On a flight from St. Louis to Phoenix last week, a most remarkable thing happened. A  man boarded the plane wearing…a hat. It wasn’t a cowboy hat or the ubiquitous ball cap or a doo rag.

It was a fedora.

It felt like I had been transported to an episode of the new ABC show, Pan  Am, about the golden age of air travel in the 1960s.

Back in those days, a hat was simply part of the uniform of business. It added an air of seriousness and it implied competence. But as the 1956 film,The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, revealed, sometimes that uniform was a matter of style over substance, as reflected in this exchange:

Tom Rath (Gregory Peck): I don’t know anything about public relations.

Bill Hawthorne: Who does? You’ve got a clean shirt and you bathe everyday. That’s all there is to it.

That, and a fedora with a crisp brim.

And wearing a hat came with a code of etiquette, as evidenced by the drawings from a 1950s civility manual which provide guidance on how to handle a hat.

I caught a glimpse of this in an episode of Mad Men, an AMC show about the Madison Avenue advertising world in the 1960s. Ad exec Don Draper rides an elevator with two younger colleagues, one wearing a hat, who continue a risqué conversation when a woman gets onto the elevator. Disgusted, Draper levels his gaze at the offender and says, “Take your hat off.” When he doesn’t, in an act of chivalry, Draper roughly removes it for him.

Fedoras, trilbies, derbies, homburgs, bowlers, cloth caps, busbies, gatsbies, top hats, boaters, panamas…

They also seemed to have disappeared at, well, at the drop of a hat.

Although “throwing your hat in the ring” and “passing the hat” remain in our vernacular, what caused this “de-cap-itation?”

The demise of the hat is often attributed to John F. Kennedy was said to have broken with tradition by not wearing a hat at his inauguration. Kennedy actually did wear the traditional black silk top hat during most of the 1961 inaugural proceedings (and there are lots of photos to prove it), but he was hatless in that defining shot as he took the inaugural oath. That’s the image preserved in memory.

It was actually a bareheaded Lyndon Johnson who completely broke tradition at his inauguration in 1965. Although there are plenty of images of LBJ in a cowboy hat throughout his presidency.

If all this discussion has you pondering whether you need to a hat, here’s a useful website that takes the guesswork out of the kind of hat you should wear, based on the shape of your face — although they all look a little like gangsters from the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Still on the fence? Let me leave you listening to this tune from Peter Mayer’s latest CD, Heaven Below. His tribute to the hat-wearing man called, The Hat Song, is an encouragement to bring back the hat.

She will adore ya in a Fedora

You’ll be the right guy in a Pork Pie

You’ll make her heart stir in a Homburg

So don’t ever be a hatless man.

On a visit to Germany a few years ago, I planned to spend an evening at one of East Berlin’s famous jazz clubs. As I wound my way through the streets looking for the club, I heard the sounds of a guitar in the distance. Following the music, I discovered a street musician playing on a subway platform.

He played beautifully and, on the spot, I set aside my previous plans and decided to listen to this wonderful guitarist instead. He was playing a cedar-top Godin nylon-stringed guitar, and his small amplifier was powered by a car battery. It was a cold evening, and on both hands he wore gloves with the fingers cut out so he could play. He transitioned fluidly from classical to jazz to pop as his finger-style playing filled the subway platform.

I listened to him for quite a while — along with the revolving crowd of subway riders who stopped for a song or two on their way into and out of the station.

During a lull, the guitarist and I started talking. He was Ukrainian, but spoke enough English to make conversation possible. He asked if I played and, when I said yes, he immediately handed me his guitar.

I played and sang for a while as trains came and went. People stopped and listened and threw Euros into the guitar case he had propped open to collect his wages. The memory is clear in my mind since this was the first and the last time I ever played on the street. The fact that the crowd came and went worked well for me – since I only know the words and chords to a handful of songs from memory.

After I had finished playing a song, a man from the crowd stepped forward and asked if I would give his son guitar lessons. We lived in London at the time and it was difficult to get him to understand I didn’t live in Berlin. Understandably perplexed, he asked, “Then why are you playing guitar in the Berlin subway?” It was an obvious question and, at the moment, one for which I didn’t have a simple answer.

People have been performing in the streets for centuries (read about the history of “busking“). One such performer is singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey. He spent his early years playing and singing in the Boston subway. He credits that experience with molding him into the inventive guitarist and songwriter he is today — since a subway crowd is pretty unforgiving and will drift away the moment they get bored. I’ve seen him live a couple of times, once at a house concert in our living room, and he is a captivating performer.

After several years as a professional, he returned to the Boston subway and produced the amazing live CD, 10,000 Mornings, recorded where he cut his musical teeth. From that CD, here’s his cover of the Paul Simon tune, Stranded in a Limousine. You can hear a subway train in the background.

In a post on his website back in 1997, Mulvey shared the following list of learnings from the formative years he spent playing in the subway. He called it “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from My Subway Platform.”

Choose your battles carefully. Smile often. We are only what we give away. Pay attention. Do the best you can with the hand you’re dealt. Sometimes, all you can do is not enough. Try to learn every minute. Pace yourself. Know when to rest, and when to call it a day.

He noted that, at first glance, the list sounds like nothing more than platitudes. But he added, “I have a theory about platitudes: they only SOUND fluffy. Try to actually do any one of these things consistently, and you will be amazed.”

I think that’s a pretty good list no matter what your profession.

Let me start by saying I’m a Netflix fan. Where else will you find 12, a Russian retelling of the movie, Twelve Angry Men, next to Helvetica, a documentary on the most pervasive font in the world? Not at my local Blockbuster, that’s for sure.

My love affair with movies goes back to my childhood. When I was nine, my parents took me to see My Side of the Mountain and ever since I have kept my eyes open for a tree big enough to hollow out and live in. Later, my uncle took my sister and me to the Killarney Drive-In to see Paper Moon, Tatum O’Neal’s Oscar-winning debut. And then in a spectacularly daft move, I took my straight-laced parents to see Bill Murray’s movie, Stripes, thinking my dad would like it since he had been in the Army.

For me, Netflix has been too good to be true. It brought me a 160-minute movie about a French monastery without any dialogue, Into Great Silence, and a film in Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, called Travellers and Magicians. I’ve enjoyed a Columbian movie called The Wind Journeys, a Faustian tale about an accordion-playing troubadour, and I’ve watched so many Scandinavian movies on Netflix, I now have a favorite Danish actor (Mads Mikkelsen). The world’s best cinema is just a mouse click away.

So when this innovative company with a passionate following raised prices and separated DVD and streaming services into two separate payment plans, the ensuing outrage was predictable.

And just yesterday, the Netflix CEO added insult to injury when he announced in a faux-folksy blog post that he is splitting the DVD-by-mail service and streaming video businesses completely. That means two bills, two separate movie queues. Netflix will remain the name of the streaming business, and they have chosen the unfortunate name of Qwikster for the DVD service.

It’s not just the 60 percent increase in prices that has customers riled up.

If the streaming options were more plentiful, this wouldn’t be getting the same reaction. Many users relied on the mix of DVDs and streaming since many movies weren’t available for instant viewing. And that gap will get worse since Starz Entertainment declined to renew its streaming agreement with Netflix last month, which means the company would lose online access to movies from Sony and Disney.

A clever analogy showed up in a Netflix story on the National Public Radio website this morning:

It’s like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that customers will notice the 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe.

How do smart companies make such dumb moves? How does Netflix go from being Cinema Paradiso to Little Shop of Horrors?

Back in 2002, Scott Bedbury cast a wide net when he described the elements that make up a company’s brand in his book A New Brand World:

A brand is the sum of the good, the bad the ugly, and the off-strategy. It is defined by your best product as well as your worst product. It is defined by the accomplishments of your best employee – the shining star in your company who can do no wrong – as well as by the mishaps of the worst hire you ever made. It is also defined by your receptionist, and the music your customers are subjected to when placed on hold. For every grand and finely worded public statement by the CEO, the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments overheard in the hallway.

Since social media didn’t exist as we know it when Bedbury wrote this book, you can easily replace the last phrase with “the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments on Twitter and Facebook.” In today’s environment, when you have zealous advocates for your product, changes you make that loosen that bond can reverberate in social media space with a vengeance.

The fine folks at Netflix should have read Bedbury’s book. His credentials are pretty impressive. He was senior vice president of marketing at Starbucks from 1995 to 1998. Prior to that he was head of advertising for Nike, where he launched the “Bo Knows” and “Just Do It” campaigns.

The outcry of disenchanted Netflix customers is vitriolic, but analysts are pooh-poohing the response as not indicative of the majority of users. But the drop in stock price from a high of around $300 per share this summer to $143 today begs to differ. And while its subscriber forecast is for 24 million customers — that’s down 1 million customers from just a few weeks ago.

At this rate, their coming attraction just may be The Last Picture Show.

In a moving ceremony last week, firefighters at the nuclear plant where I work were honored in a badge pinning ceremony. The haunting drone of a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace opened the ceremony as everyone in the room rose.

It was a fitting reminder of the event we commemorate today that claimed the lives of 343 firefighters at the World Trade Center a decade ago.

In the wake of that loss of life, the Federal Emergency Management Agency commissioned a Firefighter Fatality Retrospective Study. The study noted that every year approximately 100 firefighters are killed while on duty and tens of thousands are injured.

The preface to that report noted that, “The World Trade Center disaster represents the largest loss of firefighters in a single incident in the United States since 1947, when 27 firefighters perished in fires and explosions aboard two Texas City ships.”

One of the speakers at the badge pinning ceremony said firefighters are a different breed   — that in a time of crisis they run in when everyone else is running out. As I ate dinner with those firefighters, I realized they are people like you and me, except they’re not. They go to work every day with the full knowledge of the extraordinary things they may be called upon to do. Put simply, their job — day in and day out — is to be heroes.

In a tribute last week to the emergency workers who died on 9/11, Deputy U.S. Fire Administrator Glenn Gaines said:

To those who provide for the public’s safety, there is sweetness to life that the protected shall never know. It is the honor and privilege of wearing the badge and being depended upon to save a life that only the bravest enjoy. They have one very simple job description: they’re expected to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right stuff.

Firefighters provide a powerful example to act in the face of adversity. While you and I may not be called upon to rush into burning buildings, each of us can do more than we often realize. There are literally thousands of poignant stories about the power of a simple gesture that made a difference to someone shattered by 9/11.

David Wilcox, a singer-songwriter from North Carolina, wrote a song several years ago called Show the Way. It was written before 9/11, but it could just as easily have been written about 9/11.

He once described the song as a plea to not “give up on being the change, like a candle in the dark, just because the world needs so much light. But this song takes it farther and says: even our despair is cause for hope. There is a sacred voltage that burns in our hearts, in our awareness of all that needs to change.”

On this anniversary of 9/11, I offer my version of Show the Way. In response, I welcome your remembrances of where you were and how you felt on that day — and what insight you have gained over the years about the event that changed us all.