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We decided to go ahead and damn the torpedoes. We approached our friend, Lia, in Ok-
lahoma and offered her an all-expense paid trip to Italy if she would watch the baby while
we were visiting museums, doing slide-show presentations and exploring the countryside.
She signed on, and Lia became the first of an illustrious line of babysitters who have ma-
gically appeared every summer for more than a decade to help care for our children when
tour season is upon us.
And, so, Pam and I went all over Tuscany with our group, baby and nanny in tow, looking
at the artistic masterpieces that abound and discussing their context and religious signific-
ance. There was something wonderfully bizarre about a Jew from Newark discussing Cath-
olic art with a group of Protestant ministers and introducing them to the subtleties of Mari-
an theology in late medieval Tuscan art.
We thoroughly enjoyed leading the tour, and the group had a very positive experience. It
felt like something that we were good at, and something we would love to do again. So, we
registered a domain and started building a website to advertise an annual summer seminar
tour in Tuscany. It was only 1997 and no one had yet grabbed “
www.TuscanyTours.com
”,
so that became our new home on the web. And we began organizing and leading tours in
Italy every summer.
***
Although we loved leading the tours, it seemed clear to us that we could never really make
a living doing this kind of thing. Meanwhile, our tech business was booming. We had
bought a house in Petaluma and, then, shortly afterwards, a second one in Italy. We had
two full-time employees and two contractors whom we kept busy flying around the coun-
try. While the internet was transforming the business world, the tech sector companies that
made up the core of our clientele were flourishing. Little companies were sprouting daily
likenewgrassonalushlawnwatered byventurecapital funding.Whowouldhaveguessed
that it could all fall apart so quickly?
A few months later, as we entered the new millennium, someone would turn off the water
and the phrase, silicon valley, would acquire a new sinister meaning. The lush lawn would
turn into an arid, sandy desert as the seedlings and saplings died one after another. And
although we were far from the epicenter of the disaster, the dot-com crash completely
changed our lives.
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