'What Rhymes With America'

Sometimes I just don’t know what people are thinking!  Okay, I guess that’s not so rare, especially these days.  But I’m not talking about politics or personal behavior on the street or on a subway.  I’m talking now about theater and why some plays are selected for production and how some viewers assess them.  Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

I’ve been on family matters in the Washington area since the end of November and came back to New York City to see the world première of Melissa James Gibson’s What Rhymes With America at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea.  I came back for only three days principally to see this show, which had gotten an excellent review in the New York Times two weeks earlier.  (I didn’t read any other reviews then.  I generally don’t until after I see the show.)  Well, I guess there really is no accounting for taste.  Or discernment.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My usual theater partner, Diana, and I caught the evening performance at ATC’s West 20th Street main stage on Thursday, 27 December 2012.  The play, Gibson’s ATC début, had started previews on 19 November and opened on 12 December; the production closed on 30 December.  The director, Daniel Aukin, has staged many of Gibson’s premières, making him one of her most loyal artistic boosters.  (Aukin was also the director of Sam Shepard’s Heartless at the Signature Theatre last August; see my report posted on ROT on 10 September 2012.)  Gibson’s previous works include This (produced by Playwrights Horizons in December 2009 and January 2010), Current Nobody (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., 2007), Suitcase Or, Those That Resemble Flies From A Distance (SoHo Rep, 2004), and [sic] (SoHo Rep, 2001; 2002 Obie Award).  Born in British Columbia, Canada, Gibson, who turns 48 this month, was schooled at Columbia University and the Yale School of Drama (MFA in playwriting).  A naturalized U.S. citizen, she lives and works in New York City.

What Rhymes With America’s story is about a newly divorced father, Hank, and his estranged 16-year-old daughter, Marlene.  The play starts as the two stand on either side of a closed door because Marlene’s mother had admonished her not even to open the door to Hank.  Life is unraveling for him—he’s a university economist who’s lost his grants—and is entirely uncertain for her.  What follows is a largely disjointed series of encounters between Hank and his daughter, acquaintances (he works as a supernumerary in an opera company and we see scenes between him and his female counterpart, would-be actress—sorry, actor—Sheryl), and strangers (Marlene is a hospital volunteer for her college résumé and Hank meets Lydia, the bereaved daughter of a recently deceased patient).  It is Gibson’s point that none of these associations, including the one with his daughter, comes to anything, leaving Hank lost and frustrated.  (Me, too, if truth be told.  Others seem not to agree with that response, finding significance in the emptiness.) 

The narrative is incohesive and disconnected.  For the most part, one scene doesn’t “cause” another; the structure, if you can say there is one, is a real string of beads.  Hank’s presence in nearly all the scenes (there’s one brief moment when Marlene is with the dying patient and Lydia, though Hank turns up shortly) is the lone unifying element—along, I suppose, with the unit set which represents minimally all the locations of the play.  The time-line is logical, unlike, say, the episodes of Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries (at Second Stage two seasons ago; see my ROT report on 23 February 2011) which jumped around in time, so the structure isn’t exactly non-linear.  But it is episodic and the impression with which I was left is that Gibson “wrote scenes,” as Diana put it, not a play.  It came across to me as if the playwright imagined some plot points and characters and wrote a play to accommodate them: What if there was this divorced guy whose daughter won’t talk to him?  What if he worked as an opera extra?  What if he met the daughter of a man who just died?  It’s like a pot luck dinner for the stage.

There is one other connecting aspect, though.  All the characters are pathetic.  (Hank doesn’t agree, by the way.  But he’s self-deluded.  Marilyn Stasio in Variety does agree, though.)  I kept wanting to shout out Get a life!   The best and strongest of them is Sheryl, who’s consequently also the most interesting, but she’s in only about three of the ten or so scenes of the play’s interminable 85 intermissionless minutes.  She’s ultimately dreary, too, though at least she knows what she wants.  (Sheryl has what I thought was the best moment in the whole play: she performs her audition monologue for Hank, Lady Macbeth’s letter scene.  Unfortunately for What Rhymes, Gibson didn’t write that scene or create that character and it just showed how wan all the rest of the stuff was.  That’s the problem with slipping a long quotation from a great writer into your work: it just invites comparison—and you might not come off too well.)  I quickly determined that I didn’t want to spend an hour with these folks, much less almost an hour-and-a-half.  In fact, one New York Times reader even remarked on the review’s web page, “If I had been on the end [of the row,] I would have left half way through.”  (I share the sentiments of the reader, who called himself “GeorgeSpelvin,” suggesting some theatrical connection—that’s the pseudonym an actor uses in a program when he doesn’t want to be identified [see “‘How I Got My Equity Card: George Spelvin’” by Don Stitt, 16 November 2010 on ROT]—though I’d almost never leave a show partway through; I feel it’s an insult to the actors.)

My whole sense of bitter disappointment was exacerbated because Charles Isherwood wrote a rave review in the Times the day after the play opened.  It wasn’t just a good notice, but a really enthusiastic one.  I generally find that I agree with Isherwood’s assessments; if I have a quibble now and then, it’s because I think he’s been kinder to the production over some fault we both noted, but overall, we usually seem to share similar opinions.  (I have frequent problems with Ben Brantley’s estimations, as I’ve said once or twice before, but that’s not relevant here.)  I don’t generally read other reviews before seeing a show, but since I subscribe to the Times, I do see that notice when it comes out and while I try not to establish expectations based on someone else’s opinion—I know that reviews are little more than the writer’s private responses sometimes made to sound like a universal pronouncement (see my ROT article “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009)—when a reviewer whose opinion I usually respect is as enthusiastic as Isherwood was this time, I get a little anticipatory.  Having glanced at some of the other reviews now, I can say that many were also positive, but the Times seems to have been at the extreme, so I’m going to try to use Isherwood’s review as a template and, as it were, rebut his estimation (though, of course, he’s perfectly entitled to his response to this or any other work of art).

The Timesman called What Rhymes a “touching, sorrowful comedy,” but neither Diana nor I found it the least bit “touching” or even moving.  “Sorrowful,” perhaps, is apt, but not in the sense that Isherwood intended: rather than ‘producing sorrow,’ the performance made me sorry I went.  (Okay, maybe that’s a cheap shot, but I was not at all happy to be at ATC that night, especially since I came all the way up from Maryland essentially just for that performance.)  Drawing an analogy with the personalities of the characters with their costumes (a rather clever writing device, I must observe, by the way), Isherwood went on to say that “what the characters wear is much less important than what they say and how they say it.”  I won’t quibble over the costumes, nicely selected by Emily Rebholz to fit the drab, hyper-ordinary look of the production, but I can’t go along with the suggestion that Gibson’s dialogue has either “an entrancing oddity,” as Isherwood described it, or a revelatory point about the circumstances or the people of her play.  (This was one aspect where the forced comparison with Shakespeare did Gibson no service.)  The characters’ lines mostly seemed artificial and forced to me, as if the playwright were trying consciously to make them portentous and arresting but didn’t manage to do so organically.  She uses words like “triumphant,” “dread,” and “enjambment,” relatively uncommon in ordinary discourse I’d say, to poeticize her dialogue, but they came off to me as leaden and overblown.  Hank and Sheryl provide a brief commentary on the word “woe,” another word that belongs more in the world of opera and Shakespearean drama than backstage banter (even at the Met).  (At the same time, Hank and Lydia do a little colloquy on words they don’t much like—she’s a failed short-story writer—especially “vis-à-vis.”)  The Times reviewer didn’t so much disagree with my diagnosis as differ with the significance I ascribe to it.  Isherwood found Gibson’s use of language that’s “sometimes . . . yanked out with no rhythm or rhyme,” failing “in bringing people together, or even keeping them from growing apart,” a manifestation of “her characters’ anxiety about their seeming inadequacy.”  To Diana and me, it all seemed a jumble of disconnected verbal meanderings adding up to nothing but a few lonely chuckles. 

The language’s artificiality and brittleness is a lot like the gimmick Gibson uses in the opening scene of What Rhymes: Hank and Marlene on opposite sides of the front door of the house Marlene shares with her mother.  The door was imaginary, requiring the actors to mime it occasionally, as when Hank reached around it when Marlene opened it a crack so he could pass her a few dollars of the $240 he owes her in overdue allowance.  Though Laura Jellinek’s whole set was minimal, there were no other instances of miming a prop or a set piece (except in a reprise of the same set-up with the invisible front door).  Isherwood asserted that the unbreachable separation between father and daughter was augmented by the invisibility of the physical barrier, which I suspect is what the playwright and director intended, though, like the language, this device seemed artificial and arbitrary, out of line with the rest of the production’s basically naturalistic style.  In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz believed that Gibson’s telling us, “Even with nothing solid between people, they can’t get through to each other,” affirming, “There’s something at once mundane and major in that.”  (I don’t know if this bit is in Gibson’s script or if it was a choice of director Aukin.)

As for Jellinek’s minimal set design, Isherwood described it as “simple,” which he meant appreciatively.  I’d have chosen ‘barren’ as my descriptive.  (Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday called the set “a vast sterile-looking space,” but she was also being complimentary.  It’s a little ironic that this ATC production should have this design issue: I made a similar complaint about the set of the last ATC show I saw, Simon Stephens’s Harper Regan; see my ROT report on 20 October 2012.)  A jumble of jutting, eggshell-colored pieces of wall with isolated bits of décor—an exhaust fan here, a framed painting there, a lone pay phone upstage—it looked more to me as if either Jellinek had run out of ideas or the crew hadn’t had time to complete the construction and dressing before the play opened.  (Yes, I know that’s not really likely: I’m talking impressions here, not actuality.)  The set ringed three sides of the stage with each segment representing a different location: a hospital room; a hospital corridor; Hank’s dismal apartment; the fireplace of, apparently, Marlene’s mother’s living room.  (The imaginary front door of the house was down center.)  This meant that, except for the two scenes at the door, almost all the other ones were staged around the periphery of an empty stage.  If Aukin or Gibson made this decision to symbolize the emptiness of the characters’ lives, it was an anti-theatrical way of doing that—like a workshop set up conceived for practicality rather than aesthetics or audience impact. 

ATC’s What Rhymes With America was Daniel Aukin’s sixth directorial collaboration with Gibson (out of about 11 premières), including her début play, [sic], and her last, This, so it’s obvious they have a significant artistic relationship.  Isherwood affirmed that the London-born director “is attuned to the jittery, cascading rhythms of her dialogue,” and I can’t deny that even though I didn’t discern any especially astute insight in the staging.  Whatever rhythms Gibson’s words developed, since they were lost on me anyway, may well have been well-interpreted by Aukin.  I didn’t find much benefit to the director’s work with Shepard’s Heartless at the Signature Theatre last August, but I didn’t see any of the self-indulgence in What Rhymes that I detected in the earlier show.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that his staging of What Rhymes was any more effective artistically; I still found his work ineffective—though probably he’d never have been able to make something interesting to me out of Gibson’s script.  In an interview in December, Gibson said of their collaboration that Aukin’s “very gifted at finding carnal and emotional complexity without ever exerting a heavy hand.”  As I intimated in my report on Heartless, maybe he should exert a heavier hand—but the fact that they’re artistic kindred suggests to me that this isn’t a team I should follow avidly. 

Isherwood did acknowledge that the play “sometimes grows a little too enamored of its characters’ mournful quirkiness” and is “more self-conscious and less integrated than” Gibson’s last work, but he still came down in the end on a highly laudatory note, declaring the “the play is nevertheless full of compassionate wonder.”  I won’t argue the compassion the playwright may have conceived, though I felt none for the losers Gibson created (you can tell they’re losers, as Stasio also confirms: Hank and Sheryl smoke backstage at the opera; he even burns her costume), but the wonder they provoked in me was only how they managed to get onto a stage.  (Along with reader GeorgeSpelvin in the Times, responder Mary Ellen Goodman pondered, “[W]hy it was selected for production is beyond me.”)

The one aspect of the performance with which I have less dispute is Isherwood’s estimation of the acting.  In general, the cast did a good enough job with what Gibson provided them.  “Less” isn’t none, however, and I do argue with the effectiveness of the acting with respect to the production.  The reviewer wrote that the company's “engaging performances help add some heft” to the disjointed script, but I found that under Aukin’s guidance, the actors weren’t able to revivify a nearly-dead body, hitting mostly the same notes over and over and essentially underlining predictable outcomes at every turn.  As Hank, for instance, Chris Bauer (whose work I know only from TV: True Blood, Numb3rs, Third Watch, The Wire) was consistently morose and downtrodden.  The character’s written that way, I know, but there was no variation in Bauer’s behavior or his speech.  When he meets Lydia in the hospital hallway, we know they’re going to connect and that, when the two sad sacks have their first (and only) date, it will be disastrous.  Seana Kofoed’s Lydia was a one-note character, “synthetically odd” in the apt words of Erik Haagensen of Back Stage; she showed a little spunk in her parting scene when she tells Hank off, ordering him to forget he ever saw her breasts (“They’re my breasts,” she commands), but otherwise, she was as downcast and pitiful as Hank.  Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge that the scene in which the two nobodies meet and compare personal tragedies was well acted; it would make a terrific scene-study piece for two middle-aged acting students and Kofoed and Bauer executed it perfectly.  I think Bauer’s a good character actor and I’d like to see him in other roles like the Howard he did in the 2005 revival of Streetcar on Broadway.  As Marlene, in an Off-Broadway début Isherwood called “strikingly good,” Aimee Carrero was just as single-note and predictable as her castmates, suggesting that the fault lies mostly with Gibson and Aukin rather than with the actors.  Carrero’s teenaged daughter wasn’t as annoying as Madeleine Martin’s counterpart in Harper Regan, but her singular determination not to let her father into her life—Isherwood found that Carrero managed to signal her love for Hank but I saw no such variation in her sullenness—was as enervating as Hank’s and Lydia’s piteousness.  Only Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Sheryl, the would-be actor, showed some verve, as I noted.  Next to the Shakespeare monologue, she had the best Gibson-written bit in the play, too: a speech about what a great kisser she is which not only demonstrated how much more personality Sheryl has than anyone else on the stage, but gave Randolph, Tony-nominated for the musical Ghost, the best shot at showing her acting chops.  (She also did a nice turn in the Lady Macbeth speech, and I’d kind of like to see her do the role sometime.  I bet she’d knock it out of the park.)  The part, however, is something of a set piece, a relief from the downbeat (and beaten-down) other characters, even though Sheryl, too, succumbs to her own misfortunes.  (She can’t audition—she freezes up—so she never gets call backs and is stuck doing extra work in the opera, which she takes rather over-seriously.)  In the final analysis, the acting was generally pretty good but it didn’t aid the production much because of the writing and Aukin’s lackluster direction. 

One additional note at this juncture: the Times reviewer remarked that Carrero “does fine by the sad songs Marlene composes and performs,” referring to tuneless compositions by Ryan Rumery which Isherwood described as “mordant.”  Once again, I demur.  I admit I’m prejudiced because I can’t stand tuneless music (there used to be a TV commercial for some sugar substitute that drove me up the wall because of the atonal jingle it used as ad copy), but I didn’t find the ditties in the least “connective” but rather disjunctive, interruptive.  The scenes of What Rhymes With America—the title itself refers to Marlene’s songwriting—are episodic enough without also being separated by Marlene’s guitar riffs.  (By the way, the answer to the title’s question is “nothing”: nothing rhymes with America.  The Back Stage reviewer, however, suggested “esoterica.”  That’s supposed to be portentous.  It’s just another contrivance to me, though.)

In addition to Isherwood’s Times notice, other press response to What Rhymes was also positive.  (Interestingly, the reader response to the Times review was split almost evenly.  Of the 15 comments, eight were entirely negative—that is, disagreeing with Isherwood’s assessment—and seven were positive—or at least forgiving, as two expressed serious reservations and several others dismissed what the writers considered minor ones.)  Newsday’s Winer called What Rhymes an “enchanting, tough-minded” play “that is both morose and unexpectedly engaging.”  Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post wrote that the “quirky play meanders gently from cryptic scene to seemingly extraneous aside.”  “[A]n affecting picture eventually emerges,” reported Vincentelli, and the short play “is the rare show that leaves you wanting more.”  The Post writer complimented the cast and concluded that despite the characters’ inability to connect to each other, the actors “still touch us.”  In the News, Dziemianowicz declared that Gibson’s “offbeat and beautiful new comedy-dramedy purrs along, even as it wanders, to a gentle rise.”  The dialogue, Dziemianowicz asserted, is “smart and witty” and “sounds perfectly natural and wonderfully poetic at the same time.”  The News review-writer concluded, “Even in a play about tangled lives, every moment, every line, every smoke ring comes with a reason and a rhyme.” 

In an odd perspective on Gibson’s drama, James Hannaham asserted in the Village Voice that “director Daniel Aukin crashes Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s fiery virtuosity headlong into a backdrop of quirky Caucasians” and continued that “in Randolph's hands, Gibson's story . . . gets blown up into a sharp commentary on whiteness and repression.”  Hannaham didn’t go back to this racial take on the play, which he explained “ostensibly concerns Hank,” but he did pretty much give the review—and the production—to Sheryl and Randolph.  (Along the way, he never did assess the play.)

In New York magazine, Scott Brown cautioned that though What Rhymes has “a spectacularly awful title and a log line—lonely, half-likable folks adrift in a sere, seriocomic moral universe with only their illusions and obsessions as life rafts—that's all too easy to dismiss as terminal Off Broadway,” it’s “really quite good” due in large part, Brown asserted, to director Aukin’s control.  Gibson, he declared, “writes fluidly and beautifully,” composing scenes that are “each a sketchlike contrivance, but none of them sketchy.”  The New Yorker, calling the play a “delightfully bizarre trifle,” reported, “What the playwright is up to plotwise is not entirely certain.”  Lauding Gibson’s past work, culminating in 2009’s This, David Cote in Time Out New York felt that What Rhymes With America is “a step back.  It’s a melancholy story, told in an affecting, minor key, but overly quirky details detract from your sympathy for its failed protagonists.”  Concluded Cote:

For all [the play’s] schematic signposting (and wan musical interludes), Gibson writes concise, witty dialogue, and Daniel Aukin’s spare, delicate staging captures the emotional isolation of these characters.  In the end, What Rhymes is self-selecting: It will draw in those who treasure the plays of Will Eno, Annie Baker or Sarah Ruhl, or their indie-film equivalents . . . .  Older Atlantic Theater Company subscribers [Who, me?] may leave confused or even irritated, but they will now be acquainted with one of our most ingenious and beguiling playwrights.

Erik Haagensen of Back Stage warned, however, that “[t]he quirk quotient is dangerously high” in What Rhymes, “a rather sketchy collection of scenes in search of a play.”  What Rhymes, Haagensen said in the theater weekly, is “a thin, archly self-conscious, awfully dreary look at a largely random quartet of unhappy people that plods dully by” in a “no doubt deliberately drab physical production.”  In conclusion, the Back Stage writer, referring specifically to the enigmatic title , added, “I haven’t a clue as to what Gibson means by it,” echoing my own response.  And Variety’s Stasio was pretty acerbic when she declared:

Credit set designer Laura Jellinek for a nice piece of deceptive visual design.  Her abstract white set makes “What Rhymes With America” look like the avant-garde piece that scribe Melissa James Gibson would like to think she's written, instead of the trite celebration of mid-life arrested development that it manifestly is.

Director Aukin, Stasio wrote, “put a high gloss on the thin material he's been given to work with.”  Of Hank, What Rhymes’s central character, she averred, he “doesn't even deserve center stage.”  I wholeheartedly concur. 

On the ’Net, Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway described Gibson’s play as a “dangerously unpredictable and sometimes too self-satisfied comedy” which “maintains its consistent level of engagement.”  The playwright-director team “operate in a sharp, poetic, staccato style that captures the unfinished sentences and half-formed thoughts,” Murray said, but added, “The specific brand of quirkiness that has traditionally characterized Gibson and Aukin's work . . . does not always find a natural home here.”  The dramatist’s ideas “are scattered whenever they're not sobering,” observed Murray.  On TheaterMania, Brian Scott Lipton called What Rhymes an “often hilarious and consistently thoughtful new play.”  The director “guides the cast through Gibson's sometimes dense and sometimes deceptively simple speeches, so they never sound unnatural,” Lipton felt, resulting in a “very fine play [that] has more than enough poetry of its own.”  Elyse Sommer characterized What Rhymes on CurtainUp as a “play in which so little and yet so much happens” and lauds Daniel Aukin for “smartly and inventively” directing Gibson’s work.

The Atlantic states that What Rhymes With America explores “estrangement and the partially examined life.”  Gibson’s said, “I was really trying to explore this particular landscape and this particular moment,” which essentially means she agrees with the theater’s statement, since that’s what the play portrays in its narrative and characters.  My problem comes after that declaration: what are we supposed to take away?  What’s Gibson’s point about “estrangement” and “the partially examined life”?  That they’re debilitating and destructive?  Don’t we know that?  So what more does Gibson want us to see?  I sure don’t know from the play and its production at ATC.  I haven’t seen any other analysis, including from the playwright or the director, that tells me anything more.  As I said earlier, I get the sense that Gibson had some ideas about situations and characters, not themes or ideas, and wrote scenes to depict them.  She doesn’t seem to have come to any conclusions about, if you’ll pardon the expression, the human condition.  If readers of ROT remember my two criteria for good theater, What Rhymes With America squeaks by on the theatricality score—I didn’t much care for what Gibson and Aukin came up with, but it qualifies as theatrical—but it misses entirely on the issue of doing more than telling a story as far as I’m concerned.

Military Wisdom (Not Necessarily an Oxymoron)

[These were sent to me by a friend recently and they’re quite wonderful.  And mostly all are absolutely true.  (Except the one about not leaving anything up in the sky.  It must have been coined before space flight as I believe there are still a few objects up there—including a couple of Russian cosmonauts and a dog or two.)

[Someone left off the wisest military comment, now universally known as Murphy's Law ('Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong').  Ed Murphy (1918-90) was an actual Air Force captain, so it qualifies.]

If the Enemy is in range, so are you.

—Infantry Journal

It is generally inadvisable to eject over the area you just bombed.

—U.S. Air Force Manual

Aim towards the Enemy.

—Instructions printed on U.S. rocket launcher

When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend

—U.S. Marine Corps

 

Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs are guaranteed always to hit the ground.

—USAF Ammo Troop

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.

—General Douglas MacArthur

Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo.

—Infantry Journal

You, you, and you.  Panic.  The rest of you come with me.

—U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant

Tracers work both ways.

—U.S. Army Ordnance

Five second fuses only last three seconds.

—Infantry Journal

Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last, and don't ever volunteer to do anything.

—U.S. Navy swabbie

Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.

—David Heckworth

If your attack is going too well, you're walking into an ambush.

—Infantry Journal

No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection.

—Joe Gay

Any ship can be a minesweeper.  Once.

—Unknown

Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do

—Unknown Marine Recruit

Don't draw fire; it irritates the people around you.

 

If you see a bomb technician running, follow him

—USAF Ammo Troop

You've never been lost until you've been lost at Mach 3.

—Test pilot Paul F. Crickmore

The only time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire.

 

Blue water Navy truism: There are more planes in the ocean than submarines in the sky.

—From an old carrier sailor

If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it's probably a helicopter—and therefore, unsafe.

 

When one engine fails on a twin-engine airplane, you always have enough power left to get you to the scene of the crash.

 

Without ammunition, the USAF would be just another expensive flying club.

What is the similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots?  If a pilot screws up, the pilot dies.  If ATC screws up . . . the pilot dies.

Never trade luck for skill.

The three most common expressions (or famous last words) in aviation are:  “Why is it doing that?”  “Where are we?”  And “Oh S - - - !”

Weather forecasts are horoscopes with numbers.

Airspeed, altitude and brains.  Two are always needed to complete the flight successfully.

Mankind has a perfect record in aviation; we never left one up there!

Flashlights are tubular metal containers kept in a flight bag to store dead batteries.

Flying the airplane is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground who is incapable of understanding or doing anything about it.

The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you.

—Attributed to Northrop test pilot Max Stanley

 
A pilot who doesn't have any fear probably isn't flying his plane to its maximum.

— Astronaut Jon McBride

If you're faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible.

— Renowned aerobatic and test pilot Bob Hoover

A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it.  That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit.

—Army's magazine of preventive maintenance.

Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you.

 

There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime.

—Sign over squadron ops desk at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ, 1970

If something hasn't broken on your helicopter, it's about to.

 

Basic Flying Rules:  “Try to stay in the middle of the air.  Do not go near the edges of it.  The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space.  It is much more difficult to fly there.”

You know that your landing gear is up and locked when it takes full power to taxi to the terminal.

As the test pilot climbs out of the experimental aircraft, having torn off the wings and tail in the crash landing, the crash truck arrives, the rescuer sees a bloodied pilot and asks, “What happened?”  The pilot's reply, “I don't know, I just got here myself!”

—Attributed to Lockheed test pilot Ray Crandell

[I don’t know where these came from originally.  They sound a little like things that used to appear in Reader’s Digest—which had a regular feature called “Humor in Uniform”—but I have no idea.  The friend who sent them to me got them from someone else, so he doesn’t know the source, either.  I guess we’ll just have to pass them from hand to hand, like the old Soviet practice of samizdat, without ever knowing the origin of the collection.  Like a chain letter—without the curses or Ponzi-scheme promises of wealth.  Just chuckles and knowing smiles.  ~Rick]

“Historic 1906 Film Captures S.F.'s Market Street”

[This story was first broadcast on the CBS magazine 60 Minutes on 17 October 2010 with Morley Safer as the correspondent, and updated on 21 June 2011.  It was recently aired on 10 July 2011.  I’ve chosen to post it on ROT simply because it’s such an interesting tale.  Not only is the film described in the story a true historic artifact in itself, but its provenance was only surmised.  It was simple detective—and a lot of terrific observation—work to learn the facts of the film’s creation, what happened to it afterwards, and when it was made.]

 

You’re about to take a short trip into the past, a remarkable glimpse of a footnote to history we first broadcast last April. It’s a film made more than 100 years ago on Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare.

 

In fascinating detail, it shows how people lived and dressed in what was then, as now, the Golden City of the American West. The film is well known to historians. 

 

But who made it and why, and most importantly, exactly when? For a century, time, like the fog that blankets San Francisco, has shrouded the answers. But now we know. The film is a time traveler’s glimpse of a joyous city on the brink of disaster. 

 

Our trip into the past begins on a San Francisco streetcar built in 1895.

 

“It still comes out once in awhile and carries passengers down the main street. It looks just like a cable car because it was built by the people who built the cable cars,” Rick Laubscher of the Market Street Railway, told correspondent Morley Safer as they set off on a trolley ride. 

 

The Market Street Railway is a non-profit group that keeps the city’s vintage trolleys rolling. “This is the main artery of San Francisco and always has been,” he told Safer.

 

Market Street is three miles long, 120 feet wide – the beating heart of the city since the days of the gold rush.

 

“This is where the original film started, right here about 8th Street,” Laubscher explained.

 

The black and white film makes the past come alive, thanks to a camera that was mounted on the front of a cable car a century ago, catching glimpses of fashion, faces, and the helter-skelter of city traffic – horses, trolley cars, and that new devil’s own invention, the motor car. 

 

“You can see when people turn to look at the camera, it was really the shock of the new. Can you imagine? Here comes this contraption down the street with these guys hand cranking this camera furiously,” Laubscher said.

 

Others had made films of San Francisco, starting in the 1890s. But the cameraman of this film had the good sense to simply turn it on and leave it on. 

 

“When you saw that film, what did you make of the people, the news boys, the cars, the horses, everything all happening at once right here on the tracks?” Safer asked.

 

“Yeah. I mean, you can see the people would circulate wildly. And they’re just kind of wandering across the street. You have these huge drays led by teamsters with four, sometimes eight horses hauling along,” Laubscher said.

 

“And it seems, watching the film, that there were absolutely no traffic rules,” Safer said, commenting on the traffic chaos the film captured.

 

“It seems like it. I mean, sort of, people, it was optional to stay to the right. But you know, it seemed to be honored in the breach. And there are people will tell you today that Market Street is still that way,” Laubscher said.

 

Looking back a century from the same spot on the same street is an eerie sight. Teddy Roosevelt was president then, life expectancy was 47 years for men, 50 for women, most of whom still couldn’t vote. No one ‘– man, woman or child' – went out without a hat.

 

The last few blocks of Market Street today are home to banks and brokers ‘– “Wall Street West.” A century ago, it was the wholesale district, offering coffee, tea, and spices. It was a time when a decent salary was $400 a year. 

 

“It’s left us an astonishing record, the likes of which we rarely see,” film archivist and historian Rick Prelinger told Safer.

 

Prelinger owns the clearest of the three surviving copies of the film. “This is over 100 years old, but the image quality is just absolutely excellent,” he said.

 

According to Prelinger, the film is extremely fragile. 

 

The version excerpted on “60 Minutes” is a digitally restored, high definition copy, seen for the first time on television.

 

“What is it that moves us so when we see something like this?” Safer asked.

 

“It’s uncanny, first off, to see something that’s so old, in almost an alternate universe, really,” Prelinger said. 

 

“I love when the little kid, in the carriage ahead of the streetcar and opens up that curtain and peeks out,” he added, commenting about a moment caught on film. “And then, at the very, very end, the streetcar turns around. And you have a glimpse of newsboys looking at the camera and waving, just for a few frames. It dazzles audiences. People applaud this film.”

 

The film ended at the Ferry Building on San Francisco Bay. The movie is a small gem about a much larger gem: this magnificent city on the hills. 

 

It’s more than even that: it’s a mystery, a mystery quite literally ripped, as they say, from the headlines of the past.

 

“It just seemed like it was an important film that something must have been written about it someplace. And why not try to figure it out? I’m like that,” movie historian David Kiehn told Safer.

 

Kiehn is a man obsessed with unlocking the secrets of the Market Street film. He spent days, weeks and months at the San Francisco Library, scanning old newspapers for clues. Judging from the state of the construction on various buildings along the way, the Library of Congress had dated the film to September 1905. 

 

Screening it over and over, Kiehn wasn’t so sure. “There’s some water between the tracks, there. Reflection,” he observed.

 

The film showed puddles from a recent rain. But the San Francisco newspapers from September 1905 showed no rain at all.

 

More clues came from the surprising number of cars: there were only a few thousand of them in the whole country in those days. And it appears the drivers on Market Street were recruited to fill up the screen, circling around the camera to make the city look more lively. 

 

Kiehn was able to identify one of the cars captured on camera. “That’s J. Barry Anway, who was a chauffeur,” he explained.

 

Kiehn checked old car licenses and registration records and discovered the chauffeur’s car, number 4867, was registered in January 1906. Another one, number 5057, registered in February 1906, suggesting the film was made sometime after that. 

 

Kiehn went back to the 1906 newspapers and found the following: “Starting around mid-March, and going to the end of the month, there was quite a bit of rain.”

 

Enough rain to account for the puddles, and to push the likely time the film was made into April 1906. 

 

On April 18, 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake struck. It, and the subsequent fire, killed thousands.

 

“Was there a ‘Eureka!’ moment when you said, ‘Ah hah. It was not 1905. It was spring of 1906,’?” Safer asked.

 

“Well, certainly, seeing the New York Clipper articles, that was the, I think the defining moment,” Kiehn said.

 

The New York Clipper was a showbiz paper where actors, jugglers, songwriters, and movie makers advertised their wares. It was also where Kiehn found a series of ads from the Miles brothers, filmmakers offering movie houses a travelogue called “A Trip Through Market Street.” 

 

An ad was run on April 28, 1906, ten days after the quake: “We have the only pictures of any value ever made in San Francisco before the frightful catastrophe,” Kiehn read.

 

“So this strongly suggests that the film was made just before the earthquake?” Safer asked.

 

“Yeah. Well, it actually spells it out right here. This film was made just one week before the complete destruction of every building shown in the picture,” Kiehn said.

 

New research this summer confirmed that. Kiehn had stripped away the haze of history to show us the real story behind the trip through Market Street: San Francisco closing in on its rendezvous with catastrophe. The odds are that some of the people you see in the film had just days to live. 

 

“When you look at that film, all you can think of is what was about to happen,” Safer remarked.

 

“Yes. When David Kiehn did his research and established that this was made within days before the earthquake, it takes on a power that is almost inconceivable because you can look at the buildings and know with certainty that almost all disappeared. You can look at the people on the street and wonder who survived. You’re watching a shade fall down over an era,” Rick Laubscher replied.

 

Among the buildings destroyed by the quake and fire: the offices of the Miles brothers; their film of San Francisco in happier days barely survived. 

 

They had shipped it to New York by train just the night before the quake.

 

“Knowing that it was our relatives that did that. We were very proud,” Scott Miles told Safer. 

 

Miles and his uncle Dwayne are descendants of Earl Miles, the man who supervised the filming. 

 

They have one of his cameras and a family album of still pictures the Miles brothers took of the damage and the city’s refugees. 

 

But they never knew the Miles brothers made the Market Street film until David Kiehn uncovered the story.

 

“David Kiehn just produced so much wonderful information for us. And we’re astounded,” Scott Miles told Safer.

 

“What is it about ‘The Trip Down Market Street,’ why do you think people are so moved by it?” Safer asked.

 

“I just see the people there. And they don’t know what’s about to hit them. And you can’t help but feel for them,” Miles replied.

 

“It’s just how vulnerable we are, you know? Like this is one week. And then a week later, you’re picking up everything off the ground,” Dwayne Miles added.

 

As for the man who figured it all out, he was armed only with a computer, the internet, and an incurable curiosity.

 

Kiehn understands well the strange power of images from the past. In the California town of Niles ‘– a throwback itself to a gentler age ‘– Kiehn runs a theater devoted to silent films. Charlie Chaplin himself made movies in Niles, and watched them in the very room. 

 

On the night Safer was there, “A Trip Through Market Street” was the star attraction. “That’s the beauty of film. It captures something that nobody today has seen any more. It makes a connection. Young and old. They still react with amazement,” Kiehn said.

 

And 30 miles across San Francisco Bay, the Ferry Building still welcomes travelers. And Market Street, a century later, rolls on and on.

 

© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

[I didn’t really plan it, but I seem to have started an occasional series of articles on New York City tourist sites.  I’ve written about the High Line Park, our “park in the sky” (10 October), and Governors Island, a floating park in New York Harbor (19 November).  I’ve also covered a number of New York peculiarities, including sites that might interest a visitor, in my collection of shorts called “A Helluva Town” (15 & 18 August 2011, 9 January 2012).  Now I’m going to publish an article on another place in the city that I think is either unique or nearly so, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a restored (though not by much) 19th-century apartment building in the part of downtown Manhattan that has been home to newly-arrived immigrants for two centuries.  One afternoon last April, when my mom was here for a birthday visit, we rode down to have a look at this still-new (and, as far as I can tell, relatively unknown) museum of New York City’s (and America’s) immigration experience.]

97 Orchard Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is an unprepossessing building.  If you walked down Orchard Street back in 1997 and passed the 6-floor red-brick tenement, you probably wouldn’t even turn your head, except maybe to have a passing glance in the windows of the stores on the stoop level or the basement.  If you did, you’d notice, perhaps, that the building was old (after September 1992 there was a plaque identifying it as a National Historic Landmark and putting its construction date as 1863) and, except for the shops, empty.  It would have been exactly like many others in LES, buildings built between the middle of the 19th century and the years between the World Wars, some of them still occupied, others abandoned and derelict.  A haunt for bargain-hunters—its fabric and notion shops and upholsters have been a treasury for costume and set designers for decades—and seekers of echt Jewish deli and dairy cuisine aimed for the neighborhood.  I may well have passed by the building myself back in the late ’70s or early ’80s because aside from the fabric stores along Orchard Street, it was also home to shops that custom fit sheets and made and repaired umbrellas.  Generally speaking, however, it wasn’t a tourist area.  Little of LES was slated for gentrification.

In 1984, historian and social activist Ruth Abram, the first president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, came up with the idea of a museum to focus on the American immigrant story that would stress tolerance and understanding.  Three years later, looking for office space for her new project, she happened on the largely abandoned building at 97 Orchard Street.  Feeling as if she’d come across a time capsule, the sense that the building had been sealed up with its history for half a century, Abram knew she’d found a perfect home for her vision.  When the building was opened, Abram found that everything was exactly the way it had been when the last landlord sealed it up.  It was just like an urban Pompeii, a pharaoh’s tomb for New York City’s immigrant past.   

The first two apartments, the second-floor homes of the Gumpertzes (1870s) and the Baldizzis (1930s), were opened to the public in 1992.  On 19 April 1994, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark and on 12 November 1998, it was labeled a National Trust Historic Site associated with the National Park Service.  The Italianate building, however, is owned and operated by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a non-governmental agency.  The museum serves about 170,000 visitors a year, of whom about 40,000 are students. 

Restoration has been minimal, mostly structural to shore up floors and staircases that were in danger of collapse from age and neglect, and, as far as the eye is concerned, stripping away much of the accumulated layers of flooring and wall coverings down to the oldest level to show what the building was like in its early years.  The researchers, preservers, and restorers at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum included a demographer, genealogist, historian, urban archeologist, architectural historian, and wallpaper conservator.  Beneath the layers of wallpaper—as many as 15 or 20 layers—and floor coverings, objects, notes written on the walls, and other artifacts have been uncovered giving glimpses into the world of the tenants of 97 Orchard Street.  More than 1,500 items, including kitchen utensils, toys, cosmetics, medicine vials, soda and milk bottles, family and business papers, letters, newspapers, buttons, coins, fabric scraps, and so on, were found in the building as it was restored, many under the flooring or in the mailboxes.  The museum conducted an archaeological dig in the rear yard and historians and genealogists have tracked down the outlines and even many details of the building’s occupants, examining photographs, diaries, and letters to reveal the stories of the real people who lived at the tenement over its 72-year history as an apartment building.  (The most well-known of the tenants at 97 Orchard was Sam Jaffe, the late actor who played the title role in Gunga Din in 1939, but whom I’ll always remember from my childhood as Dr. Zorba, the title character’s boss on the 1961-65 TV series Ben Casey.  Jaffe, who was also featured in one of my favorite moves, the 1951 original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, was born in the building in 1891.) 

A tenement, when 97 Orchard Street was built, wasn’t the slum building the word conjures today.  It was simply a word that meant a building with multiple dwellings rented to “more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises,” as New York’s Tenement House Act of 1867 defined it.  This differentiated it, I suppose, from a boarding house or a rented room in someone’s home.  The original tenement houses, which began to appear in the 1840s and ’50s, weren’t intended to be slums, though they were deliberately inexpensively built with few, if any, amenities to keep down costs and quickly became associated with poor tenants and shoddy conditions.  The word became derogatory and newer accommodations became known as ‘apartment houses’ instead, until that phrase was seen as ordinary and upscale home seekers began flocking to ‘condos’ and ‘co-ops.’

The building at 97 Orchard Street, valued at about $8,000 when it was erected, was, in fact, nicer than many others built at around the same time.  In fact, the owner himself, tailor Lukas Glockner, chose to live there, having moved from St. Mark’s Place in what is now the East Village.  There was no indoor plumbing yet, but that was common in the 1860s; the backyard privies were clean and the stairs, while narrow and unlit (also common), were well-built.  Interior rooms had no windows, but there were transoms that brought in light from the front and back windows; a later law required these small windows but the ones at 97 Orchard seem to have been original construction.  The front and rear windows also let in more air than was usual for mid-19th-century tenements.

Between its construction by Glockner, a Saxon immigrant who fled the European unrest of 1848, in the middle of the Civil War and 1935, on the eve of World War II (which began in Europe in 1939), 97 Orchard Street was home to some 7,000 tenants, mostly families, from over 20 different countries.   (LES wasn’t David Dinkins’s “gorgeous mosaic”; it was the original melting pot.  Russians, Italians, Germans, Letts, Irish, Poles, and scores of other nationalities, were all crowded together in the same buildings on the same few blocks—and they came out Americans as their children and grandchildren moved on.  Later Chinese, Vietnamese, Caribbeans, Latin Americans occupied these same tenements in a continuing cycle.)  Glockner lived on the second floor and rented the rest of the building out.  There are 22 apartments in the building which has five stories above street level, starting with a stoop level a short flight of stairs up, and a basement whose separate entrance is a few steps below the sidewalk.  The basement originally housed a saloon and restaurant run by the Schneider family from Bavaria from 1864 to 1886.  (The museum has plans to “reopen” Schneider’s saloon in the future.)  Over time, the building was altered to meet the changing laws of the city and the basement was converted into two apartments and then into commercial space; the four stoop-level apartments also became stores; one of the rear units was Professor Dora Meltzer's Palmistry Studio at the turn of the 20th century (and which the Tenement Museum may also open to tourists).  When the rest of the building was vacated, these spaces remained occupied.

There are four apartments per floor in the building, two in front and two in the rear.  Between the two north and two south dwellings runs the dark, narrow corridor and staircase.  Each apartment has three rooms, a large front room (11 x 12½ feet), called the living room or parlor, a kitchen, and a tiny bedroom (8½ square feet).  Only the front room gets direct sunlight and outside air (the rear units looked out over the backyard).  The apartments, which typically housed families of six or seven, cover about 325 square feet.  The Confino family who moved onto the fifth floor in 1913, had ten family members at 97 Orchard Street, the largest family to live in the tenement.  As you might imagine, sleeping arrangements took some careful and clever maneuvering.  There’s no toilet or bathroom—privies were originally located in the rear yard—and no running water in the apartments.  Heat was supplied by the kitchen fireplace, which burned either coal or wood.  (Gas was piped in later.)  Coal-burning stoves, which may have been the apartment’s source of heat as well, had to be purchased by the tenants. 

Modernizations were made periodically: indoor plumbing was brought in, but only cold water ran into the apartments—the original meaning of “cold-water flat”—and there were two toilets on each floor; an airshaft was created to provide the interior rooms with light and air; gas was installed around 1905 and then electricity sometime in the early 1920s.  (Interestingly, an exterior fire escape was required by an 1862 law, so the tenement was built with one, though the present structure, a replica of the original, was mounted by the museum in 1997.)  These improvements were costly to the landlord, cutting into his rental profits, and in 1935, instead of continuing the process, then-owner Gottlieb Helpern, whose family continued to own the building until 1988, evicted the residents.  The upper floors were closed off and boarded up; only the commercial shops in the basement and the stoop level remained open.  (Even today, with the museum’s renovations, parts of the upper floors are still closed.)  97 Orchard stayed in that state of suspended animation until 1988 when the East Side Tenement Museum took control of the premises.  Though it slowly deteriorated as unoccupied buildings tend to, 97 Orchard had in a way become the amber that’s preserved a glimpse back into the way New York’s immigrants lived in the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries.

Visitors can only enter 97 Orchard with a tour group and a guide from the museum.  There are three different way to visit the Tenement Museum: take a tour the building and see the restored apartments, including period-accurate furnishings, of several residents from different decades; meet some of the building’s residents portrayed by costumed “interpreters”; or  take a walking tour of the neighborhood and learn about the Lower East Side and the life of the immigrants that shaped its culture.  (Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the 150-year-old structure, the building itself isn’t wheel-chair accessible.  The neighborhood tour, however, is fully accessible to wheelchairs.) 

To visit the building, there are six different tours, each one with a different focus.  In “Exploring 97 Orchard Street,” the museum guide takes you behind the scenes to display the “layers of history” revealed by the building’s many alterations and improvements.  The tour shows how the restorers stripped away the overlays of paint and wallpapers to find ever-older appearances of the tenement and how these revelations have been interpreted by “urban archeologists.”  (This tour covers parts of the first, second, and fourth floors of the tenement.  Keep in mind that the first, or stoop, floor is nine steps above street level.)

“Irish Outsiders” uses period-appropriate objects in the home (though not original to the family or the building) to tell the story of the Moores, Irish Catholics on the fourth floor who suffered the malnutrition death of five-year-old Agnes in 1869.  The tour compares the Moore’s efforts to keep their family healthy with those of the Katz family, Jewish immigrants from Russia who lived at 97 Orchard in the 1920s and ’30s. 

With “Sweatshop Workers,” visitors experience the lives of the Levine and Rogarshevsky families on the third floor.  At the turn of the 20th century, the Polish immigrant Levines, who arrived in 1870, ran a dressmaking shop in their home, a common practice in LES, and Abraham Rogarshevsky, who, with his large family from Lithuania moved into 97 Orchard in 1901, worked as a presser in a garment workshop in the first decades of the 20th century.  The Rogarshevskys later changed their name to Rosenthal.

In “Hard Times,” visitors learn how immigrants living at 97 Orchard survived the economic depressions of the era, starting with the Gumpertz family on the second floor, German Jews whose patriarch, Julius, disappeared during the Panic (stock market crash) of 1873.  He worked cutting heels for Levi’s cobbler shop nearby and left for work one October morning in 1874 and never came home, leaving Nathalia, his wife, to work as a dressmaker to support their children.  The tour then visits the second-floor apartment of the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family who lived in the tenement during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Adolfo tried to find work as a mason while his wife, Rosaria, did piece work sewing at home, but like so many in those years, the Baldizzis survived on welfare.  Adolfo and Rosaria’s daughter Josephine was located by museum historians and helped restore the Baldizzis’ apartment. 

(The “Hard Times” and “Sweatshop Workers” excursions both offer an extended, two-hour tour and discussion version.  The simple visit is an hour, as is “Irish Outsiders”; “Exploring 97 Orchard Street” takes 90 minutes.  Note that for most of these, there are stairs to climb—no elevator has been installed in the Tenement Museum—and the staircase is narrow and quite steep.  Visitors should also be aware that no additional lighting has been installed, either, so hallways and stairs are also fairly dim.)

To walk the neighborhood, the museum also offers three alternatives.  “Outside the Home” (1½ hours), which doesn’t go into any neighborhood buildings, explores LES the way immigrants have experienced it for 150 years.  Sites that had significant impact on new Americans include the Jarmulowsky Bank building, where prospective citizens put their life’s savings, which many lost when the bank failed in 1914 when German depositors caused a run by withdrawing their money to send to family at the start of World War I; the Daily Forward building, the socialist-oriented Yiddish newspaper (now published as a weekly with an English-language edition) that fought for worker rights; and P.S. 42, the area school that taught generations of immigrants how to become “American.”

In “Then & Now,” the two-hour tour explores the district’s history with a focus on why it became such a center of immigrants, comparing its present day with its past.  (This tour also doesn’t visit any buildings.)  For “Foods of the Lower East Side,” visitors must bring not just their appetites, but their culinary adventurousness.  As the museum describes this two-hour tasting tour, it explores “the immigrant experience and some of the ways immigrant foods have shaped American food” by sampling the cuisine of the Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean newcomers, among several others, who have resided in LES in their turns and are represented in the neighborhood by the many ethnic restaurants.  Tour participants sample about a dozen different foods at various stops and you learn some of the hidden histories of common American dishes that have perhaps surprisingly evolved from immigrant traditions. 

On the first floor of 97 Orchard, museum-goers can visit with “Victoria Confino” in the Meet the Residents program, an hour-long encounter with the 14-year-old resident of 97 Orchard Street in 1916.  Played by a costumed “interpreter,” known in the museum business as a “first-person character,” Victoria answers questions from visitors, always remembering the year and her circumstances (or, as we say in the theater: staying in character), about her life in LES as an immigrant learning to negotiate her new environment.  The Confinos, Sephardic Jews from Kastoria, Greece, in the days when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, came from comfortable circumstances, but her family became the object of scrutiny during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and ’13, so they packed up and emigrated to America in 1913.  Victoria, who grew up speaking Ladino, the Spanish-based vernacular of the Sephardim, has begun to learn English in her new school, a part of the role the museum interpreter has to internalize as visitors go back in time to meet her.

The meeting with Victoria Confino requires the visitors to play roles along with the interpreter.  They are expected to put themselves into the time and place of the young girl, assuming the roles of new immigrants themselves.  (The interpreter won’t answer questions on topics outside her time period or her age group.  Take, for instance, World War I: at her age, Victoria wouldn’t be likely to know much about it a year before the United States became involved beyond the fact that the Great War, as it would have been known then, was being waged in Europe.)  Though it’s the most creatively demanding, Meet the Residents isn’t the only inter-active visit in the Tenement Museum’s program.  All the guides at 97 Orchard Street ask tour participants questions and prompt them to relate anecdotes from their own histories or recall things they might have learned in history classes or out of their own experiences.  Objects and artifacts are often the catalyst for stories or historical details someone might remember. 

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is open seven days a week throughout the year (except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Days) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  The times of the different tours vary, so it’s necessary to call in or go on line to plan a visit (and some tours can be reserved on line in advance).  Tours, limited to 15 visitors, are booked and assembled and tickets are purchased at the Visitor Center at 103 Orchard Street, a few doors north at the corner of Delancey, which also houses the Museum Shop (providing many books on the subject of LES and immigration, among other pertinent topics) and the newly-opened Sadie Samuelson Levy Immigrant Heritage Center.  The Heritage Center hosts readings, lectures, panel discussions, films, and other presentations.  Tickets for most tours are $22 ($17 for students and seniors); the “Foods of the Lower East Side” tour costs $45 ($40 for students and seniors).  The museum offers memberships that provide deeper discounts as well.  There are also educational programs, including both actual tours and virtual tours, geared to students and school groups for ages 8 to 18.  There are also resources for teachers, and the website lists books and other sources for research and reading.

The museum is accessible by bus and subway (and many of the sightseeing buses stop at the museum, though street parking in LES is difficult and limited as the streets are narrow and it’s still a busy shopping area.  There are lots and garages, some of which offer free or discounted parking for museum visitors with validation.)  Keep in mind, as I said, that the building tours are not wheelchair accessible.  Some of the outdoor tours offer indoor alternatives for inclement weather and there are also alternative and supplemental arrangements to accommodate visitors with physical limitations such as blindness or deafness.   A good place to start exploring this interesting museum is on its website, http://www.tenement.org, which has links to specific information about the museum and the programs, including advice on group tours and other special arrangements that are available; the National Park Service (which doesn’t operate the museum), has a Tenement Museum site as well: http://www.nps.gov/loea/index.htm.  The general information phone number is (212) 982-8420 and the general e-mail address is lestm@tenement.org. 

[I must add that one visit to the Tenement Museum isn’t enough to get a real impression of what surprises it holds.  Since you have to visit the building with a guide, the operators have planned several different tours, each with a slightly different perspective.  You get a different narrative with each visit and a different view of the immigrant experience in lower Manhattan is revealed. 

[I’ll also point out that this isn’t the first museum about which I’ve written on ROT, though it is the first in New York City (not counting the brief description of The Cloisters I included in the first installment of “A Helluva Town”).  On 25 March 2010, I described a trip to the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., in “Spook Museum.”  There was a private aspect to that visit, as you’ll see if you read the report, but even outside of that, it’s a potentially more exciting experience than is the Tenement Museum.  Not less revealing or instructive, just more lively.  One important difference, though, is that the Tenement Museum is about the way people connected to many of us lived—my dad’s parents and grandparents, for instance.  (My grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t live in LES—they went up to Massachusetts to join other family members—but they did come through Ellis Island and eventually lived in similar neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.)  Not many of us know people engaged in the life displayed at the Spy Museum.  Well, I do—but you probably don’t.  (I’d tell you more, but then . . . well, you know how that goes!)

[I’d also like to note that the life of 97 Orchard Street is almost precisely the same as the heyday of Yiddish Theater (which I recount in “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” Parts 1 and 2, 23 and 26 August), many of whose patrons lived in this very neighborhood.  Many different waves of émigrés lived on the Lower East Side and the flavors, smells, and sounds changed accordingly, but in the era of the Tenement Museum, it was largely Ashkenazi Jewish, German and East European, and Italian.  Unsurprisingly, there was an émigré theater and entertainment scene that represented each national and language community.  (See also my report “Farfariello” on 6 June for a glimpse at an Italian-American performance form that was popular at the same time.)

[And since ROT is ostensibly a theater blog, I’d like to point out an interesting article about the “living history” interpreters, the “first-person characters” like those portraying Victoria Confino at the Tenement Museum: Nahma Sandrow’s “The Actors Who Make History Live” in the New York Times on 30 December 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/arts/the-year-in-review-theater-the-actors-who-make-history-live.html; originally in the Arts & Leisure section).  Though Sandrow introduces the article with a depiction of an encounter with Victoria, she covers many similar living history programs like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg.]