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Hang in there, you…
April 2, 2015
Tough times for Folkies Dept: First she fended off Taylor Swift’s attempt to make a movie of her life. Now comes word that Joni Mitchell was hospitalized this week. The prospect of losing the ultimate artist is too dispiriting to contemplate. We love you, Joni–now get up and get back to work.
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Oscar Bait!
January 2, 2015
It isn’t true for every child that grows up in a large family, but it was true for me: I wanted to be seen. There I was, a middle child (one of ten) convinced of his invisibility, and fighting like hell to rectify the injustice. From where I sat, recognition came either by way of…
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Mike Nichols, 1931-2014, Director
November 23, 2014
The very first play I saw on Broadway was the original production of D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game. By then, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy had left, and been replaced by E.G. Marshall and Maureen Stapleton. No matter: it was still a once-in-a-lifetime evening watching those two deliver performances so perfect they made me weep….
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Tim Hauser 1941-2014, Founder of the Manhattan Transfer
October 19, 2014
Photo: Hauser, left, with Siegel, Paul and Bentyne “Boo-bop-boooo-bop…” It was all I needed to hear–til this day those first four notes of “Tuxedo Junction” can still elicit the pleasure it did when the Manhattan Transfer released it on their debut album back in 1975. Hearing this matchless quartet for the first time was a…
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Vacations like other people
August 25, 2014
The sea air is a drug that addles reason. How else to explain the amnesia that comes over me every summer on the first bike ride back to the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island? I forget that its approach involves two short steep hills—the first brings you up to Little Ram’s Head Island, a…
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Robin Williams, Funny Boy 1951-2014
August 11, 2014
We had a few things in common. Both of us were sons of the midwest (he hailed from Chicago; I was born in Cincinnati). Both of us were born on July 21. About the last–I once worked as an extra on one of his films. It was Cadillac Man, and I was thrilled, though not…
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Horace Silver, Jazz Supernova 1928-2014
June 19, 2014
Thanks to Horace Silver, the magical moment occurred shortly after I first moved to New York, one of many that effectively, resoundingly, shot down (or made me re-consider) all my country Midwestern notions about…everything. I’d say I was hooked from the moment I heard that sneaky vamp. “Come on Home” was the first cut on…
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Scene of the Crime
June 7, 2014
It looks like a hole in the world. Among many other thoughts, that’s what struck me when I finally got a chance to see the 9/11 Memorial Plaza few weeks back. Symbols exist for a reason, and the architects of our country’s newest grief repository have hit on just the right one; it’s hard not…
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Separated at Birth
May 25, 2014
Melky Cabrera… …and Donna McKechnie (all roads lead to musical theater, dontcha know…)
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