Cheap food, aisle 1

Above: Ron Moss look-a-like.

The genuine article is on the left.
Ron Moss impersonators Gerald Cantor and Ari Silverstein, middle and right respectively.

What is with all this talk about food prices "soaring"? What is everyone buying, weird stuff like frozen dinners or pre-made pie crusts?

These are thoughts that preoccupy me in between trying to straighten out all of Leonard Pennario's concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.

I will grant that a few things are more expensive. Eggs have doubled in price since the days when you could get them for 69 cents a dozen at Wilson Farms. Yesterday at Tops I had to pay $1.29 a dozen, I think it was. And milk is up to $1.69 a gallon. Ouch! Ach du lieber, I should say. Complaining about stuff like this, I feel I am turning into my German grandmother, not that I really knew her seeing that she died in 1936.

But a lot of things have not gone up. Chicken quarters, which I live on, are still 59cents a pound at some places if you know where to go. Whole chickens, 99 cents a pound. I am a walking price index! Another icon of my household, the 28-oz can of tomatoes, is a little over a buck. They have always been that way. Produce is erratic -- here is where you really have to know where to shop -- but I can find big cheap baskets of apples, same as I always do. Zucchini the other day was 89 cents a pound, normal for this time of year, I thought. Must I go on? Stop me, someone!

Here is the clincher. Yesterday at Tops -- this is Tops, now, not the Broadway Market, not Guercio's -- black beans were 43 cents for a one-pound bag. I have never seen black beans anywhere near that cheap! In my considerable experience they have always been at least 99 cents a pound -- usually more like $1.29, which I always figured was because black bean soup is chic and the demand is probably slightly higher than for other beans. I cannot believe I walk around thinking about stuff like this. Anyway, black beans were 43 cents, and so were navy beans! I have never seen the like! I stocked up!

My record for legumes is once I found lentils for 39 cents a pound. But that was about a year ago, at Sav-A-Lot. Yikes, I am embarrassed by my vast knowledge of these matters. I should not be writing a book about Leonard Pennario. I should be writing a book about this.

Let me sum up my thoughts for the day, not an easy thing to do as I am about to leave for the ortho's to get my braces tightened and I am nervous about that. I bet if everyone started cooking and eating real food, instead of buying whatever junk they are buying, we'd hear a lot less griping about "soaring" prices. My recipe for black bean soup is available upon request. It is a goodie. I inherited it from Erna Eaton, the former society editor at The Buffalo News.

Speaking of Erna reminds me of Jocko, who reminds me of Howard (it's great when you have to be reminded of your own husband) who reminds me of his cousin Ron Moss.

We had a Ron Moss impersonator sighting yesterday. Our rule of thumb is to accept no imitations, but we secretly get a kick out of them anyway, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Howard's friend Bryan Bonn emailed him the picture at the top of this post. You compare. But we suggest you don't try imitating Moss yourself. Definitely don't try it at home.

Mr. Clean

The Van Cliburn Competition jury, 1962. Leonard Pennario is back row, third from left. Other pianists include Van Cliburn (front row with the ladies); Lili Kraus (front row, far left); and Jorge Bolet (back row, far left).

Larry Solomon called up and he wants to come over again and help me clean the house. I am thinking that when I get back from California I will hire him to do that. "After California" has become a kind of mantra with me. Until then, I am just letting the world pile up around me. I have resigned myself to living in squalor. When I get back, I could probably use Larry's intervention.

But when Larry cleans here, strange things happen.

Once he broke the kitchen garbage can. The pedal that opens the can is funny now. It still works, but it's not right.

Another time he did something to the highboy in the bedroom. That is a great word, "highboy," meaning a tall dresser. The highboy used to stand still and now it rocks forward whenever you open a drawer. Well, my clothes are jammed into the drawers so tightly you don't want to open them anyway.

The most famous Larry story involves his stripping the wallpaper off the upstairs bathroom walls without telling me he was going to do that.

Another thing he will do if you don't stop him is vacuum for hours. He goes into a Zen zone. His eyes roll back in his head. Larry is like a robot that gets stuck on vacuuming until he is manually rebooted. If you do not come along and reboot him, he will vacuum and vacuum and vacuum for three days, the same 10-foot-by-10-foot square of carpet. Howard says that going full steam, with an Indian-reservation cigarette in his mouth, Larry looks like one of those locomotives that stay in the freight yard, whose job it is to push other trains around on the tracks. I agree.

Perhaps the smoking and the rabid vacuuming are a result of Larry's being inside the Buffalo city limits. He is from Amherst. He gets nervous.

One of Larry's most alarming tendencies is to polish the piano. For hours. Which is ridiculous. The piano is one of the few things in my house -- perhaps the only thing -- that does not stress me out. It is a 1905 Steinway parlor grand and it still has its old finish, so there's not a lot that can happen to it. As long as you don't spill something inside of it, no biggie. A few things sit on top of the piano: music books (Chopin, Schumann, Broadway hits, etc.), a candy dish for when Howard practices (with my braces, candy is a thing of the past for me). There is also a framed photo of the jury of the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Leonard Pennario, who I am writing the book about, is the smiling, good-looking juror, back row, third from the left. I only write biographies about good-looking men.

You will probably recognize Van Cliburn, in the front row with the ladies.

But I was talking about Larry. Last time he was at my house. I come home and there he is, sighing, lighting a cigarette after his long day's work. It is traditional for us then to have a glass of wine. As I am pouring it, Larry says, "Go look at your piano. You'll be very happy. I was at work five hours on that piano."

And what he has done is polished the whole thing. Even the keys! Which means I can't play it without my fingers sliding around. Someone once did that to the piano at Carnegie Hall and they had to spray hair spray on the keys to make them not-slippery again. That is a famous story but I can't think right now who the pianist was.

Uh, Lar, I could have thought of better uses for your time. What about the kitchen floor? Or the dreaded upstairs bathroom? Did you forget your Haz-Mat suit again?

On the bright side Larry gives me advice on my life, says that I am the best thing that ever happened to Howard, and helped me find my kunzite ring that I lost. That is my favorite gem, kunzite.

Also here is a Larry quote I love. I was downstairs and he was upstairs and we were shouting back and forth discussing his romantic situation. And Larry yelled down to me, "I have to get out more. It's not as if Mr. Right is going to come right to my door."

I guess I miss Larry. Maybe I will have him back here again.

After California, of course.

O, the Humanities

The old Buffalo Library.

My adventures in the Central Library continue. Every time I go there to research my biography of Leonard Pennario, men start following me around. Wait a few more paragraphs till you envy me.

Yesterday being a kind of pale rainy day, and my 17 or so books on Jascha Heifetz being two days overdue, I decided it was a library kind of day. I would have swung past my branch library, the North Park, but it is closed "temporarily." (Read: "indefinitely.")

Here is where our library closings hurt us. A while ago, during the fascist countywide purge of our library system, they closed my beloved Fairfield branch. That left me with the North Park, a little far for me to walk to but sometimes I do. Now the North Park is shuttered. Two words: carbon footprint. Mine just got a little bit bigger, and it's not my fault.

Booooooo!

So there I am, in the downtown library, which isn't a pretty place to be, with patrons shouting and coughing and exposing themselves all over the place. I did not actually see anyone exposing himself but I have heard that happens there and I am sure it does. I am in the Humanities department, leafing through a history of Carnegie Hall, because Pennario played there so many times and I thought it might mention him. And this guy comes up to me.

"You're really looking hard for something," he said.

"I am," I said.

"So, you're interested in music?" he said. He pulled this book on Top Rock Hits off the top shelf. "Maybe you would like this."

"Well, I'm researching a classical pianist," I said. I should probably not have gotten into conversation but I smiled and was nice. That is how women are. It is often our best defense. And I kept kind of hoping the guy would walk away.

But he didn't. He did walk away for a second, but he came right back -- with an ancient, yellowed little book that turned out to be the screenplay to "The Sound of Music." I am not being sarcastic when I say that I love that our library hangs on to stuff like this. He opened it and held it out and I read, in italics, something about Maria and Captain von Trapp looking at each other under the gazebo. "Would this help?" he said.

"I don't think so," I said. I was starting to wonder what to do. The guy didn't look like a bum, and he didn't scare me. He didn't seem mentally or emotionally challenged, either. He was just dumb. And you could tell this conversation would have no end.

"But this is about music," he said, smiling tenderly at me.

"It's 'The Sound of Music,'" I said. "It's a movie."

"It's a movie?"

"Yes," I said.

"From when?"

"I don't know, the 1960s," I said.

Then I had an idea. "I'm going to go bother the librarians," I said, smiling. I heard him calling after me, but I just smiled and shrugged the way President Reagan used to do when he couldn't hear someone. And the story has a happy ending. Because I did go bother the librarians. And I got something done I hadn't planned on: I was able to hammer out a way to get these stories about Pennario from the Los Angeles Times that I have been missing. It will cost me 50 cents a story but still. I had to ask the librarians something so that's what I came up with.

A few weeks ago in the Central Library I was the object of another male patron's affection. That was when I was taking out those books on Jascha Heifetz. Heifetz is the legendary violinist Pennario played and recorded with, and won a Grammy with. I should have mentioned that up above. Anyway, I was standing there with my arms full of books on Heifetz and this 20-something hip-hopper came up to me. Cute hip-hopper, actually, big eyes under his hoodie.

"So," he said, "Looking for some good music to read?"

That is a line I still love. I said "Yes," and smiled, but then he ducked around the corner and I never saw him again.

Buffalo's Central Library... the adventures never end!

California dreamin'

It's almost time for me to go back to San Diego to see Leonard Pennario, so I am wondering about what movies are going to be playing. Leonard always likes to go to the movies, and I do too. On the phone yesterday he seemed more concerned about what movies would be showing than about how the book is going. He said, "I hope there are some upbeat movies we can see."

That is sort of a joke with us. All last winter when we were going to the movies, so many of them were so bleak.

Pennario is a lifelong movie expert. He told me has seen every movie worthy of note that has come out since 1940, and I believe him. He knows everything about them -- the actors, the directors. He can sing you the themes. Since he was a kid in Buffalo, he has automatically remembered every theme from every movie. We went to see "Atonement" and a few hours later, in a restaurant with rock blaring, Pennario started singing the theme from the movie. I'm sure it's still in his head.

One of my best experiences with Pennario involves a movie theme. The night I met him, when he came to Buffalo, a bunch of us were sitting around the Hyatt lounge. And Leonard and I were talking about movies and we wound up singing together the theme from the 1939 "Wuthering Heights." He asked me how it went. Which, now I know he was horsing with me, because there is no way he would have forgotten it. Or maybe he was testing me. Oh, who knows, as our friend Dick says. Remember Dick? I mentioned him a few days ago.

Anyway, I started singing the "Wuthering Heights" theme and then Leonard joined in. What a moment! What a theme! I have never seen a more recent version of "Wuthering Heights" because I can't stand the idea of not having that music to go with the story. That's how much I love it.

There are other romantic movie themes I love though I do not have anywhere near Leonard's storehouse of knowledge. "Gone With The Wind" -- thrilling to see that sky-high title as that "Tara" theme plays. I can actually call to mind all the lesser-known themes from that movie, too. (Geek!) I loved Randy Newman's score to "Ragtime." "One more hour... one more day...." I was just singing it to myself yesterday. "Moon River," from "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The song is greater than the movie.

I will add to this list as new themes occur to me.

"Wuthering Heights" reminds me: Leonard has a less-than-flattering story about how Merle Oberon looked without her makeup. But that is another story for another day.

Hair apparent

Author drying her hair.

What a racy slideshow we had yesterday! I will have to monitor the art on this site more closely. Howard is my art director and sometimes I lose track of what he is doing.

Also, my hair yesterday! In that picture!

Now I no longer have that "haircut." I put that in quotes to be sarcastic. I got that from Leonard Pennario in his diaries. He will put something in quotes when he is saying it stinks. As in: "Play the Rachmaninoff Second with the San Francisco Symphony, Arthur Fiedler 'conducting.' " AHAHAHAHAHAHA! I love that.

I have not had that long hair for a long time. When I went to California I had a pageboy cut, eerily like the one I had as a kid, which you can see in the post "My Sister The Left-Winger." But then I got a couple more haircuts in San Diego. The first was at a chi-chi salon in La Jolla where, being Buffalonian, I had a coupon. The girl who cut my hair was from Cleveland. No one in San Diego is from San Diego. The second was at, ahem, Supercuts in La Jolla. I ducked in there on the spur of the moment because Leonard and I were going to the opera the next day and I thought "Tannhauser" called for a new haircut. I know, Wagner would laugh, but that is how women think.

And Supercuts did a great job! They made my hair short, plus they fixed things so I don't have to straighten it any more. Later, back in Buffalo, the folks at the Ellicott Square Hair Salon built on what the Supercuts people did. That is how great artists operate. It is like Mozart building on Haydn. Now I don't even have to blow-dry my hair. I am in heaven.

Isn't it crazy how those among us with wavy/curly hair are always straightening it, while those with straight hair are always getting perms and whatever? Once I was in the waiting area of a hair salon and I looked around at the racially diverse group of women in the place. All the black women were straightening their hair while all the white women were curling ours. I remember thinking: If that isn't the dumbest thing!

My hair is somewhere between curly and wavy which has always been a problem. The weird thing is, hairdressers always praise it. "You have great hair," they'll say. If I have such great hair, how come I can't ever seem to get it right? And that reminds me: Dentists, through the years, have always told me, "You have great teeth." And look at me now, with my mouthful of metal! Goes to show. Do not listen to these flatterers.

Here is one more hair story. It's Friday, we have time. Once I wrote a story for Cosmopolitan magazine and a woman I told about it said, "Oh, I've always been interested in cutting hair."

She had "Cosmopolitan" mixed up with "Cosmetology"!

How do you begin to straighten this out??

At least I'm no longer asking that question about my hair.

May Day mayday

Mary ponders what to wear as fashion director Larry HUSSEIN Solomon offers suggestions.

Writing the authorized biography of Leonard Pennario is easy next to figuring out what to wear.

What do you do when it's spring and it's chilly? I refuse to wear any more tights. I refuse. I have worn them for months and they made me look skinny, but enough is enough and now it is time for sandals. It's May, for heaven's sake. It was chillier than this in San Diego when I was there last winter. And I clung to my summer clothes anyway because darn it, I was in Southern California, and it's not as if I was in Buffalo, right? Pennario teased me about that. He called me "Little Miss Hot Stuff from Buffalo." He is from Buffalo too, of course, but he has been in California all these years so his blood has thinned.

So yesterday, there I was, running around downtown Buffalo in black sandals. Skirt, short-sleeved top, little jacket. That was all I wore. OK, I was a little bit chilly. But shivering felt better than cracking out those tights again. Or pantyhose. I hate pantyhose. Just the word!

And who passes me on the sidewalk but a woman dressed as if it were November. She had on jeans, and a parka -- a parka! With the hood up! And gloves! It was as if we were from different planets.

Who was right? Was she right, or was I? I say I was. Spring is a state of mind.

Sea of scholarship

Dick is on the right.

Yesterday I went to the UB Music Library where the librarians were nice to me. All of them were! I am thinking this might be because they do not get the weirdos hanging out at UB that they get in the downtown library. Or maybe the librarians at UB get paid better. "Oh, who knows?", as our sardonic friend Dick likes to say. One of these days I am going to describe him. Perhaps Dick will make it into our cast of characters.

The librarians at UB did only one thing wrong: They asked me about Leonard Pennario. They asked me why I had chosen to write about him. Which you do not ask me because I will pontificate for hours. This is not a mistake the downtown library would have made.

I now have roughly a million books on loan, all relating, in some way or another, to my work in progress. "Double Life," the memoir of Miklos Rozsa -- he is the film composer who wrote the music to "Ben-Hur," and he wrote a concerto for Pennario -- turned up under my pillow the other night. I was wondering what was making me uncomfortable and that was it.

The last memory I usually have of ever day is a dim memory of Howard taking the book I have been reading out of my hands. And what he does is drop it onto the floor on his side of the bed. Lastnight when it was time to turn out the light, I guess he decided to clean up, and he started tossing all these books over at me. Artur Rubinstein's "My Many Years" and "My Young Years"... "Priest of Music," about Dimitri Mitropoulos, "Heifetz as I Knew Him," "Wondrous Strange: The Life of Glenn Gould," etc., etc., etc. That was when I realized the extent of my holdings.

Imagine the fines that will accrue when these books inevitably become overdue! Everything is overdue in my life right now including my electric bill and my gym membership.

They will be naming libraries after me.

Conan the Librarian

Librarian portrayed by MKG's Not Ready For Major Media Players actor Ron Moss.

Yesterday I did what you are supposed to do on a rainy day, which was go to the library. Sometimes, going to the library now, I think of how much it has changed. You used to have to be quiet -- now it's loud, with people talking in normal voices, laughing and carrying on. They even have that cafe. Who would have imagined that?

Librarians, though, have not changed. They are still a funny bunch. Some are helpful and some are downright hostile.

Experience has taught me to approach a librarian the way you'd approach a strange dog. I am humble, wheedling, conciliatory. I always think I should be holding out my hand for the librarian to sniff. Maybe I will do that next time. Anyway, a good rule seems to be to go for the younger one. So yesterday, I zeroed in on a young man behind the information desk. He was reading Dostoyevsky. And I pegged him right, because he was kind to me. He helped me find the back issues of Musical America I was looking for. Musical America, from 1959. I am such a geek!

As I waited for my back issues, I was sure glad I didn't go to the other guy, the older guy on the other side of the desk. Was this guy mean!

He just sat there, glaring. I watched with pity as another library patron approached him. The patron was a tall, nicely dressed black guy with a shaved head. Like me, he approached the librarian with deference and excessive politeness. We always talk about librarians being weenies. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The truth is, they turn the rest of us into weenies.

The conversation I overheard went something like this:

Patron: "Excuse me, sir. I was informed at the desk over there (pointing) that this-or-this reference would be available to me if I asked at this desk..."

Librarian: "No, that does not circulate." (Looks away with vast indifference.)

Patron retreats, salaaming. As I would have done, in his place. What choice do you have?

But my luck continued. My best find, yesterday: In the Grosvenor Room, another helpful staffer, finding that I was researching Leonard Pennario, pointed me in the direction of their Scrapbooks. My brother George has told me about these scrapbooks, which he says were a WPA project. You can waste hours with them. The librarian found four stories on Pennario for me, in four separate volumes.

There is no rhyme or reason to these scrapbooks. Next to a story about Pennario ("Buffalo-Born Artist Rose Swiftly To Fame") was pasted a story headlined: "Blind Miller Keeps on Job, Making Flour, Selling Seed." Another Pennario story shared a page with a story on a Pearl Harbor veteran. Under the main headline was a sub-headline: "Organized Loyal Japs."

No end of treasures in our library. The challenge is just finding them.

Good luck!

Piano blues

BuffaloBloviator Publishing newsroom. Click for full resolution.
The author's desk at left; the publisher's desk is at right.
A clammy day! Cold rain, plus I have an old house and can't close this one window in my upstairs "office." (I put the word in quotes because the room is such a mess.) On top of all that, when I brought in the paper at 5:45 a.m., Bishop Kmiec's picture was on the front page. It is bad luck to see a picture of our bishop, especially when you haven't had your first cup of coffee.

There is one solution to this morning chill and that is to start playing the piano again. This will be the week I pick it back up.

Our German piano tuner Mr. Hatzenbuehler tuning the Welte Mignon at Big Blue.

I am actually a very good pianist when I work at it. I gave a recital a few years ago and played Beethoven's Op. 109 and the Alban Berg Sonata. But I fell off the piano wagon last fall. Number one, I met Leonard Pennario and decided to do the book, so I ran away to California for a few months, and I didn't have a piano there. (I did have a hot tub. You can't have everything.) And number two, my longtime piano teacher, Stephen Manes, left town. His wife died a couple of years ago, and he got back in touch with his high-school sweetheart, and they got married. We were all surprised and delighted for him. The whole affair was written up in Oprah magazine. I believe it was the December issue.

The only trouble was that Stephen's new wife, Marta, lives in Los Angeles, so now Stephen lives there too. So I have no teacher. I am a runaway train. I am a ship without a rudder. I am an overused metaphor. The worst thing is, I don't want another teacher. Stephen was my professor back when I was a student at UB. He began teaching me again nine years ago, when I entered the first Van Cliburn Amateur Competition as a way to get away from a bad boyfriend. It wasn't easy to call Stephen after all that time and ask him to teach me again. I was afraid he would remember what a loser student I had been at UB, cutting classes and not practicing. Finally I had to tell myself, "Mary, you have to call him. It's not as if he's going to call you."

Well, he was nice and took me back. And I got very good, thanks to him. Taking piano lessons as a grown-up is the best. It is so much more fun than studying when you're a kid. Once during one of our big Buffalo snowstorms I even violated the driving ban so I could get to my lesson. Because I had been snowed in all by myself for a week, I was very good that day. Stephen said, "What a difference a snowstorm makes."

How am I supposed to switch to anyone else?

Maybe I can get Leonard to coach me. That has crossed my mind. But I don't know how I would ever ask him and besides, he lives in California too. It is so ironic. I have so many great pianists in my life I am tripping over them. But I have no one to teach me.

Well, as "The Joy of Cooking" says, "Stand facing the stove."

Today's resolution is, "Sit facing the piano."

Yuri and me

Lillie - from Lenoard Pennario's private photo collection.

This morning I set the alarm for 5:30 a.m. I am not sure how early I can push it, because my job sometimes makes me work nights, but I worry that I'm getting so behind. My friends are getting mad at me because I can't make time to get together. I have a new nephew I haven't even seen since I got back from California. I mean, I saw him before that, but only once.

Right now I am looking into a summer Leonard Pennario spent at Tanglewood where he gave recitals and had a hilarious conversation with the composer Olivier Messiaen, who was the big composer in residence that summer. I love how Pennario goes through life. His sense of humor will be the big reason this book will not be stuffy like other books on music I have run across.

Working on this chapter, one thing I did was call this conductor with an extremely long Russian last name who was studying conducting with Bernstein at Tanglewood the summer Pennario was there. I would need another cup of coffee if I were going to try to spell his last name this instant, so let's just go with his first name, which is Yuri. Come on, what else would it be?

Yuri and I ended our phone interview with this exchange:

Me: "Maestro, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me."

Maestro Yuri (In devastating accent): "Madame, the pleasure is all mine. You have allowed me to relive a part of my life I have not thought about for a very long time." He accented the second syllable of "Madame." I was swooning.

I called Pennario. He said, "Yep, that's him." He said Yuri has always been a big charmer.

I'm thinking Leonard, what about you??

I guess it is worth getting up at 5:30 a.m. if I am going to have conversations right out of "Dr. Zhivago." This book is turning my life into a movie.

Midnight in the garden...

Photo by Howard Goldman

The good news: My tulips are in bloom.

The bad news: They're surrounded by an acre of bishop's weed.

When I walk past my garden, I actually have to turn my head away. It is that bad.

Sure, I have an excuse. I am a schlep of a gardener, I can say, because I am, ahem, writing the biography of one of the great piano virtuosi of the 20th century. But the truth is, even in the best of times, I am a bad gardener. There is a lot of traffic in front of my house and on summer days that means tons of boom cars. I have trouble gardening when it sounds as if the War of 1812 is being fought 10 feet away from me. Also, people in Buffalo like to look at you. They like to yell at you, too. I am always getting things shouted at me by strangers in cars. Sometimes I am in the mood for that but sometimes I'm not.

Well, hope springs eternal. Maybe instead of renewing my gym membership I will start to garden. To get myself in the mood here are 10 plants I have that I like.

1.) Zinnias. That is the splashy flower in the picture above that Howard took of my garden last summer. (A very flattering picture, I have to say.) Zinnias are the best. The seeds are super cheap, about a dime a package, and you get so much bang for your buck. Zinnias are named for a German scientist whose last name was Zinn. I would never have guessed that.

2.) Dandelions. I'm serious. I eat the greens. Don't you love how magazines try to tell you that the dandelion leaves they sell in stores are better than the ones in your yard, because they're cultivated? Isn't wild always supposed to be better?

3.) Sage. This herb lasts through winter. I went out when the snow was a foot deep and I started digging around for it and there it was.

4.) Mint. It takes over, and I want it to. You can make mint juleps and tabbouleh.

5.) Chocolate mint. I put this in two years ago and it smells fantastic. I wish it would take over.

I am realizing that aside from the roses all I have been doing is listing things I can eat. Hmmmm.. Well, let's continue.

6.) One year I grew Sweet Million tomatoes. They were wonderful. When you're getting into your car you can grab one and eat it like candy. Another year I grew about 20 tomato plants on a sunny, rocky pile of dirt behind Howard's garage. I had an excellent harvest. I wish I could summon up the physical and mental wherewithal to do that again. That is a word I love, "wherewithall." Here is a picture of our gardening under way behind Howard's garage.



7.) Cabbage. A couple years ago I had a cabbage patch. It's amazing to watch them grow. For weeks they look beautiful, like big green roses and then suddenly, at the last minute, they curl up into cabbages.

8.) Pansies. They come in the most amazing colors and they will usually come back without your doing anything, which is the way into my heart.

9.) Black-eyed Susan. When they show up in the late summer, all of a sudden I don't look like such a loser.

10.) Bishop's weed. If you can't beat it, join it!

Midnight at the Hyatt

Last night I went down to the Hyatt and heard Jackie Jocko. Howard went too. Erna Eaton was there. We did much discussing about the state of the world and, as usual, the old songs.

Jocko met Leonard Pennario when LP was in town in October. When Pennario came into the Hyatt, Jocko serenaded him with "Midnight on the Cliffs," which Pennario wrote when he was 17 and giving a recital in Newport, R.I. He couldn't sleep that night so he ended up wandering on the beach with some friends of his and that is when he came up with the idea for this big, romantic piece of music. Later it was used as the theme for the Doris Day movie "Julie," which starred LP's buddy Louis Jourdan (pictured below from LP's private photo collection) as a murderous concert pianist.


Pennario got a kick out of Jocko playing "Midnight on the Cliffs" for him but he laughed that it was a simplified version. Of course, it was. But then, no one could play "Midnight on the Cliffs' the way LP could. LP played it for Horowitz and even Horowitz said it sounded terribly difficult.

Pennario kept referring to Jackie Jocko as "Bobby Bonzo."

I wish that could go in the book.

Another one rides the bus

Bus driver portrayed by Ari Silverstein.

Thanks, Chris Byrd, for your erudite observation on yesterday's rumination, "The Nut, at His Nuttiest!" (I stole that title, by the way, from an old ad for a Jerry Lewis movie, "The Errand Boy.")

I like how Chris looks at life, which is often through a camera. Once, on an ordinary Sunday morning, he shot a video on his way to Mass at Corpus Christi. The video showed the quaint but run-down houses of the East Side, the Broadway Market, all kinds of haunts that Chris and I both love -- which is how we know each other -- before winding up inside the church, with the statues and candles. I know great art when I see it. I watched that video three times.

About riding the bus, I have logged a lot of miles! Out of pure laziness, I didn't get my driver's license till I was 26, and then I got it only because I got a night-shift job in Niagara Falls, a situation where public transportation was out of the question.

Being good at riding the bus is a skill that serves you well in life. I still take the bus sometimes on terrible winter days when I think if I drive, I'll die. Once I took the Metro Rail to meet friends at the Anchor Bar. You would be surprised at how many people have never ridden the Metro Rail. Howard never has.

A few of my top public transport experiences:

1.) Riding the Grant Street bus with friends from my old job. We'd put our arms up in the air as if we were riding the Comet, and everyone on the bus would crack up. That No. 3 route is no joke. Once, someone actually saw the bus go up on two wheels and go down again.

2.) This is my sister Katie's story but it is too good to omit. She was standing at a bus stop and this guy was pacing back and forth, apparently rehearsing a speech he was going to give to tell someone off when he got to his destination. "Kiss my a--," he said, emphasizing the last word. Then: "KISS my a--." He kept trying the phrase different ways. We have never forgotten that.

3.) I dated a guy I met on the UB shuttle bus.

4.) Once I ran into an unpleasant social situation in Hamilton, Ont., and had to make my way home. I found the bus station, grabbed a bus, arrived back in Buffalo, boarded the Grant Street bus and -- there was my sister Katie! On that bus! What are the odds?

5.) Those steep Metro Rail escalators in their long tunnels, they're like something out of "Batman." And when schools let out in the afternoon, the schoolkids are wild and crazy and they love to ride the handrails and scream and hurl themselves all over the place. Once, after work, I thought I was going to die, I was so tired and the place was such a zoo. Then the gentleman on the step ahead of me turned around. "This," he told me, shaking his head, "is why I hate working this shift." His sympathy cheered me up and made me laugh.

6.) A bunch of us were in Paris a few years ago and riding the bus through some suburb and when our stop arrived, my brother George got up, went to the front of the bus and announced loudly: "All Americans off the bus. All Americans, disembark now." All the Parisians were dying laughing.

Perhaps there is a touch of Ron Moss in everyone!