Lobenthal.com

That’s because I’m a self-employed person, and I have been paying that double whammy  ever since Reagan’s Social Security revamp in 1983.  And I make considerably less than Keller does.  Nor did my father, unlike Keller’s, ever serve as CEO of Chevron, either.  My Dad worked as, again, a self-employed lawyer, and did an enormous amount of pro bono work for friends, family as well as strangers.  And he’s paid a hell of a lot of Social Security tax in his time, for which he now has a monthly reimbursement that is hardly baronial.

And now Keller is somehow insinuating that his income bracket and mine are commensurate simply because we’re both members of the baby boom generation.  And that somehow I should keep quiet while my Social Security benefits are slashed at the behest of people like him, who have no need of Social Security and apparently don’t give a flying fig about anyone else who does.

After that shaky opening July 11, the entire company danced magnificently for the balance of the two-week season.  They’re on the cover of City Arts, and they deserve to be. 

After the season was over, I went back and re-read an essential piece on POB style from the winnter 2002 issue of Ballet Review.  It was written by ex-Mariinsky principal dancer Evgeni Scherbakov.  On the cover, a gorgeous photo of POB’s Aurélie Dupont with the Mariinsky’s Andrian Fadeyev in Romeo and Juliet.  (They were great together at the Mariinsky’s 2002 international festival in St. Petersburg.)

in The Nation.  Alterman asks, “Why, after everyone else has given it up, do members of the mainstream media persist in helping to hide—and therefore empower—the radicalization of the Republican Party?”

I see a direct parallel between the ostensibly-news-gathering media and the cultural report-and commentariat.  A similar question to Alterman’s could easily be posed, ‘Why have we allowed the ‘mainstream’ media to impose a pin-point wide definiton of culture worth reporting?”

I asked Armond White would he have any objection to my doing two French stories in a row this month for City Arts.  He replied with a flattering remark about my judgment.  I can’t repeat it for fear of blushing girlishly.

Et Voilà!  Here they are: my interview with Baroque dance doyenne Béatrice Massin, and my report on the Paris Opera Ballet’s return to NY after a 16-year absence.

The new, Spring 2012 issue of Ballet Review is ripe for purchasing and very well worth being purchased and, what’s more, read.  Featured in it, among many other noteworthy articles, is my interview with Nicolai Hansen, whose dancing was exemplary when the Royal Daish Ballet was here a year ago.

concerning plans for next season by Bayou City Concert Musicals, that wonderful outfit which brought me to Houston last summer.

Caught in the act of dancing fabulously.  I write about them for City Arts.

No, not quite, with all due respect to Somerset Maugham, but something of an overview of Ethan Stiefel’s ballet career that I wrote for Playbill.  You can read it on online at Playbillarts.com.   Or better still you can read it while attending an American Ballet Theatre performance this month at the Met.  And then next month there is Stiefel’s final ABT performances, dancing Ali in Le Corsaire on July 2 and 7.

For City Arts , I write about Angel Corella leaving ABT on a peak note, and Isadora Duncan’s still-going-strong 100-year-old choreography.

If you’re interested in Anna Liceica and the Joffrey Ballet and/or in Natalia Makarova and 1917 movies about Russian ballet dancers, well, you’ve come to the right place.