FAMILY is EVERYTHING

Ah, the immortal words of Don Vito Corleone. As we learned from the Godfather series of movies, there are two kinds of people, family, and everyone else. It reminds me of a story from my youth. I spent a little time on a farm, not the funny-farm as you might think, and was being taken on an introductory tour by a young girl of about 10. She pointed to a cow that she called Daisy. "She is our pet." Then she pointed to other cows who were unnamed and she said these are cows...we get milk from them and sometimes we eat them. Likewise with all of the animals on the farm. Some were named pets, others were food. They looked the same to me. The point being, we separate all living things into those two categories...the ones we care about who can do no wrong because they are family or pets, and everyone else, of they are the Tataglias, someone else's family, and we care because it's good for business.

So, once again, the movies give us our most important lessons. We learn that it's OK to be a whore if you are Julia Roberts and your "John," Edward (not John Edwards) is handsome Richard Gere. That wolves are bad, and pigs are good, and that only an evil person would shoot Bambi's mother (Bambi the deer not the porn star). Whole other civilizations live on other planets and their queen is Natalie Portman. And if you want to do an impression of Marlon Brando being Vito Corleone, speak as if you are trying to clear your throat, but don't.

Well, that brings me back to the subject of family, the people who are within the "Circle of Trust" as deNiro described it in "Meet the Fockers." Once you are inside that circle, you can do no wrong. Or if you do wrong, everyone forgives and forgets because you are "family."