That is some old skool stuff

October 31

Who did I hear from the other day but Jeff Ackerman? Can you imagine?
Jeff and I were in a Jewish youth group in Denver together, a fraternal organization called AZA (Judge Saul Pinchick AZA 6, to those for whom that means something). We actually both were in college together in Boston, but he was at Boston College and I was at Tufts and we never saw each other, even though I became friends with one of his roommates, John Griffin, when we spent our junior years in China together.
Anyway, I hadn’t seen Jeff since 1990, when we bumped into each other at the Tabor Center in Denver shortly after graduating from college and had like a four-minute conversation, and out of the blue he e-mails me.
It turns out he’s Qdoba’s franchisee for Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire. It seems he wanted to bring some Denver cuisine to his adopted home, where he’s married with three kids.
So we chat on the phone and reminisce about a variety of people, which inspires him to do a web search for Peter Yanowitz, who was on the same trip to Israel as we were.
Now the interesting thing is that Peter also happened to go to Tufts with me, where he was transformed from the preppy pretty boy from Salt Lake City I knew in Israel, to a long-haired, bongo drumming Crafts House resident.
The new lifestyle seemed to work for him, because as Google told us, Peter, who now is Pedro Yanowitz, went on to become drummer for the Wallflowers, and then for Natalie Merchant, and now he’s the bassist for Morningwood.
So I e-mailed Morningwood and after a couple of back-and-forths managed to remind Pedro of how we know each other.
“ha,
that is some old skool stuff,” he said. And I learned that he’s going to be on Letterman tonight.
I guess I should set my DVR.