Time, the cliché goes, heals all wounds. But there are some wounds that cannot, and should not, ever be healed. The Holocaust is one of them.

    The Holocaust provides a daunting challenge to artists of all stripes: How do you speak the unspeakable, how do you depict evil in its purist form.

    “The Diary of Anne Frank,” both as a piece of literature and as a theater piece, on view at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, is one answer to that artistic challenge.

    This staged version was written in 1956 by an incredible writing duo, the prolific and gifted Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. They are known for sensitive yet powerful works, particularly for Hollywood, like “The Thin Man” series, and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

    The reason why “Anne Frank” works is because it is not a “plight” play. Plight plays tend to be didactic appeals for the audience’s sympathy.

    Instead, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is a look at an oppressed group trying to live a normal life under impossible conditions. But, as hard as they try, normality is something none of them would ever see again.

    The Bay Street cast is an excellent one put together by the director Joe Minutello, starting with Jessica Mortellaro as Anne. She captures the intelligence as well as the explosive precocity of the character.

    Written between June 14, 1942, and Aug. 1, 1944, by a 13 year-old German-born Jewish girl who had been brought by her parents to Amsterdam after the Nazis took power in 1933, “The Diary of Anne Frank” was first published as a work of nonfiction in its original Dutch in 1947.

    After the Nazis conquered Holland, Otto and Edith Frank-Hollander elected to go into hiding with Anne and her sister, Margot, rather than risk being caught fleeing to Switzerland, one of the few safe harbors left in Europe.

    They moved into an attic over a store. During the day, they could not make a sound, lest the workers below heard them. Cooking, smoking, even flushing a toilet was forbidden.

    The day the family moved into this netherworld, Mr. Frank gave his daughter something she’d always wanted: a diary.

    A brilliant writer, and at the same time a young teenager going through normal growing pains, she gave the world a glimpse into the Franks’ secret world, which they shared with four other Jews in hiding.

    Keith Cornelius is wonderful as the father, the only one who survived the concentration camps the eight attic inhabitants were taken to by the Green Police, under the bidding of the Gestapo. Mr. Cornelius gives us a broken man at the beginning of the play who finds redemption through the words of his dead daughter in the diary given to him by Miep (Chloe Dirksen) and Mr. Kraler (Joe Pallister). Miep and Mr. Kraler were the Dutch citizens who risked everything to hide the eight Jews. Mr. Pallister and Ms. Dirksen make us care without asking us to, which can also be said for the rest of the cast.

    It’s wonderful to see Josh Gladstone onstage with his wife, Kate Mueth, as Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan, a Jewish couple in hiding with their 16-year-old son, Peter Van Daan (Sawyer Avery). They are a talented duo here, finding the humor and then the pathos, again without pushing the issue. The same could be said for Mr. Sawyer.

    Lydia Franco-Hodges (Mrs. Frank), Georgia Warner (Margot Frank), and Terrance Fiore (Mr. Dussel) round out this excellent cast.

    As always, the technical elements of this Bay Street production are superb. The set by Gary Hygom is a wonderful playing space, and the light design blends in with the sound design (not credited), providing a frightening world where every whistle in the street stops the action on the stage, out of palpable terror.

    While the sound design was perfect, the musical underscore seemed to be a comment on a comment, undercutting the power of the simple spoken word. The recorded piano tinkling in a minor key, accompanied by a similar sounding violin, was, and I hate to use this word in connection with such a serious subject, almost schmaltzy. You don’t need to ask the audience to cry, just trust them.

    The postscript, in which the actors walk onstage after the play to tell the audience what happened to the characters, would have been better in the program. After the slightly less than two-hour play, with no intermission, the audience, many of whom were crying, began to applaud, releasing the energy they have built up watching this moving work. Then, whoops, not so fast, time for the postscript.

    Although Scott Schwartz, the new artistic director for Bay Street, was not involved in this production (he told the audience before Saturday night’s performance that this was the first time he had seen it), it is in keeping with his stated goal of expanding the theater’s Literature Live! Series, along with other community outreach programs.

    It was wonderful to see a mix of ages in the large audience, which is the idea.

    Bravo, Bay Street, bravo.

    The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a week away. It is here that I draw my reference and contemplate the events that changed my view of the world, along with many others of my generation.

    I was born when Harry Truman (“The Buck Stops Here”) was president. The 1950s, with President Dwight Eisenhower in office, were happy days. My memory is of warm summer nights, playing hide-and-seek with the old neighborhood gang.

    The election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 was a big deal in our family. I believe it was my father’s first opportunity to vote, as he was a naturalized citizen who emigrated with his parents from Canada.

    President Kennedy’s famous news conferences perked my interest in what happened outside of my own neighborhood. John F. Kennedy was the first modern-day president who had charisma and inspired me to think and ask questions. I found myself glued to the TV every time he had a news conference.

    Then that awful day — Nov. 22, 1963.

    I was in Mr. Rykinbell’s English class when the school public address system came on with the local public radio station airing the news that the president was shot, and then, moments later, announcing that the president was dead.

    I remember a classmate named Mary beginning to cry, expressing the unbelievable sorrow we all felt at that unbelievable moment. For the next four days, I was glued to the TV set, as many others, including those of my generation, watched the nation mourn his death. The funeral march cadence, the coffin on a wooden wagon drawn by a team of horses, the single black horse with no rider, the sound of the horses’ hooves as the procession marched down Pennsylvania Avenue lined with thousands of people in total silence are forever etched in my memory.

    In the days, weeks, and years after President Kennedy was buried, as I grew up, I listened as the conspiracy theories and mistrust of government became more and more vocal. President Lyndon Johnson took over and later won a convincing 1964 victory over Senator Barry Goldwater, but he seemed overshadowed by the Kennedy mystique. He misjudged public reaction to the Vietnam War and eventually declined to seek another term.

    The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and of Senator Robert F. Kennedy rocked our nation. Richard Nixon, talking law and order, captured the 1968 presidential election. His re-election in 1972, defeating Senator George McGovern, was a convincing victory, but we continued to question our government. We all know about the Watergate mess, President Nixon’s resignation, and the swearing in of Gerald Ford as president. This was almost revolutionary, although not a shot was fired. We owe President Ford gratitude for keeping our political process together and helping our nation move on.

    In the years that followed, President Jimmy Carter just seemed to have difficulty being president. The economy and the Iran hostage crisis led to his defeat when he ran for re-election. Then we elected the first Hollywood actor, President Ronald Reagan. But we owe him gratitude for his efforts in ending the cold war.

    During the evolving presidential history, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, a former president’s son, the nation had become tired of international conflicts and sensationalized, 24/7 debate about presidential indiscretion. After Sept. 11, he became a modern wartime president against terror. And then, America elected its first black president, Barack Obama.

    I reflect back to when I was a young boy listening and watching President Kennedy at televised press conferences, hearing about his response to the Cuban missile crisis, the race to the moon, and many more amazing or difficult events. I witnessed his assassination and funeral on radio and TV.

    Now it is 50 years later. My hotel controller’s organization has a conference in Dallas and I have never been there. My partner, Joyce, obtains information and makes plans for our visit to Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository on Saturday afternoon after my conference is over.

    Joyce and I and a close friend arrive at the site of the tragic event. It is difficult to express the emotions I feel. We see the X markings on the paved street, representing the shots that hit the president. A docent tells us the first X marks the shot that hit him in the throat and the second X is the site of the fatal shot. I keep staring at the Xs — the feeling is profound.

    We leave the Dealey Plaza area and enter the Sixth Floor Museum in the Texas School Book Depository Building. It is a gallery of photos and news clippings from J.F.K.’s beginnings to his assassination and the aftermath. And, of course, the corner window where Lee Harvey Oswald perched over boxes with rifle in hand waiting for the president. The section is walled off in glass, preventing anyone from going too close. There is a seventh floor that welcomes visitors to a gallery with more pictures of President Kennedy and recent photos of other presidents and famous people.

    As Joyce and I walk around, we discover an area that is not part of the photo gallery, but a room with no visible indication that this is an entrance to another space. We enter. There are four chairs on a raised platform with a long, black, floor-to-ceiling curtain behind them and a small number of chairs theater style in front of the platform. To the left, at the corner of the room, is an exposed window.

    I walk over to it and look out. To my astonishment I can see the X markings on the street. I realize that I am standing directly above the window in which Lee Harvey Oswald stood on Nov. 22, 1963, from which he fired those shots that changed the course of history. It is hard to put into words the emotions you have when you are a virtual witness to such an overwhelming historical event.

    I sign the visitors guest book and leave a message. I hope that some day my grandchildren will visit, come across what I have written, and experience and understand what their Papa felt about that horrible day as a young boy and as an adult 50 years later.

    Gary Hodgins lives in Montauk where he is the controller of Gurney’s Inn.

    As fall sets in and I look back at summer, I must admit I feel a sadness, an angry feeling that something I’ve treasured on the East End has been taken away. The monarchs have all but disappeared.

    Now, I can only recount what I used to witness. Every summer toward the middle of July, the monarchs started drifting into our garden. The Asclepias tuberosa and milkweed, or Asclepias syriaca, flowers, timed perfectly with the monarch’s arrival, were beginning to bloom, filling the air with their pungent, sweet fragrance. The varieties of Asclepias and their nectar feed the butterflies while their leaves nourish the monarchs’ larvae or caterpillars.

    For more than 20 years, my family and I have rejoiced over the replay of the monarchs’ natural ritual of arrival from long-distance winter habitats in Mexico, their renewal in our garden with larvae, then caterpillars, then pupae, and, finally, young butterflies, and then, with the onset of fall, their departure. This southern journey will take them above the Atlantic coastal waters, down into the Southern United States, where they produce another generation, and eventually back down to Mexico, where again they will arrive, renew, and, come spring, depart for yet another journey to the Northeastern U.S.

    This summer this ritual changed markedly. At best, two monarchs graced our garden. The Asclepias came and went with no butterflies sucking their nectar, no caterpillars chewing their leaves, and no glittering monarch pupae decorating leaves anywhere.

    On garden walks, this was the focus of our discussion. We talked about the loss; we mourned the butterflies that didn’t show up as they had for so many years. We addressed what we heard was the cause — some pesticide in the South that had killed their natural sources of food, and therefore had interrupted the butterflies’ renewal process to make the final leg of their journey north.

    To give expression to my grief, I decided to research what we had rumored in our garden this summer. I found an illuminating interview with Orley Taylor, insect ecologist and founder of Monarch Watch, conducted by Richard Coniff, a contributing editor for the online magazine Yale Environment 360.

    “What we’re seeing here in the United States is a very precipitous decline of monarchs that’s coincident with the adoption of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans,” Mr. Taylor said. “The first ones were introduced in 1997, soybeans first, then corn. By 2003, 2004, the adoption rate was approaching 50 percent, and then we really began to see a decline in monarchs. And the reason is that the most productive habitat for monarch butterflies in the Midwest, in the Corn Belt, was the corn and soybean fields [where milkweed, which monarchs feed on, grew]. Before Roundup-ready crops, weed control was accomplished by running a tiller through those fields and chopping up the weeds and turning over the soil, but not affecting the crops. The milkweed survives that sort of tillage to some extent. So there were maybe 20, 30, 40 plants per acre out there, enough so that you could see them, you could photograph them. Now you are really hard pressed to find any corn or soybeans that have milkweed in the fields. I haven’t seen any for years now because of the use of Roundup after they planted these crops. They have effectively eliminated milkweed from almost all the habitat that monarchs used to use.”

    I found the next point about ethanol fascinating, frightening, and maddening. As I read it, I asked: As human beings, do we ever look beyond our noses or our wallets at long-term consequences? Do we ever reach out for more information than what’s immediately offered up? Are we truly more intelligent than other creatures on earth? What kind of system have we produced that allows and rewards the destruction of our collective natural heritage?

    “Ethanol is a big issue too,” Mr. Taylor continued. “We’ve seen a 25.5 million-acre increase in the amount of corn and soybeans since 2006. And that’s been at the expense of nearly 10 million acres of Conservation Reserve Program land, which farmers are paid to set aside for wildlife. The other 15.5 million acres means that farmers had to plant a lot of marginal land — that would be milkweed habitat, pollinator habitat, rangeland, grassland, and so on. So there has been a tremendous change in agriculture to accommodate the production of biofuel.”

    Beyond genetically modified organisms, Roundup, and the loss of milkweed fields, climate change is playing a role in monarchs’ decline. I read that drought and excessive heat last summer also influenced the 80-percent drop in the number of monarchs overwintering in the mountains of Mexico last year. Then, unusually cold spring temperatures delayed the first breeding cycle of the monarchs in the Southern U.S., and that in turn delayed the next generation’s migration northward. This raises the question of whether the monarch has been left with enough time to complete its fourth generation to return to Mexico.

    My sadness at the loss of the beautiful monarchs makes me want to do more. I will talk to our politicians; I will get the word out about what’s happening. What I’d encourage my fellow East Enders and everyone on Long Island to do is raise your voices. Let your concerns be heard. Write your Congressional senators and representatives.

    Also, we need to find out what our local farmers are doing. Already I’ve heard that a number of East End farmers have switched to GMO corn. We need to get out and talk to them about the long-term impact of this decision and to understand from them why and how they’ve been convinced to switch. Then, when all is said and done, each one of us who gardens needs to plant more Asclepias to grace our gardens, with the hope that monarchs will return and will be rewarded for their long journey with plenty of food on the East End.

    Judy Bergsma served for 18 years on the Nature Conservancy’s Long Island board and is now an honorary trustee. She is the founder of MayaBags in southern Belize and lives in New York City and East Hampton.

    This hair-raising Halloween tale is set in a comfortable house on the East End of Long Island that is inhabited by assaultive demons. A huge black garden spider has been spinning a gauzy net on the front porch, but the real evil lies within.

    It started with a musty odor that at first didn’t cause the lady too much concern. A strong sense of smell and denial are her gifts, so she rationalized it away as garden odor. Her husband, who is even better at denial, didn’t smell anything. It ripened when they left the house and closed all the windows. The demons played when left alone. When the innocent couple returned after a day away, even the husband finally had to admit that he smelled the malevolent odor.

    Every house has at least one tragic flaw, and so it was with this seemingly lovely waterfront house. Underneath the heart-of-pine flooring covering the first floor was a crawl space appropriately named for its low ceiling, which forces all who dare enter to crawl — a dark, damp space that attracted vermin like mice and long-legged crickets. And mold.

    The husband and wife loved their home. They worked to keep it pleasant and safe, dealing with each invading evil in its turn.

    The mice could have lived undetected in the crawl space, but like most mice they got greedy and found their way to the kitchen, where they nibbled on fruit and crumbs, which wasn’t the worst of their intrusions. Mice do not obey that silver rule that human mothers teach their children: “Do not soil where you eat!”

    They had to go. Glue traps seemed cruel, as the stuck mouse squeals for its life. The husband decided on those blue poison pellets, but the mice seemed to think they were dessert. They ate the pellets and came back for more the next night. Finally the wife agreed to the cruel but effective traps.

    The husband and wife never knew long-legged crickets were multiplying by the hundreds below in that damp, dark space. They remain undetected because they are quiet, harmless, and purposeful. Their mission is to breed.

    The mystery odor was growing more noxious; finally it totally replaced the fresh-smelling air in the house. Low tide was more fragrant. Even the odor of garlic couldn’t kill it. It was time to get help.

    Brad, a sweet, fatherly environmental specialist, came to the house, fearlessly descending into the dank crawl space in his pressed pants and stylish shirt. Husband and wife waited anxiously as Brad inspected the space.

    He finally emerged with news no homeowner wants to hear: “Mold, yes, mold is invading your crawl space, covering the floor joists and feasting on the insulation paper. It seems that your dehumidifier is in a comatose state and probably hasn’t been working for a long time.” He couldn’t say what kind of mold, but mold nevertheless.

    “And by the way, the walls are covered with long-legged camel crickets who like the mold, love damp, dark spaces.”

    The wife asked Brad hopefully, “Do they eat mold?”

    “No such luck,” chuckled Brad.

    A mold is to a house what a malignant tumor is to a body. It is scary, potentially life-threatening, and can be cured if caught early enough, but that involves toxic chemicals, surgery, and a lot of money. Neither the husband nor the wife was coping well with the idea of this cancerous invader slowly digesting their house. They were frightened of what could be seen, but terrified of the invisible: airborne fungal spores possibly spreading all over the house.

    They took the advice of ancient wise men who said, “If it smells bad, it is bad for you!” They could feel this unseen enemy invading their aging lungs with every breath.

    They had seen horror movies where prime real estate is plagued by hostile spirits determined to kill all those who would dare to share their space. While the audience sits in the theater nervously eating buttered popcorn, spirits erode the well-being of the naive homeowners. Husband and wife decided to spare no expense to rid their beloved home of this voracious invader polluting the air they breathe.

    This Halloween neither husband nor wife will buy any scary decorations. No need, since they will have men in white suits slipping in and out of their crawl space like a scene from “Ghostbusters” — only these are mold busters. Until their work is done, beware all ye fools who would trespass on this forbidden ground.

    Geri Chrein has several essays in the book “Stringing Words” by the Windmill Writers group. She lives in North Sea.

    I grew up on an orchard that backed onto a mountain. For birthdays, my friends would use the tops of garbage cans as shields and we’d huck fallen apples at each other. There was a tree fort, a sledding run with a sick jump, and a stream where my action figures liked to hang out.

    Now I live in Manhattan, in a dark one-bedroom apartment with no airflow. This worked well when I was single and used the living room as a default putting green. But with a wife, a baby, and a temporary wall, the short game gave way to a default nursery. My girl is 2 and, to this point at least, she is blissfully unaware that she retreats to a windowless Pod hotel room every night. She has parks and swings out her door, but also cars, old cigarettes, and Wendy’s wrappers. The roosters and cows in the pastoral folds of her books are good for a certain amount of abstraction, but this girl, like my wife and I, needs nature!

    For three off-seasons before she came along, we satisfied our itch by renting a beach house in Amagansett. After the crowded contortions of city weeks, we heard the clatter of dune grass and walked on empty, infinite beaches under an abundance of stars. It felt good to feel so tiny. Paying the heating bills for this house built out of sliding glass doors was inane, but enchantments don’t always make sense.

    Of course, we indulged in plenty of real estate porn over these years, looking at places we either couldn’t afford or that were next to the highway. “You need a place where you can dream,” a broker told us. One December night in the city, where our jobs and logic anchor us, we found it. The listing showed a very small shack covered in pine needles with the euphemism “Fisherman’s Cottage.”

    Its best internal feature was the Pop-a-Plate dispenser screwed into a faux-wood cabinet, but it was right near the bay. Friends reminded me of the rising seas, sending links to those horrifying projections of shrinking coastlines. None of this mattered; we had a vision. On the day our girl was 3 months old, we made an offer and we were ripping out shag carpeting by May.

    To make way for the new stuff, we filled several U-Haul trucks with old walls, ceilings, and floors. Each time I pulled into the landfill, I looked at the hillsides of trash, now softened by grass and dotted with seagulls — take out the venting pipes and you’d have a decent sled run. That’s really not so bad, I thought.

    But as one who writes and teaches about environmental issues, I had to find ways to justify what I was doing: Combined, our two places were still only 1,500 square feet; we took the train when we could; I bike to work; our daughter was building her seashell collection. Still, I couldn’t get around reconciling that in order to enjoy nature, I played a part in disturbing it.

    Just a few weeks after we installed our nice hardwood floors and indulged in our first Home Depot-less days, Hurricane Sandy hit. Safe and dry in the city, we watched stormcasters rolling up their shirtsleeves and introducing haunting terms like “storm surge” and “Category 4.” We scoured the Web for images of our street that made us cringe. The real wrath did not come to us — our house was still where we’d left it — but it had taken in six inches of water that would subside into mold.

    The labor of putting it all back together was less than the dread of having to do it again, when the next superstorm, inevitably, hits. In the weeks that followed, our insurance paid for deft hands to erase all signs of damage, and town trucks came to push wayward sand back onto the beach. It’s as if nothing happened. In the spring, my daughter Big Wheeled up to the water and we watched the sun fading behind Gardiner’s Island as gently as it ever had.

    Now we have to decide whether we join the others on our block who are raising their houses. This is the logical thing to do, but it feels wrong, and it feels wrong because it is not natural. I am not a coal plant, a Keystone Pipeline, or an oceanfront mansion. My contribution to this is modest, but it is also deliberate. For now, I am left to weigh the impact of my indulgence against the joy of my daughter’s discoveries. No one is telling me what I have to do.

    Tim Donahue is a teacher and athlete who writes about education and sports.

    You read all the handouts with pictures of celebrities and society couples, the benefits and political fund-raisers (most recently one for the Clinton Foundation punctuated the summer season) at Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant, Topping Rose House. And then there are the normal covens of notoriety, the Artists and Writers Softball Game, Nick and Toni’s, and the bastions of old-line privilege like the Maidstone Club.

    What you tend not to read about are watering holes like the 7-Eleven in Southampton, which, as one case in point, has its own crowd of regulars who get the same special greeting afforded by the maitre d’hotel at more auspicious establishments. It’s not hard to get a table at the 7-Eleven in Southampton, or a 7-Eleven anywhere, simply because there usually aren’t any.

    So cognoscenti driving along 27 on a crowded weekend are increasingly finding the 7-Eleven to be the perfect stopping-off place, if you’re looking for a three-pack of chocolate-chip or oatmeal cookies, some unripened bananas, or one of the very ripe hot dogs that have been turning on its grill for hours. As mouthwatering as these specialites de la maison may seem, they’re nothing compared to the friendly service and convivial companionship that’s to be found at this unheralded gem of a convenience store.

    You don’t have to be Bill Clinton to get a hot dog at the 7-Eleven (though in the days when he was a fast-food lover, Bill was almost a computer printout of the customer 7-Eleven was marketing to), and where the 7-Eleven beats redoubts like Nick and Toni’s and the Palm is the fact that its casual atmosphere is free from social pressure (though of course if you’re feeling ambitious you can always drive down to Aquebogue and attend an outlier like the Modern Snack Bar, where you don’t have to have the trappings to get a great piece of duck with all the fixin’s). You can collect your Diet Coke, root beer, or Sprite from the 7-Eleven’s amply stocked refrigerated section and find friendly conversation with the small coterie of men and women who cluster outside with their takeout coffee, not having to worry about who you are talking to or who you’ll be seen with.

    There is no power-breakfasting inside or outside 7-Elevens. It’s probably not something that’s stated in any of the documents accompanying the franchise, but it’s a de facto state of affairs that’s almost guaranteed.

    The same cannot be said of establishments like Bridgehampton’s Candy Kitchen, once a user-friendly hangout for locals and even the most anonymous of tourists, which now has the same lack of pretension as the Fountain Coffee Room at the Beverley Hills Hotel.

    The 7-Eleven is a home away from home for those who are tired of being vetted for talent or appearance. It’s almost like Marx’s vision of the classless society — though it’s definitely not the dictatorship of the proletariat since it’s owned by a Japanese conglomerate, Seven & i Holdings, the fifth-largest retailer in the world. However, as a polity it’s the closet thing to working anarchy. Whatever you may think of the food, you don’t have to worry about your position on the food chain.

    Sure, you can hang out at the 10 Items and Under line at King Kullen, another gathering spot that’s off the beaten track for those seeking a change of pace after a weekend of frantic social climbing, but there’s a reason why 7-Eleven is called a convenience store. It’s convenient. It’s open 24 hours a day and it’s everywhere. Erewhon was the name of Samuel Butler’s elusive utopia. It’s almost “nowhere” backward, but the 7-Eleven is an example of a utopia that sets the bar low enough to exist.

    Francis Levy is a Wainscott resident and the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and on The Huffington Post.

    Sitting on the stage Saturday night at the Bridgehampton Community House outside the beautifully rendered set by Peter-Tolin Baker, I was taken back to the New York theater world of the 1970s and the 1980s.

    At a point in time when the city itself was dying, the theater world was thriving. As businesses abandoned the city, theater groups were moving into the spaces they had left behind.

    The “black box” concept was an important tool for theatrical artists. Take a few gallons of black paint and cover the crumbling plaster walls and sagging floors in a vacant office space, hang a couple of pipes across the ceiling for lights, and, voila, you had a theater.

    The experience for both actors and audience was personal and intimate. It was fertile ground for experimentation and produced countless creative works, including “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” by Terrence McNally, which is running at the Bridgehampton Community House through Oct. 26.

    Sitting in the black box, just a few feet from the performance space, the audience finds itself inside a 1980s one-room studio apartment. Normally, a play begins when the lights come up, but “Frankie and Johnny” begins in the dark, in Frankie’s apartment, during the final moments of coital ecstasy. Frankie (Rachel Feldman) is a waitress at the restaurant where Johnny (Seth Hendricks) is a short-order cook. It is their first time ever in bed, with a clearly happy result for both.

    Love-making over, the couple catch their breath, and the lights go on.

    “God, I wish I still smoked,” Frankie says about lighting up after making love. “It used to be so much fun.”

    The two talk about actors and movies and looking out the window into other couples’ bedrooms. The sex may have been good, but it is the post-coital experience that is the problem. Johnny is sure he has met the love of his life. Frankie? Not so sure. She is in turns annoyed, turned off, and freaked out by the ardent Johnny, who keeps pressing the pursuit.

    “This is worse than ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar,’ ” she complains, perfectly cap­turing her mood and the time period.

    This theater company is called Hamptons International Theater Festival/The Naked Stage. Finally, the Naked Stage is doing a play where people can actually get naked. But this production passes on that score, though it strives for realism everywhere else.

    These are two very challenging roles, which the actors handle well. Having said that, I did feel there were a couple of moments where they were in the lines, not in the moment, which a play like this so requires.

    Sanford Meisner does not have the fame or celebrity status of Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg, yet was as influential on contemporary theater as either of them. All three were members of Group Theater in New York in the 1930s. All three became acting teachers with their own schools. All three sought truthful acting onstage, with each taking a different path to get there.

    Meisner stressed the importance of truthful physical action, with a degree of difficulty. If, for example, after making love, a character makes the bed, then really make the bed. What does the bottom sheet look like after making love? Perhaps the love-making was so active that it came off. Better replace it. Focusing on a real physical action with a degree of difficulty frees the actor from the lines, which will then flow.

    Similarly, when a short-order cook chops peppers, he really chops them. One of the great bits in “Frankie and Johnny” is the omelette made onstage. (Don’t go to this production hungry!) Mr. Hendricks is a bit done in by the tiny chopping board he is provided. I know the space is cramped, but give the poor guy a little more room to chop those peppers.

    None of this should be taken as a knock on two very good actors. That I am ruminating on Sanford Meisner at all is a sign of how valuable this production is. The producers, Joshua Perl, who is also the director, and Peter Zablotsky, have an obvious love for raw theater, and it shows.

    This is a great date show. Instead of going to the movies this weekend, plunk down $20 per ticket (Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., Saturday matinee at 2), and step through the front door into the black box.

    The capitalist Walter O’Malley hijacked the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. This was a stake in many hearts.

    It took a while, but William Shea with the blessing of Robert Moses moved New York and brought the Metropolitans to Queens.

    My aunt fell in love with baseball again.

    This happened a long time ago. In 1962 the New York Mets started their baseball schedule miserably and got worse. They are the first and only major league baseball team to lose 120 games out of 162 in a campaign. This is hard to imagine now in an America that tolerates if not welcomes government spying on its own citizens. Texts between ex-teammates could be data-mined. Phone calls to former coaches tapped. There could be in-game tweets between friends on opposing teams.

    Back in 1962, only information on the next pitch, visually stolen by a runner leading off of second base or a clever coach on the dugout bench, was acceptable to the American crowd. The sign on the fence near first base was not an advertisement for an erectile-dysfunction drug; it was a warning: No Fraternizing. Casey Stengel was the manager in the Mets’ dugout then. A lot of fans and out-of-town sportswriters thought Stengel was a clown.

    Stengel had been discharged by the New York Yankees two years earlier after the mighty Bronx Bombers lost the seventh game of the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates on Bill Mazeroski’s dagger home run. Stengel felt that there was another reason for his dismissal: He had just turned 70. “I’ll never make that mistake again,” he said.

    Bill Irwin is a clown. David Shiner is a clown. They recently had a show on Broadway called “Old Hats.” My wife and daughter caught the show and told my aunt, who lives in an assisted-living facility, and me all about it. Irwin and Shiner are at the top of their games. I think Stengel was still at the top, too, and was an old hat, when he had to go looking for new employers.

    Irwin, dressed in baggy pants not unlike Honus Wagner’s baseball knickers, finds a way to shrink into them, until he almost disappears under a spotlight, stage front. But he doesn’t and Stengel didn’t vanish either. “There comes a time in every man’s life, and I’ve had plenty of them,” Stengel said. So there he was in 1962 in the old Polo Grounds in Harlem, across the river from Yankee Stadium, managing the newly minted Mets.

    When he surveyed that Mets squad, he famously said, “Can’t anybody play this here game?” (This question was straightened out into “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Which is grammatical, but not Stengelese.) He also then offered the most cogent statement about baseball pitching that has ever been uttered. He told one of his two pitchers named Miller — he didn’t try to tell them apart — “Throw the ball as close to the plate and as far from the bat as possible.”

    Some years before, in Los Angeles, there was a grand civic plan to raze a neighborhood of the working poor and build affordable housing. These homes would be surrounded by parkland, with shops, schools, and playgrounds. It looked so good on paper. The uprooted homeowners were to get first crack at the new residences.

    But then, a planner of the project, Frank Wilkinson, was accused by conservative politicos and real estate players of the city of being a communist. These wheeler-dealers saw no need of such housing on a very valuable cleared site. The F.B.I., spying on Wilkinson, compiled a dossier of more than 100,000 pages. He refused to answer questions of McCarthyites in Congress related to his political past. He was summarily fired and then sent to jail.

    The Angelenos of Chavez Ravine were bought out for a song under the city’s claim of eminent domain. (Although a few resisted accepting the unfair payment, right until city bulldozers crashed down their kitchens.) Their whole neighborhood, perhaps ramshackle, perhaps to these Angelenos a heaven on earth, was now gone.

    The affordable housing never got built.

    In New York, O’Malley had met with Moses with a plan to build a new stadium for his Dodgers over the Atlantic Avenue rail yards in Brooklyn. He wanted Moses to seize the property for his use. Moses suggested Flushing Meadows in Queens. O’Malley balked. Moses said that if O’Malley wanted the Atlantic Avenue site so badly, he should buy it with his own money.

    Moses didn’t always succeed, but he never lost an argument. He was the master planner of the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows Bridges, of the Northern and Southern State Parkways, of the Cross Bronx Expressway, of Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, and much more. With the destruction-construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway another neighborhood died. Moses said, “I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

    The now homeless land in Los Angeles was worth fortunes. So after turning down other sites that the city of Los Angeles had offered him, O’Malley, knowing that the local politicians desperately wanted a major league baseball team, was permitted to buy what had once been the barrio Chavez Ravine for another kind of song. He believed a law of Moses: “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.” Here he built Dodger Stadium. As Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.”

    Mark Jaster is another clown. He performs with Happenstance Theater in Maryland. My wife and I have seen him in several shows, the latest of which is called “Vanitas.” In the performance he says something brilliant: “A clown nose is the smallest mask in the world.”

    Moses often quoted by heart Shakespeare to governors and mayors. “And those that are fools, let them use their talents.”

    My aunt lives near Albany. She watches all the Mets’ games on TV. The Mets are the only major league team, I think, that was looted by the swindler Bernard Madoff. But boy did he fleece them. Right down to their sanitary socks. Their ownership is writing checks in the millions of dollars in deferred payments to former players who did not serve the team well; apparently not enough cash remains in the coffers for top current talent.

    Therefore this season the Mets are a failure, what my daughter calls an epic failure. My aunt endures loss after loss. She knows her baseball: “The bullpen stinks,” she says.

    Today the Mets are playing the Washington Nationals. (I work near the District of Columbia and a co-worker is a Nationals fan.) I say to my friend, “Do a favor for my aunt and root for the Mets today.”

    My friend says, “What if the Nationals lose the pennant by one game?” He is right to worry; the talented men at the pinnacle of the sport are separated sometimes by only luck.

    “Do the right thing,” I say. “Okay,” he replies. “One game only.”

    It’s hot near Washington this afternoon and getting hotter, but there’s light rain starting and a heavy downpour predicted. I’m pushing the lawnmower while a touted young man for the Mets fires his first pitch.

    It’s a perfect strike: near plate, far from bat. But oh. Oh. Oh. I have a glass of water in hand now. I’m inside the house and on the TV the Mets are behind by 13 runs. They lose in a landslide. You could look it up.

    After this baseball touch-bottom ends, I check my e-mail. Another friend has sent this quote from the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former commissioner of baseball and president of Yale: “Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.” I find a poem for hardball hard times in a file:

The Physics of Baseball

The shortstop, Quantum,

leaps.

Though he is all

star

the ball passes right through him.

There it is

near the base

of the curving wall

that defines his space from ours.

Three men pursue it,

but then the white ball morphs

into the black hole through which our hopes

will disappear on the day summer truly ends, again.

    My aunt has fallen, in the sense of having fallen down. Her doctor thinks she has broken a rib. This makes it hard for her to laugh. When I call her to tell her what I have just written, she says: “All Brooklyn hated O’Malley. I had to go to confession in the middle of the week. I remember Casey Stengel called the fellows who couldn’t field their position ‘plumbers,’ not clowns; but please mention to your friend not to root for the Mets anymore.”

    “The clowns you’re talking about, and you, aren’t bringing good luck to me now.”

    That hurts so much I have to take off my mask to breathe. And then it starts to rain like hell.

    Dan Marsh is a native Long Islander and regular “Guestwords” contributor. He writes from Garrett Park, Md.

    I have never been so sore from a game of Twister in my entire life. Every muscle in my body throbbed from holding various backbreaking positions while hovering over small, squirming children on the mat beneath me. You see, I was under the impression that Twister was this whole one-day deal, but apparently for kids in Cuba it’s a national pastime. I think we played that game more during this youth group mission trip than I ever did growing up. I’d forgotten how much fun it was.

    There was only one room with air-conditioning in the Presbyterian church where we stayed, and it was the girls’ bedroom, yet we all managed to be outside in the heat laughing and romping around until midnight on most days. Without social media bombarding us, the entire mission group was able to enjoy a different set of values than the ones we have back at home. I found myself remembering the simple joys of a game of cards, or dominoes, or Twister, and the long conversations we would all have sitting around the front porch watching the thunderstorms.

    Our youth group spent a lot of time together bonding and laughing with the children, and it felt like so much more than a mission trip. One night we even taught all the kids how to do the Macarena, which turned into a huge dance party in one of the side courtyards.

    Part of what made us all so close and in tune with the wonderful people around us was that there was no Internet, no cell service, nothing that would’ve passed in today’s plugged-in world as a form of entertainment. It was a total culture shock, or a living nightmare for most teenagers, depending on how you look at it. I only saw that it brought an incredibly varied group of people together in spite of vast cultural and language barriers.

    Our youth group had four boys and eight girls. We all stayed inside the church with the pastor, his wife, and their three sons. The entire family was musically gifted, so we took a few instruments for them, including an entire drum set. Getting that through customs was a story in itself.

    It was worth it, though, because they decided to put on a rock concert open to all who wanted to attend, even those from churches in nearby towns. Pastor Abel was an accomplished guitarist, equally at ease with classic Spanish songs as well as a personal favorite of mine, “Stairway to Heaven.” He wanted to incorporate youth culture more into religion and show this new generation that we could enjoy church and that it doesn’t have to be lengthy sermons all the time. It was a very successful idea, because the large attendance proved it was one way of getting both the young and old involved.

    There were many other people who came from their homes to the church every morning to look after us and make us our meals and keep the house in order while we worked with the kids. When I say looked after us I mean that they really were like mothers to us. Whenever I was outside on a blistering hot day helping distribute water, it was guaranteed that someone would look at me, notice my red hair and extremely fair skin, and immediately usher me into shade. No matter what I said about my already having applied four layers of sunscreen, it didn’t matter. I could have sat there and applied straight zinc to my entire body and the very second I set foot in sunlight a woman would run up to me and herd me back under the roof.

    Those ladies were marvelous cooks; I have never tasted more mouthwatering Spanish cuisine in my life. The savory beans over rice with crispy homemade plantain chips and creamy yucca — even the sea turtle was phenomenal. And the fruit! I mean we’re talking fresh tree-ripened pineapple and mango the color of Cheetos. I couldn’t have asked for a more hospitable, welcoming, and generous group of people to live with.

    It was all too easy to forget that we were in Cuba to work and not on a vacation. For instance, in Guines, the city we stayed in and the home of our sister church, there was no butter to be found in the entire city. The women who worked in the kitchen explained to us that you’d have to travel an hour north to Havana for that type of baking material. The most common means of transportation, other than bike or foot, is horse and carriage. Which isn’t all that convenient or romantic when the street is disintegrating right beneath your feet.

    The biggest wake-up call for me was that the Presbyterian church was the only source of clean water in the village. Last year American Presbyterian Church members built a water-purifying system to alleviate the chronic health problems caused by foul water. Every few days our youth group would help distribute the clean water by filling various canteens, jugs, bottles, bags, jars, and buckets for the locals and putting labels on everything with instructions on how to keep the water from being contaminated. I was taken aback by the number of people who lined up, the number of women who waited patiently in the beating sun because they wanted their babies to be healthy even if it meant there wouldn’t be any for themselves.

    If there is anything these people have shown it is true selflessness and compassion. Despite all of their hardships, the only thing they will ever ask in return from you is that you keep them in your prayers. That’s all.

    Keeping up with those kids and their immense levels of energy proved to be quite the task, but I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. But that will have to wait until next summer.

   Hannah Vogel is a junior at East Hampton High School. Her 10-day trip to Cuba in July and August was made through the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

    I remember the writing session as though it were yesterday: Ringo tapped away on a worn-out Liverpool phone book with two skinny, warped wood drumsticks; George holed himself in the bathroom, humming a tune his band mates refused to help him with, “Mmm my Lord, mmm my Lord.” John stuffed another box of Chiclets gum in his mouth while Paul kept pruning his hair in the mirror with a five-inch black plastic comb he was given by a production assistant when he filmed “A Hard Day’s Night.” Me, I stared out onto the Thames from the second-floor rear window of Apple Records’ offices, piecing together lyrics for a song I prayed would never happen in my life: “She’s Leaving Home.”

    Perhaps my recollection is a dream, fantasy, or flashback from the LSD John slipped me as we co-wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” but nevertheless, it feels as though I collaborated with the boys back when we was Fab.

    She’s leaving home . . . for college.

    Elizabeth was born in a hospital on Hempstead Turnpike that’s changed names three times since that glorious day in 1995 when my only and favorite daughter entered my life. When she was 3, I took her every morning at 8 for swimming classes in the white elephant known as the Aquatic Center in the heart of Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. When she was 4, I started her on piano classes twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday at 4:30, never missing a lesson in 10 years. When she was 5, I became her softball coach, shagging flies in any open field we could find, her easily reaching home plate on one bounce from deep center field. And now that she’s 18, I took her this month to Long Island University, where she’s beginning a four-year stint playing violin, piano, and guitar in the music program and joining the softball and swim teams.

    This time though, she won’t be returning home with her father.

    Elizabeth has never been away from home, never. When I met with her college counselor, Candace Stafford, at East Hampton High School last year to choose a college, the realization of her leaving home hit me like a ton of mortar, leaving me unable to sleep for 3 nights, 4 hours, 29 minutes.

    “Are you sure she passed all her classes?” I asked Ms. Stafford, hiding behind my Dollar Tree Wayfarer-type Tom Cruise sunglasses.

    Flipping through Elizabeth’s records, she answered, “Everything seems in order.”

    “I really don’t think she’s ready to graduate, perhaps another year here would be more appropriate,” I said.

    “With a 91 average, it would be hard to find a reason to hold her back,” she replied.

    Standing up, I leaned over, pointing my finger at her face, my diastolic meeting my systolic at 120. “She’s not ready to leave high school!”

    Quietly, she pushed back in her swivel chair, pencil to mouth, and asked with a James Bond-like coolness, “Is she not ready, or are you not ready?”

    Stunned, I turned and bolted out of her office, not seeing her again until the end of the graduation ceremony in late June under the circus tent on the grounds of the high school.

    “Looks like you made it,” Ms. Stafford exuberantly said, embracing me.

    “I guess so,” I answered, but quickly dashed away when I caught Superintendent Richard Burns’s Ultra Brite smile across the lacrosse practice field. I ran toward him — not in a stalking or menacing manner, that is.

    “Congratulations, your third child to graduate East Hampton High School,” he said with the biggest smile next to Jimmy Carter’s.

    “I got a little bad news,” I whispered.

    “Oh really?” he said.

    “I think my daughter was the ringleader in that SAT cheating scandal, so it looks like she’ll have to repeat the 12th grade, right?” I begged.

    “Too late now, her diploma’s waiting in the cafeteria, gotta go,” he said as he abruptly dropped his paperwork, jumped in his gray Jeep Cherokee, peeled away, and popped a wheelie, leaving a 19-foot skid mark in that brand-new $90 million parking lot.

    “See you in a few years,” he yelled as “Born to Be Wild” cranked from his car’s 8-track.

    And as I ponder my daughter’s future away from home, I rummage through my basement, scouring for the “Sgt. Pepper” album with the Colony Records label and the round $4.99 sticker stuck on its cellophane cover, recalling a time when “She’s Leaving Home” was only a song, not a reality.

    Frank Vespe, a previous “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Springs.