​​​​The Trouble With Making Assumptions, or “What’s That On Your Head?”

Steven B. Zwickel 

September 30, 2026

A few years ago I was invited to give a presentation to a group of graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. These bright young people were experts in their chosen fields and working their way towards Masters and PhD degrees. They knew all the facts and figures involved in science, math, technology, engineering, etc. and they were now expected to give brief presentations to members of the public who stopped at their exhibits at a Science Day event at the university. My task was to help them give meaningful technical presentations without overwhelming people who visited the event.

Before I began, I asked them to explain what they planned to talk about. It was immediately obvious that they really knew their stuff. What was also obvious was that they had trouble translating these highly technical topics for people who were not university professors.

I put a top hat on my head as a demonstration and told them this story about beaver hats:

• In grade school we studied American history and we were told that one of the major draws to North America for European settlers was the large population of beavers. From the time of the earliest European settlements trade in beaver pelts became a major part of the colonial economy. 
• Our teachers and textbooks explained (sort of) that Europeans were crazy about beaver hats and demand for beaver skins almost drove North American beavers to extinction.
• In my 9-year-old imagination, I envisioned all those Europeans walking around London, Paris, Rome, etc. wearing beavers on their heads. My ideas were based, of course, on having watched Davy Crockett on TV wearing a “coonskin” hat. I assumed, wrongly, that the Europeans  just plopped a dead beaver on their heads. No one corrected me.
• Many, many years later, we took a trip to the Green Bay area and stopped in Oneida to visit the Oneida Nation Museum. As I walked through the exhibits I came to one devoted to the beaver skin trade. It explained in detail how the pelts were treated to make felt. The fine beaver hairs were pressed together to create a silky fabric that was used to make all kinds of hats. {See https://oneida-nsn.gov/}
•  After 60 years I finally learned that no one in Europe actually plunked a beaver on his head. {Now, of course, you can read all about it online: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_hat>}

The lesson I was trying to teach the grad students was this: Do NOT make assumptions about what your audience knows. As an expert you have an obligation to make information accessible to your audience, no matter if you are talking to professors, business executives, or ordinary members of the public.

"Modifications of the beaver hat"comes from an illustration in "Castorologia, or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver" 1892, Martin, Horace T. 

Gloria Steinem Changed My Life

 Gloria Steinem (1934–2026) Changed My Life

Steven B. Zwickel

3 September 2026

In late April, 1970, as a college Junior, I went to hear a talk in the Student Center Social Room. The college newspaper, The Colonial News, said the topic would be “Women’s Liberation” and I admit I didn’t think I would take it seriously. In fact, I remember joking with my companion about women being as good as men. I think I said something like, “If I were in a burning building, I’d want a big, husky fireman with a big axe to come rescue me, not some petite woman who was worried about ruining her fingernail polish.”  

What I heard that night changed my mind and changed my life. 

There were two speakers, Dorothy Pitman [Hughes] (1938–2022) and Gloria Steinem. *

They were both extraordinary presenters who demonstrated their understanding of male-female relationships in a way I had never heard before. Ms. Pitman talked about the way Black women were demeaned. Ms. Steinem described why unequal treatment was bad for both men and women. By the end of the evening, I had been converted into a believer in women’s equality.

I wrote a letter to Ms. Steinem, telling her about the impact her presentation had on me and thanking her for making me aware of the way women were treated in our society. Somewhere, probably in a box in the basement, is the response I received. Gloria Steinem congratulated me for having opened myself up to the idea of female equality. Then she wrote something about how she was glad I had become a feminist.

That’s it—Gloria Steinem called me a feminist!

In the decades since then, I have adjusted to, and become comfortable with, the advances made by women. In 1970 I think the idea of women studying medicine and becoming physicians was new. We had doctors and we had “women doctors” back then. Today, my primary physician, my endocrinologist, my renal specialist, and my urologist are all women.  No big deal; the world has changed, I think, for the better.

On another level though, the way women have been treated historically still rankles. For centuries they were treated as second-class citizens—it was OK for men to be literate or educated, sometimes. Women were rarely, if ever, given the opportunity to fully participate in life beyond home-making and bearing children. Can you imagine how different the world would be today if the other 50% of the population had been allowed access to science, medicine, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, etc? What problems could have been solved if we’d had twice as many people in these fields? 

Thank you, Gloria, for helping me and so many other people understand the value of equality and fairness. You will be missed.

Gloria Steinem died September 2, 2026

 All You Need to Know About Bargaining

Steven B. Zwickel 

August 30, 2026

"A bargain is something you have to find a use for once you have bought it." 

~ Benjamin Franklin

“Well, sir, I think this is going to work out for you folks. Let’s see here. We’re looking at a 2026 Chrysler Lanechanger sedan in Ticketmagnet Red with the exclusive all-Gizmo upgrade package. You seem like a nice couple, so I’m going to throw in the floor mats and give you a special price… Hmmm, I’d like to let you have it for that, but let me check with my manager to make sure I can let you have it for such a low price.”

Of course, the manager agrees to the “special price” and the buyers feel like they did some hard bargaining and got a real deal.

Americans are not good at bargaining. They don’t like haggling and are more comfortable paying whatever the seller asks. In fact, Americans find bargaining distasteful.

➤➤ NOTE: bargaining is when buyer and seller discuss how much something will cost while bartering is a swap—something is traded for something else.

In many other parts of the world, people bargain all the time and consider it a normal way of doing business. In America, everyone deals, but not everyone realizes this. When I took some coins to a dealer, hoping to sell them for cash, I was offered something like $180. I waited a while and stared at the coins until the dealer spoke. “How much were you hoping to get?” he asked. I did some math in my head and told him I thought they were worth more, probably closer to $250. He looked at the coins again, offered me $225, and we closed the deal.

The first rule of bargaining is that the buyer should not accept the first price named by the seller. A  buyer who is serious should consider that merely an opening move and make a counter-offer. 

Always make a counter-offer. Of course if the seller jumps at the counter-offer, the buyer has offered too much. Then the buyer has to decide whether to go ahead with the sale or look for a different item and start bargaining all over again.

The second rule is that the buyer should not rush. The longer bargaining goes on, the more likely the seller is to lower the price. 

➤➤ One skill that is very helpful when bargaining is the ability to do math in one’s head. A buyer who can do math without having to write down the numbers or use a calculator can make a good deal very quickly.

If a seller refuses to budge, the buyer has several options. 

One option is to walk away and shop someplace else. (There are sellers who won’t take no for an answer. My wife was once cornered by a salesman who insisted she buy an overpriced rug. I had to go from assertive to aggressive to help her escape.)

Another option  is to ask about a different but similar item—how it compares in quality and price. Take your time studying the alternative and then say something about how you would much prefer to buy the first item, if only it weren’t so expensive. That may be enough to get the seller to offer a better price on the first item. 

Finding “flaws” can also give a buyer an advantage. These don’t need to be real flaws, but they can be any aspect of the item for sale that is less than, or different from what the buyer desires. The buyer may frown and mention that the item in question is not quite what they wanted. Perhaps it is the wrong color, shape, model number, size, or anything. A lucky seller will pull out another one that is perfect. But it is also possible that, since the item in question is not quite right, the seller will agree to a lower price.

Yet another tactic is to “walk away slow”—smile and turn away, taking your time to leave. A seller who feels that he or she is about to lose a sale may be encouraged to call you back with a better offer. For example, we were in Spain and needed to buy new batteries for our camera. My granddaughter and I found a vendor not far from our hotel. I asked about getting batteries, and he told me the price. It was well above what I thought I should pay, so I thanked him and turned to walk away. "Why didn't you buy the batteries?" my granddaughter wanted to know. I turned to her and whispered, "Shhh! Just walk away slow." She looked puzzled, but we started back towards the hotel, walking very slowly. We had only taken a few steps when I heard the vendor call out, "Señor, I can give you a better price."  And he did.

A buyer might also try asking about the price for multiple items. If the seller believes a buyer might buy several of something, the price for each item may go down. It’s up to the buyer to decide if having more than one item is useful. This is what I did while eating in a restaurant in Morocco, where I noticed that the kebabs were served on interesting-looking, hand-forged, iron skewers. My wife and granddaughter agreed that a skewer would make a nice souvenir of our trip, so I asked the waiter if I could buy one. He asked the manager, who offered to sell me one and named a price. "What if I buy all six, how much would you want then?" I asked. By buying six, I got a much, much better price per skewer. 

When making an offer, the first price the seller asks should be considered the most the seller expects to get. At the same time, the first price the buyer offers should be considered the least the buyer is willing to pay. One morning I was in a store in China looking for a pair of small speakers for a friend’s computer. I found some that looked like the ones he wanted and noted the price. A helpful clerk came over and asked if I had any questions. I told him I was hoping to buy two speakers, and I (foolishly) told him how much I thought it would cost. His face lit up. With a big grin, he told me that the price I named was just fine. He was too quick. It was clear to me that I had offered too much. I thanked him and I muttered some nonsense about needing decibels as I walked away. That afternoon I bought the speakers in a different store for a lot less than I had offered in the morning.

Another bargaining tactic is to offer to “split the difference” between what the buyer wants to spend and what the seller is asking.

Never, ever start bargaining by naming your price. I saw an American woman walk into a jewelry shop in Italy and ask the clerk for something “around $100.” You can be sure that, whatever item he showed her, it didn't cost $100 before she asked. The lesson: never tell the seller what your budget really is. It’s OK to hint at your price range or to talk about your limitations. (I once got a great deal on an item after I explained that I would like to buy it but it would be very expensive to ship it home. The seller offered to pay for shipping!)

Finally, don’t underestimate a seller’s desire to make a deal. Anyone who has worked in retail sales will tell you that, near the end of the day, they would be happy to accept just about any offer if it enabled them to finish their shift and go home. I had a garage sale a few years ago, where I was trying to get rid of many items that were no longer of use to me. After hours of sitting in the driveway and making one sale at a time, I was thrilled when a woman came over and asked me, “How much for all this stuff?” pointing at the remaining items. I did some quick math (in my head) and calculated how much it would cost if I added up all the items. I told her, but then I offered to sell it all to her for about ¾ of that. She agreed, and ten minutes later my driveway was empty and I was relaxing because I was done for the day. I could have driven a harder bargain, but it was worth it to me to shut down the sale.

Theater Programs are No Longer Interesting

 Theater Programs are No Longer Interesting

Steven B. Zwickel

July 27, 2026

I Used to Love Theater Programs

My parents, especially my mother, were avid fans of the performing arts. They believed that it was important for their children to be exposed to these from an early age. As with our choices of food and drink, we weren’t expected to like everything, but they insisted we try out new things. 

I grew up in New York City and my parents were avid theater-goers, so I started attending shows on Broadway when I was really quite young (my sister and I have the dubious distinction of being among the youngest audience members ever kicked out of The King and I—I was 4, she was 3—we knew all the songs and sang along!)

And so, from the time we were quite little,  my sister and I were taken to see musicals, shows, concerts, operas, and ballets. By the time I was a teenager, I was in love with the theater. {Concerts and operas also appealed to me, but ballet never interested me.}

One of my favorite souvenirs from many of my trips to the theater were Playbills, and I kept collecting these as I grew up and eventually moved from New York to Wisconsin. {Playbill is the brand name of a free program given to audience members in New York and some other American theaters <https://playbill.com/>}

1973 "El Grande de Coca-Cola" Off-Broadway comedy set in Honduras.
Jeff Goldblum was part of the cast

1976-78 "Sly Fox" by Larry Gelbart with George C. Scott
Based on Ben Jonson's 1606 play "Vulpine" 

I began collecting memorabilia, particularly theater programs, but also original cast recordings (at first 78 rpm records, then cassette tapes, then CDs). My collection grew over time until several large boxes were taking over our basement. I  had a collection of some 300–400 theater and concert programs—some from Broadway, some from the London stage, some from Chicago, and many from Wisconsin. Among the cast lists are some of big names in modern-day theater (a few from before they went on to become big stars—you would recognize them immediately).

In July, 2021 I contacted the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research <https://wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu/> about making a donation to the Archive Playbill Collection. I explained that I had theater programs and Playbills from theater productions and concerts done in New York City, London, Chicago, and Wisconsin dating from approximately 1960 to 2020. I also had programs for the Madison Symphony Orchestra, Madison Chamber Orchestra, Madison Theater Guild, Forward Theater Company, Madison Ballet, CTM (Children’s Theater of Madison), and Madison Opera. 

1983 "The Mikado" Madison Savoyards' production
cover design by Sarah White

In addition, I offered to donate a lobby poster, London cast recording LP, movie script, and the Philadelphia tryout program and ticket stubs for the musical My Fair Lady. I also had programs and audio cassette recordings from 1977-1986 productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas by the Madison Savoyards, audio cassettes of cast recordings of various musical and opera productions, and 35 years’ worth of programs and one poster from American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin <https://americanplayers.org/> (Winner of a Tony Award in 2026!).

 

1956 "My Fair Lady" program from the Philadelphia tryout run 

The star of my collection was the program and ticket stubs from the 3rd night of a month-long Philadelphia tryout run of My Fair Lady at the Erlanger Theater on Feb. 18, 1956. These items are extremely rare and I never found anyone who had anything like them. (Eliza sings a song called “I Want to Dance All Night”—thank goodness they changed that lyric!). In Act I, Scene 9 the song “Say a Prayer” was cut from the show but Lerner and Loewe used it in the 1958 musical film Gigi. 

The program and tickets (and the Erlanger Theater ticket envelope) were given to me by a woman who was there that night, so I can authenticate them. I thought maybe a real musical theater buff or Julie Andrews fan would probably pay a lot for them. As it turned out, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research took the entire collection for its archives.

Why I No Longer Like Theater Programs

Over the past few years I have come to dislike printed theater programs and I no longer collect them. Here’s why:

➽ Too many pages in modern-day programs are devoted to “our wonderful sponsors”. It must appeal to the vanity of those who can afford to donate $25,000+, but it comes across as boasting and bragging about how rich they are. Don’t they know that the highest form of charity is that which is given anonymously? {OK, according to Maimonides <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzedakah> complete anonymity, where neither party knows the other, is the second-highest form.}

I understand the reason for listing all of “our wonderful sponsors”—it’s supposed to encourage other rich people to become wonderful by donating. But it’s annoying to those of us who just want to know more about the play we are about to see.

➽ Director’s Notes used to tell us a bit more about the show, its origins, and perhaps some insight into its meaning. Nowadays, it seems they think it’s important to tell the un-amazing story of how the director came across this “obscure” play (often after it won tons of awards abroad) and how incredible and insightful it is, even if it is hundreds of years old and “a play about nothing.” Most importantly, we are told that this play is RELEVANT to the way we live TODAY!

➽ Once upon a time, it was interesting to read a little bit about the performers’ backgrounds, just to help us remember where we might have seen them before and to note their credentials. Now we get a complete resumé, alongside a heavily edited headshot, of every actor and everyone else who may have had anything to do with the show. Are there really people who want to know that the Assistant to the Prodcution Assistant to the Touring Company Co-Stage Manager worked on “Our Town” in Kalamazoo? 

I also note an alarming growth in the list of organizations, and people (including headshots and bios) listed as producers. 

And, of course, many entries finish with either #  or @ so we can “like” and “friend” them on social media, or with a shout out to someone “ who always believed in me.” I believe I will turn the page.

➽ I do not have a PhD in Advanced Music Theory, so I am completely lost when the program notes for a concert contain an extensive vocabulary, usually in Italian (occasionally in another European language), explaining the music that will be played. 

“The third alesatura movement, features an uccisore ensemble reflecting the peasants’ march into combat with the giant grasshoppers, followed by a mordant credenza motif in C-flat spazzatura calderossa, typical of the composer’s devotion to cestino oblongatto.” This kind of thing does not make me allegro.

Of course I will continue to be part of the audience at many concerts, plays, and shows. I still enjoy a great night watching and listening to professional entertainment. But the programs they give out will go back into the rack for re-use when the curtain comes down. I won’t be saving them any longer.

I Used to Be a Movie Lover

Steven B. Zwickel 

July 6, 2026

 I used to be a real movie lover. Not any more.

A few weeks ago, I found a bunch of my old yearly planners and started browsing through them. Among the dental appointments (not enough, I now realize) and the job interviews (far too many), were the names of movies I’d gone to see. Year after year,, I’d gone to a movie theater 2 or 3 times or more almost every month. 

Sad to say, as I write this, it has now been almost 3 years since I last went out to see a movie, and I really hated the picture. 

What happened? I got older, of course, and I am no longer part of the target audience movie producers crave. But I think it goes beyond that; the movies have changed from artistic adventures to marketable consumer goods.

I’m a Baby Boomer and grew up at a time when movies were only available on the big screen at a theater. We had a black and white set, but the studios prevented movies from being shown on television until the middle of the 1950s. One of the very first times movies were shown on TV was “Million Dollar Movie” on WOR-TV (Channel 9 in New York), which showed the same movie twice every evening. While it was sometimes a struggle to get permission to watch TV on a school night {OF COURSE I’ll do all my homework first, momma!}, whenever we could, my sister and I would devour these films. We watched, sometimes twice in one night. 

Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire in "Swing Time"

Eventually we had memorized all the songs in the Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musicals like Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Shall We Dance (1937). I would argue that “The Way You Look Tonight” from the 1936 film Swing Time is one of the greatest songs ever written (Alas,  I wish I could still hit those high notes!).

So I grew up to become a lover of movies and I think I must have seen hundreds. In Brooklyn we lived near a theater where you could watch two movies for a dollar and when I moved to Wisconsin I was lucky enough to live in a town with a one dollar theater.

Some time in the early 1980s we started renting movies on VHS tapes and watching them at home. These do not show up in any of my planners, but I know we did this, especially at holiday time, when we rented “family” movies. The VHS cassettes eventually gave way to DVDs, which we would play on my home computer before we got a DVD player. 

We survived the Covid pandemic by borrowing free DVDs from the public library. I will always be grateful to the library for helping us stay sane in a crazy time.

But then something changed. After the pandemic, even though it was safe to go to the movie theaters, I couldn’t find a reason to go. I studied the names, actors, and plot summaries of the new movies, but nothing appealed to me. 

Prequels or sequels, which seem to dominate the new releases, don’t interest me. You can learn more about the worst sequels (Jaws. The Karate Kid. Speed. Paul Blart: Mall Cop, etc.) at <​​https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/worst-sequels-of-all-time/> Somebody ought to put up a big sign in Hollywood, “If you don’t have a new idea, don’t make a movie.”

As if I needed another reason not to go see a movie in the theater, a  few months ago [Apr 27, 2026] the Wall Street Journal ran this headline, “The $50 Movie Ticket Has Arrived.” 

I put together a list of the types of movies I am not interested in watching and realized that it pretty much eliminated everything playing in the theaters.

I am not interested in:

🎥 Rom-coms: I’ve found my true love and have no interest in watching mis-matched couples battle for 2 hours on screen. If you ask me, none can compete with “Bringing Up Baby.”

🎥 Coming-of-age: They can’t pay me enough to watch awkward teens dealing with adolescence. Immaturity is not entertaining.

🎥 Coming out: People who  are not happy with the way they are can and should try something else to see if that is any better. I feel for them, really I do, but not enough to sit through hours watching other people’s internal struggles over sexual orientation.

🎥 Comic book movies: I was discouraged from reading comics when I was a kid and never developed a taste for them. If there really are super-heros, where the hell have they been all these years?  If I had super powers, I’d send all the re-makes, sequels, and spin-offs of these movies to a distant galaxy.

🎥 One-man army: It was fun, at first, to watch Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Liam Neeson, and Steven Seagal take on the bad guys. But, like the action figures people used to buy for boys {“They are NOT dolls!!!”} they are one-trick ponies. James (Sean Connery) Bond was different, because he had a sense of humor, but even he got stale and repetitive. The Bond movies became circus acrobat performances with fancy guns—the improvised weapons used to be amusing, but even those became clichés.

🎥 Pseudo-history: take any episode in history and jazz it up with modern-day sensibility (preferably by adding sex—straight, bi-, whatever), add loud, dramatic orchestral music (preferably loud enough to drown out the mundane dialog) and you have an “important”  movie. Wake me when it’s over. The old “swords and sandals” epics are still fun to watch and you can laugh at the stilted acting and oodles of ketchup that pour out of every wound.

🎥 Sci-Fi and Horror movies: Oh no! Don’t open that door/hatch! If you hear spooky music, well…..

🎥 Disney princesses, etc.: I am not, and have never been, the target audience for these films. I miss the days when Disney was subversive, with TV shows and movies about rebels and anti-heroes who weren’t afraid to take on the system. I remember Davy Crockett (Fess Parker), Zorro / Don Diego de la Vega (Guy Williams), Daniel Boone (Dewey Martin), and The Swamp Fox/Francis Marion (Leslie Nielsen). Disney also made shows about “The Magnificent Rebel” Ludwig van Beethoven, Scottish cattle thief Rob Roy, and English outlaw Robin Hood. Is it any wonder that the Baby Boomers became anti-establishment rebels?

🎥 Bio-pics: These re-work a pop culture icon into a great hero, who overcame (or failed to overcome) one or more of the following: poverty, child abuse, sexual abuse, drug abuse, alcoholism, a physical disability, harsh criticism, losing everything to a con man, wartime trauma, racial/ethnic/religious stigma and discrimination and make a movie about a modern-day hero. Maybe some people like knowing others had it worse off than they do. I’m not cold-hearted, but these kinds of stories don't interest me.

🎥 Redemption/Quest: An ex-con/ex-sheriff/ex-cop is trying to atone for some evil deed he did in the past and agrees to help a tough woman/disabled man/lost child find out what happened to her/his family, meeting a band of truly terrifying killers and killing a lot of people along the way. The ex-whatever is hoping that, by helping with the quest, he will be redeemed. There may be sexual tension between the ex-whatever and the person he’s trying to help, but who cares? 

If you add a bit of obsession, this category  includes the “Sane-guy-going Crazy” plot where the audience is treated to watching someone go bonkers for two hours. What fun!

🎥 Smart kids/stupid grownups: Long before their idiot parents realize it, their brilliant children know that their folks were meant for each other. Sometimes the kids plot against the adults, sometimes they plot to bring them together. So cute! I could gag.

We have a streaming service, and can find Pizzaflix on YouTube, so we have loads of really good old movies we can watch that we haven’t seen before. (By old I mean from before 1930.) 

They’re mostly in black and white and they rock (most of them; some are stinkers, I admit.) But they are entertaining and there is no one sitting behind me commenting—in a loud, annoying voice—offering uninformed opinions about every scene, actor, costume, and song.

         All of which leaves me with exactly no reason to go out to the movies.