From Munich with Hans

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Back when daily newspapers covered classical-music events, I often had the assignment both to preview and review an event. That’s what you see here. First the review, which had to be kept annoying brief, then the preview, which, with no interview available, became a rewrite of a press release. I’d say, “It was a living,” but I didn’t even make a living off of writing this stuff.

                                                                                             

THE PERFORMANCE by the Munich Chamber Orchestra at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall confirmed what listeners who’ve been able to find this group’s recordings already know: It’s a superb little group, led (as it has been for the past 30 years) by Hans Stadlmair. Although best known for performances of music from the Baroque and Classical periods, the orchestra also presented a very contemporary work in this concert, giving a nice variety to its programming.

Hans Stadlmair

Michael Haydn, brother of the illustrious Franz Josef, has gained a reputation for his prolific output only in recent years. His Notturno in F, which opened Tuesday’s concert, is a short, four-movement symphony with a lot of charm and nothing terribly memorable about it; it benefits most from skillful execution, and so it came across well.

Bach’s “Ricercare for Six Voices,” from “The Musical Offering,” requires very precise playing, laying bare, as it does, so many individual instruments. Again, the orchestra served it well, but so slowly that it verged on a dirge rather than a royal celebration.

Violinist Young Uck Kim has gained a notable reputation during the past 20 years, but his performances of Mozart’s Concerto No. 5 wasn’t the sort from which good reputations are made. Perhaps he’s more at home in the romantic works for his instrument. Mozart seemed to get a heavy dose of the romantic laid upon him, whereas a more successful approach would be to treat the piece as you would a Mozart aria: Discover its character and sing it through the notes rhather than try to twist the notes into a foreign characteristic.

Nevermore the Twain

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: At the beginning of 2019, the 92-year-old Hal Holbrook announced that he was retiring his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight,” probably the grandaddy of all solo shows, and certainly the one most people think of when they consider the genre. Holbrook performed it for 63 years, accumulating enough material – all truly culled from Twain – that he could vary his performances at will. Now, a year after that announcement, Holbrook has joined Twain in wherever it is such talents posthumously meet. Here’s my review of an appearance in Schenectady 35 years ago.

                                                                                    

HAS HAL HOLBROOK’S ONE-MAN SHOW “Mark Twain Tonight” been overexposed? It’s been on TV, there was a commercial recording, and his presentation of it at Proctor’s Theatre Thursday evening was his third Twain appearance there.

Well, there are those, such as myself, who hadn’t seen the act before. And, based on the excellent quality of it, there must be those eager to see it again.

Because of the nature of the show, it is possible for Holbrook to vary his material so he has the freedom of a stand-up comic to play to the particular house he is addressing.

But that improvisational nature is tempered by the material itself: it’s all Twain’s. It’s up to the actor to affect transitions and delivery but he must be true to his sources.

The Raindancer Reigns

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Now it’s 40 years for the Raindancer Restaurant in Amsterdam, NY, an area institution that is holding its own in these pandemic-straitened times. A modest, reliable place for a casual meal or more fancy fare, it offers seating – but check the website so you’ll know the current protocol. Here’s my review from a decade ago.

                                                                                  

IN MY NECK OF THE WOODS, which is to say rural Montgomery County, the big city is Amsterdam. Don’t even start with me about “Smallbany.” For over 30 years, the Raindancer Restaurant has dominated Amsterdam’s culinary scene, and with good reason. It’s a classic steakhouse, clinging to a tradition that has otherwise vanished. It has reasonable prices, contrasting ironically with the recent area phenomenon of pricing the stuff out of sight. And it’s family run, which gives it a friendly personality that chain restaurants never can achieve.

I wrote about the Raindancer 20 years ago and again ten years later. Except for the pricing and some physical expansion, little has changed. The salad bar still goes strong. The prime rib ($30) is still a hearty seller. The lighter-fare menu that was in place a decade ago gives lighter alternatives. A new emphasis on wine means that more of it is available and that periodic wine-tasting events are well attended.

The youthful servers are friendly and attentive, so there’s a comfortable sense of being in good hands. So let me quickly get out of the way the one problem I encountered.

The Chair-Man Dances

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Life during social sequestration has inspired a torrent of movie-musical watching, the more vintage the better. Which set me to reminiscing about the worthy stage shows I’ve seen that seek to emulate such spectacles. Here’s my review of a 2007 tour of “The Drowsy Chaperone” that landed in Schenectady.

                                                                                         

BACK WHEN PORTER AND GERSHWIN AND KERN were cranking out their early scores and Fred Astaire was a stage star only, the American musical had a daffy innocence that took European operetta conventions of mistaken identity and social status conflicts, added a dollop of racial stereotyping and rolled it into a tuneful romp.

Could escapism be any more compelling, with live actors singing and dancing their way through their problems? Not as far as one lonely apartment-dweller is concerned – and he’s drawing inspiration from a scratchy LP of a musical devised nearly 80 years ago. This musical is, of course, The Drowsy Chaperone, and it boasted a cast of vintage stars whose lives are of just as much interest to the Man in Chair as is the show itself.

He sits in an overstuffed armchair in his cluttered urban apartment, and addresses us in the wry tones of one whose loneliness has long been leavened with wit. Musical theater is his salvation, and he wants to share with us this long-forgotten show. And so, easing his record player’s tonearm into the opening grooves of side one, he notes the familiar crackle – and then the rousing overture. Soon enough, the sound transforms into the music of a live orchestra, and the apartment is invaded by the high-stepping cast.

On Ice

From the Vault Dept.: Back in the day, I was eager to write about anything. When there was nobody else available or willing to cover a 1986 Ice Capades show in Troy, NY, I jumped (sans skates) at the chance, and got a pair of pieces out of it: A review of the performance itself, and an interview with then-star Scott Hamilton, who would be unceremoniously dumped by the corporate powers a couple of years later – but that impelled him to start the skating-performance group Stars on Ice. Now let’s go back a few years . . .

                                                                                     

THERE WERE MOMENTS during the opening-night Ice Capades performance Tuesday when you couldn’t be sure who was doing the “oo-ing”: kids or adults. The RPI Fieldhouse was filled with both to witness the latest in the ever-changing Ice Capades spectacle – and none was disappointed.

A special feature of this year’s program is Olympic gold-medalist Scott Hamilton, who performed two contrasting solos. Hamilton’s reputation certainly preceded him and he wowed the crowd with that blend of skating, dancing, and acrobatics that is unique to him.

He’s got some pretty good competition, too: solos by Robert Wagenhoffer, Priscilla Hill, Vicki Heasley, and Jeff LaBrake were top-notch, and there was superb partnering by the teams of Tony Paul & Terry Pagano and Burt Lancon & Tricia Burton.

In fact, Lancon & Burton, who threatened to steal the show at the end of the first half, returned to top that effort with an unexpected comedy routine.

Comedy is a staple of the Ice Capades program, and the British team of Biddy & Baddy brought to the ice a knockabout routine in the admirable tradition of Laurel and Hardy. It runs in the family: each has a son, and Dave ‘n’ Joey presented a sketch titled “Romance of the Vagabonds” that suffers no pretensions to highbrow humor. Appropriately, the four teamed up for yet another comic sketch.

87 Dance in Review

From the Terpsichorean Vault Dept.: Early in my arts-reviewing days, I covered a lot of dance, which was a joy. Then it became apparent to my editors that one person isn’t supposed to cover dance AND music AND theater AND food because ... well, you’re just not spozed to. But here’s a rundown of what I enjoyed in 1987.

                                                                                    

WHEN THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DANCE in Saratoga Springs inaugurated its Hall of Fame last summer, it affirmed the region’s claim on dance as a summer institution. Happily, this sort of thing continues all year, and 1987 gave us excellent examples of that great variety.

The idea of the dance museum itself makes a lot of sense when you consider the similarities between dance and professional athletics. Both require top-notch physical conditioning. Both create individual stars. Both have the cult followings necessary to make a museum work.

National Museum of Dance

And what would a museum be without a hail of fame? The roster ranged from the back rooms of vaudeville to the elegance of classic ballet, and comprised Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Agnes De Mille, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Lincoln Kirstein, Catherine Littlefield, Bill Robinson, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn and Charles Weidman.

The inductees were honored in a ceremony on July 11 by former New York City Ballet member Maria Tallchief, who made a presentation that formally opened the Hall of Fame.

Amassing the Maestro

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Conductor Arturo Toscanini’s legacy lives on in an endlessly recycled set of recordings he approved for release, and an even greater number of bootlegs that circulate on various European labels and via collectors. RCA, then BMG, now Sony, offered a complete edition in jewel cases with a specially designed glass-door case, then supplanted it with a cardboard-sleeve version. Between those events, they put out a dozen two-CD sets that applied some newfangled digital technology to wrench a more pleasing sound from the recordings, which was achieved with mixed success, although the ones considered below came out nicely. Here’s my brief review of two such sets.

                                                                                    

THE LEGEND OF TOSCANINI the firebrand conductor is well documented by the recordings he approved for release by RCA Victor, most of which were made from rehearsals or radio concerts with the NBC Symphony from the 1930s to the ’50s. RCA, now BMG Classics, offered a once-and-for-all CD issue of all those recordings, available as a set or in individual volumes (you can pick up the set at a good price at the Berkshire Record Outlet, by the way).

So why a new series of Toscanini recordings on CD? Milking the catalogue is usually profitable for record companies, but this also has given the engineers a chance to unleash computer enhancements on the sound. The original recordings were made in Carnegie Hall or NBC’s studio 8H (where Saturday Night Live now lives), and they’re notoriously dry sounding. With the passing of certain guardians of the Toscanini legacy, BMG is free to alter the sound the maestro once approved, and the result is generally pleasing. They’re a little warmer, less harsh.

Have a Critical New Year

From the Vault Dept.: I started the new year, back when the year was 1996, with a list of sardonic resolutions that I, then in the midst of my restaurant-reviewing career, would heed. Did I? I doubt it.

                                                                                      

THE CALLER WAS EMPHATIC. “You’re too nice,” she said. “Some of those places you write about are so awful they should just be out of business.”

It’s not my job, I explained, to drive them under. I’m supposed to offer a considered opinion, based on my experience both as a frequent customer and a former waiter and cook. Like anyone who enjoys eating, I have my preferences and peccadillos, and you may well groan at the thought of them if you’ve read this column often enough. Possibly you don’t care if there’s glass on the tabletop. But to sit at that restaurant table silently sharpening my journalistic knife defeats the purpose of dining out. It’s supposed to be fun and relaxing, and I try to have a good time in spite of the serious efforts many places make to defeat that purpose.

Not that I’m unsympathetic to your pain. You go someplace everyone’s been raving about, you order a meal that’s going to set you back a bundle and everything seems to go wrong. Nobody takes your order for a stomach-churning eternity. When it does get taken, the server gets it wrong. The food takes forever to come out of the kitchen. Even then it’s not right. The server is arrogant about it, or just too stupid to be believed. It appears that management fled early in the night. And as you sign your credit card receipt, you grit your teeth and think, “I hope somebody reviews this place and really gives it hell.”

Kitchen for the Holidays

From the Food Vault Dept.: One of the joys of skidding into the year’s end was diving into the cookbooks that crossed my desk. Being no fan of televised cookery, I avoided the celebrity-driven titles, although, as you’ll note below, I wasn’t immune to the lure of such celebrity chefs as Ferran Adrià (whose elBulli restaurant closed in 2011) and Heston Blumenthal (whose Fat Duck restaurant continues to operate west of London). Here is the roundup I wrote in 2008.

                                                                                        

COOKING AND COOKBOOK READING are separate activities in my house, and I’m a devotee of both. Where others plunk themselves in front of the cacophonous Food Network, I prefer to enrich my culinary ambitions with the quiet majesty of the page. Then I photocopy the recipes that intrigue me so that the books themselves remain as pristine as possible.

Shopping from my list, therefore, puts you in no danger of presenting a loved one with some overhyped celebrity-driven screed. The celebrities we’ll meet are the chefs themselves, generally as insane as any A-list actor or music star, but at least proffering actual nourishment.

Heston Blumenthal, for example, injected one of his sous chefs with hot pepper essence and studied a brain scan of the result in order to pinpoint where the hotness hits. Dedicated? Insane? You might as well ask the same of Van Gogh or Beethoven. Blumenthal’s The Big Fat Duck Cookbook (Bloomsbury, $250, bloomsbury.com) celebrates the intricately creative fare at his Berkshire, England restaurant, a perennial Michelin three-star winner. Not surprisingly, this big fat book is to cookbooks as a Blumenthal entrée is to more standard fare: unpredictable and gorgeous, with a spectacular design by artist Dave McKean.

Diner Indecision

From the Food Vault Dept.: I ended the year 2008 with a review of an Albany-area diner, the Metro 20. Two years later, it changed hands and changed name, and endures today as the Capital City Diner. I can’t tell you about its current incarnation, although re-reading the pieces below do inspire a longing for the post-Covid world when I can check out such eateries without worry. I’ll bet you’re feeling the same way!

                                                                                          

IT’S BEEN JUST OVER A DECADE since the Metro 20 Diner put down stakes – or, as it looks at night, neon ablaze, dropped from deep space – on Western Ave. not far from Crossgates and the Northway intersection. As far as architecture is concerned, it’s about as handsome a diner as you’re likely to find north of New Jersey, and the glitter of the exterior is carried onto the inside walls, with art deco poster-style motifs.

Photo by B.A. Nilsson

That you can get breakfast items at all times the diner is open reinforces a certain otherwordliness about it. You can lose your sense of time here, as you do in a gambling casino. Although the Metro 20 closes at midnight or 1 AM, arrive after dark and it feels like four in the morning. Even daylight visits make me feel as if I’ve pulled an all-nighter, but that has more to do with my decades-long tradition of shoveling eggs and sausage into myself after staying up all night than it does with the diner itself.

I visited with my family in 1998, when that family included a one-year-old. It was, and remains, a good place to bring kids. Its spacious enough to accommodate a range of customers in a range of stations, although customers tend to be consolidated in a dining area during the slower stretches.

A Fighting Chance

AT SOME POINT during my single-digit Christmas years, I learned to impress my parents and other elders by declaring that what I really, really wanted as a holiday gift was World Peace. What I really wanted, of course, was to parlay such pearly altruism into a personal reward. Which puts me in alignment with those double- and practically triple-digit political leaders who pay lip service to notions of peace while scheming to profit off the next armed conflict.

Bending the Arc is an important book that collects 17 essays about pathways to a peaceable world, placed in the context of an annual conference that has been going in New York’s Mohawk Valley since 1998. It began as the Kateri Peace Interfaith Pilgrimages, started by U.S. Marine veteran (and president of the Albany chapter of Veterans for Peace) John Amidon as an extension of his protests against the School of the Americas – an institution he more accurately terms the “School of Assassins” because of its training of Latin American military savages who used that training to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Latin American citizens.

The first two years were pilgrimages; in 2000, Amidon turned it into a peace conference. He describes the first few years of the event in the book’s opening chapter, putting them in the context of disturbing world events, ever hoping for tangible signs of the conference’s effect. The second half of the history is continued by Maureen Baillargeon Aumand, who has co-coordinated the conference since 2004 and helped bring more activists and would-be activists to it. The theme of the event has changed from year to year: 2009's was “Harnessing the Winds of Change,” 2013 brought “The Moral Imperative of Activism,” and the 2016 call for action was titled “Confronting the Politics of Fear.” Ambitious topics, ambitious events, but Aumand ends her essay by asking, “Have we found the way forward to shared planetary sustainability where war is seen as abomination and justice and equality rule?”

Christmas Eve

EVEN IN THIS STAY-AT-HOME version of the Christmas season, we're bombarded with music. Music that easily can drive the sensitive human into fits of depression and despair. Let's ease into the holiday with a different kind of song: one that should be able to drive you to despair far more quickly.

An Unfinished Christmas Story

Guest Blogger Dept.: We’re hurrying O. Henry back into the fray in order to set the holiday mood for us. He did it brilliantly in his most beloved tale, “The Gift of the Magi,” but that also has overshadowed another of his contributions to the season. Enjoy for its atmosphere and tone of voice; who knows where the plot may have gone had the author finished it.

                                                                                  

NOW, A CHRISTMAS STORY SHOULD BE ONE. For a good many years the ingenious writers have been putting forth tales for the holiday numbers that employed every subtle, evasive, indirect and strategic scheme they could invent to disguise the Christmas flavor. So far has this new practice been carried that nowadays when you read a story in a holiday magazine the only way you can tell it is a Christmas story is to look at the footnote which reads: (“The incidents in the above story happened on December 25th. – ED.”)

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

There is progress in this; but it is all very sad. There are just as many real Christmas stories as ever, if we would only dig ‘em up. Me, I am for the Scrooge and Marley Christmas story, and the Annie and Willie’s prayer poem, and the long lost son coming home on the stroke of twelve to the poorly thatched cottage with his arms full of talking dolls and popcorn balls and – Zip! you hear the second mortgage on the cottage go flying off it into the deep snow.

So, this is to warn you that there is no subterfuge about this story – and you might come upon stockings hung to the mantel and plum puddings and hark! the chimes! and wealthy misers loosening up and handing over penny whistles to lame newsboys if you read further.

Once I knocked at a door (I have so many things to tell you I keep on losing sight of the story). It was the front door of a furnished room house in West ‘Teenth Street. I was looking for a young illustrator named Paley originally and irrevocably from Terre Haute. Paley doesn’t enter even into the first serial rights of this Christmas story; I mention him simply in explaining why I came to knock at the door – some people have so much curiosity.

B-Side Yourself

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE smack-your-forehead, it’s-so-obvious ideas: collect the other sides of all the 78s that Harry Smith chose to include in his iconic Anthology of American Folk Music. A few enthusiasts pursued this idea, and thereupon pursued Lance Ledbetter, whose label Dust to Digital has produced many stellar releases of neglected music.

The project kicked off in 2013, fighting delays caused by finding the best-quality copies of these long-neglected discs, by running them through as fine a digitization process as is possible, by securing rights, where needed, to the recordings, and by putting together an attractive package with appropriate (whimsical, inventive) essays and song explanations. And by a pandemic that cam just in time to stymie the hoped-for production schedule. The set finally was released last October. It was worth the wait.

If it’s a mirror of the original Anthology, it’s a somewhat faded one. Not because of the quality of the music – this is old-time stuff at its best – but because of the unexplainable but magical quality of the programming of Smith’s original 84 sides, an array spread over three two-LP sets and categorized as “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs.” Some of it can be rough going: there are recorded sermons that seem endless and Cajun bands that sound wildly out of tune, but you hang through it all for a cumulative effect that, when you reach the final bars of Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues,” feels as if you’ve been through an emotionally fraught but satisfying wringer.

The Executive

Guest Blogger Dept.: We welcome, for his first appearance on this blog, the great juggler and ventriloqist – and he had something to do with radio as well – Fred Allen. He was a great fan of newspaperman-turned-humorist H. Allen Smith (and wrote the forward to Smith’s 1941 debut book, Low Man on a Totem Pole) and enclosed the following doggerel in a letter to Smith written in November 1940 (punctuation per the original).

                                                                             

Fred Allen | Photo by Philippe Halsman
National Portrait Gallery | www.si.edu

The Executive
by
James Whitcomb Allen

The Executive is
A busy man
Who sits around
On his frustrated can

He presses his buzzer
He jiggles his phone
And barks his commands
In stentorian tone

His every word
Is a slogan ... a phrase
He checks ... He ties in
Buttons-up ... and okays

He mother-hens it
He thinks in the groove
He knows his competitor’s
Every move

Accent of Youth

From the Computer Vault Dept.: And then there are the seeming orphans that crouch in old computer directories, pieces that I wrote many years ago that bear no identification of their intended destinations, and don’t show up in the hard copies I managed to retain. Here’s one of them, for a long-gone software program I barely remember examining, in an era that seems more technologically remote than ever.

                                                                                  

MOVEABLE TYPE, for all its benefits, froze the way individual letters look on the page. We who read and write English use one of the simpler languages, in terms of the characters involved, which made it all the easier for us to render the language on an instrument as inflexible as a typewriter.We take for granted a minimum of diacritical markings – and a complete absence of cedilla, hacek, and ess-tsett.

In the pre-computer era, typing in a different language was easy. Either you notated diacritics with creative overstrikes, or you found the appropriate typewriter. With graphical word processing now the norm, a program like Accent fills an important niche. Windows’ ability to display characters in any desired typeface means that those characters can represent any language. The most popular fonts, including those provided with Windows, contain the most-used foreign-language characters, but Accent adds its own set of TrueType typefaces for such character sets as Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. Japanese and Chinese languages aren’t yet supported, but are promised for a future release.

Most importantly, what lies beneath Accent is a full-featured word processor that gives button-bar access to formatting commands, multilingual spell-checking and thesaurus, and even individual word translation among five languages. An integrated utility called KeyMaps redefines your keyboard according to the language you’ve chosen to work in, with many of the languages offering more than one keyboard layout to ease your input.

On the Money

From the Classical Vault Dept.: The internet can be as opaque as it is revealing. I dug out the below review, which I wrote 35 years ago, and set out to find conductor Stan Rubin. He is eluding me. I remember meeting him in a coffeeshop back then for an interview, and he was eager and full of energy as he described his musical ambitions. And we lost touch. An internet search is occluded by the existence of an identically named clarinetist and bandleader. Got any leads on the whereabouts of this fellow?

                                                                                 

“LOVE OR MONEY” is a symphony orchestra that, for now, plays for love.

A concert Sunday evening at the Albany Jewish Community Center proved that the orchestra’s heart is in the right place, even if some of its technical equipment is not.

Mykola Lysenko

Founder and music director Stan Rubin conducted a program that featured a delightful performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17 in G. Soloist Luba Lischynsky, a Schenectady native now living in New Hampshire, played with a rare understanding of Mozart's style. A sense of control is most important: the pulse must be maintained even as phrases are varied and embellished.

This kind of collaboration is good discipline for an orchestra. The Love or Money members, still developing a smooth voice, found a challenge here, particularly in the second movement, where sustained passages require precise intonation.

It is important to recognize that the group is not a professional orchestra. Not yet, anyway. Rubin took on the challenge of starting an orchestra from scratch two years ago and he acknowledges that it takes time to gain credibility – and to bring in the kind of budget that allows good players to have sufficient rehearsal time.

The Heart of the Matter

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: Thanks to a recently acquired scanner that whisks piles of papers into PDFs – and its accompanying OCR program – I’m able to digitally store what used to take up too much file-cabinet space. And share unearthed clippings like the one below. This was a 1985 interview with Eleanor Koblenz, who was an Albany (NY)-area theater powerhouse. She reviewed shows for any number of papers, local and national, and also did marvelous work as a director. I’m distressed to see that the internet can find no photo of her; what you see below is from a photocopy of the clipping.

                                                                                           

HUMOR IS A SENSE that seems to be uniquely human. In its more sophisticated forms it becomes the unexpected underbelly of tragedy. It’s also one of the dramatist’s most powerful weapons: get an audience laughing and you’ve got an audience that trusts you. Emotions become more accessible. This is the secret of such masterworks as Chaplin’s “City Lights,” the pathetic ending of which carries all the more punch because of the humor that has come before.

Eleanor Koblenz

In “Crimes of the Heart,” Beth Henley examines the life of a family in Mississippi (her native state) – in particular, three sisters whose lives have become complicated by a succession of tragedies. Tragedies that are given a wickedly humorous twist in this Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

“When I first saw it, I thought it was a strange play,” said director Eleanor Koblenz. “It juxtaposes very serious material with a – what should I say? A quirky comic outlook.” The production, by Albany Civic Theater, opened last night (Wednesday) at that company’s playhouse. It marks Koblenz’s 10th directorial effort for ACT.

“It’s different from the kind of play I’ve been directing the past few years. and that’s what attracted me to it,” Koblenz said. “So much of the time I’m involved with plays with a strong dramatic content, or historical plays. So I saw this as being a real challenge.”

Culinary Pearls

IT'S THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the lavish Thanksgiving dinners we've served here at Jollity Farm, so we weren't about to let a little thing like a devastating pandemic arrest our planned celebration. We decided to salute our first such dinner here by re-creating its menu, more or less. And I learned something valuable: Even when I'm cooking for a very intimate gathering, I still prepare too much food. The menu is below, and a retrospective look at all the menus is here.

The Purple Dress

Guest Blogger Dept.: This Thanksgiving slice-o-life comes from O. Henry, who spent the dawn of thge 20th century relentlessly chronicling the swirling life of that romantic place of fiction known as New York City.

                                                                                            

WE ARE TO CONSIDER the shade known as purple. It is a color justly in repute among the sons and daughters of man. Emperors claim it for their especial dye. Good fellows everywhere seek to bring their noses to the genial hue that follows the commingling of the red and blue. We say of princes that they are born to the purple; and no doubt they are, for the colic tinges their faces with the royal tint equally with the snub-nosed countenance of a woodchopper’s brat. All women love it – when it is the fashion.

And now purple is being worn. You notice it on the streets. Of course other colors are quite stylish as well – in fact, I saw a lovely thing the other day in olive green albatross, with a triple-lapped flounce skirt trimmed with insert squares of silk, and a draped fichu of lace opening over a shirred vest and double puff sleeves with a lace band holding two gathered frills – but you see lots of purple too. Oh, yes, you do; just take a walk down Twenty-Third Street any afternoon.

Therefore Maida – the girl with the big brown eyes and cinnamon-colored hair in the Bee-Hive Store – said to Grace – the girl with the rhinestone brooch and peppermint-pepsin flavor to her speech – “I’m going to have a purple dress – a tailor-made purple dress – for Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, are you,” said Grace, putting away some 7½ gloves into the 6¾ box. “Well, it’s me for red. You see more red on Fifth Avenue. And the men all seem to like it.”