Monthly Archives: January 2014

My 50s May Be Behind Me, But I Have the Theater, Front and Center

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

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NY PHIL

BY ANITA JAFFE

I believe I, who is further right of 50 than the rest of you Write Side of 50 contributors, has earned the right to say that getting old has its challenges. That being said, there are some perks I would not give up – such as being able to indulge all my passions for live performance in all its forms, be it at early-morning rehearsals, middle-of-the-day concerts, and every once in a while, an evening gala.

Give me human flesh over digital synthesis any day, and I am in a good mood! So I attend a lot of New York Philharmonic concerts. Here’s a short synopsis of what thrilled me, and what I truly believe will thrill anyone, on the right or left side of 50:

The Philharmonic’s final concert of the fall season was its magnificent performance of Handel’s “Messiah.”  Along with the full orchestra, the Westminster Choir belted out music that soared through the Avery Fisher auditorium.

Then there was the gala opening concert with the cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, who played Osvaldo’ Golijov’s, “Azul”, which had been written just for him. That, combined with a series of tangos by Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla, made it a double-header afternoon.

I had never heard of Piazzolla before (he was an Argentinian tango composer), and this was my first time having the privilege to hear Yo-Yo Ma. I do not know if any of you have ever watched him play. It is not merely his technical virtuosity of working his bow, and the cello’s strings, but his face and body. Nothing is sacrificed to make music.

One piece of music that will be on my list of favorites for ever and ever is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Not just because it is one of the greatest symphonies ever written, but because it will always connect me to my late husband, who cherished this work above all others. So this season, when I saw that Alan Gilbert was conducting his first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, I absolutely had to get a ticket. Again, none of my many recordings of the Ninth compare to experiencing the genius of this symphony played by the New York Philharmonic, and sung by the symphonic chorus of the Manhattan School of Music, including the outstanding soloists.

And in between I caught a little popular music- Thus sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss (better known to us peasants as the music for the movie,”A Space Odyssey”), and a little romance via Strauss’s, “Don Juan”, which featured the retiring concert master and violinist, Glenn Dicterow. The music was beautiful, and beautifully interpreted.

I can hardly await the winter and spring season!

One for the Ages: The ‘Columbia Lady’

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Concepts

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COLUMBIA 2

BY JULIE SEYLER

According to records at the Trademark Office, on March 15, 1926, Columbia Pictures Corporation, a New York corporation with an address at 1600 Broadway (home these days to a luxury condo on Times Square and the M&M store), filed an application to register a trademark. The trademark consisted of the words COLUMBIA PICTURES laid within a circle, inside of which held a helmeted woman looking as if she hailed from the wars of ancient Greece. She is wearing a breastplate, and holding a torch, as if she is running in the Olympics. We see her from the waist up – a reflection of herself because her gaze falls to the left. Columbia Pictures claimed it had been using the trademark on moving pictures since January, 1924.

By 1936, she had grown up. Her helmet has disappeared, and the “Columbia Lady” is  proudly ensconced on a pedestal. She has grown taller and curvier – no longer a Tomboy playing war games. In her draped toga a la Madame Gres, she is our hostess beckoning us in to the world of motion picture films. She is still holding a torch, but it is lit ala the Statue of Liberty. She and the COLUMBIA trademark stand in front of a blazing, rising sun. Her gaze has turned right as she heralds the start of a movie by Columbia Pictures.

frames 251

And she’s still here, looking as spring-like as she did 78 years ago. Unlike us right-sided 50 year olds, the “Columbia Lady” never gets old, and never frets about the unexpected changes that descend as one marches forward to meet the next surprise about what “aging” really entails. So here’s to the movies, and the lady who truly is immortal – or for at least as long as Columbia Pictures renews her trademark.
frames 250

Pill Bottles Keep Our Pills Tamper (and Open) Proof

06 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by in Confessional

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margo bottle

There’s nothing “easy” about this seal.

BY MARGO D. BELLER

Many years ago, when my uncle and aunt would visit, they would come to breakfast with one of those large pill organizers, the kind with seven compartments labeled with the day of the week. They had to be careful to take the right pill in the right order at the right time, and make sure the right person took the right pill.

I used to chuckle at this. Now my husband and I do the same thing.

I’ve learned that there’s now nothing as mortifying to someone who’s young at heart as trying to open a pill bottle.

When MH and I travel, we have a smaller version of the seven-day pill organizer. I can fit many days’ worth of pills in those compartments – daily vitamins, calcium supplements, iron pills, thyroid pills. But we also need separate bottles for MH’s joint pills, and our fish oil supplements.

It’s a lot of pills.

In our youth, we got by with a daily vitamin. Then I had to start taking the thyroid pill. Then, over time, I needed iron for anemia; calcium for the bones. I started us on fish pills to make up for the fish I don’t often make for supper. MH’s joint pills came after a friend of ours told him how much they helped her sore knees. MH, with his own sore knees, swear they are helping.

MH and I are in reasonably good health, but it can be a struggle to get down some of the larger pills. It’s all over-the-counter stuff, except for the thyroid medicine.

All, however, have varying degrees of hassle attached to trying to get the bottles open the first time.

I understand it’s important to keep drugs, even vitamin supplements, from being compromised, and away from small children. People have died from tampering with everyday stuff, so make it harder to open the bottle.

Still, when I try to wrap my hands around a “tamper-proof, child-proof” cap, I want to scream.

The other day I had to open another new bottle of the thyroid pills. Press down, turn the cap – I’m used to that now. I can do it. But this time, there was something else under the cap – an “easy open” seal.

This was no easy-open seal.

Bad enough I have to turn to MH for help in opening jars that prove resistant to my efforts. That’s humbling. But being unable to pull apart an “easy open” seal? What the hey?

Finally, in frustration, I pushed down hard enough to break the seal – not exactly the way it was intended to be opened – and I could get to the pills.

It’s not just pills. Try to open a sealed, “easy-open,” package of cheese or dried cranberries lately? It’s ain’t easy, and won’t get easier.

I know there is no magic pill to restore the suppleness of a younger body, or to help me lose weight without eating less. But I could sure use one to strengthen my hands.

Presuming I could get the bottle open.

A Farewell to Uncle Jimmy

03 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Confessional, Men

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bob jimmy

BY BOB SMITH

I always look forward to The New York Times year-end edition of its Sunday magazine, which is devoted to reviewing the sometimes fascinating lives of notable people who died during the year. But everyday people also died this year, and in their own ways, their lives are just as special.

Take Uncle Jimmy, my wife’s godfather. Jimmy was 98, or 99, depending on whom you ask, when he passed away in November. (He thought he was 99, aiming for triple digits in March 2014.) He was first cousin to Maria’s mother on the paternal side, and first cousin to Maria’s father through his mother. I think that’s right, but I’ve never fully mastered the intricacies of old world Italian village relationships. The name on his birth certificate was Vincent, but everyone called him Jimmy. No one knows exactly why.

He was compact, and mostly bald, with an impish grin and an infectious laugh. It seemed as if Jimmy was always happy. He raked the leaves, and weeded the beds around his house until his early 90s, when bouts of dizziness, and occasional neck pain prevented him from continuing. Jimmy liked to tell how his father had died, at the age of 89, after falling out of a tree. He had climbed up to prune it, probably over his wife’s objections. But it was, after all, his tree.

“Who else was gonna do it?” Jimmy observed with a shrug and a smile.

He loved the ocean, and fishing from the jetty for scrappy rockfish that we would cut in chunks, dredge in flour, and fry in olive oil to a cinnamon-brown crisp. When things went wrong, like the day I was fishing with him and my line unspooled and got hopelessly tangled, Jimmy had the perfect words for it:

“It’s all wickety wackety. You can’t fix that. Cut the line!”

After his wife died, he refused to go back to the shore house because it held too many memories. So for the last 10 years or so, we could only see him at the home he shared in Nutley with his daughter (now retired herself), and her husband. Every time we visited, Jimmy would sit us down at the kitchen table, pull out the bottle of Drambuie, and insist that I drink shots, even if it was 10 in the morning. He happily joined me for at least one or two, at least until last year when his hands shook so much he spilled most of the liqueur before it got to his mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” he laughed. “Wouldja lookit that. I’m shaky! I got the shakes! Hey, what’re you gonna do?”

He would shrug, and wobble the short shot to his lips anyway, taking a gingerly sip.

“Don’t get old,” he told me, waving his arthritis-twisted finger in mock solemnity. “Have another shot, go ahead!”

The night he died, he complained of head and chest congestion, but he refused to go to the hospital because he hated those places. He just took cold medicine and went to bed early. He awoke at 4 a.m., coughing. He took another dose of cough syrup, and fell back asleep. Between then and 9 a.m., when his daughter went to check on him because he’d missed his usual coffee time, Jimmy had stopped breathing.

The wake was a small, and surprisingly genial affair. After all, he’d lived a long, happy life without major illnesses, and died peacefully, at home, in his sleep.

“I’ll sign a contract for that right now,” was a much-heard mantra during his wake and funeral.

It’s wickety wackety without you, Jimmy. You were well-loved.

I’m pouring the Drambuie now.

A Night at the Museum: Martinis, a Bald Eagle, and Wilted Lettuce

02 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Art, Confessional

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Window reflection at the Museum of Modern Art.

We reflect at the Museum of Modern Art.

BY JULIE SEYLER

A few days before Christmas, Lois braved the airless space, and masses of bodies, that defines Times Square, and met me at the Museum of Modern Art. I had dangled the prospect of seeing the Ileanna Sonnabend show, which had just opened. Sonnabend was a pioneer, and premier gallerist, who had an eye for seeing: she discovered Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. To make the prospect a bit sweeter, I added in a promise of a long schmooze, and a martini, after the “culture” part of the evening.

But we reversed the schedule.

I was waiting for Lois to walk uptown from Penn Station at The Modern, the bar in the museum, and as soon as Lois walked in, I could tell from the look on her face that before any art excursion, a cocktail was necessary.

So our intended 100 minutes of art and 15 minutes of cocktails was turned inside out to 15 minutes of art and 100 minutes of cocktails.

But those 15 minutes of art were worth it. The galleries were empty and we had an unfettered bird’s eye view of Rauschenberg’s bald eagle assemblage from 1959 called “Canyon:”

Rauschenburg's bald eagle

It turns out that that bald eagle spawned a mini legal drama when Sonnabend died because the IRS valued the piece at $65 million, and her estate valued the piece at 0. The estate did not have the bucks to pay the taxes on it, and could not sell the piece to pay the taxes because of the bald eagle. It’s endangered and therefore, dead or alive, it cannot be sold. A settlement was reached. Taxes would be forgiven if the piece was donated to a museum. Now it is owned by MoMA.

Meanwhile, while gazing at Canyon, we met Nelson, nelson a guard at the museum who led us on a mini-tour of the show. He pointed out a piece of sculpture by Giovanni Anselmo, which features a head of fresh lettuce.

After we passed it, Nelson turned to Lois, and said, “Oh no, look what you did!”

There was a ring of messy sand all disarrayed around the granite base – courtesy of Lois’s misstep:lettuce

But he was only kidding. It’s part of the “performance” art. As the head of fresh lettuce wilts, it seems granite dust is released and, of course, viewers will interact with the dust.

Then the announcement came on that the museum was closing, and there was still a whole bunch to see. Our attempt to charm the guards to let us stay for five minutes more was useless, so we decided to grab a bite to eat at Trattoria Dell’Arte, or as Lois likes to call it, “the nose place,” because it is decorated with paintings of famous noses.

It’s delicious, the pours are generous, and every once in a while you score a free glass of Prosecco, or perhaps some fresh chocolate chip cookies. We split spaghetti carbonara and meatballs, and when we finished the meal, the waiter brought over two glasses of limoncello. We toasted each other, and headed into the balmy and hectic streets to walk way down there to 34th Street so Lois could catch her train.