The Fable of the Visitor Who Got a Lot for Three Dollars

George Ade Dept.: I’ve heard no reports of an uptick in sales of George Ade’s Fables in Slang despite my promotion of those wonderful works in this column. Of course, you can download an e-book from Gutenberg or get a print-on-demand copy through that online behemoth – but I’m happy to keep supplying you. Newspaperman Ade hit pay dirt when he dreamed up these fables, and once his first collection of them was published, he was able to take a lot of that pay dirt to the bank. llustrations by Clyde J. Newman

                                                                          

THE LEARNED PHRENOLOGIST sat in his Office surrounded by his Whiskers.

Now and then he put a Forefinger to his Brow and glanced at the Mirror to make sure that he still resembled William Cullen Bryant.

Near him, on a Table, was a Pallid Head made of Plaster-of-Paris and stickily ornamented with small Labels. On the wall was a Chart showing that the Orangoutang does not have Daniel Webster's facial angle.

“Is the Graft played out?” asked the Learned Phrenologist, as he waited. “Is Science up against it or What?”

Then he heard the fall of Heavy Feet and resumed his Imitation. The Door opened and there came into the Room a tall, rangy Person with a Head in the shape of a Rocky Ford Cantaloupe.

Aroused from his Meditation, the Learned Phrenologist looked up at the Stranger as through a Glass, darkly, and pointed to a Red Plush Chair.

The Easy Mark collapsed into the Boarding-House Chair and the Man with more Whiskers than Darwin ever saw stood behind Him and ran his Fingers over his Head, Tarantula-Wise.

Moscow on the Mohawk, or Hooked on Russia

From the Food Vault Dept.: This review, which I'd wanted to share much earlier, turned out to be hiding in a computer directory where it shouldn’t have been, another example of glasnost gone wrong. The night of this visit was more memorable than the piece suggests. True, we eschewed dancing to the loud, bad disco music played by two loud instruments and a rhythm box, but the party of twenty that filled up the room became increasingly boisterous, insisting that we join their table (we didn’t) or at least join them in a vodka toast – which we did, but only because they convinced us that their friends in the kitchen were not going to send out our food until we did so. Not surprisingly, the restaurant closed not long after this review appeared, but that closure surely was in the works already.

                                                                                            

LATER, TRYING TO RECONSTRUCT THE EVENING, my wife and I had trouble ascertaining just what it was that pushed it all over the top. The big birthday party, to be sure, and the Russian disco band. The mini-skirted, satin-bloused waitresses added an entertaining touch (and the worry that Schenectady’s fleshaphobic mayor might try to close down this place). Then there was the formidable menu, sporting such unusual items as schti, which our waitress wouldn’t describe because the kitchen was out of it, so why bother?

The current occupant at this address.

Troika – the name refers to the team of three horses that pulls a traditional Russian carriage – occupies a building that went through a few incarnations as Indian restaurants, interrupted by a stint serving Korean food. To put a Russian restaurant there is a delightful idea. The location does seem to be a kiss of death, though.

So my first question would have been about that location. Unfortunately, my follow-up phone calls to manager Ella were unsuccessful. She was too busy with customers to talk one day, which is a good sign; but she couldn’t honor our phone appointment the next day, however, because “she’s having some trouble with the boss,” the phone-answerer whispered, explaining, “I’m just a friend who stopped by to visit today.”

The Old Song and Dance

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Despite my lifelong Lloyd Webber antipathy, I felt inclined to like this show just on the basis of its unusual concept. And I’m a great fan of good dance. But this one turned out to be yet another Lloyd Webber show, and reading my review of it again after all these years (the piece dates back to 1987), I now understand the root of that antipathy. It was a high-school trip to see “Jesus Christ Superstar” on Broadway. I was a senior, and at last had a girlfriend – or so I thought. We sat together on the bus heading into Manhattan, and were adjacent in the theater. But I was by then picking up this-ain’t-gonna-last vibes, and, sure enough, it didn’t. I couldn’t blame it on her – I loved her, with what must have been terrifying first-relationship fervor. I was too self-centered at that point to blame myself, so I had to blame someone. I blamed Lloyd Webber.

                                                                                                 

Melissa Manchester

“SONG AND DANCE,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that began a week’s run at Proctor’s Theatre Tuesday night, presents us with a dilemma that is all too characteristic of the contemporary musical-theater stage: Bimbo comes to the city, is too stupid to maintain a successful social relationship, gets mean, regrets it, and acts stupid again. Curtain.

The two acts are divided according to the title: the first is sung; the second, danced. Emma is a Brit who comes to New York to make a success as a hat designer. But, until she gets her green card, she makes time with a succession of mercurial men, culminating in a short-lived affair with a married man from Westport who wants to leave his wife and kids for her. So she dumps him.

Cooking with the Beekman Boys

From the Library Dept.: Here’s a ten-year-old book review of mine that I never thought then to post on this blog – so here it is, still, I hope, timely, as the recipes and cooking tips in the book described below aren’t likely to go out of date. The piece originally ran on the now-defunct website knowwhereyourfoodcomesfrom.com. 

                                                                                   

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that a cookbook from the Beekman Boys would be a classy, useful tome: everything they present they present with commendable style. The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Cookbook collects over a hundred recipes, nicely described and beautifully photographed (by Paulette Tavormina), arranged by season and encouraging you to make the most of what’s available nearby.

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell fled (more or less) the wilds of Manhattan to live in the wilds of rural Sharon Springs, NY, on a two-centuries-old farm where they quickly began raising goats and tomatoes, an effort chronicled in a television series that helped establish their renown. Kilmer-Purcell has written best-selling memoirs; husband Ridge is a physician who spent a few years as Vice President for Healthy Living for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. It’s no surprise that their Beekman 1802 brand has become synonymous with good taste. And the food products taste good. Quite good.

Can you achieve a similar result with their recipes? The book, co-written with Sandy Gluck (former food editor for Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food magazine), is quartered into seasons, with each season further divided into courses. Spring’s starters, for example, include a dandelion salad and asparagus torte, with a main dish of lamb burgers with cucumber-yogurt sauce. There’s a starter of a cucumber cooler for summer, whose main dishes include stuffed peppers with fresh corn and a grilled summer squash pizza. And jumble berry pie (with blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries) for dessert.

Sitting on the Dock of the Boggs

 From the Recordings Vault Dept.: Every so often, while browsing through my files, I find a piece that I wrote on spec, or possible, as I suspect is the case with this one, for Metroland. That publication liked to stockpile a cluster of CD reviews and run them some weeks later. If this one ever ran, I have no idea. But the recording it describes is a foundational set for a collection of true American roots music.

                                                                           

EVERY NOW AND THEN a small, seminal stream of music bubbles up amidst the roar of the pop machinery. Thanks to a recent Smithsonian-Folkways re-release, we can again hear the voice and banjo of Virginia-born Dock Boggs, who recorded a series of LPs for Folkways in the mid-60s after working in obscurity in Kentucky coal mines for 44 years.

His repertory comprised songs learned from relatives and recordings, typically old songs that already had transformed in the re-singing, transformed again by Boggs during his early years of playing and singing, and changed once more when he prepared them for these recordings. Old songs like “John Henry,” “Pretty Polly” and even “Turkey in the Straw,” along with many tunes that Boggs assembled from bits of verse and music.

They’re played in a deceptively simple style – typically, Boggs accompanies himself by playing the melody against a style called up-picking, only rarely using the more boisterous clawhammer style. And his singing voice is reedy and strident, wailing with nasal intensity through one mournful ballad after another.

Caribbean Flavor in the Neighborhood

From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s a review I wrote 29 years ago about a Jamiacan restaurant in downtown Albany, NY. At the time, it was fairly unique in offering this cuisine, but now you’ll find a number of Jamaican and other Caribbean-cuisine eateries in the area. As for Clayton’s itself, it closed many years ago, but I’m happy to note that the address is now home to Hot Spot Jamaican-American Cuisine.

                                                                                        

MY FIRST PRIORITY when traveling is to find the native cuisine. A couple of years ago I poked around Nassau, in the Bahamas, in search of something other than the crappy tourist fare offered anywhere near the hotels. Finally, we learned that you had to go “over the hill,” to the part of town not recommended by the brochures. My wife and I cabbed to a place called The Three Queens and had the best meal of our stay, not to mention a fun time among friendly people.

Stew beef - borrowed from
another source

That’s sort of the feeling you get in downtown Albany, at least when you’re dining at Clayton’s. Formerly a restaurant called Caribeño, Clayton’s has been open for about a year, maintaining its predecessor’s balance of Spanish and Caribbean cooking. You get good food very inexpensively, and you get it at all hours.

You may also have known the location as Calsolaro’s, its name for many years. Located a little west of where Washington Avenue vees off of Central, the restaurant still has two entrances, one of which leads right to the bar. Unlike its immediate predecessor, Clayton’s sells alcohol--wine and beer--and has a list of wine specials posted on the back wall of the dining room. The front part of the dining room is a single aisle flanked by tables and booths; beyond it is a larger room that wasn’t being used the afternoon we visited.

A Pride of Musical Lions

A BIG CLUE TO UNDERSTANDING THIS BAND lies in the fact that Bob Crosby isn’t on the box set’s cover. It’s the first artist-centered Mosaic set I’ve seen where the named talent isn’t pictured, and there’s an excellent reason. Bob Crosby was taken on only as the nominal leader of this group. He couldn’t read music, couldn’t wield a baton, and couldn’t sing as well as his brother Bing. But he was a radio presence with an easygoing stage presence, and the bandmembers figured he wouldn’t get in their way. They were right. Incredibly, most remained happy with this arrangement.

The well-known backstory bears repeating due to its comic improbability. Ben Pollack led a hugely successful band through the 1920s, launching the careers of players like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. In the early 1930s, Pollack fell in love, and his inamorata was a second-string singer named Doris Robbins. He wanted her name to become famous. It did, but only in the context of this story.

His bandmembers resented the attention he gave her and the awful performances she perpetrated, and late in 1934 they staged a mass walkout. They were dubbed “Pollack’s Orphans” in the music press. Many of them moved to Jackson Heights in Queens, to a building where they were able to commandeer the basement as a rehearsal space. They styled themselves as a coöperative and elected reedman Gil Rodin as their leader.