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October 2015
That Old Woman in My Building Who
Died
She was an upbeat talkative
type: “I used to live on the 17th floor also.”
“Yeah, I was married too.” ”You make a cute
couple.” “Are you an actor? You have a presence
about you.” When I would run into her, she always had
something nice or complimentary to say.
She seemed kind. I once saw her bringing a
dish of food to the quiet man on my floor across the way,
who would one day wind up in prison for stealing presidential
artifacts. 60 Minutes was all over that story. Which
makes me think of that line from the old TV series Naked
City, “There are eight million stories in the naked
city….” But that’s a story for another day.
The story for this day, is about that old
woman in my building who died, “after a brief illness,”
so read the note at the front desk. It also had a picture
of her so that tenants like myself, who didn’t know
her by name could make the connection. (Yes, the cliché
about New Yorkers not knowing their next door neighbors is
sadly true.). So it’s also a story in a way, about stereotyping,
and constructing little narratives in our heads about people
we really don’t know. Especially concerning those “of
age.” Being seen in their current context as they now
move slowly through their remaining lives, we can’t
imagine them back in the day. So we sometimes concoct a storyline
for them, that often turns out to be so mistaken and short
sighted.
Mine in this case would have read something
along the lines of… a humble and kind woman, who
must have been attractive (and still trying to present a more
youthful and stylish appearance), and who liked to chat and
make connections with people, because she lived alone and
was probably lonely.
Obviously retired, she probably had had
some sort of basic job associating with everyday people; why
else would the prospect of my possibly being an actor seem
interesting or exciting to her? And all upbeat countenance
aside, was she one of Dorothy Parker’s sad “ladies
of the corridor”?
Then a while reading The New York Times, right there
in a 1,000 word obit taking up almost a half of a page—
complete with a picture of her on the job and in action, and
noting she had won five Clio Awards—there she was:
Joy
Golden Dies at 85; Made Ads With Punch Lines
“…
an advertising executive who wrote copy for Maidenform
bras and Talon Zippers during the “Mad Men”
era but found her true calling in the 1980’s when
she created the humorous radio spots for Laughing Cow
cheese, died on Aug. 29 in Manhattan. She was 85.”
Advertising Age, the industry bible
which had once been required reading for me, went even further
than the Times in praise of Joy Golden, calling her
“An advertising legend…a trailblazer…an
inspired and inventive wit with a larger-than-life-personality
… She invented hundreds of iconic characters for her
funny and sometimes racy radio commercials.”
In probing still further, another obit suggested
that she was a real life forerunner to the fictional Peggy
Olsen from Mad Men, given their similarities in starting
at lowly desk jobs and rising through the ranks of a male-dominated
industry.
In Ms. Golden’s case, she escaped from the steno pool,
by “rewriting the copy she was supposed to type and
showing it to the firm’s head writer, who promoted her
to junior copywriter.”
Then, in her own words taken from a 1992 interview,
and with no due modesty, there’s this passage.
"Little did I know that (Laughing Cow)
would make me famous. I went from nothing to international
fame. I was in The New York Times, Museum of Television
and Radio and I said, 'Goodbye' to the world and said 'I'm
opening my own business'(Joy Radio). I was 55 and I was
a hit, kids."
So much for my narrative.
I sent emails to both of her daughters (in
my “lonely life scenario,” there were no kids),
expressing my condolences. I left out the part about my faulty
fiction. Or about my implicit ageism (though “I’m
no spring chicken” myself, as evidenced if nothing else,
by the very use of that archaic idiom). While displaying no
outright bias against their mother, I didn’t exactly
reciprocate her good graces in my response to her either.
Old people can make us nervous I suppose.
They have no resume, so to speak, and they’re reminders
of time passing and mortality. So we tend to humor them.
I’ll be going over to check out her
work at the Museum of Television and Radio, about which she
said: “The induction ceremony was the most fun I’ve
had since my second divorce.”
Joy Golden. Rest in peace.
***
***
Chess: An Obsession,
The Cold War and the Madness of Bobby Fischer
“Pawn Sacrifice,”
an independent niche movie, incorporates all of the above.
And in so doing, turns out to be compelling on so many fronts.
Take chess itself. A “game” once
described by poet Peter Kane Dufult as…
“…an Armageddon of pure mind
rages on a tea table. Consider
the evanescent kingdoms
of ivory and malachite,
how they triumph and topple;
One indulges in such battles of the mind at
one’s own peril, for there is no luck factor in chess
upon which to blame defeat. If you lose, it is because you
were out-smarted, and not due to a bad roll of the dice, or
other such quirks of fate. Hence, a loss can be tough to swallow.
Then wrap your head around the idea that after only one move
by each side, White and Black (and White always has the first
move), there are 400 different positions that can result.
After just four moves? 71,852! And as the game progresses,
those numbers go beyond the scope of human comprehension.
In spite of all this, or maybe because of
all of this, once exposed to this world of Medieval Kings
and Queens and their phalanxes of Pawns, it can become an
obsession. A notable case being that of Marcel Duchamp, one
of the so called fathers of Dadaism, who at the peak of his
fame, abandoned his art to purse to a life of studying and
playing chess: "I am still a victim of chess. It has
all the beauty of art—and much more.”
Far less notable and on a personal level,
my own obsessions with this “artistic war” in
the pre-computer/internet 70’s, resulted in my playing
in a couple of 4-man tournaments through the mail. The heart
would pound every three days at the mailbox in anticipation
of an opponent’s postcard response to my last brilliant
move.
These days eschewing human opponents altogether,
I take on computer programs that are commensurate with my
level of skill. Though there’s something missing in
the satisfaction of a victory, as the computer doesn’t
care when it loses. So I get the obsessive passions associated
with chess. But the mental instability of Bobby Fischer, with
a paranoia so colossal and unbridled, is a whole other story.
One which this film tells well, through a fine performance
by Tobey Maguire.
To the complexities of chess, combined with
the volatility of Fischer, throw in the weight of The Cold
War, which hung heavy in the air when he sat down to play
Boris Spassky, the reigning champion from the Soviet Union,
for all the marbles in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972. And what
transpired, is something for the ages.
Liv Schreiber’s portrayal of Boris Spassky,
a nemesis from the Evil Empire, is every bit as good, if not
better than Maguire’s Fischer. Both are so spot on in
bringing back to life, The Cold War across a “tea table,”
especially for those of us who might recall all the hoopla
in real time.
Time magazine previewed it. Network TV anchors reported it
as global news. ABC’s Wide World of Sports and Sports
Illustrated treated it as if it were a sporting event. A local
PBS station in New York covered it live. Live being defined
here as telephone messages dripping in from Iceland over the
course of a two to four hour game, which were then translated
for viewers by a neophyte “broadcaster” named
Shelby Lyman, as he moved pieces from slot to slot on an overhead
board. A panel of experts would then analyze the nuances in
those moves that were escaping the rest of us. Which included
a good many who did not know their “horse” (Knight)
from their elbow.
 Yet
we watched. And watched. And watched. Through 21 games of
the match. Until Fischer, who once charmingly stated in an
interview on the Dick Cavett Show in ’71, “I like
the moment when I break a man’s ego,” had done
that very thing to Spassky and his no doubt cheating Commie
cohorts. So brilliant was Fischer’s play, that Game
6 of the contest is said by many to have been the greatest
game of chess ever played. First a win in the space race!
Now this! And what can we expect next from Bobby Fischer,
American hero?
Spoiler alert… nothing. Well not quite.
He would pop up in the news from time to time for one thing
or another. But he forfeited his title by walking away from
the world of chess and did not play in public for nearly twenty
years. Anti-Semitic (though he himself a Jew), and forever
railing against the Russians and communists (though his own
mother was herself a Russian-communist), he later added the
United States to his enemies list: “I want to see the
U.S. wiped out. Death to the U.S.”
It made the list because in his playing a
rematch with Spassky in 1992 in Yugoslavia—against an
executive order issued by George H.W. Bush, forbidding engagement
in economic activities within that country—a warrant
was issued for Fischer’s arrest. To avoid deportation,
he sought and received asylum in Iceland. (And by the way,
he beat Spassky again 10-5.).
While the movie rushes through the end game
of his life, it does provide actual footage of the real Bobby
Fischer, then transformed into a rather unkempt heavyset white-bearded
man at 64 years old, and still crazy after all these years.
This, shortly before he died in 2008. An enigma to the end,
to say the very least, he is still considered by many grandmasters
to be the best chess player ever.
Even if you don’t know the game, check
out the movie. It is to chess, what “Moneyball”
was to baseball. A story about the game, yet something much
more. “Pawn Sacrifice” makes the right moves in
a way, that can resonate with fans and non-fans alike.
***
Hockey Game at the Garden
They scored and scored and scored and scored
up and down the ice at will
as I sat there with my date.
First period; first date.
“This usually doesn’t happen,”
I said,
“the puck finding so much net.
Gotta’ be a record.”
She smiled a come-hither smile. And it was:
Most scoring in the shortest time
between two teams at the start of a game,
you can look it up.
The rhythm of the contest settled down.
Then rolled over
exhausted with itself.
And over a cigarette later—tied at 4
and with still a period to come
she asked me if I’d like to go.
And leaving the game behind
I went.
—Ron
Vazzano
***
Parsing “Yogi-isms"
When Yogi Berra died last
month at 90, all media accounts of the news went beyond his
illustrious Hall-of-Fame baseball career and military service
in World War II for which he earned a Purple Heart, and of
course came down to rest squarely on his worldwide renown
for being the master of the malaprop. That’s how most
people today know him having never seen him play, though my
remembrance of his playing days goes back to my first visit
to Yankee Stadium in 1952.
As defined by Webster’s, a malprop is
a usually unintentionally humorous mistake or distortion
of a word or phrase; especially: the use of a word sounding
somewhat like the one intended but ludicrously wrong in the
context. It has its origins in the 1775 play The
Rivals, by way of a character named Mrs. Malaprop, who
is noted for her comedic misuse of words.
Coming from Berra’s mouth, such malaprops
have come to be called Yogi-isms, and The New Yorker
many years ago said of him that “Hardly anybody would
quarrel …that Winston Churchill has been replaced by
Yogi Berra as…the favorite source of quotations.”
He allegedly once said…
“I’m
not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk
to school like I did.”
I say allegedly, because as Yogi has mildly
protested…
“I
really didn’t say everything I said.”
What he meant to say of course, was…
“everything I was supposed to have said.”
But when you’re a kid born of poor Italian immigrants
and come from The Hill in St. Louis, and you drop out of school
after the eighth grade to help support your family, you don’t
know nothing about good grammar. And you say the right things,
but they come out wrong.
 In
The Yogi Book (1998 Workman Publishing Company) he
expounded on many of them, including his signature quote:
“It
ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
His explanation? “That was my answer
to a reporter when I was managing the New York Mets in July
1973. We were about nine games out of first place. We went
on to win the division.”
In a broader sense, how many times do we give up in situations
that seem hopelessly lost? How many times are people given
up for dead, only to pull through? So yes, it isn’t
apparently over, until it’s actually
over. In the absence of qualifying adjectives—a classic
Yogi-ism!
I once tried a variation on this, in a tiny three line poem
I entitled “Off the Bat of Berra.”
It ain’t overt
‘til it’s overt.
Then it’s over.
Then of course there’s this mangling
of tenses:
“The
future ain’t what it used to be.”
Yet isn’t this something being lamented
today? That the future of “Gen Y-ers” isn’t
as bright as that which once stood before “Baby Boomers,”
owing to various economic factors? Not what Yogi had in mind
exactly, but so applicable; so true.
And speaking of economics, he once stated
that…
“A
nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
He goes on to support this contention by saying,
“Who would doubt this? I notice it especially when I
go to buy my papers in the morning at Henry’s in Verona
New Jersey.” That’s good enough for me.
Rounding out a personal list of favorites
with these half-dozen (in no particular order)…
“Why
buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel.”
I get it. Luggage gets banged around regardless,
whether cheap or sporting designer labels. And since it isn’t
really used that often relative to other things we buy, does
it have to be of the best quality? Are we trying to make a
statement at the airport carrousel or serving a utilitarian
purpose? Good point Yogi.
“Nobody
goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Try getting a table at that hot restaurant.
After a while, you give up having to make a reservation weeks
in advance. For that matter how will I know how hungry I’ll
be that night when I finally get in?
Another classic:
“It’s
déjà vu all over again.”
dé-jà vu 1 a: the illusion
of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the
first time.
Yog’ is seemingly being redundant here. (Is anyone ever
just dundant?) But what if something keeps happening over
and over and over again, as what Yogi described with Mickey
Mantle and Roger Maris hitting home runs back-to-back in 1961
for seemingly, the umpteenth time? And can you not have multiple
déjà vu experiences about a lot of different
things? Or “déjà twos?” I’m
with Yogi.
This exchange between Yogi and his wife Carmen could have
been right out of Burns & Allen or the Marx Brothers.
Yogi:
“Where have you been?
Carmen: “I took Tim (their son) to see Doctor
Zhivago.”
Yogi: “What the hell’s wrong with him now?”
Rim shot! No comment necessary.
And there’s this, with its existential
sounding overtones…
“It
gets late early out there.”
Of course, he was simply referring to playing
left field at Yankee Stadium in late autumn during World Series
time when shadows would creep in, and an outfielder could
have a tough time seeing the ball off the bat.
Yet, the inference is obvious. Anyone approaching the autumn
of their years, would concur that the years fly by all too
quickly, and that yes, “it does get late early out there.”
Yogi, the existentialist. Who knew?
And finally, there’s this gem that contends with the
choice Frost made in his poem “The Road Not Taken:”
“When
you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
According to a piece in the New York
Times, people in Montclair N.J. (where Yogi lived), “are
quick to point out… that there really is a fork in the
road where Edgewood Road splits with Edgewood Terrace…you
take it—and either way ends up at Berra’s house
on Highland Avenue.”
And so when Yogi came to that final grand fork in the road
last month, he took it. But through his Yogi-isms, he will
live on forever. Which can last an eternity.
***
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