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My One and Only Favorite Song

01 Monday Dec 2014

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my one an donly loveBy FRANK TERRANELLA

When people ask me what my favorite standard song is, I often reply that I have at least a dozen favorites. For example, I love Make Someone Happy (music by Jule Styne,  lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green), Someone to Watch Over Me (music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin) and What Are You Doing The Rest of Your Life (music by Michel LeGrand, lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman).  I used the last of these to propose to my wife.

But if someone really presses me and won’t take more than one song as an answer, I confess that my all-time favorite is My One and Only Love by English song writers Guy Wood and Robert Mellin.  I think it’s a masterpiece, and judging by the number of recordings of it, many people agree with me.  It has a fascinating tune as it climbs the scale with its first six notes.  But it is the lyric that clinches the deal for me. It starts:

The very thought of you makes my heart sing

Like an April breeze on the wings of spring

And you appear in all your splendor

My one and only love

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms

In the hush of night, while you’re in my arms

I feel your lips so warm and tender

My one and only love

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The poetry is just breathtaking to me. And the words fit the music perfectly. Interestingly enough, these were not the original words to the song.  When Guy Wood wrote the music back in 1947, the lyrics were by Jack Lawrence and the song was called “Music from Beyond the Moon.” It was recorded by Vic Damone in 1948, but was a flop.  The lyrics then went like this:

The night was velvet and the stars were gold

And my heart was young, but the moon was old

I was listening for the music

Music from beyond the moon

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You came along and filled my empty arms

And my eager lips thrilled to all your charms

When we touched I heard the music

Music from beyond the moon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is there any doubt why this original version didn’t make it?  Not only is the lyric nonsensical (beyond the moon, really??), it doesn’t  scan correctly.  Guy Wood wrote six notes as the end of each verse (mirroring the six notes of the beginning of each verse).  The words “Music from Beyond the Moon” require seven notes.

Poor Vic Damone must have felt like the unluckiest guy around when Frank Sinatra recorded the revised version with the Robert Mellin lyric in 1953 and had an immediate hit. Of course, the definitive version of My One and Only Love is the one by Johnny Hartman that he recorded with John Coltrane in 1963.

The bridge of the song is nothing special musically, but again Robert Mellin’s lyrics shine:

The touch of your hand is like heaven

A heaven that I’ve never known

The blush on your cheek whenever I speak

Tells me that you are my own

And finally, the last verse of the Mellin lyric draws inspiration from the second verse of the original Lawrence lyric, but Lawrence had a base hit. Mellin hits it out of the park:

You fill my eager heart with such desire

Every kiss you give sets my soul on fire

I give myself in sweet surrender

My one and only love

Now that’s a song!  It moves me whenever I hear it. It’s not the music of my generation, but then neither is Bach or Beethoven. It’s classic Tin Pan Alley — one page in the rich American Songbook that Jonathan Schwartz has spent a lifetime promoting.  And you don’t have to be over 50 to love it.

Remembering My Wedding Anniversary: A Piece of Cake

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Frank cake

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I have always been puzzled, and a little offended, by the common stereotype of the middle-aged married man who can’t remember his wedding anniversary. I don’t know how anyone can forget one of most important dates in his life. I have never had a problem remembering it.

It was November 24, 1978, and I was 25 years old. It was a typically overcast November day in Barrington, New Jersey. The wedding was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on a Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving. My fiancée had wanted an evening wedding, and the idea was to have it on a day when most people would have off not only the day of the wedding, but also the day after. Friday night also worked well with our plan to take a honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean because cruises typically leave on Saturdays.

Frank aisleI was marrying my college sweetheart, whom I had known for almost four years. We had been engaged for more than a year, and that time had been spent living 100 miles apart at opposite ends of New Jersey. We both were looking forward to moving into our newly-purchased condominium unit in Bardonia, New York, just north of Nanuet in Rockland County.
I was working as an editor on the daily newspaper in Rockland County, the Journal News. But I had just taken the LSATs, and had done well on them and in a year I would begin law school in New York City. My fiancée was working as a proofreader for Price Waterhouse in Philadelphia, and she would soon find a similar job at a big New York law firm.

Living a couple of hours apart meant that we saw each other only on weekends. And my job sometimes made even that impossible. There was no e-mail or instant messaging then, so our only communication was by telephone and letters. Long distance telephone calls were still expensive back then, so letters were the predominant means of communication. Looking back, I think that was actually a blessing because while modern communications are ephemeral, letters are forever. We can still unpack the boxes where the letter stash resides and remember a time before children.

Living apart also meant that my fiancée did almost all of the wedding planning. It was a different time, when men were expected to simply show up with the rings. Everything else was planned by the bride’s family. Even the wedding announcements in the newspapers in those days showed pictures only of the bride. Thank goodness men have made some gains in this area. My son was intimately involved in planning his wedding.

There were a couple of annoying things that emerged from a lack of my input in the wedding plans. For one, the family had arranged that we would go from the church, not to the reception hall, but to a photographer’s studio where a studio portrait could be taken by an octogenarian photographer. This probably took an hour, and so we missed the cocktail hour. And then when we finally got to the reception, there was a different, more annoying, photographer who didn’t know the meaning of the word “candid.” He wanted to pose everything. And our wedding pictures reflect that lack of spontaneity.

But I’m not complaining. Marrying my wife was the best decision I have ever made, and it’s been an almost perfect 36 years. We have two fantastic children, and now a beautiful grandson. I’m a very lucky man. And I celebrate the day it all began.

Starting the Travel Bug Early

13 Thursday Nov 2014

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Bryce loves Barcelona!

Bryce loves Barcelona!

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

When I think of all the places I would like to see before I can no longer travel (or remember traveling), high on the list is Spain. You see, as the song says, I’ve never been to Spain, but I’ve been to Oklahoma. Yet I’ve always wanted to go to Spain. I studied Spanish history in college and have always been fascinated by the Arab influence there. The architecture and the art, not to mention the food and the climate, all beckon to me.

In fact, the only reason I didn’t get there when I did my college summer trek through Europe is that Spain was not covered by the StudentRail pass that allowed me to get on any train in any other European country. Maybe it was because dictator Francisco Franco was still ruling Spain at the time. I don’t know. But whatever the reason, the StudentRail pass didn’t work there, and so I didn’t get to Spain in 1972. And in the years since, I have not had an opportunity (either business or pleasure) to travel to Spain, even though my job causes me to communicate with people in Spain every day.

This is why it is particularly hard for me to take that my 9-month-old grandson Bryce has now been to Spain. His parents got a passport for him and took him along on their recent vacation to Barcelona. My wife and I had volunteered to babysit while my son and his wife traveled, but they decided that they wanted to experience travel with a baby. By all reports, the travel went well. My grandson did not terrorize other passengers on the overnight trip over by screaming or otherwise behaving like the baby he is. Instead, he seemed to take the airplane ride in stride.

Of course, unlike adults, babies take most things in stride. That shouldn’t surprise us because if you think about it, babies experience new things every day — new sights, new smells, new tastes, new sounds. So something new like an airliner is all in a baby’s normal day. At least he didn’t have to wear a costume like he had to do for his first Halloween a week earlier. And a new country where people speak a language other than English is no sweat to someone who doesn’t speak any language yet.

Actually, my wife and I also took a baby on vacation in 1986. The 11-month-old was Bryce’s father and the trip was to Orlando and Disney World. David did just fine back then and so it did not really surprise us that Bryce also did well. But like his father, Bryce will have no memory of his first plane ride. He will have no memory of Spain. And that’s OK. He has a lifetime to go back.

Since like many young parents we took our children on lots of trips when they were very young, we know that Bryce will get tired of being told that he’s been to Spain. He will complain, as our children did, that it doesn’t count if you don’t remember it. And I guess that’s true. And that may be my opportunity. I can volunteer to take a 12-year-old Bryce back to Spain so that I finally get there. I just hope that I’m not too old to remember it.

My (Un) Bucket List

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the realities we over-50s face is the reality of time. We all sooner or later come to view time as a precious commodity. It’s something that we are going to run out of sooner or later. So it’s time to make some hard choices.

For example, of all the places we can travel to in the world, which do we need to make happen, and which are a lower priority? The number of future vacations is limited; it’s time to focus on the important ones.

Which activities do we need to try and which are not important? This is why we have bucket lists.

Drawing up a bucket list requires making some choices. Some things go on the list and some don’t. So for every bucket list, there’s an un-bucket list — a list of things we have not done that we’ve decided to pass on (at least until after we complete our bucket list). In that spirit, I have compiled my own un-bucket list. It’s just mine and I don’t expect that anyone will agree with all of it. But I think it’s a useful exercise to list some things that I have never done that I absolutely don’t have to do before I die:

1. Hike the Appalachian Trail. I have visited every state in which the Appalachian Trail travels and I don’t need to hike it.
2. Golf my age. I’ve played golf and I like it, but I don’t need to shoot a score to match my age. Anyway, I don’t think that human beings live that long.
3. Scuba Diving. This is something I might have done when I was younger, but the boat has sailed, so to speak, on this one.
4. Sky Diving. I don’t care how old George Bush was when he did it. It’s not natural to jump out of an airplane. But then again, it’s not natural to fly. Of course, it is natural to fall, but falling several thousand feet does not strike me as fun.
5. Water skiing. I used to drive a motor boat for others to water ski, but never wanted to do it myself. I still don’t.
6. Surfing. I love to watch, but this is definitely a young person’s sport. My balance and reflexes are not what they used to be.
7. Rock climbing. I swear these people have a death wish.
8. Visit Asia. I’ve visited Turkey and so I’ve technically been to Asia but I have too many other places I want to see in the world before Asia (including Australia, South America and Africa), so if I have to miss a continent, this is the one.
9. Run a marathon. I don’t even want to drive 26 miles any more if I don’t have to.
10. Go to the moon. When I was a kid, a trip to the moon in my lifetime was a given. People spoke of honeymooning on the moon some day. Now, this is one dream that I have come to accept will never be realized, and I’m OK with it. But I’d still like to orbit the earth!

Long Live Old Friends (As Long as We Both Shall Live)

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Frank friend

(From left to right) Skip, Frank and Pat.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There are a group of over-50 actors on Broadway right now in a play called “Love Letters” by A.R. Gurney. It documents the almost-lifelong correspondence between a man and a woman who come to realize that they are soulmates. But like the couple in another play “Same Time Next Year,” they always seem to be out of sync.

The play is performed entirely by actors of a certain age like Brian Dennehy, Mia Farrow, Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen and others. These stars alternate in pairs over the four-month run of the show.

The format of the show is quite simple. On a stark stage with only a table and two chairs, the actors read a lifetime’s worth of letters.Slowly the relationship of the couple becomes clear, and we watch it mature as the years fly by. It’s a premise that is best appreciated by people who have lived more than half a century. Like the actors who bring the correspondents to life, we over-50s know long-term relationships for the long and winding roads they are.

The idea of a best-friend-forever (BFF) is more idealistic than realistic for most of us. BFFs are precious because they are the exception to the rule. For most of us, relationships with childhood friends, elementary school friends, high school friends and even college friends are limited to reunions every few years, if we are lucky. Most BFF relationships do not survive into the right side of 50.

Distance is most often the cause of losing touch. But changed circumstances can also contribute. For example, becoming a parent is often so demanding of our time that we lose touch with our single friends. It’s tough to get together for a drink after work when you’re rushing home to pick up a child from daycare. And even if you can get away, conversation becomes a problem when your focus is on children, and not seeing the latest movies, plays or museum exhibits.

But in rare cases, you can be so in sync with someone that the relationship stays alive. Oh sure the relationship has its peaks and valleys, but with a little effort you stay in touch. It’s actually a lot easier to do that today, what with Facebook, e-mail and instant messaging, although actual contact is still necessary.

Lifelong friends are a precious commodity needing to be nurtured. These days many young people may feel that since they have hundreds of Facebook friends, many of these will be BFFs. But being “friended” on Facebook doesn’t mean you have a friend. A friendship requires that you put yourself out to have human contact on a regular basis.These days that can be as simple as a regular Skype call. If Siri is the only friend you talk to on a regular basis, it’s time to use the phone part of your smartphone, and have a real conversation with someone you used to know.

Recently, I reconnected with an old college friend of mine. We had been in touch sporadically over the years. He lives in Maine, and so distance is a factor. He also hates cities, and so getting him to come to New York is always challenging. Most recently, we were in touch through Facebook. But I had not seen him in 10 years. So I decided that this was a relationship worth nurturing, and if Skip wouldn’t come to New York, I would go to him.

Now truth be told, going to Maine is hardly a punishment. It’s a beautiful place. But it is a LONG car ride since Skip lives near Augusta, which is still a few hours ride after you reach the Maine border. But my wife, Pat, and I chose what we thought might be a good weekend for foliage viewing, and we decided to get in the car and go. It turned out to be a great weekend and Skip and I got a chance to re-connect in a way that you just can’t do electronically.

When I talk to my stepfather about what it’s like to be 91, he tells me that the hardest thing is that all your friends are gone. You see, the forever part of BFF is not really “forever,” but only “for as long as we both shall live.”

It’s tough to lose friends to the grim reaper. But losing friends due to laziness is criminal negligence. Like plants, your friendships need attention, or they wither and die.

As we travel down the road of life after 50, it’s especially important to maintain contact with our old friends. They’ve traveled the road with us and they can bring out the best in us. At the very least, they remind us of our young selves. They remind us of a time when the road ahead seemed long and full of promise. They remind us that life can still be like that, even after 50.

I Have Become My Grandfather. Except I Can Look It Up

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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Frank phone

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Most of us have reached the point in life where names and titles sometimes elude us. I distinctly remember the same thing happening to my grandparents. As a child I would often prompt them with the names that were just out of mental reach

“What’s the name of that actress with the big nose?” my grandmother would say.

“What’s that guy’s name who’s on that TV show I like?” my grandfather would ask.

As a dutiful grandson, I provided the answers.

Well that was then. Fast forward 50 years, and now I’m the one asking, “What’s the name of that movie with Groucho Marx and Marilyn Monroe?”

And I can see them both in my mind’s eye as they play a scene together. But I can’t get back to the title screen. I have become my grandfather.

The difference between me and people my age 50 years ago is that I have in the palm of my hand a 21st-century machine that supplies answers to everything anyone would ever want to know. It has apps like Wikipedia and IMDB, that are like having my own grandson at my beck and call.

My smartphone remembers all the things that I don’t. Just a few years ago, before I had a smartphone, my wife and I would struggle to recall names and titles. I remember many a Sunday afternoon at my mother’s house where all the adults around the table would agonize to recall one important name or another and my son, who was the only one at the time who had a smartphone, would simply look it up and take us out of our misery. Now many of us over 50 have smartphones, and they are fabulous for quickly finding those names that are on the tip of our tongues.

So today, we grandparents don’t have to rely on grandchildren to provide the answers to life’s persistent questions. We can look it up online. But just as using a calculator robbed us of the ability to perform simple mathematics, and having phone numbers programmed into phones made us forget our phone number, I fear that knowing that we can use Siri as a virtual grandchild will make us even more dependent on technology than we are already.

Years ago we were forced to rack our brains to remember things and usually the brain came through — eventually. I can remember many a morning waking up with a name or title that had eluded me the night before. But if we never challenge the aging brain to retrieve information, won’t we eventually lose that ability as well?

So I guess that like everything else, we need to rely on our smartphones in moderation. Leave the less important questions like movie trivia to stew in our brains (overnight if necessary). “Use it or lose it” applies to brains as much as anything else.

And it’s a good feeling to come up with a name or title on your own. Anyway, the day may come when a smartphone (or the Internet) is not available. And maybe when that day comes we will be able to come up with the answer on our own. Or maybe not. Just to be safe, I plan to have my grandchildren around as a backup. You can’t have too many lifelines in life.

Remember PEZ? A Museum Does

13 Monday Oct 2014

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Pez main

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Among the fondest memories of we over-50s is penny candy. It amazes my children when I tell them that when I was a kid, you could actually buy something with a penny. In fact, you could often get two of something for a penny — like Bazooka Bubble Gum. In this age of packaged candy that costs a dollar or more, it is truly remarkable that there was a time when we could cash in an empty bottle, and use the two-cent deposit to buy candy!

And just when my children are telling me that the only use for a penny today is to pay sales tax, I blow their minds when I tell them that back when I was a kid, there was no sales tax. People just paid the listed price. Those pennies were just for candy.

Pez

Well recently I was travelling on I-95 in Connecticut and I passed a sign that advertized a museum of PEZ. Now PEZ is one of those special baby-boomer-era treats like penny candy. For the uninitiated, PEZ is a small brick-shaped candy that comes in several flavors. It started out In Austria in 1927 as a mint for people who wanted to quit smoking. In fact, the word PEZ comes from the German word “pfefferminz” meaning “peppermint.” The famous PEZ dispenser was designed to look like a cigarette lighter.

However, PEZ did not come to America until the 1950s. So we were the first generation of children to experience it, and the novelty of the now-iconic plastic dispenser. I think that it was certainly the dispenser that made PEZ special. They made hundreds of different dispensers with many famous characters on them. Collecting PEZ dispensers is still widespread enough that collectors gather annually for conventions.

Pez dispensers
At the PEZ Museum in Orange, Connecticut they have displays of the many ingenious dispensers that the company has made over the years. My favorites are the dispensers with the heads of presidents of the United States. But there are few licensed characters in the world from Mickey Mouse to Elvis Presley who have not had their heads on a PEZ dispenser.

In addition to the traditional cigarette shaped dispenser, PEZ also marketed guns as dispensers. This allowed kids to shoot candy into the mouths of their friends.

The PEZ museum is actually located at the plant where PEZ candy is made (the dispensers come from China). So if you go on a weekday, you can watch them make thousands of little PEZ bricks in scores of flavors. And of course, you can buy PEZ. Here, the self-guided tour does not just exit through the gift shop, it is integrated into the gift shop. But where else can you find a Thomas the Tank Engine or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles PEZ dispenser?

PEZ and penny candy are among the great treats of a baby boomer childhood. Sadly, only PEZ is still with us. The types of candy that a penny used to buy, if you can still find them, are now a specialty nostalgia item. But even at the current inflated price, a licorice pipe is a treat that I will want to share with my grandson. And I can amaze him with tales of the wondrous things a penny used to buy for a kid.

When a Peek-A-Boo was Simple

02 Thursday Oct 2014

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Frank post

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the greatest changes in the lifetimes of the over-50 set is the Internet. We were all adults when it first became available to us. We all spent our childhoods having to look things up in encyclopedias and almanacs. It’s truly been a blessing for the last two decades and I’m sure that few of us would want to go back to a time without it.

But there is one aspect of the instant gratification we now receive daily from the web that I fear may ultimately be unhealthy for us, particularly those of us of the male persuasion. It’s pornography. I am not talking about pornography in the legal sense. I am just using pornography as a shorthand here for pictures of unclothed people.

Men over 50 grew up in a sexually-repressed society where the only place we could regularly see pictures of naked women was in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. Obtaining these usually involved getting hold of a copy purchased by an adult male because most newsstands would not sell them to minors. So adolescent boys had to work to see pornography. Today, on the Internet, young males have to work to avoid it. (Now I know that there are some women who enjoy viewing pornography as much as men, but that’s the exception rather than the rule in my experience. I think that the limited appeal of magazines like Playgirl among women is evidence of that.)

Back when we over 50s were teens, the most common way for boys to see pornography was if a friend found his father’s stash and invited you over to have a look. It happened rarely. And back then, Playboy showed only (in the words of the song from A Chorus Line) tits and ass. Today, the most graphic pictures are only a few clicks away from any 12-year-old with an Internet connection.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I truly don’t know. There is one school of thought that says viewing porn allows males to vent some sexual energy that might otherwise be visited upon women against their will. And then there are those who say that viewing porn teaches men to see women as sex objects rather than people.

I suppose the truth is somewhere in the middle as usual. Like all pleasures, it’s a matter of degree. Where an occasional trip to a porn website can satisfy the curiosity of a young male, constant exposure to exposed bodies is probably not healthy. Nudists will probably disagree. They will argue that constant exposure is just what we need to take the sexuality out of nakedness. But even if that is possible, do we really want to remove sexuality from nudism?

Anyway, like it or not, it is a fact of life in the 21st century that before a boy can hear about the “facts of life” he’s already seen what makes the opposite sex different. The Internet puts it all within reach of everyone. So we all have to deal with it.

We try to deal with it by restricting the access of minors to the Internet. But that is even less successful than the prohibitions of porn magazine sales to minors back when we were kids. The reason is that the Internet is everywhere, not just on computers, but on phones, on tablets, and now even on watches. A child who wants to see what his favorite movie star looks like naked will probably succeed despite his parents’ best efforts. Nude selfies are not going away anytime soon.

So given that our children will be viewing and even creating pornography, I think the best thing we can do is educate them about what they are doing. Parents and grandparents need to do the difficult work of talking about healthy sex. As with curtailing all potential vices, it’s better to work on decreasing demand rather than restricting supply.

At the end of it all, we may end up with a society with a healthier attitude about sex. Or we may witness the fall of the American Empire. I’m not sure which. Life was sure a lot simpler 50 years ago.

Some Regrets. But Not Enough to Want a Do-over

23 Tuesday Sep 2014

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frankBY FRANK TERRANELLA

One thing about being over 50 is that you have made some choices in your life that have brought you to where you are. You have chosen where to live, how to make a living, who your friends are, who your significant other is, whether to have children with that significant other. Each of those choices represents a branch in your path, a fork in the road. And if you’re like most people, you’ve made some good choices and some bad choices in the last 50 years.

So here you are, on the right side of 50 and it’s only natural to look back and wonder, what if? That is the theme of a show currently playing on Broadway called “If/Then.” It stars Idina Menzel and was written by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey. The show is loosely based on a 1998 film called “Sliding Doors,” which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. The show explores the ramifications of one decision the main character makes. We follow the character down both paths to see the differences depending on whether she leaves a park with one friend or another. It’s quite a cerebral concept for a Broadway musical and while the show has not been a complete flop, it has not been a hit either. It was shut out at the Tonys.

Anyway, I found the idea intriguing to ponder. Every time we come to a fork in the road we alter our life trajectory slightly. That fact was never so poignant as when we read the stories of the 9/11 victims and survivors. In so many cases, seemingly minor decisions made the difference between life and death. Many people would call this fate. But that’s really a cop-out. It implies we have no control over our destiny, when in fact our decisions determine our fate, even if those decisions are made without knowledge of the consequences.

In the course of a 50-plus-year life, the number of decisions is staggering. But our life is the sum of all these choices. I think that just about everyone would like a do-over on some of those decisions. Of course, if you only live once, you’re out of luck. For the mathematically-minded, the formula is: IF YOLO THEN SOL.

But if you believe in reincarnation this is not such a big deal for you. There is one factor tempering the destructive effect of bad decisions. Sometimes two paths can lead to the same place. Often we take the long way around in life. How often do we hear about childhood sweethearts who go their separate ways only to be reunited after their spouses die. There are many paths to each destination so in many cases you can get there from here. That’s why most of us can agree with the sentiment of the Paul Anka song: “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” I call that the definition of a good life.

A Festa, Zeppoles, and a Trip Back to Lodi

15 Monday Sep 2014

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unnamed-2 By FRANK TERRANELLA

My father was born, lived and died in the same house. But that’s a rarity. The odds are that if you’re over 50, you have lived in several different places in your life. I’ve lived in nine.

It’s always interesting to return to the place where you grew up. For some of us, it’s depressing. Inner city neighborhoods that once were great places to live, now are not so much. For others, it’s just a strange experience because so many years have gone by that most of the people we used to know are gone. I moved out of my hometown of Lodi, New Jersey in 1975, the year I got my first job. If that looks like I couldn’t wait to get out, you’re right. But just about every year since, I have returned to the town of my birth to partake in a cultural landmark — an annual Italian street fair called the Festa de San Giuseppe.

unnamedMost people in the New York who have been to an Italian feast have been to San Gennaro in Little Italy. That’s the king of Italian feasts. It has great food and even greater crowds. In fact, the crowds can be compared to a subway car at rush hour. It’s not a fun experience and no one would do it if the food wasn’t so great. By contrast, the smaller feasts like San Giuseppe in Lodi are comfortable and the food is every bit as good.

2014-08-31 18.34.16For the uninitiated, these Italian feasts are basically church fundraisers. Non-Italian churches have carnivals and bazaars every summer; Italian parishes have feasts. In addition to the best pizza and sausage and peppers sandwiches around, Italian feasts always feature a statute of the church’s patron saint on which feastgoers tape paper money. It used to be just dollar bills, but these days you often see 20s and even 50s. Watch for the guy who attaches a $100 bill. He probably is either a fan of The Godfather, or he is the real thing.

Now it would be strange enough if the feast just featured a currency-covered statue. But an important part of just about every Italian feast is the procession of the statue through the streets. That’s for the people who are too sick (or too lazy) to come to the feast. On at least one day during the run, the feast comes to them, accompanies by a band playing music from the old country. The marchers carry the statue right to the doors of willing donors. This procession of the statue through the streets of town is among my oldest memories. It’s quite amazing to a small child for a band to come to your house once a year carrying a statue like the ones you’ve only seen in church. It’s like God opened a traveling branch office — equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

unnamed-1Anyway, the Festa de San Giuseppe was a part of my life for all the 22 years I lived in Lodi. And it has continued to be a part of my life for the almost 40 years since. As my hometown has changed to the point of being unrecognizable in many ways, one thing has remained constant — the feast still happens every Labor Day weekend. And it still looks very similar to the way it looked 50 years ago. I have dragged my wife and children to the Feast for years. Why? Because it provides a sense of continuity to my heritage and to the place of my birth. And that’s important in our transient society. The unchanging ritual is comforting. Labor Day’s ritual used to be to watch Jerry Lewis on the MDA Telethon and go to the Feast. Jerry is gone now, but the Feast carries on. And I hope it does for the rest of my life. The zeppole are out of this world!unnamed-3