To All the Girls . . .

From the Vault Dept.: The Philadelphia Orchestra returns to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center tomorrow evening for three weeks of familiar classics. That summer season is an underappreciated legacy, and I’ll dip into the archives for a few vintage pieces from my own past quarter-century of writing about it. On one occasion in 1986, however, I was dispatched (why me?) to cover a different kind of event. Here’s my report.

                                                                    

Julio Iglesias

THE POSTERS FOR HIS American tour show him in a casual suit of white, hands in pockets, smiling as if struck by an old, sweet secret. “Ooh, I hope he’s dressed in white tonight,” a woman beside me whispered.

This was in the packed house at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Sunday night, where a crescendo scream indicated the arrival onstage of Julio Iglesias. He wore a dark business suit and looked, characteristically, as if he’d just combed his hair with his fingers.

The crowd was made up of people of all ages, both sexes well represented, but the ladies were dressed to the nines, ready for adventure.

What is it about this man that is so attractive? He is a very talented song stylist, no question about it, although the songs are dressed in electronic hangings of reverb and cute percussion.

He is handsome the way Chevy Chase is handsome: it’s a utilitarian appearance that needs a personality to set it in motion.

No, the attraction is that Julio seems slightly dangerous. He’s got smooth moves and the nerve to use them. The guy your mother warned you against.

Dinner in the Dells

Across the U.S.A. Dept.: Much of the appeal of writing, for me, is surprising myself with felicitous turns of phrase. Sometimes I borrow from others, and I was amused to see the Gilbert & Sullivan snitch in this piece. By request, another installment of the series I wrote in 1989 and which ran in the Schenectady Gazette as my wife and I drove cross-country in a VW camper to embrace the hippiehood we’d missed in the appropriate decade. That the request came from this selfsame wife still counts, doesn’t it? Turns out, by the way, that Paul Bunyan's is still in business with the same menu (the photos come from the eatery's website).

                                                                            

WHEN A WAITRESS BUBBLES with wit and good humor at dinnertime on Labor Day in a busy tourist-town restaurant, she’s probably able to withstand anything.

But, “The season’s almost over,” Roxanne tells us, “and I can’t say I’m unhappy about it.”

She’s hustling grub at Paul Bunyan’s, a loghouse cafeteria and gift emporium on Route 13 in Wisconsin Dells, a tourist resort about four hours west of Milwaukee. “Wisconsin Dells is kind of a joke in the state,” a Milwaukee friend warned us. “It’s a place they should have left alone.”

Now it has all the trappings of Lake George and Ocean City, which always seem to include a theme amusement park, miniature golf and a bad wax museum. And restaurants galore. We chose Bunyan’s because it advertised itself as an inexpensive all-you-can-eat place, and we were feeling broke and hungry. That must be the state of most tourists, because when you’re in that condition those flashing lights and over-written signs look mighty attractive.

Hate Mail

I enjoy sharing time with kids in a casual setting, but I have little patience with the parents who schlep their tykes to public events where quiet, reasonable behavior is expected. Which I wrote about here. That piece put in mind of something I wrote twenty years ago, something that netted me the most hate mail I’ve ever received for anything. The restaurant is still around, but it now serves only breakfast and lunch, and I haven’t been there since I wrote the piece. And the belowmentioned Ashley’s has been replaced by Chats Lounge, the name of which sounds pleasantly child-unfriendly.

                                                                   

The Market at the Marriott, Albany, NY

IT ALWAYS SEEMS TO HAPPEN after we've made a tough-to-reverse commitment to staying for dinner. The appetizers are served, we're enjoying them, we're catching up on news and gossip, we're enjoying a relaxing bottle of wine . . . and that high-pitched whine sounds across the room, like nails on a blackboard. “But, Mommy, I don't wanna sit there!” “Okay, honey, we’ll sit over here.”

Right next to my table.

Something weird happens to the sensibility of my coevals when they become parents. Where the company of tykes was once regarded as a temporary distraction, they now remain surgically attached long after mother and child were umbilically parted. And they invade concert halls and restaurants, the infant spreading mayhem once its eight-millisecond attention span has been surpassed.

Dutch Door

July 22, 2012 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Hummingbird Moth

Cellphone photo by B. A. Nilsson

SPOTTED THIS CRITTER at an outdoor garden center in Guilderland, NY, yesterday, and marvelled at its hummingbird-like appearance. "It's a hummingbird bee," someone there told me, which I later learned is a common colloquial moniker. There's actually a bee hummingbird, the tiniest species of that wee flyer, but it's based in Cuba. This guy is a moth.

It has a fascinating proboscis, which it curled and aimed and straightened as needed, and it visited flower after flower as I watched, letting me get much closer than any hummingbird ever allowed.

But it's still a quick little thing. With only a cellphone camera at hand, I did what I could, but, if you've never seen one of these, I think you'll be interested.

Children under 12 ...

. . . FREE! AS THE PARENT of a youngster, I welcomed those words. I believed that I had an inalienable right not to need to pay for the tot’s entry anywhere. Not because I thought the world needed to experience the thrill of the company of my kid, but because convenient babysitters were scarce.

Thanks to the variety of my activities, this meant that I’d be hauling her to restaurants, concerts, galleries, rehearsal rooms, and business meetings, none of which is a favorite destination of a three-year-old.

And because I find the social presence of small children has the potential to be fantastically annoying, I was always terrified that my own offspring would erupt in some embarrassingly distracting manner.

Which she did. She had the small child’s center-of-the-universe need to have the bright lights of adult attention turned her way at all waking moments, and the frustrated brat’s ability to vigorously protest the lack of such attention.

When my wife was with us, we could tag-team the attention-giving. You can’t punish a dervish. The “time out” is a cruelty devised by selfish grown-ups. Yelling at yelling provokes more yelling. You can no more still such a potent energy source than you can put out the sun.

Some of the early incidents took us by surprise. Stupidly, amazingly, we dragged the three-year-old to see “The Fantasticks” as it was closing its original Manhattan run. We reasoned (with whatever reason is given to the parents of a youngster) that she’d spent enough time backstage of the shows in which I’d acted that she’d be a precociously well-behaved audience member.

Tools of the Trade

From the Kitchen Drawer Dept.: I recycled a piece about knives in an April post; this one looks at other cooking tools.

                                                                          

PEEK INTO A RESTAURANT kitchen and you behold an impressive array of equipment hanging or stacked near the stove; nearby drawers and racks probably contain even more in the way of knives and whisks and other such implements.

Although no chef wants to be caught without a necessary tool, there really are only just a few called into constant use: knife, spoon, spatula, fork, and a few favored pots and pans. But other tools need to be there, need to be waiting, because you never know when you’re going to have to grate nutmeg or bake an angel food cake.

Here’s a very prejudiced list of what’s essential for the ambitious home chef—and some of the silly stuff that’s also for sale.

“It slices, it dices . . .” and how nice it would be for one tool really to do it all! Despite Ron Popeil’s claims of yore, you’ll need more than one tool to take care of all the cutting and peeling that cooking requires. That sharp-pointed twisty little vegetable peeler remains one of the most marvelous culinary inventions. Use the tip to dig stubborn eyes from potatoes, then peel it with the blade; and there’s a blade on each side of the opening to accommodate lefties and righties or, if you’re deft, to allow you use both, which is good for carrots and other smooth-surfaced items. Do you need a fancy plastic handle? It’s up to you. I prefer to buy two cheap metal- handled ones so I can always find one.

A harp peeler puts the blade perpendicular to the handle, which is nice for thick-skinned comestibles like apples. Cakes and sauces get a flavor sparkle from orange or lemon zest, so keep a zester on hand. Ditto a nutmeg grater. For cheese, a four-sided grater is essential, and serves for grating potatoes and other vegetables as well. I like a rotary grater for hard cheeses like Parmesan and Asiago.

We Love You, Sandy Becker

RESEARCHING THE MUSICAL “The Music Man” the other day unearthed this Playbill cover from Dick Van Dyke’s 1980 Broadway revival of the show. What struck me was the resemblance of costume and pose to a kid’s-show character I grew up with known as Hambone.

Dick Van Dyke as a
Hambone-inspired
Harold Hill

As is too often the case with low-budget TV shows from the 50s (and, in this case, into the 60s), almost none of it remains. The stations wiped and reused the costly videotape. And so the legacy of Sandy Becker is one of anecdote and some blurry YouTube clips.

Becker was born in New York in 1922 and attended that city’s prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts before moving into radio and then television. In 1955 he began working for WNEW, which was New York City’s channel 5, hosting a weeknight cartoon show.

By the time I got hooked on the tube, living in Manhattan’s suburbs in the early 60s, “The Sandy Becker Show” was all over that channel, airing afternoons and evenings throughout the week and on Saturdays.

A fine sense of chaos prevailed. Becker was a skilled voice artist who created and portrayed a range of crazy characters. Elgar’s best-known “Pomp and Circumstance” march heralded the entrance of Becker’s “Big Professor,” a white-wigged putative sage who fumbled the answers to questions he received. Norton Nork, with center-parted hair and highwater pants, bumbled wordlessly through life’s simple problems. And a kid-voice chorus shouting over Red Saunders’s busy traps gave manic life to the song “Hambone,” accompanying the crazy dance with which that character appeared, clad in a drum major’s uniform, replete with epaulettes, sash, and centurion helmet. And a strange pair of eyeglasses with four-inch-long pill-bottle lenses.

Dinner on the Go

From the Vault Dept.: How tools have changed in a mere seven years! When I wrote this piece, I had yet to acquire a smartphone, with its access to restaurant locators – and the world of online restaurant listings has exploded, creating new challenges like parsing the idiot-intensive commentary on sites such as Yelp.

                                                              

The former Dayboat

IT’S THAT AWFUL MOMENT when you’re on a stretch of interstate highway and the sun is cresting its zenith and you’re feeling the gnawing pangs of hunger. You unwisely failed to pack a lunch, so you’re going to have to get off the highway to find something. You don’t know the area. But you know it’s a minefield of ptomaine and tastelessness out there. And whatever you order probably will be fried.

Traveling around New York’s Capital Region is challenging enough, but over time you learn a few techniques and ace-in-the-hole stopping places. It’s a kind of game. You lose points for dining at chain restaurants; your license to dine out is revoked if you end up at a fast-food joint. Long-distance traveling requires a broader strategy, and I’ve boiled it down to three methods.

First is the by-guess-or-by-god approach. People have to eat, you reason, and every town must support at least a café or diner. It’s a romantic notion I sustain despite many years of bad experiences, and just as I’m about to give up on it something happens like our recent stop in Sherman, Maine.

Copter over the Edge

Across the U.S.A. Dept.: In Sept. 1989, my wife and I drove a VW camper from New York to California and back. Along the way I wrote a couple of dozen pieces about the trip that ran in the Schenectady Gazette. Here’s an account of a memorable stop in Arizona.

                                                                    

“BUT YOU HATE to fly. Why do you want to do this?”

A fair enough question. I was trying to persuade my wife that a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon was the only way to see it. I had been lured by a billboard—take note, you who deface our highways with those things—and a visit to the Grand Canyon Helicopter booth at the local airport provided information on fares and departure times.

But Susan wanted to see the canyon from its edge, resisting my argument that it would be more dramatic for first-time visitors to scoot over the rim of it in mid-air.

Our swing through the west brought us to more national parks and monuments than we'd even known existed, which may be a provincial-mindedness characteristic of the northeast. We're very urban-minded, even we who live in rural areas, because the cities here are sprawling and never too distant.

Whereas South Dakota, a state onto which you could plop all of New York and still see an enormous amount of prarie, has a capital city that New Yorkers would view as a somewhat largish town.

The Blogging Police . . .

. . . have warned me that cat photos are required.

July 27, 2011 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Tale from the Crypt

ONE OF HOLLYWOOD's most reliable and unique character actors was Mischa Auer, whom I wrote about here. You’ll note the kicker at the close of the piece: “When Auer died ... his body was cremated and the ashes interred in the Souls family plot in Prospect Hill Cemetery in Gloversville, NY, about a dozen miles from my house.”

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

There’s little reason for me to travel to Gloversville, which is a broken-down remnant of a once-thriving industry that gave the city its name. The most famous native son wasn’t even born there: Shmuel Gelbfitz was a native of Poland, who took the name Sam Goldfish when he worked in Gloversville’s garment business at the dawn of the 20th century – soon to end up in Hollywood with still another surname: Goldwyn.

Now the city sports a sad downtown perforated with so many empty shops that it has the look of a desperate, toothless grin. The Glove Theater struggles to give the city a worthy entertainment center, and it, too resonates with a Hollywood-related past: Junius Myer Schine took over a nickelodeon in the city in 1916, parlaying his success with it into a chain of theaters of which the Glove was the centerpiece.

A friend tipped me off to a food co-op that recently opened a few doors down from the Glove, and that’s what took me to the city yesterday, to enjoy a good lunch and buy some fresh berries. And then drive to a nearby cemetery to search for a stone. 

Back in the Day-O

“Put on something I haven’t heard before,” my daughter often says when we’re considering music to listen to at home. I picked out a Bear Family set of Harry Belafonte’s first recordings, including the sessions that became his multi-million selling album “Calypso.” I told her what I knew of the singer’s history, which is a breathtakingly impressive record of leadership and financial support of the struggles for civil rights. At age 85, he's still active, and his autobiography, My Song, came out late last year. “And when I talked to him,” I began, and she smacked her forehead. Seems I’ve spoken with a lot of people during the years I spent interviewing them for newspaper pieces. I knew comparatively little about Belafonte when I spoke with him in advance of a performance in the Albany area in 1986, but, as it happened, he was happy to do most of the talking.

                                                                    

WITH SO MANY PROJECTS in the works, why is Harry Belafonte adding a concert tour to his schedule? “I don't want this to get out,” he says in a deep drawl, “but I woke up this morning and discovered I had to pay the rent.”

The actor/singer/producer/entrepreneur will perform at the Coliseum Theatre at 8:30 p.m. Thursday with seven musicians, four back-up singers and a program that he describes as “a sample of new and old. People will be familiar with many of the songs, the traditional ones that I'm known for, but there will also be many new songs, songs of different cultures with global insight.”

Global insight is a phrase important to Belafonte. He was the major force behind the United Support of Artists for Africa project and continues his activism with work on a forthcoming mini-series.

'It's a motion picture titled ‘The Mandelas, a South African Story.’ It is being produced for ABC to air at the end of 1987. Right now we’re in the midst of preparing the script and scouting locations and artists. Sydney Pollack is co-producing it with me and we already have Sidney Poitier and Jane Fonda lined up for the cast.”

The Little Sleep

I WAS SIX FEET tall by the time I turned 13, so I didn’t experience much bullying once I was in junior high school. And the only significant event I remember from elementary school had such a sudden and fortuitous finish that it begs no sympathy.

Richard Pryor and Erland van Lidth de Jeude,
from Stir Crazy

When I was seven, my parents moved us from New Jersey to Connecticut, fulfilling my father’s long-held dream. He was a mechanical engineer, transitioning to a company in Stamford, and my parents picked tony Ridgefield as the place to settle because it promised, among other things, a good school system.

This moved me mid-term to an all-new second-grade class. Thanks to my parents’ competitive efforts to fill me with learnin’, I was reading at some stunningly advanced level and parsing math problems with Euclidian gusto. In other words, I was an academic misfit. I also was a shy, shy kid, to the point of being a social misfit. Soon I was skipped into third grade, aggravating every aspect of my misfittedness.

So it was that I found myself in the Ridgebury Elementary School playground one autumn afternoon, soon after the move, friendless and feeling sorry for myself. When some older kids approached, I took heart. I already was big for my age: perhaps they saw in me a potential crony.

Date with the Blues

Blue Man Group originally appeared at Proctors in its infancy in 1990 as part of the Proctors Too series of experimental shows. Since then, they've become an institution, with their own theaters and several tours. Following a successful Proctors performance last year, they'll be back this weekend for three shows (8 PM Sat., July21, and 1 PM and 5 PM Sun., July 22). Here's what I wrote about last year's performance.

                                                                                   

AT THE HEART OF IT are three bald men of similar size and shape, clad in boots and black jumpers, their heads and hands a deep, shiny blue. Their faces are impassive. All expression is conveyed by head tilts and body angles, with only the occasional flash of a pair of startling eyes. They are human machines, assimilates of a society that demands uniformity.

They begin, as all humans begin expressing themselves, by drumming—but this is drumming with deafening noise and searing light and, at the height of the conflagration, colorful sprays of paint dancing on the drumheads.

In the most engaging sequence, titled “Feast,” the funniest of the many bits we saw, they coaxed a reluctant young woman out of the audience and onto the stage and seated her with them, four abreast, at a dinner table, in a routine that required her to choose actions based on a succession of often bewildering objects the Blue Men presented. These included candles, flowers, Jell-o, Christina’s World (victim of a completely unexpected and hilarious gag), and an outsized box of Twinkies.

Scenes from Childhood

L to R: Byron Nilsson (seated),
Mark Mercurio, Ric Ebeling,
Denis McKeon, Blake Milne.

BY 1972, I’D APPEARED in a few high-school produced plays and a musical (“The Pajama Game”) the summer before – that last most notable because it won me my first full-on, French-seasoned kiss from a female castmate, the taste of whose chain-smoking I was prepared to ignore because of the thrilling novelty of the experience.

This summer’s show, “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying,” brought together much of the same cast, without, alas, my fickle osculatory friend. And I was given the dual role of head-of-the-mailroom Twimble and chairman-of-the-board Womper, and it’s in the latter role that you see me pictured. As a 16-year-old, my hair was greyed and my belly padded. Forty years later, neither adjustment is required.

Michael Connolly, an actor ten years my senior who had achieved much acclaim in our hometown of Ridgefield, Conn., was doing a lot of regional theater and singing with Light Opera of Manhattan, a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-centric group. He would make his Broadway debut in 1977, and is pictured backstage there here.

Mike and I shared a passion for patter songs, British comedy, and opera. He watched some of the “How to Succeed” rehearsals and gave me some shameless suggestions that I even more shamelessly followed.

He was a wellspring of the kind of acting techniques Meisner and Strasberg never taught, although these techniques were more of a prop-dependent nature. He’d already shown me how to discourage a scene-stealing actor when I appeared in a community-theater production of “Harvey.” Being the youngest, I played the oldest: Judge Gaffney. Our Elwood P. Dowd, a star of the local community-theater world, tended to obscure me in the scenes we shared, and developed an irritating business of clapping me, hard, on the shoulder of my swallowtail coat.

Jack's: A Tradition of Enthusiasm

From the Vault Dept.: I began reviewing restaurants in early 1986 for Albany’s Metroland Magazine. The story of my first review – and the review itself – you’ll find here. After five months, it became clear to publisher Peter Iselin that the page attracted restaurant advertisers, but the advertisers feared the “announced visit” policy wasn’t being taken seriously enough. We joined the rest of the food-review world with unannounced visits in September. Here’s my account of the first of those visits.

                                                                  

OUR GREETING AT THE DOOR was so enthusiastic that I figured something had gone wrong – that this, my first unannounced Metroland visit, had been leaked. But an eager hello is the norm at Jack’s.

It was a crowded Wednesday night and we were seated in the midst of the large dining room, facing front. “The floor show is better from here,” our host suggested humorously. And it was: we watched the mad crisscross of waiters as the tables were taken through their courses.

Jack’s has been an Albany institution for 73 years, as a sign by the door indicates, and my wife summed it up nicely: “This is the best you can get from a place this old. I’d expect something different if it had opened within the last couple of years, but this is an old-style place. They serve an iceberg salad. But it’s the best iceberg salad I’ve had.”

The multipage menu also reflects the old traditions, the pages decorated with antiquated line drawings. But the selections themselves are well-described, basic items that Jack’s has served up successfully for all those years.

Maiale

Pontassieve, Italy | Oct. 4, 2005 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet

Guest Blogger: Guy Wetmore Carryl. Time for a light-hearted trip back to a time when Mother Goose held some moral authority, and tales like this were valuable lessons. Not that such things deterred Mr. Carryl from finding his own way around these tales.

                                                                         

LITTLE MISS MUFFET
     discovered a tuffet,
(Which never occurred to the rest of us)
And, as 'twas a June day,
    and just about noonday,
She wanted to eat – like the rest of us.
Her diet was whey,
     and I hasten to say
It is wholesome and people grow fat on it.
The spot being lonely,
     the lady not only
Discovered the tuffet, but sat on it.

A rivulet gabbled beside her and babbled,
As rivulets always are thought to do,
And dragon flies sported around and cavorted,
As poets say dragon flies ought to do;
When, glancing aside for a moment, she spied
A horrible sight that brought fear to her,
A hideous spider was sitting beside her,
And most unavoidably near to her!

The People United

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned Frederic Rzewski, a brilliant composer and burn-ass pianist born in Westfield, Mass., and for many years living and teaching in Europe. His set of piano variations, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” written in 1975, stands as one of the towering works of 20th-century piano literature – a worthy companion to Bach’s Goldbergs and Beethoven’s Diabellis. I saw Rzewski perform when he visited a hall in Troy, NY, in 2004; he since has returned to perform at RPI’s new Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). Below is my review of the concert, and I’ve appended an earlier squib recommending a now out-of-print CD set. Since then, a DVD of Rzewski performing his signature work has been issued and is well worth watching.

                                                                                   

Frederic Rzewski

EVEN BEFORE THE CONCERT began, an unusual hipness permeated the air. Classical concerts – and classical-concert audiences – aren’t known for that quality, but this promised to be an anomaly among such concerts: A piano recital by a composer known for writing music that reacts to the immediacy of his time. Politically charged music, in fact, that’s also well crafted and emotionally affecting.

Still, it’s an act of commitment to attend a Rzewski concert. In Manhattan, it probably would have been a sellout. Here, fewer than a hundred showed up for the free event, but it quickly became an assembly of friends, because people assumed that degree of hipness about one another and weren’t shy about initiating or joining conversations.

Frederic Rzewski was born in Massachusetts but has spent much of his professional life in Europe, where he’s now a professor of music in Belgium. His work with electronic and improvisatory techniques 40 years ago has evolved into a unique musical language that is innovative without being self-consciously so, while acknowledging roots in classic music traditions.