Tchaikovsky: “Waltz of the Flowers,” Nutcracker Suite, choreographed by George Ballanchine
1965 wasn’t a bad time at all to live in New York. Especially where we lived, in the middle of Manhattan on W. 77th Street, directly across the street from the Museum of Natural History and half a block from Central Park West.
We didn’t have a honeymoon in the conventional sense after our wedding. We were married the day after Christmas. (Saturday, December 26). New Year’s Day was the following Friday and the Monday after that Esther reported back for work. Nor could I afford to waste time. I had given up my teaching job in Ohio. Once we hit New York, I had to find something to replace it.
Thus our ‘honeymoon’ consisted of a day and a half saying goodbye to family and returning duplicate gifts to department stores before we left Ohio for good. (Sunday -Monday, December 27-28) We took another day and a half, almost two, to drive from Cleveland to New York. We overnighted in Harrisburg, PA, not known as the honeymoon capital of the East, and reached New York and Esther’s apartment late the night after.(Tuesday -Wednesday, December 29-30) That left us Thursday (New Year’s Eve) through Sunday before life intruded and we went back to ordinary living. (December 31-January 3)
We had four magical days, though, and not just because we were finally married. We had bought tickets ahead of time to the New York City Ballet, where I sat through my first full-length ballet: the Nutcracker Suite, with George Balanchine as choreographer and Suzanne Farrell as prima ballerina. Twenty years later, we would drive two and a half hours to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center to see Balanchine and company, Farrell still starring, do phenomenal things on stage. (She danced in The Jewel Suite.)
Our first New Year’s Eve as husband and wife, we had dinner with Esther’s friend from the UN, Fumiko Hoshida, and Fumiko’s boyfriend, later husband Brian Coyne, at a Japanese restaurant near Columbia. Brian ordered a broiled fish which came whole, everything attached, including the fish’s eyes. He plucked out an eye with his chopsticks, popped it in his mouth and crunched down on it. “Tastes good,” he said. I felt no urge to copy him. Afterwards, we went back to Brian’s apartment and he played violin for us.
Two years later, we were witnesses at Brian and Fumiko’s wedding. They took their vows at a Friends meeting house in Manhattan. Brian was Catholic and Fumiko Shinto: Quaker was their compromise. The place was filled with UN guides –Kay Tataeshi, Dorrie Barros, Anne Bristol, and though I don’t see her in the photograph, I’m sure Sheila Nakh was there too. (Esther is second from right in the photograph.) The recessional was a movement from Schubert’s Trout quintet.
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Through June 1965, Esther worked as tour guide at the UN. On the side, she studied at the Herbert Berghoff Studios. Our first three and a half months married, the only job I had was eleven days pitching blenders under an out-sized reflecting mirror at a trade fair in Cleveland. (I did make lots of money out of it, the equivalent of a quarter year’s salary as a teacher.) In late March, I landed a job teaching history at a high school in Westchester County and I continued teaching there until we left New York for New Haven in the summer of 1967.
Anna Maria Alberghetti: “Mira,” from Carnival
In June 1965, Esther left the UN for an Equity job at a summer theater in Hampton Bay, Long Island. She played the lead (Lily) in Carnival (she was fantastic!) and the ingenue lead (Lady Larkin) in Once Upon a Mattress (again, very good) and sang in the chorus and did bit parts in the remaining two shows, Annie Get Your Gun and Bye Bye Birdy. I had just started grad school at NYU and was taking courses Monday through Thursday all summer long. Every weekend but one, though, on Thursday afternoon I boarded the Long Island Railroad, arguably the worse commuter line in the country, and travelled to the Hamptons to spend the weekend with Esther. Friends and family visited too, including her sister Irene who drove five hundred miles from Ohio with her boyfriend and soon to be husband, Len, to see her sister perform.
One of my memories of the summer is of the first time I ate escargots. Friends were visiting and after the show, the six of us went to a seafood restaurant for a late dinner. I saw escargots on the menu and ordered them –as an entree, not appetizer. The next thing I knew twenty-four snails were sitting in a dish in front of me, nestled in their shells and drowning in garlicky green butter. I made it through them but had to keep my mouth shut the whole next day because whenever I opened it, the room reeked, absolutely reeked, of garlic.
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We left Manhattan for Riverdale in the Bronx in the summer of 1966 but until then, we hit the town almost every weekend –sometimes during the week too. Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park was only a block away from us and performances were free. We saw Richard Jordan and Kathleen Widdoes in one of the comedies but missed James Earl Jones as Othello –the performance sold out as soon as it was announced. We did catch Jones a few months later when he performed off Broadway with Roscoe Lee Brown and Ruby Dee in Jean Genet’s The Blacks.
The week before, we saw the filmed version of Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade. We’d gotten up late in the morning and hadn’t eaten so we stopped at a deli on the way to the theater to pick up sandwiches. We reached the theater just in time for the film’s opening credits. I was hungry as hell by then so after we settled in, I took out my sandwich and started unwrapping it. The sound of the tin foil crackling was so intrusive that I had to put the sandwich away until the movie was done for fear of disturbing the other people in the theater. By the time the film ended two hours later, I was so hungry I could have eaten the tin foil along with the sandwich. I swore I’d never do that again.
Some time around then, we saw John Gielgud’s phenomenal production of Hamlet, with Richard Burton in the lead role. Alfred Drake played the wicked uncle and Geilgud playing the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father.
We saw Hello Dolly, with Carol Channing in the starring role. Esther’s teacher, Charles Nelson Reilly, had a major role in the production and Esther went backstage afterwards to see him. When Esther’s mother Sue visited from Elyria, Esther took her to see Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, Esther’s second time seeing it.
Of course, we saw The Fantasticks.
We went with friends to see Albee’s Tiny Alice, a weird weird play. John Gielgud, who starred in it, later confessed that he was never sure what the play was about or what he was supposed to be doing in it.
We saw Man of La Mancha, which Esther liked more than me. I did think Richard Kiley had a lovely voice.
We loved a recording we had of Carmina Burana so when we read that it was going to be staged at Lincoln Center with instrumentalists, singers and dancers, we went. The performance lacked toughness and the dancing was mediocre –gothicized, no core to it.
We saw Renata Tebaldi at the Met, our one opera at the Met together, and though she was good, the vehicle –a Romantic war horse– sucked, in my humble opinion.
I’m not sure when any more, but we saw Martha Schlamme and Will Holt in a review of Kurt Weill’s songs. We bought the recording of it afterwards but it didn’t measure up to hearing it live. We were left with the thin accompaniment and the recorded sound of the singers’ voices: Schlamme’s wobbled and Holt’s was tinny.
We saw that review again five or six years later at Yale where Schlamme performed it with Alvin Epstein, the actor-singer who played Lucky in the US premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I don’t have any memory of that evening though, other than that we ran into a student I’d taught in Olmsted Falls fifteen years before –Gary Stolcals– and we talked with him about our new baby, Jeremy. Gary was studying theater history at the Yale School of Drama.
Epstein as Lucky, 1955
From my standpoint, our best night out music-wise was at the Village Vanguard in 1966 on a double date with one of Esther’s UN friends and her boyfriend. The show was a triple bill and I wanted to go especially because of the first two acts. First up was the Gerry Mulligan quartet with Bob Brookmeyer; second, the Thelonious Monk quartet with Charlie Rouse on tenor. Mulligan’s group was witty, laid back almost to the point of dry, good interplay between the two horns: all I could hope for. Then came Monk. When Rouse started his solo, Monk stood up from the piano and began dancing, a shuffle step to the rhythm of the piece. Rouse ended, Monk sat down and picked up where he’d left off on piano. The second song, same thing. Third song … It was great stuff. I already felt we’d gotten what we’d paid for.
Third up was a Latin combo led by the Cuban conga drummer Mongo Santamaria. The group included a trumpeter who played somewhere between jazz and mariachi and jazz musicians Valerie Capers on piano and Hubert Laws and Bobby Capers on flute and sax, plus a killer rhythm section of bass, drums, timbales and Mongo’s congas. The music was driving, both popular and jazzy. A year later, we heard them again in Central Park. Again, they were exceptional.
If I needed proof that jazz doesn’t have to be esoteric to be good, Mongo gave it to me. Music is communicating. Mongo’s band had that down cold.
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Our apartment on W. 77th St. was a block away from a solidly Puerto Riqueno/Cubano neighborhood. At night when we walked outside, Latin music filled the air, some off the radio but just as often live, banged out on improvised drums augmented by people singing or chanting.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Mongo Santamaria, “Summertime” (1964)
Mongo Santamaria: “Watermelon Man” (1963)
MUSIC & ME 