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Blackened, Blue, Bewildered

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Finally, I can sit at my keyboard with minimal pain from surgery.  Also, my head is clearer than when I wrote my last entry.

This is a two subject piece but they are related as I’ve come out of surgery pretty beaten up, dark, angry purple bruises on both legs and staples holding the pacemaker “wound” together on my chest, with limited range of my right arm, essentially a metaphor for how I feel about the election.

We all now know that if it were not for the arcane Electoral College method of electing the president, Clinton was the clear winner.  So Trump was right in saying beforehand (haven’t heard it after the election from him, wonder why?) that the system is rigged.  Can you imagine if the results were exactly opposite, Trump winning the popular but losing the EC?  Instead of the relatively peaceful protests we’ve seen spontaneously erupting around the country, we’d have Trump’s heavily armed militia in the streets.  Revolution and bloodshed.  So, in a way, for the safety of our citizens at least short term, this outcome has that one benefit.

Long term, it’s a different deal.  There are so many issues where an unrestrained Trump presidency can wreck the future of this country and the world, that it would be senseless to detail them all here. 

First, though, as much as I thought Trump’s candidacy was a joke during the initial months of the primaries, I took it quite seriously later, my fear growing in direct relation to his Teflon ability to say anything and, what used to matter, our 4th estate -- the Press -- having little effect to act as a foil.  If I was in a prolonged coma and came out of it to hear a presidential candidate talk about shooting someone on 5thAve. with no consequences, grabbing women by their pussies, etc., I would have thought the Press would have been able to eviscerate that candidate long ago.

But cyber bullying was the factor in this campaign which made it unique.  Facebook and Twitter had more to do with the outcome of this election than all the newspapers and TV news media combined. Trump’s attention span is ideally suited to 140 character tweets and his reality TV personality gave him entrée to TV coverage whenever he wanted it, gratis.  And in spite of his racist overtone, he did carry a persuasive populist message, the forgotten plight of the white middle class male.  Whether he can make good on promises to that minority group is highly unlikely, especially with his tax cut proposals which will benefit his own economic class most.  (I don’t believe in trickle down prosperity. The “wealth effect” is to make the wealthy wealthier.)

So based mostly on anecdotal evidence, I thought Trump had a better chance than the polls reflected.  I grew up only a couple of miles from his neighborhood in Queens, NY and we’re almost the same age.  Although more than 50 years have passed since I’ve lived there, if I close my eyes when Trump speaks I hear street talk I’m familiar with.  Between his celebrity status and his strong appeal to the middle class, people were willing to overlook the big picture and especially loved the way he took down the ruling oligarchy (including the now vestigial Press and traditional mass media).  And given the unpredictability of what people do in the privacy of the voting booth (perhaps ashamed to be backing Trump publicly, but will pull the lever for him privately), I went into surgery thinking that this election was a tossup, especially with the FBI making unprecedented statements to Congress and Wiki Leak’s one sided email revelations, so ripe for Trump’s conspiracy campaign (imagine if the RNC’s emails were similarly exposed). 

Thus, nothing about election night truly surprised me.  In fact I called the outcome at 9.20 PM, turned off the TV and went to bed with the residual effects of anesthesia still in my system.  I woke up in pain throughout the night but refused to look at the TV or phone to confirm “my call.”  The next morning my heart sank, in spite of being prepared for the outcome.

So here’s the existential dilemma: how does one, as a citizen of a country he/she loves, support its new leader, while having complete disdain for that leader, his policies, his narcissistic disorders, and fearing the damage he and his administration might do?

While I could go into a long litany of all the specific issues, I’m trying to look at this from 50,000 feet so they don’t overwhelm. To me, I see a world undergoing turbulent change, hastened by a technology revolution.   The industry I came from – publishing --is just one example of the incredible forces of creative destruction that technology has fostered.  More books are being published (including e-books) using far less labor than in the past.  The majority of book titles are now printed on demand.  Warehouses are not needed for those and the process is completely automated.  The whole landscape has changed.  Robots now make the majority of heavy industry products.  This trend is only accelerating.  Capital finds the most efficient venues for its deployment.

Anyone who believes that Trump can simply bring back manufacturing jobs like we once had is self-deluded, abetted by the master manipulator himself, Donald Trump, who told the victims of disintermediation what they wanted to hear…….that things would return to the way they were. 

I do believe there is a path to expanding jobs and prosperity for the forgotten middle class, but it means abandoning the past and embracing the future.  America’s export is intellectual capital and technology.  Our educational system needs to reflect those realities and build our industries with those as a foundation.  Let the manufacturing of goods that require handwork reside in low cost labor countries, such as those which made Trump’s hats.

Going further up from a 50,000 foot overview you see a planet whose delicate atmosphere which protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet light and governs the balance of glaciers, oceans, and climate – all under siege.  Can we afford to aid climate denial forces in our society, simply because it is the easy, short term answer to some of our economic ills?  Here again is both a threat and an opportunity, an opportunity to develop the alternative energy and mass transportation industries, a win-win situation, jobs and a healthier environment for future generations.  America has to lead other countries in this effort. 

We seem to be at a Malthusian tipping point in the history of the world.  Population is growing exponentially but while Malthus was concerned about the food supply keeping pace, little could he foresee the other factor, now a bigger part of the equation of whether humanity can survive changes to the environment itself because of our addiction to fossil fuels.  

So these are just some of the big picture things I’m concerned about.  I want to support my President but I fear that progressives will have to fight tooth and nail, hoping the country can hang on for four years.

If I’m around then, it will because of incredible medical technology, the kind that allowed me to survive my fourth pacemaker implantation with the removal of existing leads being the most dangerous part of the operation.  New leads then had to be implanted, these being MRI compliant which my old leads were not.  As I age, an MRI is inevitable.  First they had to connect me to a temporary pacemaker as I am 100% dependent on the ventricle pacing by threading leads through each of my legs and then to a temporary pacemaker during the operation. Then they opened my chest to remove the existing pacemaker and begin the long arduous task of removing the existing leads, an operation of great delicacy to not injure the heart.  Unfortunately, a small part of the lead in the atrium broke off and the surgeon felt it was just too dangerous to go after that last piece and thus I lost the MRI compliant feature.  Overall the operation went well and now I’m trying to rest and rehabilitate,

I’m grateful to family and friends who expressed so much care and particularly to my wife, Ann, who stayed with me in the hospital room, sleeping on an uncomfortable cot, and watched over things for me, shaving my chest, stomach and legs and helping me take the first of two antiseptic showers before the operation.   I can’t say enough positive things about the nurses at the University of Miami Hospital.  To me they are as important as the surgeon, maybe more so.

Thus, I am slowly getting back to form, but to a political landscape that has been shaped by fear and intolerance.  I have low expectations that Mr. Trump can suddenly function as the leader we all need to help us coalesce as a nation.  His narcissistic personality must be fed and that is going to be a constant obstruction to doing the right thing, such as selecting Cabinet members who are NOT just yes people or those connected to his business interests or family.  Can one imagine Sarah Palin, a climate change denier as Secretary of the Interior as rumored?  He’s already appointed a denier, Myron Ebell, as the head of the EPA transition team.   

My good friend, Artie, reminded me of H.L. Mencken’s prophetic quote from nearly 100 years ago:  “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete moron.  Perhaps that time has come.

Nonetheless I’m desperately trying to end this with something positive:  Trump is now going to become OUR President and I for one will try to give his administration a chance to do some of the right things for the nation as a whole.

After I wrote the preceding though, I read David Remnick’s incredible article from the November 9 issue of The New Yorker, “An American Tragedy,” perhaps the most important of the many I’ve read.  Highly commended.  



William Trevor, a Writer for the Ages

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William Trevor has died at the age of 88. I came to William Trevor’s masterful short stories late in life as American fiction has been my literary bailiwick.  Trevor was an Irishman who lived mostly in England as an adult.  My loss not having followed him all that time, but I made up for it reading his two massive collections of short stories. I was astounded by his genius.  In his passing, I feel as if a close friend has died, intimately knowing him by his love of, and his sadness for, his characters.  Nonetheless, he was but an observer… By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

The Guardian obituary says it all about his life and fiction, justifiably declaring he was “one of the greatest short story writers of the last century.”  He also wrote 20 novels, an incredible output for a writer who mostly flew under the literary world’s radar screen, which suited him just fine. As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

While in my entries on Trevor I mentioned a few of his short stories, to describe them in detail is to retell his tales, so I tried to simply sum them up as follows:

“Here are widows and widowers, miscreants and innocents, the travails of the elderly juxtaposed to the innocence of youth, the dilemmas of the middle aged and the divorced, so often lonely people trying to connect with someone who is inappropriate, and people from all economic stations of life. His characters are victims of their own actions, sometimes ‘imagining’ (the number of times Trevor says, ‘he [or] she imagined’ is countless) different outcomes and different realities.  There is a Pinteresque quality to many of the stories, showing humanity, some humor, and a hint of the absurd.

We identify with his characters, perhaps their taking the wrong fork in the road as we might be prone to do, and the consequences of their actions.  He spotlights that inherent loneliness we sometimes feel at social gatherings, or in our everyday relationships.  The mistakes of our lives add up but so do our little victories, our justifications of our actions making things seem alright.” 

With the passing of Trevor, along with Updike and Cheever, our best short story writers have been silenced, but their literature lives.

A Sport and a Pastime; A James Salter Masterpiece

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Salter chisels precise sentences, ones Hemingway himself would envy.  And there are flashes of Fitzgerald as well, colorful and lyrical.  It’s long been said that Salter is a writer’s writer and in A Sport and a Pastime (“Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime…” from The Koran) he spins the tale of three people, one the narrator, and then the story of the 24 year old Philip Dean and his young lover, an 18 year old French shop girl, Anne-Marie.  We follow their pleasures of eating, abandoned sex, motoring about the French countryside, from hotel to hotel and restaurant to restaurant, all related through the imagination and recollection of our voyeur narrator.  Sexually, every major position from the Kama Sutra is explicitly explored and yet the novel is not pornographic, Salter weaving eroticism into his panoply of French provincial images and the strange relationship of the narrator to the two main characters.

The narrator warns the reader that his tale is as much fabricated as it is real.  What is real and imagined is left to the reader.  We know little about the unnamed narrator who is staying at his friends’ country home in Autun, France (the Wheatlands, who live in Paris) as he has done many times before.  It is here that he befriends Dean.  He is fond of the French countryside and he imagines a love interest in a woman there, Claude, who he only glimpses from afar.  He fantasizes about her and here is the genius of Salter who skillfully foreshadows the narrator’s interest in Dean and Anne-Marie.  Salter’s writing is exquisite:

I have discarded my identity. I am still at large, free of my old self until the first encounters, and now I imagine, very clearly, meeting Claude Picquet. For a moment I have the sure premonition I am about to, that I am really going to see her at the next corner and, made confident by the cognacs, begin quite naturally to talk. We walk along together. I watch her closely as she speaks. I can tell she is interested in me, I am circling her like a shark. Suddenly I realize: it will be her. Yes, I'm sure of it. I'm going to meet her. Of course, I'm a little drunk, a little reckless, and in an amiable condition that lets me see myself destined as her lover, cutting into her life with perfect ease. I've noticed you passing in the street many times, I tell her. Yes? She pretends that surprises her. Do you know the Wheatlands, I ask. The Wheatlands? Monsieur and Madame Wheatland, I say. Ah, oui. Well, I tell her, I'm staying in their house. What comes next? I don't know-it will be easy once I am actually talking to her. I want her to come and see it, of course. I want to hear the door close behind her. She stands over by the window. She's not afraid to turn her back to me, to let me move close. I am going to just touch her lightly on the arm … Claude … She looks at me and smiles.

Ultimately, his inner life becomes consumed by his thoughts and observations of Dean and Anne-Marie, Salter making the point that memory is not a photograph but a construct:

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can't bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

The narrator is awed by Dean, knowing he can never experience his ease in matters of love and profligacy:

I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant. And above all, I cannot confront him. I cannot even imagine such a thing. The reason is simple: I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love. That is the source of his power.

This is eerily similar in its conceit to Salter’s last novel, All that Is. Its main character, Bowman, tries to imagine the sexual life of a person he once admired, Kimmel, and goes on to try to recreate that life for himself. 

Dean subsists on money from his father.  He is a Yale drop out.  He knows that it will end but meanwhile this intense relationship with Ann-Marie blocks out all light about choices and planning for the future.  Dean is a blind man to it all.  Is it no wonder our narrator ruminates:

Now, at twenty-four, he has come to the time of choice. I know quite well how all that is. And then, I read his letters. His father writes to him in the most beautiful, educated hand, the born hand of a copyist. Admonitions to confront life, to think a little more seriously about this or that. I could have laughed. Words that meant nothing to him. He has already set out on a dazzling voyage which is more like an illness, becoming ever more distant, more legendary. His life will be filled with those daring impulses which cause him to disappear and next be heard of in Dublin, in Veracruz… I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.

After a while, the second phase begins: the time of few choices. Uncertainties, strange fears of the past. Finally, of course, comes the third phase, the closing, and one must begin shutting out the world as if by panels because the strength to consider everything in all its shattering diversity is gone and the shape of life-but he will be in a poet's grave by then-finally appears, like a drop about to fall.

Dean doesn't quite understand this yet. It doesn't mean anything in particular to him. He is, after all, not discontented. Her breasts are hard. Her cunt is sopping. He fucks her gracefully, impelled by pure joy. He arches up to see her and to look at his prick plunging in, his balls tight beneath it. Mythology has accepted him, images he cannot really believe in, images brief as dreams. The sweat rolls down his arms. He tumbles into the damp leaves of love, he rises clean as air. There is nothing about her he does not adore. When they are finished, she lies quiet and limp, exhausted by it all. She has become entirely his, and they lie like drunkards, their bare limbs crossed. In the cold distance the bells begin, filling the darkness, clear as psalms.

We all know how this must end, much like Dean’s rare sports car, a Delage, one he abandons, which immediately atrophies with Dean’s departure.  I think of Dean as a Gatsby and the narrator as his Nick Carraway.  Perhaps this is intended all along by Salter, his hat tip to Fitzgerald…

We are all at his mercy. We are subject to his friendship, his love. It is the principles of his world to which we respond, which we seek to find in ourselves. It is his power which I cannot even identify, which is flickering, sometimes present and sometimes not – without it he is empty, a body without breath, as ordinary as my own reflection in the mirror – it is this power which guarantees his existence, even afterwards, even when he is gone.

Although Salter wrote six novels as well as a number of screenplays, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All that Is are probably his finest.  All that Is was published only two years before his death at the age of 90.His first novel, which I have on my shelf to read is considered a masterpiece of war-time aviation fiction, The Hunters published in 1956 (Salter was a West Point graduate and a jet pilot during the Korean conflict, a remarkable background for a writer of his stature).  That is a span of 57 years during which he wrote his few novels.  His output was not great, but his writing is.

TRU – A Poignant “Holiday Play” at Dramaworks

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While he dishes the dirt with the audience, ‘Tru’ as Truman Capote was nicknamed as a youth, is inherently alone on stage.  Alone.  That’s the essential message from Jay Presson Allen's play, which takes place during one holiday season (circa 1975), a time when his expectation of joy is displaced by a sense of estrangement from many of his closest friends.  The play examines the place of the artist in society, drawn from the very words and works of Truman Capote.  Dramaworks’ lapidary craftsmanship and Ron Donohoe’s bravura performance make this a compelling production.

Capote is a flamboyant and proud homosexual, a person of acerbic wit with that lisp and unmistakable southern drawl, and that is part of the charm of this play.  But Tru is also an author’s author, as a sensitive boy drawn to writing, later launching a career predominately as a writer of short stories.  However, his two best remembered works are his novella of a writer coming of age in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (unlike the focus of the movie), and In Cold Blood, where he skillfully demonstrated his striking ability as a non-fiction journalist, written with the eye of a novelist. 

Rob Donohoe’s outstanding performance as an openly gay man is not an impersonation but a tribute.  Donohoe is a Dramaworks veteran, having played a wide range of parts.  Before Dramaworks’ Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes finalized arrangements for producing Tru this season, he wanted a commitment from Donohoe to play the part.  That was a year ago and Donohoe has since immersed himself in Capote’s work and life story, going to a voice coach to capture the high, nasal, southern accent of Capote and then modulating it for the stage. 


Capote’s angst becomes palpable as we first see him unraveling the day before Christmas Eve.  Thanks to a recent publication in Esquire of a part of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, in which he unflinchingly reveals unflattering portraits of his “friends”, the super wealthy, idle rich, he has now been summarily abandoned by them, and most depressingly by his high society women friends with whom he shares a gossipy codependence.  This is a very harsh blow.  But here Tru responds to his critics, ”Answered Prayers is the book I’ve been in training for my whole life…...I’ve written a lot of books, but basically I’ve always had this one book to justify..…everything.  What’s it about?  Answered Prayers is about them.  The Super Rich.  As seen through the eyes of an outsider who for various reasons has privileged access.  Hehehe.  It’s about sexual license and ethical squalor.”

The artist’s relationship to the wealthy is frequently a symbiotic one, the artist needing financial support while the uber rich need something to fill their relatively empty lives.  Tru feels this deeply, saying, “Money, money, money!  They’re very nervous with you if you think you don’t have any.  That’s why they hang together so desperately.  It’s not that they like each other…they don’t.  A yacht and five houses are what they have in common.  And they get very bored with each other.  So when they can, they try to take in amusing artists.” 

So it is with some bewilderment that Tru is facing the holidays, wondering what in the world did they think he was doing with them, other than entertaining them; after all he is a writer and to him Answered Prayers is the culmination of his life’s work.  And as we learn, he has known EVEYONE in society.  If they’ve ever been to Studio 54 they were under his scrutiny.  He proudly states:  “I am an artist.  Artists belong to no class.  And people like that who cozy up to artists do so at their own risk.” Nonetheless, this work becomes a path to self destruction, lubricated by alcohol and pills.
 
Conflicting Christmas emotions set the tone for the entire production.  On the one hand he has fond Christmas memories, particularly of “Sook” who was his mother’s oldest sister, a person some people considered retarded, and thus people thought her “funny.” “Sookie and I were like forgotten people.  Sook by her brothers and sisters and me by my parents.”  These two misfits were close, particularly around the holidays, when they made fruit cakes together.  His book Christmas Memory provides some of the narrative about their distinctive relationship.  Nonetheless, Capote confesses -- and this is the essential sadness of this “Christmas play” -- “I’m very ambivalent about Christmas.  I want it to be magic – warm and lavish with all your friends like a family.  Which sets up terrible anxiety because I don’t have a very good history with Christmases.  And that’s true with alcoholics, you know.”

Yet, in spite of the bravado, the cutting wit, and drunken cynicism, there is vulnerability about Rob Donohoe’s performance, one we all have about our lives, whether we are “liked,” and essentially the meaning of our existence, and the choices we have made, which brings Capote to this moment in time.  For much of Capote’s life he was a pop culture figure, ”famous for being famous,” but Rob Donohoe delves into that other place where the artist and the true human being reside.  Although there is a sense of sadness and resignation it is not all gloom and doom as the play provides for plenty of laughs, such as when Tru receives “a veritable horse trough of unspeakable poinsettias..…[which] are the Bob Goulet of Botany.”

One person plays are not everyone’s cup of tea, yet in many ways they are harder to produce than conventional plays and therefore more challenging to the small team of actor, director, and technical staff.  Truis skillfully directed by Lynnette Barkley, her third directorial stint at Dramaworks, and working closely with Paul Black, the scenic and lighting designer, they created other “characters” using the set --the bar, the Christmas tree, and the piano, points which relate to Capote’s life and help create movement and modulate the mood as Tru moves from his highs to lows. 

The set is gloriously breathtaking, capturing a sense of Capote’s UN Plaza apartment, with its books, framed black and white photos on the wall of Capote and friends, ubiquitous parquet floors and view of NYC.  You are a visitor in Capote’s home and get to know the man and all the different layers of his life through his interaction with his environment.  This is the magic of a one person play: you are in a one to one relationship with the character.  This person is talking to you, even breaking the fourth wall at times, which can’t help but create a special sense of intimacy.

Costume design is by Brian O'Keefe, and although only one person is on stage, he needed clothes that would enable him to perform the part believably, not to mention making him look shorter and heavier than Donohoe is himself.  Sound design by Brad Pawlak captures voice overs from the answering machine, from Tru’s memory, and an interesting musical selection Allen’s play requires, concluding with the haunting lyrics of “Little Drummer Boy”.

I played my drum for Him pa rum pum pum pum.
I played my best for Him Pa rum pum pum pum
Then He smiled at me pa rum pum pum pum;
Me and my drum.

Tru is a little gem of a theatre piece.
 

American Ingenuity and Pragmatism – The Wright Brothers

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For a change of pace from the constant drum beat of politics by Twitter and the soul-searching fiction I usually read, I needed a non-fiction reminder of what made this country so unique and special.  Toward that end, I turned to David McCullough and his biography, The Wright Brothers.  McCullough has the ability to present history as a living entity, a time machine into the past.  Once you read something by him, you feel connected to that era.  I read his award-winning 1776 and John Adams before I started writing this blog and later returned to his The Great Bridge which he wrote early in his career.  It is the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and as Brooklyn is near and dear to my heart, I marveled at his tale.

He is a natural born writer and honed his craft as an English major at Yale University.  He is not an historian by education, but historical literature is nothing more than great story telling using facts where possible and filling in the blanks.  I’ve always found that the line between fiction and non-fiction is very malleable.  Being a good writer brings history to life.

In The Wright Brothers he captures the persona of two distinctly American men, Wilbur and Orville Wright, problem solvers and entrepreneurs who after establishing a successful bicycle manufacturing business in Dayton, Ohio around the turn of the century became fascinated by flight, studying birds for their beginning education in aerodynamics.  Against the then current belief that human flight (other than by balloon) is impossible, and without funding, they methodically and pragmatically tinkered with glider design, picking the Outer Banks -- Kitty Hawk, NC -- as their testing site, not exactly around the corner from Toledo, Ohio, because of the unrelenting winds there.  It was completely desolated during those times and at first they lived in tents, graduating to a little shop they set up.  Not many people followed them, thinking they were just eccentric.

Having access to the extensive Wright Family papers allowed McCullough to tap into primary source documentation, quoting sometimes from these to tell the story.  Imagine Wilbur setting up camp, awaiting the arrival of Orville, writing a letter to his father which so clearly sets out the methodical thinking behind their experiments with flight:

I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium. I have plans which I hope to find much in advance of the methods tried by previous experimenters. When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.

This was the genius behind the Wright Brothers experiments, start with the obvious, recognizing that like a bicycle, lack of control will defeat this mode of transportation.  Well funded experiments such as those conducted by Samuel Langley, with a machine called “The Great Aerodrome” which had the backing of $50,000 in public money from the U.S. War Department and another $20,000 in private backing, including an investment by Alexander Graham Bell, was doomed to crash.  Contrast that to the total of $1,000 the Wright Brothers invested in their successful experiment and you have yet another example of private pragmatism triumphing over public profligacy.

Much of their work was done almost secretly, which is the way Wilbur and Orville wanted it, eschewing publicity and crowds until, well, their experiments resulted in a real flying machine.  In fact they had to take it to Europe to make their mark publicly.  That is an interesting story onto itself, particularly given the fact that the European chapter in their lives involved not only them, but their sister Katherine as well.  She became increasingly involved with their work after Orville was seriously hurt (but fully recuperated with her help) after their one serious accident.  They knew the work was dangerous and for that reason they had a cardinal rule never to fly together (their next generation of the “Wright Flyer” was outfitted for two people), a practice they dutifully followed until later in Wilbur’s life when flying was more commonplace.

While inspiration and perspiration were in large part the necessary ingredients in their ultimate success, so was fortuity.  The unsung hero which McCullough cites in his story is Charlie Parker, an itinerant mechanic who the brothers occasionally used for making parts for their bicycles, who was finally hired full time.  As he later recalled:  They offered me $18 a week…..that was pretty good money…Besides, I liked the Wrights….So far as I can figure out, Will and Orv hired me to worry about the bicycle business so they could concentrate on their flying studies and experiments…And I must have satisfied them for they didn’t hire anyone else for eight years.

Indeed, Parker ran the business while the brothers were working on their experiments, but that was just a small part of Parker’s contribution to solving the riddle of powered flights.  When the brothers finally felt they licked the problem of controlled glider flight, they were ready to add an engine for powered flight.  Accordingly, they asked various automobile manufactures to submit specifications for a light engine with sufficient power but received only one reply and that engine was too heavy.  They themselves had insufficient knowledge to build such an engine but happenstance there was Charlie Parker, a brilliant mechanic.  As he later recalled and recounted by McCullough:  While the boys were handy with tools, they had never done much machine-work and anyway they were busy on the air frame.  It was up to me….We didn’t make any drawings.  One of us would sketch out the part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper and I’d spike the sketch over my bench.

Does it get any more seat of the pants than that?  He later finished a four cylinder engine, “with a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke.  It was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh no more than 200 pounds, to carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying machine and an operator.  As it turned out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum Company of America based in Pittsburgh.  Other materials came from Dayton manufacturers and suppliers, but the work of boring out the cast iron for the independent cylinders and making the cast iron piston rings was all done by one man with a drooping walrus mustache working in the back room at the bicycle shop.” 
 
The brothers led a monastic life, totally dedicated to their work.  They were bachelors and except for strict observance of the Sunday Sabbath, it was work 24 x 7.  All that sacrifice and McCullough movingly recounts the moment in time when they alternatively flew the first four successful times, the last by Wilbur, 852 feet in 59 seconds.  “It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton (counting Orville's return home to see about stronger propeller shafts), a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.”

After that their life changed, becoming celebrities of sorts, but still focusing on their work for the next several years, better known in Europe than here in many ways as they went to France to demonstrate their work to the government who had more interest at the time than their own.  Wilbur was the first to go abroad.  His time there was unlike any he’d known back in Dayton, beginning with his first transatlantic voyage on the Cunard Line’s Campania which was advertised as “a flying palace of the ocean,” a phrase which of course appealed to Wilbur.  We made 466 miles the first day he wrote back home and he took a tour of the engine room, amazed at those engines delivering 28,000 horsepower vs. the 25 of the new engine for the Flyer III he was about to demonstrate across Europe. He took copious notes during the crossing and walked its decks to the tune of 5 to 10 miles a day. Wilbur was a person of contemplation and action.

One would think this methodical, technical man might not appreciate all that Paris could offer but he became a regular visitor to the Louvre and spent countless hours among its masterpieces.  Ultimately Orville and Katherine joined him and they became the toast of France, Wilbur at first.  “As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, it was not just his feats in the air that aroused such interest but his strong ‘individuality.’ He was seen as a personification of ‘the Plymouth Rock spirit,’ to which French students of the United States, from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, had attributed ‘the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterize American efforts in every department of activity.’”

I think that observation is the essence of McCullough’s biography about the two brothers, their pragmatic approach to problem solving and faith in doing what no one thought possible.  They were finally recognized back home at the White House, President Taft himself presenting medals and acknowledging the tardiness of their recognition at home and the accomplishment which given their lack of support is uniquely American, diligence prevailing above all:

I esteem it a great honor and an opportunity to present these medals to you as an evidence of what you have done. I am so glad-perhaps at a delayed hour-to show that in America it is not true that "a prophet is not without honor save in his own country." It is especially gratifying thus to note a great step in human discovery by paying honor to men who bear it so modestly. You made this discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctly American-by keeping your noses right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.

This recognition was finally followed by the largest celebration ever staged in their home town of Dayton, Ohio.  It is mind boggling to think that the invention of flight was only little more than 100 years ago.  It demonstrates the rapidity of change today.

Reading this masterful biography was the perfect antidote to a disheartening election and now post election season, with its invective rhetoric, a display of American unexceptionalism and gullibility.   One can only hope this too shall pass and we will revert to the mean that made this nation so special, as typified by the Wright Brothers and so brilliantly portrayed by David McCullough. 

While I was writing this, the report came in that the Wright brothers’ fellow Ohioan, John Glenn, died at the age of 95, the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven.  I remember watching Glenn’s launch on a small B&W TV with my college classmates in our dormitory.  We were in awe of his bravery and felt particularly proud to be an American on that day in 1962.  He and his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts were immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. The Wright brothers had the right stuff too and Glenn had already flown as a WW II combat pilot while Orville was still alive.  The Wright Brothers and John Glenn:  Ohioans, pioneers, pilots, uniquely American. 

 I was not able to attend the ticket tape parade for Glenn and the Mercury 7 astronauts as I was in class on that March day in 1962.  But Tom Wolfe captured its mood; the Wright Brothers were certainly there in spirit: “They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right!  The way it should be!  The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening!  Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing!  Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!”

He Was Right!

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Before the election we heard Donald Trump say it over and over again, “Folks, the election is rigged.”  His victory tour has been silent on the subject until recently when the CIA “in a secret assessment” (I wonder how long they had been hanging on to that) said that Russia was involved in the WikiLeaks email releases of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), possibly to swing the election results in his favor.  While the Trump campaign embraced the FBI’s resumption of reviewing Clinton’s emails only eight days before the election (clearing her once again only two days before), his Tweet response to the CIA’s assertion was to discredit the Agency saying “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

Trump’s pre-election rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Oct. 17 pretty much summarizes his stump speech about “a rigged election,” repeated like an Anvil Chorus in other speeches:  “Remember, we’re competing in a rigged election. This is a rigged election folks, OK? The media is an extension of the Clinton campaign as WikiLeaks has proven.  And they don’t talk about WikiLeaks, they just keep talking about Trump, Trump, Trump. They want to put nice, sexy headlines up even though nothing has happened, nothing took place, even though it’s a total fabrication. They even want to try rigging the election at the voting booths, and believe me there’s a lot going on.  Do you ever hear these people?  They say ‘there’s nothing going on.’ People who have died 10 years ago are still voting.  Illegal immigrants are voting. I mean, where are the street smarts of some of these politicians?”  Talk about “fabrications.”

In spite of Trump’s claim that he won in a “landslide” just that little bit of tailwind of the FBI’s bringing up the Clinton email affair again right before the election, and WikiLeaks providing the DNC email may have provided enough of a boost for Trump to marginally win these three swing states: WI, MI, and PA.  I’ve done some number crunching on this. Clinton’s national victory margin of 2.6 million votes or nearly 2% more than Trump became a hundred thousand total vote deficit in those three states, less than a percent difference.  Had those states gone to Clinton, she would have won the electoral vote and she would be President.  So much for Trump’s “landslide” victory but the one truth he told was the election was rigged, although not the way he asserted, thanks to Russia, WikiLeaks, and the FBI.

Steel, coal, and low-skilled manufacturing are not coming back in those rust belt states like the 1950’s.  He knows it.  He now reneges on his words unabashedly, even admitting they were only said to get himself elected, such as during his “victory tour” in Grand Rapids when the crowd was jeering “lock her up” “he said: No, it’s ok. Forget it. That plays great before the election. Now, we don’t care, right?”

Or “Buy America, Hire America” just another get-elected slogan, his businesses routinely buying overseas and hiring less expensive foreign labor. As our local December 8 Palm Beach Post headline spelled out “Trump again hires non-U.S. club staff.”  His Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach routinely uses the federal government’s H-2B visa program to hire foreign workers for the season instead of domestic ones.  Nothing makes a difference in his celebrity revered, post-truth world.

A little more than a year ago I wroteIt Can’t Happen Here? [Emphasis on the question mark] One would think our democracy is immune to demagoguery because our forefathers created a governmental structure of checks and balances.  Alexander Hamilton even adopted the safeguard of the Electoral College, a buffer of sorts, to ensure our Presidents are “pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”  One could argue that if there was ever a time when the Electors should reconsider an election, this is the one.  But that isn’t going to happen with Trump and his 17,000,000 Twitter followers, possibly locked and loaded.  Electors who vote their conscience do so at their own personal peril.

That is my fear over the next four years, the potential to circumvent those checks and balances, including the traditional press, via social networks and fake news.  As he said on 60 Minutes, “I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc,…[They] are great form[s] of communication.”  He knows it and we better watch out.

Me and My Girl

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We are fortunate to have two of the best theatre companies in our immediate area, Dramaworks 20 minutes to our south and The Maltz Jupiter Theatre 20 minutes to our north.  The former is a serious regional theatre specializing in classic plays,”theatre to think about” as it rightfully bills itself.  The Maltz on the other hand specializes in musical theatre (and not traveling tours), although they will occasionally put on a dramatic play. 

Many of the musicals produced at the Maltz are classic ones, such as Man of La Mancha, perhaps the best production of that show we’ve ever seen.  Then there are the others, bordering on the silly side, such as Me and My Girl.  But even then you can count on The Maltz to deliver a high energy professional production, so you forgive the selection and just sit back and enjoy the nonsensical.  Having seen Me and My Girl Friday night, a very British musical first performed in the West End in 1937, you can’t help but be impressed by the production in spite of the very thin plot. 

Bill, a cockney Londoner learns that he is an heir to the Earl of Hareford.  However, he will not receive his inheritance until he becomes a little more “civilized” and therefore gets the approval of the Dutchess.  Approval is withheld of course until he agrees to ditch his girlfriend, another cockney, Sally. True to his heart, he can’t do that and is prepared to go back to his old life until, voila, as fast as you can say “Eliza Doolittle,” Sally is transformed into a proper lady and all live happily ever after.  The songs are mostly unmemorable (best known one is the “The Lambeth Walk”) so you would think there is nothing to retain interest in such light-hearted fare.  However it is the perfect plot for lots of shtick!

It is the production itself, the performers, the incredible energy level and comic timing that made this an enjoyable evening.  The cast has 26 talented people, probably the largest ensemble on any Florida stage (other than some touring companies) but this production has a secret entertainment weapon named Matt Loehr, who we’ve seen before at the Maltz in The Music Man, Hello Dolly, Crazy For You and The Will Rogers Follies.  Not only can Loehr sing and dance with the best of them, he has that special athletic comedic gift, one similar to those skills Donald O’Conner demonstrated in the song "Make 'Em Laugh" from the film Singin' in the Rain  One could not help but think of that number while Bill wrestles with his kingly robe.  Loehr can do it all.

He’s joined on stage by his leading lady Julie Kleiner who undergoes the transformation from cockney gal to proper lady as Sally, Lauren Blackman as the lovely Lady Jacqueline who has designs on Bill herself, and Mary Stout who plays the terrifying Dutchess Maria who mellows when confronted by “true love.”  There are so many in the cast I could cite, too many, but I would be remiss in not mentioning one of our favorite South Florida actors, Elizabeth Dimon, who plays a supporting role as Lady Battersby.  Dimon is a consummate pro, whether playing demanding dramatic parts, as we’ve seen her play in numerous productions at Dramaworks, or musicals (she has a glorious singing voice). (In the photo below, she’s the second from the right.)


The direction of so many actors, dancers, and singers on the stage at one time is brilliantly accomplished by the very experienced James Brennan and kudos to the choreographer, Dan Knechtges, and to the scenic designer Paul Tate Depoo III.  There are some very clever scene changes (such as several of Bill’s ancestors coming to life from portraits on the wall during the “Song of Hareford”). All the behind the scenes technical people do a first rate job.

So, The Maltz Jupiter Theatre hits another one out of the park with this full-of-fun musical.  Next on their docket is The Producers.

Christmas Lullaby

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Talk about unknown Christmas songs.  Christmas Lullaby was written for Cary Grant by none other than Peggy Lee (Lyrics) and Cy Coleman (Music).  It is the simplest of tunes and lyrics but therein is its beauty.  And the story of how it came to be written and recorded by Cary Grant is told by Jessica Pickens in her blog,Comet Over Hollywood.YouTubecaptures Grant’s recording for posterity

James Gavin, in his biography of Peggy Lee, Is That All There Is?: The Strange Life of Peggy Lee, said “Christmas Lullaby as Lee called it, wasn’t anything too special. ‘Angles bless you, little one…my little one, sleep well.’ But as Lee sat alongside Grant at a Hollywood studio and gazed at him while he talk sang her words, he could have been intoning Emily Dickinson.”

Although Christmas is not the same for me as it was when I was growing up and then for us as parents raising two sons (happily both visiting us this holiday), the spirit indelibly left its mark.  I posted YouTube piano versions of two of my favorite Christmas pieces, one two years ago --  a Bill Evans composition, It’s Love It’s Christmas, and, last year, Vince Guaraldi’s classic Christmas Time Is Here. 

So I offer one of Christmas Lullaby, a lovely one minute waltz.  Lyrics are below.  Happy and Healthy Holidays to all!

Angels bless you little one / while you’re fast asleep.
You’ll awake to dancing toys, candy canes, Christmas joys.
And I pray your whole life through, Angels will watch over you,
loving you the way I do my little one, sleep well.
Angels bless you little one / while you’re fast asleep.
You’ll awake to dancing toys, candy canes, Christmas joys.
And I pray your whole life through, Angels will watch over you,
loving you the way I do my little one, sleep well.

Copyright © 1967 by Notable Music Co. Inc. and Denslow Music Co. Inc.

A 'Honey Fitz' New Year

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What delightful serendipity, going out on my boat with “the kids” before the end of the year, on the Intracoastal, and encountering JFK’s Presidential Yacht, the Honey Fitz a 92-foot motor yacht built in 1931 by the Defoe Boat Works in Bay City, Michigan.  Although five US Presidents have cruised the vessel, it was JFK who took to her and thus the vessel will forever be associated with him. The full story is recounted by the JFK Library.  The Honey Fitz is stately, classic, and apt for the time when the Office of the Presidency was as well. 

Our preNew Year’s cruise took us around Peanut Islandand past the Kennedy bunker on the island, built for him during the cold war and was in readiness during the Cuban missile crisis.  His part-time home in Palm Beach mandated the bunker which can still be visited.  See this nifty one minute video for the full story and to see the interior.  Undoubtedly, the furnishings are too primitive for the President-elect (alas, nothing gold-plated).

After the Honey Fitz was retired for Presidential service, it finally became a charter vessel and the full story of how it was refitted to meet Coast Guard specifications for such use is told here.


We closed out the year by watching the last sunrise of 2016 over the Atlantic.  Hopefully, 2017 and the next four years will be good to all. 



Another Day, Another Horror

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A mass shooting at an airport, the denial by the President Elect that his “victory” had anything to do with Russia’s revenge plot against Hillary Clinton (even though he, himself, used the very fake news Russia implanted) – just an ordinary day in the U. S. of A.  The normalization of such events inures us to it all.  How much can we absorb each day of reports of violence and a President-to-Be who is consumed by his monolithic view of how events affect our perception of HIM rather than how events (such as the Russian involvement in our election) impact the nation Putin prefers HIM to lead?  The distrust of Clinton that was baked into the election by Russian hacking and Trump’s demagoguery was probably enough to shift those relatively small margins in WI, MI, and PA that gave him the Electoral lead. 

Trump’s call for “Congressional Hearings” (sorry, wrong venue, Donald, try the FBI) to investigate why NBC allegedly received intelligence information before he did, reveals his world view.  He disparages “intelligence” and our intelligence professionals on the one hand (“I’m smarter than all the Generals”), but wants to first receive what he considers misinformation before a network against which he has a vendetta.  Look forward to government by retaliation.  As he would Tweet, NOT NICE!

As to gun violence, the ubiquity of guns, and our failure to connect that issue with mental health challenges and intelligence needed to keep nut jobs off our planes (even allowing them to check weapons in their luggage), there is just growing legislative intransigence.  After Sandy Hook one would think we’d have stricter gun laws.  Instead, the nation is gravitating to “open carry” including such a movement in my state, Florida.  Its insanity, especially with Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.  I’ve written about gun control ad nauseam, so no sense repeating everything here. And, no, I’m not for repealing the 2ndamendment and neither was Hillary Clinton as accused by Trump.

Will Trump ever get serious beyond his Tweets?  His actions even before taking the Office of the Presidency makes one already think about future impeachment on the grounds of Treason (giving aid and comfort to the enemies of our country).

These were my thoughts as I made coffee this morning only to discover I was so deep in thought (sort of writing this entry in my mind) that I had forgotten to put the coffee pot under the drip so I found myself in damage control, going through half a roll of paper toweling, moping the counter and the floor: a microcosm of the mess we’re in.


The Hunters

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How many men start out as an F-86 pilot during the Korean War and then become a writer over the next 50 years?  James Salter wasn’t prolific, but great nonetheless.  I had already read what has been considered his best works, Light Years,  All That Is and A Sport and a Pastime

I’m generally not “into” war novels (although will never forget reading Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, tears streaming down my face reading the concentration camp chapters), so to this point I had avoided Salter’s first novel, The Hunters.  Perhaps this is also because I had seen the movie version on Turner Classic Movies, staring my favorite film noir actor, Robert Mitchum (also with Robert Wagner and May Britt).  The novel is very different from the film, hardly bearing any resemblance, other than a story of F-86 fighter pilots during the Korean War.  Salter’s novel is so superior, but of course it’s literature, not Hollywood.  Salter must have agonized over the changes that were made to his novel for the screen version.

Cleve Connell arrives at Kimpo air base at the height of the Korean War.  There, the F-86 pilots do a dance of death with their MIG-15 enemies.  Connell learns this dance means to hunt or be hunted, kill or be killed, a path to fame or ignominy.

The wonder of flying, only decades after flight itself was pioneered by the Wright Brothers, is encapsulated by Salter, an experienced F-86 pilot.  This novel could not have been written without that credential or by a person indifferent to the joys of flying.  Cleve is ready for one of his early missions, congregating with the other pilots while waiting to go out to his “ship” as they referred to their F-86’s:  He was not fully at ease. It was still like being a guest at a family reunion, with all the unfamiliar references. He felt relieved when finally they rode out to their ships. Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the fifth time. It was still all adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening. Cleve rejoiced in it.

Cleve fantasizes about turning his flying skills into a sport, becoming an ace (5 kills).  He romanticizes to his wingman, while being aware that it’s not necessarily the best prepared pilots who become aces:  Odd. Everything about this ought to be perfect for you and me. Here we are, by sheer accident, in the most natural of worlds, and of course that means the most artificial, because we're very civilized. We're in a child's dream and a man's heaven, living a medieval life under sanitary conditions, flying the last shreds of something irreplaceable, I don't know what, in a sport too kingly even for kings. Nothing is missing, and yet it's the men who don't understand it at all that become its heroes.

By then, though, he is already transitioning into some self doubt, even after a brief burst of confidence after his first kill.  Soon he sinks into an even larger sinkhole of remorse, and finally finding an acceptance of his self worth in the end.  He is tormented, directly or indirectly by his arch rival, Pell, a man he learns would claim unsubstantiated kills or even put his wing-man in harm’s way to get a kill….he hated Pell. He hated him in a way that allowed no other emotion. It seemed he was born to, and that he had done it from the earliest days of his life, before he ever knew him, before he even existed. Of all the absolutes, Pell was the archetype, confronting him with the unreality and diabolical force of a medieval play, the deathlike, grinning angel risen to claim the very souls of men. When he dwelt upon that, Cleve felt the cool touch of fear. There was no way out. He knew that if Pell were to win, he himself could not survive.

But these opportunities for wins frequently were the consequence of just sheer luck.  The squadron flew three or four missions a day and pilots are not assigned to all.  Some came back their noses blackened, the fuel tanks dropped, indicating a dog fight while others do not see MIGs during the entire mission.  Cleve’s pick of the litter tended to be in the latter category while Pell’s were in the former, so no wonder.

The Hunters is a well developed novel, gathering momentum to the end, becoming so compelling one can’t put the book down the deeper you get into it.  Although a war novel, it is written by a then young writer whose prose, you can tell, would lead him to greatness, not in the air, but on the page.




It's a Twitter World

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Finally have been forced to join Twitter, as it has (unfortunately) become the news feed of choice.  The restrictions of 140 characters might appeal to some people.  I find it abhorrent as one cannot tell a story in that space, only a brief, fleeting emotion (or invective in the case of “some”).  Still, for late-breaking news (both fake and real) it’s a medium that needs to be reckoned with.  So, this old dog is trying to reckon.

From time to time I might post a string of Tweets here that tell a story, such as watching Obama’s moving farewell speech, then seeing a Tweet on Ben Bradlee’s memoir about Nixon’s accusation that the Press fabricated Watergate, and then, coincidentally on the very next day, seeing Carl Bernstein (live, not on TV) talk about Watergate and the role the Press still plays, even in this treacherous “fake news” environment.  Mr. Bernstein still has the right stuff – an impressive speaker.




LA,LA,LA, In La La Land

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It might seem disrespectful.  In many ways it was, a silent protest, seeing La La Land instead of our new President’s inauguration, the first one we’ve missed in decades.  It seems like yesterday when we were filled with hope as evidenced by what I wrote exactly eight years ago. The complete text is at the end of this entry.

After watching the never ending ennui of the Republican primaries and the solipsistic behavior of our new President-elect, how could anyone welcome his presence in the oval office?  And I’m referring to his behavior, not necessarily his policies, which, to be fair, remain to be seen.  We had hoped Obama would have been more effective, but how could he given the illegitimacy narrative so infused by the right and particularly by the new President himself?  All those years contending he was not born here, that he is a secret Muslim, ad infinitum.  It was their objective to block any and everything and for the most part they succeeded.  Still, the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.3% when he took office to below 5% and the Dow has tripled (although I am not naïve enough to singularly credit President Obama for these changes, but his leadership had an impact). Obama was not a “perfect” President, particularly in foreign affairs, but he was a decent, rational person.  Can we say the same, now? 

And now there are accusations of Trump being an “illegitimate” President because of Russia’s interference (not to mention Comey’s).  As there is no evidence that ballot boxes were hacked, he is not illegitimate in the legal sense of the word, but one can reasonably conclude the election was tainted.  One cannot prove an alternative reality but no doubt these events impacted the election results.
 
I had to laugh (or cry) at Trump’s assertion that “we have by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”  You would therefore think that his pick for Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, would have a better excuse for his failure to reveal $100 million in assets and links to a tax haven company, than saying “as you all can appreciate, filling out these government forms is quite complicated.”  After all, isn’t he a genius like all the rest of the Goldman Sachs ringers appointed to the Cabinet?  Not that I have anything against Goldman Masters of the Universe other than when Trump was running he equated them with the “swamp” of the establishment, paying Hillary Clinton for speeches.

But I’ve now read Trump’s Inaugural address which, when read, sounds like many of his impromptu electioneering stump speeches, but pulled together into one dystopian narrative.  I’m ready to embrace a stronger economy, jobs for all, but we’ve been on that trajectory for years now.  Rather than rebutting some of the speech, point by point, NPR has done a good job with fact checking.  Not that facts matter anymore in this post-factual, reality TV world, but here is their take on it.

So, to us the perfect antidote to the malaise of fear and despair over the election was seeing La La Land while the new President was sworn in and fêted.  The movie is a sweeping reaffirmation of the power of music and the arts, and a declarative statement that the American film musical is back.  It’s wonderful that a new generation is ready to embrace this art.  There’s a lot to be said about living in fantasy when one goes to a movie theatre, but it’s another matter to live one’s real life in the real world with leadership in serious doubt.  I hope President Trump transcends all these concerns.

Nonetheless, what a difference eight years make…

Monday, January 19, 2009

Early in the Morning

It is early in the morning on the eve of President-elect Obama’s inauguration – in fact very early, another restless night.  When it is so early and still outside, sound travels and I can hear the CSX freight train in the distance, its deep-throated rumbling and horn warning the few cars out on the road at the numerous crossings nearby.



Perhaps subconsciously my sleeplessness on this, the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, relates to the incongruous dreamlike images of the bookends of my political consciousness, from the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957, the freedom marches that culminated with the march on Washington in 1963 and Martin Luther King’s historic "I Have a Dream" speech, to the inauguration tomorrow of our first Afro-American President.  All this breathtaking demonstration of profound social change in just my lifetime.



Much has now been said comparing Obama to Lincoln.  In my “open letter” to Obama that I published here last May I said “Your opponents have criticized your limited political experience, making it one of their main issues in attacking your candidacy.  Lincoln too was relatively inexperienced, something he made to work to his advantage.  Forge cooperation across the aisle in congress, creating your own ‘team of rivals’ as Doris Kearns Goodwin described his cabinet in her marvelous civil war history.”



The Lincoln comparison is now omnipresent in the press, not to mention his cabinet selections indeed being a team of rivals. But I am restless because of what faces this, the very administration I had hoped for: a crisis of values as much as it is an economic one.  The two are inextricably intertwined.



I am reading an unusual novel by one of my favorite authors, John Updike, Terrorist. One of the main characters, Jack Levy laments: “My grandfather thought capitalism was doomed, destined to get more and more oppressive until the proletariat stormed the barricades and set up the worker’ paradise. But that didn’t happen; the capitalists were too clever or the proletariat too dumb. To be on the safe side, they changed the label ‘capitalism’ to read ‘free enterprise,’ but it was still too much dog-eat-dog. Too many losers, and the winners winning too big. But if you don’t let the dogs fight it out, they’ll sleep all day in the kennel. The basic problem the way I see it is, society tries to be decent, and decency cuts no ice in the state of nature. No ice whatsoever. We should all go back to being hunter-gathers, with a hundred-percent employment rate, and a healthy amount of starvation.”



The winners in this economy were not only the capitalists, the real creators of jobs due to hard work and innovation, but the even bigger winners: the financial masters of the universe who learned to leverage financial instruments with the blessings of a government that nurtured the thievery of the public good through deregulation, ineptitude, and political amorality.  This gave rise to a whole generation of pseudo capitalists, people who “cashed in” on the system, bankers and brokers and “financial engineers” who dreamt up lethal structures based on leverage and then selling those instruments to an unsuspecting public, a public that entrusted the government to be vigilant so the likes of a Bernie Madoff could not prosper for untold years.  Until we revere the real innovators of capitalism, the entrepreneurs who actually create things, ideas, jobs, our financial system will continue to seize up.  That is the challenge for the Obama administration – a new economic morality.



Walt Whitman penned these words on the eve of another civil war in 1860:



I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it would be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The woodcutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.



It is still early in the morning as I finish this but the sun is rising and I’m going out for my morning walk.  Another freight train is rumbling in the distance.  I hear America singing.

Protect Our Free Press

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Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.


The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work. You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”
Stephen Bannon

“You [the press] always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.”
Kellyanne Conway

“I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”
Donald J. Trump

"Never forget. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."
Richard Nixon to his national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped 1972 Oval Office conversation

We all know how it ended in the Nixon administration when he was forced to resign in August, 1974.

But it’s different this time as Trump and his ministers of propaganda are “crazy-makers.”  There is a concerted effort to make the lie indistinct from reality. Responsible journalist must stand united with the facts, clearly pointing out the dangers to the Republic.  We, the citizens, must take up each and every infringement of the Constitution and iniquitous Executive Order with our representatives, focusing on the mid-term elections to bring about an effective opposition Congress – and the removal of the “ministers of propaganda.”  

Fortunately some former congressional staff members have put together “A practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda.” It is better to read that, join local groups, than reacting to every Presidential tweet and proclamation, chasing our tails with frustrated tweets and retweets.  Even though it’s been only a week since the inauguration, it seems like a lifetime in dog years. 

Collected Stories – Literary Lives Diverge at Dramaworks

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Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories is a fascinating look into the creative process and the relationship between writers, compellingly brought to life by Dramaworks.  For more than two hours an intense emotional struggle unfolds between two women, one ascending and the other descending, leaving us to wonder who “owns” the stories of our life?

Paul Stancato’s PBD directorial debut is an auspicious endeavor, taking what is already an engaging play and transforming it into a mesmerizing evening.  He not only had the Dramaworks’ extraordinary technical team to assist his efforts, but the notable debut of the two fine actors who inhabited their roles, Anne-Marie Cusson as Ruth Steiner, the mature writer and teacher, and Keira Keeley her star struck, initially compliant student, Lisa Morrison.  From Stancato: “they taught me as much as I taught them.”  Cusson and Morrison are the consummate actors in this production, connecting with one another to the point of perfection.  Their bravura performances makes this the must see play in Palm Beach this season.
Paul Stancato

Although emotionally turbulent, there are many subtle comic moments, not only in some of the dialogue, but pauses where even facial expressions allow a twitter to ripple through the audience.  These are welcome interludes, carefully orchestrated by Stancato.

At the onset Lisa insinuates herself into Ruth’s well ordered life.  Ruth, an established writer, has published numerous short stories, collected as well as uncollected.  Lisa, arriving at Ruth’s apartment for her first out of the classroom session with her mentor, marvels “What I'm trying to tell you, Ms. Steiner, in my very clumsy stupid way... Being here?, studying with you ... ? It's like a religious experience for me. No, really, it is. I mean, your voice has been inside my head for so long, living in this secret place, having this secret dialogue with me for like years? I mean, ever since high school when I had to read The Business of Love ... ? I mean, from the opening lines of ‘Jerry, Darling,’ that was it for me, I was hooked, you had me. I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what I wanted to be.”


Keira Keeley, Anne-Marie Cusson; Photo by Alicia Donelan

Lisa speaks in the vernacular of innocence and youth, one of the many layers in this play, the process of Lisa’s maturing and Ruth’s aging.  This theme is as dominant as the teacher/student relationship and Margulies continuously weaves these leitmotifs.  As with any great short story itself, Margulies moves the plot along within a structure which is ripe for complication, confrontation, and in this case an intentionally ambiguous resolution which is sure to keep the audience talking long after they have left the theatre.

Teaching writing is the ultimate paradox.  As Ruth attempts to explain in her deprecating way that it really can’t be taught:  “Please. Never pay attention to what writers have to say. Particularly writers who teach. They don’t have the answers, noneof us do.”  Cusson infuses this role with bravado, a self assuredness that comes from her many years of teaching experience and professional success.

Photo by Robert Hagelstein

The setting is Ruth’s Greenwich Village apartment.  Scenic designer K. April Soroko has faithfully imagined an apartment filled with the very publications, relics, and books that define her life, the view from her window which changes with the seasons, the sacred place of her writing desk, her selection of music and the prominent placement of Matisse's The Dance.

Photo by Samantha Mighdoll
This setting of a writer’s life combined with reminders of Ruth’s cultural heritage are well mined in Cusson’s performance and proves to be a source of Lisa’s jealously, something she can admit to at the point in the play when she is no longer the star struck student and is coming into her own as a writer.  Lisa complains to Ruth about her limited experience and one could look at this as a climatic part of the play from which the scales tip dramatically afterward:

LISA: You had all that rich, wonderful, Jewish stuff to draw on.
RUTH: Why was that luck? That was what I knew; I started out writing what I knew, just like you and everybody else who writes.
LISA: Yeah, but that culture!, that history! The first generation American experience and all that. Nothing in my experience could possibly approach that. What do I have? WASP culture. Which is no culture at all. 
RUTH: Oh, really? Tell that to Cheever and Updike.
LISA: Oh, God, I've got to write a novel, don't you think? Isn’t that what they want?
RUTH: Who?
LISA: Isn't that what they expect? The literary establishment. I mean, in order for me to be taken seriously?
RUTH: Why? I never did.

And there is the crux of it all.  All writers draw from experience in some way.  Short story writers aspire to the holy grail of novelist, something never achieved by Ruth.  The line between fiction and memoir can be hair-thin.  Philip Roth once said “I wouldn’t want to live with a novelist. Writers are highly voyeuristic and indiscreet.”  Ruth, as Lisa’s mentor and teacher, urges her to not censor herself:  “You can’t censor your creative impulses because of the danger of hurting someone’s feelings…If you have a story to tell, tell it.  Zero in on it and don’t flinch, just do it.”

Photo by Alicia Donelan
Early on in the play Lisa comes across a volume in Ruth’s collection by the poet Delmore Schwartz and a letter slips out by him addressed to Ruth.  She puts it back, embarrassed, as clearly this is something Ruth does not want to talk about.  Later when Ruth and Lisa have more of a mother/daughter relationship, Ruth unburdens the story of her liaison with Schwartz to Lisa, with pride and regret.  He of course was an older man; she the young (and she proudly exclaims, “pretty then”) student, dazzled by meeting Schwartz in a pub and becoming a companion afterwards…  “…the power was undeniable….What sheltered Jewish girl from Detroit, what self-styled poet, what virgin, would not have succumbed?”  Ruth’s story is mostly a long monologue and Cusson delivers it with such heart and vulnerability.  Keira Keeley’s Lisa listens with wide-eyed amazement, taking it all in.

The play moves to the next level.  Lisa has had a short story published. They are now colleagues.  Ruth, the teacher, had given Lisa a story of hers to critique.  Lisa recognizes one of the characters, Emily, as resembling herself.  In fact, this heartfelt moment in the play is almost a play within itself, the story line about a mother and a daughter without a clear resolution.  Ruth defends the latter to Lisa saying: “But that’s life, isn’t it? What relationship is ever truly resolved?  People, perfectly likable people, inexplicable, inconveniently, behave badly, or take a wrong turn…it happens.”  This conceit is not lost on the audience, foreshadowing their own relationship.  After hearing Lisa’s criticisms of the story, Ruth has a sad epiphany: “I’m jealous that you have all of life ahead of you.  I can’t sit back and watch you do the dance that I danced long ago and not think about time.  I can’t….That’swhat it’s about.  Don’t you see?  Time.”
Photo by Alicia Donelan

One could see where this remarkable play is taking us. The last scene in the second act is explosive, raw, and Cusson and Keeley plumb the depths of their characters at the climatic denouement.  By then the scales have tipped the other way, Lisa appropriating the essence of the Delmore Schwartz story for her first novel, one she claims was written as a tribute to Ruth (was it or wasn’t it?, the audience must decide for itself), but a story Ruth feels was purloined from her (contradicting her earlier advice that Lisa must write whatever story without regard for hurting anyone).  Where does the moral compass point? Whose literary life is it anyway?

The costume design by award-winning Brian O'Keefe captures the passage of the six years beginning in the 1990s as well as the maturation of Lisa from girl student to published author in her stunning black outfit of the last scene.  As this is not a period piece and the passage of time allows for only subtle changes in dress, O'Keefe’s costumes appear to be designed more for the emotional moment.  

Time passage was clearly the focus of lighting designer Ron Burns, both the realism of the time of day and the surrealistic feeling of its passage over years.  The latter in particular was the fulcrum for sound designer Matt Corey, jazz interpretations of classics such as “Guess I’ll Hang my Tears Out to Dry” and “In a Sentimental Mood” playing as seasons roll by.   Music also distinguishes Ruth’s listening habits which reflect the jazz of the 50s and 60s while Lisa listens to the urban rock of the time.

Regret and loss permeate the play; loss of time, loss of friendship, loss of loves.  Yet there was real love between these two women.  Ruth transitions from self assured, in control, to friend, and ultimately to feeling utterly betrayed by Lisa, who in essence has now become her mortal enemy.  Margulies has created an extremely thought provoking, powerful story and the Dramaworks ensemble delivers it with high-intensity and top notch acting power.  The play and the performance are true to the epigraphs cited by Margulies in the printed edition of the play:

Influence is simply transference of personality, a nod of giving away what is most precious to one’s self, and its exercise produces a sense, and, it may be, a reality of loss.  Every disciple takes away something from the master.
-- Oscar Wilde

Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
-- Delmore Schwartz
 
Photo by Robert Hagelstein

Wistful Remembrances

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Scrolling down my, now, all-too-ridiculously-lengthy  key word index to “Westport”  there is a score of entries, a testimony to the strong feelings I have towards where I worked and lived for some thirty years of my life, receding with the speed of light into the forgotten past.  The essence of this blog is a written record of remembering.  I speak not of major events, but the nuances of fleeting feelings.  I was reminded of this today by an entry from more than six years ago.  Although it is a review of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, bravely produced by the Westport Country Playhouse, it evoked surreal feelings of place and time. I quote the first and last paragraphs of that piece.  It could almost be read as a stand-alone (without the details of the theatre production) as it says as much about time, and wistful remembrances.
  
What a cynical title for Samuel Beckett’s brilliant play, courageously presented by the Westport Country Playhouse to celebrate its 80th anniversary. It is not the kind of light fare one might expect on a languid summer’s night at a country theatre far off Broadway, and it was a brave choice by the Theatre’s Artistic Director, Mark Lamos. But this is Westport, Ct - a bedroom community of NYC where we lived for so many years. In fact, we were there during the celebration of the Playhouse’s 40th anniversary – half of its lifetime ago -- so although we are now only summertime visitors, its byways are subliminally imprinted on us.

It was a night of powerful theatre. We exited to the parking lot. It had just rained and the humidity hung in the air, also rising off the steaming macadam and fogging our glasses. So we drove the back roads of Westport, returning to our boat, passing landmarks indelibly imprinted and always remembered such as the location of the old Westport National Bank (gone) turning left onto the only road that runs west and parallel to Riverside Avenue, along the southern side of the Saugatuck River, passing homes where we had partied in our youth (including one Christmas eve where guests in an alcoholic induced stupor set a couch on fire and it had to be dragged out to the snow to extinguish the flames), the building our first Internist once occupied (who later died in the same nursing home as Ann’s mother), the Westport Women’s Club where my publishing company held our annual Xmas party for so many years, my old office itself across the river where I worked for the first ten years in Westport, now the Westport Arts Center, past the street where Ann and I went for Lamaze classes when she was pregnant, over the old bridge crossing the Saugatuck, turning left then right under the Turnpike past the structure which used to be The Arrow Restaurant (long gone) where Ann reminded me they made her favorite dinner, crispy fried chicken, and then further west to Norwalk, all fragments of our own earth mound, being earth bound, trying to understand. Theatre to think about. Oh, happy days.
View of Westport, CT from my office circa 1972

Trump’s Truman Show

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Once upon a time one’s life meant having some time to oneself. Presidents were there but mostly in the background except during critical times. Now we are all exhausted from less than a month into the Trump presidency. Why? He is omnipresent; no matter where you look, to whom you speak, online, newspapers, or TV, big brother is there, “100%” as HE is fond of saying. Now we are subjected to the anxiety and ennui of Trump reporting 24-7.

I can’t help but think of the movie The Truman Show. Our existential hero of the film, Jim Carrey, is an orphan who has been raised by a corporation to live and be watched, without his knowledge, on a reality TV show 24-7 -- until he discovers this and tries to escape.  In this latter respect we’re in Carrey’s position, but this is an environment HE doesn’t want US to escape from.  As the Narcissist -in-Chief HE enjoys being watched in his own simulated reality TV show, a terrarium of which the contours are “alternative truths.”  Our role is to be spellbound.  Before I merely thought this behavior “crazy making” but it may be more --  preparation for almost anything, totalitarian rule by the Plutocracy, religious wars, the demolition of the Republic, a nuclear winter, or all rolled up into the Trumpocalypse (“the catastrophic destruction or damage of civilization following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States of America.” -- from Urban Dictionary)

Instinctively, even if we survive we all know this will not end well.  I hope I am very wrong, and that the next four years will be bigly amazing, devoid of losers, with tremendous, terrific winners, but I fear it’s not gonna happen, zero percent.

‘Disgraced’ At the Maltz – Lives Come Apart at the Seams

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How does a Pulitzer Prize prizing winning play written several years ago simply become more and more relevant since it was first produced?  Is it a case of life imitating art?  Here is a play about an upcoming corporate lawyer, Amir, attempting to become fully assimilated into the cultural circle of professionals, to distance himself from his Muslim heritage through marriage and lifestyle, only to watch that façade implode.

The unseen element in the play is the current political environment, the result of a campaign full of invectives directed at, among others, Muslims, and the resulting highly contested “Muslim travel ban” and reports of illegal Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups and deportations.  Playwright Ayad Akhtar might not have fully foreseen these extreme events when he wrote Disgraced, but after 9/11 he knew the xenophobic direction it was taking us and its impact on a man of Islamic heritage.

Amir (Fajer Kaisi) and his wife Emily (Vanessa Morosco) are pursuing the classic American Dream, living in a sophisticated Upper East Side apartment, obviously possessing the resources to enjoy their professional lives.  The set by Anne Mundell and the lighting by Paul Black telegraph Manhattan power couple.  It is a crisp, contemporary setting with a view of the Manhattan skyline from their balcony.

As a mergers and acquisition lawyer, Amir has acquired all the trappings of master of his craft.  Fajer Kaisi revels in his alpha male role, one which takes him from brash overconfidence to a stunning reversal of fortune.  He powerfully delivers this plunge with steely skill.  We first see him stridently berating his paralegal for missing three words in a contract, screaming into the phone “that’s why we pay you six figures!”

Fajer Kaisi and Eddie Morales
Emily, an artist, accepts this behavior as perfectly normal in her volatile husband who in turn is amused by and tolerates her latest passionate love for Islamic Art, something acquired during their travels in Moorish inspired Spain.  While he mildly encourages her latest works, it is also clear that he is not happy about this obsession.  Vanessa Morosco as Emily is a highly accomplished actress who portrays a striving artist waiting for her first big show, a wife devotedly in love who never fully grasps her husband’s deepest insecurities and secrets.

Amir’s nephew, Abe, sensitively played by Eddie Morales with wide-eyed adoration of his uncle is disturbed that a local Imam has been falsely imprisoned.  He feels this is politically motivated, and the manifestation of growing Muslimophobia.  He comes to his Aunt and Uncle for their help.  Emily urges her husband to lend his professional legal advice.  He loves his wife and reluctantly agrees.  Eventually there is a trial. However Amir’s name is mentioned in a newspaper article about the case although he wasn’t acting on behalf of the defendant, but suddenly his firm is aware of his Islamic background, something he has conspicuously hidden.

Vanessa Morosco, Fajer Kaisi, Chantal Jean-Pierre, Joel Reuben Ganz
The stage is set for a developing train wreck of a “dinner with friends,” one Emily gives for Isaac (Joel Reuben Ganz ) an art gallery owner who wants to exhibit her work and has more than a professional interest in, and his wife, Jory (Chantal Jean-Pierre), who coincidentally works with Amir in the same law firm.  The evening devolves into an increasingly revelatory and combative conversation between a Muslim (albeit assimilated), a Jew, the African-American attorney and a WASP, where Amir has to confront himself and his apostate views. 

Both Joel Reuben Ganz and Chantal Jean-Pierre as the interracial couple give outstanding, persuasive performances, Ganz a credible foil to Kaisi’s Amir and Jean-Pierre's Jory providing some well timed comic lines.  She comports herself with the precision of another professional on the move to corporate greatness.  The pot is stirred with a boiling brew of high voltage issues, religion, the clash of cultures and civilizations; Christian, Judaic, and Islamic, as well as the volatility and infidelity of both marriages.

With the help of the ubiquitous truth-teller, alcohol, Amir, who is already feeling deeply abased by his law firm is steadily driven into the recesses of his ancestry to the point of uttering the unutterable, that the crucible of 9/11 gave him some secret satisfaction; it is a pin-dropping game changer in the play.  Although he defends the revelation as being “tribal” and “in his bones,” he has become radioactive, meant to be shunned by the ultimate fall from grace.  The contrast is striking.  He is a broken man -- and the audience is left to deliberate whether there is any hope for the millennium old conflict of religious indoctrination and bias.

It is stunning, powerful theatre.  As J. Barry Lewis, the seasoned director of some 200 shows including many others at The Maltz as well as Dramaworks said “Disgraced focuses on the various ways each of us secretly continue to hold on to our tribal identities – our identities from birth, of our education – in spite of our various and ongoing attempts to enlighten our lives. We are products of the world we create, often finding safety in those tribal identities. The play has been called 'an evening of cocktails and confessions,’ and it is certain to spark dialogue about our own contradictions.”  Lewis skillfully brings those observations front and center utilizing a talented group of actors and technical professionals.

In addition to Paul Black’s lighting, Lewis had Marty Mets’ skillful sound design, the opening scene overlaying Middle Eastern music with the sounds of the city below, segueing to the music alone during scene changes and then, again, the unmistakable sounds of the city when Amir angrily opens the door to their balcony, a reminder of the world from which he is suddenly ostracized.  Leslye Menshouse’s costume design is chic, in keeping with the sophisticated early 21st century Manhattan professional environment, replete with Amir’s expensive dress shirts.

The Maltz Theatre typically presents musicals, the majority of which are thoroughly outstanding.  They have also presented some remarkable serious theatre, Redand Other Desert Cities to name just a couple.  Seeing Disgracedthere makes you yearn for more of these blockbusting dramas.

[Photographs of the actors by Alicia Donelan]




A Mentor’s Influence Never Stops

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How many of us have had important mentors, without whom our lives may have turned out very differently?  When thinking about my own life, the first name that springs to my mind is Roger Brickner. I’ve written about him before, and this entry provides much of the background.  In short, he was my Honors Economics teacher and my grade advisor when I was a senior at Richmond Hill High School.  Miraculously, we reconnected 50 years later as he was the honorary chairman of my high school’s 1960 class 50th reunion, one I was unable to attend.  But since then we’ve been in touch by email, particularly during Presidential and mid-term elections.  You see Roger’s avocation – among other interests since retiring from teaching – is analyzing elections and projecting outcomes.  As he said “my interest in politics is an enthusiastic avocation. I began to predict presidential elections as a teenager and since I thought Dewey would win in 1948 I have been lucky to pick every winner since that time.”  That is, until the recent election. 

In addition, he is an amateur weatherman, taking after his own heroes, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, carefully recording the salient weather facts at his early 19th century home in the heart of Haverhill, NH.  And he still loves to travel, having been to more than 100 countries and to most U.S. states. 

Between our travels and his, we knew there would be a time they would intersect and yesterday was the day, as he and a friend were making their way south, having stayed in Charleston SC for a while, and now on their way to Deerfield Beach, FL.  So he called and I suggested we meet for lunch at The Cooper in Palm Beach Gardens.

It had been 57 years since I last saw him; he has the same energetic, optimistic personality.  But did he realize how important he was to me at a critical juncture in my life?  Clearly he did not.  I didn’t know why I was selected for his Honors Economics class as my status in high school in the first three years would be almost classified as juvenile delinquent (the same old story, rebelling from my parents, in with the wrong crowd, taking pleasure just getting by in class, all in preparation to enter my father’s photographic business, a tacit obligation as I would be the fourth generation to run the business). 

Roger said I was selected because he thought I was bright enough to do the work and with that encouragement I was turned on to learning, really for the first time in my life.  We were expected to do a term paper, just like in college!  I selected the topic of motivational research which at the time interested me.

So what did I bring when I saw Roger yesterday?  That paper.  He must have thought it bizarre that one would keep such a token of the distant past.  As a turning point in my life I obviously felt I should keep it (got an “A” by the way).  We were both amused to read my sophomoric conclusion: “Today [1959] motivational research is being used mainly to manipulate the consumer and slowly being used to direct the citizen.  Perhaps in the future manipulators will be trying to control every phase of our lives.”  Roger circled that and wrote boldly: “Surely you must have some comment on this.  Hitler, of course, was a master of these techniques – what shall we do about it?”  And now, we both agreed, perhaps that may be happening via social media, “fake news” etc.  So what should we do about it?

And that is Roger, always inspiring.  Without him, maybe I would have gone into my father’s business, which would have failed anyhow.  I still enjoy photography, but strictly as a hobby. So, I got what I wanted to do, not photography or motivational research, but publishing. 

Then (from my HS Yearbook, my photo partially sullied by a classmate and Roger’s one that I took as I was the photographer for the Yearbook)…
Roger Brickner

And now…..

Yesterday we talked a lot about Richmond Hill where we both grew up.  At one time he lived on the same street as my grandfather – 109th street off of Jamaica Avenue.  I spent my grammar school days at PS 90 right opposite my grandfather’s home which became my Uncle Phil’s.   

109th Street, Richmond Hill, NY

We moved to 115th Street and 84thAvenue right before I began High School – a long walk then as there were no school buses.  At one time Roger lived near Lefferts Blvd, which was near my home as well.  He went on to Queens College and then Columbia for his Master’s Degree with a nearly two year interlude in the army serving during the Korean War.

Reminiscing, we couldn’t help but think of Jahn’s as Roger had ordered The Cooper Sundae for dessert which was a dead ringer for Jahn’s infamous “Kitchen Sink.”

Good times, good talk, and it was great to see him 57 years later, and to thank him.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Henry Adams

Fake News in La La Land

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As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.  I speak of the Academy Awards’ embarrassing mistake of naming La La Land Best Picture, only to have to retract that in the middle of La La’s acceptance speech, naming Moonlight.  This is all because Price Waterhouse Coopers gave the presenters the wrong envelope.  Perhaps the Academy is shopping for a new accounting firm?  In this era of “fake news” the mistake only feeds the Zeitgeist.  Maybe it was Russian hacking?  It's one thing to tamper with the election and it’s quite another to mess with the Academy!

I have not seen Moonlight, but it does sound like award-winning material, adapted from a play.  However, I loved La La Land, particularly Emma Stone’s rendition of the song “The Audition” which I have made part of my piano repertoire.  I also admired the film as a throwback to filmed musicals of the past, albeit updated for our times. 

Our friends Betty and Claudia were visiting this weekend, both movie buffs, and they had not seen Fences(nor had we) and I was surprised to find the film being offered on pay-per-view so we watched it before the Academy Awards yesterday.  I was stunned.  August Wilson stands among the greatest American playwrights.  Although the movie rights to the Pulitzer Prize winning play were bought soon after the play opened in 1987, it was only recently produced as Wilson had insisted that the film have a black director.  His wishes continued to be honored after his death in 2005.  It was Denzel Washington, one of our finest actors, who finally was chosen to direct and star in the play – he was in the 2010 revival of the play on Broadway with Viola Davis as well.  I was surprised that Washington was not even nominated for best director, although he was up for best actor.  Until I see Moonlight, which won for the “best” film, I can’t comment, but what Washington accomplished as a director and as an actor has to be greatly admired.  Viola Davis was spectacular as well.  I will not easily forget this film, Wilson’s writing, or the performances.

When you think about it, how does one chose between a La La Land, Fences, or Moonlight– all award deserving in their own right?  It’s one of the reasons why the Academy Awards doesn’t resonate with me.  I watched part of it, but did not see the controversial ending; both Moonlightand La La Land deserved better.  But so did Fences and Denzel Washington.

I mentioned this before, but never went into any detail.  We attended the 1980 Academy Awards as a guest of the Academy.  Their Annual Motion Picture Credits Database was published by my firm at the time.  In those days, such information was in reference book form.  I used to visit the Academy and the American Film Institute searching for publishable material.

When I received an invitation to attend the Awards, I was able to combine the trip to LA with one of my editorial efforts, and, of course, Ann wanted to join me so I accepted.  Unfortunately, this is way before cell phone cameras and I thought it a little tacky to arrive with my full-size Nikon hanging from my shoulder, so I have no photographs to record the experience.

I had a rented car (not very fancy) and wore just a plain suit.  Ann was dressed nicely but no designer dress or even borrowed jewels.  A valet took our car and in spite of being unknowns (and looking the part), we walked down the red carpet to some applause.  No one asked for our autograph, though : - ).

This was Johnny Carson’s second year as host and the big film, winning most of the awards was Kramer vs. Kramer.  Coincidentally I had met the author of the book on which the film was based, Avery Corman, a year or two before.  He politely autographed a pre-production copy at the American Booksellers Association meeting after we discussed why I felt a special connection with his book: I had been divorced ten years earlier with similar custody issues.

Back to the Academy Awards, I remember standing next to Gregory Peck during one of the brief breaks, I wanted to say something, but felt it would be intrusive.  So we just stood there, admiring all the screen actors I recognized and he knew well.  It was a lot of fun to attend this major Hollywood event, but Ann and I were outsiders, looking in.

After watching the film Fences we took Betty and Claudia to our favorite Sunday night place, Double Roads Tavern in Jupiter to listen to the Jupiter Jazz Society’s weekly jam session.  Professionals play but other musicians can sit in for a set or two.  I’d like to do that myself but as most of my piano playing has been solo; I don’t have the skills for impromptu jazz accompaniment.  So, we go just to enjoy and support such a worthwhile effort.  Organizer Rick Moore, who plays the keyboard with the best of them, gathers a wide range of musicians, ones just starting out, but oh so talented, to retired and seasoned professionals who just like to jam.  It is Rick (and his wife, Cherie, a co-founder of the Society) who drive the mission to preserve jazz for future generations.  And future generations are responding.  Ava Faith, a 13 year old singer, made a surprise appearance last night after singing the National Anthem at the Marlins’ spring training game.  She already has the right stuff, a great young jazz voice and a personality that is impressive.  Wonderful to hear that generation perform the Great American Songbook and to know it will endure.  I tried to capture a brief clip with my twitter feed…
To round out yesterday, in the morning Claudia and I took a walk on the beach in Juno, watching the sun rising over the pier…


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