The Jew and the Irishman

In 1949, Joe Crosby was a thin and good-looking young Irish-American. He was also a shrewd and talented showman. Lou Brandt was a stocky, middle-aged man from a Brooklyn immigrant Jewish family. He was also an honest and shrewd businessman. Lou and his brother started selling goods from two pushcarts on the streets of Brooklyn and built their business into one of the largest chain of theatres on the East Coast. Expanding their interests, they bought the beautiful Sagamore Hotel on Lake George at Bolton Landing in which Lou and his family took up residence during the summer season. Among other improvements he made to the old hotel, Lou added an outdoor theatre on the hotel property in which only the stage was covered and protected from the weather. The audience sat under the open sky.

Knowing the Barn Playhouse was closed on Monday night, Lou offered Joe a goodly sum to move the closing show to the hotel stage for a one-night performance while the scenery for the coming week’s show was setup on the Playhouse’s stage. However, because of the possibility of rain, Lou insisted on a “no play/no pay” clause in the contract. The terms of the contract stated, in effect, that if the curtain had gone up and play begun, then Joe was entitled to full pay for the evening even if the audience had to leave and the performance halted because of rain.

When the weather was threatening rain, Joe would hurry the last minute adjustment to the scenery and props, while the audience took their seats. My job was to stand in the back of the audience and watch for Lou coming across the lawn from the hotel.

On several occasions, rain drops would start falling and the audience would start to leave. As soon as I saw Lou start out for the theatre, I would hustle backstage and tell Joe, standing beside the Stage Manager whose hands were on the rope that raised the curtain. Joe would peer around the edge of the curtain and watch Lou approach. By now a soaking rain was falling, and the audience was running out of the seating area for the hotel, covering their heads with playbills.

As Lou approached the back of the seating area, we could hear him shouting in his thick New York Yiddish accent: “Crosby, it’s rrraining. It’s rrraining.”

Just before Lou reach the audience area, Joe would quietly announce to the cast: “Places everybody” and to the Stage Manager: “Curtain Up?.

The stage lights came on, the curtain went up, and the actors began speaking their lines.

Lou would stop dead in his tracks in the back of the now empty audience area and shout at the top of his voice: “Crosby, You Irish son-of-a-bitch. It’s rrraining.”

Joe would step out from the wings and down to the edge of stage where the rain fell. With a huge grin he would hold his arms out from his sides with palms turned forward and shrug his shoulders as if to say, “So what?”

Lou’s reaction was to roar with laughter.

The two men, the Jew and the Irishman, stood there in the warm, summer rain laughing until Joe jumped down from stage and they walked arm-in-arm to the hotel, where Joe would buy Lou a drink in Lou’s own bar.

It was a game that Joe always won, but only because Lou let him.

From this experience I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: People with honest and open hearts can bridge any cultural gap with effortless ease.

See What Dorothy Dehner Says About Me

As I have explained, by the spring of 1949 the plugging away ended, for I discovered the truth of my disability and began lead a normal life. My cousin Joan Gray, then a very successful photographic model in New York who had been studying acting, decided she was ready to gain on-stage experience so she arranged an audition with a professional summer stock company: The Barn Playhouse, in Bolton Landing on nearby Lake George. On the appointed day, I met Joan’s train in Schenectady and drove her to Bolton Landing for her audition.

Joan did not join the company, but I did - as the one-man publicity department. Mainly my job (the first since my discharge from the Army) was to plaster the Eastern Adirondacks from Glens Falls to Fort Ticonderoga with posters announcing the current show and to arrange special events, such as hay rides, with the bell captains of the local lakeside hotels that would bring guests to the playhouse. I was paid $50 a week plus room and board at the Kings Inn hotel, on whose property the summer theatre, cum barn, stood.

The cast and members of the company were encouraged to mingle with the audience in the hotel bar after each evening’s performance. As an incentive to draw the cast into the bar, drinks ordered by company members were half price. However, to receive the discount, we had to sign for the drinks rather than pay in cash. The bar patrons included many fine looking young ladies of drinking age who were staying a nearby hotels with their parents, and who were very interested in meeting young men. I thought I was in heaven. Today, I would call it a target rich environment.

At the end of the first week when I lined up with the rest of company at the box office to receive my pay, I was stunned when Joe Crosby, the owner and producer of the Barn Playhouse, said from behind the little window, “You did pretty good Bob, you only owe me ten dollars.”

“My God,” I thought as I reached for my wallet, “I bought 60 bucks worth of drinks at fifty percent off.”

Obviously, I was making up for lost time much too eagerly.

Joe Crosby believed that a truism of theatre is that you cannot have a successful play until some newspaper critic gives the show a good review. Since the local Glens Falls newspaper had neither a drama critic or theatre column, Joe arranged for me to write a review for the paper under the name of Dorothy Dehner. Dorothy and her husband Dave Smith were year-round residents of Bolton Landing who were well known in the area. They were also ardent supporters of the Playhouse.

The Barn Playhouse gave performances Tuesday through Sunday evenings during the ten-week summer season. No performance was given on Monday evening so that the scenery for the new show could be setup. Thus, each Tuesday evening was opening night of a new show.

The director and the cast of actors were young, unknown, and non-union but very talented and very professional. Each Wednesday morning, I would sit in the box office using the only typewriter on the premises and write an “opening night” review of the new show and deliver it to the newspaper in Glen Falls in time for the evening edition. As I wrote, the actors would greet me with joking remarks about what I should write as they passed in and out of the theatre during rehearsal of the next week’s offering. Everyone in the company knew I wrote the review.

Of course, I had only good things to say about the show. The trick was to find different expressions of goodness and ways to make the review interesting. One means I used was to feature one or two actors in each review and describe their performance and fictional backgrounds.

One evening, about half way through the season, the resident leading man rushed up to the company table in the hotel dining room, while most of us were having dinner, waving the Glens Falls newspaper. Oblivious to the reality of the situation, he proudly exclaimed with great excitement, “See what Dorothy Dehner says about me.”

From this experience I learned: (a) People will deceive themselves into believing whatever they desire to believe regardless of known facts, and (b) In print you can be anyone you want to be and no reader will know differently.

I Underestimate the Shallowness of Ayatollah Bush

The bulk of American armed forces are bogged down in losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no end in sight; the price of oil is higher than it has ever been and out of control; New Orleans, going into a new hurricane season, is still a disaster area; a network of home-grown terrorists has appeared on our Northern border; American prestige in the world has never been lower; and, at home, the Bush administration has lost the confidence of the vast majority of American voters.

So what does Ayatollah Bush do to correct these most pressing problems? He decides to attack a small, defenseless minority of citizens who happen to be homosexuals with the most powerful legal weapon in our country – the Constitution. Does our Ayatollah really believe same-sex marriage is such a huge and pressing threat to the “American Way of Life” that we have to amend the Constitution? And we have to amend it now? I doubt it.

Ayatollah Bush is first and last a politician of the old school which means that when he’s not kissing babies, he’s giving a crony a Federal job. Bush is the worse sort of mean-spirited cynical pol. Since he and his appointees are incapable of solving, or even ameliorating, the nation’s most pressing problems, he moves to placate the religious right and, in so doing, diverts media attention from his failures.

Hopefully, the Congress will see through his shallow ploy and hand Bush another resounding defeat. After all, by this time he should be use to it. For his entire administration can be characterized as being “a dollar short and a day late’ when it comes to good ideas.

I will never forgive the Republicans for leaving me standing alone in the middle of the conservative road wondering where the party of my youth disappeared to. Some religious nuts seem to have run away with it.

The Unintended Consequences of Not Granting Amnesty

Got an email yesterday from a friend of many years whose intellect I respect. She advocates strongly not granting amnesty to the illegal aliens now in the U.S. Her arguments are persuasive, if the unintended consequences of not granting amnesty are ignored.

Here’s my thoughts.

The core question of the immigration issue is how to deal with the 12 million people living illegally amongst us legal residents throughout our nation. To refuse these people amnesty requires that they be deported. To undertake the deportation of the illegal aliens now in our country is to open a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences.

During the Third Reich, the entire resources of the German government were deployed to find, incarcerate, and kill all Jews in the nations of Europe that they controlled. To actually round up and deport 12 million illegal aliens would require an even larger effort on the part of our federal government. In my opinion, the effort would turn our nation into a police state.

Illegal aliens don’t appear any different than legal residents. Think about the Gestapo-like police force that would have to be created to find and detain aliens. The issuance of national identity cards and the creation of a national database of legal citizens and aliens, containing your date and place of birth, you social security number, your current address, etc. Consider the laws that would have to be passed to make harboring an illegal a felony. The official encouragement of citizens to turn in neighbors they suspect of being illegal would follow. Imagine the number and the cost of the concentration camps that would have to be built and policed to house the detained aliens. We’re talking about millions of people. The huge number of special deportation courts that would have to be set up and staffed to provide the aliens due-process. Under current law, deportation proceedings would go on decade after decade to process 12 million cases of incarcerated people.

This Nazi-like vision of the future is not one I want for my nation.

Even more basic, is the fact that a significant number of the 12 million illegal aliens are married couples with children. The most fundamental problem of the No-Amnesty approach to the immigration issue is how to handle families where one or more of the parents are illegal but one or more of their children are American citizens by virtue of being born here. A native American citizen cannot be deported because he or she is already in their home-birth country.

There are two possible solutions to this problem: You can deport the illegal parents and leave the young American children as parentless wards of the state or you could pass laws that strip American-born children of illegals of their citizenship. To me, both are as cold blooded and inhumane as the Nazi final solution and not to be thought of much less discussed.

These are the inescapable consequences of a no-amnesty policy. I beg everyone to get past their emotions and think about the consequences of what you are advocating by refusing amnesty.