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Guestwords

Thanksgiving in Paris

    My partner, David, and I, as is comme d’habitude, generally spend Thanksgiving in Europe. It’s a time here in this country that seems more and more like a week off.

Dec 24, 2013
In the Shucking Shack

     The year was 1991. I was 14 years old. Scallops had made a comeback, and the price was very low. Local markets wanted to pay my father, Calvin, only $4 a pound shucked. It was at the point where my dad told us shuckers that if we wanted a job, we would have to take less money per pound to shuck or he wasn’t going to go anymore until the price came up. We were getting $1.25 per pound to open scallops then.

Dec 18, 2013
Mark Mangini skillfully guided the Choral Society of the Hamptons through the rough waters of Cecilia McDowall’s “Ave maris stella” at the society’s winter concert on Dec. 8. Pealing Bells and Pure Gold

    While it could legitimately have been titled “Ghosts of English Christmases Past,” the concert given by the Choral Society of the Hamptons and the South Fork Chamber Orchestra at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church on Dec. 8 was a heartfelt gift to those present, offering hope that in the future, all people may live in a peaceful world.

Dec 17, 2013
Off the Budget Table

    With a federal budget deal apparently at hand, the facts of Social Security financing need to be re-emphasized. Last April, when President Obama, in a gesture of compromise to Republicans, proposed cuts to Social Security benefits to help reduce budget deficits, liberal Democrats were outraged. At the time, Republicans simply ignored the federal budget, preferring to create havoc over raising the nation’s debt limit. Eight months later, behind-the-scenes negotiations to come up with one are taking place, with Social Security cuts still on the table.

Dec 11, 2013
Signs of Love

    When Goldberg’s Bagels opened in Montauk last year I laughed inside. I recalled the story a woman had told me, about how years ago she’d waited on line for a bagel and lox at Herb’s Market and was told if she wanted locks, she had to go to the hardware store across the street.

Nov 26, 2013
Leafphobia

    My neighbor the slob hasn’t been blown in almost two weeks.

    I sit here watching leaves fall in his yard, leaf by leaf, a Chinese water torture. Leaf by leaf. I want to run over there and catch the leaves before they hit the ground. But that would be trespassing. It’s his rotting yard.

    You see, he’s away. In the city, where he does something. I’m not sure what. Now and then he shows up. I don’t wave.

    What right has he, an away person, to mess up the whole neighborhood with his sloppiness?

Nov 20, 2013
Jessica Mortellaro plays Anne Frank, and Georgia Warner, in the background, plays her older sister, Margot, in the Literature Live! presentation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the Bay Street Theatre. Opinion: Bravo for ‘Anne Frank’!

    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.

Nov 19, 2013
Two pieces by Ross Watts, “Jacks” and “Tar No. 3,” flank “Love Letter” by Peter Sabbeth in an installation at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill. Opinion: Lost, Fragmented, Evanescent

    The walls are spare, painted black even, and the room would look like a tomb if the afternoon sun weren’t beaming in just so. It is what makes the show by Peter Sabbeth and Ross Watts at Sara Nightingale poetic and touching — trenchant, really, and not easy to forget.

Nov 19, 2013
This corner window on the seventh floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building is directly above the window on the sixth floor from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired at the president. The circle imposed on the pavement below marks one of two white Xs that commemorate exactly where he was hit. Thoughts on Visiting Dallas

    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.

Nov 13, 2013
Grieving Over the Monarch

    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.

Nov 6, 2013
Little House of Horrors

    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.

Oct 30, 2013
Raising House and Daughter

    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.

Oct 23, 2013
“From Blue Hill I,” from this year, is one of Robert Dash’s more expressionistic works in the “Blue Hill” series. Dash and Holtzman at Drawing Room

    It is funny, but I had to be reminded this week that Robert Dash wasn’t an abstract artist, not in the nonobjective sense anyway. The inveterate gardener, writer, and artist left us last month after a long illness, but his legacy in Madoo, his residence and conservancy, and his artwork, as well as a quite lengthy catalogue of columns he wrote for The Star over many years, will continue.

Oct 22, 2013
Adam Fronc leads a country and western number in a production of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” at the Southampton Culture Center. ‘Whorehouse’: Bright Spots, but a Drab Ticket

    The last time I went to the South­ampton Cultural Center to review a play, it was for a revival of “Motherhood Out Loud” earlier this year, and I was pleasantly surprised by the high level of the production from the mostly amateur company, Center Stage. A return on Saturday night for a Center Stage production of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was a disappointment.

    This is an ill-conceived rendition of the 1978 hit that ran on Broadway for over 1,500 performances.

Oct 22, 2013
Guestwords: The 7-Eleven or Erewhon

    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.

 

 

Oct 16, 2013
Seth Hendricks and Rachel Feldman star in "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" at HITFest through Oct. 26. Take a Date To ‘Frankie and Johnny’

    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.

Oct 15, 2013
Guestwords: Players in Angel Cities

    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.

Oct 2, 2013
More Than a Mission Trip

    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.

Sep 18, 2013
Guestwords: She’s Leaving Home

    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 to

Sep 11, 2013
Guestwords: Rheba Tries Pot

At age 87, with stage four breast cancer and a survival prognosis of three months, Rheba recaptured her revolutionary soul.

“I’m going to try marijuana for the pain,” she told me on the phone from her continuing-care retirement community in Seattle. “Some of my old colleagues are shocked. It’s legal here, but they think the only thing that works are M.D.-written prescriptions.”

“The last time we discussed it,” I reminded her, “you called marijuana ‘habit-forming and evil.’”

Sep 4, 2013
Guestwords: Arrivederci Amagansett

    There are strangers lounging around by my pool! A couple, a married couple, strangers, the man, apparently heterosexual, cavorting around in a sarong!

    They are smiling, drinking rosé wine, and sweltering in July’s 90-degree-plus heat.

    What are they doing in my gorgeous — if, as my pool guy refers to it, peanut — pool? (It’s tiny. But chic.)

    Oh, wait a sec. The pool is theirs. As is the house.

    My house has been sold.

Aug 28, 2013
Guestwords: Occupational Hazard

    Call it an occupational hazard. Booksellers are prone to fits of romantic distraction. Perhaps it’s even a job requirement. How else would anyone ever get into this business in the first place?

Aug 21, 2013
An untitled work by Stuart Sutcliffe circa 1959 Opinion: Sutcliffe Hints at What Might Have Been

   Stuart Sutcliffe was at once a bit player and an integral component in the crucial formative years of popular music’s biggest act to date. A close confidant to John Lennon, the art student/bohemian/reluctant musician seemed destined for greatness in the realm of visual art, perhaps to track the Beatles’ unprecedented triumphs in the aural and performance arts in the explosion of creativity and exploration of the 1960s.

Aug 20, 2013
GUESTWORDS: Towd Point Yacht Club

    We call it a yacht club. Our fleet consists of a two-person kayak with yellow paddles, a white Sunfish with a purple, pink, and turquoise sail, and a royal blue tender with a two-horsepower engine that my husband found on eBay. Last summer my son shipped his paddleboard from Florida and he gave the kids rides as he paddled in North Sea Harbor. This year we added another kayak, bright orange, to the private navy at our idyllic summer rental on Towd Point in North Sea.

Aug 14, 2013
Guestwords: The Day the Earth Stands Still

    Someday the Earth will die. The Sun will die and the Earth will follow suit. The Sun will become a white dwarf star. The solar system will be orphaned and eventually sucked into an oblivion-inducing cosmic siphon, like human waste in a toilet bowl.

Aug 7, 2013
Commodore Woodin’s 80-foot fishing and cruising boat as of 1925. Guestwords: The Fate of the Nanin

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt 80 years ago faced the worst financial panic and economic distress in the nation’s history. Job 1 was calming the banking panic and strengthening the financial regulatory structure. To do this, Roosevelt recruited as his treasury secretary a business executive — one of three Republicans in his startup cabinet — William H. Woodin.

Jul 31, 2013
Pianofest and its many performers came to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton on July 24. Opinion: Classical, Meet Digital

   Pianofest usually holds most of its concerts at the Avram Theater at Stony Brook Southampton, with occasional events at other venues. With the completion of Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton a few years ago, several concerts have been held there each season as well. On July 24, a number of Pianofest participants presented a concert in this beautifully appointed space with its outstanding acoustics.

Although all of the performances were technically fine and played with presence, I thought that three of them were missing something in interpretation.

Jul 30, 2013
Guestwords: What Makes Julie Run?

   Look at Julie Ratner. Radiant Ratner. Trim and athletic. A mane of dark reddish curly hair flows to her shoulders in ringlets. Though no longer running marathons, she is running to save the lives of women with breast cancer.

    It all started with the painfully prolonged death of her sister Ellen Hermanson; it started as a small controlled fire of cancer, but then it spread and consumed her like a conflagration.

Jul 24, 2013
Blythe Danner, Tuck Milligan, Gerard Doyle, Kate Mueth, and Delphi Harrington, as seen in “Hands Across the Sea,” the first of three Noel Coward one-acts playing nightly Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater. Opinion: A Noel Coward Trio at John Drew

    A trio of Noel Coward’s “after-dinner mints” is being served at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, and all in all they will leave a fine taste in your mouth.

    Directed by one of America’s theater treasures, Tony Walton, “Tonight at 8:30” consists of three Coward one-acts, with one intermission, which he performed during the 1930s with his longtime friend and working partner Gertrude Lawrence. The pair would tour across England together, each night presenting three of Coward’s 10 one-act plays.

Jul 23, 2013
Guestwords: Baby-Sitting With the Stones

   Ben is throwing a fit. He’s screaming, “I want go down basement, Dianne. I want go down basement. Now!”

    I try firmness. “No, Ben, we’ve played down in the basement much too long. We’ve been down there at least three times today. That’s enough. What else can you think of to do? Hey, let’s go outside for a while. It’s nice and sunny. Come on. Let’s go.”

    Ben’s not cooperating. “No! I want go down basement, now!” His tone is imperious. He stamps his sneakered foot. His cute little face is reddening with rage.

Jul 17, 2013