ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 87 of 91

Q is for Queens

The Queens Library has the highest circulation of any public library system in the U.S.

Queens is one of the five boroughs of New York City. The boroughs are coterminous with the five counties that comprise the city, out of 62 counties statewide: Manhattan (New York County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Staten Island (Richmond County); Bronx and Queens have the same county and borough names.

Queens is physically the largest of the NYC boroughs, at 109.7 square miles (284.12 square kilometers or 70,190.2 acres), and with 2.3 million people, the second-most populous, after Brooklyn; this is more people than any other whole US city, save for Los Angeles and Chicago. NYC has established 59 community districts in 1975, based on the historic development of communities, 14 of which are in Queens.

Queens has a rich history as one of the 12 original counties of New York State. You can read about that here. Just as interesting, though, is the fact that Queens is considered one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States. Here are just the ancestry groups with an estimated 25,000 or more, according to the 2009 American Community Survey 1-year estimates: Asian Indian 137,696; Chinese 190,183; Colombian 83,433; Ecuadorian 107,931; German 48,042; Greek 50,949; Guyanese 53,012; Haitian 44,226; Irish 82,543; Italian 153,704; Jamaican 50,828; Korean 59,690; Mexican 83,185; Polish 54,974; Puerto Rican 123,219; Russian 39,798; Salvadoran 26,571; plus a lot of less numerous groups as well.

I have some personal links with Queens. My mother’s uncle Ernest died of cancer in 1954, and then six months later, Aunt Charlotte and her four kids moved from small-town Binghamton (NY) to New York City, into a house in Queens. As Charlotte’s daughter Fran noted in a 2005 interview, her mother thought that with her “kids coming from a town where there were big back yards and big houses — and when we would get too noisy she would just put us in the back yard to run around — that we would be too much to move into an apartment…. So we moved into St. Albans, a three-bedroom house.” My family would visit that house several times a year when I was growing up; it seemed enormous but was probably dwarfed by the current McMansions.

Then in 1965, my family went to the World’s Fair in Flushing. Oddly, my most vivid memory was standing in line FOREVER to get to have something called Belgian waffles. With strawberries! And whipped cream!

My sister and her then-husband moved to an apartment in Jackson Heights c. 1976, and my eldest niece Rebecca was born there in October 1978; I first saw her within a month of her birth, and then several times subsequently, including on her first and second birthdays.

I even lived in that apartment in the summer of 1977; my sister was going back and forth between NYC and Boston. I won $48 in a radio contest, and I took my sister to see a New York Mets baseball game; they, too, are the pride of Queens. The Mets played at Shea Stadium, which was built in time for the 1964 season – and 55,000 Beatles fans were there in 1965. In the early 1970s, my father and I caught a New York Jets-Houston Oilers football game at Shea. The stadium was razed in 2008, replaced by Citi Field in 2009. There’s a documentary about the stadium, Last Play at Shea; the trailer is HERE.

Since I’m a librarian, I should note that the Queens Library is “an independent, not-for-profit corporation and is not affiliated with any other library… With a record 23 million items in circulation for FY 2009, the Library has the highest circulation of any public library system in the U.S. and one of the highest circulations in the world.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

P is for Polly Ticks

So VOTE!

(With apologies to Anthony North):

Some largely nonpartisan things that have been bugging me about the electoral process in the United States recently, and not so recently.

MONEY: It has long been an issue, and there have been a series of legislative actions, Such as McCain-Feingold trying to limit the effect of money on the campaign. However, in January 2010, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court decided that corporations and unions have the same First Amendment rights as individuals, and as such may now directly and expressly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates for federal office, as long as they do not coordinate their efforts with campaigns or political parties. Without getting too wonky here, social welfare organizations may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not their primary activity. As a result, there is a lot more election spending this cycle than ever before. GOP political operative Ed Gillespie said last week on ABC News, and someone said similarly on NBC’s Meet the Press, that the American people do not care about outside spending; I care– a lot.

RANCOR: With that much money, candidates are even more willing and able to run negative, misleading, even inaccurate advertisements. One can and should debate the issues, but it’d be nice if they could get along better while doing so.

Someone’s Photoshop of 2008 Democratic candidate for President Barack Obama, and Republican candidate for Vice-President Sarah Palin

NO REAL CHOICE: A growing number of people believe a third party is needed in the US. Now, there are third-party candidates legitimately doing well this political season, but it doesn’t reflect a sustained, or sustainable national organization. My sense is that there never will be without instant runoff voting.

VOTER SUPPRESSION: Latinos for Reform is running ads on television, radio and the Internet telling Nevada’s Hispanic population not to vote on election day so as to teach Democrats a lesson for failing on the promise to deliver on immigration reform. Others have reported intimidation tactics of voters likely to vote for the opposition.

Another form of voter suppression, I believe, is the overuse of polling. When one hears that Candidate X is a “sure thing” to win or to lose, voters often lose interest and stay home, skewing the results. I’m not sure what to make of poll results anyway. I’ve read that the Republicans may win 100 seats in the House of Representatives. I’ve also noticed another poll, which includes people whose only phone is a cell phone, Democrats lead by 6 points on the generic ballot.

All that said, and in particular, in response to the voter suppression tactics, I encourage people to vote at every opportunity. Not only do I believe it is one’s civic duty, but, for me, it is a personal necessity. I’ve had ancestors who could not vote, so I would be dishonoring those who fought for the ballot not to exercise the franchise.

Did you ever notice that a large number of the Amendments in the US Constitution, after the Bill of Rights, deal with voting?

Amendment 15 states that race or previous condition of servitude (i.e., slavery) is no bar to voting (1865), passed right after the Civil War.
Amendment 17 requires that US Senators be elected by popular vote, rather than by the state legislature (1913) – someone please explain to me why some candidates this year have indicated repealing this amendment?
Amendment 19 provided for nationwide women’s suffrage (1920), though some individual states had allowed women to vote earlier.
Amendment 23 gave the Presidential Vote to Washington, DC (1961) – now if they could only get a voting member in Congress.
Amendment 24 bars the imposition of a poll tax as a requirement for voting (1964), eliminating that particular voter suppression tactic.
Amendment 26 set the voting age at 18 years (1971); unfortunately, statistically, the group least likely to use it.

So VOTE! And if you’re elsewhere in the world, VOTE when your next chance occurs.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

O is for Our Town

I should note that I was in a production of Our Town, some 25 years ago. I played the drunken choir director Simon Stimson, one of the characters in the cemetery in the third act.

How did a play written 72 years ago about a small town in New Hampshire, with no scenery and few props, “transcend the ages to become America’s most produced play”? Maybe it’s because it contains some universal themes.

From SparkNotes.com:
[Thorton] Wilder’s principal message in Our Town — that people should appreciate the details and interactions of everyday life while they live them — became critical…when the play hit theaters in 1938. It was a time of tremendous international tension, and citizens across the globe suffered from fear and uncertainty. Our Town directed attention away from these negative aspects of life…and focused instead on the aspects of the human experience that make life precious. Wilder revealed his faith in the stability and constancy of life through his depiction and discussion of the small town of Grover’s Corners, with its “marrying . . . living and . . . dying.”

Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager

Specifically, the dying. Act 1 is the ordinary, even mundane lives of the townspeople. Act 2 addresses the budding romance of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Act 3 is in a cemetery but has a flashback to a time about a decade in the past. This prompts a character to ask of the Stage Manager, the narrator: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” And, of course, the answer is “No”. But how could we?

There have been 4000 productions in the last decade according to this CBS News video, which shows segments of a recent long-running Off-Broadway production that closed only last month. One of the participants noted that if we realize life while we live it, every minute, we’d probably be on Twitter, tweeting 24/7, which would puncture the value of actually EXPERIENCING life.

The 2010 NYC off-Broadway production’s George and Emily

While there was a 1940 movie, the play has always been the thing. According to Wikipedia, there was a live musical 1955 TV adaptation starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George, and Eva Marie Saint as Emily. I remember watching the 1977 TV adaptation of the play starring Hal Holbrook, Robby Benson, and Glynnis O’Connor, though not the 1989 telecast with Spalding Gray, Frances Conroy, Penelope Ann Miller, and Eric Stoltz. And I HAD to view the adaptation of a 2002 Broadway revival starring Paul Newman, this time as the Stage Manager, a segment that can be seen here.

I should note that I was in a production of Our Town, some 25 years ago, produced by the FOCUS Churches of Albany. I played the drunken choir director Simon Stimson, one of the characters in the cemetery in the third act, who bitterly proclaims: “That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.” Even in death, Simon seemed to miss the point.

Wilder was full of pithy sayings beyond the realm of this play. Perhaps my favorite: “If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

N is for Nostalgia

Strange, but I found even then that people have a greater recollection of things that I allegedly said and did than I do.

At some level, I’m not a very nostalgic guy. As Billy Joel put it in Keeping the Faith, and I quote, The good old days weren’t always good. It seems as though, in the US, there are dreams of the 1950s being the “good old days”, represented by TV shows such as Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best, with dad out working all day, with mom home raising the kids and wearing pearls when her husband came home for dinner. It was never MY experience.

The 1950s were a period of the cold war paranoia of “duck and cover”, and an unsettling racial climate; I’ve written before how the death of Emmett Till affected me deeply.

And it’s not just the 1950s. I went to my 10th high school reunion back in 1981 and I found it quite disturbing, so annoying, still fighting the same fights that should have been over a decade before. Or lots of conversations about “remember when so-and-so did such-and-such”; well, either the answer is yes, and so what, or no, and so what. It’s like the Springsteen song from Born in the USA, Glory Days:
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days.

Strange, but I found even then that people have a greater recollection of things that I allegedly said and did than I do.

Therefore I was quite interested in this story I saw on CBS Sunday Morning last year, Nostalgia: Power of the “Good Old Days”

But you might be surprised to learn that nostalgia – which is all about the past – has a notorious past of its own. For centuries it was considered a disease and a form of depression. Soldiers even feared it as homesickness and thought it could kill them.
I could almost believe that.

But it is not so, apparently. In fact:
Reliving good times can be a critical tool for surviving these bad times.

“If right now everything is terrible and bleak if you’re out of work and you can’t pay your mortgage and you’ve been evicted and you think, ‘there’s nowhere for me to turn,’ it is actually healthy to look to the past and to say, ‘What else have I survived before?'”
(l-r, Carol, Lois, Karen, Roger, Bill)

Now I DID agree to go to my 35th high school reunion a few years ago, but there was only one reason. There were a group of my oldest friends that were going to be there. When I say “oldest”, I mean that we all went to kindergarten together at Daniel Dickinson school in Binghamton, NY, and all graduated together from 12th grade at Binghamton Central High School. The thing about THESE friends is that we had known each other for SO long that we didn’t NEED to rehash old stuff, just needed to catch up on things.

We didn’t say, “Oh remember in second grade when we danced to the Minuet in G?” (I danced with Carol, Bill with Karen, Bernie with Lois.) Well, they do or they don’t and it doesn’t matter. “Do you remember going to Carol’s parents’ summer place in northern Pennsylvania?” Of course they do; no need to ask. There’s a certain shorthand you develop when you’ve known people a long time, even when you haven’t seen them in many years.

Still, I try to be a proponent of Carly Simon’s Anticipation, specifically the last line: “THESE are the good old days.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

M is for Mockingbird

A marathon reading to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s classic novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and raise funds for Literacy Volunteers of the Greater Capital Region will take place on Saturday, November 6, 2010 from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Townsend Park Bakery LLC, 238 Washington Ave., Albany.

2010 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. If you are unfamiliar with this classic, which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, read here, and the affiliated links. But basically, it’s about a young white girl named Scout, a/k/a Jean Louise – the “tomboy” narrator of the tale – growing up in a U.S. Southern town in the 1930s with her older brother Jem, whose lawyer-father Atticus Finch ends up defending a black man accused of raping a white woman, and the repercutions the trial has on all involved, indeed on the whole town. The case was almost certainly inspired by the Scottsboro Boys trials of the 1930s in Alabama, where nine black teenagers allegedly gang-raped two white women, a crime that never actually occurred.

The story is probably best known through the popular 1962 movie adaptation starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Brock Peters as the accused, Tom Robinson, and Mary Badham as Scout, Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The film also featured a young Robert Duvall, in his film debut, as the mysterious and misunderstood Boo Radley, a role some have compared to his part in the 2010 film Get Low.

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but lost to the epic Lawrence of Arabia. It won three awards: Peck for Best Actor Award (his first Oscar win, fifth nomination); Horton Foote for Best Adapted Screenplay; and the team of Art Directors/Set Decorators. Hear one of the most famous speeches from the movie, as well as its musical theme from the Oscar-nominated score by Elmer Bernstein.

From Wikipedia: In 1995, the film was listed in the National Film Registry. It also ranks twenty-fifth on the American Film Institute’s 10th-anniversary list of the greatest American movies of all time, and #1 on AFI’s list of best courtroom films. In 2003, AFI named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of the 20th century.

Atticus Finch is considered not only one of America’s most beloved lawyers but also one of the greatest cinematic fathers.

Earlier this year, I got a chance to see a play adaptation of the story at Capital Rep in Albany. While not as strong as the movie – how could it be? – it was nonetheless enjoyable.

For the 50th anniversary, CBS Sunday Morning reported on the celebratory events taking place in Harper Lee’s hometown. Notably absent was the reclusive Ms. Lee herself, who never wrote another book because she felt it could never be as good as her first one.

An interesting dichotomy: To Kill A Mockingbird is taught all over the country – here’s a readers’ and teachers’ guide – but also one of the books most banned or challenged.

A marathon reading to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s classic novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD – To Kill A Saturday – and raise funds for Literacy Volunteers of the Greater Capital Region will take place on Saturday, November 6, 2010, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Townsend Park Bakery LLC, 238 Washington Ave., Albany, NY. Rumor has it that I will be one of the readers.
***
And now for something completely different: Mockingbird – Carly Simon and James Taylor.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7