And all that jazz...

while scrolling Instagram videos last week I came across several that featured devoted fans gushing over the Broadway debut of Whitney Leavitt as the new Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival of Chicago...now in its 30th year...many of you are thinking who?...Whitney appeared in the Hulu series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives...and then gained national attention on last season's Dancing With The Stars...and they use the term "stars" very loosely...as social media permeates every inch of our lives...we, as a society, use that term "stars" pretty loosely too...the powerhouse that is Chicago has not shied away from putting a sliding scale of celebrity in starring roles over the years...to boost ticket sales?...Walter Bobbie, who as director, brought this incredible revival to Broadway...with the late, great Ann Reinking...has always felt that using celebrities bolstered by the best dancers reinforces the underlying theme of the show...fame, media manipulation, etc...not so sure Ms. Reinking or the original creator and genius Bob Fosse would agree...but they are not here to comment...when Chicago opened on Broadway in 1975 we were a country still reeling from our exit from Vietnam and the sting of Watergate...we, as an audience, perhaps did not want the subtext of the Kander and Ebb songs...the not so subtle irony that pervaded Fosse's vision...oh, and there was a little musical that also opened that year...A Chorus Line...Chicago closed after just two years...by the time the Chicago revival opened in 1996...we were much more jaded...we thought we were impervious to media manipulation...despite having survived the greatest performance by an actor in the 20th century...Ronald Reagan...but that revival...there was Bebe Neuwirth, slinky and wry...James Naughton...Joel Grey...and oh yes...Ann Reinking...those legs and husky voice and every shimmy a love note to Fosse...and then it was Pamela Anderson...Billy Ray Cyrus...and Bravo housewives...all while the best voices and legs stood in the wings and toiled eight shows a week...not good...makes me think of that song from Gypsy...You Gotta Have a Gimmick...please Mr. Bobbie...stop with the wannabee celebrity whoring in Chicago...or just admit the show is no more the acerbic vision of one of Broadway's greatest visionaries...and just a 21st century bump and grind burlesque...with wilting razzle dazzle...

Hopping into the Super Bowl, all "kid"ing aside...

Super Bowl 60...for NY fans...after a brutal season for both teams...it was almost like...who cares?...but there are football pools, new commercials, lots of diet-killing food to inhale...and the halftime show...which unless you live under a rock, you have heard about this ad nauseum...Bad Bunny...or Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio...clutch your pearls...a Puerto Rican superstar was scheduled to perform...in Spanish...and in a case of MAGA gone wild...Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA whipped together an alternative...an "American" show...headliner...Kid Rock...I still have not stopped laughing...and thinking...what the hell was Sheryl Crow thinking all those years ago when they were together...the whole thing was disgusting...if you don't care for the halftime artist then walk away...turn the channel...clean up the snacks consumed first half...or maybe...I don't know...watch...maybe you'll be surprised...or not...in a country as large and diverse as the United States maybe we can all agree that we all don't agree on everything...the halftime show is not a telecast of the nuclear codes...lighten the hell up...but the alternative show was nothing more than a paper thin cover of inherent racism...I don't speak Spanish...I've heard a lot of Bad Bunny and like his music...did I understand most of what he sang during halftime?...no...I took French in high school...so unless they bring Edith Piaf back from the dead for halftime it doesn't help...but, yes, I got everything he was saying in the subtext...down to the power lines that were climbed and their representation of how we have let Puerto Rico...part of the US...down in so many ways with helping them fix this wrecked power system...the end so jubilant...it was like watching an opera...and crying during Madame Butterfly or La Boheme...you get it, even if you don't speak the language...joy and sorrow and pride and hope are universal...Benito's emotions scattered across the field at Levi's Stadium for all to see...and yes, Mr. Bunny...the only thing more powerful than hate is love...

one potato, two potato, three potato...

in the middle of absolute soul scorching chaos in this country, I bring you a diversion...an Amazon tale...to make you laugh...and maybe think...a few weeks ago I was looking at my credit card charges online and saw something peculiar...a $2.14 charge to Amazon...I looked on my app and could not believe my eyes...an order for 1 Russett potato...which I did not place...I tried to cancel it and received a message that it was too late...it was shipped...now, some of you might be nodding your heads...realizing how this happened...for a while now when I make orders...a small page pops up with suggestions of things you might want to add to your order...potatoes are there...I probably tapped it while exiting...(although I never got the standard notification of the order)...and so about a day later an Amazon envelope sat outside my door...and inside was a rather large...albeit lonely...potato...Amazon ended up crediting me...but here's the thing that really got to me...the waste...the colossal waste in this system...the energy exerted to deliver one potato...did they refer to me as Mrs. Potato Head in fulfillment?...how much delivery van exhaust flooded my community?...how about the poor Amazon delivery person trying to make inhuman deadlines for the day...ah...a society demanding everything at once...potatoes on demand to be consumed while watching news that makes you want to throw up...and yes...the potato was delicious...

What's in a name?...

last week...after the horrendous news of the December 13th weekend...Brown University...Bondi Beach...Rob and Michele Reiner...I really didn't think it could get worse...but who says Trump doesn't deliver?...his appointed Kennedy Center Board...which includes such luminaries in the art and entertainment world as Dan Scavino Jr....a former golf club manager...and Laura Ingraham...yes, this merry band of sycophants decided to rename the Kennedy Center...despite the fact, that as a living memorial to President Kennedy they cannot do that...only Congress can...but, oh well...and while many are still fuming...and throwing up from Trump's rant about Rob Reiner...boats are still being blown up in the Caribbean...illegally...and Bari Weiss...an Ellison puppet is squashing free speech at 60 Minutes...CBS...the network that gave us Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite...if you can't keep up with this...that is the point...news overload is the most successful form of distraction from what matters...just ask Al Jazeera...but back to the Kennedy Center...when that news broke, my heart broke for Caroline Kennedy...a woman who has suffered staggering heartbreak and loss, and now gets to watch her daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, die...I believe Caroline should remove her family's name from the center...and let it be restored down the road...by itself...as the living memorial it was intended to be...when again it will showcase and celebrate the diverse and wonderful contributions of musicians, dancers, actors, artists...and not a reward for political campaign donors (sorry, Ms. Gaynor)...it is a bit obtuse of Trump to want his name up there when you really think about it...after all...Kennedy's legacy was cut short by bullets in Texas...just saying

Arrested development

for a few months I have been on the fence about whether to keep up with this blog...I started it in 2012 with the intention of holding myself accountable as a writer...to have a twice-a-month deadline to keep writing through writer's block...and to write through the minutia of life which can often interfere with the creative process...but the world has radically changed...so does your response to it as you age...in your sixties and beyond social media tries to convince you that you have reached an age when your response to all negativity around you should elicit one overriding response..."I don't give a shit"...and yet, I can't get there...and it comes at a cost...we have become a rather cruel society since Covid...the fear and isolation Covid created permeates our feelings to the core...in 2020 we were frozen in time...and when allowed to thaw, we were gaslighted...we are not allowed to remember how we felt...who we lost...what we lost...2025 is nearing an end when we think of Santa's lists and Epstein's lists...2026 looms...in the shadows of a fragile brokered peace in Gaza I am once again gaslighted...this time as an American Jew...I am held to a standard that no religious or ethnic group is held to in this country...I can choose to condemn Israel's response to Hamas's atrocities and modern-day declaration of war on October 7th...I can defend it...I can keep my mouth shut...I can ignore revisionist history textbooks throughout this country that condense the Holocaust to half a page if any...or I can say I don't give a shit...hands over my ears...and my eyes...so I can't see the swastikas on Yeshivas in Brooklyn...or hear modern day "kapos" laughing at my deep-rooted fear...that all evil is born of arrested development...and that these are not the times to not "give a shit"...

River of dreams...

Billy Joel...on Longgg Island he is our music god...(and yes, after living here for almost 33 years I suppose I can say "our")...I always laugh a little...whenever Newsday seems to struggle to fill the Sunday Arts section...there is another article about Billy Joel minutia...I have always liked his music...and those lyrics...the catalog is staggering...when I spent my freshman year at Binghamton and would ache for the dirty streets of Manhattan...it was his "New York State of Mind" I would hear in my head when that bus would pull into Port Authority...Mike and I used his song, "This is the Time" for our first dance at our wedding...I only saw him once in concert...Nassau Coliseum, New Year's Eve 1989...singing in a new decade...the 1990's...from the nosebleed section...and I loved it...I never saw his residency at Madison Square Garden...don't throw things at me...I have a theory about remembering artistic genius a certain way...so, I was more than a little curious about the HBO two-part documentary, "And So It Goes"...I have to say, it hit me in ways I hope I can articulate...being a writer...being a writer who still struggles to call myself a writer...and I do have to say it loudly and with conviction...I think I've earned it...nothing hit deeper than listening to Billy Joel talking about writing and composing...the primal need to push boundaries and not stay complacent...the utter loneliness when creating...the protectiveness he feels for his songs...like they are children...the ones that were his favorites, which audiences did not necessarily see the way he did...the hits that baffled him...the associations that brought him to times in his life that he might not want to have dwelled on...the harshness of reviews and critique...and ultimately...when to put down the pen...it is hard to watch the documentary knowing he is not well right now...and if you fall down the google search medical rabbit hole, you might wonder if the prognosis is really what he says...but you hope it is...and then I hope that he will pick up that pen again...let his fingers dance the piano keys...and sing us his new experiences...new lyrics that we will all know by heart...he always is reaching for something...like every one of us...the search keeps us going...keeps us creating...makes me think of this line from "River of Dreams"...oh, and Billy has the lines that's for sure..."we all end in the ocean, we all start in the streams, we're all carried along, by the river of dreams"...

Can you please spell Gabbana?

The devil wears Prada...but this weekend he, and his mistress, wore Dolce and Gabbana...Bezos and Sanchez...the wedding of the minute...we all know Venice is sinking...this past weekend should have sent it into the Venetian Lagoon...the weight of all those plastic boobs...I was thrilled to see the less than happy response from the local Venetians...the ludicrous amount of money...and media attention to what passes for A-listers these days...but we are all in on the joke...the grotesque joke...about the man that is worth roughly 237 billion dollars...whose workers need to pee into water bottles to make quota...did the guests pee into water bottles at the wedding?...me thinks not...I wonder how much all the seamstresses were paid for the 900 hours it took them to make Sanchez's gown, which at least was an upgrade from her high-end hooker outfit for this past January's inauguration...or were they merely given Amazon gift cards?...this criticism might seem mean-spirited...but here's the thing...I already lived through the accepted excess of the 80's...with breaks for the mea culpa of celebrity social conscience...We Are the World, anyone?...and guess what?...there are still many starving children...and people dying of preventable diseases...but there was Bezos...all 237 billion of him...having a second wedding that cost between 45 and 56 million...with gondolas flooding poor Venice...Venice is sinking...last weekend it was stinking...