Happy Mother's Day

To the mothers in my life and everywhere:  this is your day.  Have chocolate, eat eggs and potatoes, watch hockey and baseball, have a nap, do something you've really wanted to do all week.  

My mothers:  Adair, gone so long; Veda, mother of the fantastic Ken; Fran, Midge, Barbara, Kathy, Jean, Linda, Shelly, Mary Beth, Bern, Jackie, Jill, Judith, Cathy, Mary Ann, Lucy, Lisa, Julie, Erica, Jennifer, Karen, Millie, Marilyn, Nancy, Jane, Linda, Eileen, Maryann, Jane, Marda, Linda, Candace, Yvonne, Barbara, Denise, Jan.  

A word about Ken.  As you know, he is the best.  He's given us fresh evidence today.  A lovely MD card, complete with his 'faces'.  And a gift card to Studio One, my hair cutting place, just down the street in Cherry Hill Plaza, across from the True Value Hardware.  I have an appointment for a cut/color on Thursday and Ken did what we have long wanted men to do:  he listened to me and took action based on what he heard.  It is awesome.  He is awesome.  I'm actually not sure I deserve this, but I appreciate him totally today and, hopefully, every day.   

Today, we begin prep in earnest for our Dutch artists, who arrive May 25 and leave June 14.  We will be housing them in the Larson/Stadtfeld wing, with us in an outpost on the ground floor.  Ken will be gone during the week pretty consistently, and actually we will be gone on all but one of the weekends they are here.  They are making a movie that will be part of the 400th Hudson up the River anniversary celebration in the fall.  Having them here will be very interesting and I am looking forward to it.  But today, we think very concretely about having people in the house and how we can allow them a space.  

We played yesterday, going down to the USMA in West Point for a Patriot League baseball playoff.  Army beat their opponent Holy Cross soundly the first game, but lost on errors and pitching in the second.  The rubber game is today and it will go on without us.  As a lifelong peacenik, my affection for the USMA is a little surprising, but the campus moves me in ways I cannot articulate.  That we live so close and that it is so accessible is but one of the many pleasures of the Hudson Valley.   

A last word about B & H Dairy, on 2nd Avenue between 7th and 6th Street in Manhattan's East Village:  go for breakfast, go for lunch, go for dinner, go for a snack, go for soup, go for eggs and potatoes (a theme here?), just go.  We were in town for The Public's production of "The Singing Forest," ended up staying the night on Friday and ate dinner, then breakfast at the restaurant (a grand word for it).  We would have gone back for lunch on Saturday, but it seemed a little excessive.  Their Lima bean soup inspired Ken to make a pretty good facsimile (let's hear it for fresh dill), and we had toasted cheese sandwiches based on their model.  

Enjoy the day. 

In celebration of Brahms

Not long ago, Brahms was just another name in a list of distant, uninteresting composers whose music appealed to many, but not to me.  Ah, but things change, and the Brahms German Requiem is now among my all time favorites.  I mean all time, and I have spent a fair amount of time on this earth.  The concert April 26 has taken its place among the high points of my long-ish life along with the commencement at Hill Auditorium in 1983, our wedding in the Arboretum on 08/08/80 and the day I got a job offer from Steve Poskanzer in June, 2006.  

Ken, my good friend Kathleen from Michigan and my good friend Dr. Marsha from Delhi were in the full house (well, church) who enjoyed (I hope and think) the concert, which featured a large orchestra (maybe 8 violins, led by the talented Carole Cowan), and the combined Community College Chorale and the Concert Choir.  The GR has 7 movements, and is about the human condition.  It is based in the Bible, but has lessons for us all:  "Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (For all flesh is like the grass)."  I started out loving movement 1, which we sang in the fall, but then moved to enormous enthusiasm about movement 6, the climax ("Tod, wo ist dein Stachel," "Death, where is your sting?"), then came to an appreciation of 2, with its sequentially soft and blasting statements about Fleisch.  Movement 5 also resonated, with its line "...wie einen seine Mutter trostet," "...as one whose mother comforts him."  

I think I knew this piece better than I have in the past, because enjoying performing is all about knowing whatever you are performing.  I focused on Ed Lundergan, our enormously talented conductor.  I listened to Kate, the most talented alto.  I opened my mouth and sang and smiled and loved each of the 90 or so minutes the whole concert took.  At one point, inverting the saying 'from God's mouth to my ear', the sentence appeared full blown in my mind:  I am the luckiest person on this (transitory) earth.  

I hope you all 'rabbit, rabbit-ed' this morning.  Happy May.  The end of the semester and the 2008-2009 academic year.  

There's a place for us...

We saw West Side Story yesterday, in a rainy, chilly, but crowded New York.  Among the huge throng of people whose lives were affected by the 1961 movie, and for whom in 1957, when the original was on Broadway we were in the outposts of Michigan and Wisconsin, we were very excited.  Thanks to Barbara's Christmas gift, we had pretty good seats - a 2nd balcony center - a good vantage point to witness the best part of the production (and of the movie for that matter) - the dancing.  The dancing was glorious, riveting, moving.  To watch the Jerome Robbins' choreography brought to life was wonderful.  However, I found the overall production to be only intermittently wonderful.  The dancing was great.  The music, with a big orchestra, was immediate and fresh.  But the set was only a C+.  We have been spoiled rotten with unbelievably great sets.  The great weakness of the movie was Tony and Maria - Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood.  In spite of the reviews to the contrary, I did not see that this production corrected that flaw.  The two young people who played Tony and Maria were somewhat more vivid than the vanilla players of the movie, but not much.  There was medium chemistry between them.  They made the problems with the book more obvious.  And the actors who played Riff and Bernardo:  where are you Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris?  So I'd say the production was a B-.  Ken would give it a B.  This is compared to South Pacific, which for me was a big fat A+!  

I'd like to welcome my sister Fran to the online world.  She got hooked to the Internet this past week.  I know once she gets familiar with it, she will love it.  I'm waiting to give her a tour of my favorite websites.  

Ken managed to drop himself flat on his back in the creek that lies between our house and the campus this week.  He was walking to see the exhibit at the Dorsky Museum and thought the path through the woods was too boring. Ever the Sacajawea, entered the woods at the wide part.  It was wet, but he's creative.  Then he came to the creek, which is much wider at that point than at the path.  He found a branch that he thought he'd use to pole vault over it.  Of course, it broke, and down he went, feet and arms akimbo.  He was wet through and through, although he saved his phone and was close enough to home to get dry clothes.  He then came back to campus too late to see the exhibit, which closed that day.  He came up to my office laughing about his adventure, but I was ever the scold and only envisioned what could have happened and thankfully did not.  As he says, I was never a boy. 

April is a busy month at a college and this April is no exception.  There is the bad kind of busy - the endless conversation and documentation about our financial crisis and the decisions we have made to weather it.  And then there is the good kind of busy - the wrapping up of the semester by students with performances.  I am lucky enough to be involved in two kinds of student performances.  I am one of two dramaturgs with the Theater Department's production of Blood Wedding, the Frederico Garcia Lorca play about a very bad wedding day.  I actually made my TV debut on the local On Campus show, talking with the talented director Anita Gonzalez.  I am also organizing and will moderate a panel of faculty and a student about the play before the production on April 19.  I am among the altos in the Community College Chorale's performance of the Brahms' German Requiem on April 26 at St. Joseph's Church in New Paltz.  This is BIG, MAJOR choral music and I am loving singing it.  To say that I am lucky to have these opportunities is about the biggest understatement of all times.  If you are a New York reader, get thee to one of these occasions.  Kathy is coming in from Michigan for the German Requiem.  

To cycle back to New York City, I must say a word about B & H Dairy.  It is a restaurant in the East Village that we found through our research into vegetarian places.  It is vegetarian/vegan, with the addition of a few fish items.  It was Jewish, I'm sure, but now its staffers, at least, are the New York polyglot of Latino and eastern European, all lively and visibly hard working.  It is a long skinny place with a counter and one four top table and maybe five tables for two.  The distance between the counter and the grill/working spaces may be enough for a man to stand sidewise, but probably not.  I cannot move along the back of the customers at the counter without banging into them.  It is cheap and very tasty, with 5 vegetarian soups, the most fabulous potatoes.  We've eaten mostly breakfast there and lunch yesterday:  two bowls of soup, a serving of mac and cheese and the biggest egg salad sandwich you have ever seen and a glass of freshly brewed iced tea.  The bill:  $15.  No joke.  I want to come back again and again to eat everything on the menu, which includes veggies in cabbage leaves.  It's a place that my sisters Fran and Midge would love.  

So Happy Easter to all of you.  I hope the bunny is good to you.

New Paltz in the News

Dear reader - go to the SUNY New Paltz url - www.newpaltz.edu - for a link to the New York Times front page story about public colleges.  Pictures and everything!  

It's 8 degrees out there this morning.  Brrrr!

Rabbit, rabbit

Happy March!  Wonderful, lovely, March.  Ours will come in like a lion, but hey, it's March!  

A shameless plug

I met Sally and Mark last night at Ulster Community College for a free showing of a lovely little film, "Gospel Hill."  Look here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_Hill.  It offered Giancarlo Esposito, long a favorite of mine, up close and personal!  We talked with him and admired his sweet, good natured movie.   The movie is available on Amazon.  Ask for it at your local Blockbuster's or wherever you get your videos.  It reminded me of of bits and pieces of some of my favorite flicks:  Frozen River, Sunshine State, Gran Torino.  It was my first visit to UCC, which is seriously in the country.  This campus materializes out of a dark country night.  Sally and Mark live in Rosendale, just around the corner.  They are movie lovers too, and are game for a late invitation.  How cool.  

Ken has been away most of this week, which is unusual lately.  Good in that it means the business is doing well; bad in that I've gotten used to having him home and it's desolate without him.  But we are flexible and can roll with whatever comes our way.  

Have a great Friday and weekend.

Food Obsessions

As a foodie, although that's way too benign a word for my lifelong relationship with food, I have had one food obsession after another.  There is a new one heading my way:  sushi.  My standard saying about sushi has been along the lines of "Oh, I don't eat food like that - in little bites.  Too, fussy."  What I really meant was "not enough food."   But at SUNY New Paltz, my favorite colleagues Shelly and Mary Beth eat sushi and it's so pretty!  So neat.  And another of my long term food obsessions is with ginger, and look, there's little ribbons of ginger (pickled?  cooked?) with sushi.  And then there is the chop stick thing.  We have been, "oh, could we have silverware" people at various Asian restaurants (too old for chop sticks, I guess), and it wasn't until our lovely afternoon of eating in Flushing last August that I committed myself to chop sticks.  No more forks for me!  So I'm looking for reasons to use chop sticks.  (Another parenthetical statement - in every chop stick opportunity, I start out well and my physical skill disintegrates.  What's up with that?)  

We were in Grand Haven for Ken's birthday and were having a day with a late breakfast and an early dinner.  No way was there not going to be lunch, so in Meijer's, I find packages of sushi and it's perfect!  Real food, so I do not feel deprived, but small bites of food - and good food.  Rice (another long term obsession), veggies, and an opportunity to use chop sticks.  What a deal!  

Since February 6, I have had opportunity to eat sushi 3 more times.  Have you noticed that sushi has become like pizza - originally quite exotic, now so much in the culture that you forget it was not invented right here in America?  I had sushi on Monday night, after the WONK meeting and before the first read-through of Blood Wedding.  I had sushi for lunch on Friday, eating it at the brown bag open forum for budget ideas.  Yesterday, I ate sushi at the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle - brown rice, veggies and a yummy soy-based ginger sauce.  Here we have it, a food obsession coming my way.  Will it be enduring or short-lived?  Full-blown or partial?  Stay tuned, dear readers.

We saw The American Plan yesterday at the Friedman Theater on 47th Street.  We bought tickets (relatively) cheaply, and were in the front row!  I mean we could see pores in faces.  Written by Richard Greenberg, it stars Mercedes Ruehl and Lily Rabe as well as some others I had not heard of.  Very, very interesting.  We saw Becky Shaw a few weeks ago, and those two in conjunctions are rattling around in my brain.  Both very American stories.  Both about love and deceit.  Mercedes Ruehl came out and answered questions for a half hour after the performance.  She is amazing.  We then went to a new restaurant that I can see becoming part of our standard group - Ali Baba on 34th between 3rd and 2nd.  It's Turkish and, unusually so, it has a vegetarian section.  Fabulous bread, another of my long, long, enduring obsessions.  

New York was wonderful as ever.  We saw three people we knew!  Itty from the Art Department and Patricia, who teaches Spanish and is a fellow Blood Wedding dramaturg, on the train and Kim from the Community College chorale in Whole Foods.  What does it mean that we run into people we know in New York?  

It's snowing now (no, no, no more snow!) and we'll head up to Hudson to have lunch with Maggie and Vince, then to an Oscar party with Maryann and Glenn.  

Life is good; and March is in our sights.