Nancy Davidoff Kelton's Blog, page 2

A Beautiful 59 Year Friendship

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Filled

In January, I filled up in CA with love, laughter, surprises, and moments dear to my heart. Last week back in NYC, I filled up:--as a playwright at a theater. Four actors I chose from head shots superbly read a 10-minute section from my play before an audience I did not know. Many members shared kind words after.--reading Elizabeth’s Strout’s wonderful new book, “Olive, Again.”I highly recommend it to you and will recommend to my Wed. night class which is filled with 10 longtime and new writers who have strong voices, much to say, and are getting their excellent work published. Three members were absent at our Session 1 this semester when I took the above photo.Not filled yet are my March 26 Strand workshop at 6:30 pm. Linkand my 2-session New School workshop March 28 and April 4 New School (registration/information is under “Events” on my website: www.nancykelton.com) You’ll be excited, inspired, challenged, and writing from your best selves. Come join us!When I phoned my student, Ellie, an absentee at our first Wednesday session, to check on her health, she asked if I saw her comment on my January 16 blog post saying Hercules’ penis is small. I hadn’t. It wasn’t posted. Neither Ellie nor I were sure why. I asked her to repost. Her repost, Comment #5, is at the end of my January 16 blog. I’m not reposting my photo of Hercules. Or his penis. It is small. It broke. Or something. The statue, sculptured from marble in 125 AD, was unearthed in 1790. Only parts were restored.

HERCULES

Hercules is on the left.I was at the Getty Villa in Malibu between family celebrations, babysitting, sports, writing, and walking.I’ve seen many people walking dogs. I listen to the owners and walkers talking to the dogs, asking them questions. Talk about material. I haven’t been going to the gym. Yay! I have been in a pool once and a jacuzzi twice. It’s sweatshirt weather. Double Yay! My thighs and I are thrilled my Speedo is resting.That’s Orpheus in the middle. The comedy mask scared me. Everything at the Getty is BC. Except the visitors. The present melts my heart.

CITY SIDEWALKS, BUSY WRITERS, HOLIDAY CHEERS AND CHAIRS

Walking up Fifth Avenue to an appointment, I stopped to see the tree at Rockefeller Center. On my first NYC visit in the mid-1950s, I saw the tree with my family. I saw it yearly on subsequent visits, with friends after I moved here in 1967 and then with new family members. Standing there alone yesterday brought up so many thoughts and feelings and so much gratitude and love for my precious family then and now. Love and Work. Yes, Freud!When asked what keeps her young and thriving, Estelle Parsons recently said, “Work.” I love to work. I love my work, kids, grandkids, and younger husband. Thank you, 2019.Last Sunday, as one of 7 writers, I read at Otto’s Shrunken Head Bar. Great audience! Totally with me. Reading from my memoir, “Finding Mr. Rightstein,” I was more relaxed than ever, and actually had a blast. Mr. Kublitz, my public speaking teacher in high school, would not have recognized me. Practicing at home, decades of readings and writing, and the presence of my husband and a close friend, who attends my readings regularly, were key.I’m revising my play, writing new essays, just had two accepted for publication, and am shopping for chairs. I need replacements. An erstwhile student broke one. Last week, when a writer in my Wednesday night workshop for 12 years and not because she flunked, and I reminisced, we discussed that student and the chair.My Wednesday night writers renewed their vows for next semester. Some, in the workshop for well over a decade, are getting pieces published. All have unique voices. All have grown. All write well. I’d planned on taking a group picture at our holiday party Wednesday for this post, but I got busy spilling seltzer. I am thrilled by their writing and proud to be their teacher.I am grateful for you, dear readers. Thank you for your comments and support. I hope 2020 brings you great health, joy, love, peace and new adventures. Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas! Happy, Healthy New Year to you all!!

Bye Bye Big Bird

From Agador to Almadovar

Two Saturdays ago, I sat down next to Agador in Washington Square. His good looks and outfit turned me on. According to his owner, Agador likes wearing his sweater on a cold day, which it was. We didn’t discuss his glasses.We watched the talented twins, Tic and Tac, do their fun, well-honed act. I didn’t see them last weekend. I think it’s gotten too cold and they are done performing at the park until spring.Indoor entertainment includes: not cooking, restaurants, prepping for my colonoscopy, the colonoscopy (I’m fine), writing the essay I am reading at the December 15 Otto’s event (would love to have you join us if you live in NYC or nearby) a 10-minute reading from my play, “Finding Mr. Rightstein,” at the Fifth Avenue Theatre Debut of short works, revising, and seeing Almodóvar’s beautifully written, directed, and acted movie, “Pain and Glory” at the Angelika in their tiniest theater with only 50 seats and reserved seating.If one has to sit in the second row, getting a stiff neck looking at the screen, it helps to stare at close-ups of Antonio Banderas. I don’t have photos of us together, other than in my mind’s eye, but I am thankful for Antonio Banderas.I am thankful for SO MUCH MORE.Happy Thanksgiving to you all!Love ‘n Stuff,Nancy

Happy Anniversary

Beautiful toasts by our loved ones on Nov. 7, 2009.Beautiful 10 years. Happy Anniversary, Jonathan. I love you and love being married to you. I'm so glad you said "Yes."

Spooky Things

On Thursday night, the Village Parade, now in its 44th year, will head up Sixth Avenue, turn onto my street and go by my building.“I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” as Phil Ochs sang. Not literally. I’m marching. To a different tune. More my own.Only ick factor: spooky things. This week my students are writing about something or someone that spooked them. I’m thinking of what once spooked and still spooks me. A partial list:My high school geometry teacherSolid geometry class when Danny Gerstein, from whom I cheated, was absentRegularly losing my glasses, keys, favorite lipstick, favorite penLosing my mindLosing my close friends, Cindy and Doreen, to cancerUnkindnessExclusivenessHumorlessnessKnow-it-allsForgetting names, forgetting moreMy building neighbor, in a ghost costume yesterday, shouted Boo in my ear in the mail room. It startled me. I dropped my grocery bagHe’s taller than I am. Not a child. Close to my ageMy ageIn Colson Whitehead’s “The Nichol Boys,” the violent offenders during the Jim Crow era were the white staff membersThings haven’t much changed.Ps. Link to my children’s story, “.” It was one of my first published efforts and appeared in Wee Wisdom in Oct. 1973.

PAUL MCCARTNEY AND ME AND THE LIBRARY

On his recent Late Show appearance, Paul McCartney didn’t sing. Or say much. He plugged the picture book he wrote. Stephen Colbert held it up. That night on another talk show, James McEnroe plugged his newest venture, then actress, Toni Colette, plugged hers.Many shows, books, articles, and events. Attention must be paid.Below is my Buffalo News op-ed piece, “A Love of Libraries Can Speak Volumes” (Oct.19, 2020). I included the sentences that had to be deleted in the newspaper for space reasons. They are near the end in boldface. A Love of Libraries Can Speak VolumesMy View Published October 19, 2019By Nancy Davidoff KeltonOn “CBS Sunday Morning” on Oct. 5, Pete Hamill told co-host Tony Dokoupil he “grew up poor, but not impoverished.” When asked the difference, he said, “The library.”Like Hamill, I became a library regular before I could read. My mother took me to Buffalo’s Amherst Street and North Park branches weekday afternoons. My father took me on weekends. The three of us went together the weekday nights the Amherst was open late, staying until closing time, often the last people to leave.I browsed and checked out picture books, then books with more and more words. Our jaunts were adventures. Treats. My father’s love of libraries was as strong as his love of banks. His favorite activities, depositing money and checking out books he then read, became mine.My playmates, cousins and classmates did not go to the library as regularly or at all with their parents. After I learned to ride a bicycle, I rode to the Amherst alone, not joining friends who went to the playground, nor telling them where I was going. Fairfield Branch (Amherst Street) of Buffalo, NYI felt more at home and more myself in rooms filled with books and checking them out than I did trying to fit in. It became my sanctuary. I worked at the Amherst branch the summer I decided not to go back to the overnight camp I had gone to for five years. The socializing, romancing, cashmere sweaters and makeup the girls wore became too much for me.My part-time jobs in college, both at Case-Western Reserve and New York University, were in the university libraries. One morning last summer heading down Seventh Avenue to the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library with a lightweight backpack, I bumped into an acquaintance, who lives several blocks from me, closer to the neighborhood branch.“Where are you going?” she asked.“To the Hudson Library,” I said.“Where is the Hudson Library?”“Next block,” I pointed to it. She is a freelance writer. I thought she might be kidding. She was not. “What are you going to do at a library?” Hudson Park Branch of NYCI turned halfway around so she could see my pack. “Return some books and take out others.”That she did not go to libraries surprised me. And didn’t. I know people – many people – who do not use libraries to take out books. Or for anything. Most of my family loves to read. They buy their books. I have friends who don’t use libraries, some rarely read books. I do not hold that against them – they have other qualities – however, when I told a friend I had a Colson Whitehead reserved, I was a tad surprised when she asked, “What’s a Colson Whitehead?”Hamill said that he wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for the lessons he learned at the public library and that it gave him “a sense that there was a world beyond the limits of where I lived here in Brooklyn.”I am grateful and fortunate my parents introduced me to the library and to books, showing me the joys of reading with the use of a card. Apples and trees. Trees and Apples. People often tell me their children do not read. I wonder if these parents are library-goers and readers. I wonder how they spend their time. The library gave me an enormous world beyond Buffalo. And now beyond New York. I grew up middle class. I am still middle class.I was and will always be rich.Nancy Davidoff Kelton's play "Finding Mr. Rightstein," which she adapted from her memoir, will have a staged reading on June 8, 2020, at the Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York.

Early October Reflections

I am not sure if I am fasting on Yom Kippur. I probably will.I am sure I got sick last Wednesday and cancelled my Thursday colonoscopy.Thursday, I felt good enough to eat more than a little something, play Scrabble, and make the word ‘bedding’ with 2 blanks on a triple, using my 7 letters and getting 84 points.Eating more than a little something and Scrabble figure into my routine. Thank you, Mom and Dad. Thinking and writing about my parents are part of my life, more between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. At High Holiday Services at Buffalo’s Kleinhans Musical Hall, my family sat in the balcony. My father and I counted the heads of the bald men in the orchestra, deciding who had the shiniest, and who could dot the ‘i.’ At holiday meals, some insensitive, judgmental relatives made my self-conscious, nonconforming mother feel more ill at ease. Ouch!I am fortunate she validated me and gave me opportunities to choose, make decisions, and express myself on paper and elsewhere.When I played the piano, she’d appear with a gleam in her eyes. If I played show tunes, she sat beside me and sang. Favorite family members have made “Try to Remember” part of their routine. It puts a gleam in my eyes. I wish my mother could hear them. I wish she knew I’ve improved at the piano and enjoy playing the Beethoven and Chopin pieces I sort of learned from my Buffalo piano teachers. I had my piano tuned last week. Adele, my Buffalo friend since second grade and now living in my ‘hood, took me out for my birthday. Over dinner, then a walk through Washington Square, we discussed what we often do: our families of origin and the plays we’ve recently seen.The theater and NYC are huge gifts from my parents. They introduced me to both.It's Saturday morning. I’m heading to the first meeting of a new NYC theater festival of short plays. A section from my full-length play was accepted. Details of our November 9 reading at the atrium at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street will soon be on my website under ‘events.’On Saturday mornings in Buffalo, my Aunt Dora stopped at our house on the way home from the beauty parlor. She’d get her hair washed, set, combed out, sprayed, sometimes cut, sometimes permed, and often colored. My father would look up from his book and quietly say, “What’s the matter? They didn’t take you?”A Sweet, Lovely New Year to Everyone!