I just had a conversation with one of my loan officers about Frank Sinatra. In my experience, you either get Sinatra or you don’t. I’ve talked to people who just don’t understand his appeal, and if they don’t get it, you really can’t explain it to them. Sinatra was simply the coolest man on the planet.

I’ve long believed that I was born in the wrong era. I was supposed to be at the Sands in ’64, hanging out with Frank and Dean and Sammy and Joey, drinking a martini and snapping my fingers as the orchestra locked in on a groove. And I love the word “dame”. A dame, the way Sinatra used the word, was a unique woman, a woman who had a sense of her own power even before feminism came along, who could hold her own with any man verbally – what my father refers to as a “feminine tomboy”, with wit and brilliance thrown in. Lauren Bacall was the quintessential dame of that era, and it’s not a coincidence that she was the woman who named them the Rat Pack.