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Snippets

The bride and groom were having their pictures taken outside the Plaza Hotel while the rest of the wedding party stood in clumps twenty-five yards away. The bridesmaids were cold in their ankle-length, bare-shouldered gowns. The dresses were all black. I wondered whether black was now the fashionable choice for bridesmaids.

I was given that hearing test where a device inserted in the ear emits pitches at different strengths and frequencies. When I was through raising my hand, the medical assistant said, “You have good hearing.” I said, “That’s not always what my wife says.” The assistant laughed. Spotting a ring, I asked, “Does your husband think your hearing is good?” She laughed again and said, “When I get home my hearing gets worse.”

When the annual physical was concluded, I was pleased when the doctor said, “You are in good shape.” Then after a pause, he added the disconcerting qualifier: “For a person your age.”

Nathan was going into university teaching and asked the difference between teaching undergraduate and graduate students. I said, “You expect undergrads to know nothing. With grad students, you are always surprised that they know nothing.”

I know that smell is good part of what we consider taste. But why is it that sushi tastes better when eaten with chopsticks rather than a fork?

I went to a production at the Public Theatre and thought of what Fran Lebowitz said, “Having been unpopular in high school is not cause for book publication.” Having what you think was an “interesting” or “troubled” or “unusual” upbringing does not mean that you can write a good play about it.

Waiting in a slow-moving line at a smoked fish place, the dog with the person in front of me came over to me. As always, I put the back of my hand in front of the dog’s nose. After sniffing the dog stood still. The owner said, “He wants you to scratch his head.” I wondered if this was the owner’s first dog or if she thought that in my long life I had never encountered a dog before.

In the bookstore, I extended the back of my hand to a dog and started scratching behind his ears. He jumped up on me in a friendly, doggy way. I said, “You’re easy.” The owner smiled and said, “He is that way with everyone.” I joked, “You could at least pretend that I am special.” Without missing a beat she said, “I have never seen him doing that before. He must really like you.”

She mistook the spouse for someone else. We were sitting on a bench at the confluence of several streets. She told us her name was Louise, but added it was really Phylis Louise. She was from South Carolina but had left when she was seventeen. She was last back there in 1996 and had found that her little crossroads town had changed. She said that she was 84 but that she was unsure of her birthday. The midwife said October 8 while her mother had said November 8. Her father could not read but when he was finally allowed to vote, he quickly placed an X and registered as a Democrat. Louise said, “They say that South Carolina is red, but not all of it.” 

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The Enduring Peter Brook

I never met him. I don’t think I ever even saw him, but Peter Brook, who died earlier this month at the age of 97, influenced my life.

I did not go to live theater growing up…unless a high school production of Our Town counts. Perhaps there were other forgotten school shows. Did the town have a community theater? I don’t remember it. But there was no professional theater, and our family was not the sort of family that would go to the larger city to see any.

In college, however, I took a course in modern drama. We saw a few classic movies—I remember M and Treasure of the Sierra Madre–but mostly we read plays. I found almost every one of them interesting, and I still remember many of them. On the other hand, I don’t remember any specific lecture by Alan Downer, the professor. They must have been informative, however, for I feel as though I have a fairly solid grasp of the development of modern drama, and that had to come from him.

There was a professional theater associated with the university, and I remember seeing Hedda Gabler, and I probably saw other productions, and I do remember seeing a roommate in a student presentation of Mother Courage. Playgoing, however, was akin to hearing the Modern Jazz Quartet, going to a ballet, or attending a fencing match; I had not experienced these things growing up, and I wanted to. I certainly had not yet learned the real power of the stage.

That changed soon after I moved to New York, and it came about because of Peter Brook. I was lucky enough to attend his now legendary Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I learned that night that a script can be read, but that a play must be seen. This was not Shakespeare of the drab printed word, but the creation of a magical world on the stage. It drew me in. It was more immediate than any movie could ever be. It required live actors, a stage, and an audience. And a special director who used a nearly bare stage, trapezes, unexpectedly outrageous costume, twirly thingies that glowed in the dark and produced an ethereal sound. I laughed out loud, was moved, and learned that the theater could present an experience that could not be had anywhere else.

I have now seen a half-dozen or more of Peter Brook’s other theatrical productions, some in the last few years since The Brooklyn Academy of Music, and The Theatre for a New Audience, a block away from BAM, were his American homes. They are both mere blocks from my own home. Each production that I have seen had something of interest that could only be done with live actors on the stage.

I was lucky enough to experience another of Brook’s legendary efforts, The Mahabharata, the production that christened the opening of The Harvey Theater at BAM. In the heyday of movie palaces, the building had been one of those gilded theaters, but, like almost all of them, it had closed as TV rose to prominence. It became a bowling alley, I am told. However, I had only known it as a bricked up, decrepit building like many of its neighbors.

The Brooklyn Academy, in collaboration with Brook, decided to turn it into a live theater in the mid-1980s but not into a sleek, modern space with plush seats. Instead, Brook liked the look of decay the place had. The cracked plaster and paint-peeling walls remained. Backless, hardwood benches were installed because this was what Brook wanted for his staging of the ancient Sanskrit epic.

For some theatergoers, Peter Brook is such a powerful figure that they claim to have seen his Dream when they could not have. I think of that when I claim to have seen his Mahabharata. Those benches (subsequently replaced with human seating) were unbearable for a one-act play; the Mahabharata was a seven, or perhaps nine, or maybe even an eleven-hour play. (One could attend it over several days.) I don’t know its actual length because I did not make it to its conclusion. I am only confident that it did end because I have been to that theater many times since, and The Mahabharata is not still on the stage. The seats were uncomfortable, yes, but following the complex interaction of gods and humans was dizzying, and the spouse and I had little idea what was going on. At a break in the “action” (were there even intermissions?) the spouse and I sneaked out, forgetting that where we exited was also a place where actors gathered awaiting their entrances. As we embarrassedly slipped by them, in the days before cellphones, I nonsensically mumbled, “Babysitter problems” to explain our departure.

So I learned from Peter Brook that theater could be magical and produce an experience that could not be had elsewhere. There have been many more special moments since I started going to plays, and there have been many special productions. I now go to the theater a couple dozen times a year, and something important or magical or special does not always happen, but it happens often enough that I continue going. And I thank Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for initiating me into the joys of the theater.

But I also learned from Peter Brook that theater sometimes comes with uncomfortable seats and puzzling plots. Then, you just have to get up and go home.

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Lenape Land on 42nd Street

I saw This Space Between Us last week, a funny, touching, and thought-provoking play written by Peter Gil-Sheridan and performed by a strong ensemble of six. The play was presented by the Keen Company, one of the many theater organizations in New York City.

As I have written about before, I read and save Playbills. Search Results for “playbill” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog) This one had a multi-page insert that briefly told me about the Keen Company and more extensively about the foundations and individuals who have given money to it, how I could donate to the Company, and how the audience could promote the play. All this was ordinary stuff, the usual kind of information in a Playbill.

What was different, however, was a paragraph headed Land Acknowledgement, which told me that I was “in New York City, which is the traditional land of the Lenape people. Keen Company recognizes the long history of the territory we occupy, and its significance for the indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live and work here. We pay our respects and gratitude to the Elders, both past and present, for their stewardship of this region.”

I did not completely understand this. What did stewardship of this region entail? Was this stewardship ongoing? Was it a reference to a particular plot of ground that encompassed 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues where the theater is? Or did it refer to the time when the Lenape lived as a people on lands in the Northeast?

So what was the point to this wokeness? Lenape were forced from their lands in the Northeast almost two centuries ago and even earlier for Manhattan. Driven further and further west, they are now largely in five different tribes located in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Does this paragraph in a Playbill insert for an off-Broadway production make the Lenape living far from New York City feel better?

I also wondered if the paragraph fit with what is supposed to be the mission of the theater company and the theme of the play that I saw. The Playbill stated that “Keen Company is an award-winning Off-Broadway theatre creating story-driven work that champions identification and connection. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, the company tells stories about the decisive moments that change us.” Did that paragraph about the Lenape champion identification and connection and was it about a decisive moment that changes us? If so, I did not see it. I did not feel any more decisively connected with the Lenape after reading Land Acknowledgement than I had been before.

And This Space Between Us made me question the paragraph further. In the play, Ted, a vegan, corrects the political incorrectness of others and is fond of saying, “You can’t just talk the talk, you must walk the walk.” Jamie, Ted’s partner, announces that he wants to walk the walk and is leaving his high paid legal job to work for an NGO that tries to better lives in Eritrea. At the core of this amusing and touching play is walking the walk and how mere talk accomplishes little. I could not see how the smug Lenape paragraph truly advanced anything. It seemed simply to talk the talk.

The Keen Company could have tried to get its audience to take a step or two. It at least could have told us that there is a Lenape Center in New York and urged us to visit and support it. We might have been told that the Brooklyn Public Library has been holding programs featuring some Lenape people whose ancestors were forced to Oklahoma and Wisconsin. And the paragraph might have said that there is an exhibition about the Lenape curated by Lenape at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Instead, we got only that the Keen Company paid their respects and gratitude to non-defined Elders, and I thought, as I do about many politically correct statements, that it is not expected or even meant to accomplish anything other than to make the speakers or writers feel better about themselves.

This Space Between Us, however, is worth seeing.

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Round and Round (or Is it Oval and Oval?)

          I have not kept my usual posting schedule this week because of Covid, not because I caught it but because a friend did. He got it just after the woman he lived with died suddenly. Bob teaches at Columbia University and had already cancelled a class because of the death. He knew that he could not teach this week because of Covid but did not want to cancel another class, and he asked me if I would teach it. I, of course, assented. I had familiarity with the First Amendment material that had been assigned, but I having never taught it before and wanting to do an acceptable job for Bob and the students, I spent a lot of hours preparing for the class, hours that I otherwise would have spent on posts for this blog. Thus, the posting schedule got disrupted.

          However, this week I also got in a conversation with two friends, one of whom had attended roller derby. I told them that I had written about that topic a few years ago, and they expressed an interest in what I wrote, so I am re-posting that essay.

          We all should know more about roller derby.

Round and Round, or Is It Oval and Oval?

          Jerry Seltzer died. I did not know of him before his death, but his obituary brought back memories; he was instrumental in the roller derby I watched many times on television and once in person.

          Roller derby was invented by Jerry’s father, Leo Seltzer, in 1935 in Chicago. Originally it was an endurance activity, akin to walkathons and dance marathons, but this proved too boring, and Leo, with advice from the writer Damon Runyon, created rules for a competitive, contact sport. Two teams of five roller skaters at a time circled a banked track. Skaters at the back of the pack had to get to the front and then lap the remaining skaters earning a point for every lapped skater on the opposing team. The other skaters elbowed and body-checked their opponents to help their teammates pass and score.

          Early television, short on programming, featured roller derby several times a week. This led to an overexposure and a declining interest, and the sport seemed all but dead when Jerry took over from his father. He taped the contests, and through innovative use of television syndication, built up interest in roller derby again. He used a shorter track, 100 feet, with more banking that allowed for better viewing. The new track could be put up and taken down quickly, and this allowed roller derby to make one-night stops in towns where the television ratings showed that it was popular.

          Jerry Seltzer’s efforts resurrected roller derby. Half a decade after he took it over from his father, he had it back in Madison Square Garden where it had last appeared more than a dozen years earlier. Its popularity surged with crowds of upwards of 19,000 and even more when he held it in baseball stadiums.

          Roller derby occupied the ground between spectacle and sport. It was fast with body-checking that sent skaters on their asses and over guard rails. Fights were common as were arguments with referees. Roller derby was more integrated than many other sports. There were all colors, but the unusual aspect of roller derby was that teams consisted of both men and women. Each team had ten skaters. Five men would race and elbow five men from the other team, and then five women would take the track against five women, and those women were just as physical as the men. I don’t know if they were paid equally, but the women were an equal part of the team, something that was not true in other sports. As a result, unlike many sporting events where few women attended, roller derby attracted both male and female spectators who cheered and booed the skaters of both sexes.

          For me, the biggest star was a woman, Joanie Weston. She was instantly identifiable. She always wore a scarf and had strawberry blonde hair. Weston was five feet ten and weighed 165 pounds, and every ounce of her radiated athleticism. Her skating was fast, and her powerful elbows and hips sent opponents flying. She was as well-known as any woman athlete of her era, but the figure skating or tennis crowd who knew Peggy Fleming or Billie Jean King seldom crossed paths with the blue-collar folk who watched roller derby.

          Other than watching her prowess on the track, I did not think much about the rest of her life until I read her 1997 obituary after she died at 62 from Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare brain disorder. I learned she excelled in every sport she tried. As a college softball player, she batted .730 one season and hit eight home runs in a single game, but there were few sports then in which women could make a living. She ended up in roller derby, but I was pleased to learn that she loved it and made a good living.

          Years ago, I did not have to watch much roller derby on TV to doubt whether it was a real sport. There were good guys and bad guys with raucous interviews and taunts. No one ever seemed to get more than momentarily hurt in the frequent fights. And the contest was invariably decided in the last jam, as the scrum of skaters was called. The roots of roller derby may have been in endurance walking and dancing, but it had settled into a pro wrestling mold.

          But it was still fun to watch. The great writer Frank Deford was right when he wrote that not watching it “just because you knew the Bombers would prevail on the last jam was like not going to watch Dame Margot Fonteyn dance Aurora because you knew how ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ would turn out.” (The pro wrestler Ric Flair would bristle when someone would say that pro wrestling was fake. “It’s not fake,” he said. “It’s choreographed.” At least from my understanding of pro wrestling, Flair, who never seemed humble, was being modest in this instance. The opening segment of a wrestling match is scripted, but then the wrestlers have to improvise, and since Flair had many matches of a half hour and longer, this improv took great skill and stamina until the final moments of the bout came, which were choreographed.)

          The obituary of Jerry Seltzer who popularized roller derby made me recall the days I watched roller derby and the time in winter of 1968 I went to a match. I was in law school in Chicago, and a friend and I decided to go to the roller derby at the Chicago Coliseum. This was fitting since it was at the Coliseum where roller derby began in 1935 (the year Joan Weston was born). Roller derby always had a derelict air to me, and it was fitting that we took a bus on a dreary, cold night through almost barren streets. I spied a pawnshop or payday lender. Foot high, golden letters on its front window proclaimed, “WE TRUST YOU!” The words were mostly obscured by a rusting, pulldown gate. Things had apparently changed since the sign had been painted.

          I only learned later about the Coliseum’s distinguished history. It had hosted five Republican National Conventions in the first part of the twentieth century. Six months after my roller derby attendance it also hosted a different kind of political gathering–an anti-Vietnam War rally in the days shortly before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That memorable gathering was held at a different Chicago venue, the International Amphitheatre located, not unfittingly, adjacent to the Union Stock Yards.

I attended that 1968 anti-Vietnam War Coliseum rally. In those counterculture days, nothing seemed to have been planned for the event—anarchic might best describe it. I remember little of what occurred except that Allen Ginsberg sat cross-legged on the stage endlessly intoning “OM.” I quickly got bored and left. I went to the car I had purchased since my previous Coliseum visit and started to drive to my apartment. A police car followed me, and I was pulled over after a few blocks. Two smirking cops came over, and I rolled down a window. I had been driving carefully, and I knew that this was not a traffic stop. In this land of liberty, they had been staking out the gathering that was exercising free speech and assembly and started asking me about what was occurring at the rally. I gave some monosyllabic replies. As I wondered where this was heading, they asked what I did, and I answered that I was a law student. They shot nervous glances at each other and soon departed. I was as happy as I ever was for being in law school.

But my first visit, in 1968, to the Chicago Coliseum was not about war and peace, the future of the country, divisions in the land, or police spying on citizens; it was only about the battle that was roller derby. My friend and I had seats in the first row of the balcony. We could see all of the track and the spectators on the far side but not those directly underneath us. The crowd nearly filled the seats, folding chairs on the track level. Many in attendance knew all the names of the skaters and jeered many of them, forcefully shouting out shortcomings about their skills, courage, and looks. This was a different Chicago from my rather circumspect law school neighborhood. It was fun.

I cannot tell you the names of the teams or the skaters, but it was exciting watching them zoom around the oval with bodies and taunts flying. Fights broke out time and again, and the crowd was into it even though to this skeptical eye the fisticuffs looked staged. Late into the match a “bad guy” was on top of a “good guy” flailing away right underneath us. And then something unexpected happened. The skaters who were all over the track started rapidly converging towards the fight, but they were not looking at the combatants. They were fixed on the audience where a man came into our sight holding a folding chair with two hands above his head. He started to bring it down on the back of the villain, but, as I had seen many times on TV, the hero threw his opponent off him to reverse the fight. In that split second, the chair came down on the face and chest of the unprotected good guy with blood gushing from his nose and mouth. This no longer looked fake; the blood was real. The skaters, enemies a moment earlier, circled together like a wagon train shooting nervous glances into the audience to see if they needed protection from any other crazies. None appeared, and the chair swinger was manhandled off by security.

The action was delayed for only a few minutes as the injured skater with what appeared to be a broken nose was helped to the locker room and the blood was cleaned up. I don’t know who won, but I do remember that it was on the final jam.

A few years later, the Coliseum closed, and a few years after that, the sport, or whatever it was, died. However, shortly after this century began, roller derby was again revived. I have read that there are hundreds of leagues throughout the world. I have seen the present version advertised and have seen it on some obscure TV channel once or twice. It now seems to be solely a woman’s sport with the hint of pro wrestling and camp remaining, most obviously in the colorful, pun-filled names of the athletes, but perhaps it is truly a legitimate sport now. There is no reason why it couldn’t be. It has athleticism and strategy. But I have not gone to a match. Perhaps, I thought, it is time for another visit to roller derby. I investigated and found that there is a league in New York City, the Gotham Girls, with teams representing the various boroughs. The league, which was on a winter hiatus, was scheduled to begin again in April. I made plans to go to the opening event, and then the pandemic hit. The new season’s opening day was cancelled, but I hope that roller derby has another resurrection. I would like to see the updated version.

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His Honor’s House (concluded)

A summary of Samuel Booth’s Brooklyn mayoralty asserted that it left no “especial mark,” but that conclusion was not completely accurate. Booth set in motion projects that are an integral part of Brooklyn today. As the Landmarks Commission noted, Booth “initiated a plan for a comprehensive park system.” The park commissioners appointed Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of Central Park and Prospect Park, to the task of laying out the new parks, and the result of many of the Olmsted and Vaux plans can be seen today, including in the vicinity of our house. At the urgings of Walt Whitman, who was then editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fort used in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, was turned into a park in the 1840s. By the end of the Civil War, it had deteriorated. After approval from the Brooklyn parks commission under Booth, one of the first projects of Olmsted and Vaux was to redesign what is now Fort Greene Park. The result today is an attractive, highly utilized thirty-three acres.

Even when not holding an official position, Booth remained active in civic affairs. His opinions were solicited about an elevated railroad, and the city obtained his testimony about the value of a church building that the municipality wanted. Perhaps most significantly he testified, giving our house as his address, before a commission investigating the Brooklyn Theatre calamity of December 5, 1876. In a hall with about 1,000 of the 1,500 seats occupied, a fire broke out on the side of the stage at about 11 P.M. between the fourth and fifth acts of The Two Orphans starring Kate Claxton. Booth described the narrow stairways, less than seven feet wide, with two right angle turns from the upper reaches. When an emergency exit was opened, patrons from the lower tiers fled into the stairs obstructing them even further. Although the fire department responded quickly, almost three hundred people died in the blaze. The testimony of Booth and others led to safer theaters in a movement headed by the New York Daily Mirror. (Until I read Booth’s testimony, I had never heard of the Brooklyn Theatre tragedy. On the other hand, I have read much about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, which was New York City’s deadliest NYC industrial disaster. That fire had 146 victims. The largest disaster in New York City before 9/11 was the sinking resulting from a fire of the “General Slocum,” a boat ferrying people to a church picnic on June 15, 1904. Of the 1342 people on board, 1021 died.)

While engaged in these various forms of public service and maintaining his own business, he was an active member of the Hanson Place Methodist Epicopal Church, which still exists. He was especially interested in young people and spearheaded that church’s and another church’s Sunday schools.

 Booth retired from active business in 1881. An article about him said that wealth was not his ambition, but he “acquired a comfortable competence.” Retirement gave him additional time to devote to young people. He went to the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York to talk with the warden there, and as a result, he oversaw parolees from that institution who were from Brooklyn. On his death, one newspaper cited this activity as another example of Booth’s “strong sense of Christian duty.”

He died on October 19, 1894, in his then home a few blocks away from ours, where he lived with an unmarried sister, a niece, and her husband. He  did not die in obscurity. The next day a special meeting of the board of alderman presided over by the mayor resolved to attend his funeral and close city offices for a half day. Mayor Charles A. Schieren was quoted as saying, “If ever a man earned a seat in heaven, it was Samuel Booth, for he devoted his entire life to the uplifting of men.” Several aldermen and ex-aldermen also gave kind comments and words of praise.

In the following weeks, eulogies for Samuel Booth were given from pulpits around Brooklyn. Ten days after his death, The Rev. Louis Albert Banks, a famous man in his own right and a prolific author of “uplift” literature, who was then leading the Hanson Place Methodist Episcopal Church, said that Booth was “a man of genuine public spirit. He believed it was his duty, and the duty of all Christian men, to be as faithful to civic obligations as they were to the claims of the church.” Banks emphasized that Booth was Superintendent of the Sunday School and then said, in an unfortunate phrasing that might today bring snickers about the never-married man, “Samuel Booth believed in boys, indeed it might be said he had a passion for boys, and that is why I have called him the boys’ patron saint.”

It was a good life that Samuel Booth led. He was a decent person. Of course, often house owners leave problems for the subsequent owners—asbestos or mold, for example. On the other hand, what I hope is that anyone who enters our house—His Honor’s House—feels the sense of decency that Booth once brought into what is now our home.

And he built a damn fine house!

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You Can’t Get There from Here

Subways are one of New York City’s finest institutions. They can take you anywhere in the City you want to go–if you know how to use them. But they can be a puzzle even to native New Yorkers, and a dark and frightening labyrinth to out-of-towners. I had a chance encounter with some NYC visitors that illustrates my point.

A few years ago I went to a play on 48th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues in Manhattan. I took the 6th Avenue subway from my home in Brooklyn, got out at the 48th Street exit, and walked the half block to the Cort Theatre. Easy peasy. After the play, however, the downtown 48th street entrance to the 6th Avenue subway was closed. I walked a block to the next access, but it, too, was cordoned off for maintenance work. I heard workers on the other side of the taped-up turnstiles say to another frustrated person, “Maybe you can get in at 53rd and 5th.” This is a bit of a walk, and I thought there might be an easier way.

As I was deciding whether to make the hike, five young people were coming down the subway steps. Seeing they could not get in, “What the fuck?” came out. I said, “My words precisely.” I could hear them trying to figure out what to do. Being a helpful New Yorker as so many of us are, I asked them what train they were trying to catch. They said the M or the G. I told them that the G did not run in Manhattan. (Although I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about the subways and a licensed New York City tour guide, the M train remains a mystery to me.) They were trying to go to Brooklyn, as was I. I told them to go to the subway station at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, take any train downtown, transfer at the 4th Street station, catch the A or C train there, and transfer to the G at Hoyt-Schermerhorn. I felt a certain pride in my precision and preceded them on the sidewalk down 6th Avenue. However, when I got to 42nd, I saw a notice that the entire 6th Avenue subway was closed that evening. The group of young people caught up with me. They started to look a little panicky when they saw the closure sign. 

I said that if they were up for a walk (which was clearly going to be necessary), they could go two long blocks over to 8th Avenue on 42nd, which is what I was going to do. As we headed west, I asked where they were from; South Florida was the reply. When pressed for specifics, I heard Boca and Miami. Further probing yielded that they were working on a “food justice” project in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. I asked if they were part of a religious organization. A woman said, “No, this was their college Hillel.” I smiled, as did some of them. 

Another woman fell into step with me and said that although she had lived in Florida since she was ten, she had been born in the Forest Hills section of Queens which she still visited frequently. I guess she was trying to impress me with her urban savviness, but…well, she failed.

I could tell that some of them were distrustful when I did not enter the entrance at 7th Avenue and 42nd Street that bore a sign for the A and C trains. I said that the 8th Avenue train was another block away and the sign led to a tunnel—good when it rained, but the street was better when the weather was nice, and it was a beautiful autumn evening. We kept walking.

When we finally got to the right subway platform, they looked relieved, but for some, that look of relief changed when I told them not to get on the first arriving train, which was a D, a 6th Avenue train that was now running on 8th Avenue tracks and would not take them to their transfer point. This is the sort of gobbledygook that befuddles even the most loyal subway rider. Finally, the correct train for both them and me came and we all boarded.

The guy who seemed most in charge said that he hoped to come back to NYC after graduation from Florida Atlantic University. He was a social work major. I said, “You must not be interested in money.” He replied that both of his parents were social workers.” When we parted ways after twenty minutes on the train, I shook hands with him and said, “Save the world.” I hope he at least found the G train.

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Round and Round, or is it Oval and Oval? (concluded)

          The obituary last summer of Jerry Seltzer who popularized roller derby made me recall the days I watched roller derby and the time in winter of 1968 I went to a match. I was in law school in Chicago, and a friend and I decided to go to the roller derby at the Chicago Coliseum. This was fitting since it was at the Coliseum where roller derby began in 1935 (the year Joan Weston was born). Roller derby always had a derelict air to me, and it was fitting that we took a bus on a dreary, cold night through almost barren streets. I spied a pawnshop or payday lender. Foot high, golden letters on its front window proclaimed, “WE TRUST YOU!” The words were mostly obscured by a rusting, pulldown gate. Things had apparently changed since the sign had been painted.

          I only learned later about the Coliseum’s distinguished history. It had hosted five Republican National Conventions in the first part of the twentieth century. Six months after my roller derby attendance it also hosted a different kind of political gathering–an anti-Vietnam War rally in the days shortly before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That memorable gathering was held at a different Chicago venue, the International Amphitheatre located, not unfittingly, adjacent to the Union Stock Yards.

I attended that 1968 anti-Vietnam War Coliseum rally. In those counterculture days, nothing seemed to have been planned for the event—anarchic might best describe it. I remember little of what occurred except that Allen Ginsberg sat cross-legged on the stage endlessly intoning “OM.” I quickly got bored and left. I went to the car I had purchased since my previous Coliseum visit and started to drive to my apartment. A police car followed me, and I was pulled over after a few blocks. Two smirking cops came over, and I rolled down a window. I had been driving carefully, and I knew that this was not a traffic stop. In this land of liberty, they had been staking out the gathering exercising free speech and assembly and started asking me about what was occurring at the rally. I gave some monosyllabic replies. As I wondered where this was heading, they asked what I did, and I answered that I was a law student. They shot nervous glances at each other and soon departed. I was as happy as I ever was for being in law school.

But my first visit, in 1968, to the Chicago Coliseum was not about war and peace, the future of the country, divisions in the land, or police spying on citizens; it was only about the battle that was roller derby. My friend and I had seats in the first row of the balcony. We could see all of the track and the spectators on the far side but not those directly underneath us. The crowd nearly filled the seats, folding chairs on the track level. Many in attendance knew all the names of the skaters and jeered many of them, forcefully shouting out shortcomings about their skills, courage, and looks. This was a different Chicago from my rather circumspect law school neighborhood. It was fun.

I cannot tell you the names of the teams or the skaters, but it was exciting watching them zoom around the oval with bodies and taunts flying. Fights broke out time and again, and the crowd was into it even though to this skeptical eye the fisticuffs looked staged. Late into the match a “bad guy” was on top of a “good guy” flailing away right underneath us. And then something unexpected happened. The skaters who were all over the track started rapidly converging towards the fight, but they were not looking at the combatants. They were fixed on the audience where a man came into our sight holding a folding chair with two hands above his head. He started to bring it down on the back of the villain, but, as I had seen many times on TV, the hero threw his opponent off him to reverse the fight. In that split second, the chair came down on the face and chest of the unprotected good guy with blood gushing from his nose and mouth. This no longer looked fake; the blood was real. The skaters, enemies a moment earlier, circled together like a wagon train shooting nervous glances into the audience to see if they needed protection from any other crazies. None appeared, and the chair swinger was manhandled off by security.

The action was delayed for only a few minutes as the injured skater with what appeared to be a broken nose was helped to the locker room and the blood was cleaned up. I don’t know who won, but I do remember that it was on the final jam.

A few years later, the Coliseum closed, and a few years after that, the sport, or whatever it was, died. However, shortly after this century began, roller derby was again revived. I have read that there are hundreds of leagues throughout the world. I have seen the present version advertised and have seen it on some obscure TV channel once or twice. It now seems to be solely a woman’s sport with the hint of pro wrestling and camp still remaining, most obviously in the colorful, pun-filled names of the athletes, but perhaps it is truly a legitimate sport now. There is no reason why it couldn’t be. It has athleticism and strategy. But I have not gone to a match. Perhaps, I thought, it is time for another visit to roller derby. I investigated and found that there is a league in New York City, the Gotham Girls, with teams representing the various boroughs. The league, which was on a winter hiatus, was scheduled to begin again in April. I made plans to go to the opening event, and then the pandemic hit. The new season’s opening day was cancelled, but I hope that roller derby has another resurrection. I would like to see the updated version.

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Snippets

          After I came out of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie, Pain and Glory, I thought about the term “adult film.” It is used for movies with graphic depictions of sex even though teens and pre-teens and not particularly mature adults are interested in the subject matter. On the other hand, there are many films where the young and immature do not have the experience, knowledge, or empathy to be drawn into the movie. They are just bored if they go. These are films for adults, which, of course, is quite different from adult films.

          I wonder how many adults knew who Stormy Daniels was before her connection with Donald Trump hit the news. Yet she was identified frequently as an “adult movie star.”

          The first Almodóvar film I saw was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. How many of you thought that the title was redundant? Hold up your hand if you think that question is offensive? How many of you have nail polish on that hand?

Overheard at a Feminist Conference

Sisters, this may sound ominous,

But we all have a touch of the mom in us.

                   Richard Moore

          As I passed two young men on the sidewalk, I heard one demand, “Well, who then brought the urine?” If there was a reply, I was out of earshot.

       I ran into the postal carrier in front of my house. I said that I would take the mail up the stoop and save her some steps. She thanked me, and I asked her how many steps she did during her work. She tapped her watch and said, “According to this, about 16,000.” (Just in case you ever wondered.) I asked her how many flights of steps.  (It is twelve steps up from the sidewalk to my mail slot. Sometimes my Fitbit registers this as a flight of stairs but sometimes, aggravatingly, not.) She said her device did not have flights of stairs.

          I read the handout that I was handed, and parts of it gave me concern about the performance I was about to see. The bio of the playwright said, “He’s been honored to receive commissions and developmental support from institutions like [emphasis added] The Kennedy Center/New Voices New Visions, The Eugene O’Neill Conference, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, and Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency.” I assumed that the playwright had written this. He probably meant that he got support from the listed institutions, but he wrote that he got aid from institutions that were akin to the ones mentioned. My concerns about the production further increased because the artistic director for the theater company wrote, “It is a pleasure to produce a playwright who creates well-defined and complexed [emphasis added] characters.” Is there such a word as “complexed”? Does it mean something different from “complex”? These are people whose careers involve good writing. But in spite of my concerns, the play was quite good.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The spouse asked me what time I wanted to leave to be on time for our restaurant reservation. I answered. She immediately said she wanted to go five minutes earlier, and it was clear that we were going at her preferred time. As I started to ask why she asked me what time I wanted to go, I, of course, knew the answer. If by happenstance I had stated the time when she wanted to go—the time when we would go–she could look like she was merely acquiescing to my wishes.

 

If a mirror flips your image so your left side appears to be your right side, why doesn’t it also flip top and bottom? Why don’t you look as if you are standing on your head when you look in a mirror?

 

The two had co-authored the book of a play I attended. The credit for Leo Schwartz in the Playbill said, “His musical, Till, about Emmett and Mamie Till, won the Mainstreet Musical Theatre Festival in 2016.” The credit for DC Cathro said, “His musical Till, written with award-winning composer Leo Schwartz, was one of three winners in the 2016 Mainstreet Musical Festival.”

 

The Christian radio station gave a few brief Bible readings, although where the sacred words left off and commentary began was not always clear. It also presented short inspirational stories and exhortations. Mostly, however, it played music, and mostly that music fell into the rock category. I remembered back to when rock started. (Alas, I am old enough to remember when “Rocket 88,” Bill Haley, and Elvis Aron were all new.) I recalled how ministers smashed 45s saying that rock was music of the devil. This made me think about how powerful He is. In only the short span ofmy lifetime, He had transformed a genre that would send me into eternal damnation into music that was now for the devout. Hallelujah!

 

“There is no such thing as hell, of course, but if there was, then the sound track to the screaming, the pitchfork action and the infernal wailing of damned souls would be a looped medley of ‘show tunes’ drawn from the annals of musical theater.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

 

I was driving midweek in central Pennsylvania. Signs seemed to be everywhere for a weekend church festival. I was sorry that I was not going to be there then because the festival offered not just the usual entertainment and food, but something that I have never experienced and could not entirely imagine: A Polka Mass!

 

“But, despite the convictions of many of the faithful in any tradition, who are convinced that religion never changes and that their beliefs and practices are identical with those of the founders of their faith, religion must change in order to survive.” Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History.

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The Play’s the (Limited) Thing (concluded)

The dramatist Elmer Rice thought that plays don’t have lasting power because they have to be produced, but he also thought they did not last because plays are written for a group audience, and this limits their quality. The author of a book seeks wide readership, but in an important sense that writer really composes for an audience of one, the solitary reader who can choose where and when to read.  That author has a freedom in determining at what level to pitch his writing. He can seek an audience of an academic, a trained professional, a serious reader, or pitch to a mass market. He can aim for literary or intellectual merit and have a chance of finding the right readership.

The dramatist’s audience, in contrast, requires a group of individuals assembled together at a particular time and place to experience the work together.  The socially indelicate or controversial book can be read in private, but a dramatic performance is public, which makes it subject to many forms of public scrutiny and influence that have little or nothing to do with drama as art. Furthermore, theater-going is generally not inexpensive and the audience is largely limited to the upper economic class. Rice thought that such audiences generally sought mere entertainment and were not particularly sophisticated, having on average, less understanding of the art they are perceiving than concert-goers, visitors to art exhibitions, or readers of serious books. “Rocketing costs have increased the professional theater’s dependence upon an audience that is likely to be better equipped with money than with taste.”

Furthermore, a play’s audience does not have an advantage of the book audience.  The reader can always thumb back if something has been missed, but the playgoer cannot requiring the playwright to repeat important information sometimes undercutting the artistic integrity of the work. “The audience must move forward with the performers, and what is not instantly grasped is forever lost.”

Equally important, Rice felt that the collective behavior of any group, including an audience, was different from the private reactions of individuals.  Writing in mid-career in an introduction to a British collection of his plays, Rice concluded that for whatever reason, those in a group “assume a uniformity of conduct, a sort of common denominator, . .  . which is far below the habitual level of the more intelligent . . . members of the group. . . . [The dramatist] is handicapped by the low level of his audience, which imposes upon him the necessity of over-simplifying and over-emphasizing his points in order to make them at all.” Even so, Rice pronounced “that almost any play is considerably above the level of the audience which it attracts. Anyone who has listened to the comments of an audience, during or after the performance, can say without hesitation that at least one-half of those present have no definite notion of what the author has been driving at, or even what the play is about.”  Rice concluded, “Why, then, is the lot of the dramatist more unhappy than that of his fellow-artists?  For the simple reason that he cannot address himself to the individual judgments of the scattered few to whom he may have something to say. The very nature of his art demands an organisation of his audience, in space and in time. If he writes plays for the theatre, he cannot fail to take the theatre heavily into account; if he writes plays for the library, he is no longer wholly a dramatist.”

Rice was not alone in seeing the limitations brought by a group audience. Maugham wrote that when assembled as a group, its members only want limited ideas. An audience “likes novelty, but a novelty that will fit in with old notions, so that it excites but does not alarm. It likes ideas, so long as they are put in dramatic form, only they must be ideas that it has itself had, but for want of courage has never expressed.” Arthur Miller agreed after seeing a Greek theater in Sicily that could hold 14,000 that it is “hard to grasp how the tragedies could have been written for such massive crowds when in our time the mass audience all but demanded vulgarization.”

Even with these pessimistic thoughts about the limitations of plays, however, Rice did not abandon the theater. He continued to write play after play, sometimes merely to entertain, sometimes to experiment with form, and sometimes to present ideas. He apparently saw drama’s inherent limitations as a challenge to surmount, and at least some of the time, he succeeded well enough to produce worthy plays.

And even though I appreciate the limited reach of plays, I continue to go because some of the time a production succeeds in producing a memorable event.

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