My Day: Harris Wofford’s Memoirs

Harris Wofford was an interesting guy.  Born into a wealthy family, he seemed to be like Woody Allen’s “Zelig” – always at the place where something important was happening, meeting one after another every person of importance.  He was an early supporter of John F. Kennedy (he was 9 years younger than Kennedy), he was present during the primary campaign, he was at the convention, he was around when Kennedy selected Lyndon Johnson as his vice presidential candidate.  He became a speech writer, an advisor to the President, and a senior official in the new Peace Corps project.  He continued as an advisor to Lyndon Johnson – seeing through the completion of so many of Kennedy’s legislative ideas, and seeing everything bog down with the Vietnam War, which he opposed, and witness to the shifts in positions as the war expanded and expanded.

Eventually (not covered by the book), Wofford became a one term, very progressive senator from Pennsylvania.  After his wife died after a marriage of several decades, he came out as gay and, before his death in his 90s, married and became a husband.

Interesting story – and very interesting book – that I think is not looked at much these days.

My Day: “Mother Road” at Arena

Wow, this is an odd one.  A sequel, so to speak, to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,  Several generations later, there is only one Joad, William, left in Oklahoma.  He has preserved the family farm and built it up to 2000 acres, but he is dying of cancer without having had any children.  His godson/lawyer locates the one remaining Joad heir, living in California, a descendant of the escaping Okie Joads, and he arranges for the two to meet.  The goal is to keep the farm in the family.

Well it turns out the Tom Joad, when he first got to California, got into some sort of scrape and exited to Mexico, where he married and had a family.  The remaining Joad (an American citizen by birth) is Martin, the son of Tom’s daughter; he was born here after her mother returned to the US.  But they are “Mexicans”, who work the fields and barely scratch out a living.

The first meeting of the Joads is not auspicious. William did not expect a Mexican, and Martin did not know why they were meeting in the first place.  But blood is thicker than water, and – with conditions – William tells Martin that he is going to leave him the family farm.  The two of them then start on a road trip from southern California, through the desert of California and Arizona, and the snow storms of New Mexico, up through the Texas west country, and across Oklahoma until just east of Oklahoma City, where they are about to reach the farm.

They don’t make the trip alone – there is Martin’s “cousin” Mo, a lesbian woman who is to run the farm, and there’s James, his black friend, and there’s a Choctaw Indian who joins them as well.  The trip back east is filled with mishap, misunderstanding, adventure and eventual understanding.  Yes, we can all live together as one happy family – on the 2000 acres in central Oklahoma.

What is this play?  It is quite stylized, so perhaps it’s an opera without music.  It’s a morality play.  It’s a story of our “hero” and his misplaced adventures, filled with strange and repetitive coincidences – a Candide without the humor.  Or it is Brecht’s “Mother Courage” – trudging the roads of Germany/Oklahoma, hoping for an end to life’s troubles.

Is it a must-see?  With its pat message of all too easy inclusiveness, probably not.  But it isn’t to run away from either.  Very good cast (as always), and very imaginative staging, in the round.

My Day: Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand

Wow.  I sort of knew the story, but only sort of.  Now I have read Branden’s memoir Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand.

Nathaniel Branden, born Nathan Blumenthal, (1930-2014) was clearly a very bright fellow.  For the majority of his career, he was a psychotherapist in California and an expert in various types of treatment and in the study of self esteem.  Born in Toronto, after high school and before college, he went to work for an uncle in Winnipeg, where he met his first wife, Barbara, with whom he went to California to study.  Branden’s background was that of a shy, somewhat repressed intellectual kid, but Barbara, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, who apparently made up for the lack of parental love from her beautiful mother by having relationships with a load of folks in high school, was the opposite.  Their relationship teetered back and forth  (he was faithful, she was not) but lasted into marriage and a move to New York City.

Somewhere along the way, they discovered Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead, and were hooked on the book, and on Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism”, touting selfishness as a virtue, the perfect man (intellectually, physically and philosophically) as the ideal, and laissez fair capitalism as the way for society to construct itself.

To make a long story short, they met their idol and became part of a unique set of young accolades, a cult to be sure, calling themselves “the Collective”, devoting their intellectual energies, their social commitments, and their time to her, her writing and her philosophy.  Except in Branden’s case, there was something more.  He became her lover.  Okay, so he was married to Barbara, and she was married to a quietly mysterious man, Frank, but both of them accepted this arrangement (which was kept hidden from others) because of their adulation of Ayn and their willingness to tolerate anything she wanted to do.  There was one other strange factor here.  Branden (still Blumenthal at the time) was 20, and Rand was 45.

This arrangement continued for about 15 years.  During this time, the Nathaniel/Barbara marriage kept teetering until it teetered into separation and then divorce, and Nathaniel fell in love with a woman 10 years younger than he (she was 23 at the time), Patrecia, also a member of the Collective, and creating another relationship that this time had to be kept secret from Ayn.  Nathaniel was not interested in a sexual relationship with almost 60 year old Ayn, but Ayn was not ready to give up on Nathaniel.

The upshot is that eventually, they told Ayn, she exploded (as she was wont to do whenever contradicted about anything), and cut herself off completely from Nathaniel (who had devoted his life up to that time to her work, and was running an educational and publication organization devoted to her.)  He was her protege, her would-be successor, and her heir, but that was gone now.

Rand was clearly a psychological mess throughout her career, but her charisma was such that she could hold the Collective together, attract innumerable followers and admirers across the world, and somehow mask her craziness as something that should be expected of a person of her genius.

Nathaniel married Patrecia, who had become a rising actress, and moved back to California, where his psychotherapy reputation grew, and all was peaches and cream, until Patrecia, who suffered from a mild epileptic condition (controlled by medication) had a seizure, and fell into their swimming pool and drowned at the age of 37.  Branden, after a long recover period, married his third (and last wife) and presumably had a successful career, dying at 84.  He lived about 30 years after Rand passed away; they never reconciled – she refused.

Last tidbit – one of the active members of the Collective?  Alan Greenspan.  Who knew?

 

My Day: “Pilgrims” at Mosaic

An interesting play – a “lost” young waitress takes up with an immigrant taxi driver from Egypt.  This may be real romance.  But the taxi driver (who also really likes the waitress) has a secret – he has a fiance, a young American woman of Egyptian descent, who is now in Cairo planning the wedding festivities with the driver’s family.

A surprise is in store.  The fiance comes home early, and comes directly to the driver’s apartment to bring him some gifts, only to find the waitress naked in his bed.

It sounds awful, I know, but in fact it doesn’t turn out too badly, in large part because the now ex-fiance seems to be able to put things in perspective and go on with her life, as the taxi driver and the waitress plan to leave New York and travel the country, getting odd jobs as they go.

There are a couple more characters – the taxi driver’s roommate, who is also out of town making the haj and may have turned into a ghost or a scepter, possibly drowned on the way.  And the Muslim immigrant who runs the tire repair shop, a friend of the taxi driver, who seems to be the philosopher of the crowd.

Yes, immigrants have a difficult path to navigate, and sometimes so do locals.  But that’s life.

My Day: Spring Arising

“Spring Arising”, a “rock musical” based on a 19th century German story, won 8 Tonys in 2006, and 4 Oliviers in 2010.  It was revived on Broadway in 2015, and is currently being performed at the Round House in Bethesda.  It takes place at a boarding school, where the sexes are separated.  The children, played by university graduates who are probably all in their 20s, are maybe 15 or 16.  Their ages are not mentioned, nor is the location of their school (although everyone retains German names), nor whether this play takes place in the 19th century or some other time.  There are about a dozen “children”, half boys, half girls.  The girls wear dark skirts and white shirt blouses, and the boys, shirts, ties, jacket, short and bright red knee socks.  There is no furniture on the bare set, just a few simple chairs that are moved here and there.  There’s an 8 piece band off stage.  There are two “adult” actors, each of whom play multiple parts – school officials, parents, everyman.

It’s clearly a musical, and I guess it’s a rock musical, although the genre is not particularly well defined.  The kids are all “coming of age”, and good but confused as to how life works, and how relationships with others work.  The adults, every one of them, is evil.

One boy, Moritz, has a hard time with his school work, looks disheveled, and carries a skate board wherever he goes (so much for the 19th century?); he is eventually expelled as an academic failure and trouble maker.  There’s Wendla, who asks her mother how babies are created, and Melchior, who copies something he has found on the same subject which he gives to his class mates.  Wendla and Melchior have known each other forever, but only now begin to appreciate each other, which ends in intercourse, which to Wendla’s surprise leaves her pregnant.  She dies from a botched abortion.

Are you having fun yet?

In spite of all the accolades given the show, including consistently positive reviews given this production, the six of us who saw it last night hated it.

 

My Day: Manfred Honeck and Nicolai Lugansky

Last week, I attended the National Symphony’s Friday 11:30 a.m. concert.  It is always good – this one was, in my opinion, exceptional.

I had never had the privilege of seeing Honeck conduct before.  I knew him by reputation, and know that the Pittsburgh Orchestra has been lucky to have him as their music director the past several years.

Honeck conducted two pieces – one by Dvorak, his 8th Symphony.  How lush and beautiful it sounded. The other by Mason Bates – the current (and first) Kennedy Center composer in residence.  How terrific was the performance of his Resurrexit (written originally for Honeck) – strange percussion instruments, sounds of the Middle East and of the medieval Christian church.

The third item was Lugansky playing Mozart’s 24th piano concerto.  It’s not one that I know well, and it’s not one that I particularly enjoyed as a Mozart piece.  I thought Lugansky, about whom frankly I knew nothing, did a very good job – but it was a very conservative playing (except for a fascinating credenza), which somehow didn’t flow with Honeck’s conducting.  OK, I am not really sure what I am saying.  But it’s what I was thinking as I listened.

My Day: Jewish Humor, Part 1

This was the topic of the presentation at my morning breakfast group.  Here are some jokes:

1. A little Jewish man sits between two big men on a plane back home to Texas.  The big man on one side introduces himself:  “I am Bob.  I own a 200,000 acre cattle ranch.  It’s called Big Bob’s Ranch.”  The man on the other side introduces himself:  “I am Ray.  I own a 300,000 acre cattle ranch.  It’s called Ray’s Big Spread.”  One of them asks the little man in the middle:  “How about you?”  He responds:  “I only own 7 acres.” “What’s it called”, asks the big men. “Downtown Dallas”.

2.  It’s the time in the Yom Kippur service where the rabbi prostrates himself on the ground and says;  “God, I am nothing.”  The cantor follows, and prostrates himself on the ground and says “God, I am nothing.”  A meek old man in one of the back rows stands up, moves to the aisle, prostrates himself and says “God, I am nothing”.  The president of the congregation points to this fellow, and says to the man sitting next to him:  “Look who thinks he is nothing”.

3.  An elderly man dies.  He was not a nice man, and his brother goes to the rabbi who is going to lead the funeral service.  The brother says:  “Look, I know my brother wasn’t the best, but I really want you to say he is a mensch in the eulogy.  In fact, if you do, I will give the synagogue a million dollars.  If you don’t, …. not a penny.”

It is time for the funeral.  The rabbi delivers the eulogy, which in part reads: “The deceased was a real bastard.  He was unfaithful to all of his wives, he ignored his children, he cheated his business partners, and he never did anything for the community.  But….. compared to his brother, he was a mensch.”

My Day: Why is it called “Dance of the Panther”?

The answer is:  “who knows?”

Dance of the Panther is the name of Ingeborg Glasser’s Nazi era memoir about her parents and her sister and Hitler’s Germany.  Glasser’s mother, Berthe, was born to a wealthy Jewish family in the Ruhr Valley city of Bochum, but her grandparents did not speak with her mother after she married a non-Jew and converted to Catholicism.  This non-Jew, Inge’s father, was a drunkard and abuser, who eventually left the family for another woman.  Berthe, in spite of the violence which had defined the household, was very upset. She was a bitter woman, left without resources (she finally went to work in a local brothel, but not as a prostitute), prone to fits of self-pitying anger.Inge and her older sister Marianne lived with their mother for a while, until Marianne decided to live with their father.  Later, both girls, now older teens moved to Munich to strike out on their own.

The story takes place in the 1930s and 1940s, and the background is Hitler’s Germany.  But it’s a Germany where life seems to go no for most people as normal, in spite of the war.  Except of course when Bochum is repeatedly bombed by Allied planes.  But a day later, life seems to go on.

There’s a general feeling that the Jews are in trouble.  Inge’s grandmother dies of old age, not of persecution, but her uncle is arrested and taken off somewhere.  That only seems important the day it happens – shortly after Kristallnacht, which again seems to be a problem when it happens, but then disappears from general consideration.

You would think that, as a Jew, Berte would be in trouble throughout.  But for years she is not bothered by the Gestapo until one day a letter arrives telling her to come to register for deportation as a Jew.  Inge opens the letter and decides not to tell her mother.

This, I guess, is where the story really begins. The girls try to get their mother off the list, Inge is arrested but freed through the influence of her father, the girls live and work in Munich, barely earning enough to survive, their mother leaves Bochum and surprises them and joins them in Munich. Her mother meets a restaurateur and spills out her story, and by a miracle the women in the restaurant finds a way for Berthe to hide.  Inge visits Berthe now and then, but eventually Berthe is betrayed, arrested and sent somewhere (presumably Dachau) and does not survive.  But it is already 1944.

The next year, the war ends.  Marianne and Inge, Jewish by Nazi definition, remain further untouched by the Nazis, survive the war and, somehow, get visas to come to the United States.  This last part of the story is not part of the story – only alluded to.

The book was interesting to read, but something just seemed a little askew.

My Day: Lunch with Friend

I did a fair amount of legal work for him back in the day, have maintained contact via Facebook, but had not seen him in years until we met for lunch yesterday.  After lunch, I told him that I felt like I had just attended an educational seminar, with three separate courses:

1.  He has a 3000 acre ranch in western Kansas.  We discussed raising cattle, growing crops, marketing through both a co-op and through the futures market, the effect of Donald Trump and tariff uncertainty on Chinese exports, the political complexion of western Kansas, the prices of various crops, the equipment needed to plant, bale, etc.
2.  His son owns a vending machine business in Nevada.  We discussed the need to get food from a caterer (they get it from a large casino kitchen’s night shift), how foods are packaged, including those that are packaged by other suppliers, like suppliers of sodas and candies, the truck fleet and delivery schedules, how they are delivered daily and how left over food is donated to homeless shelters, their warehouse and government clients, etc.
3. He is overseeing the repair of a 17 story, 45 year old concrete building whose apartment balconies were beginning to sag.  We discussed how you need specialized contractors to deal with replacing steel cables that run up to 300+ feet from balcony to balcony, and need to anchor the balconies outside of the concrete weight bearing outer walls, and what is involved in the work, all being done with residents in place.

Don’t you think I deserve a certificate?

My Day: “Sheltered” at Theater J

“Sheltered” is a thought provoking play, loosely based on a true story, well performed and well received.

It is 1939.  Austria has been annexed into the German Reich, Kristalnacht has occurred, the Sudetenland has been taken over, but war has not yet started.  The Jewish community of Vienna is in panic.  People want to leave (and could) but few countries would take them in.   The United States was virtually closed.

But a young Jewish doctor in Providence RI did manage to obtain 40 visas for Jewish children in Austria.  He and his wife simply had to find families to house them in the U.S.  And, oh yes, they had to travel to Vienna and select 40 children out of hundreds whose parents had applied.

They were almost ready to go to Austria (a very dangerous trip for a Jewish couple in 1939), when one of the families dropped out.  They needed to find a home for the 40th child, and invited old friends (friends with whom they had dropped out of contact for reasons that became quickly obvious) and convinced them to sponsor a child, knowing that their friends’ marriage was perpetually on the rocks, and that alcohol and domestic violence played a part, along with failing finances.  But, they were the 40th family.  (The dialogue as the families met for dinner was clever and snappy)

The second act takes place in Vienna, not Providence, and the process of selecting the 40 to come to America is heart breaking.  The atmosphere in Vienna stifling (not to mention the pounding rainstorm and dark skies).  And then comes the mother of one of the 40 who decides that she has changed her mind, and cannot part with her 5 year old son. (The dialogue, as they discuss the merits – or more precisely the dangers – of staying or leaving, is neither clever nor snappy.  It is as oppressive as the weather.)

Worth seeing.