Tom Strini Writes

PianoArts: Lucas Amory, 2024 Competition Winner, Will Play His Prize Recital March 7

2025-02-20T18:30:00.012-06:00

Amory and his violinist sister, Leah, will feature Prokofiev's challenging Violin Sonatas 1 and 2.

by Tom Strini

In May, Lucas Amory won the 2024 PianoArts North American Competiton, in Milwaukee. He'll be back for a winner's recital March 7, and he's bringing his violinist sister, Leah. They will play Sergey Prokofiev's Violin Sonatas No. 1 and No. 2.

Lucas Amory

Lucas, 22, graduated from Harvard with a double major in music and German in 2024. He is amid his first year of graduate study in piano performance at the Juilliard School, in New York. In an interview in his apartment in a beautiful old Deco building on 57th Street, Amory talked about Prokofiev, about making music with his sister, growing up in a prestigious musical family, and where his career might take him.

He laughed when I asked him how he convinced his sister to do the heavy lifting on the Milwaukee program.

"Leah was already working on the second sonata," he said. "We've always been close as musical collaborators and as siblings. But while I was in Boston (at Harvard), I didn't get to see her a lot. We had a desire to reconnect and to play more together. She was on board for this recital and I was pretty stoked."

Leah, 20, is in her third year in violin performance at the Curtis Institute, an elite music conservatory in Philadelphia, a short train ride from New York. It was easy for them to get together to work on the two sonatas.

In a separate interview, by phone, Leah said she and her brother had performed together on several occasions and had read through a great many pieces.

Leah Amory

"He accompanied me," she said. "I think he knows the piano reductions [of the orchestra parts] to all the big violin concertos."

She said that Prokofiev had not been in their repertoire, and they wanted to fill that gap. The defining moment came when she heard a friend, Anoush Pagossian, perform the Sonata No. 2, Opus 94, in a transcription for clarinet.

"When someone you love plays something so beautifully," she said, "it makes you want to play it all the more."

Prokofiev (1891-1953) composed Opus 94, in D major, on a commission from the Soviet Committee of Artistic Affairs in 1943. He was in Alma-Ata, then the capital of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, far removed from the German invasion. The commission specified a sonata for flute and piano, which Prokofiev delivered. In a letter to Nicolay Miaskovsky, a close friend and former classmate in Rimsky-Korsakov's composition studio, Prokofiev wrote that "It [the flute sonata] hardly chimes with the mood of the times, but it's a pleasant work."

Violinists in Prokofiev's orbit, notably David Oistrakh, successfully urged him to transcribe the flute part for violin. Oistrakh premiered that version in 1944.

"The D major is tonal and approachable," Leah said. "The second movement is mischievous, the fourth is triumphant. It was a diversion for Prokofiev, an easy escape. If he had written about what was in front of him, it would have been a very different sonata. It's an incredible piece, but it feels as if Prokofiev were boxed in, somehow."

In the video, Lucas Amory talks through the D-major Sonata Opus 94:

Indeed. The Germans were invading. The Soviet arts bureaucracy was becoming militantly censorious and punitive over "formalism" and elitism. A pleasant, tuneful piece was a prudent choice.

Despite all that, Prokofiev, who had returned to Russia in 1936, went his own torturous way with the Sonata No. 1, in F minor, Opus 80. (Don't be confused by that "No. 1"; Prokofiev published it after the Sonata No. 2, but started it long before.) Lucas called it one of the "war sonatas," along with Piano Sonatas 6, 7, and 8.

"It's extraordinarily turbulent," Lucas said. "The F minor sonata is a lot grittier than the No. 1."

Apart from the outside pressures, Prokofiev struggled with the act of composing the sonata. He started it in 1938, but did not finish it until 1946.

It's intensely dissonant and shot through with violent rhythms in compound meters. Commentators have likened some passages to the mechanical racket of heavy metal manufacturing. Prokofiev referred to ghostly, recurring violin scales as "wind passing through a graveyard." In the second movement, a folk dance skitters, halts abruptly, reels, and herky-jerks like a dance on its way to becoming a drunken brawl.

Prokofiev

"It's as if two different people wrote these sonatas," Leah said. "The F minor, it's like opening Pandora's box and Prokofiev jumps out." She went on to cite the story about Prokofiev urging pianist Lev Oberin, during a rehearsal with Oistrakh, to play with such force that "people should jump out of their seats and say 'Is he out of his mind?'"

The music is extremely volatile emotionally, rhythmically and harmonically.

"He'll spend three bars in one key and jump abruptly to a key completely out of left field in the fourth," Lucas said. "Prokofiev was good at maneuvering to subvert listener expectations." He went on to hypothesize that the composer's harmonic tricks related to Prokofiev's strategies as an elite chess player. "You lead your opponent to expect a certain plan of attack, then change it at the very last second."

This is uncomfortable music that challenges the listener and, in different ways, the violinist.

Leah said that the D major sonata is violinistic -- it "lies well," as string player say in the trade. The F minor does not.

"It's unpleasant under the fingers," she said. "But because it's so out there, you just have to lean in to it.

"With something so volatile, it's a joy to work with Lucas. We read each other's faces and body language. We don't have to explain much during rehearsals."

But outside of rehearsals...

"We talk about music all the time," she said. "We might be eating dinner, and one of us might say 'Oh -- I have an idea about measure 84.'"

Both Lucas and Leah see music as informing and enriching every aspect of their lives, rather than competing or interfering with full personal lives. Lucas sees himself balancing performing with teaching, and plans to have a gap year between his Juilliard Master of Music degree and a PhD or DMA. He sees academia in his future.

Leah expressed real passion for finding a way to incorporate an understanding of the lives, times, music technologies and social milieux of composers of all eras into the performance of their music. The single-minded pursuit of technical perfection in classical music's top tier, coupled with a lack of historical understanding, concerns her. And she wants to do something about it. At 20, she's not quite sure what, but she'll figure it out.

Both Lucas and Leah credit their parents for inspiring them as both musicians and as well-rounded people.

Hsin-Yun Huang shared this drawing
in an Instagram post: "Our daughter,
Leah Amory, created this extraordinary
piece as a present for me this X’mas.
It is an ink drawing inspired by
this extraordinary year."

Their parents, Misha Amory and Hsin-Yun Huang, are international A-list violists. In addition to busy performing careers, they teach at both Curtis and Juilliard. The siblings grew up learning Mandarin from their mother. His father's love of German language and literature inspired Lucas to take on German as a second major at Harvard. Leah is a highly skilled visual artist. And she constructs crossword puzzles. ("Filling that grid is so satisfying.")

"The exposure to music already shaped my identity by age 2 or 3," Lucas said. "By 5 or 6, I would listen to music and follow scores. My mom would play piano, Debussy or Chopin, often, and I would turn pages. That's how I got my love of music.

"Our parents were so busy and traveled so much, but they also sacrificed some opportunities in order to take care of Leah and me. We never felt neglected or that our care was secondary."

"The poetry and reach of music are everywhere in our lives," Leah said. "I am so grateful to my parents for showing us into this world of music."

PianoArts Concert Information

When: 7 p.m. Friday, March 7
What: Lucas Amory and Leah Amory play Prokofiev's Piano and Violin Sonatas, Nos. 1 and 2 and solo piano works TBA. The evening opens with artist interview by Reverend Randy Bush. Artist reception follows concert.
Where: Immanuel Presbyterian Church, 1100 North Astor Street.

When: 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 9.
What: “Musical Story Land,” with storyteller Kelly Doherty. “Peter and the Wolf” headlines this one-hour interactive concert. A kid-friendly reception follows.
Where: Bay Shore Lutheran Church, 1200 East Hampton Road.

How Much: Concerts are free. Donations accepted. Details: Info@PianoArts.org

Sources (other than those linked above)

CD album notes by David Hice and John Henken for the 2013 James Ehnes recording, on the Analekta Fleur dys lys label, of the Prokofiev sonatas.

Pianist Yuliana Chaplina's article on the F-minor sonata in the May 28, 2021, edition of The Strad.

Violinist Timothy Judd's blog post on the F-minor sonata at The Listener's Club.

Notes by Joseph DuBose and Michael Cansfield for a 2010 recording by Brendan Conway, violin, and Anna Balakerskaia, piano. (Record label unknown.)

Trinity Irish Dance Company Comes Home to Milwaukee

2022-03-16T13:08:00.001-05:00

Mark Howard's groundbreaking troupe reinvented Irish dance as a concert art at Uihlein Hall in 1990. Three decades later, TIDC returns, stronger than ever.

by Tom Strini

In June of 1990, the Trinity Irish Dance Company gave its first concert performance. It happened at Uihlein Hall, in what is now known as the Marcus Center. On Saturday, March 26, TIDC will return to Uihlein Hall for the first time in nearly 32 years.

Lois Greenfield photo

In 1990, company founder and artistic director Mark Howard ran (and still runs) Irish dance schools in Milwaukee and Chicago. His kids had just won world championships in competitive Irish dance, and that won them an invitation from NBC’s The Tonight Show in March. Competition dancing, with its strict rules governing everything from arm placement to the required blonde wigs and white poodle socks, was the only venue for Irish step dancing at the time.

Howard thought the form had not only entertainment value, but artistic value. Some board members and parents of his students bought in, popped to hire three popular Irish traditional bands, and rented Uihlein Hall. A surprisingly large audience turned out for the show, which straggled on for three hours. The dancers were, mostly, kids. But Howard had proved his point. Irish dance could work on the concert stage.

In the intervening years, the company has danced at the Pabst Theater, the Wilson Center in Brookfield and other area venues. But the return to the big, well-appointed hall means a lot to Howard, 59.

“It’s extraordinary to be coming back into Milwaukee proper for the first time in 20 years,” Howard said, “And to come back to the Marcus Center after 30 years. I really didn’t know what would happen back then. But after that concert, for the first time, I thought wow. Maybe this won’t suck.”

This happened over four years before Riverdance became a thing. Howard grew up in Chicago with Riverdance star Michael Flatley and some of the other principals behind that show. Howard has always argued, convincingly, that the Riverdance crew picked up on his ideas and proceeded to sprinkle them with Las Vegas glitter.

Mark Howard

Shortly after launch in 1990, Howard turned his attention to modern dance. He sought to graft modern-dance thinking – and all the virtue that goes along with its virtuosity – onto traditional Irish technique. He took cues from Alvin Ailey, Ballet Folklorico and Milwaukee’s own Ferne Caulker, founder of Ko-Thi African Dance company.

“Just regurgitating traditional competition dances on St. Patrick’s Day wasn’t enough,” Howard said. “I wanted to build something new on the chassis of traditional dance, which has two time signatures to work with. It was daunting to take it beyond that. We wanted the form to evolve, but still maintain clear lineage to our ancestors.”

From the company’s earliest days, Howard brought in modern dance choreographers to create or co-create dances. Some worked brilliantly, some not so much. But everyone involved widened their dance vocabularies and skills.

Both the dance form and the company evolved over the years. At first, nearly all company dancers came from Howard’s school. They tended to be young, and tours and rehearsals had to make room for school and family activities and other interests of teenagers and those in their early 20s. Traditional, wildly expensive competition costumes, complete with those blonde wigs, appeared in some numbers.

All that has changed.

Chelsea Hoy. Lois Greenfield photo

“We don’t wear wigs, anymore,” said Chelsea Hoy. Hoy, 26, is a dancer, choreographer and associate artistic director. She practiced at a competition Irish dance studio as she grew up in Denver, then immersed herself in Howard’s Chicago school as a college student at Loyola.

“I saw Trinity when I was 8,” Hoy said. “I still remember almost every detail. I still remember the feeling I had at seeing those strong women. I saw Riverdance, too. All I remember from that is the spaghetti at a fancy restaurant before the show.”

From then on, the competitive and glitzy varieties of Irish dance had little charm for her.

“Trinity is the only place I could have continued with Irish dance,” she said.

The strong woman theme has been central to Trinity from the start. You see these women getting off the tour bus, and they could be a Division 1 soccer team. The company has often had a few men in its ranks, but they never come off as seething heroes who, Flatley-style, save the damsels by out-tapping male villains. In the current show, the choreography is unisex, with men in the ranks alongside the women.

And the dancers are men and women, not boys and girls.

“Dancers come from all over the world to audition for Trinity,” Howard said. “They’re mostly mid-20s to early 30s. These are people who have lived and loved. They have range on stage; they know where dances whisper and where they scream. Any one of them, alone on stage, could hold the attention of an audience of 2,000.”

The ranks now include a dancer from Mexico, Francisco Lemus, and a Black dancer, Kaitlyn Sardin, from Orlando.

“Irish dance has become a global art form,” Hoy said. “Francisco auditioned for the commercial shows, but none would take him. We’re uniquely built to accept individuals. We’re leading the evolution of the form.”

As Howard has professionalized the company, he has also downsized it. In Milwaukee and Chicago shows, he once crowded the stage with as many as 26 professional and student dancers. No more; the company travels with 16 and typically puts 14 on the stage.

“The downsizing is intentional,” Hoy said. “It allows every personality on stage to pop. We celebrate individuality.”

Todd Rosenberg photo

Don’t get the wrong impression; the individuals pop amid astonishing ensemble unity. A review of recent videos showed a company with blazing solo and ensemble technique. They are aloof in relation to their remarkable physical feats; they accomplish them with apparent ease, which makes them all the more thrilling.

The sum of all that is a certain effortless gravitas. Even when they’re having fun, as in an elevated party dance, it’s serious fun. Every dancer in the company has committed to art, without irony or apology. You want glitz? Go see Riverdance or any of the other commercial Irish dance productions.

“Mark doesn’t just teach dance,” Hoy said. “He imparts a taste level. That taste level and attention to detail is passed on to every dancer. We’re all part of an evolving art form.”

“We’re the only company in the world that does what we do,” Howard said. “That’s both a perk and a handicap.”

'Communion' - Trinity Irish Dance Company from Trinity Irish Dance Company on Vimeo.

He explained that the company has no lofty historical repertoire – no Swan Lake, say -- to emulate or live up to. It means that every new dance is a new adventure that demands a new working method. That’s very exciting. And very difficult.

But right now, everything is working. Bookings are flooding in. Already this year, the company has had major shows in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York (it will travel directly from New York to Milwaukee). A tour of Japan on the horizon. And the company is on a creative high.

“Now that Chelsea and this incredible group of athlete-artists are in place, we’re operating in a shared creative place,” Howard said. “We exist to create new work. Every piece puts us inside a new creative world. We’re in a zone. We have so many ideas. It’s heaven. It’s just been heaven.”

Trinity Irish Dance Company Show Info

Where: Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, 929 N. Water St.
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 26, 2022
How Much: $25-$61, available online and at the Marcus box office, 414 273-7206

The Repertoire:
American Traffic, by Michelle Dorrance and Melinda Sullivan: A hybrid of Irish step and American tap that plays at the intersection of rhythmic sensibilities and rebellious histories. Celebrating the nuanced differences between the two forms, it presents a new percussive language.

An Sorcas (Gaelic for The Circus), by Mark Howard and Chelsea Hoy, is about the battle between substance and spectacle. An Sorcas points a mirror to the oversaturation of glitzy, formulaic productions in Irish dance.

Sparks, by Howard and Artistic Associate and dancer Ali Doughty, brings together the technical prowess and virtuosic skill of Doughty, who won a solo world championship during her competitive career, and New York-born, All-Ireland champion fiddler Jake James.

Push, by Howard, is an explosion of hard-driving, hard-shoe percussive power; perhaps the most poignant example of the company’s core value of female empowerment.

Communion, by Howard and Sandy Silva: a unique blend of Irish step and body percussion, centered on the profound power of human connection

A New Dawn, by Howard, is the 2018 remake of The Dawn, which won the 1998 world championship in choreography for competitive Irish dance. Howard calls it “folk dance for the future at breakneck speed; explosive soft-shoe dancing and rapid-fire arm movement.”

Soles, by Howard, with contributions from Michael Donnellan, Michael Gardiner, Courtney D'Angelo, Chelsea Hoy, Aaron Wolf; a tribal, driving study in hard-shoe rhythm.

Johnny, from 1991, is an early signature Howard work. He created it for NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. It altered the landscape of Irish dance, just after Trinity won America’s first world championship team titles on the competitive stage.

Black Rose, by Howard: Black Rose centers on a 120-year old Irish lambeg (bass) drum. In addition to percussive footwork, the dancers are armed with drumsticks. They clack out rhythms by striking them together and pounding the floor with them

The Dancers
Courtney D’Angelo, Ali Doughty, Michael Fleck, Lydia Fredrick (Milwaukee native), Anna Gorman, Abigail Graham-Luke, Chelsea Hoy, Francisco Lemus, Danielle Masbruch, Sierra McNall, Claudia Morrison, Sydney Niewiedzial, Colleen Michael O’Connor, Kelsey Parry, Gracie Peters (Milwaukee native), Clare Rahner, Kaitlyn Sardin, Marissa Wurster (Milwaukee native)

The Band
Live, onstage music accompanies all dances. The quartet comprises Christopher Devlin, guitar; Jake James, fiddle and bodhran; Brendan O’Shea, guitar and vocals; and Steve Rutledge, percussion.

Art Songs for Voice and Guitar: "Two Settings of Robert Herrick"

2021-04-30T15:02:00.006-05:00

I composed these songs in 1975. Finally, they're published and on sale.

by Tom Strini

Renaissance and Baroque lute music generally fits the modern classical guitar pretty well. I took an interest in it in graduate school way back when, and even wrote a little book about the process of transcribing old tablatures into musical notation.

Dedication page from Robert
Herrick's Hesperides, a massive
collection of his poems published
in 1648.

I made something of a specialty of transcribing and then playing and singing English lute songs of the Elizabethan era, especially those by the great John Dowland (1523-1626). The lute parts are fairly complex, and playing them while singing a rhythmically tricky tune is fairly difficult, in a pat-your-head-rub-your-belly sort of way.

Dowland, who held court lutenist positions in Paris and Copenhagen as well as London, was a key figure in an English lute school that bloomed for over a century. Francis Pilkington, Thomas Morley, Thomas Campian and many other lutenists were also poets. They typically composed madrigals, contrapuntal songs for multiple voices, as well as lute music. They extended the long tradition of transcribing choral music of this type for lute and for lute and solo voice, and the lute songs all have the contrapuntal texture of madrigals at work beneath the solo voice line.

The lutenists tended to be literary as well as musical. They often wrote their own texts, but just as often borrowed poems from one another and from non-musical poets they knew. They lived in lively artistic circles.

The lute songs inspired me to write songs of my own, and I rummaged through poetry anthologies looking for likely suspects. I settled on Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a highly educated, sophisticated Londoner who ended up spending most of his life as vicar of a remote, rural Anglican parish. He wrote thousands of poems on a vast spectrum of themes. Three of them are among the most popular of all time: "Delight in Disorder," "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time," and "Upon Julia's Clothes."

Herrick was not a musician, but "To the Virgins" and "Julia's Clothes" are so musical in their sound and scansion that they beg for musical treatment. So I treated them.

I composed these songs in 1975. Usually, composing was a grind-it-out experience for me, but these pieces poured out intuitively. As I examine them now, I see tunes that evolve as the words change with each verse. The guitar parts are intermittently contrapuntal, but are mostly chordal accompaniment in blocks or arpeggios. They're in the key of A minor, with the occasional B-flat or B-flat minor chord dropping in from the blue.

I had not sung this set since a brief concert tour in 1975; they only recently emerged after decades in a storage box. I must say that I'm very fond of them. They're very singable, and the music blends perfectly with the sentiments and rhythms of the words. I had nothing but an inked manuscript copy from the old days, so I bought and learned the StaffPad music program to create a publishable copy of the set, and in the process of copying revised the songs slightly.

Back in 1975, I had no trouble sustaining the high A at the end of "Julia's Clothes." That was before I spent 20 years as a soccer coach. Making yourself heard across a field has a way of shaving off the top of your range. That's why I tuned my guitar down a whole step to sing it for the video. Still not the greatest performance, but it gives an idea of the song to prospective buyers.

The songs are available as a 7-page PDF download through Sheet Music Plus for a mere $6. Spread the word to all the guitarist-baritones you know. If other people were to sing and play these songs, I would be so happy.

More Strini on Music.

Don't miss anything: Email tstrini@gmail.com with the subject line Striniwrites. I'll send you a note and a link every time I publish a new story. (And that's all I'll send you. And of course I will never share your email address with anyone for any reason.)

Editing Music with StaffPad and Microsoft Surface Pro

2021-04-27T17:59:00.005-05:00

You know how you get a new app for work and it drives you nuts, but then you like it?

by Tom Strini

In the TV commercial that first brought Microsoft's Surface Pro to my attention, a composer's hand wielded an electronic pen to sketch notes on an on-screen staff. The Surface Pro then magically transformed the pen marks into engraved sheet music. And then it played back complex scores on demand. Wrong pitches? No problem -- just drag the note head to the right line or space.

It looked so easy and intuitive. I'd long had designs of taking up musical composition again; I was a music theory and composition major in college, but had done little in that direction through decades as a professional writer and editor.

Work life and life in general held me back from composing, but so did the laborious process of writing by hand and then imagining the sound of combined voices. My ear and musical brain just weren't good enough to look at a score and mentally hear the harmonies with total accuracy. But with a Surface Pro and with the StaffPad app... hmmm.

I bought one, at last, in June 2020. I was busy with other projects and got around to buying StaffPad in November. After the holidays and a trip to Upstate New York, I finally got serious about writing music. I realized that I had hand-written copies of pieces that hadn't seen the light of day in decades. Why not start with copying and revising them in StaffPad, and then publishing them through my friends at Sheet Music Plus?

Comparison of original inked copy and "engraved"
rendering via StaffPad

I became obsessed with StaffPad, which, like most things, isn't as easy it appears to be in the commercial. Just getting the program to register a mark -- any mark at all -- was a challenge at first. It took about eight days to get the hang of wielding the stylus just so to make the notes register properly. StaffPad navigation can be confusing, and I still haven't figured out how to get to all the toolbar options. I've yet to find the symbols for harmonics, for example, which I know are somewhere in the store of StaffPad, or a way to insert fingerings for guitar. I've had to go luddite and just hand-sketch a few items into the printed score and then scan it in as a PDF.

Two Songs of Robert Herrick, settings of poems by the 17th-century British poet, is my first Surface Pro project. The two songs together cross the finish line in under three minutes. But it's taken me three weeks to render them into beautiful StaffPad pages. Among many setbacks: The abrupt disappearance of the second song just after I'd completed the final edit. I found it a day later, tucked away in the OneDrive cloud, a service that I never use. How did it get there? Beats me, but I'm glad that my desperation to find it drove me to open OneDrive.

Why didn't I just scan in my 1975 original inked manuscript? Because I intend to publish the songs at Sheet Music Plus and want to make a more professional presentation. [Update: The songs are published and available.] I was a steady-handed ink copyist back in the day, but with all the music writing and publishing apps out there, buyers expect engraved quality. And I wanted to amend the score a bit. That would have meant finding one of those special, ye olde tyme music pens, bottle ink, and paper that matches the old Pasantino ms paper in weight and staff size. Then I would have to write the new bit on the new paper, then get out the X-acto knife and the glue and carefully cut and paste the new passage into the old score.

I could be dead before the glue dries. Better to learn StaffPad.

The next step is to record the songs and post the video on YouTube, as I do with the pop tune stories. Then I'll set them up as PDF downloads for a modest price at Sheet Music Plus and wait for the money to roll in. Okay, trickle in.

Regardless of how that goes, I'm glad to have StaffPad help me give these old songs some new life. Learning to use the app is like learning to fly a plane. Anyone can do it, but if you fly solo in the first three weeks, you'll probably crash a few times. I'm far from mastering StaffPad, but I'm getting off the ground.

More Strini on Music.

Business: Content Marketing Advice (and Shameless Self-Promotion)

2021-04-10T11:00:00.006-05:00

Draw on your in-house experts for content that gives your business a distinct voice.

by Tom Strini

I didn't know how naive I was about content marketing. Then I started reading the job notices for content marketing openings, which pop up often in my LinkedIn feed. Turns out that the business world abounds with content mills that hastily crank out sausage on behalf of clients they've never met.

I thought surely, no real business -- no sophisticated business -- would sign on with such a mill. And then I got an assignment from a new tech client: "XXXX is a hot topic in our field, and we need a blog post about it. Check out these eight links of posts by competitors and write something like that for us."

Tom Strini

Ummm... okay, but you know that I'm no expert on topic XXXX. Wouldn't it be better for someone in your company to jot down some original ideas, so we can set ourselves apart from the competition? Then I could just polish it up. No? Okay; could I perhaps interview someone in the firm to draw out some ideas? No?

Alrighty, then. I suppose I'll check through the links and pull stuff out of them.

As I read through the eight pieces on topic XXXX, I realized that all of them said exactly the same thing in almost exactly the same words. I kept getting confused as to which one I was reading. It was your-company-name-here stuff. Outsourced sausage.

I should say that I am not a content marketing expert. I came to the field part-time and late, after 32 years in journalism. I'm a writer, not a cut-and-paster, and plagiarism rubs me the wrong way. So I absorbed the five or six common points among the links and checked back with the client to prioritize them and maybe add a few points.

I saw then that the client had no clear vision of the piece. So I crafted a piece that played the hits but wasn't so Polly-want-a-cracker. I hung it on a bit of a show-off metaphor, to differentiate it in readers' minds from the many clones that populate company blogs.

I didn't really expect it to fly with the client, but I hoped that dummy draft would give the client something concrete that might point in a clearer direction. That piece of it worked. The client came back to me wanting a dozen bullet points, each about equal in length. Each would cover a specific issue. A brief intro and conclusion would sandwich the bullet points.

At last, a plan! The only problem was that the original eight link sources addressed maybe half of the prescribed bullet points. Which meant I was on my own for researching a business issue in which I have an amateur level of expertise, at best.

Well, after decades in journalism, I know how to acquire instant expertise. And I know how to write quickly.

I got the revised assignment at about 10:30 a.m. I sent the finished story to the client at about 4:30 p.m. I had consolidated the dozen bullet points into nine, as some turned out to be redundant. Each point weighed in at exactly five lines of type (how's that for "equal weight"?). About 1,000 words total.

Then I toted up the invoice: 3.5 hours for the preliminary draft, .5 for phone consultation, 5.5 for final research and draft. That's 9.5 hours for one blog post. And I don't work cheap.

I like billable hours as much as the next guy, but that kind of money for one blog post is just too much. I seek viable, long-term relationships with clients, not a quick soaking. So I gave the friends-and-family discount and knocked 1.5 hours off the bill. I'm not inclined to do that twice. So I offered some friendly advice on a more economical way to proceed.

Let's call it the Northwoods Way, although I'm sure that other businesses use it.

I have worked part-time for Northwoods, a B2B company that develops software, builds websites, and consults on all aspects of a client's online operations, since 2013. Their experts write on current, important topics that interest them. Their posts cover everything from Google's latest SEO arcana to User Experience to Information Architecture to Online Privacy -- the list of topics is long and growing.

Most staffers are, shall we say, not notably gifted in the literary realm. That's where I come in. I make the copy clear, economical and eloquent. I represent the reader. I make sure that no one will have to read a sentence more than once to understand it. I make sure the posts are exactly as long as they need to be and not one word longer. I suggest illustrations and point out informational holes the authors ought to fill.

Because we use in-house talent and expertise, Northwoods' copy is unique to our company and completely authentic. Northwoods has a distinct voice. And after an ace copy doctor completes cosmetic surgery, Northwoods' voice becomes beautiful.

For years, Northwoods was my only client. I thought every company did its content marketing the Northwoods Way. Now I know better. I understand why companies don't follow that path; it's not easy. The CEO is too busy; the tech guys don't get the necessity; the sales people want to sell, not write; and half the staff are terrible at writing and they know it.

Still, persist. For one thing, in-house writing leads to more manageable freelance bills. The Northwoods Way would have eliminated the whole preliminary round of drafts in the above case study. I spent 9.5 hours researching and writing a 1,000-word blog post. I can edit a 1,000-word blog post in 2 hours.

Once staffers see their bylines on the company blog, they're likely to see the value in writing. They can refer prospective customers to their work. Their posts can generate leads.

Beyond that, writing promotes professional development. Writing is not merely a means for recording what you already know; it's a special way of thinking, of working things out. Writing organizes head space. Writing leads to a better understanding of the field and can lead to new ideas. Writing makes employees more articulate as a brand advocates and establishes them as thought leaders.

Time spent writing is time well spent. Do it. And then send it to me.

Spring Song No. 3: "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most"

2021-03-27T08:40:00.009-05:00

A jazz musical about 1950 New York Beatniks? Created in St. Louis' Gaslight Square? What!?

by Tom Strini

Imagine a musical comedy about the Beat Generation set in gritty New York in 1950, but created by a bunch of St. Louis people and staged at the Crystal Palace, a legendary saloon from the heyday of Gaslight Square. Now imagine a New York producer getting wind of it, traveling to St. Louis to see it, and transplanting it to Broadway. Unlikely as it seems, it all happened.

Jay Landesman and the Beat Life

That show would be The Nervous Set, which contributed "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" to the Great American Songbook. The Nervous Set sprang from Jay Landesman's autobiographical roman a clef novel about the post-war NYC Beat scene. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Landesman himself and his wife, Fran, and numerous other Beat luminaries appear in the never-published novel and in the show. Of course, Landesman assigned them different names and drew their characters with varying degrees of literary license.

Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf in their
Crystal Palace days.

The show pretty much tracks Landesman's actual Beat life experience. He grew up in his family's St. Louis antiques business. He often traveled to New York for the business, and in the late 1940s was drawn into the whirlpool of poets, painters, jazz musicians, writers, hangers-on, nihilist philosophers and merely disaffected souls who came to be known as The Beats. They mostly didn't know what they wanted, but they knew what they didn't want: Mainstream American Life. Rejection of everything conventional was the default, along with hornrim glasses, be-bop jazz, black turtlenecks and berets.

Many of them were brilliant, and they changed the world in many far-reaching ways. They plowed the ground for the Hippies, the sexual revolution and the drug culture. Many of their innovations in poetry, painting and avant-garde music have become part of the artistic landscape.

Jay Meets Fran, Life Becomes Theater

So, while in New York, Landesman met Fran Deitsch, an wealthy Uptown girl with a rebellious, adventurous spirit. They married -- already something of a Sin of Squareness in Landesman's circle -- but nonetheless became prominent Beat personalities. Her great wit and skillful poetry helped with that. Landesman made himself a key figure by starting Neurotica, which instantly became the Beat periodical, the messenger of its theoretical, political and artistic musings.

In The Nervous Set, Jay Landesman (1919-2011) and Fran Deitsch Landesman (1927-2011) appear in the guise of Brad and Jan. The story unfolds largely in three parties, one set in Jan's parents' country house, one in the couple's Greenwich Village apartment, and one in the vast apartment of an Uptown socialite. Over the course of nearly four hours and 20 songs, the show sometimes satirizes and sometimes celebrates the Beats, but it always takes aim at the Uptown Squares. The focus is on the married couple and the stress this deeply negative milieu inflicts on their marriage. In the end, with Jan on the brink of suicide, they decide they've had enough of that scene.

St. Louis, Gaslight Square, The Crystal Palace

In real life, Fran and Jay exited the New York Beat scene and moved to St. Louis. They opened the Crystal Palace, a bar/restaurant/venue that seated 300 and was a key addition to the emerging Gaslight Square entertainment district. They had a great eye for emerging acts -- Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Alan Arkin, Nichols and May, the Smothers Brothers, Woody Allen and many others played the Crystal Palace before they became stars. Landesman also assembled a group of St. Louis and Chicago actors and improvisational comedians into a resident theater company.

Pianist Tommy Wolf, at the time, was playing in the bar of the downtown Jefferson Hotel. Fran Landesman liked what she heard and gave Wolf one of her poems to set. The result was "This Little Love of Ours." Wolf (1925-1979) was a fine singer, highly skilled jazz pianist and highly original songwriter. Before long, Wolf soon found himself the Crystal Palace music director and the composer for The Nervous Set.

You would have thought that the alien world of New York Beats, an onstage jazz quartet instead of an orchestra, no big dance production numbers, an abundance of NYC Beat in-jokes and the sheer length of the show would have bewildered St. Louisans in 1959. Nope. The show was a local smash and filled the Crystal Palace to the rafters night after night.

The Nervous Set Breaks Down in New York

You would have thought that The Nervous Set would fare even better in New York, where actual beatniks were facts of cultural life. Nope. It flopped dismally and closed after 23 performances. But then, it really wasn't the same show as the one staged in St. Louis. Scott Miller, in his indispensable "Inside The Nervous Set," pins the blame on New York producer Robert Lantz. Lantz insisted on a happy ending instead of an ambiguous one, cut the show by nearly 90 minutes, put New York actors (including a very young Larry Hagman) in three key roles. And someone, somehow bungled away the rights to "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." The song was not part of the Broadway production or the original cast album.

The Curtain Falls

After the show flopped in New York and Gaslight Square fell on hard times, Wolf left for California and became a rehearsal pianist for the Red Skelton and Andy Williams television shows. He was music director for Fred Astaire's Evenings. At the end of his life, Wolf ended up in Utah, of all places, working on a television show headlined by Donnie and Marie Osmond.

Jay and Fran Landesman moved to London and became tabloid fodder for their open-marriage sexual exploits. But it worked for them. They remained together and married for 61 years, until Jay died in 2011. Fran died five months later.

Inside "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most"

The song, like the Beats and the show itself, is unconventional -- maybe even anti-conventional. For starters, the bridge is 18 bars, not the usual eight. The second ending of the bridge throws the ear a harmonic curveball of an E-flat minor seventh after an F-minor seventh. And that takes you not back to the opening melody, but to new material in an extended coda. Most standard melodies feature lots of flowing, step-wise motion with leaps reserved for dramatic contrast. Wolf asks the singer to leap all over the place and often to outline chords -- and he likes to start the outline on an unlikely pitch, the major seventh, for example. At one point, the singer has to find an augmented 11th.

Wolf keeps changing mood and style throughout. These four bars cry out for rhythmic propulsion; the next four cry out for free parlando. One bar, you're belting; the next, talking. Then there's the fast harmonic rhythm -- at least two and often four chord changes per bar -- and that weird string of nine quarter-note triplets that make the tune waltz for a bar and a half.

The above paragraph is a music theory nerd's way of saying This Song Is Really Hard. I gave it a good try. Carmen McRae kills it.

Many thanks, once again, to guitarist Steve Schenkel, for weaving an expert guitar line into my rendition.

More Spring Songs: "It Might as Well Be Spring" and "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nervous_Set

https://www.loc.gov/item/smor.19590512/

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/the-nervous-set-2742

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/the-nervous-set-2742#OpeningNightCast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Wolf

http://www.dbopm.com/link/index/4406/118~3231

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/arts/music/fran-landesman-lyricist-with-a-bittersweet-edge-dies-at-83.html

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fran+landesman

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCo2rvrbsWR6I766MIY6D3w

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2011/02/24/rip-jay-landesman-founder-of-crystal-palace-nightclub-mayor-of-gaslight-square-writer-and-all-around-hep-cat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_Square,_St._Louis

https://www.umsl.edu/virtualstl/phase2/1950/people/landesman.html

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/obituaries/jay-landesman-founder-of-the-crystal-palace-nightclub-dies-at-91/article_85d046b6-63cb-5544-a689-d286b2debddf.html

https://www.stljewishlight.com/life_cycle/obituaries/fran-landesman-83-queen-of-gaslight-square-s-crystal-palace/article_d9c8b4a0-bde0-11e0-a4f8-001cc4c002e0.html

https://masterworksbroadway.com/music/the-nervous-set-original-broadway-cast-1959/

http://www.newlinetheatre.com/nervoussetchapter.html

http://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/s/spring_can_really_hang_you_up.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ9JMfFVIL8 (Jeanne Trevor) https://youtu.be/bJ9JMfFVIL8

Spring Song No. 2: "It Might as Well Be Spring"

2021-03-25T18:18:00.003-05:00

Rodgers and Hammerstein's lyrical masterpiece debuted on the silver screen in 1945.

by Tom Strini

Before Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein became a songwriting team celebrated on both the Broadway stage and the Hollywood screen, there was Rodgers and Hart.

Composer Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart earned reputations for jazz-inflected tunes, brilliant wit, and for sophisticated musicals with a bit of an edge. They wrote 33 Broadway shows together from 1920 through 1943, including classics Pal Joey and Boys from Syracuse. Many of their show tunes became standards -- "There's a Small Hotel," "With a Song in My Heart," "I'll Take Manhattan," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Blue Moon," "Where or When," "My Funny Valentine," "You Took Advantage of Me," and many more.

When Hart descended into alcoholism and then died in 1943, Rodgers took up with Hammerstein. Hart was high-living, gay, social, and a big personality with forward-looking tastes and ideas about music and theater. Hammerstein was the opposite of all those things. He was respectable. He and his prior collaborators -- Jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml, Vincent Youmans, Sigmund Romberg -- had planted their feet firmly in European operetta.

Many credit Hammerstein with bringing the American stage musical to maturity. Hammerstein argued the cause of plot and character as paramount, over stars, production values and individual musical numbers. He is credited with "integrating" songs and even dances into the overall story. Gone were the days of interchangeable vaudeville acts being dropped into the mix and gone were the days of building musicals around the likes of the Marx Brothers. Hammerstein pushed the genre toward plays-with-music, starting with the landmark Oklahoma! in 1943.

Not that this was a totally new idea; Rodgers and Hart built Boys from Syracuse on a Shakespeare comedy, and even Kern and Hammerstein's Showboat tracked a novel by Edna Ferber. Even so, Oklahoma! struck the New York theater world as novel.

On the other hand, Wilfred Sheed, among others, have argued that that Oklahoma!, Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song and so on are basically 19th-century operettas tweaked up with local color and American pop-tune idioms.

Sheed has a point. Rodgers and Hammerstein might have been advanced in terms of integrating the elements of the stage musical, but they were retrograde in other ways. Jazz influence bled out of Rodgers' musical style once he teamed up with Hammerstein. High-minded sentiment -- sentimentality, really -- replaced Larry Hart's wit. Rodgers with Hart was a wicked good time; Rodgers with Hammerstein earnestly projected the Moral of the Story (e.g., "Climb Every Mountain"). It's impossible to imagine Rodgers and Hammerstein penning "There's a Small Hotel." It's impossible to imagine Rodgers and Hart writing "Sixteen Going on Seventeen."

Click on the banner link to buy sheet music for "It Might as Well Be Spring" and just about any other piece of music you can think of. Striniwrites is please to be an affiliate seller for Sheet Music Plus.

Frankly, I'd choose Rodgers and Hart's wit over Rodgers and Hammerstein's corn almost every time. That being said, I can still admire and enjoy the Romantic lushness of Rodgers' music and Hammerstein's lyrics. Their songs are great pleasures to sing, and I enjoy doing what I can with, say, "Some Enchanted Evening" and "It Might as Well Be Spring."

So I chose "It Might as Well Be Spring" for the second in my series of three Spring Songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it for State Fair, a movie musical based on Phil Stong's 1932 novel about an Iowa farm family's trip to the State Fair. The parents are interested in livestock and the latest irrigation technology. Their offspring hope to find romance. Teen daughter Margy (Jeanne Crain in the original film, with dubbed singing by Louann Hogan) sings "It Might as Well Be Spring" just before the family departs for the fair. It's getting into fall, but her teenage brain and heart are stuck in spring-fever mode.

With Rodgers and Hart, the music came first, and Hart shoe-horned the words to fit. In the '20s and '30s, Broadway teams wrote with one ear attuned to the stage and the other to the dance floor, so their tunes could have second lives in ballrooms with jazz bands. Hammerstein didn't think that way, and Rodgers fell in with his partner's The Play's the Thing mentality. The words came first with them, and Rodgers attached his melodies to them, in the way that Schubert set extant poetry in his lieder.

Rodgers composed two very different tunes for this particular set of words. Michael Feinstein performs and discusses both versions on the Library of Congress YouTube channel. Fascinating. Check it out.

And here's a bit of analysis from Rodgers himself, from a memoir quoted in Morgen Stevens-Garmon's excellent article about the song, recently published at the In the Muse Performing Arts Blog: As for the melody, it is a good example of the way a tune can amplify the meaning of its lyric. The first lines are: “I’m as restless as a willow in a wind storm, / I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string.” Taking its cue directly from these words the music itself is appropriately restless and jumpy. Moreover, since the song is sung by a young girl who can’t quite understand why she feels the way she does, I deliberately ended the phrase on the uncertain sound of the F natural (on the word “string”) rather than on the more positive F-sharp.

Rodgers and Hammerstein contributed just six songs to this big, splashy movie. They were wary of Hollywood, Rodgers especially.

Rodgers and Hart had followed the money from New York to Hollywood in 1931. They had a hit with their first film musical, Love Me Tonight, featuring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and did okay with the Al Jolson vehicle Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! But a couple of flops, one featuring faded star George M. Cohan, followed. After that, Rodgers and Hart couldn't get arrested in Hollywood, and the team headed east soured on the movie business. When 20th Century Fox approached Rodgers and Hammerstein about State Fair, the team agreed -- provided they could stay in New York and proceed without studio interference.

They did yield to one studio request. Rodgers conceived the present tune as an up-tempo number. The studio wanted it slowed down into a ballad. Rodgers went along with that grudgingly, but when the film came out, he admitted publicly that the studio was right.

"It Might as Well Be Spring" won the Oscar for Best Song, the only Oscar that Rodgers and Hammerstein ever won.

Many thanks to guitar ace Steve Schenkel for weaving a lead guitar line into my rendition.

Spring Song No. 1: "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

Spring Songs: Frank Loesser's "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year"

2021-03-22T15:34:00.006-05:00

This is the first of three American Songbook tunes about springtime.

by Tom Strini

When the notion of a series of stories of songs about spring occurred to me, I thought, well, that will be cheery after a year of gloom. It turns out that spring songs lean toward regret, longing or, at their cheeriest, wistfulness.

Maybe that's because so many were written during the Great Depression or World War II. Our present tune, Frank Loesser's "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," appeared mid-war in 1943. The lyrics could almost be a letter to or from a GI far from home:

Frank Loesser, Paramount Studio
PR photo, 1936, via Wikipedia
Commons

Spring will be a little late this year
A little late arriving in my lonely world over here
For you have left me and where is our April of old?
You have left me and winter continues cold...

As if to say... Spring will be a little slow to start
A little slow reviving that music it made in my heart
Yes, time heals all things so I needn't cling to this fear
It's merely that spring will be a little late this year

A glimmer of a sunbeam breaks through at the end: It's merely that spring will be a little late -- as in better late than never. Could the separation be temporary, something time could heal? The music, too, hints at optimism. The playful lilt of the rhythm resists a melancholy tempo. And almost every note of the melody fits harmoniously into the chords, with only the transitional "as if to say" hovering in dissonant uncertainty. Loesser chose not use dissonance to punch up emotional impact, a time-honored tactic of composers from Monteverdi through Springsteen. The structure is a little odd, too. The bridge is couched as an extended first ending to first eight-bar melody, and that "bridge" recurs, altered, at the end. Instead of the usual A-B-A form, Loesser delivers something like A-B-A-B1.

The song debuted in Christmas Holiday, a big-budget 1944 film featuring Deanna Durbin, who sings the song in the setting of a nightclub/brothel on Christmas Eve. Gene Kelly co-stars, surprisingly cast as a wastrel gambler, thief and killer.

Given the stars and the title, the public no doubt expected a holiday musical to chase away wartime blues. Instead, they got a gritty film noir, partly set in a brothel, based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. The only other song in it, except for incidental and background music, is Irving Berlin's "Always," from 1925. No wonder audiences left shaking their heads and warning friends. The movie flopped.

It's hard to say whether Loesser composed the song expressly for this movie. I suspect he wrote it ad hoc and happened to have it at the ready when Universal Pictures needed a torch song for Durbin, a terrific singer and, in this film, a gorgeous femme fatale. Durbin released a 78 rpm single of the song in 1945, but three orchestras had released recordings just before the film came out. The failure of the movie no doubt tamped down enthusiasm for the song. It all but disappeared from recordings until the great Sarah Vaughan, in a lush arrangement with the Percy Faith Orchestra, relaunched it in 1953. Since then, countless others have covered it. The song is now a standard.

"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" played an important role in Loesser's transition from lyricist to lyricist/composer. During his years penning words for the likes of Louis Alter, Alfred Newman, Burton Lane, Jule Styne and Jimmy McHugh, Loesser, a self-taught pianist, got into the habit of composing dummy tunes before he turned his words over to more trained musicians.

Then he heard the wartime -- and perhaps apocryphal -- story of the Navy chaplain who joined sailors in combat action. "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," the chaplain is supposed to have cried. Loesser heard the rhythm in the phrase and grew it into a set of patriotic lyrics and added a dummy tune. He played it for some friends who told him to publish it as is. "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" became a huge wartime hit and gave Loesser the confidence to become a complete songwriter.

"Spring Will Be" was his second big effort in that direction. By the time songwriting dried up in Hollywood, Loesser was as expert at crafting tunes as he was at writing lyrics. Loesser was to switch coasts and succeed on a resurgent Broadway. The Most Happy Fella, Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying are Broadway classics -- all with words and music by Frank Loesser.

Here's my rendition of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," elevated by the guitar track of my old friend Steve Schenkel.

More Strini on Music

Sources
Great American Songbook.Net, Frank Loesser Wikipedia Page, Wikipedia page for the song, Johnny Mercer Foundation; Books: America's Songs, by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser; The Great American Songbook, by Ken Bloom.

The Strini Memoir Crossword

2021-03-19T18:37:00.004-05:00

This interactive crossword draws on four stories that touch on aspects of Strini's biography.

Follow this link to an interactive online crossword. Each clue relates to a story published here at the striniwrites blog. The theme is memoir -- these four stories all have some aspect of biography. Each clue links to its related story, so hints and answers are at the ready. It's fun. And not as hard as the New York Times Sunday crossword.

The stories are:

Do use the interactive link above. But if you insist on printing the page and sharpening your pencil, here you go:

Strini Songbook: Daylight Savings? What about MOONLIGHT Saving Time?

2021-03-15T17:22:00.012-05:00

No time like the present to revive "(There Ought to Be a) Moonlight Saving Time."

by Tom Strini

So, how's everyone doing in the first week after Springing Ahead? An hour late for everything? Well, brace yourselves for another clock-dial twister, proposed for the first moon in June, 1931, and still pending.

It started with a song, "(There Oughta Be a) Moonlight Saving Time," with lyrics by Irving Kahal (1903-1942) and music by Harry Richman (1885-1972).

Both Kahal and Richman started as vaudeville performers. The circuit threw together singers, dancers, comedy writers, musicians of all sorts, and songwriters for long tours with thousands of miles of group railroad travel. Creative collaborations sprang up frequently. That's how Kahal became the lyricist partner of Sammy Fain. They collaborated, until Kahal's untimely death, on dozens of hits, including "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella," "I'll Be Seeing You (in All the Old Familiar Places)," "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me," and "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up that Old Gang of Mine" (which my dad and his brothers, after a few beers, sang in harmony).

"Moonlight Saving Time" appears to be a one-off detour from Kahal's work with Fain -- that sort of thing happened a lot with songwriting teams in those days. But it's hard to know for sure. Publishers bought 52 of Richman's songs, and almost all of them have fallen into obscurity. Just three other songs appear on his internet credits pages -- "Muddy Waters," "Singing a Vagabond Song" (with Val Burton, of "Penthouse Serenade" fame), and "There's Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie." But with 48 published songs lost in the mists of time and, by Richman's count, another 300 unpublished, who knows how often he and Kahal cranked out tunes.

Kahal left the stage early, focused on writing lyrics, and died young. As much as he worked at songwriting, stardom was Richman's day job. Though forgotten today, Harry Richman (born Henry Reichman, Jr.), was a household name throughout the 1920s and '30s. At age 11, he started playing piano in bars in hometown Cincinnati. By his 18th birthday, he was a veteran of the vaudeville circuit as a pianist, singer and comedian; in the early days, he copied Al Jolson, right down to the blackface act.

Mae West, a much bigger vaudeville star, boosted Richman's exposure when she hired him as her pianist in 1922, to further ignite an already rising career. According to Richman, West's manager, knowing of Richman's reputation as a ladies' man, warned him on day one against any hint of romance with West. Eighteen months later, after one "innocent" evening out with her, that was the end of the act. Richman instantly hooked up with a West rival, Norah Bayes. He became part of Bayes' successful Broadway run, which led to a prominent role in the George White Scandals revues, which led to major roles in the Ziegfield Follies, the pinnacle of show business in those years.

The biggest songwriters of the day, including George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jimmy McHugh, Irving Berlin and others -- contributed to these expensive, splashy revues, where songs debuted and became hits, especially if Richman delivered them in his powerful Jolsonesque baritone. In short order, A-list songwriters clamored for Richman's attention, as his presence expanded through hit records and radio shows.

Lobby art. (l-r) Constance Bennett,
Harry Richman, James Gleason.

In 1930, he went to Hollywood to star in Puttin' on the Ritz, which introduced Irving Berlin's title song to the world. Richman's bigger-than-life razzmatazz approach to acting didn't work so well in film, and he made just four features, two of them in England. In London, his stage career briefly caught fire in the late 1930s -- as his star faded in the U.S. (He "discovered" actress Maureen O'Hara while doing a show in Dublin, and got her a small part in one of his London films, and the rest is Hollywood history.)

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The recording studio, radio, the Broadway stage and New York suited Richman more than Hollywood. In an age of gossip columns, Richman kept his name in the papers just by being himself. He loved women and women loved him. He married and divorced three gorgeous showgirls, and in between kept himself busy with the likes of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow, among other movie stars. He owned a yacht, which for some reason exploded. He owned a popular nightclub next door to Carnegie Hall; it burned down. He owned a Rolls Royce and was known to fling money at pedestrians as he drove around New York. He clubbed around New York with babes on each arm. He learned to fly airplanes, bought a passenger plane from TWA and, with a professional pilot, flew it across the Atlantic and back in 1935. (He filled the plane with 41,000 ping-pong balls, for flotation in the event of a water landing. Richman sold autographed balls for the rest of his life.)

Changing tastes and a weakening voice ended Richman's career, except for occasional gigs, by the end of World War II. With no significant movie catalog to sustain his memory, he faded into obscurity. His divorces and high living wiped out most of his fortune, and he lived his last years in a modest bungalow in Santa Monica, Calif.

His autobiography, A Hell of a Life, published in 1966, prompted a touching, two-part interview with Telescope, a Canadian television magazine show. Six or so minutes into Part 2, Richman turns to the piano, plays a bit of "Moonlight Saving Time" and says a few words about its creation.

Truth be told, it's not much of a song, a novelty trifle that hasn't aged well and is rife with cliche in both words and music. Richman might have sung it in his nightclub acts or in radio appearances, but he never sang it in a movie or Broadway show and never recorded it. Others had hits with it, though, starting with Guy Lombardo in 1930, Maurice Chevalier and Annette Hanshaw in 1931. Some singers have made something quite lovely from this nothing of a song. I love what Blossom Dearie did with it, in both her clever, up-tempo jazz treatment (1955) and her intimate, sensual half-speed rendition (1967). And I'm pleased to link to a wonderful reading of the piece by classy chanteuse Erin Bode my good friend Steven Schenkel, St. Louis' guitar wizard.

Ah moonlight, ah romance. Who doesn't want an extra hour of both?

More Strini on Music

Memoir: A 1952 Nash Rambler in the Missouri Woods

2021-03-11T12:51:00.010-06:00

Another reason for me to love hiking in Rock Bridge State Park.

by Tom Strini

As I hiked the ridges and ravines of the Deer Run Trail in Rock Bridge State Park, I thought about writing a descriptive, poetic piece about the forested enchantment of this place, which is just a mile or two south of our home in Columbia, Mo.

With that in mind, I stopped along Little Bonne Femme Creek to take in the forest to the west and the majestic bluff to the east, with its limestone outcroppings, scrappy trees clinging doggedly to thin soil on a steep grade and the -- wait. What? What's that, way up there? Is that... a car?

A few paces down the trail afforded a clearer view. Yes. A car, at least the carcass of one, wedged among rocks, a tree, undergrowth and the park's perimeter fence.

Rock Bridge Park has many natural wonders -- sinkholes, caves, majestic cliffs, springs and many spring-fed creeks, hundreds of acres of forest -- but it is not a pristine wilderness. In the 19th century, a flour mill, a whisky distillery, a paper mill, a general store, a dance hall, a mansion and numerous farms stood on the site, which became a state park in 1967. Its 2,273 acres straddle Missouri Highway 163.

An old metal hulk would be offensive amid, say, the giant redwoods of Northern California. I'm not for turning Rock Bridge into a junkyard; one car is enough. But that old wreck somehow seems at home and right nestled against the park's boundary fence. Like the remains of silos along the park's Sinkhole Trail, the car is an interesting human artifact that fires curiosity, nostalgia and narrative speculation.

1952 Nash Rambler at rest outside the fence of Rock Bridge State Park

Especially if you're a 12-year-old boy, which I became again at that moment. Hey! Look! A car! Oh yeah, I am climbing up there because it's a car and it's in the woods where a car shouldn't be and a door is off it and windows are busted and I gotta get up there.

So I climbed, grabbing the skinny trunks of scrub trees and feeling dead leaves, loose dirt and gravel give way under my boots and slide down the slope.

As I closed in on the old car, nostalgia took hold of me. Well, nostalgia might not be the right word. It was more about familiarity with something long lost. That odd roofline rang a distant bell. As did those fenders, with that unique skirting of both front and rear wheel wells.

This wasn't just any car. This was a Nash. I reckoned from 1952. (I looked it up when I got home; I guessed right.)

Restored 1952 Nash Rambler,
same model as the hulk in the woods.
Mark Axen photo of his restored car,
via Old Cars Weekly.

I'm not really a car buff, but from the time I was 4 I could identify all the makes on the road. I'm 71, so Packards, Hudsons, Willys, Crosleys, Nashes, Studebakers, all long-lost brands, made an early impression on me. Funny what sticks in the memory.

The perimeter fence does not mark the top of the bluff, which rises for a good 100 yards beyond the wreck. How did this car happen to land here? No road runs at the top of the bluff today, but Route K is not far off. I'm pretty sure it existed in the 1950s, and I'm guessing it connected with the old Plank Road, which connected to a Missouri River port.

Did a driver lose control back in the day and slide off into the dark? Did the car roll over a few times before landing on its wheels? Did some thief strip the car and dump it here? Or did a farmer just push a worn-out vehicle out of sight and out of mind onto a commercially useless piece of land? If I wrote fiction, I could hang a story on any of those hooks.

Photo via nashnut.com.

Such thoughts darted through my mind as I stood near the Nash, while trying to keep my balance on the steep pitch.

But mainly I thought about the poignant nature of the passage of time. I thought about my grumpy, distant maternal grandfather, who drove a roomy, elegant Nash Ambassador. And I thought about my dad, whose first new car was a 1950 Nash Rambler compact wagon.

I remember dad leaving my younger brother Bob and me, when we were about 4 and 3, in the Rambler while he ran into a store one summer afternoon. "I'm gonna leave you two here for a couple of minutes. Don't touch anything," he said, gesturing toward all the things a boy would want to touch -- steering wheel, radio, horn, gear shift arm, clock, parking brake, rear view mirror...

My dad's 1950 Rambler wagon was exactly
like this one. Same color. Photo via John's Old Car and Truck
Pictures.

Of course I slid right over the bench seat into driving position and Bob climbed over into the front passenger seat. I grabbed the wheel and we joined in making motor noises. We scrambled back into proper position when we saw dad coming.

He got in, looked us over like Perry Mason examining a hostile witness and asked the question we knew was coming: "Did you guys touch anything?"

Me: No. Bob: No.

"How come the heater's on then?"

I honestly did not know. With all the other fun stuff on the dashboard, the heater controls were of no interest. But we were busted all the same.

1952 Rambler dashboard. Photo via
the Wikiwand Nash Rambler page.

When mom was in the car, which was most of the time if we were in it, we boys rode in back. Riding in front was a bit of a thrill. I remember being up there and my dad saying: "Want to see the car drive itself?"

He raised his arms from the wheel, as if conjuring a spirit, and drove along no-hands for a couple of St. Louis city blocks. I thought it was some form of magic. Actually, it was just his informal way of checking wheel alignment.

On another front seat adventure, I noticed the little shelf on the door panel. What's this, dad?

"That's an armrest."

I looked to the back seat. No armrests. Dad, how come there's no armrest back there?

"Because arms don't get tired in the back seat."

Wally, Rose, Tom and Bob Strini in the alley off Hebert Street in North
St. Louis, c. 1952. That's the Nash Rambler behind us. Probably
heading to a picnic of the Spartans Club, a group of dad's boyhood pals
and teammates that held together from grade school through old age.

The scientific half of my 4-year-old brain thought something along the lines of: My, what a strange phenomenon. Arms tire in front seats but NOT in back! Go figure. This baffled me until I was about 9 and thought: Wait a darn minute here! That's just baloney! There's no armrest because this is a cheap car!

Such thoughts came flooding back because I happened to take a 3.75 mile hike on a particular trail on a March day before the trees leaf out and make the car invisible. And because the hulk happened to be a certain make from a certain time.

I scoured the internet for some reference to the Rambler in the Woods. No old news story about an accident. No comments from hikers or trail bikers. I couldn't be the only hiker to notice the car on the cliff. And yet, nothing. I suppose I might be the only one who thought to write about it.

That's fine. Let the old Nash -- once someone's new-car pride and joy -- stay forever parked on the slope, mysterious, inexplicable, half-merged with the landscape, a blank canvas for the imagination and a conjuror of memories. Rest in peace, old Rambler.

More memoir: The Long, Long Fly Ball, Rattlesnake.

Milwaukee's Danceworks Mess, Seen from Afar

2021-03-09T13:38:00.004-06:00

Danceworks has developed a rich a singular ethos and specific culture. They are in jeopardy.

by Tom Strini

Whenever I could, back in my Milwaukee days, I looked in on the dance and choreography students at the UWM. During my 32 years covering the arts in Milwaukee, UWM's dance program became a producer of talented, hard-working and resourceful artists. Many of them stuck around and created a vibrant modern-dance scene.

Sarah Wilbur

I first saw Sarah Wilbur and Dani Kuepper at a student concert when they were sophomores at UWM. I came away thinking well, those two bear watching. Two more years of watching student work confirmed my early inklings and deepened my interest.

I'm pretty sure I first met them in 1996, about they time they were graduating with BFA degrees. Wilbur called me on my office phone, in a businesslike way, to ask for an appointment. I had no story agenda for the meeting, and Wilbur or Kuepper (then Dani Wallisch, before her marriage to Ryan Kuepper) had no event to pitch. I wanted to get to know them, and they just wanted to talk.

Dani Kuepper

We met in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cafeteria, which was empty in the late afternoon. (I was amid my 14th of 27 years as dance critic at The Milwaukee Journal, which had a year before become the merged Journal Sentinel.) They talked and talked, always passionately and often wittily, about Milwaukee's dance scene, what it had and what it lacked, and how their talented UWM cohort might fit into it and, in the process, transform it.

After that talk, I saw in them not just talent and enthusiasm, but also intelligence and drive. I was sure they would make a difference. Two years later, Mary Newton, a physician with a dance background, and Polly Morris, a canny arts administrator, started forming an organization around Wilbur, especially, Kuepper, and a scrappy gang of recent UWM dance grads.

They started putting on little shows and established themselves as a company with a particular gift for physical hilarity. My god, they were funny.

Their range expanded and their skill level rose. Donors took an interest. They got into the Water Street building. They figured out community outreach on a level far beyond that of any other arts institution. They became the city's go-to teaching studio from everything from ballet to ballroom to hip-hop. Deborah Farris came on as executive director and found new revenue streams and brought order to the office.

Yes, Danceworks had its crises and growing pains over the years, but it essentially did everything right in a business in which things routinely go wrong. They built a culture. Danceworks, with its modest budget and facilities, became a key part of the cultural ecology of Milwaukee.

Wilbur served as artistic director for 10 years. When she left for UCLA in 2006, Kuepper was the natural successor. The performing company and its far-flung outreach and studio activities kept purring along through a seamless transition. The company never lost that communal, cooperative vibe. Dancers and choreographers bought into the community outreach piece with uncommon commitment. Those who wanted a chance to make dances as well as perform got those chances. Those who went off to New York or Chicago or L.A. to make their fortunes were bid bon voyage -- and welcomed home if they wanted to return. Management, board and artists all seemed to sing together -- if not in perfect harmony on every note, at least always in the same key.

During my decades in Milwaukee, I covered meltdowns at The Skylight, the Milwaukee Symphony, Ko-Thi, the Milwaukee Ballet, the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, Theatre X, the Milwaukee Art Museum north expansion, Walker's Point Center, Present Music, the Florentine Opera, the Fine Arts Quartet, the Bel Canto Chorus and, no doubt, others that I have forgotten. Most of them recovered and survived. Most of them.

Danceworks always seemed to be the most resilient and resourceful of the lot. They apparently avoided the internal feuds that tripped up everyone else.

Until now.

A company veteran contacted me with a plea for -- well, not exactly help or advice, but perhaps for a friendly ear: The board is out of touch with the dancers. And I read my old friend Jim Higgins's story about the company in the Journal Sentinel.

Dani Kuepper has resigned in frustration. The company is in flux. The board is bringing in an executive director with no roots in dance and no relationship with Danceworks -- at a rate of pay far above any other employee in the place. To hear the Danceworkers tell it, the board went off on its own and rejected input from Kuepper and never sought any from the dancers, teachers and other staff.

I have a particular fondness for Danceworks, and this news pains me. But I've been there before. I've seen boards and donors behave badly. I've seen founders hang on too long. I've seen artists with unrealistic expectations and demands. I've seen executives who were good but overwhelmed by circumstance, or plain incompetent, or venal. I've seen many roads to hell paved with good intentions. I've seen enough to know that every story has at least three sides -- it's never as simple as two.

We left Milwaukee in 2014. At this point, I am acquainted with just two board members. I'm long out of the news business and in no position to interview lots of involved parties and triangulate the truth. (I could probably be a helpful mediator, but no one will be ringing my phone about that.)

But I am intimate with the history of Danceworks. I can say for certain that the biggest reason for its relative success and stability over the years was its ethos -- its soul. It's been an all-for-one and one-for-all enterprise. Wilbur, Morris and Newton saw to that. Kuepper saw to that. Farris saw to that. The teachers, dancers, choreographers, office and tech staff bought into it and prospered, and they despair at the prospect of it slipping away. To sacrifice that soul in the name of progress or professionalism or efficiency will prove to be a disastrous error for the company.

When Farris retired and Kuepper walked out, part of the Danceworks soul walked out with them. The board does not seem to understand that its Job 1 during transition is to preserve and nurture that soul, so the company can continue to evolve according to its nature. To bring in an outside executive and then to search for an outside artistic director at the same time will certainly lead to other exits and the total loss of that singular Danceworks ethos. No outside executive or A.D./choreographer (note how rigidly hierarchical most dance companies are) is likely to understand the communal nature of Danceworks or sign on for anything but the usual top-down artistic and management model.

Once the board takes that step, the essence of Danceworks will be lost. And what, exactly, will remain?

Cooking: Spanish Vegetable Stew

2021-03-08T15:43:00.004-06:00

Manchegan stew is quick and easy, as a main or as a side.

by Tom Strini

When Don Quixote dined at home, he ate Pisto Manchego.

Most Spanish cookbooks include a version of this dish from La Mancha, an agricultural region of central Spain not generally noted for its cuisine. I ran across it years ago, in The Best of Spain, a slim but indispensable volume by Alicia Saacs.

Spanish vegetable stew, in progress.

Zucchini is the essence of this uncommonly versatile and variable dish. You can cook it al dente or to a soft consistency. You can serve it hot, chilled or room temp. The proportions and ingredients are readily expandable, depending on season and whether the stew serves as a side or a main.

I've amended Saacs' recipe by subbing sliced grape tomatoes (which stay intact and don't lose their skins) for full-sized tomatoes and Dunbar roasted red peppers for fresh green pepper (which I just don't like). I also added garbanzos. Their nutty flavor adds depth to the dish and balances the acidity of the tomatoes. They also make it a dual-purpose side, covering both carbs and veggies. No need for potatoes or rice if you have garbanzos. Double the garbanzos and eliminate the prosciutto, and you have a nice one-pot vegetarian stew.

(Oh my god! Did I just type vegetarian?! I don't even know me anymore! In my defense, I served Manchegan stew as a side with some spectacular hamburgers last night.)

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 25 minutes, 10 active 15 passive.

Spanish Vegetable Stew Ingredients

3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups coarsely chopped onion
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
2 tablespoons diced or sliced prosciutto (optional--and pancetta works even better)
1/2 cup roasted red pepper, coarsely chopped
1 pint grape tomatoes, sliced in half
2 tablespoons dry white wine
2 medium zucchini or 1 zucchini and 1 yellow summer squash, diced medium and tossed with 1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon dried parsley (fresh parsley is great, too, added in the last five minutes of cooking)
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 pound canned garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas), rinsed and drained

Spanish Vegetable Stew Process

Heat the oil in a deep pot.
Add the onions, prosciutto, and garlic; sauté over medium heat, stirring frequently, until onions are translucent.
Add tomatoes and red pepper and cook 5 minutes.
Add the diced, salted zucchini, the parsley and oregano. Stir.
Raise heat to medium high; pour in the wine. After 1 minute, reduce heat to low. Stir.
Pour in the garbanzos and add eight grinds of black pepper; mix well.
Cover and cook over low heat for five minutes.
Check and correct salt and pepper seasoning.
Cover and cook for 10 minutes more, or until the zucchini have reached your preferred degree of tenderness.

More Strini on cooking.

Cooking: March Madness Ham Shanks and Pinto Beans

2021-03-06T11:29:00.005-06:00

They're delicious, and so is the aroma of the long, slow, stovetop simmer.

by Tom Strini

You could order out for pizzas as you hunker down for long days of TV basketball. But don't.

For a fraction of the cost and orders of magnitude more pleasure and satisfaction, make this bean stew. Prep the night before, put it on to simmer first thing in the morning, luxuriate in the mouth-watering cooking scents for hours, and dip into the stockpot whenever you feel the need (or can't resist).

Ingredients for Ham Shanks and Pinto Beans

1.5 pounds dried pinto beans.
1 large onion, about 2 cups diced.
4 ribs celery, strings removed, cut crosswise into quarter-inch crescents.
1 medium carrot, in small dice.
7 cloves garlic (about 2 tablespoons), coarsely chopped.
1/2 cup roasted red pepper. (Char a fresh pepper on the stovetop if you want. Caution: Unpaid product endorsement ahead. But I always have a jar of Dunbar's roasted red peppers handy.)
3 tablespoons peanut oil.
Three dried juniper berries. (Don't have juniper berries? Soldier on without them. Order for next time. They're great in beef stew, too.)
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika.
1/2 teaspoon flaked red pepper.
4 teaspoons dried oregano.
2 tablespoons dried parsley.
2-4 prepared ham shanks, depending on your preferred level of meatiness. (I used two.)
Black pepper to taste.
4 cups chicken stock.
6 cups plain water.

About ham shanks: They come pre-smoked and tightly packaged, about 3/4 pound and $4.25 each. Refrigerated and unopened, the shanks keep for quite a long time. Supermarkets usually hide them somewhere among the bacon and sausages and ham steaks. Do not be dismayed by the thick layer of gristly skin or the fact that these things are hard as baseballs. The skin will loosen for easy removal during cooking. Cooking will make the succulent meat beneath the skin as soft as warm butter. Unpaid product endorsement: Do buy the great stuff from Burgers' Smokehouse, 30 or so miles south of us, in beautiful California, Mo. They send to the lower 48 states. Tell them I sent you.

Cooking Process for Ham Shanks and Pinto Beans

The night before, sort through the dry beans and discard any broken or darkened ones. (Keep an eye out for foreign matter. I've never found a pebble among beans, but every recipe warns against them.) Rinse the beans, pour them into a large, heavy-bottomed stock pot, and add cold water to submerge them by three or four inches for an overnight soak.
Prepare a mirepoix of the onion, celery, carrot and garlic. (I recommend doing this the night before, too. But seal it tightly, so your entire refrigerator doesn't reek.)
Empty the beans from the stockpot into a strainer. Rinse the beans and the pot with cold water.
Warm the stockpot over medium heat. Add the peanut oil.
Add the ham shanks, whole, to the hot oil. Stir them about with a stout wooden spoon for maybe 8 minutes. Brown bits will start to cling to the bottom of the pot. That's good.
Remove the ham shanks to a plate. Pour the mirepoix into the pot. Reduce heat slightly. Stir the mirepoix with a firm nylon spatula, scraping up the brown bits as you go. (The liquid from the vegetables will deglaze the pot.) Regulate heat to avoid burning the garlic. Stir until the onions are translucent and softened, about 6 minutes.
Reduce heat to low. Stir in the roasted red pepper.
Stir in the smoked paprika, the flaked red pepper, the oregano and the parsley.
Stir in the beans.
Add the juniper berries and the bay leaves. (No need to stir; you don't want to break the dried bay leaves.)
Add seven grinds of black pepper.
If you have prepared chicken stock, pour in four cups of it. Then add six cups of water and stir gently to mix. Otherwise, gently mix in a heaping tablespoon of Better than Bouillon chicken stock paste (another unpaid endorsement there), then gently stir in 10 cups of water.
Bring to a low boil. Return the ham shanks to the pan, then reduce heat to lowest simmer your burner allows, cover the pot, and walk away for an hour.
Then stir and scrape to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom. Walk away for an hour and repeat.
After three hours of cooking, the skin should be separating from the meat of the ham shanks. Grasp the shanks with large tongs and place them on a cutting board. Remove and discard the skins and bones. Trim any clinging fat from the meat and cut it to your preferred size. (I like it in large chunks.) Return the ham to the pot.
Simmer two to three more hours, uncovered. Check and stir every 20 to 30 minutes. The beans must be covered with liquid throughout; add a bit of water if necessary.
The stew is done when the beans are still intact, but very soft and creamy. And it's stew, not soup; the liquid should reduce to a thick gravy.
You might have noticed that at no point have I indicated adding salt. Those salty shanks take care of that. Check and adjust, if needed, before serving.
For serving: a dollop of sour cream is nice, as with chili, but not necessary.

Side Dishes for Ham Shanks and Pinto Beans

Cornbread is an absolute must with this. Yet another (unfortunately) unpaid product endorsement: I use Bob's Red Mill coarse corn meal and the recipe on the bag, with the optional sugar but subbing white cake flour for whole wheat cake flour. Wonderful texture to this cornbread.

Greens: Mustard greens would be ideal. I didn't have any, so I micro'd some frozen spinach, sautéed some shallots in butter in a non-stick skillet, then re-cooked the spinach with the shallots and 1/8 tsp nutmeg, with some salt and pepper. That gets the water out of the spinach, which is the trick to making frozen spinach -- horrid straight from the microwave -- tasty.

To Drink: American style beer. Budweiser's great with this. As is my local favorite, Burr Oak Brewing's Old 63. (Yet another unpaid product endorsement. Maybe some day...)

More Strini on Cooking.

Love Lasagna? Oh Yes, but It's Complicated.

2021-03-01T16:45:00.002-06:00

My world's best lasagna takes hours to prepare, but so worth it.

by Tom Strini

I've always loved lasagna, and always hated boiling dried lasagna noodles and festooning the entire kitchen with them when they dried.

The solution: Make my own fresh pasta. The big gain: No pre-boiling; the tomato sauce cooks the pasta as the lasagna bakes. And fresh pasta beats dry pasta in flavor and texture.

Not that this makes the process easier overall. You have to make the pasta, and that takes time. But come on! That's fun, not work.

The following instructions draw on modified versions of lasagna recipes by Mark Bittman, Marcella Hazan and Giada De Laurentiis, plus many of my own touches. The result is the best lasagna I've ever tasted. Clear an afternoon, gather ingredients, and earn that deliciousness.

Before you start, remove four large eggs from the fridge. Separate them, put the yolks in a small bowl, and let them come to room temperature.

The Sauce

I have modified Hazan's Bolognese sauce, mainly by greatly increasing the tomato content. We need the extra liquid to cook the pasta.

Bolognese Ingredients

1 medium onion, 2 medium carrots, three ribs celery, all very coarsely chopped (about 1 cup each).
2 tablespoons butter.
2 tablespoons olive oil.
1 pound 85% lean ground beef.
1 cup heavy cream (or whole milk).
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg.
1 cup dry white wine.
2 28-ounce cans of whole peeled tomatoes. Please do not go cheap on this; buy premium Italian plum tomatoes.
Salt, pepper
8-ounce package of fresh, pre-washed spinach.

Bolognese Process

Place celery, onion and carrot in a food processor and pulse until they are finely chopped and combined.
Warm a deep, heavy stewpot over medium heat. Add olive oil and butter.
Ground beef amid the mirepoix.
When the butter has melted, empty the vegetables from the food processor into the stewpot. Sautee for five minutes, stirring almost constantly. Don't let the mixture brown.
Push the vegetables to the edges of the pan, to clear the center. Drizzle a few drops of olive oil onto the exposed surface. Break up the ground beef with your hands and drop the pieces into the center of the pan. Wash your hands, then further break up the cooking beef with the edge of a hard nylon spatula.
When the beef has browned lightly, stir to combine with the vegetables. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon salt and several grinds of black pepper.
Turn heat low and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.
Draining the fat.
Place a fine strainer over a bowl. Remove the beef and vegetables from the stewpot and place them in the strainer, to drain off fat, about five minutes. Press gently with the bottom of a spatula to speed the process. Keep the stewpot warm.
Return the mixture to the stewpot. Simmer three minutes to thoroughly reheat.
Stir in the cream and the nutmeg.
Simmer gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Raise heat to medium. Pour in the white wine. Stir.
Tomatoes ready for mashing.
When the wine has mostly evaporated (5-6 minutes), add both cans of tomatoes. Break them up and combine them with the other ingredients by pressing them gently but firmly with a potato masher. Keep the masher handy, in case any chunks surface during the cooking process.
When the tomatoes begin to bubble, reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 90 minutes, stirring occasionally. [Note: Traditional Bologneses simmer for three hours or more, to cook out most of the liquid; authentic versions are rather dry. We halve the cooking time to retain liquid for cooking the pasta.]
Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet and wilt the spinach. Remove from heat, place in a small bowl, and reserve until the lasagna assembly process.

The Pasta

You can roll out pasta dough by hand. You can also mow your lawn with scissors. Buy an Atlas Pasta Machine.

Pasta Ingredients

2 cups cake flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 egg yolks (separated and at room temperature)
1/3 cup olive oil
1/2 cup water

Pasta Process

Stir dry ingredients together, then place them in the bowl of your food processor. (The one you used for the vegetables, right? The one you have since thoroughly washed and dried, right?)
Add the egg yolks. Pulse to combine.
Strini pasta wrangling

With the machine running, gradually drizzle in the olive oil, then the water.
If the dough has clumped to one side of the processor bowl or failed to combine thoroughly, scrape it down and pulse it a few more times.
Gather a bit of dough in your hands and squeeze. If it's soft and elastic, you're good. If it's hard and unyielding, add a couple teaspoons of water and pulse the dough a few more times.
Turn the dough onto a lightly floured pastry board (a granite countertop is perfect). Flour your hands, gather the dough into a ball, and knead it for 5-8 minutes.
Shape the dough into a loaf, wrap it in plastic, and rest it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
After the dough has rested, cut the loaf cross-wise into four smaller, rectangular loaves.
Turn your pastry board to a "portrait" orientation. Flour it.
Shape a small loaf into a neater rectangle (trim off a bit if necessary -- trust me, you have more than enough dough).
With a rolling pin, roll the loaf away from you, until it is just under 1/8-inch thick. If necessary, trim this piece with a small, sharp knife to make it more neatly rectangular.
Set your Atlas machine to 1 -- that is, the largest gap between the rollers. Carefully crank your strip of dough through the machine. [Note: You MUST begin by inserting a straight edge of dough into the machine. Once a strip of dough starts to twist going into the rollers, you're screwed.]
Repeat this process on the 2, 3, 4 and 5 settings. If the dough strip becomes unwieldy in its length, cut it in half.
Such processing of three mini-loaves should be plenty for one large (9x12 inch) or two 8x8-inch lasagnas. If something goes wrong, you still have one emergency loaf. [Note: The picture on the box and some online videos show flawless strips exactly the width of the rollers emerging from the machine. Yours won't look like that. Especially on your first few tries, you'll find that the edges will shred. No matter. You can trim off the edges and just use the good parts. The dough pieces need not be uniform in the baking dish. A patchwork is just fine, and cannot be detected by your diners.]

Lasagna Assembly

Additional ingredients for assembly: 2 cups grated parmesan cheese; 2 cups grated romano cheese: 12 ounces whole-milk ricotta cheese.

Set up an assembly line around your well-buttered baking dish(es), in this left-to-right order:

Pasta, rolled and ready to trim to fit
Bolognese sauce
Cooked spinach
Ricotta
Grated Romano
Grated parmesan

Lasagna Assembly Process

Pre-heat oven to 400F.
Adjust Bolognese for salt and pepper, then spread a layer of the sauce across bottom of the baking dish.
Second layer in progress.
Set pasta panels over Bolognese. Make sure that the pasta pieces don't overlap too much; vapors need room to escape around the sides, lest they cause the pasta to erupt in the center. (It's just an aesthetic thing -- we want that nice flat top. Won't affect flavor.)
Spread Bolognese over the first layer of pasta. [Two Notes: Watch your pasta distribution; you want to save plenty for the top. Also, be sure to get plenty of sauce around the edges, where the pasta is most likely to dry out during baking.]
Dab globs of spinach into the red sauce.
Dab globs of ricotta into the red sauce.
Sprinkle romano and parmesan cheeses over over the sauce.
Cover the sauce with a second layer of pasta. Repeat application of sauce and all the remaining spinach and ricotta, and sprinkle with half the remaining parmesan and romano.
Cover with a third layer of pasta noodles.
Spread Bolognese generously over the third pasta layer.
I prefer making two 8-inch
lasagnas to a single larger one.
Quicker cooking, easier storage
and easier to give one away.

Sprinkle half the remaining parmesan and romano over the top.
Cover your pans tightly with aluminum foil. Bake for 25 minutes on the center rack. (Your oven may vary. Mine is very fast, especially on convection.)
Remove foil. Raise oven temp to 425F. Sprinkle remaining parmesan and romano over the top.
Return lasagna to oven. Remove when the top cheeses are bubbling, about five minutes. A bit of browning is welcome.
Remove lasagna from the oven and let it cool for 10-15 minutes.
Serve with a crisp green salad (or broccoli steamed and dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper) and, of course, a nice chianti.

Does that sound like a lot of work? Well, it is. The reward is the best lasagna on the planet.

Here's a shortcut to the world's second-best lasagna: Make a big batch of my all-purpose red sauce. Break up the hamburger and fry it in a skillet. Drain off the grease and dump the meat into the red sauce. This will shorten the lasagna-making process by about an hour.

More Strini in the Kitchen here.

When I Was a Scholar, I Wrote a Little Book on Renaissance Lute Music

2021-02-27T14:20:00.003-06:00

Forty-five years later, my guide to transcribing 16th-century lute music is on the market.

by Tom Strini

As a classical guitar performance major in graduate school, I got interested in old lute music, which is playable on guitar. Some transcriptions were published and on the market, most of them from the Baroque era. Bach's alleged lute suites and transcriptions of cello and violin works led the pack.

This was 1974, before internet research. So I found what I could buried deep in the surprisingly well-stocked music library of Southern Illinois University. I found out that reams of Renaissance lute manuscripts and early printed score resided in European archives, and that some had been reproduced in facsimile books.

Lute music was never published in modern musical notation or any of its precursors. Lutenists recorded their music in tablature, a visual representation that shows where to stop the strings on the fingerboard for any given pitch. Typically, they placed rhythm symbols above the horizontal grid of lines that represented the strings (as in the image below).

The author, 1974. Note the
Medici Renaissance coif.

Tablatures varied significantly from country to country, year to year, and even composer/player to composer/player. For some reason I decided to take on the daunting task of sorting all this out. From Carbondale, Ill. With no internet. And no budget.

So I starting writing to archives in Europe and to American sources, such as Chicago's Newberry Research Library, and waiting weeks to receive microfilms of some of their holdings. I pored over a bewildering array of tablatures and figured out how to interpret them, translate them into modern notation and play them. The result was the 63-page Transcription and Performance of Continental Lute and Vihuela Music of the 16th Century; An Introduction for the Guitarist.

I got my A for the paper, bound it neatly in a metal-clasp folder, put it in a box, and forgot about it. Miraculously, it stuck with me through moves to St. Louis, to San Diego, to Los Angeles, back to St. Louis, to Milwaukee, to Corvallis, Oregon, and now to Columbia, Mo. Not to mention a writing career comprising 27 years in newspapers, 11 in online media, seven in content marketing editing and writing, and occasional adjunct stints in academia (no guitar involved). And zero years as a professional musician.

But during our five years in Corvallis, I dusted off the classical repertoire and played in a couple of classical guitar ensembles. I wrote a stage show about the history of the classical and flamenco guitar. And I pulled out that old treatise.

I remember myself as a rather lazy student, but the work involved and the detail and taut organization of this old paper impressed me. Maybe I wasn't such a bad scholar, after all. I began to think that I should do something with this -- what? booklet?

So I have. I scanned it in, added a new cover page, and uploaded it to sheetmusicplus.com, a Hal Leonard division that has a little department for composers, arrangers and -- ahem -- scholars. It's posted there for $10.

Crass commercial moment: This link takes you right to the purchase page for the lute guide. (Note that Tom Strini Writes is also an affiliate seller for SheetMusicPlus, so anything you buy there via my website -- including via the banner link below -- will earn a bit of a commission for me.)

I'm not expecting a land rush of sales, but the book might be helpful for some curious guitarists out there. The contents include a dozen pieces by French, Spanish, Italian and German lutenists active between 1500 and 1600. The original tablatures and my modern performing editions are there for guitarists to compare and play, along with bits of biography and history and a discussion of the idiosyncrasies of each tablature. Note that this was before computer music engraving programs, so I had to copy the music with dipping ink and a custom pen nib made for the task. The same tools Beethoven used.

Here's a sample selection, Vincenzo Capirola's Ricercar X, c. 1517.

Strini's notational realization of the original tablature.

Now, the original tablature. Capirola, a wealthy nobleman, could afford to have his manuscript ornamented with fanciful illustrations. The top line is the last bit of the preceding piece. The Ricercar starts on the second line. I found this tab at Casey Fitzpatrick's indispensable and elegant site about all things lute and Baroque guitar.

More Strini on Music.

American Songbook: "Penthouse Serenade"

2021-02-13T17:37:00.008-06:00

Guest guitarist Steve Schenkel joins me in a song fit for quarantine times.

by Tom Strini

Far below the golden realms of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and the rest of American Songbook royalty lie the nether regions of the One-Hit Wonders. There, information becomes sparse and shrouded in the mists of time.

Koko and Bimbo check out Betty Boop as she
towels off after a showering on her penthouse terrace.

One-Hit Wonders

Take Val Burton and Will Jason. We know they wrote "Penthouse Serenade" in 1931. We also know that they had personal, as well as professional, connections: Their wives -- in lifelong marriages for both couples -- Pearl Stuben Burton and Selena Stuben Jason, were sisters.

We know that Burton (born Isadore Harry Burns in London, England, in 1901) and Jason (b. William Jacobson in New York City in 1910) somehow got to Hollywood and teamed up on a handful of songs and some movie projects. We don't know exactly when they arrived, but they were certainly in L.A. by 1934. That year, two of their songs, "Dilly Dally" and "The Big Bad Wolf Is Dead" were sung in a hit comedy, Cockeyed Cavaliers.

Note that Billy Cotton and His Band had already recorded and released "Big Bad Wolf" in 1933. Irving Berlin, the Gershwins and the other A-listers signed contracts to write all the songs for film musicals. D-listers such as Burton and Jason cranked out songs and sold them as they could.

Val Burton

Some sources state that "Penthouse Serenade" first came before the public (with altered lyrics) in a Fleischer Studios Betty Boop cartoon in 1933. (The songwriters are uncredited.) May Questal, one of seven baby-voiced actresses to voice the character, did the singing. But the Victor Arden-Phil Ohman Orchestra had released a recording on the powerhouse Victor label in 1932. On that disc, Frankie Munn sings the lyrics we know today, against a very businessman's-bounce society band arrangement. But that wasn't the first recording; Smith Ballew beat them to it with a release under the title "When We're Alone," on the tiny Romeo label, in 1931. (Romeo discs, by the way, were sold exclusively through the Kress chain of five-and-dime stores.)

Song Details

The song oozes charm, despite a glaring grammatical goof in the lyrics: "...a sweet slice of heaven for just you and I." Egad, the preposition for takes the objective case me. Geez.

The sentiment of the song turns on a desire to retreat from the hubbub of New York City to an apartment in the clouds (uptown on Riverside Drive, my favorite part of NYC). The plan is to wait out the Depression by quarantining in place. An opposite-world notion just now, but weirdly apt.

The song could not be simpler: a 32-bar A-B-A standard structure, a tune that undulates step-wise in triplets, almost like a barcarolle, until ending in a cadence of widely space half-notes with a "blues" minor third on the tonic chord. (The key is C in standard editions; I transposed to E to accommodate my voice.) A contrasting middle section abandons the triplets and rises and falls in stair-step thirds. The harmonies flirt with G-major and A-minor, but don't really stray from C.

Grammar aside, the declamation -- that is, the way the music and the words fit together -- is excellent. This song is more than easy to sing; it's a pleasure to sing. You should try it.

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My research into Burton and Jason failed to determine who wrote the lyrics and who wrote the music. My guess is they shared both duties. Their catalog runs to about a dozen songs, but I couldn't find any beyond those linked in this story. And some of those listed in the Database of Popular Music seem suspect -- "Ain't Gonna Rain No More," for example, which dates to at least 1923 and is probably traditional and anonymous. Maybe Burton and Jason just adapted it for a long-lost film. I seem to remember it figuring in a Popeye cartoon.

Songwriters a Movie Director and Script Writer

In any case, songwriting appears to have been a sideline for both Burton and Jason. Burton, who died in 1980, wrote or co-wrote 30 screenplays between 1936 and 1951. Several feature the character of Henry Aldrich, a spinoff of a radio situation comedy about a hapless teen's misadventures in Centerville USA. The only film you might have heard of is Bedtime for Bonzo. You know, the one with Ronald Reagan and the monkey.

Jason lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the last 10 years of his life (d. 1970). He started in the film industry as a gopher at age 13, and stuck with it after graduating from high school. He directed a long string of short subjects from 1938 through 1944, when he graduated to B movies. His 64 directing credits include noir, comedy, musicals, horror -- you name it, Jason directed it. He also directed dozens of television shows. Remember Shotgun Slade? The Whistler? Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok? Treasury Men in Action (favorite episode title: "The Case of the Slippery Eel")? Hardly anyone remembers any of it.

The movie and TV work from both partners is all but forgotten, but their "Penthouse Serenade" lives on, in dozens of recordings and from use in many films. Bob Hope and Shirley Ross give it a witty, playful version in a 1938 Decca recording, again with slightly altered lyrics. (They make a little joke of the grammatical gaffe.) Nat King Cole made lovely cocktail piano jazz of it in 1952. You must listen to Sun Ra's 1977 chaotic intergalactic solo piano flight, which eventually crash lands on "Penthouse Serenade." At the other end of the universe is Patti Page's lush voice in a lush arrangement, apparently shot during her TV show (1955-56).

Meet My Special Musical Guest

And that brings us to my version of "Penthouse Serenade" -- and to guest guitarist Steve Schenkel.

Steve I were friends and classmates as undergrads in music at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville and then grad-student roomies at SIU-Carbondale. I was a pretty good student and a so-so musician. Steve was a great student and a terrific guitarist.

Steve Schenkel

Steve went on to become professor of guitar, jazz studies, music technology and religion at Webster University in near-suburban St. Louis (now retired from the school). He also became and remains the go-to guitar player for the city, including serving as the orchestra contractor for the vast Fox Theater in mid-town St. Louis.

When Lee Ann Garrison and I married, in St. Louis in 1976, Steve played at the wedding. As Lee Ann and I moved to San Diego to Los Angeles, back to St. Louis, up to Milwaukee, out to Oregon and, finally, to Columbia, Mo., Steve and I stayed in touch on and off.

Steve took note when I started started publishing these little pieces on jazz standards, which he plays all the time. He kindly offered to weave guitar countermelodies into my renditions, and I of course I accepted the offer. I sent him my video of "Penthouse Serenade," and he returned the new, improved version I've published here. I hope this is the first of many such collaborations.

I'm trying to get him to pick up classical guitar again and play duets. Steve's resisting, but I'll keep working on him.

More Strini on Music.

Cooking: A good hot chicken stew for those cold winter nights.

2021-02-08T15:45:00.004-06:00

Winter Food: A tasty, easy one-pot meal perfect for weeknights.

by Tom Strini

You come in from shoveling snow, lift that heavy stewpot lid and take in the sweet aromas rising with the steam. Ohhh yeahhh. That sort of thing is a consolation of life in Wisconsin and other northern

Tom Strini's weeknight chicken stew.

regions, where we lived for over 30 years. And even here in Columbia, Mo., where we've had a bit of snow and a cold snap in the single digits, it warms the heart, the soul and the sinuses.

So treat yourself. This simple chicken stew is economical (feeds four for about $13), easy, delicious, and practical within weeknight time constraints.

Weeknight Chicken Stew Ingredients

1.5 cups (about 5 medium) carrots, peeled and cut into half-inch thick rounds.
1 cup celery (about 3 ribs), strings removed, cut into half-inch thick crescents.
3 tablespoons minced shallot.
1/4 cup diced pancetta.
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast [Note: Would chicken thighs, skinned and cut through the bone, so the marrow enriches the sauce, be better? Yes. But skinning and trimming thighs takes time and makes a mess. We're trying to be weeknight practical.]
1/4 cup all-purpose flour.
2 tablespoons olive oil.
1.5 teaspoons dried rosemary. (Ground, if you can find it.)
1/2 teaspoon ground sage. (The more common rubbed sage works, too.)
1 bay leaf.
2 tablespoons butter.
1/4 cup dry white wine.
2 cups chicken stock.
1 cup frozen peas.
8 ounces (1/2 package), ready-made dehydrated gnocchi.
1 tablespoon corn starch mixed with 1 tablespoon cold water.
Salt, pepper to taste.

Ingredients chopped and ready to go.

Weeknight Chicken Stew Process

Wash, chop or mince the carrots, celery and shallot per ingredients, above.
Cut the chicken into cubes of about 1.5 inches. Sprinkle with salt. Dredge the cubes in flour.
Heat a small stewpot or deep 12-inch heavy skillet (you'll need a lid later) over a medium-high flame. (I use a very well-seasoned cast iron skillet, 4 inches deep, with a heavy lid.)
Add olive oil to the warm pot.
When the oil is hot, add the chicken cubes. Stir frequently until they are browned, about five minutes.
Remove the chicken to a bowl, and turn heat to low. A browned flour crust will have adhered to the bottom of the pan. Don't worry.
Add the butter to the pan.
When the butter has melted, add the carrots, celery and shallot. Add a pinch of salt. (Be stingy with it, as the chicken stock will carry some salt and you salted the chicken before cooking. You can always re-season at the end.) Add a few grinds of black pepper. Stir to coat the vegetables, and scrape up any of the brown goodies that feel ready to let loose.
Add the pancetta, stir, and cook for two minutes over medium-low heat.
Add the bay leaf, rosemary and sage. Stir.
Cover the pan and simmer the vegetables over low heat for five minutes.
Remove the lid. Stir and scrape again. Moisture from the vegetables will have partially deglazed the pot. Raise heat to medium-high. Pour in the wine and scrape up any remaining crust from the bottom of the pot. When the wine has evaporated, reduce heat to medium low.
Add the chicken stock. Stir and bring to a simmer.
Return the chicken and any accumulated juices to the pan. Stir. Cover and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Check the vegetables at 10 minutes; they should be al dente, not al mushy.
Add the frozen peas to the pan.
Raise heat to fuel a low boil. Add the gnocchi. The gnocchi, alone in ample boiling water, cook in 2-3 minutes and float to the surface when done. Crowded into this stew, they take about five minutes to cook. Add a half-cup of water if they seem to need a bit more depth.
Maintain a low boil for two minutes, then add the corn starch slurry to thicken the mixture and transform it from soup to stew. Check for seasoning and serve immediately. Serves four.

Wine pairing: Chilled pinot grigio.

Alternatives: Leave out the peas, and serve green beans as a side. Leave out the gnocchi and serve with fresh-baked biscuits. And do note that this is a flexible, forgiving dish. You want more carrots? Add more carrots. More mouths to feed? Use a bigger pot, double the chicken and brown it in batches.

Strini chicken stew with the green bean option.

And remember my home-chef motto: If I can do it, you can do it.

More Strini on Cooking, Life and Lifestyle.

Mixed-Topic Striniwrites Crossword: Hints in the Five January 2021 Stories

2021-02-01T00:20:00.006-06:00

You're one click away from another Tom Strini Writes interactive crossword.

by Tom Strini

Each clue and solution word or phrase is based on one the five stories I published in January.

Sure, you could print out this crossword and do it the old-fashioned way, with pencil in hand while rummaging for hints through these five stories -- Long Fly Ball, Antonio Lauro Guitar Waltz, American Songbook "Skylark," Weeknight Roast Chicken and Rattlesnake Adventure.

But why would you go to all that trouble, when you can just click on this link and solve the crossword interactively on your screen? No printouts, no pencils. Furthermore, in the online version, each clue links directly to the relevant story hint. It's fun. Try it.

Link to the Crosswords Solutions Page.

Long Live Sport: Memoir -- The long, long fly ball

2021-01-27T15:28:00.005-06:00

How can I recall in fine detail a softball play I almost made 40 years ago?

by Tom Strini

We were a mid-level team playing the top team in the league. They'd clobbered us a few weeks prior and were clearly better than us. And yet, somehow, we were up four runs going into the top of the seventh and final inning.

The Big Game

After a couple of easy outs, a hit and a couple of infield miscues loaded the bases. We could still win this thing. One more out.

My Wilson A2000 baseball glove

I was playing left field, arguably the second-most important position (after shortstop) in slow-pitch softball, given the frequency of home-run cuts. This was before the era of the $300 softball bat, so even the best hitters rarely drove one over the five-foot chain-link fence placed a generous 275 feet from home plate.

We played under dim, low lights at a scrubby county park. Fly balls passed through that light on the way up into a much darker zone. The light change made the ball hard to judge. But I'd played many games out there and had the hang of it. I was a good outfielder, given to breaking with the crack of the bat and with the speed and route sense to run down long drives.

As the bases-loaded, two-out pitch arced home, I thought: Hit it to me. I can win this thing. Come on. Hit it to me.

The Big Hit

The sound of contact told me to turn and sprint for the fence, then look back to find the ball. I knew that 99 hard drives out of 100, struck by a right-handed hitter, hook toward the left-field line. So, after maybe 10 paces and still on the dead run, back to the infield, I looked over my left shoulder.

The ball was right where it should be, still a good 40 feet in the air and still a rocket. But I read the arc and felt that intuitive speed/distance/time reckoning that brings joy to every outfielder: I know where that ball will land. I know I can get there in time to catch it in stride. I checked the fence. Just enough room. I got this.

But just then, the ball began to slice toward center, opposite the customary flight. That drift forced a decision: To continue to track the ball over my left shoulder and then rotate left at the last moment, to square my shoulders to the ball and backpedal if necessary? Or turn my head opposite, re-find the ball and catch it over my right shoulder, while I continued to sprint toward the fence?

The first choice would keep the ball in view all the way into my glove, but at the cost of slowing me down, due to the turning and backpedaling, and could throw off my balance. Option two -- the more professional approach -- would get me to the interception point a step or two sooner. But I would lose sight of the ball as I turned my head to look over my right shoulder; the ball was closing fast, and I might not be able to search the night sky and find the ball before it got by me.

I chose option one. The barber-pole turn slowed me just enough that the ball ticked off the end of my glove and bounced to the fence. With two out, the baserunners were moving. Everyone scored. Grand slam.

Still a tie game, you say? Technically, yes. But it was over; we had our one shot at victory and missed the bull's eye. We had played over our heads for six innings and came down to earth with a thud in the seventh. We kicked the ball around some more on the infield and gave up another three runs. I led off the bottom of the seventh with a monstrous home run -- probably the longest I hit in my life -- but no teammate reached base.

This game took place in 1980. Maybe 1981.

How can I possibly remember that play in such detail? Because I lived it with a thoroughgoing commitment and awareness as it happened. I was completely in the moment, acutely sensing the mass and momentum and shape of my body in space and the relation of the body to the ball in flight.

Zen and Sport

Those moments of intense awareness -- of the body, the environment, the physics, even of the rapid-fire mental processing -- form the core of my deep love for playing sports. Softball (baseball in my younger days) and soccer were my games. Both granted me many treasured experiences, including the one described here.

That moment didn't quite pan out, but most such moments did -- I made the play. I could have described one of those successes, but I don't like to brag. (Oh, okay -- I love to brag; I reserve the right to reminisce about glorious victory if the mood strikes.) Fact is, the longer I played, the more the games became about that awareness, that meditative sense of being absolutely in the moment, than about winning or losing.

I more or less retired from softball at age 60, in part because the violence of my swing took a toll on my lower back, and in part because soccer -- which I had also played as a kid -- was becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life, starting in about 1990. (If you 're scoring at home, I'm 71 now.) Alas, I had to retire from soccer at age 69 -- I was playing very well, but could no longer recover quickly from the constant leg and foot injuries that come along with the game.

But I will never forget -- and can readily relive -- those sporting moments in that special state of grace. I cherish them all, winning and losing.

But damn. I shoulda caught that ball over my right shoulder.

Another Memoir: Southern Pacific Rattlesnake.

Classical Guitar: Antonio Lauro's "Venezuelan Waltz" ("Valse Criollo")

2021-01-25T13:08:00.002-06:00

Lauro, his music, and the guitar scene in old Caracas.

by Tom Strini

We so often take music for granted. As if it were an omnipresent, natural part of the human condition. The fact is, people have to make it, and some infrastructure must grow up around it, both to nurture it artistically and to pay for it.

Antonio Lauro

Because I've spent most of my life writing about music and the other arts and once had ambitions to make a living playing and composing music, such thoughts are general background music in my head. But now and then I come upon a specific example.

Take Venezuelan guitar music. Like most classical guitarists, I have always loved the works of Antonio Lauro (1917-1986), which have been performed in countless concerts around the world and recorded endlessly. For about a year, now, I've been playing Lauro's "Valse Criollo" (aka "Venezuelan Waltz"), from 1963. (That's me, playing it at the bottom of this story. Here's a link to Ana Vidovic, who plays it better.)

Music and the story behind it are staples on this blog, so I looked into Lauro's background.

Lauro's Early Life

Lauro's father immigrated to Venezuela from Italy. He was a barber who played guitar and sang for pleasure. He taught his son a few basics, and young Antonio showed interest and aptitude. When the family moved to Caracas from Ciudad Bolívar, they took advantage of more formal musical education. Lauro studied piano, violin and composition at the Academia de Música y Declamación, notably with Vicente Emilio Sojo, a composer with some international credit and the founder/conductor of the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra.

Influence of Folk and Popular Music and Nationalism

In the 1930s, nationalism dominated musical practice in Latin America, much as it had in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century. As in Europe, formally trained musicians such as Sojo saw their mission as elevating the street music of their their homelands, most of which had only recently emerged from colonial rule. Many of these composer/performers, such as Lauro and the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, had grown up playing street music before and during their formal training. They felt close to it. They and their contemporaries wanted to be for their young homelands what Grieg had been for Norway, Liszt for Hungary, Dvořák for Bohemia; they wanted to foster a national identity.

Their "raw materials" leaned toward European dance forms spiced with Spanish regional and African rhythms and some indigenous influence. Throughout the region, composers produced reams of mazurkas, schottisches, quadrilles, polkas and so on, all colored by local musical dialect, as they riffed on and formalized the sort of music that dance bands played mostly by ear. (You'll hear the Spanish hemiola -- the alternation of 6/8 and 3/4 -- in the present waltz.)

In doing so, they turned dance music into concert music. The most skilled among them turned it into showpieces that not only elevated humble music but turned it into virtuoso display. Paraguayan Agustín Pío Barrios, aka Agustín Barrios Mangoré (1885-1944), was the greatest of these virtuosos on guitar, which held a place of honor among instruments due to Spanish influence.

Barrios toured Latin America tirelessly. In 1932, Barrios landed in Caracas for an extended stay. Lauro, then 15, attended his concerts, and that was that. Lauro largely abandoned violin and piano and concentrated on guitar. (Somehow, though, he got good enough on horn to play that recalcitrant instrument in the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra in the 1940s, while also serving as professor of guitar at a Caracas conservatory.)

Side Note: In addition to being an ardent Venezuelan nationalist, Lauro was an ardent believer in democracy. In 1948, a military junta imprisoned him for several months. He shrugged it off, remarking that prison was a normal thing for a Venezuelan man of his generation.

Raúl Borges and the Beginning of the Venezuelan Guitar School

Young Lauro could pursue the guitar because Raúl Borges Requena (1882-1967) was around to teach him. Borges came from a prominent Venezuelan family known for its involvement in the arts. He was a largely self-taught musician, at first. He learned guitar from an old copy of the antique (1810) Carulli Guitar Method. Borges further advanced his musical education while serving as a diplomat in Paris in 1926, but his big advance as a guitarist runs to the same fateful 1932 Agustín Barrios stay in Caracas that changed Lauro's life. Barrios stayed at Borges' house for months and taught Borges advanced, modern guitar techniques.

Furthermore, the stir that Barrios' virtuosity caused in Caracas gave Borges the clout to get the Academia de Música y Declamación to establish a guitar program, one of the first in the Western Hemisphere.

This gave Borges a platform, for his own performances and to establish a classical guitar culture. Borges was the first Venezuelan to compose nationalistic dances for guitar as a solo instrument. Many of his students, notably Lauro, followed suit. Lauro toured with a trio named in Borges' honor.

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Follow the link to sheet music, including instant downloads, to 39 guitar works by Antonio Lauro. Tom Strini Writes is proud to be an affiliate seller for SheetMusicPlus.

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Borges attracted and developed gifted students, including Alirio Diaz, Rodrigo Riera, Manuel Enrique Perez Diaz, Flaminia Montenegro, Froila Pacanins, Jose Rafael Cisneros, Fredy Reyna, Antonio Ochoa and Rómulo Lazarde, all of whom had regional or international touring and recording careers.

Lauro, for all his talent, did not rise from a vacuum. He was part of a scene, and that takes us back to the beginning. Someone must make it happen. Someone has to be good enough and dedicated to attract attention and funding and generate excitement. That someone, in this case, was Borges, with a big boost from the parents who raised him, the street/folk musicians who influenced him, and the visiting virtuoso who launched him.

And who sustains the wider guitar culture and the even wider musical culture? All of us who participate in some way, by buying recordings and sheet music and playing it and keeping it alive. And even by writing about it.

When I pick up the guitar and play, I think of Antonio Lauro putting pencil to paper in 1963 and sending me this gift from 58 years and 2,513 miles away. I can't play as Barrios did (or as Ana Vidovic does), but I can take pleasure in my half-way decent amateur rendition of an exquisite musical trifle from another time and place.

Follow this link to more Strini on Music articles.

American Songbook: Mercer and Carmichael's "Skylark"

2021-01-18T12:43:00.002-06:00

This dreamy 1941 song has roots in the early days of jazz in the Midwest.

by Tom Strini

In 1942, the Glenn Miller Orchestra's recording of Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark" hit No. 7 on the charts. But the origins of the 1941 song stretch back to the very beginnings of the Jazz Age, to the early 1920s.

The Bix Beiderbecke - Hoagy Carmichael Connection

In those days, Carmichael (1899-1981) was a student at his hometown Bloomington school, Indiana U., where he eventually earned a law degree. But he was already playing piano, singing and writing songs. And Carmichael was listening intently to jazz, which was just emerging as an identifiable genre beyond ragtime. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, just 21, was the talk of Midwestern musical circles. White skin gave Beiderbecke a boost over equally talented and creative young black jazz players, but Beiderbecke was in fact brilliantly creative. (He also lived up to the Romantic artist stereotype, by being self-taught, by abandoning the upper-middle-class life he was born to in Davenport, Iowa, and by drinking himself to death at an early age. But that's another story.)

Hoagy Carmichael (left) with Johnny
Mercer.

Carmichael had heard Beiderbecke play a couple of times in Chicago. George Johnson, who had played with Carmichael in Bloomington, had joined Beiderbecke in a Chicago-based touring band called the Wolverines. Johnson asked Carmichael to arrange some gigs at fraternity parties in Bloomington, and Carmichael obliged. The cornetist and the college boy became close friends over the course of 10 parties and five weekends, and the friendship lasted until the Beiderbecke's death in 1931.

Young Man with a Horn

Beiderbecke had a big musical influence on Carmichael, as he did on many musicians, including Bing Crosby and fellow Wolverine Tommy Dorsey. Beyond that, Beiderbecke remained a presence in Carmichael's mind, to the point that Carmichael attempted to stage a Broadway musical about Beiderbecke. Carmichael intended to hang the show on Young Man with a Horn, Dorothy Baker's 1938 novel loosely based on Beiderbecke's short life.

One of the big numbers in the show was to be a song drawn from Carmichael's memory of a long-ago cornet improvisation. The show fell through, but Carmichael had finished that song, with the working title "Bix Lix." (Side note: Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall starred in a 1950 film adaptation of Baker's novel. Carmichael appeared as "Smoke" Willoughby, the pianist in Kirk Douglas' band.)

Carmichael often wrote his own lyrics, but this "Bix Lix" tune stumped him. To salvage the song and give it a life beyond the aborted show, Carmichael turned to everyone's go-to lyricist, his friend and frequent collaborator, Johnny Mercer (1909-1976).

By all accounts, Carmichael gave the music to Mercer and then waited for months without hearing a word from him. In America's Songs, Philip Furia and Michael Lasser quote Carmichael, re: Mercer: "He is the original 'Don't call me, I'll call you' guy." Six months later, the story goes, Mercer finished the lyrics, called Carmichael, and sang the finished tune over the phone: "Quite some kick to sit back comfy like that at the telephone and listen," Carmichael said.

Johnny Mercer and Judy Garland

Mercer, 32 and married, was involved in a torrid and scandalous affair with 18-year-old Judy Garland during the time he worked on the lyrics to "Skylark." Of course, many commentators connect the dots from the longing, searching, profoundly poetic lyrics to Mercer's passion for Garland. I'm skeptical. For one thing, Mercer had a lot more going on in his career than this song, including serving as a principal partner in a start-up company called Capitol Records. For another, he wasn't "wondering where my love could be," as in the "Skylark" lyric. He knew that Garland was in Hollywood choosing bandleader David Rose over him.

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Want the sheet music for "Skylark"? Follow this link directly to a menu of many arrangements of this great song, including instant download, from SheetMusicPlus. Tom Strini Writes is pleased to be a SheetMusicPlus affiliate seller.
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Finally, Mercer -- a complex man beloved for his charm, kindness and generosity when sober and feared for his cruelty when drunk -- was not shy about telling friends that his Judy Garland torch song was "I Remember You," with composer Victor Shertzinger. Mercer later gave Garland the rights to that song as a wedding gift. Mercer's widow, Ginger -- Mercer stayed married to her until he died -- pointedly excluded "I Remember You" from a posthumous complete edition of his lyrics in 1982.

People who have no experience at the hard work of writing music or poetry or plays or novels or making artworks too often assume that artists expend all their effort and time "expressing themselves." Art and life, certainly, relate in some way. But usually, artworks no more express the personal lives of artists than buildings express the personal lives of architects.

This lush, sustained melody sounds like a horn line. In the bridge, the tune takes a "lonely flight" from E-flat to the distant key of G major. Carmichael did not craft it with speech rhythms in mind. The tune presented Mercer with a puzzle, which he solved by fitting it with graceful vowels and consonants that flow like warm breath through a cornet. The lyrics, fused with the music, please the ear and convey sentiments tied not to an individual but to some ineffable notion of ideal love. Maybe Mercer's thoughts turned to Garland at times as he wrote the lyrics, maybe not. Doesn't matter. The impetus and requirements of art would have been enough to see him through.

Follow this link to more American Songbook entries.

Sources

In addition to the Furia-Lasser book mentioned above:

https://jazzstandards.com/compositions-0/skylark.htm

http://blog.nyfos.org/hoagy-carmichael-johnny-mercer-skylark

https://www.jmeshel.com/195-hoagy-carmichael-skylark/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark_(song)

https://www.wnyc.org/story/definitive-american-songbook-johnny-mercer-pt-2/

http://www.robertfulford.com/2004-11-16-mercer.html

https://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/road-stardust-hoagy-carmichael-bix-beiderbecke-1924.php

https://www.songhall.org/profile/Johnny_Mercer

Cooking: Spatchcock That Chicken for a Speedy Weeknight Roast

2021-01-14T22:21:00.001-06:00

Hey, I was spatchcocking before spatchcocking was even a thing.

by Tom Strini

Simple French Food, the late Richard Olney's book from 1977, had a recipe for "Split, Stuffed, Baked Chicken." Olney instructs the cook to cut out the backbone, turn the bird over, then flatten it by pressing or pounding on the breastbone.

Spatchcock roast chicken. Photo by Tom Strini.

In a word -- a word that did not appear in Olney's book -- he "spatchcocked" the chicken. (Now, everyone's doing it. Olney and I were ahead of the curve.)

I reckon I took up Olney's recipe around 1990, after I'd been cooking from his book for several years. (By the way, this book is very much worth having, and of course you can find it online.) Olney calls for an elaborate stuffing -- onion, bread crumbs, two cheeses zucchini, onion and herbs -- slipped in between the chicken's meat and skin. It's good, but a lot of time-consuming work.

Olney's project is just too much for a busy weeknight; it surrenders speed, the great advantage of roasting a flattened chicken in cast iron at high temperature. So I dispensed with the cheeses etc. in favor of a variety of simple rubs you can mix and apply in minutes.

Ingredients for Weeknight Spatchcock Chicken

1 whole chicken, about 4 pounds, cleaned, wiped dry, and trimmed of innards, excess skin, and easily removed fat. (Buy a good quality bird, if you have the budget. It makes a difference.)
For the rub: 1 tablespoon dried rosemary; and 1/2 teaspoon each ground (or rubbed) sage, sweet paprika, garlic powder, coarse salt, and black pepper.*
Two tablespoons olive oil or melted butter.

Process for Weeknight Spatchcock Chicken

Set oven to 425F convection and put a large cast-iron skillet or roasting pan on the center rack.
Cut the backbone from the chicken. (See video.) Pro tip: Invest in a good set of poultry shears. You can remove the backbone with hefty kitchen scissors or a serrated knife, but you'll be in for a fight.
Probe between the skin and the meat with your fingers, to enlarge the gap between the two and to break the separating membranes.
Stuff the rosemary rub into the space you've opened and around the outside of the chicken.
Take the hot skillet from the oven and place the chicken in skin side up. (It will sizzle.)
Brush the olive oil or melted butter over the top of the bird. Place on the center rack.
No need to baste or turn the chicken.
Check the chicken for doneness after 40 minutes. If the skin isn't crispy enough for your taste, turn heat to 475F and cook for about 3 minutes more. 50 minutes total will be enough for most ovens.
The chicken is cooked when the legs move easily at the thigh and/or internal temperature is 155F at the thickest part of the thigh.
Remove chicken to a carving board, tent with foil and let rest 10 minutes. (Internal temp will rise to 160F.)
If you wish, pour off most of the fat, deglaze the skillet with dry white wine, add two cups chicken stock and some corn starch slurry and boil to make a gravy.
Don't carve the chicken with a knife; joint the bird with a good pair of kitchen scissors. It's easier.

Wine pairing: Pinot Grigio. Sides: Green Beans Amandine, garlic mashed potatoes.

*Experiment with the rub; I do. For example: 1 TBS oregano, 1 tsp dried lemon zest, 1/2 tsp garlic powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp black pepper, to lean Greek. Or 1 TBS smoked hot paprika, 1/2 tsp brown sugar, 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp coriander + salt, pepper, to lean BBQ; thyme, savory, chervil to lean French. Have fun.

Follow this link to more Strini on cooking.

Memoir: California Outdoor Adventure Days

2021-01-11T15:15:00.004-06:00

Mikhail Baryshnikov, on his best day, couldn't execute my airborne spin in the San Gabriel Mountains.

by Tom Strini

In the late 1970s, in California, Steve Turner and I had adventures.

Southern Pacific rattlesnake. Project Noah
photo by Sean Wilcox.

Steve was a carpenter by trade, a Navy Vietnam vet, and he had crewed on charter fishing boats out of San Diego. He was back in school, as a trumpet major at the University of California-San Diego, where I was on my way to not finishing a PhD in music theory and composition.

We met after a guest lecture by the executive director of the San Diego Symphony, who explained why the orchestra could never play anything new. Steve sat behind me and we struck up a conversation about music as we filed out of the hall.

The conversation veered to baseball and fishing. Soon, we were teammates on an intramural softball team and fishing buddies.

Paddling through the Pacific Surf

Steve's adorable girlfriend, Sandy, had access to her dad's old sailboat, which lacked a mast and therefore had no sail. It was a long, slender vessel made for gliding on placid lakes. That didn't stop us from throwing in a couple of paddles, raising the centerboard and running it into the Pacific surf at Solana Beach. We'd jump in and paddle furiously to get beyond the surf line. Then we'd head a bit south, a mile or two offshore, and anchor above a kelp forest in maybe 60 feet of remarkably clear water.

We always caught fish, usually sea bass. They ran with the bait, of course, but more often than not we played them long enough to reel them back through the kelp stalks and into the boat.

Did we wear life jackets while bobbing around out there on the briny? Of course not. We probably had flotation cushions though. Maybe.

Anyway, we'd head back to Steve and Sandy's place, where she and my young bride, Lee Ann Garrison, had probably been expecting a call from Coast Guard regarding washed-up bodies. We'd grill the fish and drink beer and have a beautiful time.

Steve and I went to Mexico and camped on the beach and caught fish surf-casting a couple of times, and those trips were pretty adventurous.

Tramping through the San Gabriel Mountains

But all this is prolog to the main story, of a four-day, three-night, self-contained trip into wild terrain in the San Gabriel Mountains, east of Pasadena. Steve, who had grown up in Long Beach, had been up there quite a few times, but not in several years.

This, of course, was long before the internet or geo-positioning or cell phones. We ordered topographical maps and studied them to plan our trip, through U.S. Forest Service territory with no park amenities. After all these decades, I'm a little fuzzy about the distance we planned to cover; maybe 25 miles of rough country, with a lot of verticality? Something like that.

Most of our route ran parallel to a mountain stream with high, rocky bluffs on either side. The topo maps showed trails maybe 40 to 60 feet above the stream bed. The maps indicated a relatively easy hike on a stable path dug from the cliffs.

White California Sea Bass. U.S. NOAA drawing.

The girls dropped us off, and we began our hike on a dirt path through a meadow. The first hiker we encountered was an elderly, wiry gent with a bush hat on his head and a six-shooter on his hip. What was the pistol for?

"Rattlesnakes."

No problem. I'd been around them during my summer working in a nuclear waste processing yard in the desert north of San Diego. (Yes. I was a nuclear waste processor. But that's another story.) And we already knew lots of rattlers were up there. The same way we knew we shouldn't be paddling an old hulk of a sailboat into the Pacific while not wearing life jackets.

Within a couple of miles, we'd lugged our 50-pound packs through the meadow and ever-sparser vegetation and ever-rockier landscape and reached the stream. We scampered over boulders and scree, up the bluff to where the trail should be. Nothing but rockfall. Same on the opposite bluff.

Before long, we ran into another party of hikers. They told us that a huge flood had crashed through the canyon and obliterated the trails a year or two before.

That meant we had to turn back, right? With no trail, how could we possibly meet the girls at the take-out location at the appointed time? (And remember, no cell phones for changes of plan.)

Of course we kept going.

The Bridge to Nowhere, abandoned since the roads washed out in 1938, was one of the more
surreal sights on our hike. Photo: Visit California.

We managed to find enough flat ground to camp on, and enough dead stream wood to build cooking fires. We may have had a tent, but I doubt it. I vaguely recall sleeping in a bag in the open and hoping that no rattler would need a warm place to spend the night.

The East Fork of the San Gabriel River was no pleasant babbling brook. It flowed in two alternating conditions: On more level stretches of terrain, it spread out shallow over gravel beds scattered with boulders. It crashed and surged in furious, foamy white through precipitous drops.

Because the trails had long since tumbled down the bluffs, we had to advance along the edges of the ice-cold stream. The cliffs frequently closed on the stream and forced us to the other side. So we had to constantly cross and re-cross the stream to maintain our climb toward a far-off mountain pass, where a road met our trail path -- our take-out point.

Sometimes, we hopped easily across on large, flat boulders with white water rushing among them. Sometimes, the water was shallow enough to simply wade across without fully soaking our feet. Or we would use the walking sticks we'd picked up early in the trip to dig into the gravel to maintain balance as we stepped across half-submerged rocks. Occasional daring leaps were sources of terror and triumph.

Steve took the lead on our most memorable crossing. The stream was a foot or two deep, but swift and maybe 40 feet wide. He hopped neatly stone to stone, but ran out of footing maybe seven feet from the bank. He thought about removing his pack, tossing it to the bank and then making the leap. But that would be awkward. So he wound up, gave it all he had -- and landed shin-deep in the water.

Of course, I did not hide my amusement. My laughter echoed through the stony canyon as he removed his boots and socks to dry.

I was sure I could land on the other side with my feet dry. I had spotted a huge boulder just upstream from where Steve had come to a wet landing. Its sheer wall rose about 15 from the water, but that wall tilted back from the stream. A ledge, placed exactly where a daredevil would want to grab it at the end of a leap, ran the width of the monolith. From across the stream, I couldn't actually see the ledge, because of the tilt of the wall. But I could tell that it was plenty deep for a firm hand-hold. I'd done some rock-climbing and was sure I could shinny my hands sideways and toe-tap across the rock above the water line and join Steve high and dry.

To pull off this stunt, I could not stop and step on the stones leading up to the big leap to the slab. I had to build momentum and hop from stone to stone then take off!

I could hardly believe how well it was going when I pushed off into the air, well above ledge level. I reached out to grab the shelf, looked down, and instantly thought of the wiry old guy and his six-gun.

"Rattlesnake."

There it was, minding its own business, stretched out to its full four feet, enjoying the sunlit, stony warmth when some giant oaf appears in the sky ready to clutch and strangle it. No wonder it broke into the world's loudest maracas solo.

That solo accompanied the greatest air turn in the history of ballet. At the peak of my arc, I spun shoulders and hips sharply backward and around to my left. The 50-pound pack on my back abruptly shifted my momentum away from ledge, slab and snake toward a downstream direction. As I rotated I noticed that the rattler had just as abruptly shifted from its placid recline to a menacing coil. As I completed my 360° rotation, the heavy pack's momentum again redirected my flight, this time toward the bank.

My boots planted into dry gravel. I looked left just in time to see the tail rattles disappear around the far side of the slab.

The rest of the trip is blurred by the passing decades, but I do remember that we somehow made it. I remember emerging from the trail, so happy to see two beautiful women patiently waiting for a couple of scraggly, happy idiots.

Damn, we had fun.

Cooking: Holiday Recipes Crossword

2021-01-06T15:29:00.001-06:00

The crossword solutions and clues draw on four recipes published since Thanksgiving.

by Tom Strini

The holidays are over, but we can have just a little more fun with them.

I've created a crossword puzzle based on dishes I created for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. If you know your way around the kitchen or if you've tried some of my recipes, you'll be able to fill in the blanks for some of the clues without checking the source stories. If you're stumped, follow the above links to the puzzle source stories for hints.

You can print this page and do the puzzle the old-fashioned way, pencil in hand. I suggest following this link to an online, interactive version of the puzzle. Cool feature: Click on the [?] for a direct link to the story that gives you a hint. (I can't believe I figure out how to do that.)

Enjoy the puzzle. (Find the answers on the Crossword Solutions Page.) And enjoy the recipes. The holidays have passed, but you can cook squash soup, stuffed pork roast, paella and chili any time.