I know that the title I have chosen for this series of accounts can be misleading. It gives no explicit indication about what the reader will shortly encounter. So I will tell you. It is my story-the account of my private life. For the first time really, it is the melding of my public persona with the full reality of how I have chosen to live, to indulge my imagination and to achieve the realization of the fantasies of my youth.

I have little illusion about how the reader will judge me. Self-indulgent may be the most generous description I can hope for. But at one level of reality I don't care and at another level of reality, I clearly do. The part of me that wishes to share my story with the reader is not inhibited by concerns about others' judgments; the part of me that maintains the buffers that shield my lifestyle and identity from the rest of the world acknowledges the consequences of flouting norms of behavior.

Well so far I have been a bit abstract and I am anxious to start but a bit of biographical data is necessary.

I am forty-three years old. I am also quite wealthy. My father was a founder of a household-familiar kitchen appliance manufacturer. When I was twenty-two and a second year law student, the business was sold to an even larger public company and my family became that entity's largest single group of stockholders. A year later I inherited all those holdings. I have sold much of the stock I inherited and have invested the proceeds fairly diversely. The last time I looked (and I look reasonably often) I have about $115 million invested in publicly traded securities, about $26 million in cash and cash equivalents and about $65 million in less liquid inv estments. That my sound like a lot of money. It is, but it is not so much money that I have a highly visible public profile. You would be surprised at how many private fortunes in the U.S. exceed mine.