Second Act

The difficulty was that my life, up to age 70, had been very involving and interesting. I had made a nice living as a Hollywood actor, though I had never reached major stardom. I was also a medical doctor (You know the Hollywood joke that he became a brain surgeon in case the acting thing didn’t pan out?). Anyway, I had practiced board-certified family medicine for forty years and had really enjoyed its special rewards.

Because of added income from acting, I was fortunate enough to be able to vary my medical days and so practiced in West Africa with the Peace Corps, in cowboy Montana with the National Health Service Corps and even in the mid-western corn and soybean state of South Dakota as a small town family doc. In Los Angeles, I had practiced among the rich, having developed healthy offices in west Los Angeles and Beverly Hills and for many years had worked among the poor, having manned medical offices downtown among Koreans, Hispanics, American Indians, and the L.A. homeless population.

My resume was an unusual one, I knew. Actually, at the beginning of my adventure back to Cornell University, I remained hesitant to give up any of the things I was doing,