It's about time!

Fun news to report tonight: a childhood friend of mine, Marco Beltrami, a composer who has become the go-to guy in Hollywood for horror and action films, received his first Academy Award nomination today for his score to 3:10 to Yuma. Many critics say it's long overdue.

I'm quite confident that Marco wouldn't recognize (or even remember) me at this point in his life. But back in the late sixties and early seventies we saw each other several times a year. Marco's dad, Nino, is a mathematician and one of my father's oldest friends. We used to visit the Beltrami boys out near Stony Brook, Long Island, where we would have races down the enormous wooded hill in the backyard of their home. One weird memory: I remember coming down with chicken pox at the Beltrami home one year.

Anyway, Marco vaulted to stardom after he wrote the score for a small film in 1996 called Scream. It made a few dollars, if I remember correctly.

Congratulations, Marco!

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Also from the Dep't. of Overdue Praise: My dear friend Kelly Corrigan, whose wedding I photographed many years back in Radnor, Pennsylvania, is now officially a best-selling author, having popped up on this week's New York Times bestseller list with her newly released memoir, The Middle Place.

I first wrote about Kelly back in October of 2006, after she had started her cancer website and had written a children's book about cancer called "Last Year, This Year." You can find that post here.

Since then, Kelly has been hard at work on The Middle Place, a memoir that touchingly (and, not surprisingly, knowing Kelly, humorously) deals with both her own breast cancer as well as the bladder cancer that her father, Big George, was struggling with. One doesn't ever expect to share chemo treatments with a parent but Kel did just that.

Last week I had the honor of hearing Kelly read from The Middle Place at Thyme Out in Gaithersburg. Thyme Out is a place where folks can prepare delicious meals for their families (thereby avoiding expensive take-out) and happens to be owned by Kelly's dear friend, chef Missy Bigelow Carr. Yup, I shot Missy's wedding as well!

It was fantastic to see Missy's business doing so well and Kelly's book gathering incredible word of mouth. (Kelly did a segment with Ann Curry on the Today show last week.) To get a feel the effect this book is having on regular people, read this story.

So skip on over to Amazon.com and pick yourself up a copy of The Middle Place. We're proud of you, Kel!


Matt