I Just Want to Play – An interactive, Practical Guide for Parents and Coaches by Debbie Lantz

Anyone who has experienced organized youth sports knows how crazy it can get, so millions of copies of Debbie Lantz’s book, “I Just Want to Play” should probably be dropped from airplanes over every American suburb!

Lantz has been coaching business leaders at Fortune 500 companies such as Hitachi, Nokia, and TI since 1991, has a master’s degree in exercise physiology, and is the single mother of a teenaged son actively involved in sports, so she has credentials. Check her out at http://crazysportsmom.com/

She says that she wrote “I Just Want to Play,” “…to help parents and coaches reclaim the culture of Youth Sports in leagues and schools from an overly competitive adult culture.” Although that sounds mighty lofty, I think this may very well be the “little book that could.” Click on "Read More" to see why.

Gals Graze

I cannot tell you how stimulating, interesting and surprising my Very Smart Gals luncheons always end up being. There’s really nothing quite as dramatic as the real lives of the people we most often swish by nonchalantly each day.  Wednesday was no exception.  
(Left to right, Mary, Sandra and Paula)
 

Mary Moore Harper, whom I love, is my daughter’s sister-in-law, a 5th generation San Antonio rancher and commercial property owner, former Wilhelmina model and rodeo queen, and currently a partner with her husband in the Austin Capitol Chevrolet dealership and a precious nine-month old daughter.

Paula Disbrowe is a chef and a food and travel writer, famous for her fab cookbooks, Cowgirl Cuisine, Crescent City Cooking, co-written with chef Susan Spicer, Down Home with the Neelys (Food Network fame), co-written with the Neelys, and for her magazine writing for New York Times, T Living, Food & Wine, Spa, Health, Cooking Light, and Saveur. In spite of the fact that she and her husband have two young daughters, they’ve launched a new, ubercool business with some Amsterdam-ians (ites?) called "Feather Down Farm Days," which is like eco-tourism, but farm-y, fun and luxurious. Check this out! Click on Feather Down Farm Days.

Sandra Martin is a long time friend, mentor, and icon of ethics and professionalism. She is also the founder of CASA Austin, founding and current CEO of the Kozmetsky Center for Child Protection, and an Austin Woman Magazine cover-gal! Her PlayBingo and Dancing With Stars fundraisers raise more than half a million dollars a year to help abused children in Central Texas. She and I raised more than $10,000,000 a couple of years ago to build their new beautiful center. Check out their website. Click on Center for Child Protection. Click on Read More.

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel By Colum McCann

I didn’t want to like this book, which won rave reviews in 2009, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I had this preconceived notion that it would be about Philippe Petit, the young French tightrope walker who in 1974, illegally rigged a wire between the World Trade Center Towers, and walked, hopped and toodled his way back and forth for nearly an hour. If you haven’t seen the Academy Award winning documentary, “Man on Wire,” which includes excellent film footage of everything from Petit’s youthful days of tightrope walking, to the blow-by-blow of the harrowing and historic walk that made him famous, go rent it. It is really very good.


Let the Great World Spin is rather about the lives of ordinary people who walk the tightrope of life every day, just like us. McCann begins the book with stunned crowds on their way to work, stopping to marvel and gawk at Petit, just a tiny speck in the sky, weaving back and forth between the towers, above the fray of life, but McCann then quickly gets to the spectacles going on below.