Guestwords

   “A picture’s worth a thousand words.”

    On Saturday night at Guild Hall in a special benefit perform  ance, we heard about 5,000 well-crafted words in staged readings of five short plays, inspired by four paintings and one photograph, all by East End artists. The result was a delightful mix of comedy and drama.

Surfing the Net recently, I finally figured out what’s gone wrong with baseball. The cheapest seat at an upcoming Yankees-Red Sox series was $55, about four times the cost of an official major league baseball, which goes for $13.99. In my baseball days, back in the 1930s, the cost of a baseball was four times that of a bleacher seat, about a dollar for the ball, 25 cents for the ticket, and only 10 cents for kids under 12, which is what my friend Dick Warren and I were in 1937, when Boom-Boom was pitching for the San Francisco Missions.

    Is there any more prominent and trenchant depicter of the not-so-secret life of contemporary haut bourgeoisie than Eric Fischl? Aside from his latest bullfighter paintings, which have held a prominent place in all the right art fairs in the past few years, it has been awhile since I have seen the artist in any type of concentration, and certainly not in his more familiar milieu.

“Beautiful Highway, Excellent

Service Plazas, No Traffic Jams”

5 Stars

   If your sun-spotted hand has ever held a tennis racket, put this on the bucket list. Die-hards: Skip the miscellany and go straight to Saturday.

    Brilliant advice from Debbie Mays, a former Londoner, who advised me to prepare for all kinds of weather, which I did. It was 60 degrees and rained a bit every day. Sometimes more than a bit, but I was well jacketed and never left the hotel without an umbrella in hand.

    Transportation: District Line tube. Exit at Smithfields. Brilliant, again.

The film “Kook Paradise” started as an inside joke between two veteran surfers who live, surf, and dodge the crowds at Ditch Plain in Montauk.

    Something always needs tweaking or tightening at the restaurant, so I am a regular at True Value and Riverhead Building Supply, Thayer’s Hardware, Herrick Hardware, Kmart, and Lowe’s. Greeting you in most stores is a multi-headed monster that dispenses candy and jawbreakers and gumballs. Even at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, when I am flagging and could use a pick-me-up or a lay-me-down, I can resist most caloric temptations.

    Not Peanut M&M’s. They stop me in my tracks. They trigger salivation glands and cause mild palpitations.

   The fourth concert of the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, held last Thursday at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church and called “Winds of Change,” featured winds, strings, and piano. It included a lesser-known sextet and a sharp-witted musical collage, which were bookended by two of the more standard chamber music fare.

   Perhaps the first thought someone might have hearing about outdoor theater on the lawn behind the Bridgehampton School would be that the traffic noise from the highway nearby is going to be loud. Dismiss the notion, because the huge brick building blocks nearly all sound from the vehicles rolling by on the other side — which is good, because being able to closely hear the roiling, if sometimes hard-to-follow, lovers’ battles and reunions in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is essential.

    Summer has come to the Northern Hemisphere. For sun lovers everywhere — particularly on the East End — that means swimming, surfing, sailing, digging for clams, building sand castles, buying new bathing suits, casting a line, stoking bonfires, playing volleyball, running or walking along the water’s edge, applying sunscreen, and scattering Grandma’s ashes. Not necessarily in that order.

    Um, about that last item: scattering Grandma’s ashes?

   Somewhere between the edgy nihilism of Holden Caulfield and the playful insurgency of Ferris Bueller, there was Benjamin Braddock, the 1960s misfit hero of “The Graduate,” now playing at the Southampton Cultural Center until Sunday.

   Kevin Breslin’s short documentary “#whilewewatch” was shown last Thursday night at Guild Hall. The film, shot within the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in September, was the latest in Guild Hall’s Red Carpet film series.  

    Here are some very important tips to optimize your Hamptons summer shopping experience:

    When a salesperson greets you, don’t be afraid to smile and respond. She is just being friendly — it’s an odd local custom. You’ll get used to it, and you can always ignore her if she tries to bother you again.

   Sightings of literary legends on the East End are almost commonplace, but a look into the heart and mind of Virginia Woolf is a rare opportunity. Through the end of the summer, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton is showcasing an important collection documenting the life and work of the writer and feminist — manna to Woolf enthusiasts.

   For all animal owners who travel, a reliable pet sitter is a major asset. For those who keep cats, a sitter is virtually indispensable.

    What about boarding our pets while we’re gone?

    For dogs, this can be a fine solution. Some friends of mine swear by it. A lot depends on the personality of the dog and the quality of the boarding kennel. The most trustworthy facilities are recommended by word of mouth. Every prudent owner should, of course, pay an inspection visit before leaving his dog there for the first time.

   “Men’s Lives,” the 20-year-old play about the disappearance of a South Fork way of life by Joe Pintauro, opened as a revival Saturday night at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, the same theater in which it received its debut production.

    When an audience is told how to feel, it usually stops feeling. Allow the audience, as this play often does, to find its own way as the story unfolds on the stage and it will feel, and more important, care about what the author cared about.

   I’m lying under a blanket in the back seat of our 1964 Chevy Impala, snoring through “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a blisteringly boring film for an 11-year-old who hates science fiction. Sleeping is my only escape from an incomprehensible, insufferable cast of actors dressed as prehistoric apes screaming at an anachronistic monolith, astronauts babbling about a mission to the moon, and a droning, lullabying computer with a superiority complex.

   In its first exhibition of a single artist in its new space, the Drawing Room will present a selection of drawings by Donald Sultan, with one new painting, the diminutive “Hanging Lanterns,” at its epicenter.

    Tucked away in a space between rooms, the painting invites a rare intimacy with Sultan’s industrial materials. For all its physical strength, his plywood, vinyl, and tar rendering of Chinese lantern flowers reveals Sultan as an abstract artist with the romantic spirit of a naturalist.

    I love Montauk, and here’s a tiny glimpse of why.

    A perfect game has occurred only 22 times in Major League Baseball’s 143 seasons. More people have reached the top of Mount Everest than have thrown perfect games, and that includes Apa Sherpa, who has climbed it 21 times, one fewer than the total number of perfect games thrown.

   At the heart of comedy is emotional pain. Pain raised to a heightened level, to the point where all you can do is laugh. And laugh you will at the brilliant revival of Murray Schisgal’s “LUV,” directed by Lonny Price, playing at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall through July 1.

   Skipping home after charm school that afternoon, I stopped only once to catch a glimpse of a stranger in the deli’s plate-glass window: teased hair, lips painted fuchsia pink, tweezed eyebrows penciled black — a new me!

    I struck a pose and sauntered on. Mother was waiting. “What have you done?” she cried. “Your father’s legacy. Ruined! Gone! Go wash your face.”

   It is a sad fact that as an actress matures and ages, the parts available for her decrease. She may be getting wiser and better as a performer, but the characters to show it simply aren’t there. Theater, while an art form in which women can thrive, has historically been male-dominated, hence the dearth of mature female roles.

   The opening salvo of jangly guitar licks on “Ex Post Facto,” from Chris Campion’s new EP, is so arresting, practically spellbinding, it raises the question of the extent to which pure sound, at once propulsive, insistent, and melancholy, can be a character in a 4-minute- and-50-second rock ’n’ roll tale.  Instrumentals can of course call to mind all manner of emotions, but what about embodying, say, futility, or striving, or loss? Any one of those could be standing over your shoulder as the disc spins.

   In the late 1950s, I attended catechism classes at a Catholic school called Our Lady of Czestochowa. This particular incarnation of the Madonna had a long history among Polish Catholics because the story goes that her gold-framed portrait hung in Jasna Gora monastery in Poland. One day in the 1400s, a fire erupted and the flames darkened the flesh-tone pigments. The church was miraculously saved and the icon became known as the Black Madonna.

    Lillian grabbed my forearm and locked her eyes on me. “Your life is gonna change now,” she said, staring into me as her grip tightened for a few long seconds. “You know that, right?”

    Her husband stood with hands clasped at the French doors that closed around the hallways of Glueckert Funeral Home. She loosed her grip and walked away toward him.

    “Bye, honey.” She waved. “I loved your mom.”

    Her words hovered in the air.

This newspaper imagined a large number of very desirable building lots becoming available, with the prospect that the street, to be known as Maidstone Lane, would equal the popularity of Huntting Lane, opened 20 years earlier.

    It’s a bold risk to dismiss the 360-seat capacity of Guild Hall’s John Drew, ignore over $10 million in renovations, and turn the 80-year-old gem into a black- box theater, but Stephen Hamilton’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” pays off. In an intimate and powerful theater experience, the audience (55 seats total) is placed right onstage, only inches from the action.