The Band and Me

This is not going to be another obituary for Levon Helm. If you want to read such, the absolute gold standard for obituaries, chock full of stories about Levon Helm, was in the New York Times. Read it here.

This triggered my own memories of The Band, Bob Dylan, and a time in New York when I was young. No, I wasn't a folk groupie, or a Woodstock alumna, or even a starry-eyed kid waiting for Bob Dylan's next record. I was in my late 20s, an actress working at temp secretary jobs in New York. I was married to an actor, Jim Vann, and we were both Dylan fans and idealistic folk music fans. We were just a little older than Dylan's demographic, but we loved hippies and thought of them as an exotic new species on the horizon. We thought they were the hope of the world. We were almost the only people we knew who didn't smoke pot or experiment in the drug scene.

I had a temporary assignment as secretary to an executive in a little music company. This was a mainstream company, classy offices, upscale address. All I did was a little steno and typing, and it was only for a couple of weeks. It was on Madison Avenue, I believe, maybe up in the 50s. I wouldn't know the man I was working for if he walked in the door today, but I can remember this: He was related to the Gershwins, and he was trying to persuade one of the daughters to give him the rights to record some of the brothers' recently discovered music. This would have been a huge get for him as the very young head of a small New York company. He was enthusiastic to the point of obsession about the prospect of making it big in the business. When he learned a bit about my musical tastes, he told me about this great new sound, the band who used to be Bob Dylan's backup, who had rehearsed in a pink house in a remote town near Woodstock. He waved the album "Music from the Big Pink" at me, played some of it on his fabulous sound system, and after work I went out and bought the album.

The music was like nothing we'd heard before--and we had heard a lot of Bob Dylan, so we had heard some strange stuff. It was hard to think of these guys as a backup band for anybody, their sound was so unique. I'll never forget it booming at me on those huge speakers in that office. Years later my brother, who had been at the University of Alabama at the time, told me that The Band had been booked to play at one of the fraternity dances the night before the big game with Auburn. He said they blew the audience away by focusing on their job, playing their kind of music, and at the end the leader--my brother said it was "the one with the big head"--simply said,"Good night. Hope y'all win your ball game." This was a departure at the University of Alabama, where the bands know all the dances are partly football pep rallies (indeed, it might be argued that most of university life is a big football rally). It is expected that, if not playing "Stars Fell on Alabama," at least most of the night will be devoted to local chauvinism. The Band had a different agenda.

I still have one vinyl and one CD of The Band. The music doesn't sound a bit strange or revolutionary to me anymore. It was part of an era, a shred of hope against all odds, combining sounds of the past and an uncertain present with the defiant throb of the future. The era has ended. We have all moved on in spite of ourselves. The music pulls us back and slings us against the walls once more, but more gently now, as if the walls were nothing but a distant memory.

I'm at a point in my life where I'm forced to let go of old friends. It's not easy to do, and sometimes, as in a particularly well-written obituary, I'm drawn back to a place and time I had almost forgotten, and I have to do it again. Let it go; let it be. Rest in peace, Big Pink.

Hoboken Taps Its Feet

The scene is a church hall in Hoboken, New Jersey, where a former Broadway dancer is instructing a modestly talented class in the art of tap dancing. Each of the class members came for a different reason, most of which we learn during the course of the evening as we watch them magically become almost good--and we are pulling for them every minute.

Hudson Theatre Ensemble's production of Stepping Out by Richard Harris warms the heart and sets toes to tapping as it takes the audience through a labyrinth of frustrated hearts and semi-broken lives, all looking for an escape through tap dancing. As is to be expected from this excellent troupe, under the direction of Laurie Brongo, the play is fun and crisply performed.

Cristina Marie plays Mavis, the catalyst as dance teacher, who is sympathetic and wise even though she is going through a crisis of her own in her real life. Marie is a dynamite actress and dancer, coaching the clumsy and talented alike. Somehow we know all along she's going to get the best out of all of them. The script is predictable although it contains many little side trips and not a few unsolved mysteries and unresolved conflicts. But never mind about that. Life is better if you dance, isn't it?

The cast is interesting and each plays his and her own story at a professional level while admitting that if life wasn't so bad outside they wouldn't be here trying to tap dance. Even the pianist is frustrated about something, although it's less clear what. Dinah Gravel plays her quite seriously, with a bit of a sarcastic edge. I would have liked to have seen her really playing the piano, but I guess that's too much to ask. She had the role nailed, even with piped in music.

Florence Pape is always a joy to watch onstage, and the audience loved her as Vera, the bossy control freak to whom tap dancing is an escapist pastime. Other characters have more serious problems, like Emma Peele whose husband beats her and who gets a powerful dramatic scene that brought the role into sharp focus. Gregory Nye played the only male in the class with a studied unease that made his inept dancing appear to be good acting. In some cases I couldn't tell--and in this show it didn't matter.

The house was packed on opening night, and the air conditioning was faulty, which was a bother. Pacing could have been picked up in the first act, but that will all be worked out by the next performance, I'm sure. Stepping Out will run Saturday at 8 P.M., Sunday at 3 P.M., and next weekend Friday and Saturday evenings and a final matinee Sunday, April 22 at 3. Hudson Theatre Ensemble perfoms at the Hudson School, 601 Park Avenue. Go--and enjoy the show!

My Un-Bucket Un-Lists

Sometimes I think I'm just plain ornery because I seem to avoid things that everybody else really wants to do. I decided to make a list of them just to show myself what a contrarian I am. This is not a bucket list of things I would like to do, it's a list of things I don't care if I never do no matter how close I come to getting the chance.

Things I had the opportunity to do but didn’t and don’t regret:

1. Visit the Eiffel Tower.

2. See a production of an Andrew Lloyd Weber show.

3. Go to Disney World.

4. Sit through a symphony.

5. Go skiing in the Alps.

6. Go to a rock concert.

These are wonderful projects, things that anybody should want to do I suppose, but for the life of me I don't really want to do any of them. Before I began to feel bad about myself I decided to make another list, a list of things I'm pleased to say I have done and have treasured memories of.

Things I have done that make me happy to think about:

1. Read all of Don Quixote.

2. Visited Stonehenge.

3. Walked through Roman ruins in Switzerland.

4. Saw Ralph Bellamy in Sunrise at Campobello, Andy Griffin in No Time for Sergeants, Jack Lemmon in Tribute, John Lithgow in M. Butterfly, Kevin Kline in Cyrano de Bergerac, Ian McKellan in Wild Honey, Jane Fonda in 33 Variations, Sutton Foster in Anything Goes, Bernadette Peters in A Little Night Music and Follies, Carrie Fisher in Wishful Drinking, and the original production of The Book of Mormon.

5. Heard jazz at Tivoli Gardens.

6. Chatted with Ellis Larkins at the Carnegie Tavern.

7. Had cocktails with Ralph Bellamy and his wife.

8. Watched the fireworks at the annual Fête de Genève from a friend's balcony.

9. Learned to use a computer.

10. Wrote a novel.

11. Saw JFK in person on the Senate floor.

12. Started two theatre companies.

13. Dined at Lutece, Taillevent, and Commander’s Palace (when Emeril Lagasse was chef).

14. Shook Jacqueline Kennedy’s soft hand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

15. Visited Rome and London by myself.

16. Flew to Paris for a weekend with a lover I hadn’t seen in 30 years.

17. Interviewed two American Ambassadors to Switzerland.

18. Started three blogs.

19. Raised a beautiful daughter who is one of my favorite people in the world.

20. Created a character called "Grandmama" for two really special young men.

So it's mostly coming down on the plus side of the ledger. I'm not finished yet, not by a long shot, but as I started on the lists the good stuff kept coming to me. I can continue the lists, but let me suggest something to you, my reader: Make a list or two of your own, and share them with us on the comment page here. I'd love to hear what you've done in your life, what you've avoided doing, and which you're proudest of.

Tom Pelphrey's Rainbow

I had heard there was soon to be a Broadway musical about Judy Garland. Why not, thinks I, we're so busy deifying actresses who can impersonate Marilyn Monroe and others of the era, and Judy is so accessible to the impersonator--ho hum. Little did I know.

I picked up the review (if you can pick up an Internet posting) in the New York Times this morning of End of the Rainbow and was astonished to see a review that was nothing short of a rave from Ben Brantley. This is the paper of record for the theatre, and Brantley is a respected and articulate critic.

I'm reading along, about how beautifully the play is written, how astonishing is the leading lady's (Tracie Bennett) performance, and I hit upon a familiar Hoboken name: Tom Pelphrey. He is playing Micky Deans, Garland's husband during her final slide into drug-induced, hysteria-laced darkness. Brantley says he is perfectly cast. This means he's done quite a job--going toe-to-toe with a dynamite actress playing the role of a beloved dragon--and he's made the shadowy part of an also-ran type guy into a remarkably living, memorable character.

I first heard of Tom Pelphrey when he appeared in a one-man show in Hoboken called My Italy Story. My Hoboken theatre friends were blown away by his performance. It had run for only one or two performances in Hoboken, but I made it a point to catch it when it moved to The Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village. Tom peopled the stage with characters and held the audience in the palm of his hand as he described a young Italian American's journey to the village where his family lived in the hills of Italy. I came away somehow convinced that it was Tom's own story, that he was the one who had written it and was just relating his adventures in a vivid way. I look at the flyer I was given and see that it clearly names a playwright, Joseph Gallo, and identifies Pelphrey as an actor playing a role. He doesn't even have an Italian name.

I'm thrilled for Tom. I'm thrilled that the play is good. And I'm thrilled to be back in Hoboken, where a trip to a Broadway play is just minutes away. I'm hoping to see this one.

Remembering Howard Kissel

It is with enormous sadness that I report the contents of an email this morning informing me of the death of Howard Kissel, whom I have known since the late 1960s, and whose friendship I've cherished from the start. He was brilliant, funny, and a unique man. I saw him develop from a newcomer fresh from Milwaukee and dreaming of a career in the glamorous part of New York--the New York he and I knew from movies and plays--to an eminence gris who was very much a part of that world.

Howard came to visit me in Hoboken in late 2008, when I had relocated here after returning to my hometown in Alabama for almost 20 years. This is the blog post he wrote about that visit, appearing in the New York Daily News January 8, 2009.

Tuesday I took a journey that lasted barely 15 minutes but brought me into a totally different world.

Boarding a Jersey Transit bus at Port Authority, following the directions given me by my friend Mary Lois Adshead, in a quarter of an hour I found myself in downtown Hoboken, a place that until then had only been a name.

I knew its history -- it gave us Frank Sinatra and "On the Waterfront" -- but I had no sense of it as a place. I have known Mary Lois for over 40 years -- we worked together at Fairchild Publications in the late '60s, a quiet time in New York, when the city was thought to be headed for self-destruction.

We toiled in an old building on 13th Street just east of Fifth Avenue, which did not even have air conditioning. In the summer if the Temperature Humidity Index reached 80 and you had finished your work you could go home earlly. The one good thing was that we got, after only a year of employment, three weeks of vacation.

In those days Fairchild was still a family-owned business. (It would later be acquired by Capital Cities, ABC and finally Disney, which sold it to Conde Nast a few years ago.) Its best known publication was Women's Wear Daily. Mary Lois and I worked for what was the original Fairchild publication, Daily News Record, which had been started as a general business paper at the turn of the century Chicago World's Fair. As businesses grew in importance -- like women's ready-to-wear -- separate papers would be spun off DNR. A few months ago DNR became a weekly page in WWD.

When I was there DNR covered men's fashions and textiles. My career began writing about hosiery and underwear. Then I was given work clothes, soon pants, then sport jackets and eventually all of sportswear. I remember telling a source about one of these shifts (perhaps the addition of sport jackets to my other responsibilities.) "I hope this is not just a lateral move," he said, by way of congratulation.

I was indeed an intrepid reporter and in my coverage of work clothes I even ventured to the East Village, a bar called Slug's in the Far East (in the '60s that meant East 4th Street between Avenues B and C, dangerous territory in those days.) There I heard the not yet known Sun Ra and interviewed him the next day.

I wish I could remember who had recommended him -- I did not have many hip friends in those days. All things considered, I do not have many hip friends all these years later, which is why it seems so remarkable that I could have known about Sun Ra. The main thing I remember about out interview was that he costumed his Arkestra (his coinage) in fabrics from a store called Paterson Silks, around the corner from m office on Union Square.

As work clothes editor, I also did a tongue-in-cheek review of the latest Sears, Roebuck catalogue, for which I was chastised by my editor, Blll Taffin, one of the few bosses in my long career for whom I had unreserved respect and affection. Once a year he and I would go to lunch with executives from Sears. Whenever we ordered a round of drinks and someone said, 'Cheers,' one of the executives would say, with an impish grin, "And Roebuck!"

Mary Lois covered textiles. At the time she was married to an actor of the avant-garde variety, Jim Vann. He had a young daughter roughly the same age as Mary Lois's Alison. (I remember that when Alison saw her first Afghan she asked, "Mommy, is that dog wearing a costume?") Weekends with Jim's ex-spouse the girls were taken to avant-garde performance spaces. At some point they were taken to see a play in a Broadway theater and were enraptured by the spectacle of the curtain.

Mary Lois left Fairchild well before I did. At one point she married an executive with DuPont and spent several years in Geneva, Switzerland. A dozen years ago, when she had moved back to her home town, Fairhope Alabama, she invited me to direct Wendy Wasserstein's "The Sisters Rosenzweig" at the semi-professional theater she ran, the Jubilee Fish Theater, three of the happiest weeks of my life.

A year ago she returned to this vicinity and settled in Hoboken, about which she blogs on "Finding Myself in Hoboken." She has also written a history of Fairhope, a Utopian community, called  The Fair Hope of Heaven.

She suggested we meet Tuesday at an old German restaurant called Helmer's, a block from the bus stop. It had the Spartan charm of working class taverns of a century ago. It also had an excellent steak sandwich with very thin slices of steak and gravy topped by perfect home fried potatoes. I wish there were a place in New York where you could get perfect home fried potatoes.

Mary Lois also invited Jerry and Kathy Anderson to join us. It is a sign of how naive the times were that dating between employees was forbidden but Jerry and Kathy had ignored the ban. When they decided to get married they had to tell one of the supervisors about it so they could take simultaneous three week vacations for their honeymoon. All this had to be kept secret, but their last day before getting hitched somehow the word got out. We tortured them mercilessly but they refused to come clean. Jerry continued to work in the men's wear industry, most recently as director of the Men's Tie Foundation, which recently disbanded. Neither of us, I regret to say, wore a tie to lunch.

One test of true friendship is that time is erased within seconds when you see someone with whom you were once truly close. I think of my four years at DNR as the darkest, longest part of my life, but there was deep camaraderie among the inmates, and our reunion could not have been warmer or more festive.

After lunch we wandered through the streets of Hoboken to have dessert at Mary Lois's apartment, a few short blocks away. The architecture resembled that of Brooklyn more than that of Manhattan, and there were a few buildings glittering enough to be on Main Street U.S.A. in Disneyland.

Mary Lois has been delighted to find that longtime citizens of Hoboken have a deep understanding of their history, which they share with her on her blog. She had learned, for example, that Helmer's had been destroyed in a fire a few years ago but was restored to its original state from photographs. It is more authentic now than it was before the fire.

The discovery of a getaway, free from the cares of Manhattan, just across the river, has contributed enormously to my mental well-being as we begin a difficult new year.

***

I'm pretty sure Howard didn't believe in heaven any more than I do, but today I keep visualizing him there, making the acquaintance of his heroes in music and in the theatre. How happy they are to meet him--and, well, he is in heaven.

Changing A Life

I'm about to do it again, but in a small way.

Four years ago I totally changed my life by making a move from Alabama, where I was born and raised, to the New York City area, where I have felt the most at home in my life. I lived in Hoboken for one solid year before I decided to revisit the South again, first for two weeks, and then for the month of February. Then last year I went home in January for a month. When I got back to Hoboken it was still bitter winter--blizzards and freezing temps--and that weather lasted until the end of March. I decided to do the smart thing and take the months of February and March in southern Alabama from then on.

And then came the winter of 2011-12, astonishingly pleasant and mild. A freak snowfall came on October 1, but melted away, and the rest of the season we've had no brutally cold days or nights (or, if it was below freezing at night, I slept through it in my cozy little place).

Never mind. The plans have been made. The cottage has been reserved, a rental car requested, and old friends have been told of my imminent arrival Feb 1. Now I have to get out of my New Jersey state of mind and into my Alabama one. There is more than jet lag involved. I'm not ready for some football, although no doubt there will be some, nor many of the other activities that I know I'll run into no matter how I try to escape. I'll take some books, I'll visit with some friends, and maybe have a surprise or two. I'll be changing my life, but only for two months, after all.

It won't be all that cold there--but thank goodness it won't be summer-hot either. Azaleas and wisteria will bloom. The bay will softly welcome me with its constant sound track of gentle waves. There will be sea food and grits. There will be comfort and smiles. Everybody will tell me how happy they are. The people who hate me just will avoid me and I will see many admirers and supporters. I shall avoid controversy. I shall stay on my diet. I shall continue to visit the gym four days a week.

And I'll bask in pretty days and pleasant weather. I'll see a local play or two and join a group of friends at the movies. I'll gab and gossip over lunches of salad and have the occasional cup of tea with family members.

And I'll start posting on my other blog soon--I hope you'll join me there. I'll be in Hoboken until Feb 1 and maybe run into you before I go. If not, I'll see you in April, when the flowers are in bloom and there is little chance of a blizzard.

The First Four Years

There was no wonder I picked Hoboken as the place to relocate when I first saw it back in June 2007. The wide sidewalks of Washington Street were welcoming, the skies were blue, the people friendly as those in a small town. It had the self-contained feeling of a historical and pleasant community, yet it was only 20 minutes from the heart of New York City by bus or subway.

I put my house on the market, sold 3/4 of my furniture and possessions--including my car--bought a one-way airline ticket, and packed my bags. I was returning north from the town founded as utopia to the one known as the mile-square city. I had lived my happiest years in New York back in the 1960s and 70s, but with the way things were I found it impossible to afford now. Hoboken would have to do, even though I assumed I would be spending a lot of time in Manhattan. That was four years ago. On December 1, Fairhope friends drove me to the Pensacola airport, where I flew to Newark and spend the first night of my new life in a Marriott in Jersey City. It was much colder in Jersey City than in south Alabama which I had just left, but I was prepared for that. The Marriott is in a neighborhood I know pretty well now, across from the Pavonia Newport Mall.

I walked, that cold December day, from the Marriott to Target and bought a pair of folding chairs, carrying them back to my hotel room. There would be no furniture in the new apartment but an inflatable bed and these until the moving men brought my stuff from Alabama in a few days. I've been around long enough to know a body does need a chair or two.

My furniture did arrive as scheduled, and I began to make adjustments to my new location bit by bit. I found that what furniture I'd kept more than filled the 800-sq.-ft. apartment. Luckily there were lots of big closets, and most of the stuff was shoved in. I bought a little single bed since the bedroom was too tiny to get even a double in comfortably. I was also able to use the little room for my laptop. I began my new blog.

Right away I found a doctor, a dentist, and the public library. I explored Hoboken on foot and got a little disoriented looking for basics like the A & P; tried to adapt to the colder climate, and wrote about all my new situations on the blog. A compulsive blogger in my home town, writing about my life helped me clarify things in my own mind.

The enormity of what I had done was slow to sink in. I had thought about the climate, the isolation, the difficulties of getting everywhere on foot--the blank slate that lay before me--and it all confronted me every morning. It was a whole new life. There would be no phone calls, no board meetings, club meetings, organizational meetings. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t experience this as loneliness, but rather as a transition to something I couldn’t possibly understand. It seemed like an opportunity, but I couldn’t define for what.

I felt a little uncomfortable in my own skin, as if I were in a dream or on vacation in a place where I could speak the language but nothing else. I would get confused on the city streets, even in my old neighborhood in Manhattan. I took it slowly and didn’t push myself into doing too much too soon. It seemed as if my feet always hurt, from the walking and from minor foot surgery I had endured at the end of summer. I was never sure my clothes looked right--everybody in New York and New Jersey seemed to wear black all the time, not the bright colors and patterns I had been looking at in the South for almost 20 years. It took time to realize that this was less about Hoboken than about myself, facing a new phase of life in which I had to admit the person in the mirror looked didn’t look much like the self I had once known.

Writing a blog about these things was helpful in surprising ways. Within a few months people were actually reading the blog, which had not necessarily been the case of my blog in my home town, “Finding Fair Hope.” On the Fairhope blog I had had a few regular readers, but most of them were people I had known in the distant past, keeping in touch with me from far flung outposts. I had about five regulars from contemporary Fairhope, and they were all people I knew who seemed a little uncomfortable about the thought that I might quiz them about the blog the next time I saw them. Hoboken brought me an average of some 40 readers a day, and they began to make themselves known to me by sending me emails and commenting on the blog. The blog posts about "old" Hoboken brought interesting responses and commenters enlivened the blog and informed me about my new-found home. I learned what Hoboken was like in the 1940s and 50s, about the making of On the Waterfront, about the ice cream parlors and the Fabian Theater, Mr. Stover of Demarest High School and what it meant to be a b-n-r in those days. From Chris and Mary I learned where to get the best mutz in town (Lisa's); and I met Christina, who has been a loyal and kind friend in need ever since. I heard many stories about Frank Sinatra, and about the history of Hoboken as the birthplace of baseball and as a place of debarkation for the doughboys of WWI.

As time went by I felt less and less like a visitor and more convinced that this was indeed my real life. I could hop a bus and go see a matinee on Broadway in less than an hour's time and I saw some great ones: Bernadette Peters in both A Little Night Music and Follies, Kevin Kline in Cyrano de Bergerac, Christopher Walken in A Behanding in Spokane, Anything Goes, The Book of Mormon and the extraordinary English import Jerusalem I took my grandsons (who met me at the Port Authority Bus Terminal), to The Farnsworth Invention,, Blythe Spirit with Angela Lansbury, Avenue Q and All My Sons with John Lithgow. I've even omitted a few, but I've seen a boatload of plays.

I took part in a local reading of The Flora Dora Girls by Hoboken playwright Louis La Russo II and met a number of Hoboken and Jersey City actresses in the process. I wrote reviews on my blog of the productions of Hoboken's Hudson Theater Company every year.

With a little time and distance, my perspective on recent life events changes; I rewrote my book about Fairhope Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, retitled and repackaged it as The Fair Hope of Heaven.
I surprised myself by writing a novel last year, set in the utopian Fairhope of 1921, about a young teacher from Hoboken who finds herself there, finds romance, and moves on. It has been rewritten three or four times now and is in the hands of its second editor. I've learned that it's one thing to sail through the writing of fiction and quite another to make it come alive and interesting (nay, compelling) to an unbiased reader. It's more than a project--it is a new experience. An adventure.

After that first year I discovered the joy of going south for at least a month every winter. Last winter, full of blizzards and bitter temperatures in the Northeast, I decided to make that two months this year. I love the beginning of winter, the look of the city at Christmastime, the crunch of snow under my boots, but month and month of grey skies, layering clothes, and dodging slippery black ice, is wearing to the spirit. From South Alabama, I had become accustomed to a flowery and fragrant March. I shall spend that month where it is already spring, and when I return to Hoboken it will be spring here too.

Wherever I am based, things keep happening to me. Over time in Hoboken I've made new friends. I have the option of lunch with a friend or the theatre in New York, a visit with my daughter and her family upstate, or a movie date with a nice guy I met online. People still ask me why I chose Hoboken, and the answer is always that you may not know it, but it's a beautiful little town. I invite you to scroll through this blog for old posts that deal with my growing affection for Hoboken and my life here. It was a good move, just four years ago, and I love living with the promise of still better things to come.