HOSPITALITY MATTERS WITH THE HOSPITALITY KING

Hospitality matters most when you have high expectations, high hopes.

If you saved up to stay someplace nice, you don’t want the memory soiled by anything, but especially something as simple as hospitality.

What happens when hospitality royalty shine their own crowns?

Share my shock when the Hospitality King out-means the Queen of Mean.

Sweet Leona:

Helmsley was using company monies and phony invoices to charge Helmsley Hotels for the renovation of Dunnellen Hall, the couple’s sprawling 28-room Jacobean hilltop mansion on 40 acres in the ritzy back country of Greenwich, Conn. The estate overlooked Long Island Sound, and had German Shepherds tethered to the security fence.

Trumped-up charges billed to the company as business expenses included a $1 million marble dance floor installed above the swimming pool, a $45,000 silver clock, a $500,000 jade figure and a $210,000 mahogany card table.

Nothing was too personal or too small for Leona to bill it to Helmsley Hotels: a $12.99 girdle, bras, and a white lace and pink satin dress and jacket ensemble were all bogusly charged to the Park Lane Hotel as “uniforms for the staff.”

Hotel Queen rubbed people wrong and instead of letting her slide on her cheating ways, they brought the house down on her. Hospitality matters equally, Queen.

If this isn’t the playbook for the Hospitality King, it should be.

Hospitality Matters When The Queen And King Share The Love?

As two larger-than-life real-estate personalities, Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump loathed each other. Trump called her “a disgrace to the industry and a disgrace to humanity in general.”

Leona said of Trump: “I wouldn’t trust him if his tongue was notarized.”

If you saved enough to stay someplace nice you don’t want the memory soiled by bad plumbing, poor trim work, shoddy craftsmanship, or a dazed staff going through their prescribed motions.

I’ve stayed in places, okay one place, where crisply uniformed service staff patrolled and saluted with a forearm across their chest. It was hard not to do it in return after a few days.

Why not salute? Come on. It’s just a small gesture. Don’t be rude because it could be rude not to salute back.

Hospitality matters, but I stayed away from arm salutes.

Hospitality King Wanted His Crown Transferred

If I’ve never heard of Friedrich Hegel, I still like his quote.

This one too:

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

I love the idea of “the consciousness of freedom.” So much room for freedom.

The devine freedom I’ve enjoyed most is,”The Truth Will Set You Free.”

That it’s been said by too many liars doesn’t make it any less important.

After a presidential term of questionable opinions spoken from one of the biggest media platforms in the world, all we’re asking for is better truth.

While hardly anyone expects the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in a soundbite, the Truth still matters.

Different Bibles with different translators have slightly altered variations of ‘the truth will set you free’; however, they all reference the same idea. The truth is meant to represent Christianity, God or Jesus which will set you free from worldly impediments such as sin, misery, or ignorance.

The Truth From The Hospitality King Might Set Us Free If Hospitality Matters

The old shit-talking shakedown artist still has a few more deals to make.

Who else has questions they’d like answered?

I’ll start. How has a television tycoon become the icon of so many decent people?

I understand how he attracts men and women who ‘grew up different’ and created their life story where he was their real daddy, and he was a good daddy, the best daddy they ever had. Grab me, please.

When he said he loved the under-educated, was this why?

Well, no one wants to break that Daddy bond, as tenuous as it might be, so let’s take another angle.

An American flag flying upside down is a distress signal. Is anyone feeling a little distress today?

After top figures from the previous presidency said Putin was a savvy genius, there’s distress rising like stomach acid after a bad burger.

I’m feeling for all of the cult followers who may find out their cult leader wasn’t the cult leader they thought he was.

It’s got to be hard keeping a cult together with questionable leadership, or sponsorship, or blackmailmanship.

Let’s shake the Truth Tree for who’s who and let the chips fall where they may.

One Cult Didn’t Have To End This Way

If you’re old enough to remember the cult in Waco, Texas, then you remember how it ended.

Have we learned enough about cults since then?

Come over to the other side where we’re still looking for inspirations and connections and meaningful relations. Most important, know that there’s no easy answer, or one answer.

You can find those in people cheering for Russia in Ukraine, where it feels like they’ve found themselves at the crossroads of a bad cult life getting worse.

Let’s make better choices than that. Everyone mistakes; not everyone stays tied to them when they could move toward a consciousness of freedom, like Hegel says.

Simple hospitality matters.