Guestwords

    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. 

    My mother has been gone 44 years now. I was 21 when she succumbed to colon cancer at age 55. Although I can hardly remember what she looked like, her sayings and morals spring to life in my head, and often pop out of my mouth, almost on a daily basis.

    For instance, when there’s a reason to procrastinate about some necessary task, like an early morning workout, the internal conflict set into play is “never put off for tomorrow what you can do today,” as opposed to “the early bird catches the worm.”

    It was a nice morning on the Rhine — warm, hazy, a breeze. I remember it that way and have checked the weather records to make sure I’m not idealizing it after 67 years.

    I was sweeping horse manure from a Bailey bridge that my outfit, the 1251st Combat Engineer Battalion, had built from Neuss to Dusseldorf. A major driving by in a jeep pulled up, leaned toward me across the passenger seat, and said before I could free my hand to salute him, “It’s over, son.”

    I went numb. I’d been expecting it, but couldn’t believe it.

   As we think about planting our gardens this spring, let us not forget to make a special effort to grow some flowering plants, especially for honeybees. These insects pollinate about 80 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and seed crops in America. You can thank the honeybee for a third of the food you eat every day.

   I’ve always been fascinated by credit card fees. When your bank is already charging you any interest rate they like, why antagonize their customers further with hefty nuisance fees? It doesn’t seem to make marketing sense. (Just bump up that “default” rate to something even more usurious than it was before; most of your customers won’t notice.)

    “I’m sorry, but you have cancer.” There are probably no more frightening words than those. And everyone feels like a potential victim. After all, if one doesn’t die of heart disease or Alzheimer’s or in an accident, then chances are it will be one of the many forms of cancer.

    My East Hampton is a small town. It is not “the beach,” “the Hamptons,” or some docu­drama. I raised a son here. I talk politics on Main Street. I wait the winter out with fireside reading. The most important thing to me is living here, not how fast I can get in and out for the season. I like having a small airport. It is an amenity. But ultra-luxury travel is not part of my life.

    The first Saturday night of each month, I go contra dancing in Water Mill. The word “contra” always arouses curiosity. Typically, it goes like this:

    “You do what?”

    “I go to contra dances.”

    “Is that some sort of Central American activity?”

    “No, it’s North American country dancing.”

    “Oh, then why contra?”

    “The first New Englanders called it contra, maybe their slang for country.”

    Imagine Paul Revere galloping through town on an average evening, lantern in hand, shouting, “Contra dance tonight!”

   The heralded Obama-Berwick plan to reduce health care infections and errors by 40 percent by 2014 is much too cautious. It falls short of goals already achieved by infection-control advocates in hundreds of hospitals throughout the country and would still leave us with an annual toll of more than 120,000 preventable health care deaths, more than a million preventable illnesses and injuries, and an annual taxpayer cost of $21 billion.