Plaintive Melodies

As much as we enjoy returning to live on our boat in Connecticut, the worst thing about summer is leaving my piano behind.  If I was a professional, or played nearly at that level, it would be intolerable.  But I remember having once worked with the great harpsichordist, Ralph Kirkpatrick (in the capacity of publishing and cataloging the works of Scarlatti), visiting him at his home in Guilford CT which was populated by harpsichords and grand pianos.  He had made lunch for us, with some wine, and before we got back to work I timidly asked him whether he might like to play a piece.  He looked at me as if I had lost my mind, saying he never gives private audiences and especially not after a glass of wine.  I wondered, doesn't the love of music transcend everything else? 

Contrast that experience to the one I had with Henry Steele Commager, who was the dean of American intellectual historians.  I used to visit him in Amherst and we would work in his study on the second floor.  On the first floor he had a baby grand piano and one day, again after lunch, I asked him whether he played.  He raced to the piano and I quietly sat listening to him play a Beethoven sonata, and very competently. For Commager, playing the piano was his creative outlet and during that moment historian took second place.  I understand that.

My piano has been good to me this past year and in fact we've been partners, preparing programs that I performed at the Hanley Center in West Palm Beach, a rehab facility, and at The Waterford in Juno Beach, a retirement home.  Actually, most of the music I played at the Hanley Center was impromptu from fake books but at the Waterford I gave musical presentations with some commentary (Ann frequently helping me with the latter), something I really enjoyed doing, and now have programs for the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schönberg, and songs of the Great American Songbook as immortalized by Frank Sinatra.  

Next season, I'll do others and perhaps record another CD at a professional studio.

Of course I have no illusions about the enduring value of such recordings, other than having goals keeps one young, and it is a joy to be able to play.  Luckily for me, my kind of piano playing -- reading the melody line and improvising with chords -- is sort of like riding a bicycle; once you know how to ride, you can do it anytime without frequently practicing.  So, a summer away from my friend doesn't really set me back in terms of my ability to play. 

Nonetheless, as we prepare to leave, I look at my piano with a melancholy regret and I tend to play pieces that reflect that mood. Recently, I found myself playing some Bill Evans songs, constantly reverting to his "Time Remembered" -- a piece with abstract, floating harmonies, not exactly melodic.  It reminds me a little of Debussy, but in a more abstract form, so I found myself fiddling around with some classical music, not one of my musical strengths, but what better piece to play than Debussy's "Reveries" as a bookend for the Bill Evans piece.  From there I turned to one of Stephen Sondheim's most beautiful ballads, "Johanna" from Sweeny Todd,  much more structured than the Evans piece, but all three musical compositions share this sense of the plaintive. 

I set up my camera and recorded the Sondheim piece, a brief rendition (BlogSpot has restrictions on video size).  It is less than two minutes. and as I never play a piece the same way twice, improvising much of it, when recording (especially video with just a digital camera in our echoing living room), some self consciousness encroaches.  Nonetheless, I include this below as a musical statement of the moment and particularly because "Johanna" most accurately captures my mood.   Whoever said Sondheim can't write a beautiful melody is crazy as this is one of the most haunting songs I know.  It is also one of his few outright love songs.

We'll be on the road soon and the blog will go quiet for a while.

He Made a Hat

It's a wrap, a life of joy and genius, the second volume of Stephen Sondheim's biographical and encyclopedic collection of his lyrics and recollections, Look, I Made a Hat; Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany  (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). My enthusiasm for the first volume, Finishing the Hat, led to writing about it before I was finished reading it and then again upon completion more than a year ago.

My initial observation on reading the first volume bears repeating for the second as well: "As the subtitle hints, it is not only an erudite, introspective, and sometimes self deprecating account of his own works with the complete lyrics, both those retained and discarded for the shows he wrote during the period, it is also a frank discussion of the 'major players' of his time, most of whom he of course knew or knows, and some of whom he did not but nonetheless influenced him in some way. I call this book 'a document' as only a first-hand participant of Sondheim's stature could make his reminiscences a treasure-trove which will be studied by students of Broadway for years to come."

The amusing subtitles of the two volumes at first glance look similar, but there are subtle differences. Both have "Attendant Comments" and "Anecdotes" in their subtitles, but Finishing The Hat's "Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines" have been replaced by "Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions," and the all encompassing, "Miscellany" and "Amplifications" in Look, I Made a Hat's subtitle.  Sondheim is too precise a thinker to imagine these changes were made only because of his playful, almost sardonic sense of humor.  This second volume is less about others in his profession (although it is still that to a degree), than it is about himself, the process of creating, an attempt to tie everything together, the dominant figure of the NY Stage coming to grips with the process of aging and looking back at what defines his work.

This second volume covers his more mature works, 1981 to the present.  It also reviews a wide range of "miscellaneous" works, ones I've never heard of, some incomplete or unproduced pieces.  The "big four" here are his well-known Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion. 

Sunday in the Park with George is about the life of George Seurat and, in particular, the two years he took creating his "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte."  Of significance to Sondheim is this musical united him with the author of the book, James Lapine, with whom he would frequently collaborate afterwards.  The song "Finishing the Hat" is from Sunday and as he uses the title as the general metaphor for both these volumes, it bears some closer examination.  He says it "reflects an emotional experience shared by everybody to some degree or other, but more keenly and more often by creative artists: trancing out -- that phenomenon of losing the world while you're writing...."

 He continues with an anecdote.  One of his pleasures is "inventing games" and he was once playfully challenged by his friend, Phyllis Newman, the actress and singer, wife of Adolph Green, to create "a game of murder" (a more interesting one than the card game of the same name that already existed) and once Sondheim started to work on the game, he labored continually through the night, saying  "I hadn't moved for eleven hours. I must have, of course, if for nothing else than to go to the bathroom, much less get a drink or a snack. But I had no memory of it. I had left the planet for eleven hours, completely absorbed in a world of instructions, gunshots, diagrams, and clues, calibrating every possibility of the players' movements and observations. I've never had a better time making a hat. No matter how trivial the goal may have been, the intensity or the concentration was the same as that of writing a song, and just as difficult and exhilarating. 'Finishing the Hat' is an attempt to convey that treasured feeling. ...Relinquishing the world may be easier in the privacy of a study or during a walk in the woods, but it can happen in a public place, too.... When the cocoon is self-created, the surroundings matter not at all. As befits the creative act, 'Finishing the Hat' is a stream-of-consciousness lyric. There is no complete sentence."  

....That, however you live, / There's a part of you always standing by, / Mapping out the sky, / Finishing a hat... / Starting on a hat../ Finishing a hat... / Look, I made a hat.../ Where there never was a hat.

Into the Woods came right on the heels of Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim wanting to collaborate with James Lapine again.  It started off as a "quest musical along the lines of The Wizard of Oz," one of Sondheim's favorites as the songs help define the characters and convey the story. Into the Woods became a potpourri of famous fairy tale characters going into the woods, "the all-purpose symbol of the unconscious, the womb, the past, the dark place where we face our trials and emerge wiser or destroyed..."  Sondheim says of the two main characters, the baker and his wife, "their concerns a quotidian, their attitudes prototypically urban: impatient, sarcastic, bickering, resigned -- prototypical, except that they speak in stilted fairy-tale language and are surrounded by witches and princesses and eventually giants.  This makes them funny and actable characters, and their contemporaneity makes them people the audience can recognize." 

Sondheim thought the work would be producible by a wide range of theatre companies, from schools (as there is an absence of obscenities) to professional theatres, and the musical works on two levels, one for just entertainment and the other as a sophisticated adult parable. "I predicted that Into the Woods could be a modest annuity for us [he and Lapine], and I'm surprised to say I was right."

I've "feared" seeing Assassins as having lived through so many of them in my lifetime, I just did not want to have it in my face on the stage, pretty much the same reason Ann and I don't see violent movies.  But, after reading Sondheim's description of the musical, it's on our list to see if it should ever be revived. Leave it to Sondheim (and his collaborator, John Weidman, based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr.) to make a musical out of nine of the thirteen attempted presidential assassinations.

In describing how he came to Assassins, Sondheim reveals much about the process and writing lyrics in particular.  It also shows his own level of enthusiasm for this work, not to mention the level of reflection and prose in Look, I Made a Hat: "Writing lyrics is an exasperating job, but there are occasional moments which compensate, such as finding the right word that sits exactly on the right phrase of music or stumbling on the surprising but appropriate rhyme. It is those moments that propel you (me) to continue groping through the morass of banalities and not-quite-good-enough stabs at freshness and grace which constitute the bulk of the writing. And there is no moment more invigorating than reading the initial pages of your collaborator's work, especially if your collaborator is first class, the kind with whom I've been repeatedly blessed (not by chance, I can assure you - I've approached, and agreed to be approached by, only those whose work I like). Suddenly, what have been weeks of theoretical palaver, circling the subject, finding the spine and mapping the trajectory of the story, analyzing the characters, improvising scenes and songs, discussing style-suddenly, all that - becomes crystallized in a page or two of dialogue which makes the idea into words, much in the way a first rehearsal makes the word become flesh. Because of the quality of my collaborators, I have experienced that moment often, but the most exhilarating of those highs was the evening I read the first pages of John Weidman's script for 'Assassins'."

Passion is another collaboration with James Lapine, although the idea itself was conceived by Sondheim after he had seen an Ettore Scola film Passione d'Amore  which struck him "as a story worth singing." He was concerned about making it into a musical as "the characters were so outsized."  It might have demanded an opera, not a musical, and that is an art form that Sondheim (I am happy to learn) does not enjoy.  I say "happy" as I too have carried around the scarlet letter of "OP" (opera-phobic) even though I enjoy both music and theatre. Sondheim has exonerated the tinge of guilt I feel about opera, even though I briefly studied it in college when I used to go to the Met, sitting at the student's desk which had a very limited view of the stage in my day where I followed the score of the opera.  Maybe I simply don't go in for pageantry. 

Here's Sondheim's take on opera: "I have successfully avoided enjoying opera all my life. There are many moments in the operatic literature that thrill me, but few complete scores, and even those that do ...I would rather listen to on records because they strike me as way too long. I was brought up on the swiftness and insubstantiality of musicals, and I'm not as enthralled by the human voice as I would like to be. For me it's the song, not the singer; I don't really care who sings 'Vissi d'Arte,' I care about what she's singing. I discriminate among singers of popular songs and show tunes, but for some reason I'm both less enthusiastic and less critical when it comes to the higher stratum of the art form. I recognize that this is my loss, and I sometimes envy (but not a lot) the swooning pleasure my opera-buff friends get from it. The thing that puts me off most is that most opera composers seem to have little sense of theater. They spend as much time having their characters sing about trivialities as about matters of emotional importance, and they too often resort to recitative to carry the plot along-for my money a tedious and arid solution to a problem easily solved by dialogue."  You are preaching to the choir, Mr. Sondheim.

Passion is an epistolary musical, with the songs, as Sondheim puts it, "somewhere between aria and recitative...[and] there's enough dialogue so that no one could mistake Passion for an opera. I hope."

Then, some one hundred plus pages of the book are dedicated to the on and off again fourteen year affair of creating a musical based on the Florida resort architect, Addison Mizner and his raconteur brother, Wilson Mizner, perfect models of picaresque lives.  Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show went through four different incarnations, finally ending up pretty much as it began as far as the main theme is concerned, the relationship between two brothers.  The show had "four distinct scripts; three distinct directors; nine leading actors."  Sondheim had written thirty songs, most of which did not survive all four versions. Among the directors who impacted the show was, ironically, Sam Mendes in London who was also the director of the film Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates which I republished when thefirst edition had gone out of print.

But the director who had the most impact was John Doyle, who put the work on the course of becoming Road Show, after its previous variations over its ponderous life as Wise Guys and then Bounce.   About Doyle, Sondheim says, "He was enthusiastic about the story and understood the style, and at the same time saw what the show was trying to say about America with the objective, yet sympathetic, eye of a foreigner. He also saw that what the show needed was compression, to give it the kind of pace that defines the American image: speedy, impatient, determined, brash and humorous, all of which was expressed in what we had written-except for the speed, which wasn't speedy enough....Doyle turned out to be an exception among directors; the script he handed us after his tinkering, although it had its fair share of misguided and awkward moments, brought the mix of family dynamics and American penchant for reinvention into one focus, and that was what we had never properly been able to accomplish. 'Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show' was about so many things: American enterprise, American conniving, American promotion, American greed, the class system, sibling love and rivalry, road movies- a soup that Doyle (and Oskar) boiled down for us, which is what a good director, like a good editor, can do."

Then, Sondheim covers his "Other Musicals,"  "Movies" and "Television" (following college he wrote for the TV show, Topper, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie an amusing aside to his career).

In the mix of his lyrics and reminiscences are some of the "attendant comments."  Although Oscar Hammerstein was his mentor, and Sondheim thinks of himself as a lyricist, he is also a first rate composer.  When Sondheim graduated from Williams, he won a coveted prize for music which allowed him to study composition with the composer and music theorist Milton Babbitt.  Sondheim explains why he focused on lyrics in his two books: ".... the technique of composition is impossible to be precise and articulate about without using jargon. The inner workings of lyrics can be communicated easily without resorting to arcane terms; understanding what a perfect rhyme is requires no special knowledge. But understanding what a perfect cadence is requires knowing something about harmony and the diatonic scale. Music is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak. The effect is describable in everyday language; how to achieve it is not."

Sondheim has had a love-hate affair with critics and while he takes some head on in these volumes, he writes generally about the art of criticism and the impact of this Internet age:"...It takes a long time to learn not to pay attention to critics, or at least not to let them distract you. ....A good critic is someone who recognizes and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been. A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you'd never have imagined you'd want to go to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find. Then again, to a certain degree good critics are no longer necessary to find. The phrase 'Everybody's a critic' has taken on a universal cast. The Internet encourages people to  share their opinions with the world. In the theater, the 'buzz' created by chat room chatters has become increasingly important to a show's reputation before it opens, and has actually affected some of the news-paper and magazine critics, who refer to the chatter in their opening- night reviews. The irony is that the Internet is in the process of killing off the critics' jobs."

I think of Broadway as having several fairly distinct periods.  Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, the American musical was primarily revues with a loose plot to introduce song or dance, mostly light musical fantasies and comedies without much serious meaning to simply amuse and entertain. R&H changed all this with the introduction of the "book" -- a play in which music, dance, and plot were all integrated.  And musicals became more serious, introducing themes that were largely ignored before. It became the most emulated form for the Broadway musical since.

But the fermentation of social change in the 60s and 70s brought a new period to Broadway.  Sondheim was part of that but so was the so called "rock musical" starting with Hair and Tommy, coming into full bloom with musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber, beginning with contemporary rock pieces such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar, morphing into operetta type musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera.  Broadway came full circle with some of those works, operettas having flourished before Broadway's golden age.  Of those works, Sondheim says, "Rock and contemporary pop are not part of my DNA; worse, I find them unsatisfying when applied to the kind of musicals I like to write because of the limited range of their colors. Perhaps someday (maybe even by the time this book is published) someone will write a rock score that will have suppleness and variety, but the ones I've heard seem to me rhythmically and emotionally restricted, earnest to a fault and, above all, humorless except when they're being 'satirical' (that is, sarcastic). This lends them a pretension which rivals the British pop operas that briefly conquered the world during the 1990s."

 

Sondheim, meanwhile. blazed new trails, the "urban musical" such as Company, in addition to pushing musical limits in areas normally reserved for drama, Pacific Overtures, Sweeny Todd, Assassins, to name but a few.  He also sought vehicles for his love of panache and paying homage to those that made the Broadway theatre, most clearly celebrated in Follies. 

Who will now carry on the tradition of Broadway innovation?  Instead,  revivals seem to be sweeping contemporary theatre (maybe just a deficit of good stuff being written?).  They of course have their place.  It is the lifeblood of good regional theatre such as our own Dramaworks in nearby West Palm Beach.  Sondheim's thoughts on revivals? ".....I suspect that every writer who has had the pleasure of seeing his shows revived, whether on Broadway or in a community theater, has also suffered the chagrin of seeing it distorted almost beyond recognition-if it were truly unrecognizable, it would be a relief. The problem is that a great many directors, not just the academics or the amateurs, reconceive for the sake of reconception, usually in the name of "relevance" or of "fixing" the show's flaws. They want to be considered creators so desperately that they think nothing of rewriting the authors' work. Good directors shine a new light on a piece; the others shine a light on themselves."

Irreverent or outspoken?  Perhaps.  But, if Sondheim isn't entitled, who is? If you decide to read the book, read the "Epilogue" closely.  It reveals as much about the man as it does the artist.  He says that one would think writing songs for the theater, after so much experience, would become easier but "invention" does not.  In fact, "...it gets harder chiefly because you become-or should become-more aware of the pitfalls, especially the danger of repeating yourself. I find myself using the same chords and the same tropes over and over, and I fight against it; but when I lose the battle, I rationalize it as being a matter of style, my style, a style I've developed over the years, an identity as unchanging as my signature. And to a certain extent it is-but notas much as I tell myself it is."

And here is a man who knows he has climbed most of the mountains of his life, and is looking back, trying to bring it altogether and make some sense of the inexplicable and iniquitous process of aging. (Fitzgerald had it right with his short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but T.S. Eliot best summarized the process in his poem "Little Gidding" -- "Having rehearsed the bitter gifts reserved for age / the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.")

About this universal truth, Sondheim laments, "The diminution of energy and the fear of superannuation are unpleasant enough, but you learn to put up with the first and ignore the second; the loss of memory is worse, and dangerous. The thing that bothers me the most is not forgetting faces or names, but forgetting trivia. Having to search my dwindling gray cells for who directed 'The Sound of Music' upsets me a lot more than not recognizing the stranger who wanders up to me at a party and turns out to be someone I've known for thirty years and worked with half a dozen times. What's dangerous is that not remembering makes you think about remembering, which inevitably draws you into the past. As time goes on, I watch old movies and listen to old songs more and more; when asked my place of residence on a customs form, I always want to write 'The Past.' "

As an amateur pianist I have a special appreciation for the work of Sondheim.  He writes extensively about his lyrics, but his music, to me, is equally brilliant with a fondness for waltzes like Richard Rodgers had..  Some of his pieces are hard to play (for me) as the music is pared to almost recitative lyrics, with many notes to a measure.  His music is always a challenge but a joy to play and no doubt he will always be known as one of Broadway's finest.

I have so many favorites, but his short lived 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along includes one of his most beautiful, fragile ballads, Not a Day Goes By and for this entry I include (albeit a somewhat flawed) "home video" of my playing the song.  It is a testimony of my great respect for Sondheim's music and what it has meant to my life. His lyrics best express how I feel....

"Not a day goes by,

Not a single day

But you're somewhere a part of my life

And it looks like you'll stay.

As the days go by"

Cruising and Reading

Put me on a boat (a ship in this case) and give me a book and I am a happy man. And that about describes last week's cruise to places we've been before, San Juan, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten, the ship, Celebrity's Solstice, being a destination onto itself. We planned this trip with our good friends, Art and Sydelle, a couple we met on our very first cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale in 2000 on the Century. They are retired NYC teachers. If it were not for meeting them, becoming good friends, it is unlikely we would have taken last week's trip.

Travelling with them is an endless feast of chance meetings of acquaintances from their childhood, or from their days as teachers. They both grew up in Brooklyn, became engaged while at Brooklyn College, and Brooklyn folks from those days are like a tribe. Many have now migrated to South Florida, the starting point of the cruise. It's like radar; they can look at another couple and identify them almost instantly and, then, chances are they either know them or someone in common. ("Hey, I went to New Utrecht HS in Bensonhurst. We beat your school, DeWitt Clinton for the 1953 Championship at Madison Square Garden in overtime!")

Contrast that with us. I like to say I'm from NYC, but I grew up in Queens which any true New Yorker will tell you was a place where people lived who aspired to move to Long Island. Ann grew up in Atlanta although she moved to Manhattan sooner than I did. We rarely encounter people from our past.

And, if it were not for the fact that we celebrated out 40th wedding anniversary on board the Solstice two years ago, which, for us, lived like a small ship as we were in their "Aqua Class" category and loved the experience, we also would not have gone on this cruise: the ship and category being the main reason.

I like to joke that the main benefit of "Aqua Class" is being able to swim alongside the ship (rimshot, please, ba-dum-TSH), but we normally like to travel on smaller ships, and although the Solstice is 122,000 tons, accommodating 2,850 passengers and a crew of 1,500, it "lives" like a smaller ship. One of the reasons is their "Blu" dining room, available only to Aqua Class (about 150 staterooms so designated). Therefore, Blu is less frenetic than the Main Dining Room which serves the remaining passengers - with the exception of several specialty restaurants which all have an extra charge. The food in Blu was uniformly excellent, geared to a more healthy life style, smaller portions but beautifully presented. The dining room itself becalms the occupants, large windows, with the sea rolling by, uniquely shaped plates, and the signature white rose sculpture on the wall. Breakfast is served there too with the same relaxing ambiance.

Another desirable feature of the ship is the solarium, with pan flute music in the background, spa like cuisine offered for breakfast and lunch, dancing waters display, it's own pool and Jacuzzi, with very comfortable lounge chairs for relaxing or reading, and although this section is available to all, no children allowed! We're always amazed that more people do not seek out this section of the ship, but I suppose most booking a Caribbean cruise are seeking the sun and the tumult of the main outside pool. We're glad they do.

Another nice feature of Aqua Class is the availability of the heated tile beds, a perfect place to lie down and absorb the heat on tired muscles and listen to the soft, unobtrusive music. An easy place to fall asleep, as Ann did on several occasions. My own routine was to start the day at the gym as the sun rose, trying to get in at least a half hour on the treadmill at jogging speed, something to challenge my new unobstructed arteries and to neutralize the diet which, although "healthy" is far richer than I'm accustomed to.

So much of the days at sea, and even some of those in port, were spent in the solarium where I could dig into a good book. Reading preparation is a fun part of the trip for me as I can get a lot read on board, more so than I can at home. I was eagerly looking forward to making my main read Sondheim's second installment of his composing life, Look, I Made a Hat. I had read his Finishing the Hat, remarking that it was "one of the most remarkable documents of the theater that I've ever read."

However, when I picked up Look, I Made a Hat, its sheer heft of almost three pounds acted as a deterrent, not wanting to lug it around on such a trip. Also, it is a beautiful book and the thought of reading it in a wet bathing suit was abhorrent. If I haven't succumbed to a Kindle, I'm not going to desecrate an exquisite book as well.

If the Sondheim book was not to be my main read, I needed another from the stack of books I sequester for future reading. Or, to use a baseball analogy, I went to the bench and called up another heavy hitter, Jane Leavy's The Last Boy; Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. I had been introduced to Leavy's other biographical work on Sandy Koufax by our traveling companion, Artie. Leavy's biography of Koufax was excellent; The Last Boy is a work of great passion and meticulous scholarship.

How do you write an objective biography of a legend, one who you've worshiped as a kid? That was Leavy's challenge. But by telling the truth, Mantle with all his foibles, and there were many, she actually enhanced the legend.

Mantle's career in some ways is a real life version of Bernard Malamud's The Natural, published in 1952 only a year after Mantle's rookie season. Roy Hobbs is shot by a strange woman, while Mantle has his knee blown out by a drainage ditch in Yankee Stadium chasing a fly ball and trying to avoid running into the Yankee patrician, Joe DiMaggio, playing out his last year. Mantle and DiMaggio were never friends. Unlike Hobbs, Mantle did not have a "Wonderboy" bat, but his "Wonderboy" was a surfeit of guts. He played hurt when today's ballplayers would be seeking R&R. He played with a family history of illness and early death, and battled osteomyelitis throughout his career.

The book is as much a love affair as it is a scholarly biography, successful on both counts. And for me, it conjured up my own childhood, my own worship of Mantle, and my own indebtedness to baseball. As I was always one of the smaller kids in my neighborhood, I could not hit for power so I became a pitcher, and a crafty lefty has some advantages. At first I copied Eddie Lopat, one of the "Big Three" of the Yankees' pitching staff, which included Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi in the early 50's. Lopat was known as "the Junkman." He was small for a pitcher and did not have much of a fastball, so specialized on the slow curve, thrown at different arm angles, and the screwball, and so did I. Another lefty, Bobby Shantz, became my hero in high school, after he was traded to the NY Yankees from KC. and like Lopat he used crafty off speed pitches to his advantage. In fact Shantz was one of the Yankees interviewed for Leavy's biography, one of about one hundred. Those names brought back memories of those glory days when the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers all played in NY and we argued about who was the greatest centerfielder, Mantle, Mays, or Snider. I think Leavy answers that question (read the book to find out!).

Leavy's work is more biography than a recounting of the great baseball moments of the Mick's life, although it is that too. Mantle came from a dysfunctional family, the father controlling his life (before and after his father's early death). What "Mutt," the Mick's father thought or would think became pivotal to Mantle and one of the factors of Mantle's alcoholism. And Mick was a real "good ole' boy" a carouser who felt most comfortable with the guys in the locker room and not with his family. Even after hanging them up, he spent more time on the road, frequently with other women leaving his wife at home. He paid. His family paid. But one thing about Mantle in addition to his baseball ability, he was loyal to his friends, fiercely loyal, and generous as well. Overall, you have to admire him, and hats off to Jane Leavy for a brilliant biography, walking the line between adulation and scholarly criticism. And Leavy went one step farther in analyzing her subject, by bringing in experts on the mechanics and the physics of the sport.

As a poor hitter in my brief baseball career, I always wondered how in the world anyone could hit a fast ball being thrown only sixty feet away, and downhill from a mound as well. And how could anyone hit it like Mantle. To answer that question, Leavy interviews experts, concluding that Mantle hit "with felonious intent:"

In an effort to pin down how Mantle generated such power, I asked Preston Peavy, a techno-savvy hitting coach, to analyze Mantle's form, using the visual motion-analysis system he created for his students at Peavy Baseball in Atlanta. He converted film and video clips of Mantle into a set of kinematics, moving digital stick figures that show the path of each part of the body as it moves through space...(To view the kinematics, go to www.peavynet.com or www.janeleavy.com.)

A 90-mile-per-hour fastball doesn't leave much time for thought. Traveling at a rate of 132 feet per second, it makes the sixty-foot, six-inch journey from pitcher to batter in four-tenths of a second. The ball is a quarter of the way to home plate by the time a hitter becomes fully aware of it. Because there is a 100-millisecond delay between the time the image of the ball hits the batter's retina and when he becomes conscious of it, it is physiologically impossible to track the ball from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's glove. David Whitney, the director of the Vision and Action Lab at the University of California, Davis, explains: "A 100-millisecond delay doesn't seem very significant. But if a baseball is traveling at 90 mph, that translates to around fifteen feet. If we perceive the ball fifteen feet behind where it's actually located, the batter has to start his swing very early on in the baseball's trajectory."

Neurologically speaking, every batter is a guess-hitter. That's where implicit memory comes in. The ability to infer the type of pitch and where it's headed with accuracy and speed is inextricably linked with stored experience-the hitter has seen that pitch before, even if he can't see it all the way. Add the reflexes to respond to that memory and a visual motor system that allows the batter to react on the fly to a change in the trajectory of a flying object, the right DNA, and Mutt and Grandpa Charlie out by the shed throwing tennis balls, and you have Mickey Mantle.

Every at-bat is a dance of double pendulums. The pitcher leads, using his body as a kinetic chain to deliver energy from his legs through his trunk into his shoulder, arm, and, finally, the ball. The batter follows, reacting in kind. The converging and opposing forces may or may not be equal, but the goal is the same-to turn potential energy into kinetic energy as efficiently as human physiology allows.

The pitcher has the inherent advantage of foreknowledge-he knows •what he's going to throw-and he has the downward slope of the mound to generate momentum. With only flat ground and muscle power at his disposal, the hitter creates force by twisting his upper and lower body in opposite directions like a rubber band. When that human rubber band is stretched taut and is ready to snap, it uncoils, propelling the bat through the strike zone.

This deceptively simple act is an intricate biomechanical task requiring the coordinated mobilization of virtually every muscle in the body in than a second. "Everything but the chewing muscles," said Dr. Benjamin Shaffer, a specialist in orthopedic sports medicine and head physician for the Washington Capitals. "Unless you grit your teeth."

Nobody gritted more than Mantle. Lefty or righty, he swung with felonious intent.

I just could not get enough of The Last Boy, and even read the Acknowledgements, Appendices, and Bibliography in detail. I did not want it to end, but it did, as did the last boy's life, riddled by cancer, and not long after he had successfully ridded himself of alcoholism. Moose Skowron, Hank Bauer, Whitey Ford, Johnny Blanchard, and Bobby Richardson (who was then a minister) were with him near the end, but he was with his son, David, and his wife Merlyn at the very end, dying on Aug. 13, 1995.

Such a downer, so I turned to a novel, How To Be Good by Nick Hornby, an English writer. I had picked this up because Jonathan Tropper is touted as "the American Hornby" and as I admire Tropper, I had to see/read for myself.

And I can see why there is the comparison: like some of Tropper's work it almost reads like a screenplay with a similar sardonic sense of humor. And like Tropper it is a fast read, a story of midlife crisis and its effect on the nuclear family. As the main character says: "We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile a lot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody." Interestingly, it is written in the first person by the female protagonist. How Hornby can do that so effectively is a mark of a good writer, although at times I had the problem of thinking to myself, is this really how a man might think about how a woman thinks?

But it is the humor, or the truth in humor that is Hornby's strong point, such as his riff on organized religion, as expressed by our heroine, Katie, who in the midst of her crisis decides to go to a church, any church, with her daughter, Molly, although she has rarely gone to church and needs to pick one randomly. She describes her experience after arriving at a nearly empty service at a local Church of England ("C of A"):

I start to drift off. I have never been to an ordinary church service before. I have been to weddings, funerals, christenings, carol services, and even harvest festivals, but I have never been to a bog-standard, nobody-there Sunday service.

It all feels a long way from God-no nearer than the bring-and-buy sale would be, and much farther away than I imagine Molly's friend Pauline is at this precise moment. It feels sad, exhausted, defeated; this may have been God's house once, you want to tell the handful of people here, but He's clearly moved, shut up shop, gone to a place where there's more of a demand for that sort of thing. And then you look around and wonder whether the sadness isn't part of the point: those who are able to drag themselves here once a week are clearly not social churchgoers, because there is nothing social happening here. This isn't a place to see and be seen, unless opera glasses are placed on the backs of the pews. You'd have to walk twenty yards to shake somebody's hand. No, these people are the hard-core, the last WASPs in Holloway, the beaten and the lonely and the bereaved, and if there is a place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven, they deserve it. I just hope that it's warmer there than here, and there is more hope, and youth, and there is no need for bring-and-buy sales, and the choir of angels isn't singing elsewhere that day, but you rather fear it might be; C of E heaven is in all probability a quarter-full of unhappy old ladies selling misshapen rock cakes and scratched Mantovani records. Every day of the week, for all eternity. And what about the nice lady reading the notices to us? Is she ever dispirited by her hobbling, careworn flock? I thought that I could detect a touch of weariness, maybe even despair, during the appeal for flower arrangers, but maybe this is because flower arranging is not her thing.

Despair in humor. You get the point. As to the rest of the novel, a worthwhile read, no sense going into more detail here as reviews are readily available on line. I'll read another Hornby book again.

I finished my trifecta of books during our seven day cruise by going from the satiric to downright despair, the path of Philip Roth's most recent, novella length works, and in this instance his The Humbling. In a sense it completes the circle, the sunshine of youth as Mantle emerges from the playing fields of Oklahoma into the big leagues, the midlife struggles of the modern family in London, to the "loss of magic," decline at the end of life of Simon Axler, a famous stage actor who suddenly loses his acting abilities, a metaphor for life, and tries to resurrect a life with a woman twenty five years his junior, the daughter of one-time friends. As Axler's agent reasons with him, trying to convince him to see an acting coach:

Look...everyone knows the feeling 'I can't do it,' everyone knows the feeling that they will be revealed to be false -- it's every actor's terror. 'They've found me out. I've been found out.' Let's face it, there's a panic that comes with age. I'm that much older than you, and I've been dealing with it for years. One, you get slower. In everything. Even in reading you get slower. If I go fast in reading now, too much goes away. My speech is slower, my memory is slower. All these things start to happen. In the process, you start to distrust yourself. You're not as quick as you used to be. And especially if you are an actor. You were a young actor and you memorized scripts one after the other after the other, and you never even thought about it. It was just easy to do. And then all of a sudden it's not as easy, and things don't happen so fast anymore....So you start to feel afraid, to feel soft, to feel that you don't have that raw live power anymore. It scares you. With the result...that you're not free anymore. There's nothing happening -- and that's terrifying.

So it is with aging and obviously a mordant fixation of Roth in his later works, something I understand. And I guess that is why I still appreciate Roth. I've "grown up" with him as I did with Updike. Roth fights desperately against the gravity of it all, Axler seeking respite in the arms of a younger woman, Pegeen, but as Roth beautifully and concisely writes: "A man's way is laid with a multitude of traps, and Pegeen had been the last. He'd stepped hungrily into it and then the bait like the most craven captive on earth." Roth remains one of the great living American writers.

I've said little about the ports we visited, as we've been to all before, but I will say that St. Thomas conjured up feelings of our visit there almost 23 years earlier to the day, when we did a bare boat charter with our friends, Ray and Sue, visiting many of the American and British Virgin Islands. So here we were again, that many years later on a cruise ship, on the one island that is better known as a shopping port. But our bare boat adventure is imprinted in my mind and remains one of my favorite trips, leaving me to wonder why we haven't done it again.

Life on a big cruise ship is highly regimented. There are lectures, discussions, games, shows, cooking demonstrations (even hot glass blowing demonstrations sponsored by Corning on this ship), etc. and that is probably why I prefer to hide out and read most of the time. One of the exceptions was the talk by the Captain, the most personable one we've met on any of our cruises, Captain Gerry Larsson-Fedde who, unlike most of Celebrity's skippers, is Norwegian, not Greek. He gave a PowerPoint presentation with a question and answer on navigation. The gorilla in the room of course was the Costa Concordia disaster,and the question was finally asked but, as expected, Capt. Larsson-Fedde deferred. The facts are still speculative.

I think after his talk, though, it is more understandable. Capt. Larsson-Fedde described the heavy reliance by large ships on Differential Global Positioning Systems which can triangulate a position within about 4 inches. Electronic charts are constantly being updated, but only for major shipping lanes. The more a ship strays from those lanes, the more likely it will have to depend on paper charts that might have been last sounded decades ago. I recall that the Captain of the Concordia said the rocks were not on his chart. That might be, but the ship had no business being where it was.

The first mate of the Solstice followed that with a talk about the construction of the ship, an outstanding engineering accomplishment. He was there during the entire construction in Germany at the Meyer Werft yards, one of the prime companies for building cruise vessels, some 22 miles from the sea up a relatively shallow river. But this was the largest vessel they've ever built. Amazingly, bridges had to be dismantled to deliver the huge vessel to the open water. There it tested its four Wartsila diesel engines that generate 92,000 horsepower, channeled into two 20.5 MW Azipods that swivel 360 degrees to act both for propulsion, rudders, and stern thrusters.

But the most surprising part of Capt. Larsson-Fedde's "work" on the ship is that he is an accomplished entertainer and hopefully this brief clip captures that aspect of his role:

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New Year's Day

It was brilliant and warm here on Jan. 1, 2012, a perfect day for venturing to our new go-to destination of Munyon Island on our boat where Ann, Jon and I had the beach pretty much to ourselves. Not much to do there but as it was a Sunday, we had the New York Times to keep us company, relax, and watch the yachts go by on Lake Worth. We decided to return home via the Earman River.

As our home is actually on an island, we have two ways of reaching Munyon, the northern route via the Intracoastal or the southern route via the Earman River. This screen shot from Google, showing our home (circled at the west portion of the shot) on the North Palm Beach Waterway and the Munyon docks (circled on the east), speaks for itself. Further east beyond Munyon is MacArthur Beach State Park on Singer Island and then the Atlantic.

Returning via the Earman we went past a man jet skiing with his dog. It was an absolutely perfect ending to our New Year's Day of boating, a Florida moment, bringing a smile to everyone's face.

But what would New Year's Day be without friends, other than man's best friend? Years ago half the day would be spent on the phone with friends but now there is email so I caught up with many via that route. Still, I have had a long standing agreement with my old friend and colleague Ron to avoid email on that special day so we had a marathon talk when I returned from Munyon. Naturally our conversation moved from remembering other colleagues in publishing, to the state of the industry (particularly the impact of eBooks), to politics, and finally to our families. His "kids" are doing well as are mine and we both recognize the truth of "you're only as happy as your unhappiest adult child." In Ron's case there are also grandchildren -- in Washington DC --and he is lucky enough to live fairly nearby in North Carolina.

I also "spoke" to my old friend Ray through his wife, Susan, as Ray was in the bilge of his boat all day repairing a generator. He and Sue spend the winter in Boat Harbour, Bahamas on their boat (which is their year-round home). We see them when they briefly visit on their way to or from the Bahamas and in Norwalk, Connecticut where we both live on boats during the summer.

On New Year's Day I also think about my dear friend and colleague Howard who died at such an early age more than three years ago. I used to speak to him on New Year's Day so that is such a void. He was a brilliant, talented person (click onto this link to see his superb carvings of a Manatee and Koala Bear), gone but always remembered by me. I also keep in mind, with great respect, another friend and colleague, Peter, who has now been out of my life, but not memory, for nearly twenty years now.

Finally there was some surprising news that arrived by email on New Year's Day. But first brief background information. My first job out of college in 1964 was at a division of Academic Press, Johnson Reprint Corporation. I was hired by the Vice President at the time, Fred, who was living with his partner, Michael. I remember when he hired me, thinking he's so old, 35. Ha. About six months later he also hired a "sassy dame," and she showed up at a New Year's Day party that Fred and Michael threw, I think it was Jan. 1966. She was wearing a backless dress right down to the tip of her derrière and believe me, even though I was there with my 1st wife, I took note as she moved to the music. Later she became wife #2 (Ann). So that little intersection of time and space changed my life and hers, thanks to Fred's astute hiring practices.

Here are Michael, Fred and me sometime after I had turned 35.

Well, Fred and Michael have stayed together all that time and, as Fred put it, they "finally tied the knot after 54 years," a civil union performed at New York City hall at the close of 2011! What better way to start the New Year?


Life is Company.....

Phone rings, / Door chimes, / In comes / Company!
No strings, /Good times, / Just chums, / Company!
All those / Photos / Up on the walls--
"With love." / "With love" filling the days,
"With love" seventy ways, / "To Bobby with love"
From all those good and crazy people, your friends!
Those good and crazy people, your married friends!
And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
That's what it's really about, isn't it?
That's what it's really about,
Really about!
From Company, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

Summer Endeavors

One of the benefits of living on our boat in the summer is being able to finally get to some postponed reading and catch up on local theatre either in Westport or NY and the last few weeks reminds me that so much of what we read or see in the theatre often serves as historical guideposts, snapshots of different periods of cultural change. I recently picked up John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which I first read when it was published in the late 1970’s. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to reread the novel other than I had forgotten much of it and always liked Irving’s quirky self-reflective story-telling, so much about the process of writing itself. I had forgotten how much the role of women’s rights plays in Garp, such a major issue in the 1970s. Irving playfully toys with the issue, satirizing it to a great degree, reminding me of my first business trip to Australia in the 1970’s when a Sydney taxi driver lectured me about the evils of women’s rights and, in particular, the role that Americans had in exporting those dangerous thoughts to Australia. I wonder whether Garp (or Irving) might have agreed with the accusation at the time.

Then a few weeks ago we saw Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart at the Westport Country Playhouse, portraying two heterosexual couples vacationing at a home on Fire Island, in the middle of a gay community. It is a play that is constantly on an uneasy edge, the problems of the two couples acting out their aberrant behavior contrasted to the high-spirited, better adjusted gay community, off stage. But central to the play is the paranoia of how AIDS was thought to be transmitted at the time, symbolized by the couples’ dramatic fear of going into the pool (on stage) -- an obsession of twenty years ago when the play was written. Nonetheless, the play is still a compelling tragicomic drama and wonderfully staged at the beautifully restored Westport Country Playhouse.

A twenty year leap forward brings me to reading Jonathan Tropper’s Everything Changes. Here is a very contemporary novel by a thirty-something author about relationships between fathers and sons, and male female relationships. Tropper’s idiosyncratic characters (in particular, the protagonist’s father) at times reminds me a little of Richard Russo’s and Anne Tyler’s. Trooper’s writing can be very funny but sensitive at the same time. These are the two paragraphs that grab you and pull you into the novel:

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it. This is no accident. I made this happen. I had a plan.

I am about to fuck it all up in a spectacular fashion.

It was quite a contrast reading Anita Brookner’s Strangers, perhaps the most interior novel I’ve read in some time, most of it taking place in the mind of the 72 year old protagonist, a retired banker and confirmed bachelor, who feels he may be missing something not sharing his life with a woman. By chance he meets one of his old lovers (he hasn’t had many), now aged and frail, but one for whom he thinks he still has feelings. He also meets a woman on a flight to Venice, younger than he. Much of the novel is a debate (in his mind) of the advantages or disadvantages of being with one or the other or neither. Brookner’s writing is timeless, meticulously exacting, set mostly in London, but a London that seems to exist merely in some recent time. It is also about aging and finding meaning in life after a lifetime of work:

His reading now was confined to diaries, notebooks, memoirs, anything that contained a confessional element. He was in search of evidence of discomfiture, disappointment, rather than triumph over circumstances. Circumstances, he knew, would always overrule. Those great exemplars of the past, the kind he had always sought in classic novels, usually finished on a note of success, of exoneration, which was not for him. In the absence of comfort he was forced to contemplate his own failure, failure not in worldly terms but in the reality of his circumscribed life. He knew, rather more clearly than he had ever known before, that he had succeeded only at mundane tasks, that he had failed to deliver a reputation that others would acknowledge. Proof, if proof were needed, lay in the fact that his presence was no longer sought, that, deprived of the structure of the working day, he was at a loss, obliged to look for comfort in whatever he could devise for himself. His life of reading, of walking, was invisible to others: his friendships, so agreeable in past days, had dwindled, almost disappeared. Memories were of no use to him; indeed, even memory was beginning to be eroded by the absence of confirmation. As to love, that was gone for good. Whatever he managed to contrive for himself would not, could not, be construed as success.

Finally, yesterday, we saw the NYC preview performance of Stephen Sondheim’s great musical, Follies. This is a show I failed to see when it opened in 1971 or any of the revivals and have been waiting, waiting for the opportunity. Sondheim is the last surviving composer of another era. Talk about historical markers. This is Sondheim’s tribute to various eras of Broadway’s past and it has some of his best known songs, too many to mention, including one that is perhaps my very favorite, Losing My Mind.

This new Broadway production, coming via the Kennedy Center, is spectacular, the kind of show no longer written for Broadway. It was Sondheim’s first musical as both composer and lyricist and every line, every word is delicious. The Broadway production includes some of Broadway’s luminaries, Bernadette Peters, Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell, Ron Raines, and Elaine Page. Each brings the house down with some of Sondheim’s most iconic numbers. The juxtaposition of their ghosts from eras past is particularly evocative. Here is a two and half hour production which seems to pass in minutes, portraying innocent and happier times past, lost loves, regrets and heartbreak.

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