The New York City Marathon

The New York City Marathon is tomorrow and it's a very big deal. In part, because it's New York and it's 26 plus miles of grueling running, but also because parts of every borough are included in the race course. For those of us who live or work on Staten Island, we are proud of the fact that it begins here and covers a tiny fraction of the total distance before crossing over into Brooklyn via the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. For those of us who live on the Upper West Side, we are proud of the fact that it ends in our neighborhood on the edge of Central Park. I am, as a result, doubly proud!

But I'm also worried, for, you see, this being the New York City Marathon that includes parts of every borough, it is also an event that brings delay, congestion, and untold chaos to every section of the city. And there is no way to get around all of this craziness, so you must resign yourself to doing nothing during the time the race is run, unless you are a contestant. You might think spectators would also be spared, but no, they, too, must push and scrape to achieve any kind of reasonable perspective on the race.

So what I will be doing during the New York City Marathon? Occasionally wondering how contestants I know are faring, but mostly catching up on my reading and listening appreciatively to a Beethoven string quartet or one of those wonderful Schubert piano impromptus. And then, at just the right moment, about 2 hours and nine minutes after the race begins, I will take the two block stroll over to Central Park and just listen for the sounds of the large crowd that is gathered there cheering on the newest champion of the New York City Marathon.

The Yankees

I live in New York City now, the same city as one of the winningest teams in the history of sports. I don't know, maybe the Montreal Canadiens won more Stanley Cups, maybe the Celtics won more basketball championships, maybe the Chinese Olympic Ping Pong team is still undefeated. But there is no question that when it comes to winning, no team is better known for it, no team better symbolizes it than the New York Yankees. And there they are once again in the World Series, vying for the 41st time to be the baseball champions of the world.

Of course, now that I spend all my time in museums, theatres, and concert halls, I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about the current Yankee team. Ah, but the great teams of the past, their stories still enthrall me. Pictures of the Babe on the street or in the newspaper always make me look. Stories about Gehrig or DiMaggio invariably pique my interest. And the Mick, as flawed as he was, his history still calls me, going all the way back to the schoolboy biographies by Gene Schoor and extending to a recent book like Pete Golenbock's silly fictional biography titled "Seven."

I don't even know quite why, really, because winning interests me so little, though I am endlessly fascinated by great performances. Often, it seems to me, there is a difference. But in the case of the Yankees, even though their individual performances were not always that great, they came together in the right moments again and again and again to outdo their opponents. It makes me think of the psychological side of competition, about which I still think we know so little, but in the case of the Yankees, they were so determined to win, and so confident that they would, that far more often than not they did prevail over the competition. No matter who that competition was and no matter how handicapped the Yankees were by injuries or by their own self-inflicted deficiencies (read: too much carousing), they found a way to come out on top.

Of course, even as I make these claims above, which only partially hold up, I return to the Babe, whose greatness, as compared to everyone else in his own time, is so surpassingly remarkable, so incredible, that he remains the standard in sports by which we measure anyone who is head and shoulders above all others. Now we have Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan, too, but when you look closely at what the Babe did, relative to his contemporaries, there just is no comparison. And when you think of the Babe, it only takes a second before you think of him in that Yankee uniform waddling around the bases at the old Yankee Stadium after striking still another towering home run.

smiles

Karen and I were crowded into a very busy subway car the other day, when we saw a little boy, somewhere between two and three years of age, sprawled on top of a stroller that was just a bit too small for him. He was calm but seemingly bored, with very little of the vitality that you expect from a boy that young. His mother, too, was still and appeared to be very tired, drained of expression or energy. Karen sat just a few feet away from the boy and, looking straight at him, flashed her most radiant smile. The boy responded immediately by beaming broadly, almost as if he were waiting to be acknowledged and appreciated in this way. Karen beamed back and for a few seconds that part of the car seemed almost suffused with sunlight, as the two smiling riders infected others with this epidemic of smiling, including the boy's mother who offered her own modest but irrepressible grin. There really is no way to overestimate the impact that a single smile can have on the everyday life of anyone, especially a child in the busy and seemingly uncaring city, just waiting to be greeted and appreciated with this simple but immensely human gesture.

Lynn Redgrave

Lynn Redgrave is appearing in a one-woman show called Nightingale right now. She spends the entire 80 minutes of this show reading from a diary-like text recounting and reinventing the story of her maternal grandmother. Although her grandmother was a remarkably ordinary woman, she nevertheless spawned a daughter named Rachel who married a man named Michael Redgrave who in their own right and owing to the considerable accomplishments of their offspring created one of the most distinguished theatrical families of the 20th century. Frankly, the story of Lynn's grandmother in itself is not that compelling or moving, and yet, Redgrave is such a winning and effective performer, she rises above the material to turn in a performance that stays with you long after you have left the theatre.

Additionally, the parallels between her grandmother's life and Lynn's own life do leave an impact. Lynn found herself in a loveless and passionless marriage, which was roughly the sad and bewildering situation that her grandmother faced as well. Further, there is the larger context of Lynn's real life recurring cancer and her treatment for it that actually necessitates her reading from the text, something that she does with immense skill. But more broadly, her own impending mortality adds gravity to a play that attempts to recapture a life after it has ended and in which the main strands of the story were lost to family and to history, that is, until Lynn breathed new life into them.

Neil Simon

Is it obvious or hyperbole to say that Neil Simon is some kind of genius? Of course, we all know that back in the 60s and 70s he seemed to be able to write one uproariously funny play after another. I still laugh out loud at the scene in Barefoot in the Park when the newlywed Paul climbs the seemingly endless flights of stairs for the first time to the apartment his wife Corie has picked out and with almost no breath left inquires: "Did you know it's six flights?" To which his wife Corie answers, "It isn't, it's five," because the outside stoop doesn't count as a flight. Still barely able to catch his breath, Paul wheezes: "It may look like a stoop, but it climbs like a flight." That kind of line, which seems so simple to compose, but is, of course, a comic rarity, spewed liberally for almost 15 years from Simon's fertile pen in such plays as The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Sunshine Boys, The Last of the Red Hot Loves, and many others.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, though, he began to lose his touch, and for the first time in his professional career as a playwright lost the ability to attract large audiences. He recently related that he was on the verge of giving up on writing plays altogether in the early 80s, when he discovered a partial draft of an autobiographical play he had been working on some years earlier. He liked what he read and went on to complete Brighton Beach Memoirs, which was not only a hit, but also perhaps his first work that elicited from audiences as many tears as laughs. This led to a series of plays based on his childhood and early adulthood, including Biloxi Blues, Lost in Yonkers, and Broadway Bound, all of which were products of a maturing theatrical master, increasingly regarded as equally effective with drama as with comedy.

We saw Brighton Beach Memoirs the other night, and it struck me as not only flawlessly acted and produced, but as a kind of perfect capturing of one representative family's life in that hard and precarious year of 1937. It is, in part, the hilarious coming of age story of the fourteen-year-old Eugene Morris Jerome, but the bigger context is one of a large extended family just scraping by economically, the perils that can result from losing any source of steady income, and, most of all, the fear of a world war that cannot be stopped and the urgency of finding a safe haven for Jewish family members escaping from Europe before it's too late. All of that is there, but it is never done in a heavy handed way, and Simon's gift for humor holds the horror in balance, even as we know that it is only a matter of time before boys like Eugene will be obliged to risk their lives while fighting for their country. Our laughing is mixed with bitterness and loss and leavened with the hope and strength that families sometimes supply.

Shonen Knife

What the hell is Shonen Knife, you might be wondering, that is if you happened to glance at the title of this post. Well, Shonen Knife is an all-girl, Japanese pop punk band that we went to say a few evenings ago in an abandoned warehouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the launch of what will prove to be their triumphant U.S. tour. The three very small women who make up Shonen Knife create a very big sound and attract an eclectic and loyal gathering of fans. Their audience that night included old people like us, and our friend Stephen Brookfield, who got us the tickets, and is himself the leader of a punk surf band, as well as a large cohort of teenaged appreciators. Many of these younger fans enjoy standing near the stage under the glare of the harsh strobe lighting, jumping, gyrating and jostling each other (known as "moshing"). The members of Shonen Knife appear to be young, though the lead singer and guitarist - Naoko Yamano - has been doing this since 1981, when the group was first formed, and is now joined by two younger collaborators - Ritsuko Taneda - the bass player, and the hard driving Etsuko Nakanishi, their explosive drummer.

We enjoyed ourselves, though we arrived late enough only to hear about a half dozen numbers, which, for our first time, was enough. At the end, we were surprised to see a number of the older admirers, including Stephen Brookfield, pull plugs from their ears, which seemed like cheating, though if you go to enough of these concerts, you probably do need to protect yourself over the long haul against excessive noise. I had received an email from Stephen suggesting that we pick up ear plugs from a local drug store before arriving at the concert, but I thought he was joking. Only when the music ended and all these old guys (and they do mostly tend to be guys) pulled out their plugs did I realize that he had been completely serious.

At any rate, you might want to check out Shonen Knife. Until you have heard their rendition of "Deer Biscuits" or "Na Na Na," you really haven't lived.

windows on the urban world

We now have three large windows in our abode that boldly face the neighborhood of the Upper West Side. As I have mentioned in other posts, there is a line of skyscrapers about 500 feet from these windows that remind us how immersed we are in an urban environment without, at the same time, giving us the feeling of being too penned in. But here's the thing about those windows. They are open to the world, uncovered and undraped, bringing in the sunshine from the East in the morning, while also revealing, until the last light is out, all our nighttime movements. This is okay, as all of these activities are entirely innocent and no one could make out anything, in any case, from the buildings that are so distant from our tiny habitude. But even if outsiders could peer into our private little universe, it wouldn't matter, as we are too much in love with the sweetness and light of our windows. Let there be light and activity and air and that wonderful sense of being a little bit above it all. Our downstairs neighbor has asked us to install some rugs on our beautifully refurbished wooden floors, which we are in the process of doing, but we are committed to keeping the windows as clear and unobstructed as possible. The morning light is invigorating, but the symbolism is important, too. That we should be as open to the world, especially this glorious urban world, as possible. May it always be so that our windows face the incredible busyness of the city, and may it be so as well that we continue to have a vista on this world, as it grows and shrinks and mutates in ways that no one can predict. That, too, is part of being of and with the city.