The West Village is being assaulted by the combined and colluded forces of City Hall and the development community. City Hall’s been caught with its lies down over and over again, as it schemes to blanket the Village with behemoths.
Go to Village Preservation’s web site and there take the opportunity to make your voice heard in defense of the Village.
Alan Alda’s reluctance to talk about Diana Sands, his co-star in The Owl and the Pussycat for a year on Broadway, has frustrated Steve and I, but now it doesn’t.
Alda has been, to the best of our knowledge, deafeningly silent on the subject of DS for years. Interviewed by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker in 2022 became almost the first time he’s ever discussed working with her; he says they were competitive on Broadway. “We got a lot of praise for ‘ensemble acting,’ when what we were doing was the opposite.” And yet, from the front that’s exactly what it probably registered as.
The fact that he didn’t go to London with her when she transferred the play there in 1966 says something.
But I don’t think it started that way, not when they were colleagues with The Compass on Cape Cod in 1962, nor–as producer Philip Rose details in his memoir You Can’t Do That on Broadway!–when Owl and the Pussycat was being read privately for backers early in 1964.
Last January I talked to Rose Gregorio, who was Diana’s understudy in the play, who died last August. She had pertinent things to say. I finally feel that Steve and I can do justice to The Owl and the Pussycat.
Biography is arduous but rewarding! Sleuthing, recovering something from the partly-retrievable past that you hope does conform in large measure to the empirical truth, as well as the subjective truths that also must be acknowledged.
that they must refute, on a daily basis, every obscene byte of double think and double talk emitted by the distended maw of the orange one.
And you know what, Mr. President? You might retain the youth vote that put you over the top in 2020 by ceasing your aggressive promotion of more drilling, digging, apocalyptic extraction.
A male friend of mine who’s married to a woman nevertheless describes himself, thank you very much, sexually as not “straight” but rather “crooked.”
As for race, he’ll describe himself “off-white.”
Will the corporate media continue to choose not to notice?
So the Street is really, really worried about the minefield of another Trump presidency–or rather the beginning of a perpetual Trump/Trump clan presidency–but it’s going to vote for him anyway.
Why are these myopic vultures considered societal leaders?
The Republicans, who submit blindly to the current neo-Nazi, white supremacist GOP front runner, have now fallen upon the current Israeli crisis to pass censorship bills that mandate penalty for anything THEY call anti-Semitic. Who the hell are they to tell us what is or is not anti-Semitic?
The same lies and defamation, phrased exactly the same way, day after day after day, until, so he hopes, the American public gives up the ghost.
I’m trying to research this, but aren’t press conferences illegal on courtroom premises? Aren’t the steps of the courthouse the place for that?
If so, yet another example of the special treatment given Herr Trump by our judicial system.
It was nice that the media gave Suzanne Shepherd’s death on November 17 a lot of play, largely highlighting her appearances on “The Sopranos” sand in “Good Fellas.”
I’d called her a month earlier to say that I’d finally finished transcribing our interviews of a year earlier, which related to a career accomplishment of hers that largely flew under the mainstream media’s radar.
Shepherd had formerly been married to David Shepherd, who founded the watershed improvisation group “The Compass,” in Chicago in the early 1950s.(Two books have been published about it.) She was herself a Compass member. In 1962, David Shepherd put together a new Compass configuration and booked them into a two-month engagement at the Yachtsman in Hyanisport on Cape Cod.
Ever game to essay new career challenges, Diana Sands was one member of the group; the others were Suzanne, Alan Alda, Reni Santoni, and Ron Weyand. Two years later, Diana and Alda starred together in “The Owl and the Pussycat” on Broadway.
I told Suzanne that I wanted to come over and review my chapter on that summer engagement when I’d finished it. No, I don’t give interview subjects approval over text, but I will work with them to clarify their thoughts, and hopefully record them accurately.
In her late-eighties, and not in good health, Suzanne remained enormously vital. I’m glad I told her in October that I’d started watching her movies. She told me that she’d written a paper on Chekhov when studying at Bennington. I wonder if it exists.
You’ll read a lot about Suzanne and the Compass in our book on Diana.
