MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG

Nancy's mother, Beulah Wasserman, died four years ago; her father, Joe, followed his wife of 65 years into the great beyond in 2008. They lived a rich, happy life, and their family and countless friends mourned their passings, grieved for an appropriate length of time, but then, as we must, moved on.

All but the IRS, which went into a state of total denial. Having been duly informed of their deaths by Nancy, who as the eldest daughter took on the task of dealing with the estate and related matters, the IRS decided to stonewall. Letters addressed to Buelah and Joe Wasserman appeared regularly, demanding information -- why had they not filed tax returns? Had they changed domiciles? -- and making veiled threats: you are liable to penalties if you do not etc. etc.

Nancy dutifully replied to each missive, explaining in language that any child could grasp that the taxpayers in question were deceased. Last month, another letter arrived (by this time the IRS seemed to believe that B & J had cunningly taken refuge in East Hampton with us) that said, essentially, Prove it! Send us the death certificates! We'll send them back when we're convinced they're genuine.

So I scanned the death certificates and Nancy mailed them off to Washington. Today, an envelope arrived from the IRS with the certificates in them. It was addressed to Beulah and Joseph Wasserman.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST

Last night, Nancy and I went to a play reading at the Player's Club (founded by Edwin Booth in the late 19th century, and looks every day of it). The play was called "Mortal Terror," and its subject was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a malcontent named Guy Fawkes tried unsuccessfully to blow up Parliament and everyone in it, including King James and the rest of the Royal Family.

I went partly because I knew that Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights Ben Jonson and John Marston were characters in it -- though they had no connection with the Plot, they figure prominently in the plot, Shakespeare to the point of having a clandestine affair with Queen Anne. But primarily I was there to renew my acquaintance with the playwright, Robert Brustein, who had been my advisor at Columbia during my first year of grad school and for whom I had written a thesis on the Modern French Theater. The proseminar on drama that he taught changed my life; it was my first experience with the academic side of theater, and it both scared me a little and thrilled me. If I'd never met Bob, I doubt I'd have finished graduate school and become a professor.

This was in the 60s. Bob, though he's now in his 80's, is still straight-backed, with all his hair and a brain in perfect working order. He's actually as handsome now (see picture) as he was then. Having not seen him for decades, I was sure he wouldn't have any idea who I was, but he remembered me -- the name and the thesis were familiar to him, though we haven't seen each other once during all those intervening years, which he spent at Yale Drama School and then at Harvard, running the American Repertory Theater, which he founded.

We don't often get a chance to make connections over that span of time. It telescoped virtually my whole adult life to a vanishing point; suddenly I was 22 again, and he the Young Turk of the Columbia English department. Before Columbia, he had taught at Vassar, and his charisma was such (I have this on good authority) that Jane Fonda, then an undergrad, got up an hour early to apply makeup before showing up in Bob's class. He was a little intimidating in those days, but now we met almost as equals, and he couldn't have been warmer; he seemed to be getting as much of a kick out of our reunion as I was. So here's to you and your new play, Bob -- may we all age as gracefully as you have.

LIKE A MILDEW'D EAR: A TALE OF TWO CITYSCAPES

Driving down Park Avenue at dusk yesterday, stopped at a red light, I had Hamlet on my mind -- specifically the scene in Gertrude's bedchamber, in which Hamlet forces his mother to confront two pictures -- his father and her present husband -- in which his villainous uncle comes off far worse:

Look here, upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself. . . .
This was your husband. Look you now, what follows:
Here is your husband; like a mildew'd ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?

The light turned green, and I looked forward, down the avenue to its vanishing point -- which used to be the graceful silhouette of the Grand Central building, but is now the shapeless colossus of the Met Life Building just to the south, which (as one architecture critic said when it was built as the Pan Am Building in 1963), is wedged into the space it occupies like a fat lady trying to get through a narrow doorway.

So, like Hamlet, I superimposed the pictures of past and present, and came to the much the same conclusion: Park Avenue, whose terminus used to be as graceful as the Champs Elysee leading into the Arc de Triomphe, now simply hits a brick wall, so to speak. Lever House and the Seagrams Building, which had brought some architectural distinction to the famous boulevard, has been decisively trumped -- and not by the Donald, who later accelerated the process. The Pan Am / Met Life usurper, like Claudius, has irreversibly blasted its wholesome brother.

WEST SIDE STORY

I’ve lived in many New York apartment buildings – I think the total is up to ten – but none of them more wonderfully situated than 2 West 67th, to which my parents moved when I was about 13, and which was my home away from home during prep school and college. Aside from fronting on Central Park, our building had the advantage of being situated directly across the street from the storied, landmarked 1 West 67th, better known as the Hotel des Artistes, built in 1916 as an artist’s cooperative (all the south-facing windows are double-height) and home, during its illustrious history, to Child Hassam, Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward, Norman Rockwell and Howard Chandler Christie who, in lieu of paying rent, executed the murals that graced the restaurant that, until last year, graced the main floor, the Café des Artistes. What he painted was a series of panels featuring naked woodland nymphs gamboling about a Grecian landscape, and I believe that the elderly woman who could be seen almost every afternoon during the 60's sipping an aperitif under one of the larger panels was the model he had used for all the figures 50 years earlier.



I’d never been inside any of the apartments until last night, when a very well-connected woman in Nancy’s pottery class threw a birthday party for a friend, the centerpiece of which was a piano recital by the composer Philip Glass, who filled the huge, stunning apartment with his own piano works. Sipping champagne as the music rolled in lushly around me, I marveled at the architectural details – the 25-foot ceiling, the kitschy second-floor balcony – and that wonderful mix of West Siders that no other neighborhood can boast, the multiracial academic/intellectual/bohemians of a certain age, leavened by a sprinkling of young men and women whose collective coolness was easily a match for lower Manhattan, a few toddlers, and an enormous cat who prowled among us as we listened.




My people, I realized. I’ve lived on the East Side for 40 years now, and such a gathering would never have taken place on Park Avenue. Money on the East Side is stodgy; everyone wears a suit, and it would have been a charity event to be endured. Money on the West Side has style; everyone wears what they want, and it was a musical event to be cherished. I’m so glad, after all these years, finally to have found my way into a building in the same class, culturally and architecturally, with the Dakota and the
Osborne.

"UP IN THE AIR" AND "PRECIOUS"

On New Year's Eve, Nancy and I stayed home and watched DVDs. I'd like to pretend that we turned down invitations to all sorts of glamorous parties because it's a long-standing tradition with us to view It Happened One Night every December 31st, but such was not the case. We went to a friend's house for a drink at 7, and were home by 9.

The friend's daughter, however, is a member of the Motion Picture Academy, and she offered to lend us "screeners" of two possible Best Picture contenders, Up in the Air and Precious (whose full title, annoyingly, no doubt for legal reasons, is actually Precious: Based on a Novel by Sapphire). We took and watched them both.

Disclaimer: Stop reading here if you haven't seen, and want to see, either or both of them, because I'm going to have to tell you a little about them to make my point.

On the surface, no two films could be less alike. Up in the Air is about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who has no life and likes it that way; he travels 300 days a year for his soul-destroying job (he works for a company that fires people for other companies), and he hates the days he's not travelling. The element in which he lives is the world of business class, airport lounges, car rentals, and hotels, all of which he enjoys mightily because his huge total of amassed frequent-flyer miles entitles him to upgrades in every department. He has no friends; he's estranged from his family; the only women in his life are one-night stands he meets on the road, and his only ambition is to become only the seventh person to achieve 10-million-mile status on American Airlines.

Precious is about a depressed 16-year-old black girl who lives in Harlem and faces a future so bleak it's painful to contemplate. She has a child with Down's Syndrome and is pregnant with another, both fathered by . . . her own father. She lives with her satanic mother, who abuses her emotionally and physically, screaming at her to give up school and go on Welfare, as she, the mother, has. And, though she fantasizes about herself as a celebrity, she's startlingly obese. At school, Precious is doing all right in math but she can't read the simplest of sentences. The second pregnancy causes her to be expelled, and just as she's settling into an alternative school, she discovers that her father has given her AIDS.

I had been looking forward to Up in the Air because it sounded like a breezy, sexy comic recreation for grown-ups. I had little interest in Precious because it sounded like something worse than tragic -- the inexorable downward spiral of someone whose life is insupportably awful and who never expected or had a shot at anything else. Wrong on both counts. What makes the films similar is that both Ryan and Precious blossom as the narratives unfold. Ryan reconnects with his family, saving his sister's wedding; he mentors his young assistant, who manages to teach him a thing or two about what's wrong with the business they're in; he meets a woman in an airport bar who turns out to be smart, funny, and interesting enough for him to abandon their transient relationship (meeting in hotels whenever their business travels intersect). He takes her along to the sister's wedding, and the relationship develops depth and human texture.

Precious, too, comes to life. Monosyllabic throughout the first half of the picture, she's taken under the wing of an extraordinary teacher at her new school, and she begins to read and write and talk out loud. This sounds like a lot of inspirational-teacher movies you've already seen, like Dangerous Minds, but it's not; such is the brilliance of Gabourey Sidibe and her mostly anonymous supporting cast that everything looks, sounds, and feels almost unbearably real. She rescues herself from her mother, moves into a halfway house, finds the courage to live with her disease, and at the end of the movie is well on her way to her GED and a life with some dignity and the promise of rewards in it.

Ryan is not so lucky. Breaking a cardinal rule, he surprises his new-found ladyfriend at home, and discovers she's married with children. He learns that one of the countless people he's fired on the job has committed suicide, and his career breaks into a thousand little pieces. Achieving his 10-million-mile status, he finds himself indifferent. The assistant goes off to a real job in San Francisco; the girlfriend says she's still up for intermittent escapist sex but nothing more; what passes for his home is a studio apartment in Omaha, where the movie leaves him contemplating the bleakest future imaginable.

So what begins as a feelgood movie turns out to be a downer, a story of a clever, resourceful, sympathetic man who loses his way in a life that has become a trackless wasteland from which he'll never emerge. And the movie that looks to be a heartbreaker is instead that rarest of beasts, a heartwarmer for adults, a story of someone who seems doomed but who will survive and if not thrive, at least cope. So in the end, they are, indeed, very different films, except in two ways: they have the same narrative structure, if not ending, and they're two of the best movies of 2009.

THE 2009 HORWICH/BELLENOUE FAMILY NEWSLETTER!

Danielle and Maxim share a quiet moment at the beach on Utila

Hello, friends, colleagues and well-wishers! Thank you to those of you who were organized enough to send out your cards and letters before Christmas; we now reciprocate as best we can.

2009, as it was for everyone, was an up-and-down year for the Horwich and Bellenoue families -- more up than down. Maxim learned how to walk, is beginning to talk, and is shedding his diapers. And it was a year of family reunions. Benoit, Danielle and Maxim made a long-awaited trip to France to visit Ben's family in Paris, Orleans and Montpellier -- Danielle says she met 38 relatives of all descriptions, and her conversational French improved dramatically. Here are Ben




and Maxim in the garden behind his sister Agnes's house in the Parisian suburb of Houilles. And we all met in Orlando last month where, at Animal Planet, Disney presented a wide-eyed little boy with tigers, zebras, rhinos and gibbons. Nancy and Dick visited Utila once; Danielle, Ben and Maxim made several trips to the States.



Dick revealed to the world his secret life as a playwright. He has written perhaps the most uncommercial play in history: its title is The Merchant of Venice, Act Six, and its audience needs to be on speaking terms with the Shakespeare play to which it is a sequel, which rules out about 95% of potential playgoers. Nonetheless, it received a professional reading during the spring at The Naked Stage, an East End group that supports dramatic activities out here. In the picture below, Dick is reading stage directions; the actors are Melissa Hermann, Molly McKenna, Josh Perl and Joe Brondo. The next step would be a workshop; if anyone knows a small theater group that's looking for material, please have them get in touch!




Nancy is continuing to grow as a potter and has had several shows (with accompanying sales) this year: first, as a member of the Clay Art Guild in Water Mill and also as a student at the West Side Y in Manhattan. She is setting up a pottery workshop in our basement but also will continue her lessons with master potters Nancy Robbins in Sag Harbor and Outi Putkonen in New York City. "Learning something new at my age is a wonderful thing. Making money while doing it is miraculous." Here she is at a sale of her wares in Water Mill; above are adorable Smurfy bud vases of her creation.





And finally, we peripatetic Horwiches have moved from our tiny pied a terre on First Avenue and 100th Street to a larger, brighter, and infinitely more convenient apartment at 108 East 96th St. (10128 is the Zip), between Lexington and Park, handy to Central Park and the subway and buses.

All in all, as the song goes, it's been a very good year. And we wish everyone the same for 2010.

Love,

Nancy, Dick, Danielle, Benoit & Maxim

SNOW DAY

The picture above of our back porch will give you an idea of how hard East Hampton got slammed by the blizzard last Sunday. NYC got 12”; the deepest snow measured in Suffolk County was 26”, but I think we got closer to thirty. I foolishly left the car in the garage overnight, instead of doing what my more experienced neighbors did, which was to park it at the bottom of the driveway facing out. Much easier to clear snow off the car than shovel a 100-foot driveway. It didn’t really matter, though, because the town hadn’t gotten around to plowing the street when we had to leave on Monday. I had thought briefly about leaving Saturday morning to beat the storm, but the people who did that hit a wall of white coming at them, and at least one had to abandon her car in Nassau Country.


So there we were, on Monday morning. I had to give my final exam at 2:00 on Waverly Place. The jitneys were running, but how to get into town? We ended up floundering down the driveway and along our road to a bigger road that had been plowed. Then we stuck out our thumbs. Twenty minutes before the jitney was due to leave, a taxi – one from a company I hadn’t called – stopped for us. There were three people in it, all going to the jitney, so we were saved.


But what about that blizzard itself? Some of the forecasters were calling it a 50-year-storm, not so much because of its intensity as because it occurred (technically) before winter had even begun. The usual pattern where we live is chilly Decembers, frigid Januaries, and lots of snow in February and early March.

I believe this storm was a manifestation of global warming. Wherever the warmth is (and it ain’t here), it makes for more volatile weather all over the world -- more or less rain than usual, hotter or colder than normal. I’d love it if New York’s climate was changed into Atlanta’s overnight, but maybe we're going to become Montreal South. Last summer, June and July were like April – cool and damp. When summer did come, in August, it lasted for three blistering weeks and then it got cool again. It also seems to me that the past few years have gotten windier, though this is purely a subjective impression garnered on area golf courses.


After the relative fiasco of the conference in Copenhagen, I’m more convinced than ever that there’s no solution. The sundry nations of this world – controlled as they are by governments driven by self-interest and short term political and economic gains – are not going to lower emissions. It’s estimated that the world’s power usage will rise 50% in the next twenty years, and windmills aren't the answer. I’ve flipflopped on nuclear power; there will inevitably be accidents like Three Mile Island, but the benefits of all that clean energy outweigh them.


Rather than spend the trillions necessary to change the climate, why don’t we spend billions preparing for the worst? Holland, centuries ago, didn’t try to lower sea level. Instead, they built dykes to raise land level. That may not work for the Seychelles, but then, nothing will. Global warming, within my grandson’s lifetime, will make uninhabitable all of the tropical and most of the subtropical parts of the earth. It will correspondingly make habitable – by which I mean arable, comfortable, viable -- places like Murmansk, Hudson’s Bay, and the Cape of Good Hope. More people die in today’s world from extreme cold than from extreme heat; there will be enormous dislocations but the result, globally, won’t be all bad.


Or else it will. There’s a fair chance we’ll pollute and poison this planet until human life can’t inhabit it any more. Is that a bad thing? Yes, for human life; no for Mother Earth. Ecologically-minded people who worry about what we’re doing to the planet would be better off worrying about themselves. Some time after the last human dies, after the last V-8 runs out of fuel, after the last coal-fired power planet shuts down, Earth will start to heal itself. It may take a thousand years or a million, but eventually, it will be Eden again. Everything will be green. The polar ice caps will have re-frozen. The snow pack on Mount Kilimanjaro will have returned. The coral reefs will teem with fish. There will be isolated traces of mankind's existence, but no archaeologists to study them.