Some Like It Hot. Others Not So Much.

It isn't even that hot but the cat has already left to summer in his favorite spot.

Sunday Memories: New Appassionata

Ludwig comes to life! in Nancy's living room



The thing about growing up under a Steinway is that the music is as intimate as the air you breathe or the punches you exchange with any given sibling. It's just life.

But I didn't like that life that much and took much delight as a young adult corrupting any beloved piece of either parents by inverting its key. This meant a sober, sad sounding piece would at the turn of a single note become a happy beer-drinking polka, and the trolloping joy of a sonata or symphony would just as easy become a funeral dirge. This elicited rage and reprimands from both parents who revered the great works and the great composers. Such responses of course only elicited more delight from me.

However, at some point it's just not nice to piss off an old person, especially one you are related to. So I stopped messing with their music, and other than an occasional indulgence of PDQ Bach's play by play of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony I moved on to disco, funk, salsa and rock.

If only I had known there were others like me. Luckily, like almost all things in life, it is never too late to find kindred souls. One perfect sunny, windy, beautiful day, friends and strangers crowded into the small theater of Nancy's living room for a dress rehearsal and went on a wild ride with Ludwig van Beethoven as he attempted to right wrongs, settle the score with Mozart and terrorize a stage manager into being a cast of thousands.

LUDWIG LIVE!
June 30 to August 30

at the Seven Hills Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts

This Used To Be Normal

3 A.M.


I heard male laughter in between meandering banter, but unlike the party kids who wandered below my window these voice didn't go away. Then the cat thought it was time to play or feed him or do something vertical. That's when I realized there was unusual activity happening on the corner.

The oblong plastic shape at first looked like a body bag, but there was no police tape wrapped around the scene and the cops were way too relaxed. Then a head at the end of the oblong shape popped up and began arguing with the cops. People coming home from the 24 hour grocery store or back from a bar stepped around the trussed up man, trying really hard to be nonchalant, but dying to check out something they heard used to happen this neighborhood all the time years ago, but now only seen on crime drama tv shows.

In Honor of and with Gratitude for: The Carol Burnett Fun and Joy Project

I wanted to say thank you to Carol Burnett for everything I had gotten watching her show and singing along with the soundtrack from Once Upon A Mattress.

I told everyone: "She has been my role model (along with Madame Curie who died from radiation poisoning and Captain Kirk who is a fictional character)."

I also wanted to lighten the load of what we artists, every day, go through. Writing, auditioning, risking, attempting, and facing rejection over and over again, wears and tears. Every so often, we need to recharge and rejuvenate our spirit.

So I came up with the Carol Burnett Fun and Joy Party for Writers and Other Miserable Artist.

I put together a tea party and invited a bunch of friends to join me in some fun and joy and a chance to say thank you to Carol Burnett.

On Sunday, we gathered for the first one. No one really knew anyone except Yuki and Dizery but within minutes of dishing food and dishing dish we were all laughing and talking, sharing and learning, and eating tons of delicious foods we had all contributed to the table.

The best part was showing Dizery, who had never seen Carol Burnett's variety show, clips from the show, and laughing hard, describing to her and each other what the show meant to us.

Gathering together and sharing fun and joy was wonderful. I also asked that we all say thank you to Carol Burnett in a very easy, simple way.

Carol Burnett's daughter, Carrie Hamilton died of cancer. A theater space in the Pasadena Playhouse is named after her and the Playhouse has a program dedicated to at-risk youths. I asked that each one of us send IN THE AMOUNT OF OUR LAST TAKE OUT OR ORDER UP OR WHAT WE SPENT FOR THE TEA a check to:

The Pasadena Playhouse

or

The Salk Institute

and put on our checks "In honor of Carol Burnett/ Carrie Hamilton".

And now I ask all of you, dear readers, to do what I did.

• Gather your friends who know or don't know one another

• fill with wonderful fun food a table or a picnic blanket or any other place a potluck or meal could happen
  

• laugh and share and connect to what brings joy into your life

• At the end of your gathering, IN THE AMOUNT OF YOUR LAST TAKE OUT OR ORDER UP OR WHAT YOU SPENT FOR THE GATHERING write a check to:
  

Salk Institute for Biological Studies
10010 North Torrey Pines Road,
La Jolla, CA 92037

Pasadena Playhouse
Campaign Manager
Pasadena Playhouse
39 S. El Molino Ave
Pasadena, CA 91101

And after your own gathering ask each person there if they would go home to their friends and family and put on their own celebration and send their own donations to Salk or Pasadena.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if from table to table across the land, we said thank you to someone who shared her fun and her joy and lightened our load as we went through the wear and tear of our days?

Pass it forward and then send me a picture of your table or your friends or anything you want to share from your own gathering.

Sunday Memories: The Door

I didn't know the youth center was named after a verse in the new testament. When, in 1972, I called their hot-line off a card someone had handed me, all I knew was I had a bottle of aspirin in my hand and was thinking that if I took all of them, something would give.

Once there, all I knew was that from 4 or 5 in the afternoon until 10 at night it was the best hangout in the world - cute guys from every neighborhood in the city, plus runaways from like other states none of us New Yorkers knew anything about, but who cared because did I mention those boys were cute? For a thirteen year old girl from the Lower East Side, it was heaven. Only in hindsight, years later, did I understand how this youth center kept me out of serious trouble, both from myself and from others.

The youth center got bigger and moved from 12th Street and Fifth Avenue (now Gotham Bar and Grill) to 18th Street and Sixth Avenue (now Bed, Bath & Beyond) and from there to Broome Street. By that time I had aged out.

Still, before I turned 22, it was this place that made sure I stayed healthy with free medical, got fed dinner four nights a week after I was on my own but didn't know how to cook and more important than anything, made sure that when my landlady tried to illegally evict me, I got legal help and was able to keep my lease and my home.

Thirty-nine years later, I get to walk through my door now because there was a Door to walk through then.

"...Just Like I Pictured It"

In another state of mind and place, a little glass snapshot of New York was packed up and sent back to the view from whence it came. Its creator was leaving the center of the country and returning to her original home where new views await.

True Love Takes Wing

See, I thought that camera lens meant there must be someone really famous nearby. So I asked who it was.

It was the most important celebrity in the world and he lived right across the street.

"Why do you do this?" I asked the photographer.

"Love," he answered.

Sunday Memories: Encore: In The Still Of The Night The Sound Of Silence Revisited

original post: Tuesday, August 17, 2010



It started as an unconscious homage to Florence.

During the hot days, she, like many of our neighbors, would prop open her front door and let whatever breeze existed waft in from the stairwell's window.

With so many opened doors our different lives would also drift up and down the stairs, the sounds and smells and conversations, the T.V. going, all weaving in and out making a village out of thirty-five apartments.

One night, decades later in a much smaller apartment building, I opened the door during a non-stop heat wave, and a breeze blew in and as it came in, the cat ran out, the cool of 100 year old marble floors and walls too much to resist.

And soon that door, like Florence's, stayed open as the cat and I, wandering the stairs in the middle of the night, listened to our neighbors sleep, hummed along with all the air conditioners in the air shaft and sat in the still and the silence.

I miss the normalcy of open doors during hot days and sleepless nights, and when my door is closed because the neighbors are awake, I miss my mother.

Another Escape

When the night got too hot Florence or Seymour or their neighbors or friends or the whole neighborhood would escape to the roof or the fire escape or even the park and sleep. I know they dragged the mattresses onto the fire escape and sometimes the roof, but how did they sleep in the park? Or did the cool breeze mitigate the concrete ground?

These days, parks close before midnight, roofs are locked and alarmed and it's against the law to be on a fire escape unless of course you are escaping a fire. Quiet cool escape becomes creative. Like for instance the gym of the university Seymour went to because it was one of the few that would accept Jewish students. There, an hour before it closes, and empty of healthy young people who don't fume at a lack of stomach muscles, escape beckons on fancy machines that make heated worries of the day steam off.

After The One Hour Of Spring...

...it was summer.


And toes emerging from coverlets coaxed the cat out from behind the toilet.

Sunday Memories: It Takes A City To Build A Village

Over the last couple of weekends, Bill began the gentle process of emptying The Flower Stall. Any reasonable donation offered for any plant would be given to Seneca Village, a project Cornell loved and supported. A steady stream of neighbors and strangers came stopped by the beloved old shop, as plants were adopted and checks were written.

Other offerings were made as well. Memories, copies of blog postings, and this photo, taken December 23, 1967.

***

The Flower Stall is usually open on Saturday, but Bill is there on and off during the week as well. Please stop by with your checkbook or money order made out to The Seneca Village and take home one of Cornell's beautiful plants.

THE FLOWER STALL
143 East 13th Street
NYC

Mishpocheh Across Time And Place

Antiquity in the Metropolitan Museum, 2011



Mimi's hair is like that on the Roman lady statutes she teaches us about and Leilani easily gets cute young men to take pictures of us together. We wander through centuries of worlds, from China to Africa, from Rome to many parts of America.

Later, over hot dogs and pretzels in Central Park, we wander through now and then, musing about our younger days, pondering our present lives, and cooing over adorable dogs rescued by now-adoring owners.

If We Dug A Hole Deep Enough, Would We Be Able To Return To Our Twenties?

It had been 25 years since we all met in China.

Guangzhou 1986



Mimi and me from New York City with attitude to match, and Leilani from Hawaii and England and Australia and Indonesia and other places who floated through each country with a graceful elegance any New York girl would have killed for.

Coney 2011


And now each one of us searches the other's face, wondering where the hell the proof of those 25 years hides. Maybe we are more mature, happier, kinder, smarter, confident, but we look exactly the same to one another.

Sunday Memories: On The Cusp Of Marilyn

China
1986



Nixon went to China in 1972.

The City College Study Exchange went in 1986.

When we left the Guangzhou University Campus for a sight-seeing excursion, we were stared at, touched, followed and talked about (in Chinese) because we were often the first Westerns ever seen. I decided at some point it was just practice for when I was a superstar. (The internet hadn't been invented yet so writers were still revered.)

The streets were still filled with bicycles and very few cars and taxis that went even too fast for me. Crates of dogs were for sale, snakes were killed and cooked and served right then and there, and road side late dinner got served while sitting on wooden benches or crates. Hand holding between males and females was frowned upon until the sun came down. So during the day, it was normal to see men soldiers walking hand in hand.

If there was more than one western-like hotel in the city, I don't remember. The White Swan, an understated Vegas-like explosion on the idea of fancy luxury, had a waterfall or big fountain in the lobby. More importantly it had a western style all-you-can-eat brunch buffet on the weekends. We would bring big bags on the couple of occasions we'd splurge on homesickness and food.

On Halloween, we watched the university students dance in circles, the boys with the boys holding hands and the girls with the girls holding hands. I don't remember the music one of the exchange students had brought, but the Chinese students were lit up, liberated by a rock and roll beat. I had come as Marilyn Monroe and when I asked one of the students if he recognized who I was dressed as, he said, "Yourself?"

Of course, these days China is not like that at all. And now anything you see here in the United States that looks like Marilyn Monroe probably has been made in China.

New York Underground: Millenium Style

14th Street
11:20 pm

Another Monday Night With Eighth Avenue

10:48 pm

Sunday Memories: Fast Food in Fast Times

It was really late the other night when I passed the series of fast food joints on 14th Street. And that's when I noticed all the teenagers hanging out. Hanging out in their tribes of multi-faceted fashion statements talking laughing milling being.

For us in those early years of the 1970's when vestiges of hippie land began the slow turn into serious drug use it was Nedicks on the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue which still wasn't called the Avenue of Americas and if it was we never called it that anyway.

There, 13 or 14 years old, we gathered in our multi-faceted fashion statements, sending word like the Pony Express of who was looking for who and when would everyone be headed to the park or did anyone go to the therapy group at The Door which lived on 12th Street then - free meds but no free meals - The Door didn't have a kitchen until 18th Street. We all bummed cheap cigarettes from one another and the richer kids sprung for hot dogs and orange drinks from triangle cups.

It was on this corner we all said goodbye to Cowboy. Cowboy was a legend in our tribe. He walked about with a guitar on his back like a troubadour. A black kid from somewhere else, to us he was the coolest, nicest, hottest, hunkiest older man of 16 or 17 we knew. That afternoon he told us he was headed across the country or something like that and we all melted goodbyes in the hippie hugs everyone gave everyone, man, woman, gay, straight, sober or stoned.

Weeks later, one of the kids came running to the corner, telling us Cowboy was dead. He had taken acid and tried to swim across a Great Lake in some other state, I think it was Michigan.

It's like almost 40 years later, but every time I walk that corner I always think of Cowboy. And when I passed those kids on 14th Street the other night I thought of all of us.

Thursday Morning with Second Avenue

12:33 am

Monday Night With Eighth Avenue

10:45 pm

Sunday Memories: Mother's Day

Florence at her mother's apartment in Knickerbocker Village



These days, I am amused at the accolades on Mother's Day that often include the passing down of make-up tips and the special shopping trips for new clothes.

These were not the gifts Florence gave my sister or me. And although I inherited her love of lipstick, it's what is not found in a tube or a store that reminds me of my mother. It is, instead, a ferocious, unending, tenacious, gut wrenching, miserable exhaustion, banging-head-against-wall, exhilarating 'til-death-do-us-part relationship with the work of an artist.

Personally, there are days I would have been just fine with a new dress or some blue eyeshadow.