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Ken Adelman is currently vice-president of Movers and Shakespeares, which conducts executive training through leadership lessons from Shakespeare. Ambassador Adelman began teaching Shakespeare in 1977 at Georgetown University, and later[…]

Wonderful works of art.

Well when you see a wonderful work of art, I think it gives you a different dimension than the world of politics. It gives you . . . It’s harder to deal with because you don’t know exactly . . . it doesn’t give you a “how to”, 1-2-3-4-5, do this, do that. It’s not a Dale Carnegie, you know, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. But you see a character like Polonius, or like Hamlet himself, and you get an idea of how to structure a life, and lessons that come from your . . . You listen to a music, and it seems to have a greater insight into feelings, into emotions. My daughter, who’s with us right now, is a violinist at the Richmond Symphony. It’s a paid political ________ . . . unpaid, actually ________. But when my father died, we all gave a wonderful tribute to him at the funeral. And Jocelyn played a number. And the only thing everybody remembered after that was not the words that we said, as wonderful as they were – my father was a wonderful person – but the way Jocelyn’s violin, and the piece she took, and the way she played it, made a greater impact on the memory of that ceremony than anything we ever said. That was kind of my different plane.

Recorded on: 7/2/07


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