It Was A Very Good Year

So, on a brutally cold winter night  in NYC,  I force myself out of my warm apartment and go to a party. The setting was humble, but the attendees were glamorous. The type you study in High School English.  I met one of my idols, a ground breaking, innovative writer – he wasn't very nice.  Disappointing. So maybe he was having a bad day, or maybe as my friend, Jean Caffeine says, never meet your idols.  Fortunately, things perked up from there.  

I have a basic guideline when I go to a party, which has served me well.  I’ll either talk to someone no one is talking to, or the oldest people in the room.  Often they are one and the same. 

I saw an older gentleman and his wife.  She was dressed in all white – white pants, white boots and the largest white fur hat in existence.  Fabulous.  So I go and introduce myself.  Ervin Drake and his wife Edith.  

They are charming, fun and clearly have a zest for life.  We make our chit chat and then ask the inevitable question – what do you do? Since it was a party of writers, the basic was a given, but not the particulars.  Playwright I tell them, and invite them to  a reading of my play the next weekend. 

Ervin’s a songwriter.  Popular songs and he also wrote musicals. His most successful song is - It Was A Very  Good Year recorded by Frank Sinatra.  Frank said, Ervin I’ll record anything you got. What Ervin didn’t tell me was that he also wrote one of my favorite songs, Good Morning Heartache sung by Billie Holiday, which was one of Billie’s favorite as well.

They ask if I know Stephen?  Of him, of course, but not personally, so they introduce me to Stephen Schwartz, who is kind and gracious, and so talented, as evidenced by his many Broadway hits.

Edith describes what it was like in the early 60s.  She was gorgeous now but must have been quite striking then.  Men were grabby and they chased her.  Literally.  At parties around a table. It seems Mad Men had it right.  

Edith and Ervin tell me they are going to a charity event, but they didn’t write down where it was.  Don’t worry, said I, someone with a smart phone can look it up.   “Smart phone?  What’s that?”   My phone at the time, wasn’t so smart.   So we found one.  Evidently, the charity event was the day before!   Phased, they were not.

We continued to have more laughs, and then they caught a cab to the train station for the ride home.  On a frigid cold night, they exuded great warmth.  What a great treat to have met them.

I was sorry to hear that Ervin passed away last year.  What a bright light.   He clearly had many Very Good Years.

Message In A Bottle

So, a friend of mine, Greg, came home late one night, to find a letter in his mailbox.  It was addressed to:

Any Boys and Girls
123 Broadway Street
United States of America
 

He read the letter and laughed and laughed for hours.  Greg, a fine artist, lives in a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  As all New Yorkers know, Broadway is just Broadway without a “Street”.  However, the Post Master General decided Greg’s loft was the right place. He couldn’t have made a better choice, as you will see.

The letter was written by Sergei and Natasha, two young Russian children.   It began:  Hello New Friends!  They were studying English, they were ages 9 and 10.   They talked about their lives, what their home life was like and how they hoped their new friends would write back to them.

He showed me the letter and we laughed and laughed.  I happened to mention this letter to a friend, a teacher of third graders, at a private school in the West Village.  Her eyes lit up.   I said, do you want the letter?  Indeed she did.
 

The class wrote a reply letter to their new friends Sergei and Natasha.  They responded.  They spent the entire school year writing back and forth to each other.  It became a special class project.  At one point Natasha asked, “what is this doll called Barbie?”

The next day every girl brought in Barbies hoping to send them to Natasha.  They chose a cross section of Barbies and shipped them off to Natasha.  Unfortunately, what they didn’t do is pay off the corrupt Russian civil servants because Natasha never received the Barbies.

This happened several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It truly was a message in a bottle.  These two clever Russian children with sense of adventure, reached across the ocean.  Knowing we are all the same, and with a deep sense of humanity - they took a chance.

They are young adults now.  I like to think that a few have maintained contact.  That lasting friendships were made.  Perhaps even a few visits.  That the world is a tad more amicable. 

Ye Olde Antique Shoppe

So, I spent a summer in Scotland when a play of mine  ran in the Edinburgh Festival.  It was received really well and was a big success.  In the cast was an actor who is now a huge star, I won't name names but he now has a hit tv show and is in the Wolverine series.  We had triumphs, trials, victories, laughs and worked hard.  Finally we had a day off, and a few of us decided to rent a car and toodle about the Scottish country side.

The landscape, like the Scotts themselves, is lovely.  We saw ancient castles, lochs, mountains and shades of green I never knew existed before.

So we discover this lovely Scottish town, and on the High Street we find a parking spot in front of Ye Olde Antique Shoppe..  And low and behold we discover we have a flat.  The owner of Ye Olde Antique Shoppe comes out to see what happened.  He asks us where we are from – all 4 of us are New Yorkers.  He tell us he’s been to New York and went to a Bar Mitzvah on Long Island, and that he’s Jewish and Gay.  Three of us were Jewish and Ben is Gay, and all of us have been involved with theatre our whole lives.  The homing pigeon found it’s own kind.  What were the chances!  It was as if a huge cosmic magnet pulled us to this very location.  We chatted, laughed and then our new friend had customers he had to attend to.

It was time to get to the matter at hand.   None of us had ever changed a flat before.  Tom and Ben were valiant, found the spare, the tools and a book on how to change a flat.  One of them grabs the tool, as the other reads the instructions out.  A man sees this and walks by shaking his head in disbelief.

Our new friend from the Shoppe comes out to see how the progress is going. Slowly, we tell him.  We ask if he knows how to change a tire.  He said, not really.  I tell him, you don’t want to get greasy anyway.  Our new friend, slaps his thighs, lifts his hands up in the air and said in his Scottish brogue, “You can grease me right up!”  With that he pivots and returns to his store to attend to new customers.

The man who shook his head came back.  Let me help, he said.  Within 5 minutes he changed the tire. We thanked him profusely.  I never saw anyone read the book, he said in his Scottish brogue.  He might have repeated this several times.  And then he went on his merry way.

We said our fond farewells to our friend in Ye Olde Antique Shoppe, he promised he would visit us in NY and we reconvened our toodling.

Sometimes you luck out, make new friends and rely on the kindness of strangers.