A Gift to New York

When Oscar Hammerstein died, in 1960, I remember reading that the lights of every Broadway theater would be dimmed at curtain time for one full minute, and thinking how wonderful that was—the ultimate curtain call—for one man to achieve such extraordinary recognition for a life in the theater and his contribution to the art of it. Since becoming a New Yorker, I’ve noted a number of such fitting testaments to men and women whose luster illuminated the theater world. But none moved me the way a tribute to a gift to New York did this past Tuesday evening, when Broadway’s lights were dimmed for Howard Kissel. Through the din of Times Square, I could hear his mellifluous speaking voice in his measured tones, rich with irony and warm with whimsy, as he audibly punctuated his graceful prose.

We’ve lost a cultural icon, an irreplaceable one. Broadway, New York, the world, can ill afford it. Howard knew opera and dance, theater for sure, music of all sorts, and a good film. He knew books and he knew art. And he spoke masterly in the language of all of these. He knew knowledge.

And he could tell a great Jewish joke. Sprinkled with Yiddish. Relishing one, from his lips or another’s, he could laugh quieter and more broadly—at the same time—than anyone I ever came across.

For years, Howard, dance critic Joe Mazo and I would join up and sit together at High Holiday services. Even in synagogue, Howard always seemed to have a better bead on things than we did. Perhaps it was a result of an early goal: you’re unlikely to find this in any theatrical who’s who, but Howard told me he initially wanted to be a Reform rabbi.

For many months over one of those years, we three met for dinner practically every Friday night. Initially, it was to discuss and dissect the topic beloved by us, the performing arts in New York, specifically everything we could cover (plus a few books). The evenings evolved into a notion that we could collaborate on the libretto of a musical, with one of us volunteering to do the primary research, another assigning himself to a working outline, and the third designated to start tracking down the rights. I don’t remember any of us ever producing anything we could even draw a pencil line through. After apologies and excuses as we pulled our chairs closer to the table each week, we plunged into what any three people in New York who love theater do best, “talking theater.”

Howard, whom I can’t imagine comfortable growing up in the Milwaukee of the 40s and 50s, told me he was looking through a book of Bettmann Archive photos when he came across one of a Lower East Side New York storefront shop (one of those entered by descending three stairsteps below the sidewalk), a sign above its store window bearing the proprietor’s name and the store’s merchandise—in Hebrew. “And I knew there was a place where I belonged,” he said.

More than Broadway lights have been dimmed by our loss of him. He’ll be missed. I'll miss him.

Laughter in the Can

I’ve been trying to find the culprit for the watering down of humor to sweat and spit. If “sweat and spit” suggests the last stand-up comic you saw on “Letterman” or “Leno,” we’re on the same track.

As you can see, I’ve narrowed down the guilty to television, principally late-night TV talk shows. Television created a demand far in excess of supply for people who could enter and amuse for three minutes. Formerly, comics honed their talents and their acts out of the limelight, venturing anywhere they could find an audience, spending years randomly succeeding, more often bombing, until they were ready to step up to “the big time.” Talk show TV took people who got laughs in school, whose friends and family thought they were funny, and handed them “the big time” on a silver platter. All they had to do was show up and breathe words. Their introductions would do the rest. Good old Johnny was so delighted to have them on his show and so amused by people only the show’s talent booker may—or more likely, may not—have seen in advance that he couldn’t stop laughing when he introduced them. This guy comes to us directly from… (the unemployment line, Johnny?)—and opens tomorrow at… (the Orange Room at Nedicks?) By the time the comic enters, he’s star quality: the audience is laughing before he opens his mouth. “Hi,” draws laughter. “I just flew in from…” They don’t care where from—he’s funny! Leave it to Johnny!

So five nights a week, season after season, what we had foisted upon us were callow, unfunny people. To make matters worse, they were angry or sullen, or wounded, and always at a loss to tell us why they were so unhappy. Cut to Johnny, sitting at his desk yocking it up.

Almost 30 years of “The Late Show with Johnny Carson.” 4,531 episodes. That means 4,531 3-minute comic turns. Other than the select few who earned repeat visits to Johnny, how many did anyone ever hear of again?

Mediocrity passing for better had a strong small screen precedent: before television treated audiences to the merriment, concocted or kosher, of the late-night talk show, it brought them the canned hilarity of the prime-time sitcom.

People in their living rooms couldn’t be relied upon to recognize humor. Studio audiences weren’t much better, laughing too softly or loudly, laughing unevenly or—most disconcerting to performers—in the wrong place! So a CBS engineer began to mix in prerecorded laughter with audience laughter, or the lack of, to “sweeten” what became the “laugh tracks.”

Those presumed-to-be dense dolts in living rooms across America were introduced to, or more accurately subjected to and manipulated by, the first laugh track in 1950. The bearer of manipulated tidings was a weekly sitcom. The results were in without having to be tabulated—for the folks at home, if an audience anywhere else was consistently laughing so heartily, the show had to be funny! Live audiences quickly became irrelevant as “canned laughter” became the order of the day.

While watching a TV sitcom today, has it ever entered your mind that you’re laughing with people who may have been dead for as long as sixty years?

We laugh without laugh tracks on the Internet, don’t we? Generally speaking, yes, but without being cued?—no!, we’re not allowed to; those who send us jokes, and especially those who make their own, think they have to tell us “this is funny” (just like sound engineers). Either they’re afraid they’re genuinely not funny or they underestimate us, either way resulting in the omnipresence of the digital smiley-face emoticon, the “Kilroy was here” of the 21st century, and the killjoy.

Funny isn’t so funny anymore. Not when it’s dumb and dumber. In movie theaters, the big box office fare is frat-boy humor and gross out movies—if there’s a difference. Shock humor is extinct because no one can be shocked anymore. Permeating all media is what I’ve come to think of as the caca-doodoo school of comedy. It’s naughty as only children who don’t know better can be naughty; as humor, its shock value is decidedly of schlock value; and it’s not funny.

“It’s” not funny today unless a major voice—theater critic, cult icon, PR maven—tells them it’s not only funny, but the funniest [fill in the blank] to come along since… the last funniest one! They enter laughing. It’s come full circle: in Broadway theaters—the last stand, legs trembling, for quality humor and valid wit—a live audience is the new canned laughter.

Which brings us to today’s paltry excuse for yesteryear’s achieved illustriousness in the Broadway musical—and to this season’s pretender, “The Book of Mormon.” The laughter started the moment its high-profile creative team was announced, built while it was selling out even before an audience had seen it, and crescendoed when the New York Times’ chief theater critic pronounced it tantamount to “heaven on Broadway.” In his rapture, curiously, he never used the word “funny,” or any of its synonyms—because he found it too funny for words?

“Mormon’s” audiences are laughing at everything offered to them—because they paid dearly and in most cases waited months to laugh at what the word-of-mouth that follows the critics and the hype says is funny. If you care about wit, I can save you anxiety and money—it’s completely lacking in wit. I wouldn’t give away a good joke and spoil it for anyone, but here’s a very bad one, one that gives new definition to “gag” line: the show’s running joke, “I got maggots in my scrotum.”

What has humor become, or is it what has become of humor?

The Sidewalks of New York, Part Two

Overheard—a dialogue between two street people as they walked:

First man: We’re all separate individuals.
Second man: I respect that.

My ears went up when I heard “separate individuals.” The sidewalks of New York are heating up again. Not thermally, not just yet, but intrinsically, by nature of the people who drum their rhythms of life from them.

In the initial “Sidewalks of New York,” I wrote, “Everybody has a story” and told a scant few of a New Yorker’s slew of them. “A Distant Admirer” commented, “You don't have to be a New Yorker to love these stories, or your special New York. More, please?”

I didn’t have to be asked more than once. But then, curious, I couldn’t resist asking for “more” from my readers as well. Captured audiences we wry New Yorkers are, time-tested troupers of the serendipitous and the screwy dutifully reporting from the trenches, here’s the scoop:

This one starts like “The Ancient Mariner” and ends like a Quentin Tarantino film. A bedraggled fellow with a cheerful expression on his face approached Stuart Bardin. As Stuart tried not to be distracted by the pirate hat plopped on the man’s head and the stuffed parrot perched on his shoulder, he politely asked if Stuart had a minute to hear his tale of woe. Ever the gentleman, Stuart couldn’t say no, at least not fast enough. The less-than-ancient mariner proceeded to tell him that his ship had run aground in Central Park Lake and he was trying to raise enough money to "buy his crew some rum." He was awarded $10 for his creative fabrications—or, as Stuart puts it, for “the best laugh I ever had on the Sidewalks of NY.”

Overheard outside a Broadway theater:

I don’t understand what happened to this show. They loved it in Boston.

Celebrity-sighting in New York is a celebrity slighting the natives do well. You can read it directly from their five-borough body language: Who does he think he is that I should notice him? So the art of the game is to spot the illustrious one and then deliberately ignore him or her. Bernard Fox (no relation) relates the exception to the rule where his children’s godmother was concerned:

“She had just parked at a meter. She dug into her purse for quarters and found she had only large bills. Thinking for a moment about rushing to a nearby store to get change and then rushing back before her car was ticketed or towed, she spotted Woody Allen walking down the street. He was walking with a fisherman-like hat pulled way down over his head, his collar up, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. She stood in his path and said, “I have no change for my meter, and unless you give me a quarter, I’m going to shout ‘THERE’S WOODY ALLEN!’" He gave her the quarter. And a smile.

Overheard:

Hey, lady, you got a hundred bucks? I wanna get out of the city.

The following happened to me. Almost twice:

On a sunny day on the cobblestone sidewalk along Central Park West, a neatly-dressed, light-skinned African-American man seemingly in his twenties approached from the opposite direction, greeting me with a happy-to-see-you smile and a warm hello. While I scrutinized his face quickly, trying to recognize him, he said, “You know my mother.” It’s not a line you can walk away from. As I stood trying to place him, trying to find the face of the woman “I knew” in his, he asked, “Who’s the black woman you know best?” My mind flashed on Blanche, a woman who helped my mother raise me when I was a child, a woman I dearly loved many years ago. Perhaps it was emotion, perhaps it was the incredibility of the situation: I barely uttered her name. It didn’t matter—he didn’t need to hear it. “I’m her son,” he said.” The incredibility of the situation predominated. “Is your mother still alive?” I inquired. He assured me she was—old, but fine, he indicated with a proud, confirming nod. I was in no position to do the math, but now I could walk away and was ready to. Careful not to repeat her name, I pointedly told him, “If she were still alive, she’d have to be over a hundred.” With another nod, he said, “Let’s step over here and discuss it.” Stepping back and saying we had nothing to discuss, I departed quickly, feeling a little foolish and a little sad—I hadn’t thought about Blanche for years, and if there were any chance she… no, impossible. My melancholy quickly turned to begrudging admiration for the young man—he was good! I wondered how many people he took in per day, per week, and how much he asked for, for money surely was his object. I thought of reporting the incident to the proper authorities, but I know New York detectives, and, in addition to the serious pursuit of more dangerous men, they have bigger fishy people to fry. Continuing on my way, I couldn’t help smiling.

I said, “almost twice.” Less than a month ago, a man coming toward me on Broadway smiled and greeted me. It was the same neatly-dressed man, and he looked none the worse for the years that had passed, five by my count. Before he could say, “You know…” I told him, “I’ve already heard your hustle.” He smiled and said, “Good to see you again,” and moved on without breaking stride.

Overheard:

Could you tell me how to get to Times Square, or should I just go f#!* myself?

Autumn in New York

It’s supposed to be autumn in New York, but signs of it, if evident, are few. Days drift from sultry to balmy to lamely breezy at best, rendering evenings occasionally cool only by comparison. As seasons go, it’s no season at all. It’s too early for nature’s best show: that shocking change of indescribable colors that slips into town for a limited engagement, but too-hastily doffs its fiery bonnet and unceremoniously skips out with let’s-blow-this-town indifference.

Soon, it will be too cold for the lone street-corner sax player—whose thin, labored musical strains I hear every day well before I emerge through the arch of my building— to occupy the wee circle of prime sidewalk real estate he lays squatter’s rights to, to play, tirelessly, (tiresomely for me), the only song he apparently knows, “As Time Goes By.”

A block south of me, a man lives on the street with his dog, his cell phone, and his journals, which he has been observed to pour through, under one of those open-air phone booths mounted on a post. The wife of one well-known New Yorker routinely stops with her dog, crouches down and lingers to chat at length with him. He doesn’t lack guests to his blanketed oasis—yesterday, he was host to a young woman who stroked his disinterested dog as the two parties softly discussed... what? Assured that New Yorkers are not as indifferent as they are perceived to be, not by a long shot, I’m hoping to catch sight of whom among them will offer the man and his dog, inseparable, shelter for the winter. It has to be the best reality show going.

Nothing against man and dog, but truer to character, my heart goes out to the lonely man with a horn. In my mind, I offer him solace. But only on condition of his learning to play a new song. And, if it’s “Autumn in New York,” I readily foot the bills for every lesson for as long as it takes.

Fall is a foolish name to call a season so glorious, and, as the song says, “so inviting.” It’s autumn—in New York or anywhere else. Wikipedia says the word comes from the Old French autompne, automne in modern French, but doesn’t state what it meant or came to mean in old or new French. That may explain why autumn gained disproportionate popularity as fall. Wikipedia also tells us, “Since 1997, Autumn has been one of the top 100 names for girls in the United States.” But I’ve never met a girl named Autumn. Or Fall. So much for Wikipedia this season.

Autumns in New York may no longer spell “the thrill of first-nighting.” Not when substantially discounted preview tickets are available. But reliably, on every Halloween every autumn, every brownstone on West 69th Street in the two-block stretch between Central Park West and Broadway becomes a story-book haunted house full of thrills and treats for children of all ages. And for the 84th Thanksgiving morning, Central Park West and 7th Avenue (in lieu of Broadway) will become the Main Streets of Anytown for the locals, who gather hours earlier to view and to cheer on the footsloggers and float-squatters of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Autumn is the season for The New York Film Festival and The New York City Ballet; for this season, the overdue arrival of the longed-for Upper West Side Trader Joe’s and, painfully, the imminent departure of the community-prized Lincoln Square Barnes and Noble; the Yankees’ post-season and Christopher Columbus’ Day; plus so much more that is distinctly New York. The season and occasion for a love song to New York that sings to all. All the more poignant, then, to know that “Autumn in New York” was the inspiration of a Russian-born composer, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky, who became, in New York, the great American songwriter, Vernon Duke.

Autumn in New York,
It's good to live it again.

Listen to what Ella and Satch do with it.

Saying It Now

I remember being young enough to say, “I don’t know anyone around my age who has died.” That was a long time ago. Sadly, bad news not only travels fast, it starts biting at your tail.

These days I read the obituary page braced for news of yet another person it’s too late to call. More than remind me, death notices reprimand me never to put off ‘til tomorrow someone who might not have a tomorrow. Whatever under the sun you should say to anyone, say now.

The recent death of an old acquaintance and the sudden, distressing news of a medical threat to a dear friend prompt me to recall…

My first job in New York was as the resident lyricist for a music publishing company. My two bosses professed knowing nothing about Broadway but “really liked” a score I had written, music and lyrics, for an original musical. They gave me the green light to do what needed doing to present it to agents and producers; they would foot the bills. The first thing I needed to do was find someone who knew what I didn’t. That’s how I met John Wallowitch.

John, a superb pianist on his way to becoming a noted songwriter, knew to hire, first off, a vibrant actress/singer with sultry good looks to present the songs with him. My two mavens took charge. They arranged the material, painstakingly rehearsed it and, to my wide-eyed admiration, created a polished performance that illuminated conference rooms at William Morris, MGM, the Shubert Building and more.

It wasn’t long before I elected to free-lance, which meant taking leave of my “underwriters” and consequently, my stellar “cast.” Over the years, John and I occasionally would run into each other for five minutes at a time. In later years, we would find ourselves seated at the same table for mutual friends’ cabaret shows, but with scant opportunity to chat at length. One of those friends informed me that John was ill, and on another day, how ill he was, and cautioned me that if I wanted to see him, I’d better not wait too long. This being New York, I might have put off what I had been putting off far too long for only the weakest of reasons—we’re always so busy. But if we live and learn, then I have, and I didn’t wait.

I invited John to lunch at "Alice's Tea Cup," which I knew he loved. To the one nearest him, but on that day, the weather was blisteringly hot and his voice was thin, and when I offered to bring “Alice’s” to him, he thanked me by saying, “Oh, would you?”

We sat in his living room and in his garden, nibbled scones in his kitchen, and talked and talked. We exchanged confidences about ourselves and our careers that we’d never broached; disclosed our personal disappointments and divulged what we perceived as each other’s triumphs. We talked songs, but John never went to his piano. We were interrupted only when it became time for him to take his medications. He never acknowledged how ill he was and never complained.

Deep into the afternoon, he reminisced about how excited he and his friend, the lady singer, had been about the auditions they did for me. “Excited?” I questioned. “Why were you excited?” He explained, “You were taking us in to meet and perform for all these important theater people we had never met and didn’t know how to.” All these many years, I had believed I’d put myself in the hands of two pros who knew the ropes and were showing them to me, and suddenly I was discovering they had been the green ones who considered themselves so lucky. “Yes,” John said, “We were so grateful to you!”

With the long, late-light summer day drawing darker, and John visibly tiring, I prepared to leave. He said he’d loved the day and thanked me. I said it wasn’t necessary, I’d loved the day as well. He asked if he could give me anything. “Not a thing, John,” I said, “nothing I could possibly think of.” He said, “Wait, I’ve got just the thing.” He went into a cabinet and withdrew a songbook, Songs From Manhattan/John Wallowitch. “That I’ll take,” I said, “and with the greatest pleasure, John.” He inscribed it: “After all these years—an afternoon of glory.”

Weeks later, I learned of John’s death from his New York Times obituary.

I saw our sultry actress/singer over the years as well, much more occasionally, usually backstage, always limited to warm greetings, a hug and kisses. I saw the announcement of her death on-line several weeks ago. She was Dixie Carter.

I Was Here

When I wrote the lyric below I was relatively “a kid,” one under great pressure from a team of distinguished Broadway theater veterans impatient for me to produce the lyric that, set to music, would complete the score for a musical intended for Broadway. The song called for was a swan song for a former vaudeville star. In theater terms it was the eleven o’clock (“closing”) number a la “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” and like it, its purpose was to stop the show by tearing the audiences’ hearts out.

“What do I know about an old man at the end of his life?” I protested to the composer, Albert Hague, a man many years and awards my senior. I sat down at my desk to address that question and my father came to mind. The lyric flowed as I cried.

When I presented it to Albert, he cried. When we played our finished “aria” for the producers, they cried. As did everyone else. It got to the point that after we played it for the great director of the day, Joshua Logan and, safely out of his earshot, I remarked, wonderstruck, to Albert, that he cried, Albert said, “They’ll all cry. I no longer let people judge the song, I let the song judge the people.”

All these years later, it’s come back to me with profound meaning I never imagined at the time. It’s no longer about my father—it’s about me.

LEGACY: I WAS HERE

I, JACK JUDSON, BEING OF SOUND MIND,
DO HEREBY MAKE, PUBLISH AND DECLARE.
I, JACK JUDSON, BEING OF SOUND MIND,
DO HEREBY GIVE, DEVISE AND BEQUEATH,
ALL MY… ALL MY WHAT?

I WANT TO LEAVE SOMETHING BEHIND
TO LET THE WORLD KNOW I WAS HERE.
THEY SAY YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU,
I DON’T WANT TO TAKE IT WITH ME.
I WANT TO LEAVE SOMETHING BEHIND,
SOMETHING THAT SAYS…

I WAS HERE,
MAYBE ONLY PASSING THROUGH,
BUT WE’RE ALL JUST PASSING THROUGH
UNTIL WE’VE DONE WHAT WE CAN DO,
AND I DIDN’T GET HERE STANDING STILL.
I COVERED GROUND
BEFORE THE GROUND COULD COVER ME,
I WAS HERE.

YOU MAKE A PLAN
TO REACH THE TOP OF YOUR PROFESSION IF YOU CAN.
YOU STAKE A CLAIM,
AND NOW IT’S UP TO YOU TO LIVE UP TO YOUR NAME.
YOU STOP AND ADD,
SO YOU CAN COUNT HOW MANY UPS AND DOWNS YOU’VE HAD.
FOR WHAT?
SO YOU CAN LAUGH…
AT WHAT?
TO KEEP FROM CRYING WHILE YOU’RE SETTLING FOR HALF…
FOR WHAT?
FOR HALF…
FOR WHAT?

I WAS HERE!
IS IT SELFISH AT MY AGE
TO INSIST ON FILLING EVERY LINE
BEFORE THEY TURN THE PAGE?
AND TO ADD THESE WORDS BEFORE I SIGN:
LIFE CAN BE FULL,
AND NOW I’VE LIVED IT TO THE FULLEST…
I WAS HERE…
I WAS HERE…
I...WAS HERE!