Back to the Lake in the Sky

Thanks to the vagaries of my performing career, I’ve appeared at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz several times and always enjoy the opportunity to spend a couple of days hiking the trails and, especially, enjoying the food. I’m writing this from my room there on an overcast day that nevertheless didn’t dissuade me from hiking to Skytop, fog-shrouded lack of a vista making the climb no less enjoyable. To celebrate, here’s a reprint of a review I wrote a couple of years ago about the buffet meal I enjoyed – with some updated photos.

                                                                              

“MY FAMILY HAS BEEN coming here every year for 43 years,” a woman told me. “Back when we started, Mohonk didn’t advertise. But they asked the people who stayed here to recommend others who might like the place. Two friends of my father were stuck in New Paltz one night, and couldn’t find a hotel room in town. Someone suggested they check with Mohonk. A room was available, so they made the trip up the mountain – back then you did the last section in a horse-drawn carriage – and stayed the night. And the next day, when they were asked for those recommendations, they gave my father’s name and address. We’ve been coming here ever since.”

I’ve heard variations on this story several times over, having stayed a few times myself at this venerable property. The 265-room main building is an astonishing feature, as is the mountaintop lake it overlooks. The state-of-the-art spa that recently was installed is so thorough that there’s even underwater music for enhanced pool enjoyment. Hundreds of miles of trails crisscross the thousands of surrounding acres of the Shawangunk Mountains, much of it part of the Mohonk Preserve, even more of it a State Park.

But even more spectacular, to my point of view, is the food. Dinner at Mohonk comes in two varieties: table d’hôte and buffet. Except for Sunday brunch, the buffet is served from June 29 to Sept. 2, as well as on major holidays and during late-in-the-year weekends. I visited the day after Christmas, when the buffet was in full swing, but I’ve been there during other times of the year and ordered off the menu. Either way, you don’t emerge hungry.

The (Polish) Joke's on Me

Hard to imagine that in our mild-mannered environment a classical-music review should draw considerable ire, yet that’s what I managed to provoke in 1986 when composer-conductor Krzystof Penderecki appeared at Proctors with Yo-Yo Ma and the Cracow Philharmonic. But it wasn’t my musical opinions that set people off. It was the sentence, “Krzystof Penderecki writes music that can sound as impenetrable (to an American) as his name.” Schenectady’s Polish-American community took terrible umbrage at what they took to be a swipe. As I explained to a group spokesman, I was merely observing that Americans have a tough time grappling with the spelling and pronunciation of foreign names where the consonants and vowels behave differently, and who among his association hasn’t suffered consequent spelling errors? The music, of course, was a non-issue to my critics, none of whom attended the concert. I should note that I’ve become a much bigger fan of Penderecki’s work in the intervening years.

                                                                             

Krzystof Penderecki

HOW DO YOU KEEP a concert of classical music contemporary while respecting centuries-old traditions?

The Cracow Philharmonic had the nice idea of touring with a distinguished composer at the helm, bringing in a renowned soloist and offering a mixture of 20th-century works for its performance at Proctor’s Sunday evening. The idea was nice; the result was disappointing.

Krzystof Penderecki writes music that can sound as impenetrable (to an American) as his name. His experiments with orchestration – particularly in the use of semitones and tone clusters – have challenged tradition and earned him great respect in the avant-garde music world. But his most significant exposure to a mass audience probably was in Stanley Kubrick’s use of his music for some of the eerier sequences in the movie “The Shining.”

Speaking of Laurel and Hardy . . .

... as we were over the past few days, they were at their best with the right comic foils. Jimmy Finlayson, Edgar Kennedy, Billy Gilbert, and Charlie Hall were among the best of the men they worked with. Among the women were Anita Garvin, Thelma Todd, and Mae Busch.

Busch was an Australian-born singer and actress who worked in American vaudeville before appearing in silent films with Erich von Stroheim and Lon Chaney, but her mercurial nature led her to the Hal Roach studios as the talkies came in.

This is a scene from Laurel and Hardy's first sound film: "Unaccustomed as We Are," from 1929. Overlapping dialogue and a wonderful musical gag (no overdubbing!) are among the innovations Stan Laurel helped craft for the screen.

Jake Moon

May 18, 2010 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

They Are Mechanical Blunderbusses!

A Week in Byron’s Hollywood Dept., Final Day: We’re finishing a few days celebrating some of the actors who created the character archetypes of the classic motion pictures.

                                                                   

Billy Gilbert

ALTHOUGH NOT NECESSARILY an archetype, he had a quirky everyman quality that netted him well over 200 screen credits over a 33-year career – and those are the roles for which he’s been credited. Billy Gilbert seemed to be everywhere during the 30s and 40s, usually behind a bar or delivering a telegram or in chef’s whites or sneezing. Sneezing was his trademark, and he’s best known, although you probably didn’t know it was he, as the voice of and model for Sneezy in Disney’s “Snow White.”

Gilbert was born – in a dressing room – to a family of opera performers and launched himself into vaudeville before hitting his ’teens. Stan Laurel spotted him in one such show and recommended him to Hal Roach, for whose studio Laurel and Hardy were working. From the start, Gilbert was a triple-threat talent, writing and directing in addition to taking acting roles, crossing paths with Thelma Todd and the Our Gang kids.

He made eleven films with Laurel and Hardy between 1931 and 1938, including the Academy Award-winning short “The Music Box” – the saga of hauling a piano up a forbidding flight of 131 stairs, only to discover that the top-hatted professor (Gilbert) who lives at their destination wants no part of it. “Piano? Piano? I hate and detest pianos!” he thunders. “They are mechanical blunderbusses!” (According to Gilbert, his German accent was intended to distinguish him from frequent Laurel and Hardy antagonists Edgar Kennedy and Jimmy Finlayson.)

I Want Excitement! I Want to Hot-Cha-Cha-Cha!

A Week in Byron’s Hollywood Dept., Day Four: We’re spending a few days celebrating some of the actors who created the character archetypes of the classic motion pictures.

                                                                 

Thelma Todd

WHAT SET HER APART from the platinum blondes of the early ’30s was that she could hold her own with the best of the comedians. Sure, Harlow worked with Gable and Barrymore, but Thelma Todd went up against the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante, even Wheeler and Woolsey (who pushed censorship limits to the max. Their “So This Is Africa” may be the most enjoyably tasteless film of the pre-code era, with the most unexpected ad-lib).

Thelma Todd started out, as did so many, as a beauty queen, and her earliest films, which were silent, included her for that purpose only. As the talkies took over, she was fortunate enough to be working for Hal Roach, who started her off in the first Laurel and Hardy talking picture, a two-reeler titled “Unaccustomed as We Are.”

She’s the incredibly polite and obliging wife of irascible Edgar Kennedy, which can only mean that she’ll end up in camisole and step-ins in Hardy’s apartment as his own wife, sharp-tempered Mae Busch, is returning.

From there, Roach teamed her with ZaSu Pitts and then Patsy Kelly in a series of shorts films, and she returned for five more Laurel and Hardy pictures, including her final one, “The Bohemian Girl.”

But she may be best remembered as Groucho’s foil in two of Marx Brothers Paramount classics: “Monkey Business” and “Horse Feathers,” neither of which featured Margaret Dumont, his usual object of romance. In “Monkey Business,” she’s a bootlegger’s wife, and Groucho’s courtship begins in her stateroom on board a ship. It hits many surreal notes, as when she declares, “I want excitement! I want to hot-cha-cha-cha!” and Groucho grabs a conveniently located guitar to accompany a madcap dance she performs.

If the Best Man is the Best Man, Why Does the Bride Marry the Groom?

A Week in Byron’s Hollywood Dept., Day Three: We’re spending a few days celebrating some of the actors who created the character archetypes of the classic motion pictures.

                                                                        

Mischa Auer

HE’D ALREADY BEEN in over 80 films by 1936, although some roles must have been fairly unmemorable, like “Firing Squad Victim No. 3 (uncredited)” in Greta Garbo’s “Mata Hari.” The screwball but sort-of socially conscious “My Man Godfrey” changed everything. Mischa Auer was cast as Carlo, a mad Russian genius whom wealthy socialite Alice Brady keeps as an artistic protegé, although his most creative act seems to be the gorilla impression he performs to cheer up spoiled Carole Lombard.

Auer got an Academy Award nomination and never looked back ... at least until the political climate changed. For the next fifteen years, Auer was the crazy but adorable Russian, sporting such character names as Prince Muratov, Baron Rene de Montigny, Dimitri Kyeff, and, memorably, dance master Kolenkhov in “You Can’t Take It With You,” Frank Capra’s film of the Kaufman-Hart Broadway smash (and played on Broadway by George Tobias, another of Hollywood’s character-actor greats).

You can sense that behind Auer’s wide, mournful eyes and crazy characterizations lurked a deep intelligence, and it’s confirmed by his unusual history. Born Mikhaïl Ounskovsky in St. Petersburg in 1905, he grew up in a well-to-do family whose fortunes changed with the early death of his father and, of course, the Russian revolution. He fled with his mother to Turkey, where she worked as a nurse and died of typhus. The young Mischa was found by his mother’s father, who brought him to America.

More Clothes for the Horses

A Week in Byron’s Hollywood Dept., Day Two: We’re spending a few days celebrating some of the actors who created the character archetypes of the classic motion pictures.

                                                                         

Joan Blondell

SHE STRIKES A PERFECT balance between wisecracking sourpuss Aline MacMahon and cute but acting-deficient Ruby Keeler in “Gold Diggers of 1933.” And she’s as strikingly attractive as you can ever want too see. Which only shows that Joan Blondell was able to move from being the main sidekick – with wisecracks galore – to part of an ensemble and still hold her own. Which is saying something when you’re up against a champ like MacMahon.

And Blondell got one of the her finest moment in that movie, as the lead singer (or declaimer, as it happened) of “Forgotten Man,” one of the Hollywood’s few straight-on looks at the Depression. Ironically, by that point, Blondell was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars.

(Before we let this movie go, let me share a DVD-release discovery. During the lead-in to the “Shadow Waltz” sequence, at 81 minutes into the movie, there's a general hubbub in which one of the ladies clearly can be heard saying, “Shit! I can't find my shoe!”)

That’s Why They Put Rubber on the End of Pencils

A Week in Byron’s Hollywood Dept.: We’re going to spend the next few days celebrating some of the actors who created the character archetypes of the classic motion pictures.

                                                             

Allen Jenkins

NOBODY WRENCHED AS MUCH inflection out of the start-of-the-sentence word “Say!” as did Allen Jenkins. The rubber-faced character actor spoke with a drawl colored by the vowels of his native Staten Island, and was the perfect foil for the likes of James Cagney, with whom he appeared in five movies between 1933 and 1935 (“The Mayor of Hell,” “Hard to Handle,”
Jimmy the Gent,” “The St. Louis Kid,” and “The Irish in Us”) and Humphrey Bogart, with a long run of seven pictures between 1932 and 1940, one of the most memorable being 1937's “Dead End,” where Jenkins played gangster Bogart’s sidekick.

(For the record, the other films are “Three on a Match,” “Marked Woman,” “The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse,” “Swing Your Lady,” “Racket Busters,” and “Brother Orchid.”)

Jenkins played a character who was worldly-wise, who knew how to hustle a quick buck, who delivered side-of-the-mouth wisecracks with deceptive ease – and was good-looking enough to win the second- or third-billed girl. He was at his best in movies like “Three Men on a Horse,” (1936), based on a hit George Abbott play. It was a film without above-the-title stars, and there’s a sense of merry abandon as Mervyn LeRoy (with whom Jenkins worked often) keeps the cast in some semblance of order.

Barbecue: There's the Rub!

From the Smoker Dept.: Today's nice weather has prompted thoughts of barbecue, so here's a helpful piece from a couple of summers ago. And once you get to cooking this stuff, don't forget to invite me over.

                                                                          

Saratoga Awesome Dogs | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

ALTHOUGH NOTHING BEATS AN impromptu outdoor cookout that litters the picnic table with burgers and dogs, my friends (and I now have many in the neighborhood) are never more pleased than when there’s a threat of barbecue.

The hardware chains have obliged us by offering sturdy, lower-end smokers that do an excellent job for household use. Forget the vertical type: it has little capacity and tends to go out overnight. You need a horizontal grill with an offset fuel chamber. They’re heavy, and awkward to assemble, and I suggest torquing the hell out of the bolts you use to attach the legs. If they’re not provided in the parts bag, look into adding lock washers or double-nut the bolts. (I speak from the experience of one who’s seen his smoker list to one side in a high wind like a drunkard, eventually telescoping into total collapse.)

A Telephonic Conversation

Guest Blogger Dept.: We welcome Mark Twain with a contribution proving that technology may change, but those who abuse it have remained similar for over a century. The telephone came on the scene in 1876. Three years later, Twain had one. In 1880, the following piece appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, presumably drawn from something Twain used in his public performances.

                                                                        

CONSIDER THAT A CONVERSATION by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room. I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by. Well, the thing began in this way. A member of our household came in and asked me to have our house put into communication with Mr. Bagley’s downtown. I have observed, in many cities, that the sex always shrink from calling up the central office themselves. I don’t know why, but they do. So I touched the bell, and this talk ensued:

CENTRAL OFFICE. (GRUFFY.) Hello!

I. Is it the Central Office?

C. O. Of course it is. What do you want?

I. Will you switch me on to the Bagleys, please?

C. O. All right. Just keep your ear to the telephone.

Then I heard K-LOOK, K-LOOK, K’LOOK—KLOOK-KLOOK-KLOOK-LOOK-LOOK! then a horrible “gritting” of teeth, and finally a piping female voice: Y-e-s? (RISING INFLECTION.) Did you wish to speak to me.

Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world—a conversation with only one end of it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted—for you can’t ever persuade the sex to speak gently into a telephone:

Happy Birthday, You Big Baby

April 4, 2004 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Turned Off TV

We're in the middle of Screen-Free Week – it began April 30 – and I've seen little publicity about it. Then again, I don't watch TV. But even internet news sources have failed to offer much. It's been happening since 1994, formerly called TV Turnoff Week, and the official website is here. My own epiphany came in 1980, as described in the article below. It's long and pretends to scholarly import (with a bibliography, even!), so take a deep breath. And it's followed by an interview piece about Bill McKibben that was published in Metroland Magazine many years ago. Remember: you can help make the world safe for yourself and others with a TV-B-Gone. I never leave home without it.

                                                                        

I’VE NEVER SEEN an episode of “Cheers” or “Seinfeld.” I’ve never even seen “M*A*S*H.”  I have a vague idea of what’s going on with “The Sopranos.” I’m a former television addict who inadvertently took a break from the box and never went back to watching it.

I can confess, along with so many millions of others, that TV was a babysitter and companion throughout my childhood. From Saturday morning cartoons to the Friday night primetime schedule (that’s when a couple of seasons of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” aired), I rushed to see what the living room’s oracle had to offer. In the pre-cable days, these were all commercial offerings, and even now I get an emotional jolt when I come across a vintage ad on an Internet site.

My family dined on TV dinners perched on TV tray stands in front of the TV, silently gumming Salisbury steak as Red Skelton cavorted in front of us (a scene poignantly recreated in Barry Levinson’s movie “Avalon.”) My allegiance began to shift slightly when, late in my high-school years, I discovered vintage movies, which at that time were to be found in a handful of revival houses – and on television, usually late at night. Still interrupted by commercials.

Y'All Come

Across the U.S.A. Dept., Sex Division: Here's what became the most widely read of the two dozen pieces I wrote for the Schenectady Gazette detailing aspects of a cross-country tour my wife and I took in 1989. For this one, she waited in the car while I conducted my research.

                                                                       

IT'S NOT IN THE Chamber of Commerce brochures, and you won't see signs of it on the main streets of the Nevada towns where the multicolored casino lights make three in the morning look like noontime.

If you've got your CB radio on, you might get your first inkling of it from this kind of message on channel 19: “Hey there, all you truckers. This is Dusty from Simone's and if you want to stop in Winnemucca we've got lots of nice hot coffee for you and can help you relax.”

To find Simone's you steer down Lower Baud Street into what looks like a long driveway, at the end of which is a cluster of five well-lighted buildings. My Place, The Villa Joy, Penny's Cozy Corner and The Pussycat complete the collection.

Nobody lounges out of the windows or beckons enticingly. You have to know where you're going and what you plan to do once you get there.

Waiter! There's a . . .

From the Vault Dept.: Here's a piece that never loses currency, originally published twelve years ago, the quotes giving a snapshot of an Albany-area dining scene that has shuffled considerably since.

                                                                                  

THE CHEF'S SPECIALTY WAS soufflés – huge, airy concoctions bedecked with lobster or caviar. Three members of a party of six ordered them. They’d been celebrating whatever event brought them here with round after round of vodka  martinis; by the time their entrées arrived, they were boisterous.

Then: “Waiter!” summoned one. I eased to her side. “This thing – ” she gestured to the soufflé in front of her, a yellow pillow now the worse for wear – “this thing has no flavor!”

“I’ll tell the chef.” In the kitchen, the German martinet was busily working the stove as I relayed the complaint.

“Arschloch!” he thundered. “What’s her problem?” This tends to be the immediate reaction of any chef I’ve known. I explained my theory that the party had numbed its taste buds with so much booze. “Of course that’s what happened!” he agreed. “It’s their problem.”

Pale, Thin People

Sweet Snake-Oil Dept.: I found this pamphlet in my attic while re-wiring and insulating. It's undated, but there's a companion piece at the end from the NY Times from 1894, and as far as I can tell from the Times piece, it was passed off as a legit news story. (It was also referenced in the Charlotte Medical Journal from 1895.) Has dietary science really improved since then? I'm going to contemplate that over lunch. Note: It's lengthy, but they sure wrote convincing copy back in the day! 

                                                                      

PALE, THIN PEOPLE

• Simply suffer from want of nourishment.
• If you are thin, it is because the food you eat does not digest properly.
• It is not healthy to be too thin. It is better to be hearty and fat.
• If your food doesn't digest properly, what can you do? You must change your diet.
• To get fat you must eat less fat and more starch, for fat and oils are indigestible.
• Starch is the only healthy fattening food

PASKOLA is starch food artificially digested; treated by science, the way nature treats it in your digestive organs.

PASKOLA forms fat without giving your digestion any work. It is a delicious, healthy pure food.

It is a food that will make you bright and rosy and healthy and fat, without the use of drugs or medicines.

PLUMP PEOPLE AND THIN ONES

What Makes the Difference?

Striking Image

Provincetown, Mass. | Aug. 17, 2007 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Spring Chickens

From the Coop Dept.: Against all odds, we still have two of the Rhode Island Reds we acquired eight years ago. Otherwise, the brood is a mix of breeds, with a handsome rooster who is as friendly as his never-eaten predecessor was mean. Here's a piece from seven years ago that explains it.

                                                                        

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

I ENJOY CAESAR SALAD and live on a farm, so it seemed logical to get chickens. We’ve been told to avoid those raw-egg dishes like the classic dressing for that salad – not to mention egg nog, boeuf à la tartare and most morning-after concoctions – because of salmonella danger.

That’s also why we’re exhorted to clean any prep or body surface that touches raw chicken meat. This isn’t because chickens are inherently disease ridden. It’s because the chicken-processing industry raises the beasts in such horrific conditions that they spend most of their brief, antibiotic-laced lives mired in ordure.

So why not turn some of my acreage over to a flock of them? We’d have fresh eggs, which are significantly better than store-bought, and we could kill and dress our own birds for dinner.

Heavy on the Light Verse

I WRITE LIGHT VERSE. I also write song lyrics. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that such efforts best succeed when they’re rhymed correctly, if rhyming is appropriate.

I received the parody lyric presented below some years back, and fortunately cannot remember who forwarded it to me. It also figures in an urban legend suggesting the Julie Andrews actually sang the horrible thing, which she didn’t.

Another thing I can’t remember is whether I sent my annotation to whomever forwarded the parody lyric to me. I hope so. What’s written below should give warning to the untrained parodist: you probably don’t know what you’re doing.

                                                                    

What's needed here.

Here’s the problem with trying to parody someone like Oscar Hammerstein. You have to know the rules of scansion and rhyming. And you have to know how to set up a gag so the payoff is as effective as possible. Let’s see what we’re working with here:

These are a few of my favorite things

Is this meant to be the title? If so, the title is merely “My Favorite Things.” It doesn’t work as an opening line, and messes up the quatrain.

Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,
Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings,

“fittings” and “knitting” don’t rhyme properly.

Bundles of magazines tied up in string,
These are a few of my favorite things.

Ditto “string” and “things.” In the original, the line is “Brown paper packages tied up with strings.” For a parody, this should be a payoff line. You’re constricted by the need to rhyme with “things,” but a quick check of the options suggests the following: “Wasting the time that retirement brings,” “Wrapping your butt in disposable slings,” etc.

Old New Dining Resolutions

Vintage Stuff Dept.: In late 1985, I was settling in as one of the Albany-area arts-writing hacks. I made my debut in the Schenectady Gazette in March, 1983, began writing for Metroland Magazine a year later, and soon added Albany's Knickerbocker News to my roster, which provoked a wee scandal I'll write about in the coming days. In December 1985 a glossy magazine called Capital Region appeared, brainchild of Metroland founder Peter Iselin. I wrote some features and food pieces for the short-lived publication, and for its second issue, I asked four area restaurant critics about their gustatory New Year's resolutions – little knowing that I'd join their ranks in a mere few months. The photo, by Bill Murphy, was taken in his Albany studio, and assembled the quartet in question to sample the stuff they'd pledged to avoid. I prepared and styled the dishes and, yes, that's me serving them.

                                                                     

IF FOOD IS ONE of the last things you consider when charting your New Year’s resolutions, you’re paying tribute to that staunchest of internal organs, the stomach. With a language all its own, it tries to guide us through a maze of dietary offerings that must be unrivaled in history for wretchedness. The American diet is designed almost solely for mouth appeal and has caused the mouth and stomach to become enemies. The mouth may win as far as choice of food is concerned, but it’s the stomach that will get you in the end.

Fred LeBrun, Vinod Chhabra, Peg Churchill Wright,
Doug de Lisle, and B. A. Nilsson | Photo by Bill Murphy

My wife and I have a dessert technique that dresses up our craving for sweets as something romantic: “Should we?” I ask, surveying a listing that already has the stomach preparing to do battle. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she says, but adds, “that ‘Slice o’ Heaven Pie’ sure sounds good.” “If I were going to have dessert,” I say cleverly, “I’d probably go for the ‘18-Layer Cake.’” And then we both ask the ceiling, “How long has it been since we had dessert?” (overlooking last week’s binge at Ben & Jerry’s) and, when the items arrive, hold hands while digging in as if to tell the world that ours is a gluttony inspired by love.

The Saga of the Longkill Diner

As a restaurant reviewer, I’ve seen places I praised suddenly close and places I hate soldier on, but I never had the experience that befell reviewer (and all-around fine writer) Vinny Chhabra late in 1981, when he did what we all love to do: stumble on a gem. Here are the two pieces that ran on successive weeks in the Albany Knickerbocker News, and then I’ll come back with some history. Here are Vinny's pieces.

                                                                  

IT’S EASY TO MISS, but keep your eyes peeled for a little green diner, behind a row of evergreens, right next door to a gas station, where Ushers and Longkill roads meet. It’s a diner, all right, but one like none other around. A haute diner.

Stuart deVoe bought Arlene’s Country Diner five months ago when Arlene decided to devote all her time to being a cook at the Saratoga County Jail. DeVoe had managed an inn in Greenwich, NY, before turning hair-stylist; but his interest remained in food. He catered parties, he followed Craig Claiborne religiously, he experimented with food, improvised.

“To build up business,” he offered inexpensive but classy dinners three evenings a week at the diner for around $4. It didn’t make him rich, but it attracted a lot of attention, especially from the people in the Van Patten developments close by.

DeVoe couldn’t keep up the pace, the 100-plus hours a week, so he cut out the dinners and concentrated on breakfast and lunch.

At 6:15 Wednesday morning we placed our orders: Blueberry pancakes ($1.59); eggs Benedict 1$2.75): a Longkill Omelet ($1.95).

Developing Ability

ONE OF MY FIRST photos. Note the cunning composition of power line and (just-built) fence, and the casualness of the subjects. Man, I was good.

It's a shot of my father and sister, taken in the summer of 1964. I was eight. I used my dad's camera, which was a Kodak Duraflex II that used medium-format 620 film. Then he helped me develop the negative and make prints. I'm amazed the negative survived all these years, to the point where I'm able to scan it directly into a computer -- a gadget the eight-year-old me would have found unbelievable and therefore entirely acceptible, which is one of the wonderful things about that age.

Ridgefield, Conn., 1964 | Photo by Byron (not yet B. A.) Nilsson

Vlad the Regaler

APRIL 23 IS THE birthdate of several artists whose work I admire: William Shakespeare, Sergei Prokofiev, J. P. Donleavy, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Besides being the author of such superb novels as Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada, and Pnin, Nabokov was a lepidopterist of such repute that he worked on Harvard’s butterfly collection. His trips crisscrossing the U.S. in search of specimens provided the roadmap for Humbert Humbert’s travels, and Timofei Pnin has this experience:

A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin's shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again. (Nabokov, Pnin.)

Untame "Taming"

Vintage Stuffe Dept., Shakespeare Division: Long before I had any professional association with the NYS Theatre Institute, back in the days when it was the Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts, I reviewed its productions for Albany's Metroland Magazine. Here's a time-machine visit to a 1985 production of The Taming of the Shrew.

                                                                    

John Abajian (top) and John Romeo

IF THE EMPIRE STATE Institute for the Performing Arts production of The Taming of the Shrew suffers from anything, it’s a surfeit of attention. So keenly has director Terence Lamude striven to overcome any opacity the play has gained over the ages that he has, if anything, given us too much detail. But it’s a spectacular production, the kind that makes Shakespeare as accessible as he deserves to be. There may be a large number of people, kids now, who will look back at a school trip to this play as a door-opener to something a little weightier (and ultimately more fun) than Neil Simon nonsense – never mind trash like The A-Team.

The set, designed by Klaus Helm, has a cartoon-like aspect of much detail and not all filled in. It suits the action, which joyfully discovers the burlesque In the script. Lamude also adds a few manic touches of his own, in the manner of film director Richard Lester. People bash heads; slops get dumped from a window.

Grouching

DICK CAVETT HAS A piece in today’s New York Times reflecting on the 1972 Carnegie Hall performance by Groucho Marx. Cavett, who was host of a TV talk show at the time, introduced Groucho that evening, and he discourses about what terrible physical shape the comedian was in and the mediocre performance it led to.

Dick Cavett and Michael Connolly
August 1977 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Writes Cavett: “His performance consisted mostly of an unenergetic reading of his favorite anecdotes from three-by-five cards; a thing I feared might turn even that audience to stone.

“But a sort of miracle took place. They were so pre-sold to have the time of their lives that they barely seemed to notice any difference between the all-but-drained Groucho onstage and the capering madman of the movies. And, as an actor still susceptible to a booming audience, mercifully he did ‘come up’ a lot.”

I’d like to say that Cavett is dead wrong, that Groucho fully rallied to the occasion and turned in a stunner of a show. But he didn’t. I had a sixth-row parquet seat, in a sold-out house that had a mix of the scruffy and illustrious, and saw a frail 82-year-old guy go through a halting sequence of stories and songs.

Cutting Edge Cutting Edges

When it comes to kitchen knives, I've been a die-hard carbon steel partisan for decades. But I was hearing so many good reports about new handle shapes and grades of steel that about a year and a half ago, I ran a series of knives through extensive kitchen testing. A shortened version of the results appeared in Metroland. Here's the piece in its entirety.

                                                                                     

“AT LAST! MY right arm is complete again!” cries Sweeney Todd (unless he’s portrayed by a southpaw) as he closes his fingers after many years around the chased-silver handle of his cut-throat razor. That sense of completion – of balance and totality – is shared by professional chefs, whose most-used kitchen implement is a knife that sits comfortable in the hand and, when wielded with precision and grace, seems a natural extension of the body.

In the home kitchen – at least in the kitchens of homes I visit – it seems to be the most neglected of tools. Cheap knives, stamped of inferior metal, abound, knives unable to hold an edge even if they were sharpened properly in the first place. Even the good knives too often hide in a drawer, dull and therefore dangerous. Do yourself a favor and get a good chef’s knife. Get one for a kitchen-minded family member. Get one so that visiting friends (like me) have something to cook with.

I tested eleven candidates, a variety having in common a ten-inch (or thereabouts) blade, priced from $70 to $295. Should you prefer an eight-inch blade, you’ll pay a little less.

Road to Morocco

My restaurant review in today's Metroland extols Tara Kitchen in Schenectady, where excellent Moroccan cuisine is offered. Back in November, one of my food columns looked at three new Moroccan cookbooks, in the course of which I lamented the lack of such fare in the area. As noted in the restaurant review, I quickly heard from Aneesa Waheed, who promised that she was about to right that wrong. She's done so spectacularly. Here's the piece that prompted her response, written from a mid-autumn perspective.

                                                                        

DAYS ARE SHORTER, nights are colder, it’s root vegetable season. It’s time to spend a little longer in the kitchen. I’ve been spending more of time with earthenware cookers, in particular one of the most marvelous of clay-pot designs, the Moroccan tagine.

I featured it during one of a quartet of Mediterranean-themed cooking classes I taught not long ago. France, Italy and Spain were the easy-to-choose first stops and, although more of Morocco extends around the Atlantic Ocean, there was enough of it on the Mediterranean Sea, I decided, to justify its inclusion. Not to mention that it has been greatly influenced by the cuisines of its neighbors. Almost simultaneously, three new Moroccan cookbooks appeared. Were it not a Turkish term, I’d call it kismet.

Take a Spanish cazuela, a large clay dish, and add a conical cover. That’s the tagine. As chef Mourad Lahlou writes in Mourad: New Moroccan (Artisan), “Their ingenuity is twofold. First, they’re designed to circulate heat in a way that’s not unlike what a convection oven does. The tapering lid forces hot air back down over the food, so that when everything is mounted the same way – the meat on the bottom, the vegetables over it, with the softest ones on top – everything cooks in the same amount of time.”

Tagine refers both to the cooking vessel and the meal it produces, and the quality it imparts is known as goût de terrior – the flavor of the earth.

Memphis in April

Felicia Boswell and Bryan Fenkart

THE BROADWAY MUSICAL “Memphis” opened on tour last night in Schenectady. Immediately thereafter, Dick Clark died. A spokesman I just invented insists there was no relation between the two events.

Clark is mentioned in the musical, which charts the rise of unlikely DJ Huey Calhoun (brilliantly played by Bryan Fenkart) as he forces music by black performers onto the mainstream airwaves in Memphis in the mid 1950s. Calhoun eventually is poised for national success, and Clark is named as one of his competitors.

But Calhoun is foolishly self-destructive, mirroring the career of actual Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips, who parlayed his enthusiasm for black R&B and a what’ll-he-say-next hillbilly persona into a few years of local popularity.

At one point in “Memphis,” Calhoun’s about-to-be boss, Mr. Simmons (the always-impressive William Parry), wants to assure the radio audience that Calhoun isn’t black. “Tell them what high school you attended,” he insists, which is book writer Joe DiPietro’s borrowing of a Dewey Phillips incident, in which the high-school ploy was used to reveal Elvis Presley’s race.

Improvising vs. Composing

Guest Blogger Dept.: Today's author is Sergei Prokofiev, who offers a diary entry from June 16, 1913.

                                                             

. . . . In the evening I yielded to the entreaties of the landlady and some of the ladies in our pension, and improvised on various themes they picked out. I played them all kinds of nonsense, but they were full of admiration. I do not like improvising, and do it only rarely, perhaps once a year.

The process of composing at the piano has nothing in common with improvising: composition consists of intensive, urgent searching, in the course of which the composer divides himself into two people: the creator and the critic. The first rapidly clothes his thoughts, one after the other, in snatches of music; among this throng there will be a number of purely automatic reflexes, but buried deep in them will be ideas of true originality. It is like sifting through gold-bearing sand and occasionally coming across a nugget of something valuable.

Fletcherize Your Music!

Yes, I got cranky in a recent review of a splendid performance by The Knights at the Troy Music Hall. And that's an edited version! (Although it adds some text dropped from the print version.) I fear that I've mellowed over the years, a state of being that can seem like part of the slow descent into Giving Up, so I looked back to if I was any crankier in an earlier decade. My conclusion: Not really. Even this piece below is far too kind.

                                                                                  

IN A BOOK TITLED Fletcherism, What it Is or How I Became Young at Sixty, Horace Fletcher, a leading crank of the early years of this century, insisted that “nature will castigate those who don't masticate.” He insisted that the key to good health was to chew each mouthful of food from 30 to 70 times before swallowing.

The American way to satisfy such a requirement would be to hire someone else to chew it for you. That’s a ridiculous way to deal with dinner, but unfortunately, it may become the popular way to digest music – pre-chewed to a paste.

There seems to be a conspiracy between record companies and radio stations, abetted by those of us entering our fourth decade, to place music into compartments like so many shipboard staterooms; music is offered as a commodity that shouldn’t tie up our senses. Being an aural experience, music frees the dominant sense of vision to scan a newspaper or dinner partner.

The Kid Gets in the Picture

April 14, 2012  |  Photo by B. A. Nilsson

A Lot to Like

Back in the old days, when we all were exciteable pups, significant classical music events got a newspaper preview and then a review right after the event. In the mid-1980s, I was a stringer for the long-gone Albany Knickerbocker News, the city's afternoon paper. Noting that tonight marks not only an appearance by Musicians from Marlboro at Schenectady's Union College but also the final concert of the season, I offer a preview-review combo from 28 years ago. The preview piece is so unexciting that I can only assume most people who were interested in the event ignored it or attended anyway. And the review shows my pathetic attempt to satsify an editorial decree that you should be able to find something wrong with any event.

                                                                            

THIS SEASON'S SERIES of chamber music concerts at Union College in Schenectady – sponsored by the college and the Schenectady Museum – will conclude with a performance by Music from Marlboro Tuesday at 8 p.m. in the college’s Memorial Chapel. The featured performers are bass-baritone Sanford Sylvan and French horn soloist Robert Routch.

Sylvan first received national recognition when he won third prize in the 1979 Kennedy Center-Rockefeller Foundation International Vocal Competition. He has received three fellowships to the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. His recitals throughout the country have provoked a storm of critical acclaim – and he should be well known to area concertgoers for his terrific performance last February at Union College, singing the title role in the Monadnock Music production of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.”

A Man of Versatility

Yesterday I posted one of my rewrites of the Major General's song from "The Pirates of Penzance." It wasn't the only time I used that number as a model. Four years ago, I was asked to participate in a memorial for Doug De Lisle, with whom I shared aspects of my profession (restaurant and theater reviewing and, on one occasion, the stage ("The Cradle Will Rock," Schenectady Civic Players, Oct. 2004). Most often, I'd see him with fellow press people at opera performances, where we'd debate such things as the merit of translations. So I decided to present my tribute as a song, and once again ravaged the legacy of W. S. Gilbert.

                                                                  

I

He was the very model of a man of versatility,
Intelligence and humor were the heart of his ability;
His writing covered topics from the opera to gastronomy
And came across with elegance consistent with his bonhomie!

I Run the Very Model of Maniacal Machinery

From the Technology Vault Dept.: This time I saw it coming: a hard-drive failure. I backed up everything just in time, and, fortunately, backed up the backup. But while buying its replacement, I splurged for a fast, new desktop unit that I'll be laboring for days to fill with the data I saved (there's much to be said for mirror-style backups). It led me to recall a new computer I acquired about fifteen years ago, and which I celebrated by rewriting the Major General's song from "The Pirates of Penzance." Oh, how dated those technology references are today! Apologies, as always, to W. S. Gilbert.

                                                              

I

I run the very model of maniacal machinery,
To make it more amazing would no doubt be misdemeanory,
It wakes me in the morning and it tells me if it’s soggy out,
And if it’s really soggy my machine will let my doggy out;

One Man, Four Walls

TRUE TO ITS commedia dell’arte roots, Richard Bean’s “One Man, Two Guv’nors” plays fast and loose with the theater’s fourth wall. That wall – the imaginary boundary between audience and players – is itself a 19th-century conceit, but so firmly rooted that unless you grew up with the likes of British pantomime, it’s a surprise when one of the actors fully engages the spectators.

Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 classic “The Servant of Two Masters” is Bean’s basis, borrowing an absurd-from-the-start situation in which hapless Francis Henshall finds himself not only doubly employed, but working for a pair of on-the-lam lovers, neither of whom knows the other is in Brighton.

Produced by the National Theatre of Great Britain, and movie-theater broadcast last year as part of its NT Live series, the play was such a hit that it transferred to London’s West End, and is currently in previews on Broadway with most of its British cast intact.

Which means that we have the pleasure of seeing James Corden give the comic performance of a lifetime as the wily servant.

A Heritage in West Virginia

Across the U.S.A. Dept.: Late in 1989, my wife and I piloted a VW camper from Schenectady to California and back, and I sent back a couple of dozen Ernie Pyle-inspired dispatches that ran in the Schenectady Gazette. On the way back, we stopped to visit my some of my West Virginia cousins and found ourselves in the midst of the Pittston strike.

                                                                   

THE SIGNS IN NEARBY Williamson tell you you're In the Heart of the Billion-Dollar Coal Field, but you don't need signs to tell you what's king around here. Route 52, which takes you through that city, parallels the train tracks. You pass a yard in which endless combines of coal-filled cars sit on the 24 sets of tracks.

There are no dry valleys in this area. The high mountains meet at stream-filled crevices. The roads are etched into the hillsides. As you round a hairpin curve there's a good chance you'll meet a coal-filled dumptruck coming the other way.

Sixty-eight years ago a Williamson jury acquitted Matewan sheriff Sid Hatfield and a crew of union miners of charges that they murdered a group of Baldwin-Felts detectives. These detectives were nothing more than hired thugs sent by the Stone Mountain Mining Company to turn striking miners out of company-owned houses. Matewan is over in the next hollow (pronounced “holler”), near Pigeon Creek and Red Jacket and Varney, but Williamson is the seat of justice for Mingo County.

Watch Me

EXIT THE N TRAIN at Canal Street and you have the option of ascending to the sidewalk in a very slow glass-walled elevator that takes you to a glass-walled box, an excellent metaphor for what you’re about to become: a fish in a fishbowl.

At least that’s what happens to me. I never feel quite so large and slow-moving and touristy as when I hit the nerve center of Manhattan’s Chinatown. But I was a man with a mission. Well: a couple of missions, one of them lunch, which you can economically obtain when you poke carefully around the side streets.

But I also wanted a watch. I headed east on Canal. Between Baxter and Mulberry Streets is where the streetside shopping potential peaks. Beside you is a row of storefronts promising jewelry, perfume, watches, souvenirs. At your elbow pass a succession of people murmuring, “Handbags. Watches.” Near the curb are carts and table displays. On a pleasant day, the block can be packed with people, most of them tourists like me.

Easter Sunday Dim Sum

Jing Fong  |  April 8, 2012  |  Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The Subject Soon Vanished . . .

Salumi e formaggi  |  Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Dutch Treat

I felt bad knocking the Albany Symphony's performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 1. True, it was a piece I wrote at the time the performance took place, which was in 1986 or so. And while I have no direct recollection of the concert any more, I'm willing to trust my long-ago appraisal. But the Albany Symphony has come a long way since then. Here's a look back at a terrific concert they gave ten years ago.

                                                                                 

The Dogs of Desire,
David Alan Miller, conductor
Troy Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY
Friday 21 March 2002

OSTENSIBLY COMMISSIONED TO CELEBRATE the 350th anniversary of the founding of Albany, NY, by Dutch settlers, the eight works premiered by Albany Symphony Orchestra members on March 22 more aptly celebrated the varied voices of youngish composers – and proved that the technique arsenal has never been more fully stocked.

Tonality, atonality, minimalism, jazz – all of it was represented, with a healthy dollop of humor, too.

The Albany Symphony always has paid attention to new works, and music director David Alan Miller draws an avant-garde unit from the ranks, a group dubbed The Dogs of Desire. (This is a city whose hockey team was named The River Rats.)

Boring Orchestras

Here's another old piece I found while searching for yesterday's essay. It's undated, but based on the reference to Paul Henry Lang and the fact that it's typewritten, I figure it's from 1986. And I'm guessing it's one of the pieces I submitted to a number of Albany-area newspapers as an example of my skill as a classical music critic, a strategy that got me work at a few of those papers over the years. I can't say I'm much impressed by that putative skill when I read the piece today; it labors to make its points and gets annoyingly look-what-I-know. Since then, I've struggled to correct the first of those problems, but I'll be damned if I'll change the second.

                                                                                  

DURING A RECENT LECTURE in Albany, 85-year-old musicologist Paul Henry Lang declared that he was adding his distinguished voice to the clamor against the zealous use of antique instruments in performances of antique music. “They may drum me out of the musicological societies,” he said, “but I don’t believe that we should turn our backs on the progress achieved in building and playing modern instruments.”

Opponents of his opinions (he described a baroque violin as a “beautiful product of an Italian craftsman that is then given a hysterectomy”) left the lecture grumbling and found solace in a performance a couple of weeks later in Schenectady by the Hanover Band, an English-based orchestra that recreates the ensemble of Beethoven’s day, with Beethoven-era instruments.

The modern-instrument crowd got to glory in a concert by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, which shared a piece with the Hanover Band: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. The rest of the ASO’s program comprised 20th-century works, which were played with excitement. The Beethoven, however, in common with so many of the older pieces being played by the big orchestras, was dull. Played by the Hanover Band, it was thrilling.

"Clarence": A History

Speaking of Tarkington Dept.: Syracuse Stage presented a revival of Booth Tarkington’s play Clarence during its 1983-84 season (if I’m remembering correctly), and I got wind of this and persuaded them to let me write program notes for the piece. I can’t find a copy of the program, but my original draft is at hand and shows the obsessive enthusiasm I had developed for Tarkington’s work. In other words, I wrote this for them for free. Just as well: it's a pretty dry piece of work.

                                                                                 

John Flood, Alfred Lunt, and Helen Hayes
in Clarence, 1919

“WHEN WE WENT to the theatre,” wrote Booth Tarkington about his life in turn-of-the-century Manhattan, “we paid a dollar and a half for an orchestra seat; though when Sarah Bernhardt came  over that winter the impressive charge for such a seat was three dollars. . . . There were table d’hôte dinners with wine for thirty-five cents at Italian restaurants; a dollar and half paid for a Sunday evening table d’hôte, with music, under the great gas chandeliers of the best hotels in the town.”¹

Like so many young novelists, Tarkington developed an interest in the stage. He had gathered a reputation as a talented actor while at Princeton, where he co-authored a successful satiric revue. His second novel, Monsieur Beaucaire, achieved enough popularity to invite interest in a stage version, so the author travelled to New York City in 1900 to assist in that project. To his delight, he was sponsored for membership in the Players Club, where he met such theatrical luminaries as Richard Mansfield, John Drew, and Joe Jefferson. Tarkington described the experience of seeing Jefferson in The Rivals: “(He) was an elderly man, but there was no elderliness in his ‘Bob Acres.’ A fresh-colored country youth came before us, inimitably the funniest young coward ever seen on the stage, and not until he played that part with increasingly fierce electric light glaring upon him was the illusion of youth dispelled.”²

Mary Smith

Guest Blogger Dept.: We've asked Booth Tarkington to step in again as today's wordsmith, with a story that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, August 17, 1912. Tarkington was greatly influential as I learned to write, and is second only to P.G. Wodehouse in his ability to turn a comic descriptive phrase. During his heyday he was one of the country's most popular writers, but despite winning two Pulitzer Prizes (The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams), his work began falling out of fashion as a less-sentimental school of writing emerged in the 1930s.

                                                                      

HENRY MILLICK CHESTER, rising early from intermittent slumbers, found himself the first of the crowded Pullman to make a toilet in the men’s smoke-and-wash-room, and so had the place to himself — an advantage of high dramatic value to a person of his age and temperament, on account of the mirrors which, set at various angles, afford a fine view of the profile.

Henry Millick Chester, scouring cinders and stickiness from his eyes and rouging his ears with honest friction, enriched himself of this too unfamiliar opportunity. He smiled and was warmly interested in the results of his smile in reflection, particularly in some pleasant alterations it effected upon an outline of the cheek usually invisible to the bearer. He smiled graciously, then he smiled sardonically. Other smiles he offered — the tender smile, the forbidding smile, the austere and the seductive, the haughty and the pleading, the mordant and the compassionate, the tolerant but incredulous smile of a man of the world, and the cold, ascetic smile that shows a woman that her shallow soul has been read all too easily — pastimes abandoned only with the purely decorative application of shaving lather to his girlish chin. However, as his unbeetling brow was left unobscured, he was able to pursue his physiognomical researches and to produce for his continued enlightenment a versatile repertory of frowns — the stern, the quizzical, the bitter, the treacherous, the bold, the agonized, the inquisitive, the ducal, and the frown of the husband who says: “I forgive you. Go!”

Finding Your Place

Vintage Glowing Stuff Dept.: Even after 22 years at my rural compound, I’m still asked how I ended up here. My wife, Susan, and I lived in Schenectady for many years, a place to which I moved from Connecticut in 1980 to work as a classical radio announcer. Soon I eased into freelance work as a writer and actor, writing and acting. Thank goodness Susan remains gainfully employed. Although we lived in an attractive, historic part of that city, the neighborhood was changing. One morning we were awakened by the sound of the FBI breaking into the house next door, from which they removed guns and drugs.

Seeking a new residence not more than a half-hour from Susan's job site, we plotted a circumference on a map and examined its slices. We were familiar with all of the pie pieces except a section to the west where a village with unlikely name of Glen fell on the circumference line. To reach it, we took a stretch of the NYS Thruway, followed by a series of small state highways. About a mile before we reached the village, just as a lovely view of the Mohawk Valley was rising to our right, the car ran out of gas.

Plenty of daylight remained on this pleasant August evening. We walked on into Glen, pleased to see that the farmland sparseness soon gave way to a modest cluster of houses, some of them attractively old. But would there be a gas station?

At one of the houses, a cottage that we later would learn was one of the oldest structures in the village, a man and woman relaxed in kitchen chairs on the small front porch. Susan is bolder than I about such things, and hailed them from the street, explaining our predicament. “There’s no gas station here,” we were told, so I asked if I could use their phone. “It’s right inside,” the woman said. “Go on in.”

Not the kind of invitation I’m used to getting. I dialed a friend in nearby Amsterdam and got no answer. As I returned to the porch to discuss the predicament, I found my wife chatting away with the couple. “You’re a writer?” the woman asked. “I have some pamphlets to give you.”

Oh no. Religious nuts. So sure was I of the annoying nature of the material pressed into my hand that it took me a moment to realize that they were politically based screeds giving information about a low-level radioactive dump-siting commission’s target of Glen as one of several candidate sites.

Their names were Sherrie and George Dedicke. They phoned their friend Tim Lane, who was leading an opposition group, to come over and talk to us. I took some notes. We got a ride back to our vehicle with some jerry-can gas to get us home. I returned and did more interviews, and the piece ran in Metroland not long thereafter.

“Remember how you said you’d like to live out here?” asked Sherrie, phoning a couple of weeks after the piece appeared. “There’s a house for sale just down the street. Got lots of property, too.”

The siting commission gave up. But we’re still here. Here's the piece I wrote:

                                                                                

Sherrie and George Dedicke
Photo by Michael Ackerman

TIM LANE KNEELS by a row of leafy plants and detaches a ripe cucumber from each stalk. He works quickly: he has to. It’s hot and he’s tired and he’s working this farm alone. The property belongs to his grandparents, and puts him high on a scenic hill in the town of Glen in Montgomery Country. If he’s fast enough and can get the produce to market while the demand remains brisk, he might turn a profit this year. It might be as much as two or three thousand dollars.

He brings a young man’s passion to an old-fashioned job. He is constantly experimenting: with soil, with irrigation. He hopes to establish a hydroponic system to grow lettuce. He respects the land and is careful to use only organic substances for disease control.

His wife, Laurie, is expecting their first child any day now and is on a leave from her job as an accountant in Albany. A lot is riding on Tim’s enterprise in the field. But he’s been handed another full time job, one which pays nothing and demands all the hours he can give to it. The dining room table in the little farmhouse is piled with books on two subjects: vegetable gardening and radioactive waste. This farm that the Lanes hope to buy is a few miles from one of the sites chosen by the State of New York as a possible home for a dump that would contain low-level radioactive waste.

Rolling Green

I'm happy to note that, in the two years since this was published, several big-box department stores with food departments, such as Target and BJs Wholesale Club, have joined the program described below. Wal-Mart remains a holdout, however, and continues to deny that it's due to the store's reluctance to deal with unionized truckers.

                                                                            

NEXT TIME YOU SEE a Consolidated Foodworld truck at Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, or any of several other chain restaurants, study the vehicle’s sides and roof. New models are sporting a complicated array of solar panels and plexiglass windows sturdy enough to withstand speed and the elements, but transparent enough for a novel use of the greenhouse effect.

“We’re big fans here of the ‘locavore’ movement,” says Consolidated Foodworld spokesman Doug Tisch, “and we’re pleased to have come up with a way to apply it to our nationwide families of restaurants. The Albany area is home to many successful units, so it’s one of several key markets we’ve chosen in which to test market this idea.”

Rather than serving only as delivery conduits for the restaurant’s produce, the new trucks have been fashioned into rolling gardens equipped with multi-level growing areas and a computer-based hygrometer and light-monitoring system that allows the driver to keep constant tabs on the state of his cargo.

We inspected a prototype truck in the parking lot of the Latham Applebee’s. Tisch, who started with the company as a nutrition planner before moving into PR, led me up a ramp and down the very narrow aisle separating rows of growing areas spaced like old Pullman berths – but with the unusual addition of sunlight.