From Robin:
Paul and I met at our friends Ray and Monica Lamontagne's Christmas party in 1986, and impressed each other right away.
The Lamontagnes' liquor locker has yet to be fully reconstituted.
And just two months later, after a zillion nominations, Paul finally won his Academy Award.
I've always been good luck.
So we started writing a cool little Broadway children's show together, but then shelved it for legal beagle reasons.
And then he came up with something really cool: a summer camp for kids who never get to go to camp! At first, it was especially for kids with incurable blood disorders (cancers, sickle cell, thalassemia, etc.) who spend their abbreviated lives tethered to tubes and machines and hospital weirdness (now the tent's much bigger). He built the camp-- with the help of pretty much everybody he asked, who could say no to Paul Newman?-- to look like Hollywood Wild West sets from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," with the highest of high tech gear inside, with the best doctors from Yale and all around, with the coolest counselors and the most ridiculously dedicated staff you can imagine. It was like Heaven; it was, as Paul liked to say, "where all these kids could get a chance to misbehave and get away with it," without life-threatening consequences or scaring their parents to pieces. Where a kid could, for once in their life, just be, you know, a kid.
I'd help A.E. Hotchner, Paul's pal and Hemingway's biographer and co-founder of Newman's Own, to write skits and songs for the yearly celebrity fundraiser bash. For instance, David Buskin and I and James Naughton would sing the Everly Brothers' "Bird Dog" while Newman sat between us reading the spoken word part off a roll of toilet paper. Nothing but high class stuff. Whoopi Goldberg and Alec Baldwin and Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts and Christine Lavin and Robin Williams would all pitch in.
And one year I wrote a camp theme song, sitting alone in the dark one night with tears running down my face, "Voices from the Hole in the Wall," and it became soundtrack for videos and testaments and pitches for the camp from Paul and the gang. This is one of those videos.
Now that the election is over, please make a note to put the Hole in the Wall Gang Camps at the top of your Christmas and Channukah and Kwanzaa list, and donate an amount equal to what you spent on holiday food you wish you hadn't eaten.
Life's all about balance.
Once I said to Newman, "You know what you're about, Paul?
You're all about the inspiration of generosity and the generosity of inspiration."
He looked up, took a beat, and said, "Sounds like you need another Budweiser, Butch."
Hoist one for Paul, everybody, while celebrating the great 2012 Obama victory!
Love, Robin