Taking What It's Worth

An aged guitar playing singer entered a New York subway car. Bundled in layers of clothes, wearing a faded, black wool cap and frayed fingerless gloves, he balanced himself with a wide stance and tore into an up-tempo version of the Beatles tune “Let it Be.” The passengers wore their usual blank expressions and avoided any acknowledgment of the musician’s presence, lest they be compelled to give him a token of appreciation. Before reaching the next stop, he walked down the aisle, hat in hand, seeking donations. All ignored him, except for a young woman. When he reached her, she looked up and began fumbling in her purse. She pulled out a handful of bills and, with a heavy accent, explained to him that she was not from here and didn’t understand “the money.” She held out the bills like an open hand of playing cards and extracted a $10 bill, asking him if that was enough.

He gave her the $10 back and withdrew a one. “That’s fine,” he said. “Thank you.”

Birth

"In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again; and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility towards human life; towards the idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God."

James Agee

Imposer

The critic Kenneth Tyman found that, the gift of talent apart, what enables one to exercise that talent is the ability to impose oneself. Roman Polanski, Karl Lagerfeld, Barack Obama and Julie Taymor are among those who definitely possess this gift; those who don't have it can't be named because, notwithstanding their immense talents, nobody knows them. How do you know if someone has it? Tyman's answer: An imposer is a person about whom one worries whether his response to one's next remark will be a smile or a snarl. Check it out yourself next time you meet a genius, if he or she is inspiring in you a need for his or her approval and a fear for his or her disapprobation.

Hard

"Movies are for pussies. Musicals are hard." That’s how screenwriter Janus "Jannie" Cercone summed up the difference between working in film and live theater when she was interviewed lately by the Hollywood Reporter Magazine. Cercone and her husband, Michael Manheim, have taken their 1992 movie "Leap of Faith," which she wrote and Manheim co-produced for Paramount, and made it into a stage musical starring Brooke Shields and Raul Esparza. Now in previews, it opens October 3 at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles, perhaps on the way to Broadway. The music wrote their longtime friend and composer Alan Menken ("Beauty and the Beast," "Little Mermaid"), who with eight Oscars has more than any other living person. A veteran of theater ("Little Shop of Horrors"), he's also has been nominated twice for Tonys. Besides, Alan is a wonderful person. I had the pleasure of working with him on two shows. He can be cruelly honest, though. "In our very first meeting," Cercone said, "Alan said, 'You know musicals take about 10 years.' I thought he was kidding. 'Yeah, right. You're so funny.' And here we are 10 years later." Yes, musicals are hard indeed.

Unsung Pop Heroe

Sound engineers are the unsung heroes of pop music. In the 1950's, young Bill Porter helped producer and guitarist Chet Atkins create the Nashville Sound that eventually became syn-onymous with Rock'n Roll and conquered the world. Bill Porter recorded several Number One singles, among them the Everly Brothers' "Cathy's Clown" and all of Roy Orbison's super hits, such as "Running Scared", "Pretty Woman" and "In Dreams". When Elvis Presley returned from his military service in Germany in early 1960, Bill Porter recorded and mixed in one legendary night session the hit "Stuck on you". He used a Telefunken U-47 microphone instead of the American RCA 77D in order to capture Elvis' unique voice. From then on the king never accepted any other mike.  Porter went on to engineer hits like "His Latest Flame", "Devil in Disguise", "Suspicious Minds" and countless more. 580 of the songs he recorded made it to the US pop charts which makes him the most successful sound engineer of all times. Bill Porter died at the age of 79 in Ogden, Utah on July 7th, 2010.

Get A Massage!

There is scientific proof now that a good massage does more than just relax your muscles. Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in blood and saliva, and in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system. 

The Poison Of Contentment

"There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income."

Edmund Wilson

Caustic

The American poet Carl Sandburg devoted most of his life to research the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and to writing his biography. When Sandburg passed away in 1967 he left six well-written voluminous books on the greatest American president which range still among the best books ever written about Lincoln. Nevertheless his contemporary Edmund Wilson, a literary critic and brilliant essayist, hated Sandburg. He commented: "The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." Maybe Wilson's ire was rooted in his own inability to write epic works of that size. But then again every critic has the right to be unfair, a freedom denied to a conscientious biographer.

Creative Linkage

"The commercial and subsidized theatre are intrinsically linked. I wouldn't have had the career I have had without the opportunities I had through the subsidized sector. However, I do think, in any walk of life, subsidy for the sake of subsidy is not always healthy. Sometimes, thinking on your feet can be the most creative. Constrained circumstances can bring the best out of you. Some of the most successful shows come out of shoestring invention."

Cameron Mackintosh

Mistakes

"Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them."

Peter Ustinov