Heil, Brooklyn!

HIS FIRST INKLINGS of the immediacy of Nazi atrocities took place in a neighborhood bakery, in 1956, where the four-year-old Bobby Rosen spotted the tattoo on the forearm of a woman working the counter and coaxed a whispered explanation from his mother. This opens an awareness of the ubiquity of such signs in his neighborhood, and why “A day never passed when I didn’t hear somebody express an opinion about the Nazis – usually my father,” a World War II veteran who was particularly infuriated by the sight of German-designed cars. “Yeah, we all hated the Nazis,” Rosen continues, “and if anybody didn’t, he kept his fool mouth shut about it.”

Rosen describes his boyhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in his new memoir Bobby in Naziland (Headpress). It’s his third book, following the best-selling Nowhere Man, an account John Lennon’s final days, and Beaver Street, a look at the porn industry as experienced by Rosen when he was an editor of erotic magazines.

Bobby in Naziland takes an episodic stroll through a Jewish neighborhood that seemed stuck in its own kind of timelessness, colored by the multi-directional progression of prejudices reported throughout the book. Anyone who is German is, of course, a target, which for Rosen included his building’s super, Mr. Kruger (“My father called him ‘that damn Kraut’”). “We also routinely beat the shit out of his blond and suspiciously Aryan-looking twin sons ... who were my age.”

But there also were Catholics to despise, and Poles and Puerto Ricans. “It was garden-variety bigotry, inane and vicious at the same time.” What Tom Lehrer parodied in his song “National Brotherhood Week” played out for real in Flatbush, where “everyone ... I knew hated black people – Jew and goyim alike.” Although racial integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers made it seem as if the borough “were some kind of racially harmonious mecca,” in truth it was bad enough that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had to be applied to Brooklyn as well as the former Confederacy.

Can’t Help Falling

From the Opera Vault Dept.: We’re gearing up for summer opera season, so here’s a re-visit to a time, thirty years ago, when the NYC Opera performed in Saratoga Springs each summer. When the NYC Opera existed at all.
                                                                                        

THE NEW YORK CITY OPERA’S opening production of their short Saratoga Performing Arts Center season this year was marred only by two adversities: the weather, about which no one is able to do much, and the perennially unkind acoustics, about which ditto.

Marilyn Mims

Other than that, it was a glorious trip to that fancified Paris of “La Traviata” Wednesday night with a die-hard crowd that sloshed into the amphitheater to share in the magic of Verdi’s masterpiece.

Marilyn Mims and Walter MacNeil sang the roles of Violetta and Alfredo, the lovers whose affair, you get the feeling, is doomed the moment she starts coughing in the first act.

The opera is a soprano’s showcase, both in talent requirement and the skill with which the part is written. Mims did a lovely job transforming herself, during the first act, from a live-for-the-moment character into a woman seriously touched by Alfredo’s attention. She echoes the elements of two of his first act arias and then launches into two difficult arias, back to back: “Ah fors’e lui che l’anima” and “Sempre libera,” all of which was sung with strength, precision and a keen sense of grace.

Lesson Number One

Guest Blogger Dept.: Hello again, Mr. Benchley! The estimable Robert is here again with a piece that’s more timely than ever.

                                                                            

FRANKLY, I AM NOT MUCH OF A HAND at machinery of any sort. I have no prejudice against it as such, for some of my best friends are of a mechanical turn of mind, and very nice fellows they are too. But the pencil sharpener in our office is about as far as I, personally, have ever got in the line of operating a complicated piece of mechanism with any degree of success.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

So, when George suggested that he teach me to run his car, it seemed a reasonable proposition. Obviously, some one had to teach me. I couldn't be expected to go out and pick the thing up by myself, like learning to eat olives. No matter how well-intentioned I might be, or how long I stuck at it, the chances are that I never could learn to drive a car simply by sitting in the seat alone and fooling around among the gadgets until I found the right ones. Something would be sure to happen to spoil the whole thing long before I got the hang of it.

The car was, therefore, brought out into the driveway at the side of the house, like a bull being led into the ring for a humid afternoon with the matador. It was right here that George began to show his true colors, for he stopped the engine, which was running very nicely as it was, and said that I might as well begin by learning to crank it, as I probably would spend seven-eighths of my driving time cranking in the future.

Sky Lights

From the Vault Dept.: It was pretty cutting-edge when I wrote about this melding of music and lights at the Schenectady Museum and Planetarium in 1987. Everything has moved on since then – including Raytel founder Alan Jackson, who co-founded an outfit called Voxon that’s exploring 3D volumetric display.

                                                                                            

YOU SIT BACK AND OBSERVE the stars of a clear, dark night. The throb of music begins: drums, twangs and vocal of a Pink Floyd number. A red beam of light hits that sky, wiggles, expands to a shimmering beam, forms the pattern of a singing face. Behind it a mosaic of iridescent green winks in a changing geometry, a spider-web twisting to the beat.

The sky is the inside dome of the Schenectady Museum Planetarium; the lights are the lasers of Raytel, a Troy-based company presenting a new Visual Music Festival at the Museum on Nott Terrace Heights at 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, and continuing through the following weekend.

Alan Jackson, founder (and licensed laserist) of the company, began building robots when he was a child. “In 1976,” he says, “I was getting interested in building computers. At the same time I saw a laser show and decided that was what I wanted to do.”

He has combined his talents into the design and construction of the units that form the basis of shows that have been presented throughout New England and as far away as Arizona and Oregon.

Sweet Meet

WHAT BECOMES APPARENT as you examine the exhibition, Like Sugar, is that the exhibition is all around us, all the time. What Skidmore College’s Tang Museum has done is isolate a number of elements – sweet, bittersweet, and merely bitter – to resonate with our sugar-infested world, and remind us of its loathsome past.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“I’ve always been aware that sugar had a powerful draw for me,” says Sarah Goodwin, a Skidmore professor of English who helped organize the show. “It must have been a good twenty years ago, there was a women’s study group that used to hold brown bag lunches where we’d discuss something of interest to us. I proposed the topic of sugar, and there was a very lively discussion that day from different disciplinary perspectives. So when the Tang Museum was opened as an interdisciplinary space, about sixteen years ago, I thought we should do a show about sugar. But I wasn’t thinking about it being so informed by contemporary art. I didn’t realize how much there would be!”

Drive-Worthy Vehicles

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Once upon a time, the saving grace of laptop computers (in the days when laptop computers required somewhat more than a lap’s-worth of real estate, until they were supplanted by a form factor termed “notebook,” which now has pretty much taken over the laptop arena, with strong insurgency from the netbooks) was going to be the PC Card, or PCMCIA card, which fit into a standardized slot but allowed you to add a modem, network connection, GPS device, and even an extra hard drive. But components got smaller and USB came along. The PC Card now is a thing of memory – and a subject of my quarter-century-old piece below, written for Mobile Office magazine.

                                                                                           

IN A RARE EXAMPLE of technology moving in complementary directions, the price of hard disks is dropping almost as quickly as the size of programs is swelling. The result: adequate disk space need not be a problem.

Unless you’re carrying a portable computer. A 200 megabyte hard disk seemed more than generous as newer, sleeker, faster machines emerged. Now, even with disk compression, those drives fill up far too quickly. Replacing the hard disk in a notebook computer is costly and wasteful – you’re left with an orphaned drive. Fortunately, another technology is also hurrying to keep up with the situation. The PC Card market is finally settling into something reliable and, better still, predictable. We’ve seen an efflorescence of modems and network devices in the PC Card form factor; now hard disks are joining the class.

The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) is the standard-setting consortium that established parameters of size and compatibility; their efforts are finally giving us cards that are truly interchangeable. Hard drives follow the Type III form factor of 10.5mm in height, allowing the manufacturers to fashion a complete but incredibly miniaturized unit complete with the rugged packaging needed for something that’s frequently handled.

Stranded on a Davenport

Guest Blogger Dept.: We deserve a visit from H. Allen Smith. He was a newspaperman in the 1920s, a Mark Twain devotee who won his own fame as a humorist in the 1940s thanks to his best-selling memoir Low Man on a Totem Pole and the many wonderful books that followed. I wrote about him here, when I went searching for his Alpine, Texas home. Here’s one of his Low Man stories.

                                                                                    

NEWSPAPER SHOPS, LARGE AND SMALL, accumulate fantastic personalities and weird behavior patterns. I once knew a Washington newspaperman who suffered from the delusion that Herbert Hoover had bladders on his feet. The first time I met him we were fellow passengers aboard the ill-starred Morro Castle in its maiden run from Newport News to New York. He kept calling me aside, telling me he had an important piece of inside information to give me if I’d promise not to print it. Then he would reconsider and decide to nurse his great secret for a while longer.

At last he came to my stateroom and after looking up and down the corridor to see that he had not been followed he stepped quickly inside, closed and locked the door and announced that he was ready to spill it.

“Herbert Hoover has bladders on his feet,” he said, spacing the words out for emphasis.

“No!” I exclaimed.

“It’s the God’s truth,” he said.

“How do you know he has bladders on his feet?” I demanded, pretending to be skeptical in the face of such a staggering statement.

Seriously Fortunate: The Armadillo

From the Food Vault Dept.: I tried to combine my longer trips with restaurant reviews back in the days when I took long trips and wrote restaurant reviews, and here’s an example of such: a nifty Mexican restaurant in Kingston, NY, that’s still very much in business.

                                                                              

SHE’D ALREADY BOUGHT AN UPSTATE HOUSE, upstate in this case being Kingston, as defined relative to Manhattan. “I’m a child of the first Woodstock generation,” says Merle Borenstein, “and I love the area. So I bought this place, but I’m still working in the city.” Working in the restaurant business, as it happens, managing a prestigious operation. “I’m vacation in my upstate home, thinking I’d like to run a restaurant in the area. But I didn’t tell anyone.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“So this customer comes in one day, a regular customer at the Manhattan restaurant, and he says to me, ‘I have a space I’d like to rent to someone who’ll know how to use it.’ And wouldn’t you know, it’s in Kingston!”

Borenstein looked at it. “It had nothing! No kitchen! It was a bar in the 1890s, I was told, but at this point the neighborhood was run down and brutal. A tough neighborhood, they told me! I looked at it and said, ‘I’m from Brooklyn. It looks fabulous.’”

Thus the Armadillo Bar and Grill opened in May, 1987. “You know how you’re supposed to have six months of salary and other expenses in the bank? We had nothing. We opened with a fundraising event, for Hospice, and it did very well. And we’ve been going ever since. We’re very seriously fortunate. And we’ve stayed small.”

Regaining Your Roots

FOR BROTHERS DAVID AND DAN PODOLL, one of the solutions to the economic stresses of operating their North Dakota farm turned out to be heirloom seeds. The brothers’ farm has been in their family since 1953, with wheat and turkeys providing their main revenue stream. But their ability to continue farming in southeastern North Dakota had been hit by shifts in both economics and weather, and conventional approaches were no longer succeeding, at least on the small scale the Podolls practice.

They’re one of three farm families located in three different parts of the United States, profiled by Lisa M. Hamilton in her engaging book Deeply Rooted, Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2009). The common threads are devotion to the land and innovative approaches to maintaining it, usually in the face of resistance from those too steeped in what passes for tradition to see how tradition is failing.

“Revenue from three acres of seeds roughly equals that from the farm’s three hundred acres in grains,” Hamilton notes, and the heirloom seeds that the Podolls are producing are cultivated to flourish in less-than-ideal conditions. They include a medium-sized watermelon they named “Dakota Rose,” alongside Dakota Tears onions, Dakota Black popcorn, and Uncle David’s Dakota Dessert squash.

But the enemy of the heirloom seed and the Podolls’ approach to farming is the incredibly profitable world of corporate science. Monsanto (now a division of German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG), a leading developer of GMO technology, sells patented single-use seeds, the purchase and use of which obligates the farmer to a draconian set of rules and restrictions.

The Digital Decision

From the Tech Vault Dept.: There’s a rain barrel outside my house that has spawned a large sunfish, swimming within. I was going to blast it with my .22, but decided it would be easier to regurgitate the column below. I believe that everything referenced in it is completely obsolete. Even me – I certainly no longer resemble that photo!

                                                                                            

ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO, I tested a then-representative pile of digital cameras for Computer Life magazine, concluding that they all were pretty good in delivering images of mediocre resolution – good enough for Web pages, say, but not what you’d use to archive vacation memories.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

A few hundred dollars would buy you an entry-level camera; for professional applications, such as magazine photography, you’d have to spend well up in the thousands.

As is inevitable, the technology has improved – and it’s improved pretty amazingly. I looked at a few current models that are priced in the hundreds and found cameras that are easier to use, more versatile and capable of producing very high-resolution output. Let’s look at the best of those, as well as what you can do with those photos you take.

Olympus, well known for its traditional cameras, got into the digital biz early and evolved a series of cameras that have been in the forefront where features, price and ease of use are concerned (but keep in mind that pricing in this realm is well above that of the film-camera cousins).

The Grand Mississippi Babes Mill

From the Record Shelf Dept.: All right, CD shelf, but even what sounds more up-to-date is charmingly antiquated. At any rate, here’s a look back some thirty years at a pair of significant releases of music by now-forgotten American composers.

                                                                                    

FERDE GROFÉ WROTE MUSIC in a self-consciously “American” vein, trying to achieve the same formal identity European composers were perceived as having. Victor Herbert was one of those European composers (born in Ireland, trained in Germany), but ended up in America, promoting American composers even as he continued to write his successful operettas.

“Babes in Toyland” (1903) and “The Red Mill” (1906) are about as American as you’d find on the musical stage at that time, which is to say that they’re very German even as they ape the then-popular French operettas that were so successful in England. The nicely recorded Naxos CD offers two suites, proving how thoroughly Herbert’s catchy tunes insinuated themselves into the musical language. We know them as folk tunes, and when “March of the Toys” wraps up the “Toyland” suite, we’re comfortably back in a childhood state of mind.

War and Pieces

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Pianist Gary Graffman, who turned 90 last October, is still active as a teacher and performer (and numbers Lang Lang and Yuja Wang among his distinguished students. Here’s a look at a visit he paid to New York’s Capital Region nearly fifteen years ago.

                                                                                

BIRTH, DEATH, THE THREAT OF WAR, the aftermath of war – the programmatic or circumstantial elements of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s triumphant performance at the Troy Music Hall last week touched on topics never more relevant than today, painting them through the emotional abstraction of music. Which may be the most compelling emotional manipulator of all.

Gary Graffman | Photo by Charles Grove

By the time Ravel’s “Concerto for the Left Hand” kicked into gear, with piano and orchestra merrily jazzing along, the effect was very uplifting. An excellent melding of soloist and orchestra gave the work both excitement and transparency.

By way of background, pianist Paul Wittgenstein (philosopher Ludwig’s brother) had his right arm shot away during World War I, and thereafter built up a commissioned repertory of left-hand-only piano works that included concertos by Prokofiev, Britten and, of course, Ravel, who wrote his contribution alongside his other (two-handed) piano concerto.

Wittgenstein also paved the way for soloists like Gary Graffman and Leon Fleischer, both of whom became right-hand-disabled at their career peaks. Graffman (who has himself commissioned works from Ned Rorem and William Bolcom), now president of the renowned Curtis Institute, has lost none of his performance fire, and, unless you could see the keyboard as he played, you’d easily forget the work’s dexterous restriction.

Troy’s Tasty Italia

From the Food Vault Dept.: I began my restaurant-reviewing career, such as it was, in 1986 with a column titled “Byron’s Blue Plate Special” in Albany’s Metroland magazine, which had yet to become an alt-weekly. Because we had no budget for meals, I suggested we ask restaurants to comp us, and write about what it is they do well. That format lasted nine months, after which a budget was found. And I promise you that I eventually turned in more interesting pieces. This piece also dates from a time when Troy, NY, was on the brink of becoming an exceptional  culinary center – but, like so much in the Capital Region, that went away.

                                                                                         

HOW DO YOU GO FROM running an art gallery to running a restaurant? If you follow Anthony and Joseph Busone’s example, you just add the restaurant. Actually, they had a gallery a few doors down from their current location at The Italia, but now feature showings of area artists that hang in the dining room for eight weeks at a time.

The author (L) with Anthony and Joseph Busone
Photo by Drew Kinum

“Something for the eyes, something for the ears – and something for the palate,” is how Joseph described the experience of dining at his restaurant, because the brothers’ interest in music also plays a part. When there isn’t live jazz, as happens Friday and Saturday nights, there is recorded music, hailing from the golden age of jazz and swing.

But our tough mission was to sample the food. We picked a quiet time for the visit: a late weekday afternoon. We were joined by Drew’s brother, an Italian-food specialist.

Although the menu is divided into categories of pasta, seafood, chicken, veal, and so on, the top-of-the-page specialty was good enough for me as an entrée. For an appetizer, I chose from a hand-printed list of daily specials: Carciofi Ripieri features that edible cousin of the thistle, the artichoke. In this recipe it is stuffed with a mixture of bread crumbs, seasoning, and artichoke hearts.

Whatever Works

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Listen, my children, and you shall hear of an era with DOS to fear. That’s right: once upon a time we had no graphical interfaces on our computers (and cell phones were bulky monsters that lived in our cars). We toiled in the character-based interface of a thing called DOS, for “Disc Operating System,” which was what brought those early computers to life. (It’s still there, but well-concealed. Run “cmd” in Windows and you’ll see its enigmatic face.) WordPerfect was an early favorite for DOS-based word processing; in 1992, the company spun out a suite of companion programs, which I reviewed for the long-defunct PC/Computing magazine.

                                                                                      

WORDPERFECT WORKS is an all-in-one package that makes a lot of sense for anyone who’s already part of the WordPerfect family. And, with such a low list price, it’s an excellent introduction if you’re thinking of joining.

Clustered within this integrated system are modules for word processing, spreadsheet and database work, graphics editing and communications, tied together by the Shell program familiar to users of WordPerfect Office. It’s a terrific laptop bundle – it takes up 5 Mb of disk space – and may even be all you need on a desktop.

The outside world may be a little baffled by a group of applications that uses function keys so differently from everyone else: F7 (not Esc) is the exit, F3 (not F1) asks for help. But Works now even sidesteps those conventions by offering stronger-than-ever mouse support and menus.

If you know the WordPerfect line, the only unfamiliar module is Communications, and even then it’s reminiscent of MTEZ, a program bundled with many modems (both were written by MagicSoft).

Portrait of the Artist

From the Darkroom Dept.: As I mentioned a few days ago, I found some interview and promo pieces I wrote for Capital Repertory Company’s 2013 season brochure. This one is dear to my heart, because photographer Joe Schuyler was a very good friend and an endless inspiration. I’m delighted to read this again.

                                                                                          

Joe Schuyler

“I TEND TO LIKE PLAYS that are a little off-kilter and visually interesting,” says Joe Schuyler, which, if you know his work, is no surprise. And you do know his work. It hangs in the lobby of Capital Rep’s theatre and greets you on the company’s web page. He’s the company’s resident photographer, and has been capturing its signature moments since 1988, seven years its founding. Which gives him a longer association with the theater now than anyone else working there.

“The first play I did was ‘Saint Florence,’ by Elizabeth Diggs,” he says. “I’d already been photographing shows for ESIPA in the ’70s, and Soho Rep and the Lake George Opera. I even did a season at Williamstown, which didn’t pay very well. Of course, unless you’re doing Broadway and Off-Broadway, it’s not a lucrative gig. You have to have some reason other than a monetary one to do it.”

In his case, he confesses, he loves the world of theater because he married an actress. “I started photographing plays in Boston, then New York, now here.” Eileen Schuyler is known to the area audience for her work with a number of companies, including Capital Rep’s recent “33 Variations.” She spent many years working the Empire State Institute for the Performings Arts and its successor, the NY State Theatre Institute. Most recently, she played the title role in “The Old Mezzo” at Pittsfield’s WAM Theatre.

Meat: The Parents

From the Cinema Vault Dept.: I’ve written very few fim reviews over the years, which is surprising given my intense love of the cinema, and unsurprising given the crap I’d be asked to write about. But I’ve been able to cherrypick a few choice assignments over the years, and this was one of them (albeit an uncharacteristically brief example).

                                                                                   

MANY YEARS AGO I attended a lecture describing an island culture that resolved its aggressions through “dream therapy,” the conscious manipulation of the unconscious state that allowed the dreamer to conquer an oppressor by imagining and then eating the person’s image.

Randy Quaid, Bryan Madorsky, and Mary Beth Hurt

Writer Christopher Hawthorne and director Bob Balaban may not have had this in mind when they embarked on the film Parents, but it certainly examines one nightmare case of parental oppression in terms both ghoulish and frighteningly familiar.

The familiar ones are the scariest, a tribute not only to the abovementioned and an exceptional cast but also to design consultant Yolanda Cuomo, who reproduced the look of 1958 Indiana in all its Eisenhower-loving glory.

Nick and Lily Laemle (Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt) have just moved into a spanking clean town with their 10-year-old son, Michael (an astonishing debut performance by non-actor Bryan Madorsky). They drive the right car and wear correct clothing. Dad works a nine-to-five job (he’s a defoliant expert for Toxico) and Mom keeps house.

The Fable of a Statesman Who Couldn't Make Good

George Ade Dept.: We invite the distinguished newspaperman and fables-writer to spin another yarn of How Things Were and How They Ought to Should Be, vintage 1899. Amazing how contemporary it remains.
                                                                                  

Drawing by Clyde J. Newman

ONCE THERE WAS A BLUFF whose Long Suit was Glittering Generalities.

He hated to Work and it hurt his Eyes to read Law, but on a Clear Day he could be heard a Mile, so he became a Statesman.

Whenever the Foresters had a Picnic they invited him to make the Principal Address, because he was the only Orator who could beat out the Merry-Go-Round.

The Habit of Dignity enveloped him.

Upon his Brow Deliberation sat. He wore a Fireman's moustache and a White Lawn Tie, and he loved to Talk about the Flag.

At a Clam-Bake in 1884 he hurled Defiance at all the Princes and Potentates of Europe, and the Sovereign Voters, caught up by his Matchless Eloquence and Unswerving Courage, elected him to the Legislature.

The Fur Horizon

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: A few years ago, I was hired to write promotional copy for Albany’s Capital Repertory Company (known now in our buzzword-intensive era as TheREP). Most of the pieces were specific to shows that mightn’t mean much to you, but I’m hoping you’ll enjoy the interview I did with David Ives.

                                                                                   

IT’S A CASTING DIRECTOR’S NIGHTMARE. You’re closing up shop after an exhausting day of auditioning actors, good and bad, and you’d just as soon not hear another word of the play – at least for the rest of the night. In David Ives’s “Venus in Fur,” it’s a playwright named Thomas who’s just about to wrap up an audition day when an oddly-garbed actress barges in, wet from the rain.

David Ives | Photo by Jennifer S. Altman

The setup seems a million miles from the short novel that inspired the play, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. “It’s a serious novel. It’s a central text of world literature,” says Thomas, to which the actress Vanda replies, “Oh, I thought from the play it had to be porn. Anyway, you don’t have to tell me about sadomasochism. I’m in the theater.”

“The book is dull,” says David Ives. “Very dull. But famous.” It is, in fact, the book that bestowed its author’s name upon the willful pursuit of pain: masochism. It tells a story-within-a-story as its unnamed narrator reads the confessions of a friend who describes a volatile, provocative romance.

But that’s not where Ives got started with the project. “I had this terrible idea,” he says, “which was to turn The Story of O into a play. It’s a really terrible idea because it could never possibly work in any way.” Another classic of pain-and-subjugation literature, The Story of O was published pseudononymously in 1954 and garnered both literary awards and obscenity charges.

Good Reception

From the Vault Dept.: During the course of my thirty-year Metroland career, I wrote a massively wide variety of reviews, advances, calendar listings, puff pieces, political pieces, and the kind of utilitarian stuff that reassured advertisers that this alternative newsweekly wasn’t too damn communist to help hawk their wares. Thus it was that I was asked to cook up the piece below, offering tips on your wedding reception dinner.

                                                                                                   

I ALWAYS END UP at the back of the prime rib line. After eyeballing the pasta station and deciding that the line pace there is glacial, I ease over to the carving station just as Table Eight is called and suddenly twelve enormous people have clustered in front of me, plates in hand, each drenching an outsized chop in all available sauces.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The wedding dinner is probably the most variable element of that special day, and it defines the look of the occasion. A feast for 400 in a capacious catering hall is very different from dinner for 40 in a restaurant – or catered at home.

The key to success is your involvement. Your leadership, in fact, because the more you entrust to others, the more it will look like every other cut-and-paste affair.

This is not to disparage the work of the planner or caterer or other wedding professional, who should ensure that the event runs smoothly, but it’s up to you to add the individual touches that make this your wedding and nobody else’s.

Babes in Goyland

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Here’s a charming little musical that had its world premiere in Cohoes, NY, in 1989; it had runs in Chicago and Manhattan in the years that followed. I’m going to give you my review first, followed by an interview piece that ran a week earlier.

                                                                                         

“IT'S LIKE A MOVIE,” sings Rachel, a screen-struck character in Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi. And she's absolutely right. This musical, receiving its world premiere at the Cohoes Music Hall, boasts an improbable plot, unbelievable sets, wildly uncharacteristic songs and a gratuitous helping of beautiful women offering generous views of their bosoms.

I'm going to see it again as soon as I can.

The creators, composer Bob Johnston and writer Jeff Hochhauser, call their show a “shameless musical,” and shameless it is in exploiting every entertainment style that's ever been overmagnified on the silver screen.

Set in 1917 at the height of Theda Bara's stardom, it opens with the glamorous vamp at her most austere and inaccessible, just as publicist Selwyn Farp (Raymond Wood) designed her. The gorgeous Theda, played in varying states of dress by pretty Liz Larsen, is regarded as such an evil influence that no self-respecting person would be caught watching her films.

That's the problem a young rabbi goes up against when a member of his temple catches him at the movies. Isaac Birnbaum is so flustered that he explains his purpose as information-gathering: he's going to deliver a sermon against the vile woman.