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Sean Connery changed my life. When I was nine, my Mom and Stepdad asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. Now, having your birthday in the first week of February well and truly sucks; it’s always freezing and miserable. Still, it took me all of a second and a half to answer. “I want to see Diamonds Are Forever at the Woods Theater.” And that’s exactly what we did, braving the freezing-cold winds of the Loop to make our way to the Woods Theater, the last of the grand movie palaces in Chicago at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph. I remember getting there nice and early so we could get the best seats - in the middle, about 1/3 of the way up from the front. And, for the next two hours I got to see the most larger-than-life character in movie history being portrayed by the most perfect actor to ever portray him, on a screen three times as big as our house. Sean Connery as James Bond was my first hero. He was smart. He was cool. He was tough. He was graceful. And he could wear the hell out of a tuxedo no matter how exotic the location. To a kid living in a small, rural town at the farthest edge of the suburbs, Sean Connery made me want to see as much of the world as possible. Thanks to my chosen profession, I’ve been lucky enough to see a great deal of it. And, whenever I’ve been overseas, from London to Rome to Tangier to Cape Town to Hong Kong, I’ve always thought of Mr. Connery as I’ve walked their streets. When I was a kid, I learned how to kiss watching him in Goldfinger on the ABC Sunday Night Movie. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying to teach myself how to raise a single eyebrow like only he could. I ended up perfecting it with my right eyebrow, but I never could get the left one to go up independently. I learned to tough things out - I always pretended my poor dentist was Blofeld and I would refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing that something hurt. And, from my early 20’s until today, I have always, always owned a tuxedo. Of course, I eventually had to unlearn a lot of the things I learned from Bond movies: a whole lot of sexism, a dash of racism, and that jumping from a great height into a small body of water (in my case, from nearly 30 feet up in a tree into a 3-foot deep, above-ground pool in Ray Murray’s parents’ backyard) is something best left to MI6 operatives and/or their stuntmen. But the one thing I never outgrew was my love of Sean Connery. Every time I’d go to see him in a film, part of me would still be that eight-year old kid, wide-eyed in the middle of the theater, hanging on every word. The Man Who Would Be King, The Hunt for Red October, Finding Forrester, The Rock, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Untouchables, to name just a few. I can give you at least three quotes from every movie, as I’m sure many of you can, too. And now he’s gone. Nobody lives forever, which, while sounding like a Bond movie title, is, in fact, a sad truth. But, for as long as there is film, Sean Connery will always be alive to me. So, thanks for all those films, Mr. Connery. And thanks for changing my life.