World Show Business Exclusive on Old Song Lyric

Just saw Sting at the Brooklyn Paramount. Great show. One note: I think I heard new lyrics to "Wrapped Around Your Finger." He changed the lyric "servant is your master" to "servant has surpassed you." I can't find any confirmation for this except from my own ears. 

Looks at Books: The Aurora Revelations by Michael F. Walker

A Ghoulish Tale of Aliens, Monstrosities, and Mad Science

Walker has crafted an entertaining novel of what-ifs, positing a unified theory of aliens, a 20th-century mad genius, and things that go bump in the night. A wise-cracking team of paranormal enthusiasts unearths a long-dormant mystery in a Texas cemetery, entering a hellscape of hillbilly horror and a monstrous mindscape of things to come (or will they?). Read it and find out. The paperback is a neat production, and I speak from several decades in New York publishing, trade and academic. The text is also very well edited.

https://www.amazon.com/Aurora-Revelations-Paranormal-Mystery-Novel/dp/B0D99JH15Z/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Reading the Bible

I’m still working through the Old Testament after reading the New Testament some years ago.

I keep a beautiful leather-bound of the New Revised Standard Version on the lamp table. The volume was given to me when I joined Marble.

On my Kindle phone app I read the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Great for train trips and waiting on long lines at Walgreens.

And because my eyes tire easily, I’ve also been listening to a great podcast on Spotify called Bible: Beginning to End, a straight reading from the New Living Translation with questions (but no answers) for thought after every chapter or so.
I used to think that reading the Bible was something I would do when I finished reading everything else important. Or watching everything on Netflix. Or when I was fully retired. But now that I’m immersed in it, I wish I had done it sooner. My father told me that there is something on every page of the Bible that is good for you. He was right.

The Great Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart, who returns to the Daily Show tonight, is the Sesame Street of smart politics. If Sesame Street worked as it was supposed to in 1969, we should be on our second or third generation of people who are good at reading and understand math. That didn't happen. All reading and math scores are down compared to 1969. The smart kids picked up the learning, and the rest watched it for the shiny colors and pretty songs. Stewart had to be disappointed that his years of insightful comedy still led up to Trump winning. He's fact-preaching to the choir and the few fence sitters that are left. The alternate reality folks can't be swayed.

Learning to read in the 1960s

 Interesting article in today's NY Post about a failed reading theory that is being discontinued. A person named "B. Black" commented:

In the 1960s, Mom taught me the alphabet and that b + at spelled bat. From there I figured out cat, fat, hat, etc. My father taught me math using coins. By the time I entered 1st grade, I was miles ahead thanks to pencil and paper, a pocket full of change, and Mom and Dad (neither of whom went to college).

https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-teachers-college-project-that-ruined-countless-lives/?spot_im_scroll_to_comments=true&spot_im_highlight_immediate=true

Yay AI!

 ChatGPT may work out well for me. There are suddenly appearing many job requests for copy editors to humanize books that were generated by ChatGPT from authors' input, but the copy needs humanizing. The conclusion is that more books are going to be written in general. So rather than a threat to my copy editing business, it's a boon.

Call Me Kat Canceled

This is not a flame but an honest review of why Call Me Kat failed. The source material, a BBC classic, featured a comic giantess, Miranda Hart, who viewers either love or hate. Her love interest in the show was very believable, whom US viewers might recognize as Welshman Tom Ellis of Lucifer fame. A lot of humor was mined from the largeness of Miranda compared to most everyone, including her diminutive friend and co-worker, Stevie. Miranda's gangliness must have been part of at least a half-dozen gags per show. Miranda's mom was a major funny force, trying to get her married off (a concept that can't play anymore in the US).

Now to CMK. In the US you can't do any body-shaming humor, so casting a gangly lady was not in play. Kat's shortness was also out of play for laughs. Kat's best friend is . . . nobody I can tell. Kat's mother is played by Swoosie Kurtz, whose terrifyingly thin appearance takes the edge off her comedy. Kat's love interest is played by Cheyenne Jackson, a talented Broadway performer who has no chemistry with Bialik. The loss of Leslie Jordan was curtains for Kat. He was the comic soul of the show.

The bottom line is that the US show is about a humorless independent woman. The UK show has a pathetic woman with room for growth, which does happen (spoiler alert). So watch the UK show, skip the US. And Jim Parsons, hire a casting director next time you produce. You're never going to get Maddie-and-Dave- or Rob-and-Laura-level sizzle, but maybe at least Cheers?

Gordon Lightfoot RIP

 Watched a lot of old CBC footage on YouTube last night. Saw a great odd clip of the iconic Anne Murray introducing Dylan inducting him into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTP8RIRaFNQ

Mrs. 1OTT always gets upset by "If You Could Read Mind" when she thinks I'm mad at her. Not many songs can do that.

Add to the lookalikes: young Gordo and actor Chris Pratt.

Drinking with pals Al and Ken, there was a song we made up about the legendary exploits of Al--the taxi driving, the hejira through Texas and the South, the women, the barber chair in the apartment. We made up heroic lyrics to the tune of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So much fun. 

And, Liza Minelli's medley of If You Could Read My Mind/Come Back to Me. It will infuriate and delight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6muweIFQmM

Johhny Cash brings it back to earth in one of his very last recordings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6b1NwbdOLQ

One takeaway, if true, was that he wasn't happy as just a songwriter. He had to crack the US market. He finally did. Then he went home.

Tom Holland Biopic of Astaire Has a Director

 Paul King, director of Paddington, is onboard the biopic of Fred Astaire starring Tom Holland. 

They have guts even thinking about it. I like the idea of focusing on a period of his life rather than doing 80 years in two hours with corny montages to show the passing years. If it's a hit, it could be a trilogy: 1. the years with Adele from childhood through the 1920s; 2. the years with Ginger in the 1930s; 3. post-Ginger, the dawn of television, the amazing final years of productivity.

His young widow is taking the money. As rotten as that sounds, the silver lining to the silver pieces is the exposure to this generation of what talent is. I worked with Ted Mann, the father of Off Broadway, on his autobiography. The widow of Eugene O'Neill took a play to Mr. Mann and disregarded her late husband's will, which specified that his unperformed play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, not be performed until 50 years after his death due to its painful autobiographical nature. If she had respected her husband's wishes and not taken the play to Mr. Mann, the play would not have come out until 2003, when it would have had little impact as the subject matter was old hat by that time. So, the Widow Astaire may trigger a great cultural revival with this film, which I think Fred might approve of.

If they should bar wars . . .

Mrs. 1ott needed to see the Elton John farewell to N. America (residencies, town halls, and county fairs excepted) so I signed on for a month of Disney+, which means I finally saw The Rise of Skywalker. It played like every other Star Wars movie, with a borrow from every other science fiction series. Hunting for the spice planet? C'mon, man! Death is very low stakes, at least for the charismatic leads, when you can talk to ghosts. There appear to be two categories: 1. real ghosts who can interact with our world with some effort and 2. mind ghosts (scene between Han Solo and Kylo Ren). There's mumbo-jumbo to explain this, but esthetically this is very jarring. It's like a character on stage pouring water from a pitcher, taking a drink, then leaving thru a doorway. Then another character mimes pouring water, mimes drinking from the invisible glass, and mimes opening a door. You wonder what the heck is going on?

Jumping the metaphorical turnstile

The story below from the NYT 11/13/22 is the definition of entitlement:

Dear Diary:

Caro and I spent that college summer back home in Hoboken, traveling to our internships via Port Authority each day.

My internship was unpaid, but it came with the stellar consolation prize of an unlimited monthly MetroCard. I got a monthly bus pass, too, and bounced happily around the boroughs to see friends on weekends. Some days, I crossed the Hudson four times since all the rides had already been paid for.

I planned to spend the last weekend of that July out of town, and I promised Caro my MetroCard before I left so that no free ride would go unused.

But while waiting at Port Authority for a bus to take me upstate, I realized I had forgotten to make the handoff. I decided to hide the MetroCard somewhere at the terminal.

I went to Duane Reade, found the cheesiest greeting card in the racks there and stashed the MetroCard between the third and fourth envelopes behind it. I texted Caro the details of the hiding spot (sending a picture would have been too easy).

On the way home from the city two hours later, Caro found my gift: three days’ worth of free subway rides.

Total bliss.

— (name withheld)

Somebody should tell this sprited young lady that she may have committed petit larceny, as my father taught us about the use of his pass. His unlimited train/bus pass, given to MTA employees and retirees, was for his use only. He said that a lot of people thought that transit workers abused this privilege by letting family members use it, but I know we didn't. Pay your fare!

And to explain the concept of "free" rides, or "free" anything for that matter, take the total budget and divide by the number of rides. Studies show that the subway fare is subsidized by sources outside the rider's cost of a MetroCard for $1.05 per ride. In other words, your fare does not pay for the entire ride. So when you abuse a "free" card, you steal $2.75 (your cost) + $1.05 (subsidy) in theft of service. But in a city that won't prosecute chronic fare beaters, I guess it's all moot.

Lawsuit Against Lies

Could radio be next?: The NY Times reports this a.m. that the owner of voting machine company Smartmatic "sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name—and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case." His lawyer claims, “We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this.” You can't lose your license because of speech (Stop the Steal, COVID Hoax, Pizzagate), but you may have to sell your license to pay damages. 

When I posted mid-March regarding the chance of losing your license over broadcasting fake news, there were over one hundred dead in the US from COVID-19. The pandemic generating an individual or class action suit against a talk radio station owner on behalf of one person or the +300,000 dead is not so far-fetched now.

Why I Didn’t and Won’t Vote For Trump

I would not trust him to run my business, pay me if I painted his house, be faithful to me in marriage, give me medical advice, or be respectful of my disability. He is not immoral—someone who makes bad moral choices. He is amoral—a person outside the system of morality. He is a pagan who lives for what happens in his own lifespan. He used the Word of God as a political prop. He is a moral idiot, not a stable genius.

The Silk Roads; learning words and expressions

Finishing up the Peter Frankopan epic, The Silk Roads. Especially distressing is the 21st century coverage of the Levant and surrounding neighborhood. The lessons of history are that no one except scholars and autodidacts studies history. You get the occasional Churchill, but for the most part leaders are muddlers who play checkers on a chessboard.

I'm adding "the Levant" to the list of words and expressions that I have had to make an extra effort to learn and glue to the old hippocampus. Other words that I have made an effort to learn over the course of life include palimpsest, quotidian, phlegmatic, mote. I also had had a hard time defining "irony" until I heard a character in a movie define it. "Laconic" was hard until I read it as applied to Coolidge. Sanguine: I can remember the second definition about bloodiness, but I often have to relearn the first definition. Reading William F. Buckley's newspaper column and Gore Vidal's novels and essays improved my sesquipedalian ambitions. 

WGN America News Nation—3 hours of Straight News Every Night

The Nexstar Media Group, owner of WGN Radio in Chicago—and the largest owner of US TV stations—is launching News Nation tonight, September 1, on cable, satellite, streaming, and app (including audio news updates from WGN Radio). The website slogans with “NO BIAS AT ANYTIME” and “It inspires you to think, not how to think.” Rob Nelson, formerly of WABC-TV weekend morning news, is one of the co-anchors. Many questions: Will this be 1010 WINS with pictures? Could ratings success spark a centrist trend that could spill over to talk radio? Will there be enough audience at 8 pm for info over opinion? They can draw from both extremes who have their fill of Rachel or Sean for the evening or from folks who form opinions from facts (as opposed to crafting facts from opinions). It’s a crazy concept, like CNN in 1980.

Mom Diplomacy

My mother stayed neutral when it came to disputes that occurred between any of her four children and their respective spouses. My wife compares her to Switzerland. Mom had a strong identity as a mother and resented any denigration of the office. For example, she hated the character of Ray's mom on tv's Everybody Loves Raymond for many reasons, most obviously her meddling in Ray's family but especially the idea that a mother could favor one child over another. She resented Saddam Hussein for saying that the Gulf War would be the "mother of all wars," and she hated the vulgarity of the expression "mother of all {fill in blank}," which became a meme. She didn't like the expectant mother (with whom she shared a room in the maternity ward) who was disappointed when the baby she delivered was the opposite of the sex she was hoping for. 

As Lincoln said,

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.

My mother felt the same way about meddlers. This was summed up by her favorite Family Circus comic (by Bil Keane), which hung on her refrigerator. An old biddy sees the mom with four small children and says, "How do you divide your love among your children?" The mom replies, "I don't. I multiply it!"

A future post will cover specific famous folks my mother could not stand: Frank Sinatra and his song "Something Stupid," Oprah, Nixon (the New Nixon when he became president), Jeannette MacDonald, Alex Trebek (a love/hate thing), Buddy Hackett (when he worked blue), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Today v. the 1930s: Opportunities

Women today have it pretty good compared to 1930 or 1970. I was watching Mrs. America on FX on Hulu and got to thinking about the frustrations expressed subtly by Mom from as far back as I can remember.
One example involves my first bank account, safely ensconced in the old Hamburg Savings Bank on Fulton Street in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. In the 1960s, when bank interest was 5% (not a typo), if you left 100 bucks in your account you found 105 bucks (and more, depending on compounding interest daily or monthly) after one year. My mother would bring our bank books to the bank to have the teller run them through the printer and show the interest accrued over the fiscal quarters since the last time it was updated.
The first entry in each of the three books (myself and my two brothers) showed $300. I asked Mom where the money came from. She said that she had cashed in her War Bonds to start the accounts. During World War II, the government sold bonds to finance the war, unlike practices after the war such as tax surcharges or budget increases adding to the federal deficit.
Printed at the top of the first page of the book was her name followed by the words "In Trust For [my name]." I asked her what "In Trust For" meant. She said that it was her money (which was true) and that I could not have my own account until I turned 18. She said many times up until I was 18 and many times thereafter, "You know I could cash in all your accounts and go to Hawaii." You hear this when you're little and it's a joke. As I got older, I realized it was my mother feeling trapped—being smart, wanting more, and having no way to get it.
Flash forward to the 21st c. when she was in her late 90s. I wanted to help her out with her checking account when she was having a harder time balancing the checkbook and just writing out a check. I thought power of attorney was a good idea for me to have. Even better and more practical was a joint account, so advised a bank officer, with her name and my name, allowing me to write her checks for her and conduct any bank business as if it were my own.
So, after 40 years or more there we were, together again on the same bank book.

typo the morning to ya

Spied at Pier 11, Wall St.

Miss you Ma. You're in a better place now.

Don Imus RIP

https://nyrmb.com/messages/454995.html

He said many things over the years that stuck with me and a few can be paraphrased: no one goes through life undefeated; the worst decisions you can make are based on money; quitting drinking is impossible if you think of doing it for the rest of your life, but you can do it one day at a time. For such a "hideous" man, as a few profane posters have called him, he did more good for more people than many of his detractors have done and leaves a legacy of a fine family and good works. To blame one man for any of the current ills of the broadcast and real world just makes no sense. Good men make mistakes. The last great Imus saying: if you don't like what you're hearing, change the dial. That last one is funny because it seems like the haters still tuned him in frequently. They even post about him, taking pleasure in the death of a good father, husband, and citizen. To the hypocrites, who have never had a bad thought or impulse, I recommend the poem, "The Man in the Glass" by Dale Wimbrow, that Don Criqui hilariously read on Imus in the Morning.

• The Man in the Glass

Last Hurrah

I’m starting a new job Monday and squeezing all the fun I can into this week. Tonight, Le Vent du Nord in Bryant Park and the Konrad Paszkudzki Trio at Birdland.

Brigid's eulogy for Grandma

Brigid Black delivered this eulogy at the cemetery on April 17 for her Grandma. My eulogy for Mom was given the evening before.

Henrietta Black 1919-2019

A Life Well Lived

I want to tell you a story.

It would take one hundred years to tell the whole story.

I’ll give you the short version.

It is a story in three acts, with an epilogue.

These are my best recollections, and I’ve tried to be accurate.

ACT I

Henrietta, Mom, Grandma was born on March 25, 1919, in Harlem, to Henry and Carrie Lutz.

Her mother was the former Carrie Solomon. As descendants of a Solomon, I think this is why most of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren I predict, score high on SATs.

Henrietta had an older sister, Josephine (who was a twin—the other twin was stillborn).

The two girls were raised non-religiously.

Their father was Lutheran, and their mother was Jewish.

I discovered later in life that some of the things Mom made or enjoyed or had in the house, such as potato pancakes, herring for New Year’s Eve, chocolate coins in gold wrap, or Hungarian goulash had Jewish roots.

Henrietta was very close to her father and mother.

Every night Henry would come home from work  at Karl Ehmer’s, the well-known meat supplier, and give Carrie a kiss on the neck.

Carrie taught her how to knit, crochet, tat, and bake, but she has said many times that she never really learned how to cook until she got married because her mother did all the cooking.

We still have a blanket that mother and daughter made together—Carrie crocheted the squares, Henrietta sewed the squares together into the blanket. I might have that backwards.

Henry was also an amateur brewmeister during Prohibition, like many other Americans, with a setup under the kitchen sink, brewing just enough for the fellows in his pinochle game.

As a young girl she used to sit in as a fourth when the game was short one hand.

The family of four moved from Harlem to Chelsea in Manhattan and then to Chauncey Street in Brooklyn. That’s where Jackie Gleason placed Ralph Kramden’s apartment, which he also said was in Bensonhurst, which we know isn’t true.

She was afraid of the water and even got a doctor’s note excusing her from swim class in public school.

Speech class also terrified her, which makes her later accomplishments in Act III all the more remarkable.

Henrietta remembered seeing the first talking picture, THE JAZZ SINGER with Al Jolson. Before that, she lived across the street from an outdoor movie house where you could see silent movies on the big screen from her apartment window.

Her New York City public school education was excellent.

She knew a lot of Shakespeare.

She was a member of the Arista Honor Society.

Only a few years ago, we were discussing some disastrous national event, and I said, quoting a line from JULIUS CAESAR, “The evil that men do . . . .”

Without missing a beat, she finished the quote, “. . .  [the evil that men do] lives after them. The good is interred with their bones.”

I thought, this is pretty good for a 97-year-old.

Mom said that during the depression, City College had layoffs; some instructors went to teach high school, and one of her own teachers wasn’t called “Mister”—he was called “Professor.”

This was in Richmond Hill High School, for which she had to take a special test to gain admittance.

She took the commercial sequence and became an excellent typist—whenever you mentioned someone’s typing speed in words per minute, she always said you had to deduct words for each mistake.

Another graduate of that school was Yankee 2^nd baseman [BB1] Phil Rizzuto, whom Mom met many years later at a grand opening of The Wiz electronics store.

When she told the Scooter that they were in Richmond Hill High School at the same time, he said something gentlemanly like, “That can’t be!”

Some time later she wrote to him and asked if he would send an autographed picture to family friend Father Lewkiewicz.

Which Father Lewk did.

Mom loved the New York baseball Giants. 

She was the only Giant fan in an office full of Brooklyn Dodger fans. (We’ll hear more about her office job in Act II.)

She was a big fan of the great Giant pitcher Carl Hubbell.

She wrote to him in his retirement in Scottsdale, Arizona, when she heard he wasn’t feeling well. He wrote back, thanking her for writing and remembering him, and sent a nice autographed post card.

She and her mother would go to the Polo Grounds, and pay the Ladies Day admission of fifty cents and then upgrade to box seats.

Their box seats were in the same section as New York high society, such as the Vanderbilts.

This was many years before luxury boxes.

As she entered her senior year of high school in 1936, the Great Depression was in full swing.

Even with good marks and skill as a typist, there were no jobs to be found after high school. and that takes us to . . .

ACT II

The 1930s. No jobs. What to do? Henrietta enrolled in night school to learn how to operate the comptometer—a mechanical calculator with a 9 x 9 grid of keys numbered 1 to 9, up and down, and across, and a row of little zero keys at the bottom, on which you could add, subtract, and even multiply and divide! Some claim that it was faster than an electronic calculator as you could press multiple keys at the same time.

Armed with a certificate of completion of studies, she found a summer job as a comptometer operator at Domino Sugar in Williamsburg.

The summer gig led to full-time employment that fall.

She said the job was like being a junior accountant.

She used to tell me that that if she hadn’t gotten married and had children, she might have ended up as a vice president of Domino Sugar.

Every time I see a bag of Domino, I think of Mom.

Brigid and her wife Mattie named their cat Domino in her honor.

She finally ended up leading a two-woman department with Henrietta in charge of an assistant.

Accuracy was important, with each column of figures was counted twice.

1939, the country slowly crawling out of the Depression. She saw a live stage show before a screening of THE WIZARD OF OZ, featuring the stars of the movie (minus Judy Garland).

World War II came and dragged on, and everyone in the office had to go down to the sugar refinery and warehouse to get a pass for working on the East River docks.

The women received a lot of catcalls when they reported to the warehouse for their passes—it was rare for a woman to be in the warehouse.

Henrietta knitted watch caps for the sailors in the Pacific theatre—Macy’s gave the wool away for free.

She also donated so much blood for the War effort as she became a member of the Gallon Club, that she became anemic.

And that’s how she helped win the war.

(Many years later she also donated blood to her grandson, Robert, who was having a heart operation.)

She bought hundreds of dollars of US War Bonds and cashed them in when my two brothers and I were kids—opening three accounts at $300 each, five percent interest (this was the late Fifties/early Sixties).

She remembered lights-out air raid drills in the office (and some giggling in the darkened office).

She loved theatre, and she and I saw many musical shows together in later years.

I was amazed when she talked about seeing the original OKLAHOMA on Broadway in the 1940s  (like seeing HAMILTON today); she saw THE BOYS OF SYRACUSE with Ray Bolger; she even went down to Greenwich Village and saw a nightclub revue featuring men in drag.

Her favorite singer was still Nelson Eddy (she used to do her high school homework while listening to his radio program). Her favorite actor? Jimmy Stewart—she liked people of the highest morals.

The war ended.

She had made a few good friends from the office; one was named Mary.

Mary’s father died, and Henrietta went to the wake, where she was introduced to Mary’s brother.

The brother was a handsome Irish widower with jet black hair and a great wit, who came to America on a boat in 1922, when he was almost 13 years old, on a ship with his mother and siblings; his father had come over first, made some money, and “sent for them” as it used to be said.

She didn’t date much up to that point.

She went out several times with the chief engineer from the Domino Sugar warehouse, a man named Arthur.

Nothing serious developed—she said there was no chemistry.

Eventually her fiend Mary asked Henrietta if she was still going out with Arthur—“No,” said Henrietta.

Time passed, Mary got engaged to Arthur, and Mary and Arthur set the date.

Henrietta had an acquaintance at the office—she said they weren’t really friends—who insisted on going out with her to buy a dress to wear at Mary’s wedding.

It turned out to be a nice black dress, very contrarian for a wedding reception.

Henrietta met Mary’s brother for the second time at the wedding.

Mary’s brother, Thomas Black, was smitten—after dancing with her several times at the reception, he asked her for her phone number, to which she replied, “It’s in the book.”

Their first date soon followed, and it lasted all day.

Other dates followed—including the race track at Elderts Lane on the Brooklyn/Queens border and a long day at the beach.

After the beach she got a terrible sunburn and scandalized the older ladies in the office when she wore a sundress to work.

They were in love and got engaged.

Henrietta was raised non-religiously, as I said earlier.

She converted to Catholicism to marry Tom.

The night before the wedding Tom showed up at her door at 11 p.m. with a bag of shrimp.

It was a Friday night, June 19, 1953 (Catholics couldn’t eat fish on Friday, and you had to fast from midnight to receive Holy Communion.)

The next day, June 20^th, they got married; the reception was held at the back room of the Welcome Inn in Glendale.

She recalled many of Dad’s family taking her up to the bar in the front for a drink.

The not-so-young couple (in 1953 on the day of the wedding he was 42, she was 34) started their life together, moving a few times from Cypress Hills to Woodhaven and finally back to Cypress Hills. Along the way they had four children. That’s Act III.

ACT III

Mom said, and I quote, “If men could have all the babies, there would be one child in each family.”

Nine-and-a-half months after they got married, Mom had her first child, Brendan, on April 2, 1954. She celebrated her first Mother’s Day, she used to say, before her first wedding anniversary.

She had her second child, Dennis, on September 24, 1955—the day President Eisenhower had the first of seven heart attacks.

I was born on March 25, 1957, on Mom’s 38th birthday.

People would ask if I felt bad that I had to share a cake with my mother—I didn’t: it made me feel special.

And then one day in church, Mom saw another mother with a baby girl and said a prayer that she would some day have a girl.

Her only daughter, Marianne, was born in a blizzard on December 12, 1960. They had to climb over a curbside snow bank to get home with the baby basket in single-digit weather, over 15 inches of snow.

Mom said many times that we should pronounce the first part of her name as “Marry” as in marriage, and not Mary Ann.

Mom used to sing to her the calypso song made famous by Harry Belafonte: All day, all night, Marianne / Down by the seaside sifting sand / All the little children love Marianne / Down by the seaside sifting sand.

Mom told her three little boys that they couldn’t run around the house in their underwear or get dressed on the couch anymore now that we have a little girl in the house. I remember looking up at the baby basket on the kitchen table when they came home and said, “Is that all you got from the hospital?”

Mom was almost 42 with four kids under seven years old; Dad was 50—they more than made up for a late start; Mom called herself “Myrtle the fertile turtle.”

We settled in on Pine St. in Cypress Hills, moving at one point from 101 Pine to finally 97 Pine St. in the middle of the block.

One of old neighbors still lives there, Gary Louer of 96 Pine St.

She kept a beautiful garden in the backyard, including roses, hibiscus, Rose of Sharon, and silver dollar plants, and a beautiful grass lawn. (My father kept a mulch garden in the back.)

There were even wild peas in the backyard, and one of the next-door neighbors, one of the Canadian Ryan boys, would come through the fence and eat peas right out of the pod.

In the backyard of our old house at 101 Pine St. there was a rhubarb patch; one year Mom asked the new owners, the Brundas, if she could get some of the old rhubarb to make rhubarb pie.

Sounds like Mayberry.

There was a tree in front of our house on Pine St.

The tree was dying, and Henrietta called the Parks Department and asked for advice.

This was a block full of lush maple trees, and a blight was running through some of the trees that summer in the city.

The Parks Department advised her to water the tree every day and add fertilizer.

If you do a Google Street View of Pine St. today you will find there is one tree left standing on the block—it is that tree in front of our old house.

For Dad’s birthday, Mom was making a leopard print robe for Dad on the Singer sewing machine.

I remember her feverishly hiding it away when he came home early one day.

She made customized designer birthday cakes for the children, including a hockey rink and football field for Dennis and a cake with a radio tower made of toothpicks for Brendan. Marianne asked her to make the rainbow cake with Jell-o, Brendan also like Boston cream pie.

She was creative. I used to play canasta when I was very young, with Mom and Aunt Audrey, but my hands were too small to hold the 15 cards in the opening deal. So Mom made a card rack from two wooden slats of a set of old Venetian blinds.

She handpainted a white sign with red lettering, which was in the garden in the backyard, and each kid had their own name over their section.

“Your father wanted children,” she told me—Tom’s first wife had died after twelve years of marriage in the 1930s and ’40s: there were no children.

When my mother told me that my father always wanted children, I had proof that we were wanted and loved.

Mom called our father’s friends, “The Jolly Boys”—Dad liked showing off the kids and invited his pals to see us running around.

The Jolly Boys visited Dad when he was sick in bed with phlebitis for a week.

His boss, Mr. Sacco, waited at the bottom of the stoop, and Mom waved him to come in too.

She read us bedtime stories about “Wopsie,” the young guardian angel who was always getting into trouble himself and helping children with their problems.

In the 1960s there was a King Tut craze, and I would ask Mom, “Make me a mummy,” and she would tuck in the blanket around me, neck-to-toe.

She was so upset when Barry Goldwater lost in 1964 that she wrote him a condolence letter.

She used to be a substitute teacher if one of the teachers at Blessed Sacrament School called in sick.

Henrietta was the first female lector at Blessed Sacrament Church.

One day after Mass an older female parishioner came up to her and said it was so good to see her up there (there had been some resistance from the old male guard).

Henrietta was the accidental president of the Rosary Society—she had been the secretary. The president resigned, and the vice president turned down the job.

She was the publisher and editor of the Rosette, the newsletter of the Rosary Society, writing a monthly message to the members, and she created Word Search puzzles that greatly impressed the pastor, Father O’Connor.

This was the same era when Gerald Ford became the accidental President of the United States.

She entered a contest in one of her crossword puzzle books—this was during an election year, and the object was to place the names of the states on a blank grid, counting the electoral votes of each state as your points.

She finished high in the contest and won a bar magnifier as the prize: it was exciting to see her name in print in the book as one of the winners.

She switched to mail order crosswords when she had to stop going to the candy store—she was shocked by the other printed material that the store was starting to sell in the 1970s.

She was offered the job of cook at the parish rectory, which she turned down.

In all the years we went to grade school, only once did we not eat lunch at home; that single day, we ate at Mrs. Weimer’s, a friend of the family.

Every other school day for eight years we ate at home and watched Jeopardy! on Channel 4 at noon, heading back to school at 12:30.

Some of my friends who didn’t get along with their own mothers liked my mother and developed a nice relationship thru visits and correspondence.

The four Black children grew up, got married, and had children.

She has 11 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.

The many hours, days, and nights that she spent with Margie and me helping us take care of the newborn twins, Matt and Tom, and little Brigid, were the happiest days of my life.

She was 70 years old in 1989 when the twins were born.

She said that helping us with the kids kept her young.

Margie called her Mary Poppins.

Margie and I, and our children, were lucky enough to see the real Henrietta in everyday life.

Everyone in the family got a cupcake with their initial on it for Christmas at her place. She might have taken awhile to warm up to new people, but when a new member of the family joined us by way of marriage, this was her way of saying, “Welcome to the family.”

Epilogue

I remember her scrubbing the linoleum under the washing machine on the day Mom, Dad, and Marianne moved from Pine St. to Bensonhurst (upstairs from Brendan) trying to get a spot out of the floor where the new family would probably put their own machine.

She spent more years on her own after Dad died in 1985 than she spent with Dad.

Marianne helped her all those years after 1985 with unwavering devotion.

After our father died, Mom kept busy in creating things: 400 cookies every December for family and friends; Christmas tree ornaments; Mom knitted booties for the mothers, and blankets for the babies, for a place in Coney Island called Rachel’s Joy that cares for single mothers.

One of the last two things my father said to me was, “Take care of your mother.”

The other thing he said was, in talking about Mom, “She was good with the children.”

I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to help out in the last few years.

When Marianne and I nursed Mom back to health from one of several pneumonia scares, a Russian nurse named Yevgeniy Bashmashnikov said to me, “You and your sister have done a good job.” It was the greatest thing I ever heard.

I would say to her on the phone or in person at Maria Regina Residence “I love you Ma.” She would sing in reply, from GUYS AND DOLLS, “I love you, a bushel and a peck.” She used to sing that when were little, going to bed.

At the party for her 100^th birthday, the birthday cake had three candles: a one, a zero, and another zero. I was afraid Mom might not have enough breath to blow out the three candles at the same time, so I borrowed an idea from Sen. Mitt Romney and picked up the candles one at a time. She blew out the zero, then the other zero, then the one.

Goodnight Ma. We know that you are with God now. Now, you belong to the ages.

Mom’s 98^th birthday in 2017.

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 [BB1]My brother Dennis fact-checked this as I took a pause later. Rizzuto played shortstop.