Guestwords

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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 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.

    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.

    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

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.’”

    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.

    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?

   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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

   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.

   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.

    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.

   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.

    In 1983, I was invited by Rubin Gorewitz (a man known as the accountant for artists), whom I was then dating, to join him for Christmas week on Captiva Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida. We were to be the guests of Robert Rauschenberg, taking residence at the Bay House, one of his three homes on the island. With its expansive view of tranquil water, this house was distinguished from the Beach House overlooking the ocean, where parties were held, and from the Print House, where the artist and his assistants worked on his limited editions, mostly lithographs and silk screens.

    It is Day 12 and I am doing well, thank you. It was rough at first, when my Internet service suddenly crashed. Ugly detox. I had no idea that one week without the Internet could simultaneously recover repressed memories, trigger temper tantrums, damage my standing as a freelancer, drag my fantasy baseball team from first to fifth, place undo stress upon my marriage, and thoroughly disrupt any rhythm of a normal life.

    Last week, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets to protest all that is wrong in their enormous country. This leaves me with two feelings: hope and pride. Hope that the longstanding ills of the South American giant can be addressed, and proud of its people, who are finally taking it upon themselves to be the force of change that is so badly needed.

    “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it does rhyme.” Harvey Shapiro did repeat himself (when he was reading his poetry), and unless I missed something, he did not rhyme.

    I met Harvey 30 years ago at a memorial service for a friend of Harvey’s, a poet, who was also my uncle. When I met Harvey again years later at a dinner party in East Hampton, he said that it was the funniest memorial service he ever attended.

    Let us say that my brother is married to a woman from Yemen. Let us say that they are good people (whatever you think that means). Let us say that she and my brother have become estranged, but share custody of their children. Let us say that they are good parents. Let us say that their son learned Latin at Boston College, their daughter Arabic at the University of Maryland. Let us say my sister-in-law once worked as an actuary for the I.R.S.

    You line up like a captive on a pirate ship, steeling yourself for the final walk off the plank. Common sense reminds you that air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation. And yet just to be on the safe side, you surreptitiously glance at the other passengers to catch a sign of any instability that might have been overlooked during check-in.

   My mother just sent me a birthday card with the five volumes of “Origins of the Past,” the series on local history that recently had its latest installment published. Her note on the card: “I think that your heritage can influence your whole life.”

   My partner, David, and I had dinner recently at Nick and Toni’s. We eat at bars; the drinks seem to come more quickly and you get the check faster and you can dine alone at a bar if you like with a magazine or a book and not be bothered by other solo diners looking to meet, or converse, or just feel less lonely.

    For better or worse, with or without reading material, you often wind up talking to people to the left and right of you, whether you’re attracted to them or not. It’s kind of like airplane seating when you fly alone, without the turbulence. Or the meals.