Stories about Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, Dr. Juliet (of Capulet) and others...

   
 



1.   Lebovitz and Warhol and a Case of Withering Sights
2.  Pointing and Shooting in George Plimpton's Apartment
3.  When Irving Got Mad. And Vice Versa.
4.  Misshapen Chaos (my Juliet adventure)
5.  Joe Franklin: Venerable. Inimitable. Flammable. 
6.  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Marquee
7.  A Radio Flyer in an Empty Nest
8.  By the Way, We Even Called Him Satchmo
9.  Love Between the Covers
10.The story of a water-breaking app
11. The non driverless car of the future
12. The best inning of a football game
13. Pot luck in Colorado
... look at the bottom of this page for information on all my books

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1. Lebovitz and Warhol and a Case of Withering Sights.

           

            Peter Lebovitz and I were sitting in the company cafeteria. I can’t recall exactly how the topic came about, but after the second or third bite of a turkey wrap, Peter—the other token Jew in our little group—told me that when he was nineteen years old he appeared as a minister in an Andy Warhol film. I stopped chewing at that point, not because of the wrap itself (which wasn’t bad, actually), but because I was having a little trouble picturing a guy I had always thought of as a cross between Alex Reiger in “Taxi” and Dr. Sidney Friedman in “M*A*S*H” (with a dash of Mark Twain thrown in) as a minister in an Andy Warhol movie.    
             I’m sure there were a lot of different kinds of people who appeared in Warhol films in the 1960s, but I doubt that a Peter Lebovitz type—which is to say a Judd Hirsh/Allan Arbus/Samuel Clemens type—was ever one of them.  After all, didn’t Peter’s revelation mean that he participated in a crazy approximation of a motion picture production directed by the eccentric Warhol? Didn’t the revelation mean that Peter was surrounded by a phalanx of drugged-out, sexed-up, weirdo Warhol sycophants in a paint-splattered den of vice somewhere in lower Manhattan?

            Not my Peter Lebovitz!

            Peter and I worked at a large German-owned manufacturing company in northern New Jersey. I handled employee communications, Peter was a marketing executive. As part of my job, I was required to tap into executives like Peter for employee newsletter stories and other internal communications projects, and sometimes executives like Peter had to tap into me for grammatical help or to explain why the proper phrase is “I couldn’t care less.” Peter and I didn’t socialize outside of the building, but inside we made the most of whatever a platonic on-site work relationship can be. For instance, we both played the Jewish thing to the hilt whenever we saw each other in the hallways—sprinkling Yiddish words and phrases into our conversations as a sort of cynical fraternal code within the walls of our company which, in a much earlier manifestation, was part of a German conglomerate that allegedly did business with the Nazi party. Other than that secret code, there wasn’t much else to the relationship.

            But then came that turkey wrap exchange. That brought the friendship to an entirely new level. Unfortunately, it was a level in which Peter had very little interest.  

            As far as imagining Peter in a Warhol movie was concerned—or not being able to picture it in the first place—I knew right off the bat that I might be alone in my appraisal, simply because not many people see, or have seen, Andy Warhol movies. Most Warhol films are warehoused, awaiting preservation, and most are a challenge to watch. Like the one that shows a guy sleeping for five-and-a-half hours.

Peter Lebovitz

              Still, after twelve years of writing employee newsletter articles about CIP, ISO, QEA, SAP and other corporate acronyms posing as IBIs (Important Business Initiatives), I was more than ready to tackle PWA—Peter’s Warhol Adventure.

            It wasn’t easy. 

           Other than getting him to share with me the most basic recollection of his involvement, it was more difficult to get Peter to discuss the story than it was to stay awake through tedious CIP and ISO meetings. Several times after he spilled his Warhol beans I told him that I was fascinated by his disclosure and wanted to write a story about it. But Peter kept telling me that to him the entire experience was “Just one long day spent with a total fake, although a famous total fake. It wasn’t filmmaking,” he said about the artist’s cinematic efforts, “it was just filming. There’s a difference.” I said that Warhol in general was a fascinating cultural footnote (the artist died from a heart attack in 1987 following gall bladder surgery), and that he, Peter, should be proud to have been a part of that footnote. Peter responded that the entire incident was “drek.” I mentioned that if any article I would end up writing was published in a major magazine, he, too, could become an intriguing footnote—at least for the amount of time it would take for someone to read the article. Peter replied to that with an indifferent “Oy.” I said that at the very least, it must have been an interesting afternoon that he’ll remember forever—an afternoon filled with degenerate craziness and decadent shenanigans. But Peter said that at the very most it was a boring, annoying, and infuriatingly long day that he wishes he wouldn’t have wasted.

            This journalistic goal of mine began in 2003, which was also the year that my department at the company was eliminated. Suddenly I was unemployed. But I used the shocker of my termination as an incentive to jump into this project. After all, I started out as a trade magazine writer and reporter and had always believed that I’d find my own Watergate one day. But it was a rocky start with Peter because the only three things that he was able to tell me about the Warhol movie was that it was shot in 1966, that it was filmed in someone’s Manhattan apartment, and that it was some kind of take-off on a famous book from long ago. He couldn’t even remember the name of the damned film. 

            I went into research mode. Before long, I came upon a brief reference to a Warhol production called “Withering Sights”—a tease on the title and story of “Wuthering Heights,” the 1847 Gothic novel by Emily Bronte.

            My first call was to Greg Pierce, a film and video technician at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Greg didn’t know much about that particular film, but he did give me the name of Callie Angell, who was curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan and a consultant to the Museum of Modern Art on the preservation of the Warhol films. (Callie’s father was the noted writer and New Yorker Magazine senior editor Roger Angell, whose mother was married to E.B. White, author of “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.”) Callie confirmed for me that a motion picture called “Withering Sights” was indeed shot on February 26, 1966. Bingo. I found Peter’s film. It didn’t make me Woodward-Bernstein (or, more appropriately, just Bernstein), but it was a start, and it felt good.

            Peter couldn’t care less.

*

            Nineteen sixty six. I was only nine at the time. But my cafeteria colleague was already working. He was, in his words, “doing a menial job in a market research company, along with other misfits from the fringes of society. Market research,” Peter theorized, “attracted the intelligent dregs of society, like out-of-work actors and head-in-the-cloud writers.”

            Peter was neither, but one of his coworkers was. Richard Schmidt, who wanted to be an actor, was a regular visitor to the Factory, the Manhattan studio on East 57^th Street where Warhol and his hangers-on made music, movies, mayhem, and sometimes even a little art. One day Schmidt invited Peter to go along with him to the Dakota apartment complex on West 72^nd Street and Central Park West. Warhol and his merry pranksters were making a film there, Schmidt said, and Peter was given the opportunity to play the small part of a minister.

            “So a couple of us piled into a taxi and drove to the Dakota,” Peter recalls. “We were herded into a magnificent apartment. There was a camera there, tripods, lights… I was told to stand in front of a young couple to be married and say, ‘Now you are man and wife. Kiss and be wed.’ I noticed that the other actors were ad-libbing, and no one appeared to be taking anything very seriously. Plus, a bunch of us were fed up with sitting around all day. So, instead of ‘Kiss and be wed,’ I said, ‘Kiss and be cursed.’ And then, while the camera was still rolling, someone off to the side called out, ‘Curse you all.’”

            That’s where Peter wanted to end the story. But I wanted more. A lot more. I wanted to learn about the disposition of the hangers-on, their attitudes, how many drugs were being used, how much sex was going on...

            “Drugs? I don’t think there was a single drug there,” Peter said. “As a matter of fact, I seem to recall that Warhol was determined not to have anything like that around at all.”  (That may have been true on the “Withering Sights” film set, but there are several reports of drug use by members of Warhol’s Factory crowd over the years.)

            At my urging, Callie Angell at the Whitney looked up her notes on “Withering Sights.” In her role as curator of the Warhol film project at the museum she had once viewed the original camera negative, difficult as that can be to watch, before it went into storage to await preservation. Callie noticed that she had added a parenthetical insert to her notes while writing about the wedding scene:

           

“A priest comes in (who’s this?) and marries them over the dead body on the floor.”

            I visited Callie at her office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She showed me the “who’s this?” notation she had made about the priest, and let me peruse various books and papers she had about Warhol and his film activities, none of which shed any additional light on “Withering Sights.” Nor did she have any photographs from the production, or the script. No one seemed to have the script. She confirmed that the film itself was locked away in a Museum of Modern Art storage facility somewhere in Pennsylvania.

            I next spoke with Kitty Cleary, who worked in the film and video library at the Museum of Modern Art, which had a Warhol film preservation project in the works. But Kitty merely confirmed that there was just one camera negative original of “Withering Sights,” and that it was almost certain that getting permission to view it would be impossible because of the delicate nature of film preservation.

            I checked with Steven Higgins, at that time curator of MOMA’s film department, and was told the same story that Cleary told me.

            While all this was going on, I kept Peter apprised of my efforts. At one point he said to me, “My wife thinks we’re both nuts. Especially you.”

*

            With a little more research I discovered that “Withering Sights” was penned for Andy Warhol by Ronald Tavel, a writer who had met the artist in late 1964. Warhol had just purchased a sound camera and had shot his first sound film. One of the earliest collaborations between Warhol and Tavel was called “Vinyl,” based on the novel “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess. Clearly bitten by the cinematic bug, throughout 1965 Warhol and his Factory crew amassed quite a number of full-length unedited reels—many of them long, static shots of one subject or another. He financed these productions with the money he earned from his artwork. Between 1963 and 1968 he produced hundreds of movies, including approximately 500 three-minute personality portraits (the famous “Screen Tests” project), and another hundred-plus features. Collectively it provided a peek into the underground culture, a pinch of Hollywood dream weaving, some documentary filmmaking (whether intentionally or otherwise), a little pornography, and some performance art before that was even fashionable.  

            According to Tavel, who I had finally located via email in 2008, Warhol at one time had told him that his two favorite novels were “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte and “Jane Eyre” by Emily’s sister Charlotte. But Tavel never believed that Warhol actually read either of the Bronte books; more likely he was referring to the Hollywood movie versions because he talked of the books in terms of the actors who played key roles in the films, such as Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in “Wuthering Heights” and Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in “Jane Eyre.” 

            Tavel also told me that he had wanted Edie Sedgwick, a socialite and current Warhol superstar, to play the key role of Catherine Earnshaw in the film. But the part went to Ingrid Von Scheven, who lived in New Jersey and worked as an office temp in Manhattan. Why? As the story goes, Von Scheven was spotted at a bar on 42^nd Street and recruited to be in the Warhol troupe as a way of punishing Sedgwick who, it was said, had become difficult to work with. Von Scheven eventually adopted—or was given—the name Ingrid Superstar, likely as a ploy designed to further annoy Sedgwick. Ten years later, in December 1986, Ingrid left her apartment to buy some cigarettes and was never heard from again.

            Heathcliff in “Withering Sights” was played by Charles Aberg, who had also taken part in Warhol’s “Screen Test” project. By many accounts, Aberg was apprehensive and ill at ease throughout that entire shooting of the Bronte takeoff.

            The role of the minister went to that 19-year-old Jewish market researcher who earlier that morning had no idea he’d be appearing in an Andy Warhol film.

            Shot in black & white, the 70-minute “Withering Sights” was filmed in the Dakota apartment of Panna Grady, a patron of the arts whose suite was somewhat smaller than Tavel had hoped for, considering that several scenes required the use of many people as part of the sprawling, festive atmosphere that the screenplay called for. Tavel remembers that on the day of the shoot, Grady’s suite was overflowing with “extra extras, fashion editors, guests, and morbid curiosity-seekers who caused a delay in rolling Reel One.”

            Peter was more than just an ‘extra extra.’ He was a character with scripted lines (only two—but lines nonetheless) and, as Peter had recalled, he ad-libbed an additional few words, even though he probably didn’t even know what ‘ad-lib’ meant at the time. It was only after I had piqued Tavel’s interest in my Peter odyssey that he sent me, via email, a pdf of the screenplay (which has since been made available on line; on the screenplay, the title of the film is listed as “Heathcliff, or, Withering Sights”). It includes a 2,700-word introduction that Tavel wrote about his role in the project, with a focus on his complex professional relationship with Warhol. I downloaded the screenplay and told Peter about it. He couldn’t believe I had it. Maybe he just didn’t want to.

            In the screenplay, near the end of Reel One, Catherine Earnshaw meets up with Edgar Linton, takes his arm and moves with him toward a minister. Church music begins. Then:

MINISTER: Do you, Catherine Earnshaw of Withering Sights, take this weakling, Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange, as your lawful wedded spouse?

CATHERINE: Spouse? Sounds like mouse. Sounds ominous. Sounds dirty, too.

MINISTER: Then kiss and be coupled.

CATHERINE: Oh, I’m so excited! My very own wedding day.

EDGAR: And my very own wedding night!

HEATHCLIFF: Curse you both!

            The Minister appears no more. That was the end of Peter’s film career—but not the end of my journalistic involvement in the film. I tried to convince Peter that I was doing a good job of making something out of what he defiantly continued to say was nothing (i.e. drek), and that I should pursue the odyssey even further. After all, didn’t I identify the film, learn a little about its production, and find a reference to the real Peter Lebovitz on paper (Callie’s parenthetical inquiry as to the identity of the minister)? What’s more, I was now able to measure Peter’s recollection of the shoot against the actual shooting script. And it only took five years! So I set out to determine whether or not “Withering Sights” had any life beyond its filming in Panna Grady’s apartment (and its brief mention at a lunch table in New Jersey). Other than Callie Angell once viewing the original camera negative and, more recently, Greg Pierce at the Warhol Museum looking it over with a photographer’s loupe, the answer to that question seems to be no, it had no other life, publicly or otherwise.

            Late in 1966, Warhol announced a 25-hour film project that was to be comprised of several self-contained features, collectively called “****” (pronounced as “Four Stars”), the final version of which was to have more than 90 full-length reels to be shown just once (on two projectors in a single superimposed image) at the New Cinema Playhouse in New York. It was once rumored that the 70-minute “Withering Sights” was to have been one of the self-contained features in “****.” But according to Pierce, that didn’t happen. “****” was shown from 8:30 p.m. on December 15, 1967, to 9:30 p.m. the following day, but Peter Lebovitz’s short wedding scene was never seen because “Withering Sights” itself was never seen.

            Tavel, too, saw neither “****” nor “Withering Sights.” He was far more dedicated to his theater work at the time to worry about Warhol films. (Two of his one-act plays had been performed at the Coda Gallery in downtown Manhattan).  I tried to contact Tavel once more to discuss the matter further, but discovered that he had passed away in March 2009. He had been midflight between Berlin, where he was working on a film festival, and his home in Bangkok. He was 73. In hopes of having another discussion with Callie Angell, whose work in the field of Warhol scholarship has often been called unparalleled, I attempted to contact her, but she, too, had passed away. Her body was found May 5, 2010 in her apartment, an apparent suicide.

            Certainly I would love to be able to see the film myself (impossible right now), but I would also love to find some written or recorded reactions to the filming of “Withering Sights” from someone who was involved in the production. Other than Callie Angell’s few notes, however, there seems to be nothing like that at all in existence, and with both her and Tavel gone, the chance for more is dimmer than ever. A book called “The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol,” by J.J. Murphy, was published in April 2012 by the University of California Press, but there is no mention in it of “Withering Sights.” The Huffington Post ran a piece in August 2012 called “17 Andy Warhol Films You Probably Haven’t Heard of But Should Know.” It mentions “Sleep” (1963), “Mario Banana 1” (1964), “Vinyl” (1965), “Blow Job” (1966), “The Nude Restaurant” (1967), and twelve others—but not “Withering Sights.” The Bronte takeoff  lives somewhere in the black hole of Warhol filmdom.    

            There is, however, a light hovering high up over that black hole. “We are in the process of digitizing every inch of the Andy Warhol film catalog, whether they’re from camera originals or prints,” the museum’s Greg Pierce told me in September 2015. “We’ve finished batch one, we’re starting on batch two, and batch three will include ‘Withering Sights,’” he reports, encouragingly. But when asked to guess when the movie will finally be available for viewing, his response is somewhat less encouraging: “It’s years down the line,” he admits. “Years!”

            In the past, a lack of funding was blamed for an inability to preserve the Warhol catalog. But with the project now on track, there’s hope that everyone (everyone who wants to, at least) will one day be able to see it, either at the museum in Pittsburgh or, because of digital’s growing capabilities (especially in a few years), virtually anywhere. Even Peter can see it. Although he probably won’t want to.

            His complete lack of curiosity is curious, though his persistence in calling me a fool to continue my journalistic quest is refreshing. When other people call me a fool, it hurts; when Peter does it, it’s with such tranquility, such affability, that it’s almost inspiring. Maybe playing a minister had an effect on him that he’ll never truly acknowledge. Maybe that’s what my pursuit has accomplished.

            But it also accomplished this: before I got involved, no one in the world of Warhol scholarship had ever heard of Peter Lebovitz. After speaking with Callie Angell at the Whitney Museum, who was always working on updating the Warhol film catalog, Peter’s name may now officially be logged in—somewhere—as a performer in “Withering Sights.” I say that counts as a big accomplishment. Peter says it’s practically insignificant.

            Thinking of Callie reminds me of one question that still haunts: as the only one I had talked to who actually had viewed all 70 minutes of the camera negative, she recalled that the minister married the couple over a dead body on the floor. But Peter has no recollection of a dead body at all. (The screenplay doesn’t specify one, either.) Also, Peter says that the off-screen voice that calls out “Curse you both” was an ad-libbed reaction to his own ad-libbed “Kiss and be cursed,” although the screenplay indicates that “Curse you both” was actually written into the script. In one final attempt to make something out of nothing, I grilled Peter about these two critical discrepancies. After all, despite the fact that Warhol kept his set drug free, it was 1966, and Peter was a young ‘dreg of society’ (his words, not mine) in the urban jungle. So I asked him if there was something he wanted to tell me about his state of mind during the filming in that Central Park West apartment. He thought about it for a moment and had a very engaging response:

            “As Timothy Leary said, if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.”

            Ambiguous, but engaging.

            Recently Peter had one final comment before deciding to irrevocably close the door on this chapter of his past. He told me that my ridiculous persistence over the last decade has turned his quarter-hour of notoriety into the longest, most annoying 15 minutes of fame.

            That famous phrase, which Peter adopted so freely, would not have been his to adopt if not for Andy Warhol.

                                                                                          The End

________________________________________________________________________ 

2. Pointing and Shooting in George Plimpton’s Apartment

           

            I was at the library the other day and came across the oral biography called “George, Being George.” It contains many wonderful recollections by notable people on their encounters with the writer George Plimpton. I’ve never been notable enough to have been asked to contribute, but I do have my own ‘George being George’ story. I don't know if Mr. Plimpton, who passed away in 2003, would have wanted me to tell it. But I’ll tell it anyway, because it has long been my goal to tell interesting stories about colorful people—just like he did. Of course, he did it about people who were still alive. I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough.

            He was brave. And very colorful.

            Back in the days when there were just seven channels to watch, and taping shows to view later on was not yet possible for most families, television specials were a hotly anticipated commodity. At least in my childhood they were. As a kid I always looked forward to the George Plimpton specials that aired every once in a while, and made sure never to miss a single one. I enjoyed the ‘professional amateur’ stunts for which he was famous: George the standup comic, George the trapeze artist, George the football player... George Plimpton entertained and, in turn, educated us simply by trying things he was genuinely interested in, yet could accomplish with only moderate success. I admired his conviction, his love of adventure, his sense of humor, his singularity of character and style. As a novice writer with plenty of professional dreams of my own, I imagined myself a George Plimpton of the Twenty-First Century.

            But back in 1987. I was just a twenty-something public relations manager for the Olympus camera company on Long Island. I kept up the dream—but also worked hard in public relations to pay the bills and support my new and growing family. One of my functions at Olympus was to come up with ideas for new product press conferences. I always tried to do something a little newsworthy—like create a publicity stunt, or bring in a celebrity. A new product we were introducing that fall was a point-and-shoot camera designed to make amateur photographers feel like professionals, so the first person I thought of was George Plimpton, the professional amateur. I looked him up in the Manhattan phone book. He was listed! I called. He answered.

            Nervously, I explained my idea to him: first I would make a few introductory remarks, briefly mention the product’s market position as an amateur’s professional camera, then introduce him. At that point he would share with the audience a few of his ‘professional amateur’ stories, and wrap it up by describing the camera’s remarkable features and capabilities.

            To my surprise and delight, Mr. Plimpton agreed on the spot to do the press conference for Olympus. We decided to meet at his apartment on the Upper East Side the following week to go over the details and discuss some additional particulars.

            On the day of the meeting, I was nervous and excited. I was about to meet the famous, wild and erudite professional amateur whom I had enjoyed on TV specials so many times, the man who was so winningly portrayed by a pre-“M*A*S*H” Alan Alda in “Paper Lion,” the 1968 a feature film about Plimpton’s stint as a Detroit Lions quarterback that had always been one of my favorite movies.

            At Mr. Plimpton’s apartment, a young assistant ushered me into what looked to be a combination living room and office. For a moment I felt as if I was the one in a movie: a young, inexperienced PR guy—and fledgling novelist and playwright—standing in the home of an older and very successful writer and editor, and silently praying that, in some way, he might be able to boost a fledgling career. I’m pretty sure that the room in which I was standing was where Mr. Plimpton did much of his writing and editing, perhaps even for the Paris Review, which even then I had looked upon as a byline goal for my still-nonexistent writing career. I imagined it was the room where he kept many important papers and books and a few mementos from his endeavors, mementos that were as much a part of my own childhood as they were of his fascinating career.

            I was told that Mr. Plimpton would be down shortly. Fifteen minutes later he finally appeared. I hope my mouth didn’t hang open the way mouths hang open in cartoons when a character sees something bizarre: George Plimpton was unshaven, sloppily dressed in a wrinkled tee-shirt and baggy sweatpants, his hair an unforgiving matrix of shapes, his eyes completely bloodshot. He seemed entirely unfocused and didn’t dive into a conversation as much as wade into it slowly, with what seemed to be uncertainty and maybe even regret. My first thought was that he had accepted the assignment too fast, that he really didn’t want to do it, and that his late arrival and gloomy appearance was his way of telling me he wanted a way out.

            But then I had my second startling realization: could it simply be that he was hung over? I had to believe that to be true, for if anyone knew how to select the right words to find a way out of a situation, it would be George Plimpton. And he didn’t seem intent on finding those words. He have been drinking overnight.

            So a man I had so admired was singlehandedly derailing my public relations career—and thus my writing career—right before my eyes, which initially had been as wide as his were red. How would this press conference turn out? The event was just a week away. Would Mr. Plimpton completely misunderstand and misrepresent the technical details of the camera? Would he show up at the wrong hotel? Would the trade press write scathing articles about the ridiculous Olympus press conference? Would I be laughed out of a job? Would I ever get another? And if not, how would I support my family, especially since I had not yet written the Great American Novel? 

George Plimpton

              I was so troubled that I forgot to discuss with Mr. Plimpton some of the important details of the press conference itinerary that I had planned to cover with him. I didn’t even ask him to bring anything with him—“Just yourself,” I remember saying anxiously. When I left his apartment—that Upper East Side citadel of words and ideas—I was shivering with a lot of uncertainty and not a little regret.

            The day of the press conference arrived. I paced the ballroom floor like an expectant father (which, if memory serves, I actually was at the time). George showed up three minutes before he was scheduled to speak. And when he finally did take the podium, he was dapper and eloquent. He told some marvelous stories about the time he boxed with Archie Moore and played goalie for the Boston Bruins. The press conference guests seemed engaged and amused. Mr. Plimpton was the same confident professional amateur that he had been in those old TV specials, and he concluded by flawlessly describing the Olympus professional amateur camera the way it needed to be described. It seemed as if he had been using the camera successfully for months, even though it had not yet been officially introduced to the market.  

            Was it a perfect press conference? No. I hadn’t supplied nearly enough slides to our audio-visual technician to show on the screen behind Mr. Plimpton to accompany his oral presentation. I had but four or five. I was upset about that. In fact, a few moments after he left the podium, our guest speaker overheard me telling my boss how I wanted to shoot myself for not digging up more slides to project on the screen. Mr. Plimpton turned to me and gently asked me why I simply hadn’t requested that he bring some of his own when I was at his apartment a few days before. He said he could have brought along dozens. Then he turned back to my boss, with a sympathetic look on his face, as if to say, 'Don't be too hard on the young chap. He's doing his best.'

                                                                                           The End

____________________________________________________

3. When Irving Got Mad. And Vice Versa.

            Parody was recently back in the news. Music division.

            Weird Al Yankovic, for example, the harmless provocateur  of “I Love Rocky Road,” “Eat It” and “Like a Surgeon” fame, not long ago returned to the ABC show “Galavant” as a comical singing monk in an episode entitled “The One True King (To Unite Them All).” And then there’s Dr. Demento, the disc jockey who made a career of playing novelty songs on the radio. He’s the subject of a theatrical  documentary called “Under the Smogberry Tree” that is expected to premier shortly. The only reason a discussion of both gentlemen might be considered newsworthy is because parody songs themselves almost never make news these days. Nothing surprises us anymore. Or shocks us. Right now there happens to be a nasty fight between Dr. Demento and the production team that shot the documentary footage (the ongoing conflict has put the film in jeopardy, though the original producers still insist it will debut soon). But even a battle like that pales in comparison to some of the clashes that went on half a century ago.

Irving Berlin

 Take March 23, 1964, for example. That’s when spinning cheeks into sheiks became legal. Or, more accurately, it was when taking a song like the famous Irving Berlin tune “Cheek to Cheek” and turning it into a parody called “Sheik to Sheik” did not become illegal, as Berlin hoped it would be. This was the result of a court battle known as Berlin et al. v. E. C. Publications, which concluded that frigid March afternoon fifty-three years ago. The case pitted the famous composer and several other notable songwriters against Mad Magazine. Mad had taken 57 illustrious songs, parodied the lyrics, altered most of the titles, and told readers to sing them “to the tune of” the famous originals.

            The tunesmiths weren’t amused and sued the publisher, naming 25 of those songs in their complaint. They sought $25 million in damages, based on one dollar per song for each copy of the magazine that was sold. Mad won. Twice, in fact.

            Irving Berlin was my grandfather’s idol. Grandpa—Poppy Benny, as I had always called him—was a songwriter and recording artist who, even though the work for which he was known was decidedly un-Berlin-like, still considered the Tin Pan Alley legend his greatest inspiration. But despite how much I enjoyed and admired Poppy Benny, I’m glad his idol lost the court case to Mad.

My grandfather, who went by the stage name Benny Bell, wrote and recorded several noted ditties, such as “Everybody Wants My Fanny,” “Take a Ship For Yourself,” “My Janitor’s Can” and one that was a hit twice in his lifetime and once in mine, “Shaving Cream.” That’s the one that uses a reference to the white facial foam to disguise a common four-letter expletive. It was a popular song in 1946 and, thanks to Dr. Demento, made it onto the top 40 pop charts in 1975.

            While it was the irreverent ditties that gave him his greatest success, my grandfather did write several love elegies, not unlike Berlin’s first hit ballad, “When I Lost You,” written after the death of his wife Dorothy in 1912. Poppy Benny was six-years-old at the time, but considered learning that song one of the turning points of his young life. “When I Lost You,” and a ballad written by my grandfather called “If You Promise to Be Mine,” were the first two songs that I ever memorized; combined, they comprised the soundtrack of my childhood, as both songs echoed almost continuously from my grandparents’ apartment whenever my family drove to Brooklyn for a holiday, and from my house whenever my grandparents came out to Long Island for a visit. Poppy Benny sang both songs with equal pleasure. So did I.

While most of Berlin’s compositions can be said to be clever, Poppy Benny’s—other than “If You Promise to Be Mine”—were mostly just silly. He wanted to be as well-known for his droll double-entendres as Berlin was for his narrative and musical dexterity. I wonder now how Poppy Benny reacted to the lawsuit in 1964; I was only seven at the time, and can no longer ask him about it because he passed away in 1999. His love for Berlin is partially what prompted my search into the life of the man who gave us “Cheek to Cheek,” and that search, in turn, is what led me to “Sheik to Sheik.”

*

There were many song parodies before the 1960s, by such practitioners as Stan Freberg, Spike Jones and Allan Sherman, though most of them mimicked classical compositions or works in the public domain, and some were entirely original pieces that used words and sound effects to mock contemporary music or social conventions. Berlin v. Mad paved the way for a more direct kind of musical parody—the kind that made Weird Al Yankovic famous with his recipe of turning the Knack’s “My Sharona” into “My Bologna” and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” into “Another One Rides the Bus.” Poppy Benny probably could have done something similar, but it’s important to  note that my grandfather was genuinely afraid of lawsuits, having nearly gotten in trouble with the law back in the 1940s for a few of his novelty records, some of which were considered obscene by the authorities. Weird Al was co-billed several times on the same stage with my grandfather shortly after the mid-70s “Shaving Cream” resurrection. That was shortly before he became a superstar. But who knows; without the Berlin v. Mad legal decision a half-century ago, Weird Al might have become just another wedding band accordion player.

            Irving Berlin’s co-defendants (represented by their publishing companies) included such notables as Jerome Kern, whose “The Last Time I Saw Paris” in Mad’s hands became “The Last Time I Saw Maris,” Cole Porter, who’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” was turned into “I Get a Kick-Back From You,” and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, whose “Hello, Young Lovers” was transformed into “Hello, Young Doctors.” Despite the participation of so many eminent songwriters, Berlin received most of the press, not just because his name was in the title of the complaint, but also because he was arguably the most celebrated of the bunch. And although he lost, it didn’t stop him from being regarded, then as now, as one of the most important and prolific purveyors of American popular music in the 20th century. After all, as Poppy Benny would have told you, Berlin was American popular music; he wrote one of the most recorded holiday tunes of all time, “White Christmas,” as well as the song many people over the years (including my grandfather) insisted should replace “The Star Spangled Banner” as the nation’s official anthem, “God Bless America.”

            Despite Berlin's renown, it was obviously difficult for the man to hear people (from the mountains to the prairies) singing the melody of “Easter Parade” but using words that Miss America would loathe:

“Don’t wear that bikini

The one that’s teeny-weeny,

Your looks are not important

In the Beauty Parade.”

Or this “Cheek to Cheek” imitation:

“Heaven

I’m in heaven

And our earth with rich black oil just seems to leak,

And we always find the happiness we seek

When we’re talking dough together

Sheik to sheik.”

Or “Blue Skies” masquerading as a healthcare commercial:

“Blue Cross

Had me agree

To a new Blue Cross

Policy.

Blue Cross

Said I would be

Happy that Blue Cross

Covered me.”

             These parodies appeared in a 1961 edition of the Mad magazine called “The Fourth Annual Edition of the Worse of Mad,” in a section called “Sing Along With Mad,” and were devised by several editorial staff members and long-time contributors. The tagline of the special section was “A collection of parody lyrics to 57 old standards which reflect the idiotic world we live in today.”

            The case was argued twice, the first time in 1962 in U.S. District Court. That one was heard by Judge Charles Metzner, who ruled in favor of Mad in all but two of the twenty-five songs named in the suit. According to the decision, twenty-three were distinct enough from the original songs to be considered safe from copyright infringement. The two exceptions, both written by Berlin, were “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Always,” which Mad called, respectively, “There’s No Business Like No Business” and (without a change in the title) “Always.” Both parodies were pronounced by the court as being too close to the originals with regard to fundamental phrases. And because twenty-three out of the twenty-five were deemed okay, the ruling amounted to a win for Mad, with a mere slap on the wrist for the other two.

           Berlin et al requested a second trial at the Court of Appeals Second Circuit, where Judge Irving R. Kaufman presided. Kaufman was the justice who, thirteen years earlier, had sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for espionage. This case was somewhat less consequential to national security—though serious in its own way—and Kaufman, like Metzner before him, ruled in favor of Mad, but this time for all twenty-five songs in the complaint. What Kaufman said in his decision was that the plaintiffs neither adequately proved that the parodies “caused substantial and irreparable damage” nor that the public would “have had any difficulty in differentiating between the works” of the original composers and the Mad men.

            “The disparities in theme, content and style between the original lyrics and the alleged infringements could hardly be greater,” Kaufman wrote, adding that even using a few direct words and mimicking the meter is permissible in order for the effort to be a successful parody.

            The plaintiffs then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but the high bench refused to hear the case.

            While they were writing it, the Mad parodists were undoubtedly convinced that the lyrics were different enough to avoid legal trouble, but apparently they also knew that “the idiotic world we live in” might nonetheless throw some trouble their way. Perhaps that’s why they printed this tongue-in-sheik warning in the special section: “For Solo or Group Participation (followed by arrest).”

            No one was arrested, but the publishing company had to endure a legal case that between the original filing and the final decision dragged on for more than two years.

            “We just continued doing our thing with no trepidation, but knew from the outcome of the first trial that from then on we had better make the differences between the originals and our parodies very clear,” recalls Nick Meglin, a writer and artist who worked on some of the parodies. “There was just a slight anxiety while it was all going on since so many laws and their interpretations are often unpredictable. But we knew the defendants’ position was, well, stupid. Plus, we knew our lawyer was as sharp as the First Amendment, so we didn’t fear the worst.” Meglin, who contributed to the magazine for almost 30 years, now teaches illustration in North Carolina.

            What is interesting to consider, he further notes, is that the parodies merely brought free advertising and promotion to the original songs and, by extension, to the talents and merits of the original songwriters.

            Mad had actually swum in these novelty waters prior to the “Sheik to Sheik” case. In 1960, a year before the Berlin lawsuit was filed, the magazine ran a spoof called “My Fair Ad-Man” based on the stage musical “My Fair Lady,” which was still playing to packed houses on Broadway. Mad, founded in 1952 as a comic book by publisher William Gaines and writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman, was already well-known for its parodies of other comic books, such as Archie (which they called “Starchie”) and for lampooning just about every aspect of popular culture.

           When the 1962 and 1964 trials were over, Berlin found himself in a strange new place. In his 1996 Berlin biography, “As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin,” author Laurence Bergreen suggests that the lawsuit, in addition to influencing the publication of satire, also impacted Berlin’s vanity, which by most accounts was quite vast.

            “To his way of thinking,” Bergreen writes, “there was no end to the ways that the disrespectful editors of Mad magazine had offended him.” Besides printing lyrics so closely resembling his without payment or permission, they had, Berlin believed, “corrupted the value of his original songs.”

            The court’s decision, Bergreen adds, made the songwriter “seem quite the curmudgeon.” What’s worse, he was professionally humiliated by Judge Kaufman when the justice addressed the issue of meter in his written decision: “We doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.”

            It didn’t help, of course, that Berlin’s career was all but over by then. But the lawsuit really had little if anything to do with that. By the conclusion of the trial he was 76 years old and had been writing songs professionally for 58 years. The last motion picture with which he was involved was “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in 1954, eight years before the first lawsuit was initiated, and his last Broadway show, “Mr. President,” which debuted in 1962, was unsuccessful. And though he wrote a few dozen more songs afterward, none of them approached even a scintilla of the popularity of his earlier catalog.

            Was the outcome of Berlin et al. v. E. C. Publications a foregone conclusion? Did Mad have to win? Some think not.

            “I certainly believe a different judge could have made a difference. After all, it took two different judges to decide between all of the songs in the lawsuit,” notes Devin Lucas, a filmmaker who is currently involved in producing a documentary about Dr. Demento, who more than almost anyone else is responsible for the success of Weird Al Yankovic—and for my grandfather’s resurrected career in the 1970s. “It could very easily be that Mad lucked into a final judge who got a personal chuckle from the parody lyrics.”

            Bill Freytag, a musicologist, record collector and expert on the big-band era, agrees that Mad wasn’t necessary disposed to win in the Berlin case. Berlin, he speculates, would have won handily had the case been fought in the first three or four decades of the 1900s, which was when Berlin more or less ‘owned’ popular music.

            “Had there been a judge who stubbornly still lived in the past, there could have been a different outcome,” Freytag says. “But that didn’t happen. What’s more, by the time Mad got into the picture, the public had already heard Allan Sherman’s lyrics parodying classical and public domain songs, and they enjoyed it. A lot! Also, Mad didn’t make recordings for release, so in effect their ‘sung to the tune of’ directive went on in the public’s head. Perhaps the judge realized that the law couldn’t, or shouldn’t, control our minds.”

             Yankovic does make recordings for release, which is why he occupies a somewhat different place in the novelty song milieu. “I still don’t know how he gets away with it,” admits Meglin, who is a friend of the “Eat It” man. But Yankovic makes it a point to obtain permission first. There have been times when permission was denied by some original artists, and he’s had some disagreements or misunderstandings with others, but he has never been sued.

            By contrast, Mad has been to court on more than one occasion, once in a suit defending their use of Alfred E. Neuman as their mascot (an image that, in one form or another, can be traced back to the 1890s; the plaintive lost the case). As far as the Berlin affair is concerned, there haven’t been too many in-depth histories written about it from the vantage point of those directly involved. Most of the plaintiffs have since passed away (Berlin died in 1989 at age 101), and while many of the defendants are still here, scattered around the county raising hell in one way or another, few include the 52-year-old story of the lawsuit in their ramblings, published or otherwise. The facts of the case are easily found, but gossip, secrets, tangents, memories and anecdotes seem to be in short supply. That’s a shame since there are probably many such anecdotes, from the bizarre to the instructive, from the harebrained to the ironic.

            For instance, on one hand, Irving Berlin sued Mad for parodying his songs, and on the other, he was known to write parodies of his own. In fact, there is wide speculation that he once wrote parody lyrics to Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”—and Porter was one of his co-defendants in the Mad lawsuit. Talk about irony. Still, you can’t be too mad at Irving; his contribution to American music withers any personality flaws he may have had. From ballads to Broadway, from pomp to patriotism, his songs dictate that he can only be sued for making it difficult for other songwriters to have the same kind of timeless influence. Berlin’s range—musically and lyrically—was broad. When he was 70-years-old he was still thinking outside his own massive musical box, writing a song called “Israel” on behalf of the still-relatively-new Israeli independence. (Israel was also Berlin’s real first name.) My grandfather also wrote a song about the new Jewish homeland, which he titled “Home Again in Israel.” It was one of his most flavorful and elegant compositions. The thing is, Poppy Benny wrote “Home Again in Israel” in 1950, and Berlin wrote “Israel” in 1958. My grandfather’s song contains this verse:

“Home again in Israel

At last, no more need I roam,

My sacred land, oh beautiful Israel

You are now my home sweet home.”

A verse in the Berlin song, written eight years later, goes:

“Wandering,

Through with wandering,

Nevermore to roam

Today’s the day we sing and pray

And thank God that at last you’re home.”

 Too bad both gentlemen are gone. This would have made a fascinating lawsuit.   

                                                                                          The End

 _______________________________________________________________

4. Misshapen Chaos

            Did you see me on the Tony Awards last year?

That’s because I wasn’t there.

Actually, there was a time when I thought I might be on the show one day, back in my actor wannabe days. But the curtain drew on those days many years ago. In my defense, it had nothing to do with failing to make my mark on stage; I had decided halfway through my college career to become a writer instead. In terms of interests and passions, writing always won out—even though acting is what brought me out of my red-headed, freckle-faced shell when I was a teenager. When I started to act on the high school stage, I suddenly had a full, engaging social life where once there had been none at all.

So for my first two years of college I majored in drama. But when I realized that what I truly wanted to do was write about people, and not just impersonate them, I switched to journalism.

But that doesn’t mean that my adult life has been devoid of some theatrical drama. It has, and I’m happy about that, for I believe that real-life theatrics can only add to the contributions I make as a writer. There was that one time, though, where the drama was quite Shakespearean, and I’m still deciding whether or not it was a journalism-worthy experience—or just a sadly embarrassing one that I’d be better off to forget.

To set the scene, I must tell you that I played Romeo in high school. It wasn’t easy. I had to wear tights in front of kids who made fun of me even when I wore pants. The red hair and freckles didn’t help, regardless of the marvelous words I had to work with: “O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms...”

Juliet was played by a cute, dark-haired girl named Linda, and she and I got along well during rehearsals. If there was any realism at all to our love scenes—and I’d like to believe there was—it sprang from the fact that we treated each other with respect. After all, we were serious young students of the theater.

From the high school yearbook:
bottom right, rehearsing with Linda

          Linda and I lost touch shortly after we killed ourselves, but soon I met another girl, Bonnie, and she didn’t seem to mind a red headed, freckle faced Romeo, either. Before long, I proposed. Fortunately, our families weren’t at war, and we didn’t have to resort to putrid potions and pointy swords to prove our love for one another. We’ll soon celebrate our 35^th anniversary.  
              Not long ago Bonnie had to take a diagnostic test at the hospital. The staff was very nice and personable. We met doctors and technologists who made us feel relaxed. It was around this time that my job as a corporate writer was eliminated and I was starting to build a career as a full-time freelancer. I was working at home, elated at the prospect of not having to wear a tie and not having to shave every day. I wrote well into the early morning hours, puffing on pencils and pumped up with day-old coffee. I felt like the starving artist I had always wanted to be (without actually having to starve to do it).

            When Bonnie and I returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit, I was exceedingly tired, my eyes mere slits, my nerves rankled. I wore my sloppy writer’s clothes. Wrinkled and torn. I was unshaven. For a moment I worried that hospital security would call the cops. Being bohemian is one thing; getting arrested for it is something else.

            I fell asleep in the waiting room. Suddenly I was awakened by one of the doctors. She introduced herself with a personable smile. I felt bad that I wasn’t in a better state of mind to return the pleasantries. Despite this, the doctor seemed willing to engage in small talk, perhaps to ease my mind about the results of my wife’s diagnosis. But with no energy to respond, I simply kept quiet. The doctor went away.

            Moments later, Bonnie came out.

            “Did Linda say hi?” she said, smiling.

            “Who?” I asked.

            “The doctor—your Juliet from high school,” she exclaimed. “She came out to talk to you, didn’t she?”

            Had I known it was Linda, I could have at least acted halfway normal. That’s assuming, of course, that I’m a decent actor. I suppose the jury will always be out on that. But is it something to write about, or just an episode best left on the cutting room floor? 
             You be the judge. 

_______________________________________________

5. Joe Franklin: Venerable. Inimitable. Flammable.

           There were so many things that I wanted to say the first time I met Joe Franklin, the television legend who passed away in January 2015. It was 2007 when I asked if I could meet him to discuss a book I was writing about an old vaudeville and Borsht Belt performer who had appeared several times on his long-running program, “The Joe Franklin Show.” I needed to pick Mr. Franklin's brain about the performer, and I also wanted to congratulate him on what was then his 65^th year in show business.

            But only one thought crossed my mind as soon as I stepped over the threshold of his office door: the place was a powder keg waiting to explode.

            Franklin Central, on West 43^rd Street in the heart of the Broadway theater district, was not so much an office as it was a print-and-vinyl depository of 20th Century entertainment. There were thousands upon thousands of magazines and books and programs from countless concerts and plays, sheet music and photographs spanning eight decades, posters that were probably worth thousands of dollars, records galore, overflowing folders and more, all of it stacked from the floor to the ceiling, covering not just every wall, but on the floor in rows going north and south and east and west and probably a few other directions thrown in for good measure. It was a maze made of showbiz history.

            So awesome. So distinctive. So flammable.

            I didn’t know if I should be impressed or alarmed. I mean, something as simple as an errant ash from the cigarette of someone passing by in the hallway could do the trick, or a burst light bulb from a lamp on his desk, or an overly aggressive space heater. Mr. Franklin and I would be dead in a heartbeat. I was very worried about it during my short visit.

             On the other hand, he was an 81-year-old legend who achieved his fame and status because he knew what he was doing. Who was I to tell him how to run his office? No dummy, he. From his first professional job when he was still a teenager, working for Martin Block’s “Make Believe Ballroom” radio program, to his own iconic TV show on WOR from 1962 to 1993, where he interviewed tens of thousands of guests, from the wildly famous to the wacko fringe, Joe Franklin became an institution without even trying too hard. That, of course, is not really true—he worked very hard; but his style was at once so relaxed and spirited, so gracious and genial, so in awe of others while being entirely self-possessed, that it seemed as if he strolled through his career without ever breaking a sweat.

Joe Franklin

        So I forced myself to stop looking around and simply focus on what I had stopped by his office to discuss. The warm and pleasurable conversation I had with Mr. Franklin was interrupted many times by the ringing telephone and by people sticking their heads in his doorway to say hello, or to remind him of something, or to ask for a time when they could meet, or to wonder if he needed anything... But despite the constant intrusions, I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. I got the information I needed for the book I was writing. He was happy for me, and even promised to read it and provide a testimonial once the galleys were available. 

            But all those interruptions, in concert with the way Mr. Franklin spoke (a rapid-fire and occasionally sputtering stream of consciousness), made me wonder if he’d come through on that promise.

            I left his office, thankful that my initial inferno fears were unfounded, and a few months later I discovered that my other fear was unfounded, too: he came through with the testimonial.    
            I’m glad his office never burned down. He’s been gone more than two years now, and there hasn’t been much news—at least not publicly—about what happened to the hundreds of thousands of items that I saw stacked in not-too-neat piles throughout the room. I’m sure proper arrangements were made. But since the legend’s not there anymore, I’m not really going to worry about it too much.

                                                                                                 The End

______________________________________________________________________

6. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Marquee

           I once wrote a play called “Assorted Nuts at Passover, or, The Night I Felt Like I Became the Last Real Jew Left in America.” It is loosely based on the crazy Passover Seders I used to attend at my grandparents’ Sheepshead Bay apartment in Brooklyn back in the 1970s. They were wildly nutty, as were most of the relatives who were always there. But I never found a producer, production company or theater willing to take on the play. I vaguely recall reading one thank-you-but-no-thank-you note that said “Oy,” which I’m fairly certain was directed at its 27-syllable title. I had to wonder how much a long title has to do with the success, failure, or very life of a play.

So I did a little research—and I think that the only decisive conclusion I drew is that there are no decisive conclusions to draw.  

            In 1970, Paul Zindel’s “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” unfolded on a Broadway stage, and Clive Barnes, then writing for the New York Times, used such words as “discouraging” and “stupid” in his review—but I don’t feel bad for Mr. Zindel because of the context in which those words were used: “It has, I must admit, one of the most discouraging titles devised by man,” Barnes began, “… yet curiously enough you realize at the end of the play that the title is valid—valid but stupid.” Jerry Talmer of the New York Post, who considered Zindel’s play a powerful and beautiful story, said it had a terrible title “which is far less terrible once you’ve seen the play.” Lee Silver at the Daily News concurred, adding that “the title seems zany, weird or even superficial—until you experience the play. Then it becomes poignant and hopeful.” I can only hope for my own work to be called discouraging and stupid one day; you never know when that can lead to poignant and hopeful.

           “Gamma Rays,” with its full 15-syllable tongue-busting title, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as best new play of the year.

           But other than my rudimentary research into the matter, there apparently have been no studies about the correlation between long and short titles and long or short runs on Broadway, Off-Broadway, or anywhere else. What is clear is that long titles have given some critics something extra to criticize from time to time.

           The truth is that a brief title takes as much thought and imagination as a marathon one, and that the paths playwrights tread in search of perfect titles are filled with numerous motives, including wit, poetry, simplicity, desperation, and bluntness. It was bluntness that seems to have been the motive behind Peter Weiss’s choice in 1964, when he broke every long-title record with “The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.” That’s a 24-word, 42-syllable brute of a title. Mollie Panter-Downes, writing in New York Magazine, called the production “a long, abstract and difficult debate” about liberty and dictatorship that was nonetheless “a dazzling theatrical experience.” (She was also among the first to report that the title was condensed to “Marat/Sade” “by arguing Londoners, to save breath.”) When “Marat/Sade” crossed the Atlantic, it won the New York Drama Critics’ Award for best foreign play of the 1965-66 season.

            “Marat/Sade” was by no means the first of the long-titled breed, but its length does give it a special place in theater history. Three years before Weiss completed it, Time magazine’s reviewer warned audiences that “The marquees of Broadway may soon have to poke the New Jersey Palisades, for a new American playwright is about to arrive, and his considerable ability is exceeded only by the length of his titles.” If Arthur Kopit’s “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad” poked the Palisades, Weiss’s, a few years later, must have scaled the Delaware Water Gap.

            A long title can grab critical attention without critical success, no matter who writes the play. Certainly, “Matrimonium: Overruled Passion, Poison and Petrifaction” is not one of George Bernard Shaw’s best-known efforts. William Saroyan’s 1975 farce, “Rebirth Celebration of the Human Race at Artie Zabala’s Broadway Theater,” wasn’t well received, either.

            “Rebirth Celebration” was about a struggling Off-Broadway theater proprietor who needed a good production to keep his theater alive. Saroyan poked fun at the state of New York theater in the mid-1970s and audiences apparently took it personally. Even a shorter title might not have helped.

            But a shorter title may have helped William Gibson’s 1975 Christmas comedy, “Butterfingers Angel, Mary and Joseph, Herod the Nut and the Slaughter of 12 Hit Carols in a Pear Tree.” Gibson, author of “The Miracle Worker” and “Two for the Seesaw,” was perhaps trying to capture some of the inventive lunacy of a contemporary production with a much shorter title, “Godspell,” but may have frightened some people away with its unforgiving title.

            (The play was full of inventive lunacy: it takes place in Nazareth and Bethlehem in 1 B.C. and the characters talk about such things as diapers and vitamins. When Joseph asks Mary when she’s expecting the child, she says, “I think around Christmas.”)

            In the case of a 1980 drama, its long title brought playwright Edward Allan Baker a comparison to one of the greatest American writers—although it was a somewhat dubious comparison. In his favorable review of Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?” New Yorker critic Brendan Gill said, “Surely (the title) hints at some not very deeply buried death wish on Mr. Baker’s part in regard to our commercial theater. How can so many words possibly be made to fit on a Broadway marquee? Let me abandon this point with the gentle suggestion to Mr. Baker that if ‘Main Street’ was good enough for Sinclair Lewis, ‘Prairie Avenue’ might well be good enough for him.”

Baker, who is currently writing a book on how penning “Prairie Avenue” drastically changed his life, says that the title was the result of two other titles that he merged at a moment’s notice. He recalls how as a college student driving along I-95 in Rhode Island, he was suddenly mesmerized by a gorgeous twilight behind The Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston. (Baker was attending the University of Rhode Island.) He scribbled on a pad, “What's so beautiful about a sunset over a prison?’ simply as an idea with no real narrative meat behind it. Months later, Baker was told by the chairperson of the theater department at his school that if he wrote a play, the department would produce it. One  afternoon, this same chairperson told him that she had to put together a list of plays for their next season—and by the end of the day needed a title of his as-of-yet unwritten play. Baker rifled through his notes, came across his I-95 scribble, then noticed another scribble—a different rough, meatless idea—on the same piece of paper: “The Bride Of Prairie Avenue.” That’s how “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue” was born—as a title, not a play. At the time, Baker still didn’t know what it would be about. (The completed play concerns a character’s struggle to flee a Southern New England slum.)

“Titles of plays are extremely important to me,” Baker shared with me. “I believe they have a bearing on how a play is received. I’m not going to see a play titled, ‘The Inside of His Head,’ which was the title before Arthur Miller settled on ‘Death Of a Salesman,’ or ‘Poker Night,’ which Tennessee Williams used before ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ I think a title has to stir the unconscious in the same way a good poem does.”

            I don’t think that anyone truly knows whether devising the perfect title takes creative energy, sheer inspiration, or just dumb luck. Whatever it is, it’s probably the playwright’s first or second idea that wins out in the end. If a title does result from a first or second idea and still happens to have a dozen or more syllables, sophisticated audiences (and even many critics) usually prove they can deal with it. Fortunately, though, first and second ideas generally do produce much shorter titles.

So if I can get a producer to be interested merely in considering a play about the screwy Seders of Sheepshead Bay, I’ll tell him that I already wrote one, and that its title is “Oy.”  

                                 

                                                                                      END

_______________________________ 

7. A Radio Flyer in an Empty Nest

            These things have been around for generations. I’m sure I had one as a kid. I don’t remember it, though, probably because it was a pretty typical thing to have. Every kid had one. Having a Radio Flyer red wagon didn’t exactly make you special.

            My own children had one during the course of their entire collective childhood, but they probably don’t remember it, either. All three shared the same Radio Flyer red wagon, along with every other kid in the neighborhood, which is why it didn’t make them special, either.

            Why just one for all three kids? It wasn’t that I was cheap. I wasn’t. And it wasn’t because the kids were four years apart, which made it just a little easier to pass down many toys and games without too much commotion. It was because a Radio Flyer wagon lasted for years, even when used to its maximum capacity season after season. There was just no reason to buy a new one; the one wagon we bought served dozens of purposes flawlessly, giving each child plenty of opportunity to use it as a doll and toy cart, a stagecoach (with me as the horse), a pet carrier, a thinking station, a delivery truck to assist in setting up lemonade and flower stand businesses on the corner... The little Radio Flyer never failed in its duties.

            Anyway, that’s why I bought just one to last three childhoods.

            From what I recall, it wasn’t even too expensive. I guess I could have bought three, had I been so inclined. But I wasn’t so inclined. Besides, the company that made it probably didn’t need any more of my money. Other than the cheaper and far less impressive plastic Fisher-Price wagons, nobody else but Radio Flyer seemed to make them. Of course, I don’t know if that was really true, and it probably wasn’t, but that was my impression at the time, and my impression is what drove my decision. I thought of Radio Flyer as a monopoly, and didn’t want to make the company more powerful than they already were. But it hardly mattered; the one wagon I bought held up just fine, no matter which child claimed primary ownership, or how many times it slammed into a brick wall, or how many winters it was left outside.

Celia in 1986

Me in 2015

            Frankly, the whole monopoly question is the only thing that made me stop and wonder about Radio Flyer recently; did indeed the company have a monopoly at that time? I’m willing to concede now that it may just have been a case of a product name taking on a universal life much bigger than the reality, like Kleenex, Frisbee, and Google. After all, over the years I’ve blown my nose many times with something other than a Kleenex, flung many round disks into the air that weren’t Frisbees, and have conducted quite a bit of online research using something other than Google. I bet there was a red wagon back then that looked just like a Radio Flyer that wasn’t a Radio Flyer.

            On the other hand, I don’t recall ever seeing a little metal red wagon that wasn’t a Radio Flyer. So yesterday I decided to embark on some research (using Bing), but stopped myself when I realized that I didn’t care too much. The only thing I do care about is that the Radio Flyer that I bought for Celia (born 1983), passed to Kate (1987), and finally gave to Dan (1991), is now back with me (1957), an empty nester in a new home in another state. Whatever joy it provided the three of them, it’s giving me five times that much now. Do I really want to find out anything about it that might tarnish my grown-up pleasure of using the hell out of it now? I have no real interest in its corporate pedigree, product history, quality standards, competition… All I care about is that it’s my trusty little helper now.

            The nest may be empty, but the backyard is full—full of hills and corners and places ripe for a little alfresco creativity. Now that I no longer have to drive anyone to school, or rehearsal, or practice, and I don’t have to listen to teachers justifying hours of homework or go to football games just to watch a five-minute halftime show, I have much more time than ever before to conjure my inner landscape architect. But since there’s no one to drive to school, there’s no one around to help me carry or move things around in the backyard, either. What’s more, once you have an empty nest, you begin to realize that you no longer have the strength and endurance you had when the nest was full.

            That’s where the Radio Flyer comes in.

            Over the last four summers, that little guy has lugged perhaps a thousand gigantic rocks that I’ve used to create rock walls and tree borders; hundreds of bags of topsoil and mulch to fill up gardens, raised beds and big clay pots; dozens of large slabs of cement that I dug up from an old pool path to use as a walkway on either side of the patio; countless bricks that now edge that cement slab walkway; and plenty of large shovels and rakes and hoes and clippers and other landscaping tools. The little red Radio Flyer has also functioned as a carting service for downed tree limbs, trimmed hedge and bush branches, and countless bags of autumn leaves.

            Don’t get me wrong: it definitely shows its age; you can actually see a little bit of the ground when you look down on it because of a somewhat-larger-than-a-hairline crack in its metal surface. One look inside, where the children used to sit, or where their potted flowers and lemonade pitchers used to reside, and you realize you would never allow a child ever to dwell there again. That’s because in addition to the crack, the Radio Flyer is completely rusted and bent out of shape, with a few shards of metal protruding here and there. The handle is bent like a broken arm. It seems as if it’s about to give way. But I say that every summer, and every summer it soldiers on, unimpeded by its abuse and advanced age. It still holds everything I dish out, its wheels still turn, the handle still helps me navigate from the shed to the walkway to the gardens to the raised bed. I have no clue if its resilience can be attributed to the way it was made, to a favorable fluke of manufacturing, or just to my own crazy mixture of stubbornness, willpower, and pride.

            All I know is that it makes me feel special.

                                                                                                 * * *

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8. By the Way, We Even Called Him Satchmo

            It wouldn’t surprise me if my old friend Keith became President of the United States. When I knew Keith in high school, 41 years ago, he was charismatic, bright, extremely popular. He’s also black. Sound like any president you know?

            Keith came to my almost all-white school in a Long Island suburb from another district. We weren’t the closest of buddies, but I considered him a good friend. In fact, I looked up to him, literally (he was a foot taller than me), as well as in every other way. We were in the concert band and marching band together. He played the trumpet a lot better than I played the clarinet. My high school had a highly-regarded music program, which may have been one of the reasons that Keith was given the opportunity to transfer from his own school.

            From what I recall, there were no issues at my school whatsoever with respect to the half-dozen black students who attended (the term African-American was not yet in vogue), nor with students from the other racial groups who were represented in the student body. Keith turned some of us on to a lifelong love of jazz; he was an extremely funny guy who made us laugh because of the stunts he pulled—like when he sat on the passenger side of his car and used his extremely long arms and legs to make it appear as if no one was driving. (I’ll never get that vision out of my head—nor do I want to.) Plus, he was a caring friend who was always available to lend a hand. I don’t remember ever thinking about his race or the color of his skin. It just never came up.

From my high school yearbook

            Barack Obama was elected president almost eight years ago, and reelected without much of a fight. People coast to coast can discuss the changes that have taken place in our country to have made his election and reelection possible, and as of this writing, we can also discuss the changes that may possibly lead to our electing a woman or a Jew to the highest office in the land. No longer will it be a total surprise. It can happen.

            Nor  would it be much of a surprise if Keith occupied the Oval Office one day. After all, he had such a majestic presence back then, I imagine it has only grown and developed even more in the four decades since.

            But thinking back on those days also reminds me of a Keith-related story that probably could never happen today—at least not without a few heads rolling in its wake.

            Our marching band was scheduled to attend an event at another school in a neighboring town. A bus was parked near the football field ready to drive us there. I was one of the first on the bus and sat up front. A classmate named Bob followed close behind and sat across from me. A few other students took seats behind us. Then Keith strode aboard, his head nearly scraping the top of the bus.

            “Hey, you—” Bob called out, a mock-officious tone to his voice and a playful smirk on his face, “back of the bus!”

            Every student around us instantly grasped that Bob’s quip was a commentary on just one thing: the supreme stupidity of racism. Nothing more, nothing less. It was Keith, for crying out loud! Those of us up front who heard it laughed because we all were well schooled on the reprehensible historical events that the comment referenced—and we all knew Keith.

            Keith, who could kick Bob’s ass to the back of the bus without even trying, if he wanted to, gave Bob a look that said just that—along with his own perceptive smirk, for he, too, recognized that the reference and its disgraceful roots were being satirically acknowledged by a friend who held no prejudice or bigotry whatsoever. Then he took his seat across from us. That was that. We didn’t need to bask in the glory of our progressive attitudes and behaviors; we didn’t even know we had those things! We were just being ourselves. Which is why the historically-conscious quip came and went in a heartbeat. 

            Imagine, though, what would happen today if an African-American kid got on a school bus and a white kid said to him, “Hey you—back of the bus.” Even if they were the best of friends, if word leaked out it would be on every television and radio newscast; talk show hosts would debate it; blogs would analyze and scrutinize the comment and the personal lives of Keith and Bob and the rest of the students on the bus; certain newsmakers would loudly and histrionically decry the violation of civil rights, vilify the evildoers and call for suspensions of the offending student and jail for the adults in charge; on line, the story would go viral.

            Could an incident like that come and go in a heartbeat today? Should it be able to? Would anyone today have the patience to try to understand and appreciate the context in which it was said?

            No, it wouldn’t surprise me if Keith ran for president one day. But neither would it surprise me if someone got hold of that story and used it to describe how candidate Keith battled a busload of insensitive racist bigots in his last year of high school.

                                                         The End

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9. Love Between the Covers

           Years ago I fell in love with a young woman named Peony. A distinctive yet beautiful and poetic name, and one I have never questioned. I probably would have loved her had her name been somewhat more conventional—a name which I was more familiar—but being Peony just made it all the more special. I spent several days with her back then, not quite knowing if my love was genuine or merely a fleeting infatuation. What I was sure about was that it was unrequited. There was nothing I could do about that, so I tried not to care.

            Recently I was reintroduced to Peony. The intervening years gave me a greater appreciation for her story as well as the implications of our crossed paths. But what hasn’t changed at all is that both the original encounter and the more recent one have all the gravity of a schoolboy’s crush: sweet, stubbornly persistent, and very secretive.

            I am a Jewish man who has always had an abiding and respectful yet sometimes troubled and quizzical relationship with faith (all faiths) and have written a number of books and articles that in one way or another have Judaism at their core. Peony lived with a Jewish family for the first few decades of her life and had a similarly respectful and quizzical relationship. And while that may not have been what initially drew me to her, once I made that slender connection it gave me a sense of hope—as if Peony wouldn’t mind living with me, too, had fate allowed.

            Why would I want to live with her? I suppose it’s because she’s at once exquisite, artistic, and wise, as well as mischievous, decisive, and strong. Those kinds of traits turn me on, I suppose. Is it any wonder I should fall in love with her?

            How I would have loved to arise each morning to see her waking up in the same house (or, dare I say, the same room). After all, as someone once wrote about her, “The many joys of her life grew bright again with the morning. She enjoyed comfort, she loved beauty, and of both this house had much.”

            Of course, that wasn’t my house. When I first met Peony my house was on Long Island, and when we were reacquainted it was in Connecticut. Hers was in China. Here, too, is where I initially felt, and still feel, a certain connection, unconfirmed though it may be. I recall hearing when I was a boy that there may have been some Asian blood mixed in with my family’s Russian/Polish blood somewhere along the ancestral line. For that reason, and others, I’ve always felt some kind of kinship with the Asian world. In fact, the same person who introduced me to Peony is most likely the one who also helped that kinship develop because of the stories she told and the way she told them.

            It was that person, too, who provided me with the opportunity to observe some of the things that made Peony Peony. Not just her appearance—the silken long black hair, the dark piercing eyes, the warm ivory skin, the full red lips—but the stories of her life in that Jewish home. How she would tell white lies in order to protect people who erred or stumbled for obstinate yet well-intentioned reasons. How she would tell brutal truths when only brutal truths could make people face the importance of reality. How she adored the seasons. On one wall of her room she hung a scroll she had painted herself that displayed spring and summer flowers, autumn leaves, and winter pines, and underneath the images she placed a poem she composed on her own:

                                      “The peach flowers bloom upon the trees,

                                      Not knowing whether the frosts will kill them.”

           She could also be complicated and mysterious, but always thoughtful and captivating.

           Peony eventually left the Jewish family she lived with, and because of various high emotions and changing relationships, she went somewhere completely different and became a completely different person. It was almost painful for me to learn about that. But maybe it’s not fair to assume that she changed at all; maybe the essence of a person never really changes. Despite the fact that she lived elsewhere, dressed differently, and assumed a lifestyle quite distinct from the one she had before, maybe she remained Peony in the most important ways. At least that’s what I’d like to believe.

          Yet, even if that were true, I still would have appreciated the chance to intercept her just before she left, to talk some sense into her, to beg her to stay. But I couldn’t. She was incapable of hearing me. Characters in novels aren’t real. They can neither hear nor see anything outside the pages of a book. “Peony,” written in 1948 by Pearl S. Buck, is about a Chinese bondmaid to the house of Ezra in the northern Chinese province of Honan. It takes place in the mid-1800s. Peony never really existed. Except on paper. And in my heart and mind, I suppose. I first met her when I was a teenager, thanks to a high school English teacher named Mrs. Newman, in whose class I was required to read “The Good Earth.” That book, in turn, prompted me to devour everything else written by Pearl Buck. I read “Peony” a year or two later. I picked it off my bookshelf a few weeks ago and read it once again. My reaction was the same, only better.

          But with age also comes wisdom—or at least a lot of questions. And the most important question I have today is this: Just who is it I really love? Peony? Mrs. Newman? Or Pearl Buck? 

                               
                                                                The End

By the way, if anyone is interested, I have completed a book of short stories called "Tales from a Splotchy Hot Dog," as well as a novel called "All the Leaves are Brown." If you'd like synopses, let me know. In addition, four plays I have written are eagerly awaiting for a stage to call home: "The Book of Josh," "The Elements of God," "The Battery's Down," and "The Apprentice" (which is about young Ben Franklin). If you have any leads, please let me know. Thanks! JoelSamberg@gmail.com.

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10. The Apple of My Eye

              Inventions are supposed to make life a little easier, safer and healthier. The new gizmos, gadgets and formulas announced in 2016 have not let us down, and it looks as if 2017 may be even more interesting. Someone recently invented a super-lens that enables us to see germs that are too small for conventional microscopes. That can improve treatment of sickness and disease. We also finally learned how to generate power from raindrops—another decisive step on the road to energy independence. There’s even a new kit that anyone can use to change the oil in their cars quickly, effortlessly and immaculately. No more waiting an hour at a quick-oil-change joint just to be told that there are three things on your car that require immediate fixing, or else.
It just goes to show that even after the digital revolution, some inventions can still surprise us. Maybe we’re just naturally skeptical. After all, most of the biggest inventions that have truly changed our lives happened in just the last fifty years; perhaps routinely believing in amazing new things is not yet etched into our ancient DNA.
And then, of course, there’s Apple, which just came out with a device that senses when a pregnant woman’s water is about an hour away from breaking, and automatically sends a text to the mother and father’s cell phones that says something like, “Hey, it’s me, Ella. I’m planning on coming out in about 55 minutes. Mom, get your things. Dad, leave work NOW.” (My new granddaughter’s name is Ella.)

Before you go running out to buy it, read on: this is not true. No such device exists. I made it up. But maybe one day it will be invented. And when it is, at that time—and only at that time—I will pat myself on the back and tell everyone how prophetic I am. Just like I did when the iPod came out, twenty-four years after I first predicted it.
Here’s the story about that.
In 1981, my wife and I were visiting my friend Bob. Bob is very smart. He knows mechanics, physics, electrical engineering and a few other scientific disciplines. He has a few patents. I was working for a public relations agency at the time, and one of my coworkers had been on the PR team that helped introduce the Sony Walkman two years earlier. Bob and I were talking about the Walkman. We thought it was a great thing—a device not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes that you could carry around with you and play as many as  twenty songs before you have to change the little cassette inside. But I insisted that it was just the tip of the iceberg. I said that one day there will be a mechanism no larger than a postage stamp that will hold as many as two or three hundred songs. Bob said that was impossible, and he cited reasons having to do with bits or bytes or other kinds of digital thingies that were still relatively new at the time and entirely foreign to me.
Bob is still my friend. I admire him, look up to him and enjoy his company immensely. But let’s not forget that the iPod Shuffle was introduced in 2005.
My point: no one should ever say that something is impossible. The truth is that anything is possible. Obviously I am speaking exclusively about technical matters here, but I suppose it can also apply to fashion (clothes made out of rejection slips from publishers), politics (Téa Leone really becoming Secretary of State) and dozens of other things.
I am convinced that many of my predictions will come true one day. Like the ability to attach an object to a beam of light and travel at warp speed. Or an app that translates animal sounds into the human words. Or a button that, when you press it into a phone after receiving a scam call, completely destroys the caller’s entire phone and computer system. Or a machine that records and plays back dreams.
Well, actually, that last prediction can be a little dangerous. I’m not sure I would want anyone to see my dreams. I don’t want my next grandchild, through the water-breaking app, to say, “Hey, mom, dad, it’s me--but I ain’t gonna come out as long as that weirdo’s my grandfather.”

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 Some Kind of Lonely Clown

  

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11. Focused on the Future

          For this week’s column I reached far into the future and pulled out an article that I happen to find quite intriguing. Maybe you will, too. It’s from August 18, 2104, 88 years from now. 

Cars Take a U-Turn for the Worse

New way of driving poses increased threats for public safety

Special to the New York Daily Times

         August 18, Detroit, MI—In a move guaranteed to send shock waves across the country and around the world, Specific Motors (one of the auto manufactures created after the 2019 breakup of General Motors) announced that it is releasing a prototype of a new kind of car that requires human intervention. Self-driving cars came to prominence in 2021 after several years of failed tests, legislative brawls, consumer lawsuits and other setbacks. But if SM has its way, road travel in the future may never be the same.

Engineers at the automaker have discovered a way let people take control of their cars. Although the company did not release details, early reports are that one car occupant will actually have to determine when to start and stop the car, when and how far to turn the tires, what course of action to take to avoid collisions, and many other functions of that cars have been doing on their own for the past 83 years. 

“In the early days of automobiles, humans actually had to exert both physical energy and mental acuity in order for their cars to go from one place to another,” says Mark Fentress, Vice President of Technology at SM. “When self-driving cars finally appeared, the industry realized its true potential. So, many people are asking why we are returning to an ancient paradigm—cars that need to be driven by humans. It’s because our studies show that there is growing portion of the population that is tired of cars making decisions for them. On a limited scale, we will reintroduce cars more similar to those we manufactured early in the previous century. We’ll see how it goes.”

In a survey conducted by the New York Daily Times, the public seems to be equally divided among those who think it is a good idea, and those who think it is crazy. Critics of the new technology seem to get particularly agitated. The newspaper reached out to noted auto industry critic  Tessandra Larkman for a comment. Ms. Larkman, who was born in 1997 and recently celebrated her 107th birthday, said that she received her driver’s license in 2016, when she was 19, and her first car was one that needed human intervention. She refused to give it up even when self-driving cars took over the market five years later. 

“My 2017 Ford Focus was just fine. You  had to look left and right and you had to think at the same time, and you had to decide whether to use the brake or the gas pedal,” said Ms. Larkman. “But so what? It became second nature. It worked fine. I didn’t see the need for self-driving cars. Robots now play music at weddings, they make movies, write books, design clothes and do almost everything else people used to do. So I’m sure the people who are speaking out against the new non-self-driving cars are simply reacting without thinking. But if they thought about it, they’d see that a non-self-driving car is actually a good idea.”

Although non-self-driving cars are currently illegal, Ms. Larkman keeps her classic 2017 Ford Focus in her garage, maintains it well, and once in a while takes it for a spin in her community. So far she has faced no police intervention. 

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “One day last month I was planning on taking it from my house to the grocery store, but at the very last minute I decided pass the grocery store and go to the clothing-optional beach instead. I was never able to do that with my self-driving car.”

                                                              The End

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JoeltheWriter.com 

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12. Sore Loser

          Now that the Olympics are long over, I feel safe sharing my opinion about them because we’re onto so many different world topics now. I doubt anyone will kick up a storm about my opinion, even though it's shared by so few of my fellow Americans. But that’s okay; no one agrees with me about Adam Sandler, either.
Here’s what I think: by its very nature, the world-famous Olympics constitute a mammoth overstatement of just about everything: importance, influence, opportunity, reality... To explain why I feel that way, I have to start with a mammoth understatement of my own: I am not a sports person.
Quite the contrary, I’m the one who walks into a room where a bunch of guys are watching the Super Bowl and poses this question, “What inning?”
I realize that not being a sports fan does not preclude me from appreciating what athletes can accomplish. Two hundred and six nations participated in this year's Olympic Games in Brazil, and it is certainly a marvel of cooperation, not to mention logistics. Plus, it’s nice to feel part of the national community and root for our countrymen and women. Yes, I should enjoy the Olympics. Alas, I don’t. (What true sports guy would ever use the word alas?)
First of all, to me it reeks of blatant commercialism. What started as a quadrennial in Greece in the year 776 B.C. (they were not televised at the time) is now a biennial, with the Summer Olympics held one year, and the Winter Olympics two years later. I’m a sucker for good traditions, and the quadrennial system appealed to me. When they switched it I said to myself, “Sure, this way everyone can make more money.” Maybe I’m just jealous. I tried to earn twice as much money at my last freelance job by handing in one project twice, and followed it up with two invoices. Accounts Payable just ignored the second one. I know it’s an imperfect analogy, but the Olympics are an imperfect spectacle—and not just because they’re no longer held every four years.
Do the Olympic Games really represent the pinnacle of human physical achievement, or just the results of what can be achieved when you devote every single waking moment to winning, naturally or otherwise? I would love to see an Olympic athlete who reminds me of myself—the Howdy Doodie-ish way I look, the pear-ish way I’m shaped, the oafish way I can’t tear myself away from “Road House” whenever it’s on TV despite the fact that it’s one of the cheesiest movies ever made... If there were Olympic athletes like that, I might be inspired to Olympic greatness. But so many of the athletes in the Olympics don’t even look human, let alone Joelish. They’re walking muscles. Humorless automatons. Holders of MBS degrees (manufactured by steroids).

It doesn’t inspire me. It frightens me.
Lastly, I still fail to understand the appeal of many Olympic sports, such as gymnastics. Everyone I know (even me!) can go outside and pretend to play a game of, say, baseball, or football, or soccer, or almost any other field game. We don’t have to do it well, but we can follow the rules, go through the motions, and get a little exercise at the same time. Same for swimming. We can jump in the water, swim a lap or two, race against a friend. But gymnastics? There is not a single, solitary gymnastics move I can duplicate or even pretend to imitate, and I’m willing to bet that the same goes for dozens of my friends and acquaintances. So why do I have to go gaga over seeing someone do something that I can’t do, that none of my friends can do, that I don’t want to do, never had an urge to do and (because it looks so painful) wouldn’t do even if I  could.
Once again, I know I’m in an exceedingly small minority in my criticism of the Olympics. But I don’t care. After they read this column, no one who knows me will ever invite me over to watch another game with them on TV.
Which I guess means that I win the gold medal.

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13. Hell of a Joint

         The legalization of marijuana in Colorado has nothing to do with the decision my wife and I made to take a trip to the Centennial State two months ago. But it may have a little to do with why we’re not anxious to go back.
Pot has been in the news a lot lately. Just last week the DEA refused to reclassify marijuana for medicinal uses, claiming there is still no decisive proof of its health benefits. Over in Denver, people are getting ready to vote on a measure to allow the use of marijuana at social clubs and on private business property. And that’s just the tip of the doobie. There are a lot of other things going on in Potland. So when my wife and I were preparing to board the plane for our Colorado trip, I was well aware that in addition to trying to rest and relax, as a journalist I also needed to observe and assess.
A couple who used to live near us in Connecticut had relocated to Colorado Springs three years ago. We were invited to their wedding and decided to turn it into a little bit of a vacation. It turned into one of the most discomforting vacations I had ever taken.
(I almost wrote ‘had ever tooken,’ but believe me, that’s simply because I’m tired; it has absolutely nothing to do with being under the lazy, grammatically-challenged influence of anything at all. I swear.)
Shortly after we arrived in Colorado, a waiter who served us at a small luncheonette in Manitou Springs was so high that the line was completely blurred between knowing if he was serious or joking around. At one point I asked him if I could have a bottle of ketchup and he barked, “NO!” with such gravity that I lost my appetite. Moments later he added, “Just kidding. I like doing that to people.” He then proceeded to tell us how he lives in the mountains with a chipmunk and a bear.

Now, I know you’re not allowed to smoke marijuana while walking around Colorado streets, but I’m not sure what the law is regarding being under the influence while you’re at work. The waiter was wearing a Superman shirt and Clark Kent glasses, both of which made him seem normal enough. But his hair, his demeanor, his speaking voice and his on-the-job behavior told a completely different story. Admittedly, he was very colorful, but our luncheon was marred because we were unable to relax, wondering as we did about everything from what was (inadvertently or otherwise) put into our food, to the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the charges on the check.
When we walked around the neighborhood where our bed-and-breakfast inn was located, we had to avoid several fellow pedestrians who looked, shall we say, dubious. In New York City we would have simply assumed they were homeless. In Colorado Springs, we couldn’t merely assume it; stoned was just as likely. Now, having never researched the effects of marijuana on social behavior (other than the half-hour experience with our Manitou Springs waiter), I didn’t know what to expect from these passersby had they passed by a little closer. I put me on edge.
Finally, on one the several hikes we took in some of the region’s glorious mountainous terrain, I had a whiff of the unmistakable weed of which we are speaking. On one hand I could not help but smile at the thought that people in this state have a better chance than most of indulging in two of their passions at once—mountain hiking and smoking grass. On the other hand, having never indulged myself, I had to wonder if the contact high I was getting could have put me in the mood to pretend I was Superman and jump off the steep face of the cliff I was on to save Lois Lane, who was probably halfway down by then. Because as I’m sure you can well imagine, if I did that, it would have been the last vacation I ever would have tooken.
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Please forgive me for taking a moment to plug my TV projects. Maybe there's someone out there who wants to take a look? Just to see? That would be awesome. Because hey, you never know. I have written six pilots--four sitcoms and two dramas. The sitcoms are "Oyster Bagel," "Between Forks," "One Dag," and Old Rockers." The dramas are "Exposed" and "Rose in Spanish Harlem." If you'd like synopses, just let me know! Thank you very much. 
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My Other Books:

Smack in the Middle:

My Turbulent Time Treating Heroin Addicts at Odyssey House

(coauthored with Gibbs Williams, PhD.)

A compelling narrative of Dr. Williams’ professional baptism by fire at Odyssey House. The first book to tackle the early history and the social-psychological dynamics of a therapeutic community that was at the leading edge of heroin addiction treatment while at the same time at the verge of mutiny and collapse under the weight of despotic leadership.

Soon to be available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other online booksellers.

Black Opal/History Publishing, 2019, 173 pages.

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Some Kind of Lonely Clown:

The Music, Memory & Melancholy Lives of Karen Carpenter

Karen Carpenter’s popularity never really waned. She’s almost as popular today as she was during her recording heyday. But not everyone knows that behind the velvety voice was a love-starved romantic, conflicted sister, obedient daughter, unpredictable jester, wannabe mother and emotional wreck. This book is an exploration of Karen’s issues, mystique, and timelessness.

Available on Amazon, GoodReads, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and other online booksellers.  

BearManor Media, 2015, 150 pages

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Grandpa Had a Long One:

Personal Notes on the Life, Career & Legacy of Benny Bell

Benny Bell—of “Shaving Cream” fame—was one of the funniest, quirkiest and hardest working entertainers ever to come out of the vaudeville and Borscht Belt eras. Although far from a superstar, and never anywhere near rich, Bell is revealed in the book to have had quite a notable career and a life that was immensely rich in humor, drama, music, and unceasing optimism.

Available on Amazon, GoodReads, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and other online booksellers.

BearManor Media, 2009, 238 pages.

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Carpenters: An Illustrated Discography

I was privileged to be part of a team of journalists, authors, musicians and entertainment figures assembled by Randy Schmidt to provide a series of in-depth, insightful and opinionated conversations on every Carpenters record ever released. Randy’s book is beautifully presented with more than 200 images, many of which have never before been seen.

Available on Amazon.
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Upcoming:

Remember Me to Herald Square

In the summer of 1985, Michael Abraham gets a job on the New York Herald—his goal for years. His first order of business is to find his high school love, the actress Tina Kennedy. Can they really get back together with any degree of success? After all, they both make certain choices for their careers. How far will Tina go to get a part, and how far will Michael go to get a story?

To be released by Blue Thorns/History Publishing in late 2019.

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