It was time to learn a new strategy, which I call selective procrastination.
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I was always the girl who was on time, organized, and started assignments well before they were due.
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Don't you hate the state of late?
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Call me ungrateful, but I lacked a plan for the balance of the dawn, or for the rest of my life which stretched before me like the enormous ocean, and I was alone.
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Does anyone remember the days when it was acceptable, even encouraged, to drink at lunch? This story takes place on June 4, 1976. It will later become evident how I remember the exact date. Dan and I both worked at our first jobs at SofTech – he as a programmer; I, a Program Librarian (glorified data inputter) in Waltham, MA, and lived a few miles away.

This day, a group of about six or seven of us went to lunch at Callahan’s, a large steak house, better known for the LARGE drinks they served, to celebrate a project completion. At the time, my drink was a gin and tonic, but I’ve never had a head for alcohol. Drinks at Callahan’s were served in large, 11 ounce plastic tumblers.

We placed our steak orders but the drinks came out first (I eat so little meat these days, I can’t imagine eating a steak for lunch, but that’s a different story). I weighed all of 90 pounds. It was a warm day and the others at the table encouraged me to drink quickly and order another. They were having fun with me.

I’d had one and half drinks before consuming any food. Boy, was I fun! John W. puffed away on his nasty cigar and they had me take a puff (meanwhile, my husband sat there, bemused, as the whole episode unfolded). Though I didn’t, it probably wouldn’t have taken much encouragement to have me dancing on the table. Yeah, it was that kind of party. I finally got some food into my stomach, the bill was paid, Dan and I started to drive back to the office (we had come together), but I felt terrible (big surprise). I asked him to pull off the road. He pulled into the parking lot of a church, I rolled down the window (no automatic windows on our cars back then) and puked out the window. Good lord, I was sick.

I asked Dan to take me home (at this point, we were closer to our apartment than the office). He did, then went back and told everyone that I was “shit-faced”, not untrue, but not how I might have characterized my condition. My car stayed parked at the office overnight.

I passed out at home. I drifted in and out of consciousness. I was truly sick. I threw up many more times. I don’t remember eating anything. I had no appetite.

Later that evening a friend came over and we turned on the TV to watch our beloved Celtics in the NBA finals against the Phoenix Suns (I became a big basketball fan at Brandeis and was now a full-time resident of Massachusetts; I had never watched professional basketball in Detroit, so had no allegiance to that team). I tried to watch but kept passing out. This was the 5th game of the finals, the famous triple overtime game. Every time I became conscious, that damn game was in overtime, a bit like “Ground Hog Day”. That’s why I know exactly what day it was. I really wanted to watch, but couldn’t stay awake. The Celtics persevered and won 128-126 and won their 13th championship two nights later.

I was sick throughout the night. It was clear that I had alcohol poisoning. I have not been able to tolerate the smell of gin since. I actually have a sense aversion to it. And I’ve learned to not be the “party girl”, but watch my intake. In fact, I haven’t had any hard liquor since, just a little wine. I really cannot hold my alcohol.

 

 

 

David visited from London at the end of the summer, 2017. A large storm brewed off sea. It didn’t affect our weather, but churned up violent waves and such high tides that we had no beach, which forced its closure. We went over, just to look at the odd sight.

So we trundled over to the lap pool at our club. We’d never sat there before, but it was pleasant. We swam, then sat in the lounge chairs with our reading material. I leafed through “Vineyard Magazine” and came across an ad for a gallery we enjoy: The Granary Gallery. The painting in the background was a night scene, moody, beautiful. The interiors eminated glowing light. This is Jeanne Staples’ hallmark. We were intrigued. Off to the left was a favorite restaurant on the bottom, our club on top. In the forefront was the building used to weigh in the fish caught each day during the annual MV Derby competition, a big deal competition with various categories for various fish, caught from a boat or surf-casting from shore and adult and child divisions. Grand prize was a large motor boat, suitable to fish from. We would occasionally go to watch the weigh-ins. All fish were cleaned, gutted and the meat donated to the island senior center.

I loved the image as depicted in the ad, but didn’t know how large it was; was this the entire image? What were the dimensions? How much did it cost? We were looking to replace a few antique charts with real art. Would this be appropriate?

I showed the ad to Dan, who also was intrigued. We showered, dressed and headed over to see the show in West Tisbury. The painting is large and was hanging on the back wall of the gallery. It was stunning, one truly couldn’t look away. It was also too large for any space we could think of, and too expensive! The magazine image was cropped, it didn’t show the entire right side of the image.

But we really liked Jeanne’s work and immediately were drawn to a few other pieces of hers; cows grazing in Katama Farm (near us, actually), and continued to look for something for our dining room wall. Nothing quite fit the bill. The gallerist pulled up images that were not at the gallery, but scattered around the island. We went in search. A few turned out to be in Jeanne’s studio. She kindly brought a few over to our house to look at where they might work. She was very pleasant.

The assistant from the gallery brought over the large cows painting for us to try up in our den.

 

We loved it and agreed to keep it. We also decided on a scene on Beach Road, entering Oak Bluffs from the Edgartown side, along State Beach to hang in our dining room.

Clever Adam also brought the large, gorgeous “Derby Evening”. We protested; we had no good place for it. But it was SO alluring, such a fabulous painting, how could we resist? We walked from room to room – nope too large, or the colors didn’t work. We wandered into our sun room, all blues, green and white with lots of light. We had a blue barn star hanging on the white bead board wall. Could this be the spot? Adam valiantly held it up. MAGIC! It looked fantastic! Oh my goodness! Adam told us to live with it for a bit (always a great strategy; then the owner can’t live without it)! Of course we were totally over the moon about it. We had close friends come over to give their assessment. They loved it too.

We went back to the gallery owner to negotiate for all three works. He gave us a nice deal. Still, that one piece was the most expensive work of art (or anything else – clothing, jewelry, anything), we’d ever purchased.

We sit in the room all the time. It makes the space. Even when not in the room, I admire it when passing by. Our house was on the Edgartown house tour last year (for the second time). The artwork got the most comments (someone thought we had built the upstairs den around the cow painting). But the “Derby Evening, 2017” was the most admired. We held the house open a few extra minutes so that Jeanne and her husband could come and see where her works live in the world (we have since bought four more, smaller pieces by her; we are true Jeanne Staples collectors). But nothing compares to this work.

 

A local jazz singer had called and asked if she might come and sing at Dad's bedside. Would he like that? And would it be all right if she brought along a male vocalist she had in mind?
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A soft, blue velvet regaled The Los Angeles night. The concentric circles of the Hollywood Bowl’s procenium glowed with a warm, eggshell white. White-jacketed waiters served last suppers on trays and scuttled away. Onstage, two microphones bracketed a single, straight-backed chair. Without announcement, a man in white tie and tails walked from stage right, carrying a cello burnished by age and a rich orange-red hue.

The lights dimmed and the concave shell of the Bowl changed to the same blue velvet as the color of the Angeleno sky. The man sat down, placed the instrument between his knees, and smiled at the amphitheater’s masses. He placed the bow on the strings, took a breath, and began the first notes of the first movement of Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G major.

For two hours and 40 minutes, the Hollywood Bowl reverberated to the arpeggios, octaves, and double stops of Bach’s baroque homage to this perfect instrument. The tiny man played on through the intricacies of each suite’s preludes, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, bourrées, and gigues. When he finished each composition, he launched into the next.

The cello’s rich sound, meticulously amplified, flowed out of the bowl and into the sky. I became aware of layer after layer of impressions — the diminutive figure’s exertions with bow and digits on the ebony fingerboard; the complex timbre and overtones of the instrument; the shape of the sound that rippled out of the layered arcs of the Bowl’s shell; the shower of notes falling onto the placid surface of the warm night; the musician’s synapses sparking with memory and tactile application.

Bach’s cello suites are arranged in order of difficulty, the first being the simplest, continuing through over two hours of notation to the most complex. As he traversed this experimental composition — Bach had rarely written for solo stringed instruments — I became aware of a larger reality: I could trace the sounds of the suites backward, from the vibration of the instrument: the strings oscillating the bridge, which, in turn, vibrated the soundboard, passing through the unseen sound peg placed beneath one foot of the bridge between front soundboard and the cello’s back. I followed the sound into the player’s movements along the neck, where Ma’s fingers altered the resonating length of each string, set in motion by the horsehair bow. From these touch points, I followed his fingers backward through the tendons to the shoulders, each moving independently in their contrary tasks, the strong, smooth sweeps of the bow, the muscular attack of fingers on strings.

I felt the flow of impulses from Yo Yo’s right auditory cortex upward through the top of his skull and into the cosmos where elapsed time disappeared, and Ma’s movements connected to the cerebral energy of the old composer who sat, meticulously present through three hundred irrelevant years of calibrated time. Yo Yo Ma’s boundless energy (he began to tire slightly in the sixth and final suite), radiated the cascading arpeggios of Bach’s composition through the fragile endurance of the Stradivarius instrument, older than the Suites themselves. My senses began to swirl around the focal point of the single man, alone with the rich, red instrument, a unity of precision and love, given to us all beneath the vast, blue arc of the Hollywood Bowl. I suppose I sat as close to my own, weird god as I ever come.

#  #  #

 

"And what good news:  a new Tom Stoppard play, “Leopoldstadt”, is opening at Broadway’s Longacre Theater this fall..."
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In 1964 our family drove cross-country to see the World’s Fair in New York. On our last day in town, my mom and I took the subway to 51^st and Broadway to see Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand. I was 13, starstruck, and thrilled to be in New York. But when we entered the Winter Garden Theatre lobby a grim announcement awaited us at the box office: “This performance sold out.”

Cue the sad trombone. Now let it fade and move forward 11 years to my first solo trip to New York.

By that point I’d seen touring companies of Broadway shows in Los Angeles, and religiously followed the Broadway scene through the New York Times’s Sunday Arts & Leisure section (thank you, West Covina Public Library). Broadway tickets were $16 tops in 1975 — it seemed exorbitant at the time — and I saw Anthony Hopkins in Equus, Rita Moreno in The Ritz, and Bob Fosse’s original production of Chicago with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera.

In all the years since I’ve made a theater pilgrimage to New York at least once a year, the exception being these Covid years. I’ve seen between 350 and 400 stage productions, mostly Broadway and several off-Broadway. In some way, it seems, I’m making up for the bruising disappointment of not seeing Funny Girl that summer afternoon in 1964.

One of the joys of live theater is witnessing a performance in real time, unfiltered and immediate. As a theater-goer, you’re a participant, a collaborator. You share the same space, breathe the same air. You wait for those thrilling moments when audience and actors create something together – a kind of magic, a chemical exchange, a perfect dance. For the performers it’s called “being in the zone” — when the audience is so alive that you ride the waves of their energy and responsiveness.

I’ve always loved actors and great acting. I’m grateful for all the pleasure and insight they’ve given me. Here’s are some memorable performances I’ve seen, not in order of preference.

* Philip Seymour Hoffman played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in 2012, two years before his death. He was excellent, but it was Hoffman’s painfully raw performance as the alcoholic son Jamie in Long Days Journey into Night that stays with me. I couldn’t imagine how someone could spill that much blood, figuratively speaking, for eight shows a week and still survive. It felt like you were watching his heart break and his spirit wrenched dry. What could still be left of him when he walked off stage?

* Audra McDonald is great in everything. She has a powerful soprano that’s lush with color and emotion, but she’s also a superb actress. I’ve seen her seven times on Broadway, in Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, 110 in the Shade, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, as Billie Holliday in Lady Emerson at the Bar & Grill, and in Shuffle Along. If I had to choose a favorite, I’d go with Porgy and Bess. Bess is a desperate drug addict – that’s what drives her and crushes her – but until Audra I’d never seen that aspect of her character realized so vividly. The whole show made more sense as a result. I’ve also seen Audra in concert two or three times, and she’s one of the warmest, most generous performers. She loves what she does.

*  Reba McEntire was the original choice for the 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, but when she wasn’t available the producers hired Bernadette Peters. A year later when Reba’s schedule opened up, she replaced Peters and gave a robust, joyful performance that might be the greatest musical-theater turn I’ve ever seen. This wasn’t a Nashville-hitmaker-slash-Broadway-newbie trying her darnedest to convince us she belonged on a Broadway stage. No, this was a consummate pro giving a fully realized performance, so expert in comic timing and stagecraft that had you not known better you’d have sworn she’d spent her entire career in musical theater. Dazzling.

I was lucky to see her closing night, which is always a good time to see a hit show — the emotions run high. Reba’s parents were brought on stage to surprise her, and they were adorably shy and awkward and overwhelmed with pride. The audience was full of Reba fans and theater geeks and Annie repeaters who’d seen her in the show four, five times. Her cast members and half the audience were in tears. Unforgettable.

* Angela Lansbury, George Hearn and Patti LuPone in Sweeney Todd. Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece is the ultimate proving ground for a musical theater performer. The lyrics are sophisticated and brittle, the musical structures complex, the material demanding even for seasoned veterans. Lansbury said Mrs. Lovett was the greatest role she ever played, and if you want a master class in acting please take a look at her stellar rendition of the songs “A Little Priest” and “The Worst Pies in London.” You can rent it from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sweeney-Todd-Demon-Barber-Street/dp/B085LVRHPK.

Hearn was equally remarkable. He wasn’t the original Sweeney (that was Len Cariou), but I saw him in a touring production in 1980 at the Golden Gate in San Francisco, and 20 years later in a San Francisco Symphony concert with Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett. The word that comes to mind when I think of Hearn in Sweeney is “titanic.” He harnessed such power, and expressed so viscerally Sweeney’s tragic thirst for vengeance, that I could feel his grief under my skin, crawling up my back and down each arm. I remember when LuPone and Hearn had taken their final bows, LuPone took a step back, opened her arms with love and admiration and said to Hearn, “Take another bow.” What a pro.

LuPone, you might remember, is the actress who lashed out at an audience member (“Who do you think you are?”) who took a photo of her during her big number, “Rose’s Turn,” in a 2008 revival of Gypsy. Years later she saw someone texting in the first row and snatched the cell phone out of the miscreant’s hand. How can you not love her?

* In Terrence McNally’s Master Class, Zoe Caldwell played opera diva Maria Callas – not the young Callas but the later-in-life veteran giving a master class in singing. Caldwell, an Australian who worked in England before coming to the U.S., had an extraordinary speaking voice – deep and throaty, supple, musical in its variation and texture.

I always hope when I go to the theater (or to a movie) that one of two things will happen: 1) I’ll fall in love, or 2) I’ll see something I’ve never seen before. With Zoe Caldwell, both happened. She was sly, she was diabolical; she was flirtatious, wise and wickedly funny. She encompassed all of that in one performance.

* Spring Awakening. Timing is everything. When I visited New York in the fall of 2006, I heard the buzz about a contemporary rock musical, still in previews, adapted from an 1891 German play about disaffected youth. Sounds strange but it worked brilliantly. My friend and I scored tickets to the last preview before opening night and the ensemble cast – including Jonathan Groff, Lea Michelle and John Gallagher, Jr. – was on fire. The company was so thrilled to be on stage together — in a nascent hit — that you got a contact high from watching them. The energy was electrifying, the audience ecstatic.

There were many more. For these fine performances, I’m also grateful: Vanessa Redgrave in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Gabriel Byrne, heartbreaking in Moon for the Misbegotten; phenomenal Lily Tomlin playing 12 roles in her one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe; Amanda Plummer and Geraldine Page in Agnes of God; Dorothy Loudon in Annie; Rita Moreno, hilarious in The Ritz and riveting in Master Class at Berkeley Rep; Dorothy Collins, The Sound of Music; Dustin Hoffman, in a 1984 revival of Death of a Salesman.

Judith Ivey, Hurlyburly and the best Amanda Wingfield I’ve ever seen in The Glass Menagerie; Mary-Louise Parker, How I Learned to Drive, Proof and The Sound Inside; Judi Dench, Amy’s View; Patti LuPone, Evita, Anything Goes and Gypsy; Mandy Patinkin, Evita; Cherry Jones, Doubt and The Heiress; Jefferson Mays, I Am My Own Wife; Elaine Stritch, A Delicate Balance; Joan Allen, Burn This; Sandy Duncan, Peter Pan; Natalia Makarova, On Your Toes; Alan Cumming, Cabaret; and John Glover, Love! Valour! Compassion!