Family and a Sense of Place

 

With the “relative” safe COVID travel easing, we ventured once again, six weeks later, by returning to New York City, this time for ten days and then, finally, after three long years, to our former life as boaters in Connecticut for a week.  There we were reunited with the boat we lived on each summer since I retired, mostly at the same dock in Norwalk, the ‘Swept Away’ (now Captained by our son, Jonathan, and his wife/first mate, Tracie).  Our other son Chris and his significant other Megan were able to meet up with all of us at the end of that week.  To be with our four “kids” was the highlight of our trip. 

 

The flight to NYC went flawlessly, thank you Jet Blue, and there was an orderly line to get cabs when we arrived at the gleaming new LGA terminal.  For the following ten days we enjoyed living like the Upper-West-Siders we once were, staying at Jon and Tracie’s apartment overlooking the Hudson River (while they vacationed on the boat).  Ironically one can see part of the West Side Highway from their windows, which I drove each morning in 1970 commuting from our little rent controlled apartment on West 63^rd Street, to where I worked at a new publishing job in Westport, CT, not moving there until a year later.  It was a more civilized drive in those days.  I became the President of that company and was there for the rest of my working life.  I feel deep roots in Manhattan and Southwest Connecticut.  Florida has its merits but the verdant hills of Connecticut and Manhattan’s macadam still call out.

 

Jon and Tracie’s apartment also fronts Riverside Park which on some mornings I walked, especially enticed by a visit to the pier which juts out into the Hudson River and sitting on a bench where I could marvel at the 360 degree skyline.  Manhattan was literally a breath of fresh air, in the 70s, low humidity, a nice breeze.  The juxtaposition of the old West Side Highway and the new gleaming condos reaching for the sky, and the George Washington Bridge to the north in the distance and New Jersey to the west made for expansive viewing, dazzling in the light. 

 

 

 

 

Manhattan people-watching is still so much fun.  I was lucky to photograph a man and his dog enjoying that fresh morning air on the pier, and later, walking with Ann on Central Park West, the sweet mother and daughter strolling in lock step, Mom transporting her child’s roller skates. 

 

 

Or an elderly woman feeding Manhattan's requisite pigeons at Riverside Park in the morning. 

From a cab I saw a flight attendant who noted I was taking photos and stopped to pose as she crossed the street.  My pleasure!

 

Not allowing grass to grow under our feet our first full night we were thrilled to catch our favorite jazz pianist at Birdland, Emmet Cohen.  In addition to his steadfast drummer, Kyle Poole, and a guest bassist, he was joined by Bruce Harris on the trumpet, and Ruben Fox on the sax. 

 

We had a front row table, directly facing Harris, probably one of the leading trumpet performers, but the young Aussie, Ruben Fox did some other-worldly riffs, to such an extent that Harris and I made eye contact, acknowledging what Fox was doing, both wondering, how the heck?  Cohen meanwhile was smiling at his crew and doing his usual virtuosity on the ivories.  We were able to chat briefly with him afterwards, “old” fans that we are, in both sense of the word.  

Another night we were able to see Sondheim’s Into The Woods.

 

There were so many new cast members that it felt like an opening night.  When the curtains opened and the cast came out to perform the “Into the Woods” Prologue, the audience jumped up to a boisterous standing ovation which DID NOT STOP to the point that the performers began to look uncomfortable.  It was a mutual audience/performer love fest all night.  What a high bar for them to clear, but, clear it they did. 

 

Among the almost entirely new cast were several well known performers including Stephanie J. Block, and Sebastian Arcelus of Madam Secretary fame.  But to me it’s Sondheim’s glorious music and lyrics which makes this show a true work of art.  A thunderous wave of ovations concluded the show.  We exited to 8th Avenue and it became a battle to even move among the throngs of humanity in the light rain forcing us to walk blocks and blocks to get a cab or an Uber.  It was some distance until the aggressive crowd filtered out that we finally were able to hail a cab in the rain.  This may be our swan song for an evening Broadway performance.  But never say never!

 

Another theatre event I was looking forward to, not for the faint of heart, is The Butcher Boy downtown at the Irish Rep., a very dark coming of age, absurdist production, a musical no less, based on Patrick McCabe’s contemporary piece of literature.  The book, lyrics, and music are by Asher Muldoon, only 19 years old attending Princeton University.  He has been compared to a young Sondheim, and some of the lyrics and music had a Sondheim quality to it.  Imagine if Sondheim’s Saturday Night was performed as intended when he wrote it in 1954.  I felt that seeing a work by this young artist was a must, sort of getting in at the ground floor.  This piece of theatre, like Sweeny Todd, progressed to a very dark place.  But dark places are where we now live in the world.  Bravo to Mr. Muldoon and the cast!

 

Part of our days and nights were centered on some of the great restaurants of NY but my favorite was the old NYC diners, Greek owned, mostly booths.  There is a sense of comfort being part of that scene and the food is darn good.  That is yet another essential ingredient of the UWS which makes it unique, a village within a great city. 

 

But then of course there were the “finer” restaurants, including this one recommended by our son, a great UWS French restaurant, Cafe Luxembourg.   With a staff like this, how could it go wrong?

 

 

 

Most of the NYC time was spent walking the UWS, visiting its markets (call outs to Fairway, Citarella Gourmet, and of course Zabar’s) and then days at some of our favorite museums.

 

The Jewish Museum was new to us, but it had an exhibit everyone is raving about, NY 1962-64, exactly matching three of our formative years as New Yorkers!  It’s a collection of all art forms of the period, including photographs and artifacts, arranged chronologically, sometimes day by day or weekly. 

 

 

The New York Historical Society -- which we make a point to visit anytime we are in NYC -- showcased The Art of Winold Reiss: An Immigrant Modernist whose book designs captured my imagination. 

 

 

 

Their special exhibit Confronting Hate 1937-52, is a terrifying harbinger of our present times. 

 

 

 

 

The NY Historical Society also has its affiliated restaurant which we love, an oasis within an oasis, Storico.

 

 

I enjoyed the replica of the oval office the the NY Historical Society has created, and I felt very comfortable running the country from there.

 

 

Another beautiful day was spent at the JP Morgan Library Museum which features the Gilded Age magnificence of its interior and the breath taking library of JP Morgan.

 

 

 

The highlight of that visit was seeing their extraordinary collection One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses with priceless Joyce documents and artifacts.

 

 

The Morgan gardens were also open, revealing the original entrance to the mansion.

 

 

Then to cap off our wonderful ten day stay in the City, we returned to Dizzy’s Jazz Club at Columbus Circle, for a tribute to Duke Ellington.  Three wonderful singers performed all of his iconic pieces, backed up by the bass, piano, sax and drums.  This Lincoln Center supported venue is unique overlooking Central Park.  It is where we first discovered Emmet Cohen four years ago when he was relatively unknown, just coming up in the jazz world at the age of 28.

 

 

The following Monday we closed up Jon and Tracie’s apartment and headed up to Connecticut for another week.  All I wanted to do at that point was to enjoy our old boat, see family, read and relax, and meet up with a few of our old boating friends we haven’t seen since Covid.  It was strange walking down the dock to our old boat, our summer home for 20 years.  The cool CT breeze and the lovely sunset made it seem like no time at all had gone by.

 

 

 

So many of our boating friends have either moved away or passed away.  Those three Covid years have certainly taken a toll on the health of others that remain.  It was nice to see them but a painful reminder of aging.

 

The following weekend our small but close family was able to get together, the first time since Covid.

 

Jonathan prepared the boat for a cruise to our beloved Crow Island where we spent so much time during our boating years.  Add to that time those at the dock during our retirement years, and cruising to ports as far as Nantucket, with extended stays in Block Island, we figure we have lived on a boat for a total of about eight years.  We miss the waters of the Long Island Sound. 

 

 

So although Jon fired up the starboard engine, the port engine failed to turn over.  The fuel pump failed.  Always something in boating.  By the time the replacement part arrived, we were there with our family for the last day, but just being at the dock was sufficient, beautifully soul-satisfying.

 

We then flew home, just beating a thunderstorm out of Westchester Airport.  How many times remain for such trips?  We wonder, and hope.

 

 

 

Farewell to a Horrid Year

 

Aging is a cruel master. In 2020 it has been particularly unforgiving.  More change, chaos, and suffering have been thrown our way, collectively and personally, than I can remember.

Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would do anything about it.  In the case of COVID vs. Donald J. Trump this is not a figurative, innocent person on Fifth Avenue, but hundreds of thousands of real American lives.  History will record many of the deaths and suffering as avoidable.  By politicizing the wearing of masks and holding his “rallies” with no social distancing, he has blood on his hands. Ask the family of Herman Cain, who was diagnosed with COVID nine days after attending a crowded, face-maskless Trump rally in Tulsa.

It has been a surreal agony to witness this.  As an aging person this entire experience has increased our risk and ratcheted up anxiety; merely to survive this period, essentially in isolation, is so far something of an accomplishment.  And in the wake of this health crisis is the enormous economic suffering rivaling the Great Depression.  For many hard working people, particularly those connected with the travel and leisure industries; small shop owners and independent restaurateurs, this pandemic has seen hardships that can’t be measured.  An American Tragedy.  So much of it could have been mitigated.

As for us, I’ve been unusually silent during the past several weeks as we did the unthinkable, we moved.

The experience of moving is bad enough in one’s younger years but the accumulation of 50 years of living as if tomorrows are endless makes moving to another home even more traumatic. And during 2020?

The triangulation of circumstance led us to this at this time.  The plan was formulated this way: as boating became too demanding, physically and financially, we would move off the water, into a smaller home, into a gated community, where some of the responsibilities of home owning are absorbed by the HOA.

We had had our house on the market for some time with this thought in mind but at the beginning of the pandemic we took it off deciding we would stay put, try to be safe and wait this out.

Maybe it was cabin fever, but we impulsively rented a mountain-view home near Asheville for several weeks in September.  We figured we could pack our SUV with all needed supplies, and sit on a porch overlooking the Pisgah Mountain Range and read to keep our minds far from reality.  Shortly after we arrived our real estate agent called to tell us a fair offer, clearly out of the blue, was presented to him to buy our home, while it was off the market no less. The wise decision would have been to wait, but we rationalized that by hiring a full service mover, they packing and unpacking, some of the stress and risk would be minimized.  This was not well thought through.  Especially considering we had no idea where we were going.

Our main concern was how to do this and avoid COVID.  The moving company explained their protocols, masks at all times and the logical explanation that as their movers work as a close team, one member of the team would not expose the others if he did not feel well.  Also, when preparing for the move, a bit of serendipity, for I found a dozen N95 masks still in their wrappers tucked away in our garage which I had purchased years before for a sanding and stripping project.  Of course, long forgotten.  That gave us some measure of security while moving.

There were still risks.  In particular a free-lance Internet / AV person the moving company recommended who would be immediately available once moved in to connect and trouble shoot a whole new cable set up, and get our computer and TVs working, a challenge in this day and age.  He came, started connecting things, some unsuccessfully, and announced that he had to leave for an hour as he had a Doctor’s appointment but would be back to complete the job.  He returned, worked for another half hour with Ann, still not being able to connect everything.  He did however know how to wait very successfully while she wrote out his check!

That would be bad enough if it were the end of the story.  No, we found out two days later that his Doctor’s appointment was to be tested for COVID and he was positive.  Yes, he consciously put us at risk (we were both wearing masks, however).  The next ten days were a living hell of anxiety, my being tested twice and my wife once.  Masks do work, as we were both negative and completed the quarantine period.

Even now, weeks after moving, the house is slightly chaotic, but coming into shape.  I look forward to the days when I can return to real writing and the piano, although I’m slowly ramping up.

So how does one achieve any semblance of normalcy during such times?

Each person has had to find his / her own answer.  The basics must be covered, food, shelter, access to health care.  Shame on the US Congress that for many these cannot be taken for granted, but I’m trying not to make this a political invective.  It could easily turn that way.

For us, we are fortunate to have those.  So outside of family and friends, there are four major life purposes:  music, theatre, reading, and travel.  I used to include boating in that mix.  No more, a major phase in our lives, closed.  Travel is not remotely safe.  Reading, except for the news, has essentially been put on hold.  One has to have an inner sense of tranquility I think to leisurely enjoy fiction.  

FaceTime has been a life saver to see family and friends (as many, we have not seen our adult children since Thanksgiving 2019, except virtually).  Thankfully, Zoom and YouTube has kept theatre and music in our lives.

Music is divided into two parts for me, performance and listening.  My piano “gigs” at retirement homes and playing on opening night at Palm Beach Dramaworks have ceased now for nearly a year.  That usually meant preparing concerts primarily focused on The Great American Songbook.  Now, not having such venues has rendered me a vessel with no rudder.  So, I find myself just randomly going through my collection of thousands of songs and in the process finding pieces I’ve never played before – not many but I’ve found a few gems. 

The other part of our musical life has been to attend professional performances, primarily jazz.  Oh, what we took for granted before, the ability to go to a jazz jam at the Jupiter Jazz Society on Sundays, and special performances all around town and even going on a Jazz Cruise right before the pandemic hit. 

One of the performers on the cruise was Emmet Cohen, a young jazz pianist we saw several years ago at Dizzy’s in NY and have admired ever since.  He is gifted, can play all forms of jazz, personable, and reverent of jazz history.  He is the whole package.  In July I wrote about his innovative “Emmet’s Place,” a Monday night streaming jazz performance where he plays with his bassist Russell Hall and drummer Kyle Poole as a trio, with frequent guest performers, at first all virtual guests and then in person, all of this streaming from his apartment in Harlem.

Since I wrote an entry about his virtual performances, he has expanded his technology to include multiple fixed cameras and a producer to switch back and forth from the appropriate camera angle.  All of this free on YouTube and Facebook!  Well, nothing is really free so we’ve become and probably (hopefully) along with thousands, members of “Emmet Cohen Exclusive,” a means for him to raise financial support for his group and for what he is doing.  One of the benefits is access to some private concerts, but the mainone is supporting an upcoming superstar of jazz and his colleagues.  

The other solace has been the regular Palm Beach Dramaworks play readings and interviews.  That’s another twice a week event and they are free if one registers with the box office for tickets.  They even did readings of a trilogy by the award-winning Lynn Nottage and then Producing Artistic Director, Bill Hayes, followed that up with a live interview with the playwright as part of their Contemporary Voices Series.  To sign up for their free readings and interviews, check with their box office 

PBD of course is not the only theatre offering Zoom readings or YouTube “productions.”  This brings up a dilemma for me.  I’ve been reviewing plays in my blog and published a collection of them in Explaining It to Someone: Learning From the Arts.  In fact, this book contains 10 years of Palm Beach Dramaworks reviews. 

Here’s the conundrum: How does one “review” a reading?  Theatre is made up of so many elements and in reviewing a performance, the reviewer is evaluating the gestalt.  It’s the overall experience, right down to the audience’s reactions as they are part as well. 

While I was in college, I took a course that focused on theatre as literature, as philosophy, and when you peel away all the elements, that is what you are left with.  If the play isn’t meaningful to the audience in some way, it could have all the other elements, great acting, directing, staging, etc. and it could still fail.  I think the future of reviewing will be more dependent on the core of the theatre although as the technology of producing virtually improves so will all the other elements come into play, but never the way live theatre does.

So my hope for 2021, under a new administration, and with effective vaccines, that there is a chance to reclaim a semblance of “normal.”  Meanwhile, for us, virtual theater and music have buoyed our spirits.

At this time of year I normally try to post a video to celebrate the season, seeking “holiday music” which is somewhat overlooked.  As we just moved I’m weeks or months away from being able to post performances.  But to mark the season, I’ll include here something I posted six years ago, “It's Love -- It's Christmas,” my most viewed Christmas piece.  No wonder, it’s by the great jazz pianist Bill Evans, an unlikely composition for him.

May 2021 be a year to celebrate.  2020 will go down in infamy.