Jersey Boys Again

I may have written something here when I saw Jersey Boys in Washington on tour.  At the time, I was pleasantly surprised, having gone to the National Theater with low expectations. The story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons was just enough of a plot to carry all the fabulous musical numbers. You also had the feeling that you were right there with the performers in whatever venue they were on stage, much as the Broadway production of Master Class some years ago re-created Callas singing in La Scala.

It permitted me along with much of the rest of the audience to walk out of the theater humming, in this case, quite familiar rather than new-found tunes.  Last night I saw the new movie of the same name in a perfect venue, the wonderful Uptown Theater in Cleveland Park, DC.  It was fun, and for the most part, moved well, but it didn't strike me that it was as well-assembled as the stage show had been.

Now we are not as willing to accept the scrubbed scenes in movie musicals the way we were when such classics as Singin' in the Rain were appeared. Director (and producer) Clint Eastwood seemed to have unbelievably stagey sets for even locations in not-so-pristine locales, such as, well, New Jersey, and downtown New York too, for that matter. The story did take too long getting going, until it takes off when the group finally encounters Bob Crewe, who will be their producer and songwriting support for group composer and singer Bob Gaudio, for the first time in the Brill Building.

Crewe, incidentally, didn't come off half so swish in the show as he does in the picture.  A point for accuracy here, I presume. The two best acting jobs are turned in by the amazing Christopher Walken as the reigning Mafia don, and Vincent Piazza as the least-talented member of the group but the most assertive and ultimately failed leader. John Lloyd Young was Frankie in several of the stage companies--possibly the original--and he's passable. In that the songs themselves are the original recordings, I believe, it's hard to tell how much his singing falsetto is truly at the level of the real Frankie.

So once again a movie has opened up a stage show, and I for one found that the result was all right but didn't generate for me the excitement of the live performance.  I haven't seen all that many of these "music musicals" but did take in Million Dollar Quartet last year, I believe, on Broadway. This thinly-plotted vehicle drew on one real day when Johnny Cash, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins happened to turn up at Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in Nashville. The plot focuse on how all of them, including Sam, was figuring on where their next main chance would come from and how they would seize it.

In the end, this show was mainly a vehicle for the music and at the end of the show, the music went on past the finale for quite some time. I'm not sure of the other similar shows but I still favor some more of a play in the theater and when we get to the movies, alas, the flimsiness of the plot may detract from even as musically delightful an outing as Jersey Boys.

World Cup and World Series

I spent an absolutely delightful day Saturday at Yankee Stadium. Not bad, since I've never been a Yankee fan. Not really a true Yankee hater, either. But I still have some liking for the O's, built up during my ten years of driving up to Baltimore to see a few games a season on a shared series. Alas, I did pick the really bad years for the franchise, but I still enjoyed their coming back after losing the first two to the Bombers and leading right from the start. (They even went on to shut out the Yanks Sunday.)

Baseball on a nice -- actually, perfect -- day is wonderful. You watch for the good plays, the exciting turnarounds. They also honored Tino Martinez with a plaque in what is now called Monument Park -- it had so much more significance when the three monuments--Ruth, Gehrig, and Miller Huggins -- were right there in center field and Joe D (never saw him, alas) or the Mick had to retrieve a ball from behind them. I'm also not sure that anyone but the true greatest belong there and to me, that would be the Babe, Lou, Joe D, and the Mick.

It was also great to see a lot of O's shirts--some for Manny or Adam or Wieters--but more than a few Cals and Brookses.  Lots of Orange in the crowd, as it turned out, because it was Syracuse U day at the park. The O's played well, as they have been capable of doing for the past two or three seasons. Manny hasn't settled down, he's still only 20. But they have the makings of a steady club--Adam Jones, Markakis, JJ Hardy, Witers when he comes back, next year, I think.

The exciting part of the weekend was having the Nats turn it around mid-series against their tormentors, the Braves, and take the last two games after suffering painfully close losses in the first two. It would be great to have two contending teams right around here.

So then I watched the U.S. v. Portugal encounter in the true jungle. Getting beyond the World Cup environment--the FIFA sleazebags who almost make the Olympic Committee look good, the horrible waste of Brazils' building all those needless stadia--the match was wonderfully enthralling to watch. Lots of good play--plenty of room for improvement on the U.S. side although they did play well enough for most of the game. 

I was surprised that after playing total defense for the last few minutes, that they had no one around the defense area in front of the goal when the Portuguese attacked. Did they forget about keeping a close watch on Christiano Ronaldo because he had been "not a factor" until the very final seconds? I would berate Klinsmann for that egregious and disastrous oversight, or maybe the team captain, too.

The organized attack that Portugal mounted was also impressive; I was amazed that for most of the game, it was more or less ineffective. I'm afraid that the wrenching tie (which the U.S. would have readily settled for before the match) may still inspire overconfidence among U.S. supporters. Anyone is crazy should they underestimate everyone's most traditional opponent: the Germans.

Fathers and Sons

Yes, it is the title of a fine novel by Turgenev, which I did read quite some time ago, but it merely provides a title for my ruminating about my father this Father's Day. (This novel is likely the only place where you will find yourself having to learn what nihilism means.) A weekend visit to my uncle, now nearly 96, made me think back about so many things, including my father. As for my father, I took his presence for granted for years on end, until one day he wasn't there any more. And that, amazingly, was 27 years ago, since he still looms large in my sights.

Since he was an outsized personality--literally and figuratively--it's taken some time for me to wrestle with both him and his image. Over time, I understood that I had been conditioned to hold the view of him that the world saw: he was engaging, funny, charming, a man's man, and impossible to equal. At least, that was how I saw him as I grew up and until I was forced to gaze more deeply much much later, as Frank Sinatra was brainwashed by the North Koreans in The Manchurian Candidate to regard Raymond Shaw, as played by Laurence Harvey, as a hero when in reality he was anything but.

I'll start with his having been a head counselor, a role he easily filled for life. That meant he assumed he was in charge. He was strong and confident--I always felt that this persona resulted from his early success as a swimming champ. (That was even more of an accomplishment because he apparently took to the water at an early age to overcome an early and blessedly light case of polio.) He had a good sense of humor--though it did include plenty of teasing that could get on you. He was incredibly popular, in that high school definition of the word. Very few didn't like them, and I have to admit that those few--when I happened to meet them, which was rarely, because they were few--were not a very likeable bunch.

Although he loved comedians, including W.C. Fields, he was the opposite of WC in that he enjoyed both kids and dogs, and his liking was invariably reciprocated.  Actually, he liked animals of all kinds, and I remember my Uncle Bill telling me how they had rabbits and other animals at the old house where they grew up at 68 Buena Vista Ave., Yonkers. When he returned to Yonkers, he remained something of a mythic figure. There he would always be "Hooks"--who retained a perfect crawl stroke in the water, had directed amateur shows at the JCC, was a respected member who occasionally attended his Masonic lodge, and would likely have been even more involved in that community had we not moved to Mt. Vernon when I started school. He did abjure titles--he might've headed a number of boards and organizations, including the lodge, had he been willing to spend any major amount of time at it. In this, I would like to think I've at times emulated his example.

That move to Mt. Vernon was something for which I was always grateful. The schools in MV were way better than those in Yonkers and I had great experiences growing up. Harold commuted to New York--he always worked within three or four blocks of Grand Central--and never got that connected to MV, except for when they got him to serve on the temple board. In that he was unlike many of his friends in not being well-off, he served one short term and quickly exited that board. Afterward he warned me never to join a shul until I found out if they had building plans.

He was Groucho's kind of clubman in a way, since he rarely sought out membership but was sought after by members of the Lambs and Players, as well as the N.Y. Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League. (He fit a slot they needed--a board member who was not a member of B'nai B'rith.) That he resembled an Irish cop probably enabled him to escape being ticketed several times, and allowed him  to be invited to join the New York Athletic Club, which he declined, not liking any possibility that he was a token.

He travelled to California often, during his many years with both AFTRA and SAG (they merged about two years ago, only about 50 years after the idea was first broached and only when merger became critical to the survival of both actors' unions). This made it possible for him to keep in touch with the several parts of his family located in Southern California, including my imperious Aunt Ruth, who invariably assumed that the purpose of his being in L.A. was to visit her, and two of my several grown-up (when I was in grade school) first cousins, Bob, a savvy doctor then living in Malibu Beach in high style, and Herb, a sage lawyer who had gone from the Atomic Energy Commission in DC to working for a nuclear reactor builder based in San Diego.

He maintained contact with many members of his family, something in which I've followed his example. As with so many of his generation, he never spoke of what must have been searing experiences in both the Depression (he graduated from law school in 1932, in case today's grads think they have it rough) and World War II. To use one of his lines, he "came on like Gangbusters" because you never failed to notice when he entered a room. He encouraged me to study rather than go out for sports, which in retrospect was wise in view of my limited athletic prowess.  He was stalwart in supporting my mother, who developed MS, which limited her mobility for 30+ years. He made sure she accompanied him on many of their trips.

He had no patience so despite what most who knew us thought, he could not teach me to swim or to do anything else. As it turned out, his friends, many of whom were my counselors at camp, couldn't either, but I never figured out why I never learned to breathe correctly when swimming until I taught myself about 40 years later.  But I accompanied him to swim meets, where he was usually meet director, armed with the governing whistle round his neck, and comfortably in charge as always. In a way, this set me up to be a college sportswriter, and to a lifelong enjoyment of sports--both in running, a sport he disdained, and as a spectator, which he was incapable of being--yes, Harold Hoffman walked out of the 7th game of the World Series. Why? Because he was bored, as a spectator.

No Going Home Again

Today was a day for me to take a spin around the two Westchester County (NY) cities where I spent the first two decades of my life:Yonkers, my birthplace, and Mount Vernon, the adjoining community where I spent all my public school years through high school.  I was in the area for a 70th birthday party at Saxon Woods, probably the premier public golf links in a county with six or so public (and many, many private) courses. So that afternoon, on my way to the gathering, I drove around the two towns which lie directly north of The Bronx.

Part of the reason I decided to check these places out was spurred by my meeting a woman on the trans-Canada train last week who related how her physician daughter was living right on the river in Yonkers by the pier where the Day-Liners used to stop in the summer. True enough, that area, once known as the destination of all the Yonkers trolley cars--"Foot of Main St."--has been revived and there are a few smart-looking restaurants and shops near the classic N.Y. Central-designed rail station, also by the Hudson. The old car barn is now a luxury apartment building and there are even streets that did not exist down by the river to provide upscale housing with fabulous views of the Hudson and the Palisades across the way on the New Jersey side. 
.
But I drove up the street by the old car barn where my dad grew up, Buena Vista Ave., always pronounced "Buna Vista" by locals, and most of the housing stock was in bad shape or torn down. On the river side the old sugar factory was being turned into upscale housing. The rest--including my father's old place, looked pretty bad. His old home had a "For Sale" sign slapped on it and it didn't look like one aimed at attracting anyone interested in doing anything but tearing it down and starting over.

So it was with almost all of the rest of downtown Yonkers. The kind of stores that you find in neighborhoods that are going nowhere. The old newspaper building for The Herald Statesman was there but was occupied by others as there now is a county-wide paper so neither Yonkers, the fifth-largest city in the state, nor Mount Vernon has its own daily paper anymore. South Broadway, once a bustling commercial avenue, was mostly forlorn and had some down-market enterprises.

Nor had Mount Vernon yet participated in the great revival lifting all of New York City's outer boroughs--Brooklyn has gone the farthest but the others are close in pursuit. The old Sears is a community college branch and the commercial streets again have discount clothing and cosmetic and other shabby emporia. The old YMHA in Mt. Vernon is boarded up, along with the Elks, and the Masonic Temple in Yonkers where my dad's lodge met. In contrast, the Yonkers YMCA, where my dad became a swimming champion, looked fine and much the same as it always had (it replaced my grandfather's fruit and vegetable store in 1915) although its environs were spare of much active enterprise. Perhaps it is close enough to the magical riverfront to benefit from patronage by the young successful types in that housing.

My 50th high school reunion was held at a White Plains hotel because there's no place in Mount Vernon to have such an event. White Plains isn't an unalloyed success story but Mamaroneck Ave., the main drag, has lots of prosperous-looking shops and snazzy restaurants and modern-looking bars as well. The county seat has always managed to keep itself alive as a going community, even if the new county courthouse was badly designed because of the traditional low-grade political corruption endemic to the county.

I found little to object to in the current White Plains, even if they had torn down the storefronts on Main St. next to where the courthouse once stood--the spot how houses a concrete-walled but at least functioning Macy's. Our old family friend's liquor store, aptly named Main Court Liquors, has been replaced by a small park. These are minor carping as White Plains comes off as almost entirely a success story, likely aided by both its status as county seat and its central location amid the major portion of the county that remains a high-status suburb or exurb.

Continental Crossing

Tuesday night at 8:30 P.M. found me striding down the platform at Vancouver's Pacific Central Station en route to my cabin for one on VIA Rail's Train 2, The Canadian, bound for Toronto after about 4 1/2 days crossing Canada.  The walk brought back old rail memories from accompanying travelers when I was all of 9 or 10 to equally lengthy trains at the old New York Central changing stop at Harmon.

This train was out of those days in length--24 cars. Of course, way back then all of the long-distance trains had consists of that size. I remember in particular seeing someone off at Harmon on the Ohio State Limited and we finally found their sleeper after passing about 25 cars.

The Canadian is big enough to have two diners and two activity cars--situated at the front and back. We managed to switch my sleeper so that I wouldn't be heading in one direction to the diner and my friends a car or two back would be going the other way. Each activity car had a dome, as did the last car on the train, the Park Car, and between Vancouver and Edmonton, probably the most scenic section of the run, there was a panorama car, somewhat like the lounge cars on Amtrak.

From Vancouver, we passed along the rushing torrents of the Fraser River for a good distance until it got dark. Waking up,  we passed along wide and narrow parts of the river and then began to climb into the Canadian Rockies, passing snow-capped peaks and Pyramid Falls, until reaching Jasper late in the afternoon. A large tourist group detrained there and a huge crowd surged on board to replace them, fresh from negotiating the icefields highway and other high spots of Jasper National Park.

From here, as it got dark, we moved toward the great plains of Canada, passing Edmonton late that night and then coming into Saskatoon the next day, finally reaching the midpoint and major stop in central Canada, Winnipeg, the next evening. There were ample provisions on the train, continental breakfast in the Park Car, so named because these cars once had murals from one of the Canadian national parks, which also came with a bullet lounge giving us a great view out the back of the train, as well as another dome.

The Canadian train comes out ahead of Amtrak in accommodations, tight but well-designed, and the diner, which can now and then achieve a level reminiscent of the old days, such as the B&O's Royal Blue. Dinners were the high point--yes, complete with great rack of lamb one night--but when the crew changed at Winnipeg, we must have acquired a chef who hailed from Quebec because his omelettes for breakfast were light and fantastic.

Amtrak, however, seems to have been more successful in negotiating with the freight carriers who own the tracks to give the long-distance passenger trains priority. In Canada, by contrast, we pulled over to let every freight train pass and there were quite a few, carrying grain, we were told, by government order. This put the train behind schedule, and even halving the two-hour stop in Winnipeg, still brought us in a few hours late.

But the scenery continued to hold fascination. Beyond the plains, we crossed the geologically-famous Canadian Shield, with much granite outcropping as we moved past so many deep blue lakes even if not on the old Canadian Pacific route closer to Lake Superior. Then we came down along Georgian Bay and saw all the cottages to which Torontonians repair when it gets warm.

Finally, we were in Union Station, Toronto, and I was able to join up with my friend from Toronto, check my bags to head right across the way to see the Blue Jays take on the Royals in a day game. They were already up by five by our arrival in the bottom of the first.