right around this time of year, and Harrison who was to become one of my very best friends was wrestling with a crepe paper tissue monster to get it displayed in time for Halloween. Back then, Halloween decorations went up in October, and Christmas decorations went up in December. Life was simpler, then. Sweetest Day was a holiday brought (more…)

75 DAYS

I know.

With all that is going on in the World right now, just the mention of “CHRISTMAS” could make me appear tone-deaf and out-of-touch.

But this is not about rushing the Season.

Quite the opposite.

This is about forging a path around the imposed commercialism and giving ourselves the time to create for ourselves a Season of Love and Kindness the way we would ideally like it to be.

(more…)

World Right Side Up

A dozen or so years ago,
I visited a Shaman.
He waved a large eagle wing back and forth over me.
He took me on a Journey of Soul Retrieval – we did not see the wolf which I am given to understand means that my Soul did not need to be retrieved. Apparently, I have all of it with me – so that’s a relief!
He danced and chanted and drank some green juice from a glass bottle with a long thin neck – then gargled and spit it across my body…
That doesn’t happen every day!
He explained to me that there is a group of Shamans from all over the World who meet in some sacred place — maybe somewhere in South America — once every fifty years to hold sacred ceremonies for several days during which they receive a Message from the gods about the World in the coming Half Century.
He told me that in the 1950’s when they had last met, the Message they received was,
“World Upside Down!”
More recently, just after the start of this Century, they convened once again and received the Message for this Half Century:
“World Rightside Up!”

Events of these past two decades – and in particular, these past three and a half years – may not make us feel that the World is Rightside Up! Quite the contrary, it feels we are through the Looking Glass, especially this past 100 days or so.
And yet… (more…)

HAL

HAL PRINCE
January 30, 1928 – July 31, 2019

HAL PRINCE and me at the Opening of CANDIDE

I was HAL PRINCE’s Casting Director for the better part of a decade.
We worked together on his revival of SHOW BOAT from its inception throughout its many productions all around the world. Our production of SHOW BOAT premiered at the North York Performing Arts Center in Toronto 26 years ago. I also worked with HAL on the most recent Broadway Revival of CANDIDE, as well as KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, and PARADE.

This year alone, we have found ourselves saying goodbye to countless theater luminaries, including DIAHNN CARROLL, CAROL CHANNING, ANDREW ZERMAN, KAYE BALLARD, PHYLLIS NEWMAN, VALERIE HARPER, BILL ESPER, DORIS DAY, E. KATHERINE KERR, KATHERINE HELMOND, MARTIN CHARNIN, MAX WRIGHT, ALAN WASSER, ALVIN EPSTEIN, ERIC LAJUAN SUMMERS, TONI MORRISON, RIP TORN, GLORIA VANDERBILT, ANN CRUMB, TIM CONWAY, GEORGIA ENGEL, LUKE PERRY, ARTIE GAFFIN, MARION MCCLINTON, KYLE RENICK, RON LEIBMAN, RENE AUBERJONOIS, and So Many Others… But even among so many shattering losses to our Community this year, this one stands out.

HAL PRINCE died on July 31st at the age of 91. There will be a Celebration of his Life at the Majestic Theater next Monday December 16th.
I have never known a professional life without him in it, and the loss to the theater community is perhaps the most profound imaginable.

You see, (more…)

2 Comments

by Arnold J. Mungioli on December 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Community, Legacy, Theater Life, Uncategorized

Posted by Arnold J. Mungioli on December 9, 2019

https://livethequestionsnow.com/2019/12/09/hal/

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Life Adventure
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Some Good Movies

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
THE SIXTH SENSE
SAINT RALPH
I AM
PRIDE
THE GOOD LIE
MAO'S LAST DANCER
MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
CALENDAR GIRLS
WALK ON WATER
CINEMA PARADISO
SLIDING DOORS
THE LIVES OF OTHERS
LOCAL COLOR
BREAKING THE WAVES
EVERYBODY'S FINE
READY? OK
INKHEART
THE LIVING END
MARRIAGE, ITALIAN STYLE
THE BUBBLE
BIUTIFUL
GYPSY w/ ROSALIND RUSSELL
and Anything by PETER HEDGES
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Some Good Movies