Day 5 of National Emergency: Senior Shopping Times, Teaching Children, Impacted Jobs, Theater at Home

Stop & Shop announced exclusive new hours for senior citizens—6 am to 7:30 am—effective Thursday morning.

I’m not sure if the supermarket chain is trying to make shopping easier for seniors by making it less congregated and safer from the general public’s pushing and jostling, or if it is trying to shield younger shoppers from the most vulnerable age cohort. The company, in its press release, gave it a positive spin, saying the new policy for those 60 and older would “protect shoppers considered most vulnerable to coronavirus.”

Either way, my only real objection is having to get up so early. Perhaps some elderly are early risers but the 71-year-old who shares my bed and I sleep late. Our normal wakeup time is considerably later than the cutoff time for exclusive senior shopping. (BTW, for those who do not know, today is Gilda’s 71st birthday. I normally throw a big parade in her honor down Manhattan’s 5th Avenue, but concessions must be made during these coronavirus days.)

When I heard about Stop & Shop’s special hours for the elderly, I was a little concerned Gilda and I could be age-appropriate-challenged by the shopping police as we both are often confused for someone younger than 60. But Stop & Shop says it will not request an ID to enter, relying instead on the integrity of its customers not to abuse the privilege. 

After inquiring through a chat box whether Costco would be implementing senior hours as well, I was informed it is under consideration. My fingers are crossed …

My sister Lee, a retired elementary school teacher, and my cousin Steve, separately reposted the following on Facebook: “It seems a little ridiculous to me that people are so afraid that their children are going to miss a whole month of learning. How about using this month to teach them how to cook, check the oil in the car, do laundry, treat others with respect, sew on a button, deep clean, balance a checkbook, etc. Not all learning is done in a classroom.”

Amen.

Most of my friends, professionals in various fields, are sequestered at home. Mostly, they can connect via the Internet to clients and documents they may need to conduct business, with the understanding it is not business as usual. 

Take a moment to consider some whose occupations are not transferable to new technologies, workers such as school bus drivers and crossing guards. The average school bus driver earns $34,349, according to salary.com.

With the economy in flux (sounds nicer than free-fall), it’s not a good time to be selling a home. Real estate agents are having a tough time setting up open houses. 

Travel agents are fielding lots of calls. Unfortunately, they’re mostly from clients who are calling to cancel hotel and travel plans.

During our walk today Gilda wondered aloud if house burglars are going through a slow period as residences are occupied virtually round the clock.

Raising two sons and a daughter in the 1950s-1960s while she worked full time with our father, my mother instilled what you might call a sing-for-your-supper ethos in her children. We did not literally sing (except z’mirot—traditional Jewish songs—after Friday evening Shabbat dinners). Rather, she had us augment taking care of our household on weekends when our housekeeper was off.

We had a rotating set of chores. Dusting one week. Vacuuming the next, followed by kitchen duties—setting and clearing the dinette table, loading and unloading the dishwasher and even scouring pots and pans. I learned to use Twinkle when cleaning the copper bottoms of our Revere cookware. I never stopped being amazed at how the greenish-yellow Twinkle paste made the copper shine like new.

We also had a daily assignment to pick up fruit and vegetables at Joe’s, the neighborhood produce store, and to buy a fresh rye bread at the bakery on Ocean Avenue (our father thought bread made any meal taste better. He also castigated Joe from afar for any melon that tasted like a potato). On Saturdays we shopped at our local supermarket, Waldbaum’s, a few doors down from the bakery.

Being the youngest I benefitted from a lighter workload until both my brother and sister moved out, leaving me for several years solely responsible for all chores. 

Bravo, Bravo: Finally, for those who enjoy Broadway musicals but are experiencing some feelings of withdrawal since the Great White Way has been shuttered by the pandemic, here’s a Playbill link to 15 shows you can download for viewing. Enjoy:

https://www.playbill.com/article/15-broadway-plays-and-musicals-you-can-watch-on-stage-from-home?fbclid=IwAR1wKuPh0Yevbqm0CJALNoeFPngh_cAeVEsoGQVyem9tP8PCbmJphkKbGOI

A Broadway Experience A Child Would Remember

About a month ago Ellie took three-and-a-half-year-old CJ to her first live play, a local Omaha production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Like many young girls CJ is enraptured by stories of princesses. So Ellie was not too surprised that CJ sat intently absorbing the three hour production (her equally young friend bailed out at intermission). 

Experiencing live theater at any level is a treat best appreciated at the youngest age possible. Ellie, for example, tasted live theater when she was barely five years old. It was  a staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Coat at the Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck. She and eight-year-old Dan squealed loudly when they recognized the actor playing an Elvis-inspired pharaoh was a counselor from their summer camp. (Eight years later Ellie’s first dramatic roles in “real” Broadway plays came in two productions of Joseph, the first as the vampy wife of Potiphar in her eighth grade play, and then as one of Joseph’s brothers in the first Play Group Theatre rendition in Westchester. 

For the next four years PGT and Ellie were almost inseparable. After Joseph, Ellie took on leading roles as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, the baker’s wife in Into the Woods, Wendy in Peter Pan and Ti-Moune in Once on This Island. (In non PGT productions she was Rizzo in Grease and split the role of the Leading Player in Pippin.)

Ask most adults who grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s about the shows they remember seeing and they invariably will call out names like Howdy Doody or Leave It to Beaver, Winky Dink, Captain Kangaroo or The Lone Ranger. 

I, too, watched those television shows. I have fond memories of them and enjoy the nostalgic times friends reminisce about them. But the shows that made the biggest impression on me, the ones I most recall from that golden time, were Broadway shows. 

In the short span of five years, from the time I was nine to 14 years old, I saw at least six Broadway shows and two operas (Tosca and La Traviata) at the Metropolitan Opera House. 

My earliest Broadway memory—seeing Sam Levene in the comedy Make a Million. For the record, I cannot recall any of the plot. But I do remember sitting with my siblings in the balcony while my parents sat in the orchestra. (An interesting footnote: Make a Million was co-written by Norman Barasch. For those not aware, Gilda’s maiden name is Barasch. She is unaware of any family connection to Norman.)

If you’re not familiar with Sam Levene, let me assure you he was a bonafide star of the theater and movies. Google his name if you don’t believe me. 

My Broadway experience was heightened by the renowned original casts I witnessed. In 1961, Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker in Do Re Mi. Later that year Camelot featured Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet. 1961 was a stellar theater-going year for me. I also saw Robert Weede, Mimi Benzell and Molly Picon in Milk and Honey. The next year, Alfred Drake in Kean, followed in 1964 by Zero Mostel and Maria Karnilova in Fiddler on the Roof.   

The inspiration for this whole story is to tell you Ellie and Gilda took CJ to a Sunday matinee of a Broadway revival of Once on This Island. Yes, it could be argued that CJ is a tad young for the play’s message. But Ellie has been showing CJ a video of her performance 20 years ago as Ti-Moune. CJ is familiar with the plot and the songs. 

Ellie and Gilda reported she sat on the edge of her seat, enthralled, throughout the performance. She had a day to remember: a subway ride, a walk through Times Square after dark, dinner out in a restaurant, and her first Broadway play. It’s hard to imagine it could have been any better.

Yiddish "Fiddler": A Reality Check on Survival

One of the eternal laugh lines of any staging of Fiddler on the Roof, including the production in Yiddish currently playing at the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene inside the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, comes in the opening song, “Tradition.” 

As Tevya the milkman introduces the audience to the varied characters that populate his shtetl hometown of Anatevke, a pious resident asks the rabbi if there is a proper blessing for the Tsar. 

Of course, responds the rabbi. He chants, “May God keep the Tsar … far away from us!” 

Like Jesse Green of The New York Times who reviewed the play (https://nyti.ms/2JtZnJW), Gilda and I shed more than a tear or two as we sat through a preview last Thursday. We know but a handful of Yiddish words, but as veterans of prior Fiddler productions (including, for me, the original Broadway cast starring Zero Mostel), the story line and songs required little translation, though the theater provided both English and Russian supertitles on both sides of the stage. 

Through the decades since its debut in 1964 Fiddler has conjured up a fantasy world of the hardscrabble peasant life—make no mistake about it, most Jews were peasants in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, the restricted zone to which Jews were confined by the tsars. Nevertheless, they no doubt loved Mother Russia and were truly saddened when uprooted from their homes. Even those who came to America shared fond memories with their descendants.

Jesse Green wrote the Yiddish version of Fiddler evoked the “sound of my own grandparents and all they lost in leaving their Anatevkes.

“Fiddler on the Roof always makes you cry for that loss.”

Yes, tears do flow, but a reality check is in order. Had they stayed in the Pale, Gilda likes to point out, they likely would have perished, if not during World War I, surely during the second world war. 

So, I’m going to give the tsar a pass. Not a blessing, and surely not the kiss of friendship, or is it fealty, proffered by Donald Trump to Russia’s current nominal tsar, Vladimir Putin. 

Jesse Green and millions of other Jews in America, Israel and numerous countries around the globe are alive today because the rabbi’s blessing to keep the tsar far away fell on deaf ears. Or, perhaps, God took the request literally and arranged the mass emigration of his chosen people to safer lands not ruled by a tsar. 

Far-fetched? Could be. But as The Times headline observed, “Fiddler in Yiddish? Sounds Crazy, Nu?”

Celebrating My Mother's Centennial Birthday

Were she still alive, my mother, Sylvia Margaret Gerson Forseter, would have turned 100 Saturday, November 11. You’ll notice I did not say she would have celebrated her centennial. It would not be incorrect nor disrespectful to say my mother never got much pleasure from turning the page on another year. As different infirmities invaded her body and mind she used to say, “Good health was wasted on the young.” 

That lack of birthday excitement, to my memory, transferred over to celebrations of her husband’s and children’s birthdays, as well, though she did enjoy the spotlight at the bar mitzvah affairs of my brother Bernie and me at the Aperion Manor on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. And she got a kick out of turning our home’s basement into a dance hall for our sister Lee’s Sweet 16 party.

Mom had a ribald sense of humor. If she saw you yawning she would say, “You wouldn’t be so tired if you slept at night instead of fooling around, but then sleep isn’t as much fun.”

On her night table at various times one could find a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, risqué reading for the 1950s and 1960s.

Whenever a movie starring Tyrone Power was shown on television she would say, “He could park his shoes next my bed anytime” (as was the custom of the times, my parents slept in twin beds separated at first by a night table, though eventually the beds were pushed together to simulate a king size bed, albeit with a slight gap between the mattresses to accommodate their wooden frames).

Mom introduced her children to opera at the pre-Lincoln Center Metropolitan Opera House (she took me to see La Traviata and Tosca, the latter starring Renata Tebaldi and Franco Corelli—if you’re not into opera those names wouldn’t mean anything to you. But if you are an opera buff, you’d be envious).

She enjoyed musical theater. She instilled a love of that entertainment genre by taking each of her three children individually to a show each year so that each would feel special not just from the Broadway experience but also from having her solely to ourselves. 

She was, though, slightly snobbish in her reviews. One year Bernie wanted to see Flower Drum Song. But as it contained a modified strip tease scene and Bernie was just 14, she nixed his choice and took him instead to West Side Story. 

In successive years when I was 11 and 12, she took me to Camelot starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet, followed by Kean, a musical about the early 19th century Shakespearian actor Edmund Kean, played by one of her stage heroes, Alfred Drake. Kean garnered so-so reviews. It ran for just 92 performances. Camelot became a semi-classic, with 873 performances on Broadway before being made into a feature film. As we were leaving Kean Mom asked me which play I liked more. I replied Camelot. She did not mask her disappointment in what she considered my plebeian taste. 

Some shows commanded viewing by the whole family. After our parents saw Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel, they bought tickets for Bernie, Lee and me and her older sister, Pola. During intermission between acts, Aunt Pola, who had been sitting in a different section, came by to ask how we were enjoying the show and to say she had laughed so hard during one scene she wet her panties (earthy language not being one of the restraints practiced by our mother and her three sisters). 

Before I was a teenager they took the three of us to see Milk and Honey about the early years of Israel, and Take Me Along with Jackie Gleason, Walter Pidgeon and Robert Morse, a musical adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness. 

Most every night, at 8, Mom would lie down on the living room couch to listen as WVNJ-AM aired a complete musical recording of a Broadway show. Often I would sit with her, enjoying and learning by heart the music and lyrics to scores of shows. Our stereo was stocked with dozens of original cast recordings of Broadway shows.

Those memories reflect one aspect of the vibrant mother I grew up and lived with until she was in her mid-50s and I left home for graduate school, work in Connecticut and marriage to Gilda. She was social and sociable, a gracious hostess and good cook, a theater-goer and poker player, a successful business- and clubwoman, an independent world traveler. About the only thing she could not master was driving a car. 

Much of that persona vanished in her last two decades. I won’t dwell on the reasons why or the effect on her husband, children and grandchildren. She passed away at 78 on February 16, 1996. She left a divided legacy, which is to say, she led a normal life, with ups and downs, triumphs and disappointments, passion—good and bad—toward her family. All in all, a life worth remembering.  

Gentrification Took Its Toll on Broadway

The tale of New York City mayoral indifference to the plight of small business owners as described by Jen Rubin in a Friday op-ed piece in The New York Times struck a chord in me (https://nyti.ms/2vjst86).

Just as Rubin’s dad unsuccessfully sought municipal assistance and relief to forestall the gentrification-based elimination of affordable commercial rents on Broadway’s Upper West Side that was forcing independent shopkeepers to close, my father tried in vain to thwart New York University’s transformation of small apparel manufacturing factories along Broadway north and south of Houston Street into apartment lofts, some for student housing but many for wealthy tenants.

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, my father operated a lingerie factory on Broadway, shifting its location whenever his lease would expire, from 718 Broadway near 8th Street down to 692 Broadway (the old Tower Records building) to 683 Broadway to 611 Broadway at Houston Street (where Crate & Barrel now occupies the ground floor). 

There was a whole community of moderately priced lingerie makers. Nearby, Joe Buchwald had a factory. To me he looked like the character actor James Gleason, a mainstay of films of the 1930s-1940s-1950s. There was Dora the lacemaker, a short, full-bodied woman my father befriended, perhaps because she shared a name with his first love back in Poland before they both sought refuge from Hitler, he to America, she to Australia. At the end of the day, and whenever the factory had to be moved to a new location, there was Sidney, a red-cheeked, always smiling, independent trucker with beefy hands and a fondness for my dad that overlooked his shouting to be quick and make his delivery to the Railway Express drop-off point a few blocks away so his slips and panties could be transported to stores across the country without incurring a late shipment deduction from the invoice.

NYU was the landlord for several of the buildings where my father leased whole floors. Back then NYU converted many of the buildings to loft apartments or studio space for artists. Doing so effectively put out of business many of the small lingerie manufacturers who for decades operated in the area. 

When it was 611 Broadway’s turn to be converted, my dad organized a march on city hall to protest the city’s silence as jobs were sacrificed in the name of gentrification. All the rally did was get him a few seconds on the local news, Channel 7, I believe. He moved his factory to Brooklyn, into the Howard Bros. building just south of the Manhattan Bridge. By then, in the mid-1980s, the lingerie business was not strong, nor was the T-shirt business he has transitioned into. He was losing about $1,000 a month. 

In his mid-70s, he couldn’t abide the thought of losing money. My brother and I counseled against closing the factory. It was, we told him, better therapy than seeing a shrink. It kept him active and out of the house, meaning, not in our mother’s hair 24 hours a day. As she used to say, she married him for breakfast and dinner, not for lunch. They had worked together for some 30 years, he in charge of the factory operations, she in charge of the office. When he ventured into her sanctuary, decibel levels invariably rose. Now in retirement, she had no desire to have him poking around her domestic domain all day. 

Despite our best efforts, he chose to close his business. All he could see was red ink.

Forgetting the Message Behind the Music

Another one died Wednesday.

I can’t say that as I approach my 67th birthday next month I find myself paying more attention to obituary notices. There’s no truth to the cliched joke that I check the obits each morning to make sure I am still alive. Truth is, I’ve always found the recounting of an individual’s life to be among the most fascinating and interesting articles in a newspaper. 

A few years ago, at a luncheon for mostly retired journalists eager to hear Gail Collins, an acquaintance from back in the early 1970s when her husband and I worked at The New Haven Register, I sat next to a veteran reporter from The New York Times. His career covering police and politics had downshifted to part-time work on the obit page. Most of the history of the renowned, he confirmed to me, was pre-written. Only the most recent news of the deceased required immediate input by deadlines made ever tighter because of Internet editions.

No doubt, like many of you, I’ve been startled and saddened by the seemingly weekly revelation that another icon of the rock scene of the 1960s and 1970s has passed away. Not that they were young. David Bowie was 69, Glenn Frey, 67, Paul Kantner, 74, Signe Anderson, 74, and Maurice White, who died Wednesday, was 74. To some it must have been amazing that they lasted as long as they did given the abusive lifestyle many rockers lived decades ago. 

Here’s another truth—I knew few if any of them by name (don’t fret, I knew David Bowie). Oh, I knew their groups, even sang along with many of their songs. However I would not survive the first round of a game show contest if I had to match a band’s name with a specific song.  

But ask me to identify the music from a Broadway show circa 1943-1970 and I’d possibly run the table. Perhaps that’s one reason I so enjoyed Ellie’s star turns in musical theater productions during her teen years, though the plays she performed in were written later than my sweet spot years.

I’m not trying to be sentimental in my appreciation of the music of the deceased and nearly so. Read Timothy Egan’s genre eulogy instead: http://nyti.ms/1UPVA9J.

If you must mourn, lament members of a generation now in their middle age who have forgotten the message behind much of the music of their youth. Love, peace, tolerance, equality. Instead, too many have embraced the message of anger and exclusion espoused by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

I get it. Not everyone was a liberal back in the 1960s. But there outta be a law, or at least an admonition—you can only listen to someone’s music if you share their values. I’m okay not playing Ted Nugent. Let’s check the playlists on Cruz’s and Trump’s iPhones. And those of Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Rick Perry, as well.

Regrets, I've Had a Few

The linked article from Saturday’s NY Times Arts section recounts a music critic’s choice to donate the cello he has owned for more than half his life but has not played in years. It was a moving summation of transition and regrets that for some reason evoked within me pangs of melancholy, nostalgia  and regret (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/arts/music/a-critic-donates-his-cello-his-musical-past-to-wqxr.html?ref=arts&_r=0). 

I regret never having learned to play an instrument (and, as a parent, never having insisted my children take lessons). For a short time in my childhood we had an upright piano in our living room. It was for my sister, Lee. The piano teacher came to our home just often enough for our parents to realize it was a waste of time and money. The ability to bang out “Chopsticks” was not a sound return on investment.

My brother, sister and I never took up another instrument, nor, to my knowledge, did any of our friends. Until, that is, my best friend, Lenny Dorfman, worked one summer as a counselor in a day camp after either his freshman or sophomore year at SUNY Stony Brook. To garner larger tips, Lenny had been counseled that he needed a shtick, something to make his campers distinguish him in the eyes of their parents. So he self-taught himself to play the guitar and, this being the summer of 1967 or 1968, the harmonica, which he propped up in front of his cheeks à la Bob Dylan. 

It was a transformational experience. Lenny had entered Stony Brook to study physics. He graduated a music major. He learned to play piano. He grew an Afro. He performed under the name Len Gary, Gary being his middle name.  He wrote his own songs, though he could barely carry a tune. 

One thing Lenny didn’t want to carry was an Army-issued rifle in Vietnam, so after graduation in 1970 he opted to go to Canada to avoid the draft. He taught music in Windsor, outside Detroit, returning to New York only after a draft evasion amnesty had been extended. Last time I checked he was teaching music on Long Island.

Unlike Lenny, or my children, I regret never having the college dormitory experience. Brooklyn College was a commuter school. Most evenings I ate dinner with my parents. My year in graduate school in Syracuse I spent in a rented apartment, not a dorm. I guess I had enough communal living from 15 years of sleepaway summer camp. 

I regret not living in an apartment in Manhattan.

I regret being too timid to cast myself forward for parts in camp and school musicals. I knew the scores of most Broadway shows, but couldn’t overcome my fear of failing to remember dialogue and embarrassing myself. I was on stage just twice, when I was 13. For a camp talent show I sang “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. Later that summer I was Rusty Charlie in the opening number of Guys and Dolls. I was one of three gamblers in “Fugue for Tinhorns” handicapping horses. My horse showed a lot of class; his great grandfather was Equipoise. Only trouble was, I could never learn to harmonize with the other singers. My Broadway dreams finished out of the money. (By a cruel coincidence, The Times also carried an article Saturday on a one-time benefit concert performance of Guys and Dolls performed last Thursday at Carnegie Hall. The article began with a tribute to "Fugue for Tinhorns.")

No doubt there are other regrets I could share, but that’s enough for this post. Besides, for every regret there’s a counterpoint of triumph. Attending Brooklyn College meant I met and married Gilda. No regrets there.

Fifty Years Ago Today

I was sitting in art class on Friday, November 22, 1963. Mrs. Franzblau was the teacher. No doubt, my high school sophomore classmates were like most of our predecessors. We made fun of her. We paid little attention to her. We giggled a lot and bantered a lot during the art exercises she tried to get us to master.

Suddenly, the loud speaker on the wall at the front of the room crackled with static. It was a few minutes after one pm. An announcement was made that the president had been shot in Dallas. All students were to return to their home rooms for subsequent early dismissal.

I'm an early baby boomer, born three years into the population explosion of 1946-1964 when more than 76 million gained entry onto the nation’s census rolls. I'm therefore bemused when the John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination is portrayed as one of the defining moments of my cohorts. Truly, few of them were old enough to fully comprehend its significance. Bill Flanagan, born in 1955, a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning, said the death of JFK resonated so powerfully with those who were kids at the time because “it was the moment our parents went from believing in all the great things that were going to be, to regretting what might have been.”

It’s a nice turn of phrase, but I’m too basic a person to wallow in the psychology of the moment. I can’t say I remember my parents moping about the assassination, though they were deeply disturbed by it. It didn’t stop my father and mother from working hard in their small manufacturing business, from prodding their three children to excel in school. Like most families that fateful weekend, we watched the round-the-clock network coverage. I seem to recall being home from school Monday and watching the funeral on television. Yet it would not be until 1968, when Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were felled by assassins’ bullets, that sudden, unimaginable tragedy struck a more intimate chord within me. By then I was 19, a sophomore in college this time, old enough to recognize and fully comprehend racism, intolerance and inequality, old enough to worry about the war in Vietnam and what the prolonged conflict might mean to me, personally, if I were drafted when my college deferment expired. 

That’s not to say I was oblivious to national and international events as a younger teenager. I can recall watching Kennedy’s press conferences, at least the ones he held late in the afternoon after I returned home from school. I remember watching on television our United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, use aerial photographs to expose the buildup of Russian missiles in Cuba. Did I think the world was about to come to an end? Probably not. It was more like a war game being played out before our very eyes as we saw our navy intercept Russian freighters on the high seas. It was only later we learned how close to the brink of annihilation the world had come.

A wasted world is what is lamented at the end of Camelot, the Lerner and Loewe musical of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that opened on Broadway in December 1960, a month after Kennedy’s election victory over Richard Nixon (the show closed January 5, 1963, 11 months before the president’s fateful trip to Dallas, and, coincidentally, my father’s birthday). 

Jacqueline Kennedy depicted her husband’s presidency with lyrics from the last song of Camelot, “a brief shining moment.” Just months after it opened, I saw the original Broadway production of Camelot, starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet and Roddy McDowall. Each year my parents, usually our mother, would take my brother, sister and me, individually, to a Broadway musical. I loved Camelot. My mother gave it mixed reviews. The next year we saw Kean, about the life and loves of Edmund Kean, the noted 19th century Shakespearean actor. I hated it. My mother loved it, partly because it starred Broadway legend Alfred Drake. I remember my mother favorably comparing Kean to Camelot. The public agreed with me. Kean closed after 92 performances, Camelot after 873. 

Street Scene, Death By Stiletto, Drive Time and Hiding Out in Plain Sight

Sylvia Sidney was my father’s favorite actress. Perhaps that explained part of my mother’s attraction to him. Her name was Sylvia as well. My mother did not reciprocate. Kopel, or Karl, was not among her heartthrob names. Like most women in the 1930s and early 1940s, she was partial to Clark Gable. She also favored Tyrone Power. When she’d see one of Powers’ movies, with his dark, languorous eyes and chiseled veneer, she’d say, “He could park his slippers beside my bed, anytime.” 

But back to Sylvia Sidney. A few years ago I watched Street Scene, a 1931 movie about life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Though not the lead, Sylvia Sidney had a central role as a daughter seeking escape from the tenements to a better life. Much of the movie, adapted by Elmer Rice from his Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name, takes place on the stoops outside a walk-up apartment building.

As The NY Times reported last Friday, streets in Park Slope, Brooklyn, hardly resemble “a mean quarter of New York,” as Rice described the venue of his work. But that didn’t stop the Brave New World Repertory Theater from choosing the front of 568-570 Fifth Street from serving as the backdrop for a street theater production of Street Scene this past weekend (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/nyregion/with-the-street-as-a-stage-a-fictional-murder-plays-out-in-brooklyn.html?_r=0). 

Why do I bring this to your attention? Because 568 Fifth Street is where our daughter Ellie and husband Donny live. If you’ve taken the time to open up the link provided, you’d have seen a woman perched in the window to the right. That’s the window of Ellie and Donny’s apartment!

Some who saw Ellie perform as a teenager always thought she would make it to Broadway. She chose not to pursue that line of work. At least her apartment window has made its mark on Broadway, er, Off-Off-Off Broadway. 

Did anyone else find it salaciously ironic that just days before The Times ran a story in its Thursday Styles section entitled, "Going Toe-to Toe in Stilettos", about over-the-top designer shoe sales at Bergdorf Goodman and other fashionable emporiums, a Houston woman was arrested for allegedly killing her boyfriend by piercing his head, repeatedly, with her stiletto heels? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/ana-lilia-trujillo-stiletto-stabbing_n_3417097.html

None of the articles I saw detailed how long the stiletto heels were. 

There’s an old saying, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Gilda and I found this out last Friday on our way north to visit Dan, Allison and our grandchildren. 

We thought we left pre-rush hour, around 2:30 pm. But no sooner did we hit the Connecticut border on the Merritt Parkway that traffic backed up almost to a standstill. We checked our car’s  and our phones’ GPS traffic reports. The highway would be turtle-like for miles on end. So we opted to try to beat the system by taking back roads past the tie-up. 

Mistake. It took us more than an hour to go what normally takes 15 minutes. Wherever we turned, local streets or the Connecticut Turnpike, we got stuck. A three-hour ride to Massachusetts took five hours. Had we just plodded along on the Merritt, I’m sure we could have shaved, oh, maybe 30 minutes off that time. But then, we wouldn’t have seen the back roads of Greenwich and Stamford and wondered about the people who could afford to live in mansion after mansion.

Traffic, or more to the point, inconsiderate drivers, are becoming the bain of Gilda’s daily commute home up the Harlem River Drive. She expects traffic from cars headed toward the George Washington Bridge. They should be in the left and center lanes. But those going to the end of the Drive, as Gilda does before crossing the Harlem River on the Fordham Road Bridge, expect the right lane to be free of GWB commuters. Not. Too many of those New Jersey bound are clogging the right lane, waiting to dart into the center lane at the last possible moment. Trouble is, when the center lane is locked down tight, they wind up jamming the right lane and making it impossible for Gilda and her fellow northern travelers to pass gently on their way home. What is normally a 45 minute ride can turn into a two hour-plus end-of-the-day-hell, as it did last Thursday. Arghh!!!

There’s another old saying, not as common as the previous reference but still appropriate to recent news: “hiding in clear view” or its alternate, “hiding in plain sight”. 

Those descriptions come to mind because of the trial of Boston organized crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger who evaded detection and arrest by the FBI for 16 years. He was nabbed two years ago only after an alert neighbor in Santa Monica, Calif., tipped off authorities. 

Bulger’s case preceded the latest claim that an alleged Ukrainian Nazi war criminal has been hiding in plain sight in Minnesota since 1949. According to an Associated Press investigation, “94-year-old Michael Karkoc entered the U.S. in 1949 by lying to American authorities about his role in the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, which is accused of torching villages and killing civilians in Poland.”

 Let’s leave it to the judicial systems of the United States, Germany and Poland to determine the veracity of the claims and denials. But my family can tell you from experience that choosing Minnesota to hide out in plain sight was a smart choice.

In the early 1920s Jack Fursetzer, a cousin of my father, came to New York. Illegally. Within a short time he was alerted to a roundup of illegal aliens planned by immigration authorities. He asked an acquaintance where would be a good place to hide. Minnesota, he was told.

Off he went to the wilds of the upper Midwest, specifically Minneapolis. He changed his name to Brushman; he switched back to Fursetzer after an amnesty was declared and he became a legal citizen. He started a furrier business, married and had six children. 

Vertically Challenged and Red Ink

When you’re almost a foot taller than your wife, standing straight has its challenges. Unlike Fred and Ginger, we don’t dance cheek to cheek, even when Gilda wears heels. Where to hang pictures on the wall is a quandary. Her eye level is way below mine. Gilda raises the bathroom shade a mere 22”. I prefer a more comfortable 33”, so that I don’t have to bend over like a hunchback to peer outside.

My father used to tell his children to stand up straight and walk with shoulders thrust back so we wouldn’t bend over. I think he was reacting to the many hunched over men and women he saw in his youth in Poland. He didn’t want us to turn into hunchbacks. Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews have a tendency to suffer from scoliosis, a condition Gilda sees quite often among Hasidic patients who come to the spine surgery practice where she works. It’s a curable condition if caught early enough. 

I’m not really in danger of becoming a latter day Quasimodo, but I do sometimes envy those couples who are more vertically compatible.

Speaking of my father, I thought of him the other week when New York University received City Council approval to expand its Greenwich Village campus despite opposition from community groups and even members of its own faculty who feared the project would alter the character of the neighborhood. According to an article in The NY Times, “University officials argued that if they could not build on that parcel, they would have to continue buying up, tearing down or converting buildings, which would further damage the neighborhood’s character and infuriate residents.”

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, my father operated a lingerie factory on Broadway, shifting its location whenever his lease would expire, from 718 Broadway near 8th Street down to 692 Broadway (the old Tower Records building) to 683 Broadway to 611 Broadway at Houston Street (where Crate & Barrel now occupies the ground floor). NYU was the landlord for several of those buildings. Back then they converted many of the buildings in the area to loft apartments or office space. Doing so effectively put out of business many of the small lingerie manufacturers who for decades operated in the area. 

When it was 611 Broadway’s turn to be converted, my father organized a march on city hall. All the rally did was get him a few seconds on the local news, Channel 7, I believe. He moved his factory to Brooklyn, into the Howard Bros. building just south of the Manhattan Bridge. By then, in the mid-1980s, the lingerie business was not strong, nor was the polo shirt business he has transitioned into. He was losing about $1,000 a month. In his mid-70s, he couldn’t abide the thought of losing money. My brother and I counseled against closing the factory. It was, we told him, better therapy than seeing a shrink. It kept him active and out of the house, meaning, not in our mother’s hair 24 hours a day. As she used to say, she married him for breakfast and dinner, not for lunch. They had worked together for some 30 years, he in charge of the factory operations, she in charge of the office. When he ventured into her sanctuary, decibel levels invariably rose. Now in retirement, she had no desire to have him poking around her domestic domain all day. 

Despite our best efforts, he chose to close his business. All he could see was red ink. 

New York in 10 Objects

If you had to pick 10 objects that told the story of New York City, actual items that could fit into a museum, not pictures of them, what would they be?

This exercise is not original to me. It’s an admitted rip-off of a feature from the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, the public radio station that is part of the National Public Radio network. In turn, the Lopate show was inspired by a BBC and British Museum series it is in the middle of broadcasting depicting the History of the World in 100 Objects.

Submissions to the Lopate Show had to be in by 5 pm Friday, February 10, so I’ve missed the deadline. Thus I’ve no need to keep my selections secret. Nor do I have to restrict my nominees to 10. To get the public started, Lopate offered three suggestions—an elevator from the Empire State Building, a bagel and a subway token.

Here are my choices for objects peculiarly New York in character with historical and/or social significance (I’ve restricted myself to items available from 1900 going forward, though some may have originated earlier). See if you agree and can cull them down to the 10 most significant. Or you can add your own iconic items. My Top 10 picks are at the bottom:

1. Slice of New York-style pizza
2. Nathan’s hot dog
3. Car from Coney Island’s Cyclone ride
4. Playbill from a Broadway show
5. Bloomingdale’s big b brown shopping bag
6. Interlocking N-Y Yankees logo on a baseball cap
7. Front page of the New York Times
8. Central Park bench
9. Checker taxi cab
10. Steel girder from the World Trade Center
11. Statue of the Wall Street bull
12. Ticker tape
13. The marquee of Harlem’s Apollo Theater
14. Art deco frieze from Radio City Music Hall
15. Sewing machine work station from the garment district
16. Manolo Blahnik shoe from Sex and the City
17. Ralph and Alice Cramden’s main room from The Honeymooners TV show
18. Ellis Island immigration stamp
19. A New Year’s Eve ball dropped at Times Square
20. TKTS theater booth
21. The detectives room from Law & Order TV show
22. Lions in front of the 42nd Street Public Library
23. Inside of a tenement apartment from the Lower East Side
24. A montage of magazine covers including Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, New York, The New Yorker, Time, Life, People, Look
25. Street sign of Madison Avenue
26. Menu from The Four Seasons or some other iconic restaurant
27. The steps in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
28. Part or whole Staten Island ferry
29. A bodega
30. Jackie Robinson’s cleats
31. Willie Mays’ baseball cap
32. Babe Ruth’s bat
33. Neon lights of Broadway
34. Fashion show runway
35. Pushcart
36. Looped showing of Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan”

My Top 10:
4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 19, 23, 24, 30,