Last month, I helped convene a conscientious crowd to explore the question “What is Jewish Detroit?” The Ann Arbor symposium — hosted at a neutral (read: equitably inconvenient) location by Michigan’s Jewish Communal Leadership Program — was rich in life lessons and lox, cultural context and capers. As we’ve come to expect in any Jewish conversation, the opinions outnumbered the participants. To my knowledge, neither the onions nor opinions led to tears.

Like any question worth asking, “What is Jewish Detroit?” begat not tidy answers, but more questions.

My task was to reflect on the question, “What language do you use to talk about Detroit and Jewish involvement in Detroit?” I talk about each a lot, a result both of talking too much generally and of the depth and dynamism of our communities.

In my experience, what we say can be amplified or undermined based on how we say it. Words and phrases we think directly denote what we are trying to articulate can have complex connotations for different audiences. Without getting tongue tied by political correctness, we can work toward conversations that will lead to positive actions, unhampered by negative reactions.

With the caveat that this guide is mine and mine alone – and without annotation – here are some do’s and don’ts, humbly submitted for your consideration.

Do Say:
LiverNOISE.
Lasher.
6 Mile.
The Boulevard.
Meijer’s.
Ford’s.
Kresge’s or Kmart’s.
Party Store.
And, of course, pop.

Do say: Opportunity. Don’t say: Blank canvas.
Do say: Dynamic. Don’t say: Renaissance.
Do say: Urban planning. Don’t say: Urban renewal.
Do say: Detroit. Don’t say: Downtown, if you mean the whole city.
Or, if applicable, do say: Downtown, Midtown, Corktown, Greektown, Mexicantown, Poletown.
Or, instead of Midtown, say: Cass Corridor, New Center, Brush Park, Cultural Center, Wayne State, Woodbridge.
Do say: Neighborhood: Don’t say: Inner city.
Don’t say: Ghetto.
Do say: RenCen. Don’t say: CoPa.
Do say: Lafayette. Don’t say: American.
Do say: The city limits. Don’t say: 8 Mile.
Do say: Nonprofit. Don’t say: Charity.
Do say: Underserved. Don’t say: Underprivileged.
Do say: Initiative. Don’t say: Project.
Do say: Partner. Don’t say: Adopt.
Do say: This is the Motor City. Don’t say: This is the Motor City — why would anyone want to take a bus?
Do say: Public transit. Don’t say: Mass transportation.
Do say: City kids. Don’t say: Urban youth.
Do say: Graduation rate. Don’t say: Dropout rate.
Do say: Cycle of poverty. Don’t say: Culture of poverty.
Do say: I’m from Detroit. Or I’m from Metro Detroit. Don’t say: I’m from outside Detroit.
Do say: We can empathize with oppression. Don’t say: Well, we were discriminated against, too, and we worked hard and got ahead.
Do say: Riots or civil unrest or rebellion or revolution or whatever you think characterizes Detroit in the summer of 1967. But if someone has a different name or take, don’t call him out — buy him a beer.
Do say: Black. Or African American. Don’t say — even in unmixed company or facetiously or to yourself – shvartze.
Don’t say: Kwame.
Don’t say: Coleman.
Do say: Invest in and engage with. Don’t say: Revive, reinvent or revitalize.
Do say: With Detroit. Don’t say: For Detroit.
Do say: Love. Don’t say: Save.
Do: Talk about Detroit.
Don’t: Talk at Detroit.

Four investors with a wealth of experience in restaurants decided that a long-abandoned Denny’s in Berkley — Woodward at 12 Mile Road, to be exact — would be the perfect spot for a joint venture. They guessed right. Crispelli’s Bakery & Pizzeria has been bustling since opening in early March.

Every element is spot-on here, from fresh, tasty food for dine-in or carry-out to updated retro decor, affordable prices and responsive, capable staff. Doors open at 10 a.m. daily.

General manager Ron Nussbaum keeps the place humming, but the partners are hands-on, too, starting with owner Mark Artinian, founder of Bosco Pizza Co. The other bus-iness leaders are Glen Willson, owner of Willson’s Pub ’n Grill in Commerce Township, and Joe and Ken Morelli, pizza pros who’ve operated multiple Papa Romano’s stores.

Crispelli is a “fast-casual eatery” — a growing industry concept, according to Willson. Instead of table service, guests order at separate counters designated for pizza, salads, soups, sandwiches and bakery. It’s a cafeteria, Italian-style, where food is made before your eyes. Guests check out at a central pay station.

People like the system, he said, because “you’re in control of your time when you’re here.”

The pizza oven behind a white marble counter is front and center at Crispelli’s.

“We have the first natural gas stone oven in Michigan,” Willson said. “It was designed in Italy and assembled in San Francisco.”

The Morelli brothers developed their own dough for the oven, turning out two sizes of Authentic Italian Thin Crust (East Coast-style) pizza or the Deep Dish (Detroit-style) variety. Topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and up to three toppings, pizza comes hot to the table in a paper bag.

One of six available gourmet pizzas, White Pie is really delicious. Spread over the thin crust are mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil, minced garlic, Parmesan Reggiano and Romano cheeses, roasted garlic and artichoke hearts. Two other gourmet pizzas are Mediterranean, including chicken and feta cheese, and Margherita, with tomatoes and basil.

Four soups are available, including Tomato Bisque, which has Roma tomatoes simmered in chicken stock, onion, garlic and oregano with a hint of cream. My minestrone was chock-full of veggies in a savory broth featuring white beans, pasta and pesto.

Get different tastes and save money with a combo: cup of soup plus half sandwich or half salad (Caesar or house only). My colorful Crispelli (house) salad was dressed in a light-tasting, red wine vinaigrette.

My favorite among Crispelli’s five deli sandwiches is flank steak on sourdough bread. Panini sandwiches are grilled with Parmesan butter. My friend enjoyed her grilled vegetable panini, but wished for roasted red peppers.

Timothy Kitzman, director of baking, rises early to make artisan breads and other leavened goods. He has years in the business, as does Executive Chef Steve Lindemier, whose resume includes Ellwood Bar & Grill (Detroit) and Bay Pointe Golf Club (West Bloomfield).

Gourmet and convenience items, including beer and wine, are sold in Crispelli’s marketplace. Once an expansion is completed across a covered alley, guests will be able to sit with an alcoholic beverage.

Looking for a place for high-end, customized personal training? Check out Retrofit Studio, 704 W. 11 Mile Road  in Royal Oak. Owner Brad Goodstein has been growing his business every month. Visit retrofitstudio.net to see some photos of people who’ve achieved weight-loss success with Brad.

There’s a new place for people looking for creative and innovative concepts and products for events. Jon Layne has announced that thegoodiebag.com is live and ready to party!

Kelly Nigohosian has opened Salad Solutions, 29555 Northwestern Highway in Southfield, a healthy change of pace for lunch. Huge salads. Fresh ingredients. And you choose your own toppings.

Andiamo Novi has a new completely renovated banquet and event center that can accommodate up to 500 people. If you’re planning an event, you should check it out.

If you know someone who is getting ready for camp, take them to Perfect Trading Co., 3643 W. Maple Road in Bloomfield Township. You’ll find custom-printed apparel and camp gear as well as sports team apparel.

Remember Uncle Robinson? We’ll he’s back in the furniture business! The new Robinson Furniture will open in May. Find new furniture as well as high-quality, lightly used furniture and accessories at deep discount prices. Open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-6 p.m. In Detroit, 3180 E. Jefferson Ave. on the south side of Jefferson at McDougall between Chene and Mt. Elliot.

HOME TURF

Alicia Blas’ two teenaged sons are skaters.

“One day, a fireman stopped by my house and said, ‘You’ve always got a gaggle of boys skateboarding outside your house, and you can’t see your address.’ That got me thinking,” says Blas.

The master gardener in two states headed to Home Depot and bought a load of AstroTurf.  “I laid it out in my living room and realized, ‘I can make everything out of this stuff.’ ”

So she started with her now-coveted (by Rachael Ray, among others) maintenance-free house numbers and named her business Firmly Planted.

Blas, who grew up in Farmington Hills and is a Hillel Day School, Kingswood-Cranbrook and Harrison High School graduate, went to art school at Chicago’s Columbia College and launched her career working as a photo stylist for big-name stores and magazines, including Blooming-dales, Macy’s and Target.

Hired to style the set design for a Sears shoot featuring garage doors, aluminum siding and paint, someone else on the shoot pointed out to her that she was missing her calling. “She said, ‘You should be doing gardens,’ ’’ Blas recalls.

Realizing the stranger was right, Blas, 50, studied to become a master gardener in Florida, where she had moved with her husband before moving on to California, where she had to study again to become a master gardener of that state’s specific zones.

“I love working with plants and flowers,” says Blas, who wanted to know all she could about their names, origins and very best applications. “But I’m a designer, too, so I like to try to put everything together. My goal is to be a ‘gardenologist’ — I want to help people create a whole out of the inside and the outside.”

To that end, she has been studying feng shui (as well as Kabbalah), an ancient Chinese system of improving one’s energy by living in harmony with one’s surroundings. And in 2010, she founded Firmly Planted, a collection of boldly hued, playfully designed and eco-friendly indoor-outdoor pillows (backed in vibrant all-weather Sunbrella fabrics), clocks and, of course, numbers, plus custom designs — all intended for indoor-outdoor use and all manipulating the soft-to-the-touch grassy faux greenery.

After posting some pictures of her pillows on Facebook last year, she got a call from an old friend who loved them. Judy Solway Jennings, who grew up in Bloomfield Hills and whose parents were friends of Blas’ parents, told Solway she worked for Frontgate, a high-end home furnishings and accessories website and catalogue, and a deal was sealed: The pair became business partners, and together they sold more than 300 pillows last year alone. They recently counted Britney Spears as one of their Facebook and Twitter followers.

“I’m an outdoors guru, with a bit of spirituality mixed in,” says Blas. “I want to create a lifestyle. I want to connect people with Mother Nature with all the comfort and style of the modern age.”

For more info, go to firmly-planted.com.

BABY LOVE

Just in time to share with all the moms-to-be for Mother’s Day this month, Melissa Schweiger and Annette Rubin have paired to author Belli Beautiful: The Essential Guide to the Safest Health and Beauty Products for Pregnancy, Mom and Baby (DeCapo; $16.99), which landed on bookshelves in April.

Schweiger, a beauty and style aficionado, grew up in Ann Arbor but headed to New York City for a writing career (Seventeen, Marie Claire and InStyle magazines), eventually becoming the beauty editor at Sephora and writing their book Sephora: The Ultimate Guide to Makeup, Skin and Hair from the Beauty Authority (HarperCollins; 2008).

While pregnant with the first of her two boys in 2008, her attention naturally turned to the beauty and skincare products best for pregnant women and the babies within. So she teamed with Annette Rubin, founder of Belli Skincare, the No. 1 pregnancy- and baby-safe beauty brand recommended by ob-gyns, to help pregnant women go beyond the usual warnings from their doctors about which foods and medications to avoid and to educate them about which beauty and skincare ingredients can be potentially harmful to their unborn child through topical absorption.

“Many of the ingredients used in beauty products are normally safe, but when applied during pregnancy are actually linked to birth defects and miscarriage,” says Schweiger.

Carefully screening hundreds of beauty products and vetting their ingredients for links to birth defects and hormone disruption, Schweiger and Rubin explain which ingredients to avoid — and which to get the most of — and recommend a boatload of pregnancy and baby products they love, plus share plenty of their own wonderful and varying adventures in motherhood.

Available at local bookstores and amazon.com.

Hey, all you audiophiles, here are some suggestions for your iPod this spring:

1. Bear In Heaven – I Love You, It’s Cool

The Brooklyn-based synth band Bear In Heaven has crafted a psychedelic expression of sound with their newest release, I Love You, It’s Cool. It travels in waves of an alternate dimension coming together in a fusion of music that could be somewhere between the Pet Shop Boys meets MGMT — a great album to kick back and relax to.
2. Fanfarlo – Rooms Filled With Light

The London music outfit Fanfarlo has crafted a finely tuned sophomore album with Rooms Filled With Light. The album is ensconced in a light and whimsical new-wave glamour with a little bit of a Talking Heads influence interlaced throughout.
3. The High Strung — ?Posible -o- Imposible?

The High Strung hail from Detroit and have been playing together for about 10 years. Their newest exploration of music is ?Posible -o- Imposible? The album includes the bonus track “The Luck You Got,” which is featured as the theme song for the Showtime series Shameless staring William H. Macy. The album has a bouncy and groovy sound mixed in with a little bit of surf-rock flavor.
4. Punch Brothers – Who’s Feeling Young Now?

The Punch Brothers are a progressive bluegrass band that appeals to a broad audience. Their sweet, soothing vocals mix well with the plucky and rollicking motion of the song structure on the new album. They are bound to slowly reel you into a vibrant and colorful explosion of music with their new album, Who’s Feeling Young Now?
5. Shinedown – Amaryllis

The rockers from Jacksonville, Fla., have released a hard rock album infused with melodic moments. The band came onto the rock scene in the early 2000s with their album Leave A Whisper, which featured hits “Fly From The Inside” and the popular cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.” The new album Amaryllis stays true to their signature sound while pushing further with heartfelt lyrics and heavy guitar licks, once again killing it Shinedown style.

A Jewish concept, tikkun olam, or repairing the world, has made profound changes in the world. To some, it is the basis of their Judaism. To others, it’s a piece of the puzzle. No one can say that tikkun olam is not a universal good.

Terry Bean, a networker, connector, speaker, author and presenter, has been teaching people how to use the concept of “selfish altruism” to help the world and themselves.

Bean started an organization called Motor City Connect (MCC) with the goal of helping people network better. LinkedIn, LBN, BNI (Facebook wasn’t used for business back when MCC was founded, and Twitter didn’t yet exist) and the countless other networking portals were not cutting it for Bean.

Teaching people how to network in person and online have been part of his life’s work. Over the last five years, MCC has taken on a number of pet projects, including blood drives, working with Motor City Blightbusters to tear down abandoned houses and helping raise money for the Friendship Circle walk.

This year, Bean wanted to step it up a notch. Being a believer in the law of attraction and the laws of metaphysics, he wanted to do something for the Metro Detroit area as a whole. He asked his network, consisting of tens of thousands of people on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the MCC website, to use the hashtag #313Dlove on March 13 at 3:13 p.m. to show Detroit some love.

Bean’s connections made good on his request. Not only did they (we) come through for him, we came through for the region. His hashtag was trending worldwide, meaning if you logged onto Twitter from anywhere in the world, you would see #313Dlove on your homepage. If you clicked that link, you would see people posting messages about the beauty of all things Detroit. From Woodward to Belle Isle, to sports, food, Downtown and the suburbs, people were posting the things they loved about Michigan.

The big question is: Did this make anyone money on March 13? I don’t know the answer to that, but I believe that it brought attention to the great things happening here. It was one more step that we, as a region, took in spreading the positive message our hometown has to offer.

Now, I am not saying this was a deciding factor, but within 30 days of the #313Dlove campaign, Twitter corporate announced that it is opening up an office in Detroit at the M@dison building, the home of Detroit Venture Partners, Detroit Labs, Ludlow Ventures and other Detroit-centric technology companies.

Hell, I will say the #313Dlove campaign was a contributing factor. Just try to prove me wrong!

When speaking to Bean, his passion comes through clearly.

“The #313Dlove that was shared on March 13 was just the beginning. We are working hard to make this initiative one that positively changes Detroit from the inside out once and for all. Stay tuned.”

As someone in the commercial real estate business who works on deals in Detroit on a regular basis, I am excited for this. Attention is coming here on a national level. It is no longer a few optimists hoping for something good. Whole Foods and Twitter are among the first, but they are not the last national companies coming to the city. This is good for everyone.

For Bean, this was not the beginning nor end of his campaign for tikkun olam. This was another chance for him to spread his message and place another brick on the road to a recovered region.

Benji Rosenzweig is a commercial real estate broker, blogger, father, husband, Detroit advocate and musician. The order of those things changes daily. Read him at www.BenjiUnSpun.com.

Think of it as one of Detroit’s little ironies: an ecologically sound, environmentally sustainable hub for start-up businesses housed in a former Model T Ford showroom. The Green Garage, located on Second Avenue in Midtown Detroit, is trying to pave a new way of developing socially conscious business in a building that once helped give birth to the automotive revolution.

Tom and Peggy Brennan, the building’s owners, have been interested in the environment since Tom sat on the board of the Monroe-based River Raisin Project, a Catholic nonprofit organization dedicated to ecology and sustainability, said Peggy during a tour of the 12,500-square-foot building.

“We sat down with about a dozen friends in 2005 and formed the Great Lakes Initiative, and that group met at our kitchen table every Tuesday morning from 10 a.m. to noon for five years and talked about different areas of environmental sustainability,” she said. “As an outgrowth of that project, we thought it would be interesting to develop a sort of green demonstration center for the things we had learned and locate it close to a university.”

When they bought the building in 2007, 200 volunteers helped with the design, followed by two more years of construction. It opened in late October 2011.
The Brennans funded the $1.5 million project, but also received brownfield tax credits from the state. They spent as much to renovate the structure as it would have cost to raze the old building and build a new one, she said. Most of the costs were for labor.

The Green Garage is considered a net-zero building: It produces as much energy as it consumes. The outside windows are very efficient. Solar tubes coming into the building help light the inside and reduce the need to heat and cool the building by 85 percent. Solar thermal panels on the roof heat water in tanks, and the water runs underneath the floors to heat the building. Brennan estimates it will cost only $300 a year to heat the building.

The interior is as beautiful as it is “green,” with the main stairway made out of old steam and gas pipes, a wall constructed from scrap wood, and the railing an old walkway that connected the two mezzanines. About 75 percent of the materials brought into the building came from the U. S. waste stream. The floor came from fallen oak and ash trees. The frames for the interior windows were donated from a powerhouse in Lansing, and all the furniture came from a Detroit Public School warehouse.
“We filled one-and-a-half dumpsters for this two-year project,” she said. “Everything else stayed in this building.”

There are currently 15 businesses hanging a shingle in the Green Garage, with room for another 15.

Shared table space rents for $50 a month, a desk for $125 a month, or rent a space for four-five people for $1,000 a month.

Private meeting rooms are available and people can work at the Imaginarium, a lounge upstairs with couches.

The businesses that operate out of the Green Garage are socially conscious and include photographers, website developers and healthy food providers. The following three businesses have Jewish influences.

Students Get Fit
Matthew Tugender, chief marketing officer and director of sales of Students Get Fit, says the advertising company “gives you the incentive to get up off your ass and get in the gym.”

SGF provides incentives to college students on college campuses to get fit, said Tugender, 25, of Walled Lake.

He calls it “moral advertising.”

Once the students sign up, their fitness is tracked through one-time login geo-tracking. “They walk in to an approved fitness center that is basically the school gym and work out at least 30 minutes to get credit for the workout.

“There are short- and long-term incentives for students, from daily prizes to weekly prizes to grand prizes,” he said. “Short-term you can win a $10 gift card for a salad, but long term, if you hit your fitness plateau, which is 50 days of working out per semester, you’re not only going to start looking better and eating better, but you’ll be eligible to win the bigger prizes, which will be the iPads, the televisions, the things you want really bad.

“We try to educate you on food choices, on how to work out and make it habit forming,” he said. “We just had a challenge that ended at University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) last week. We gave away an iPad as a grand prize, and smaller prizes were $10 gift certificates to Panera Bread in the area.”

More than 200 students are signed up at UDM, and more students are members in Syracuse and Buffalo. SGF donates 10 percent of profits to fight childhood obesity.

New Solutions Group
New Solutions Group is a consulting and advocacy business, said Steve Tobocman, managing partner and former state representative in the Michigan House, representing Michigan’s 12th State House district in Southwest Detroit from 2002 to 2008.

“Originally, I formed the limited liability company to afford me the opportunity to work on two critical issues I had developed expertise on while in the legislature: foreclosure and immigration,” said Tobocman, 42, of Detroit. “As I started circulating among my networks of folks who were making positive change in the nonprofit field, conversations evolved and I was offered several exciting and interesting opportunities.

“By forming New Solutions, it afforded me the opportunity to work with other talented, passionate, creative and insightful people to tackle some of Michigan’s most pressing problems.”

His earliest clients included the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Community Economic Development Association of Michigan.

“Work for the Chamber focused on some grant funding from the New Economy Initiative for Southeastern Michigan (NEI), which is a partnership of 10 regional and national foundations that collectively committed $100 million to help transform our regional economy. NEI and the Chamber were interested in how immigration might be used as an economic development tool, helping to grow our economy and create jobs that would benefit the region.”

In 2011, New Solutions really began to grow, he said. “New projects emerged, including overseeing a strategic planning process for the Michigan Earned Income Credit coalition, a network of the state’s free tax assistance providers helping low-income and working people to file their taxes and claim the credits due to them.”

New Solutions now has five clients and four full-time staff members and numerous part-time employees.

“We were the Green Garage’s first, and remain its largest tenant. Our firm’s goals of designing creative and meaningful solutions to our city’s, state’s and country’s challenges align well with the sustainability mission of the Green Garage. We have greatly enjoyed our workspace and the camaraderie and spirit of innovation and positive change. There are always exciting and thoughtful people moving through and visiting the Green Garage.”

Fresh Corner Cafe
Noam Kimmelman would like to see healthy, fresh food in every small grocery store, gas station and bodega in Detroit. Fresh Corner Cafe, the company he formed through a University of Michigan course a couple of years ago, is planning to do just that.

Kimmelman, 25, originally from Boston, moved to Detroit and started the business in May 2010. He has earned a master’s degree in health management and policy from U-M, and lives a few blocks away from the Green Garage.

“The idea started out of a U-M social venture creation course that teaches students to develop a business model to address a social concern,” he said. “I pitched this idea about fresh food access in Detroit, and a team of six graduate students from business, engineering and public health students collaborated on this idea, and we concentrated on the close to 1,000 corner stores in the area.”

Fresh Corner Cafe, an L3C, a low-profit limited liability company, is currently found in 25 stores in Detroit, eight in the Midtown area. The rest are in northwest Detroit. They also have a catering menu of sandwich wraps, salads and fresh fruit.

“We partner with a restaurant in New Center called Lunchtime Detroit, and they produce our food,” he said. “We tell them what we want, what ingredients, and they make it and slap our label on it. We work with Peaches and Greens, a local nonprofit, and they cut our fruit for us.”

By year’s end, Fresh Corner Cafe will have its own kitchen, but Kimmelman said he would maintain the space at the Green Garage. “The collaboration possibilities are endless.”

Photos by Brett Mountain

Would you puh-leeze stop hovering?

I watched coverage of this year’s White House Easter egg roll with a certain amount of foreboding, waiting for one of the television correspondents to report Secret Service snipers firing warning shots at the helicopter parents who were fighting over the eggs.

Of course, the national terrorist threat level hadn’t been raised since the city of Colorado Springs cancelled its Easter Egg hunt in March for the same reason, so I guess I should have kept eating my matzah and chilled with a nice glass of Magen David.

Growing up in Flint in the 1960s, there weren’t a lot of parents hovering over their kids in our neighborhood. Most moms were stay-at-home; the kids went to school within walking distance, came home and played together in the street until the dads came home from work. Kids settled their disputes as they arose without parental interference.

Those lucky enough to have the athletic skills to play football, baseball and/or basketball were encouraged to join school teams. Otherwise, you played in a field, on the street or in a driveway in street clothes.

Sure, I had a nice fading jump shot in basketball, as long as you didn’t cover me and gave me the necessary four seconds to get the shot off, but I knew early that I sucked at sports.

So, I was a bit startled when a story ran on 60 Minutes last year on helicopter parents and their children, referred to as Millennials.

These precocious children joined teams at an early age, wore expensive uniforms, used expensive equipment and, no matter how much they sucked, every member of every team received the same-sized trophy, just for showing up. Every child was special, constantly protected by their parents, who were involved in every aspect of their children’s lives.

The segment showed human resource professionals across the country attending seminars on how to best handle these incoming graduates. How to keep them working, keep them happy and keep them from leaving the company after all that money was spent to train them. I felt sorry for some of them, especially the ones who said that some parents of these Millennial employees would contact them to demand salary increases.

I’m not a psychologist, but I do understand that the world is vastly more complex than it was almost a half-century ago, and helicopter parents hover over their flock to give them a better chance in an increasingly competitive world. But they have to pick their battles. An Easter egg hunt is not a good place to hover. Contacting a teacher when your child’s grades are falling is considered being a good parent. Contacting your kid’s employer to get him a raise, when your kid is a 22-year-old college graduate, is being a ____ (fill in your own swear word.)

I understand that technology plays a huge role, too. I didn’t have a computer until the mid-1990s. Millennials were born in a computer-based world and use them as easily as toasters.

Facebook and other social media allow people to become self-centered. Is an event worth photographing without the picture-taker’s face and upper arm included in the shot?

I’m thinking of pitching a television series to Hollywood about a man who can’t escape precocious Millennial teens no matter where he goes. Driving his car down the street, he gets cut off by a kid driving and texting. Buying a shirt at a store, he pays cash to a Millennial, and receives seven dimes and three pennies when the register is filled with quarters. Sitting at a table in a diner, a group of Millennials enter and spontaneously burst into song — off-key but awesome to themselves, of course — and sends the man running away from the store. I’ll call it Flee.