David / Jeff
David in 1974.
Groucho-David in 1963...
…and still at it in 2000.
David now.
Jeff at Harvard.
Jeff in the here and now.
11-27-2024
“My father used to wake me up when the Marx Brothers came on the late movie on TV, so I started dressing up as Groucho when I was 10, and I never really stopped,” psychiatrist David Goldbloom tells classmate Jeff Melvoin in this episode of PasstheMic.
Some of the secret of success, Goldbloom continues, is choosing your parents wisely. Not only did his introduce him to Groucho, but to classical piano and the world of musical theater, as well, which is how he and Jeff met at Harvard; Jeff cast him in two Leverett House productions, A Thousand Clowns and Guys and Dolls, and the rest is history—at least as far as this director and actor are concerned.
Jeff confesses that at the time he thought David was “just a knucklehead” from Toronto—a talented knucklehead, to be sure, but not someone who would go on to become a Rhodes scholar, distinguished psychiatrist and educator, author, and chairman of the board of the Stratford Festival, among many other community leadership positions.
Looking back, David’s glad he never really had a mapped-out career. “Man plans and God laughs,” he says, quoting an old Yiddish expression. He’s relished the unexpected turns his life has taken.
In this freewheeling and funny encounter between old friends, David covers everything from empathy in the clinical encounter to what it means to be able to sit at his piano, playing with the lights off. And then there’s the joy of having his grandchildren sleep over, which, he says simply, “is heaven”—with time, perhaps, for a late-night Marx Brothers movie on TV.