Leo the Lip, Arky Vaughan, And A Holdout Called Frenchy

70 years ago this month, the Brooklyn Dodgers found themselves fantastically inconvenienced by a European tiff known as World War II. Rather than travel south for spring training, they went north, and not very far, to the upstate resort known as Bear Mountain. It was cold, it was stressful, it was baseball.

On March 21, 1944, as the Nazis occupied Hungary, the Japanese pushed into India, and the Allies assaulted the ruined Italian hamlet of Cassino, manager Leo Durocher watched the snow, and dreamed of Florida. In deference to the army's need for trains, the sternly patriotic commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had decreed that no club would travel south for spring training. And so, for the second time, Durocher's Brooklyn Dodgers wintered at the Bear Mountain Inn in New York, where the fires were warm, the steaks were thick and the practice fields were covered in eight inches of fresh powder.

They could work around the snow. While other teams shivered, West Point allowed the Dodgers to use its massive field house whenever the cadets weren't drilling. Durocher's problem was his infield, which had been so savaged by the draft that Branch Rickey had suggested his manager play second base or shortstop. Although ostensibly a player-manager, the Dodgers' skipper hadn't played a full season since 1938. His knees were bad, his bat was slow and he had acorns in his elbow.

If you're asking, "What the hell do you mean, acorns in his elbow?" then you have something in common with the sporting public of 1944. To find out what the hell Leo's talking about, click here, to be taken on to Sports on Earth.

The Killer Named Gyp The Blood

I've spent much of the last few weeks with my head floating around in an imaginary version of New Orleans, editing stories for Narratively's week on the Crescent City. We have some really lovely stories up there, none closer to my heart than the one I spent entirely too long working on, about a Storyville murder that has largely been forgotten. We'll see if I can fix that. 

Ever since the first flatboat sailor came down the Mississippi, loaded with cash and rotgut whiskey, New Orleans has been wary of outsiders. On Easter Sunday, 1913, a trio of New Yorkers learned that lesson well, when they found themselves in the center of a gunfight that forever altered the nation's most famous red light district. Driving the chaos was a man named Charles Harrison, better known as Gyp the Blood.

After the shooting, Harrison got his picture in the paper, under the headline "Harrison Bad Man." The Daily Picayune described him as a cold-blooded killer with a cocaine habit and a sideline in white slavery, but the picture does not match the crimes. About thirty years old at the time, Harrison is shown as soft-featured, with a bulging nose and an awkward smile. In his left hand, this "man of evil days and black surroundings" clutches a small white dog.

"He was spruce," the Daily Picayune would later write, "even dapper in appearance, as far as clothes went, but his pale, smooth-shaven face, bulging at the eyes, caving into sunken cheeks and squaring into a brutal jaw, bore the cold, steely cast of unregenerate impulse to crime."

Gyp the Blood was a hardened criminal of the Lower East Side. Or perhaps he was a fake, a coward who killed a man to prove he wasn't scared. He was a dupe, tricked by his employers into throwing his life away. Or he was a wild man, whose itchy trigger finger caused a bloodbath, and ruined business for hundreds of law-abiding purveyors of vice.

In the photograph, all Harrison seemed to want was to show off his puppy.

If you like that, there's about 5,000 words more. Eat it up—it's juicy.

Radio, Video Games, And A Beloved Doomed Ballpark

I realize I've plugged this piece before, when it first ran in the inestimable Classical Magazine, but last month it ran online in its entirety. Read up!

Two hours before first pitch, Brad Tammen combs his stadium for peanut shells. He sees one wedged into a seat back, and points it out to a staff member, who prises the stubborn, seemingly-fossilized shell out with his fingernail.

"I swear, I thought we had every one of them," says the general manager of the Nashville Sounds. It's peanut-free night at Herschel Greer Stadium, which means no peanuts, Cracker Jacks, or (oddly) Dippin' Dots. Tammen has faith in his grounds crew getting the stadium clean. He's worried about the sky. "I don't need another thunderstorm," he says. "We don't need any more rain."

Not bad stuff, eh? I bet you want to find out what happens next, eh? Well click up there! Click click click!

I've had some other odds and ends run in the Classical this month, all quite heartfelt. The first is an appreciation of the most wonderfully verbose-named video game I've ever played: World Soccer: Winning Eleven 7 International. Just rolls off the tongue, don't it?

It was not a functional relationship. I gave and gave, time and energy and effort, and got nothing back but hurt. But we do not always have a say in such things, and the video game that stole my heart was Winning Eleven, a mid-2000s soccer franchise that was, for all its mastery over me, as awkward as my fifteen year-old self.

Its cover was ugly, its graphics were bland, and its generic team and player names ranged from forgivable (Merseyside Red, for Liverpool) to absurd—meet Ruud Von Nistelroum, star striker for, um, Trad Bricks. Even the name was clumsy, as the European Pro Evolution Soccer 3 was rebranded as World Soccer: Winning Eleven 7 International.

And yet, as with many early-life relationships, I saw something in the object of my affection that was, maybe, not there. It was janky and goofy and unconvincing, but beneath the surface was one of the smartest soccer games of all time. I have found healthier relationships since then, in life and on various gaming platforms, but I still believe that bit to be true.

If so inclined, you can enjoy that beauty here.

And last, out of fear that the Mets ace radio partnership was on its way to being broken up, I wrote a plea for continuity in an organization that has none.

What's the best season to need crutches? Look out your window at the blackening New York slush, and it seems reasonable that, if one absolutely must spend three weeks Rear Windowing inside a walk-up apartment, January would be the ideal time to do it. Why waste summer sweating in your bandages, staring out at clear blue skies and aching to be in a park? Only a fool, you’d think, would prefer crutches in July.

Unless that fool was backed up by Howie Rose.

Crutch-bound for three weeks last summer, I left my apartment only four times. Once was for lunch, when a foolish attempt to crutch my way to a nearby park left me feeling like I'd attacked my arms with a meat tenderizer. The other three excursions were for baseball. I'd slide down the stairs, crutch to the bench in front of my building, and spend three or four hours breathing and smiling, the Mets chirping from my transistor.

A person on crutches wants to vacate the body, head floating off cramped shoulders and away into the blue. Sports, at their best, make that possible—and nothing can deliver us from our blighted physical form quite as well as good sports radio. In the world of good sports radio, I know of no pairing so transporting as Josh Lewin and Howie Rose.

Behold! Stella Starlight: Queen of Space!

Good news, everyone! On Sunday afternoon, the inestimable women of Squeaky Bicycle Productions are producing a staged reading of my superexciting new one-act play, "Stella Starlight: Queen of Space." As a bonus, you will receive a helping of "Private School," a long one-act (or short full length?) by the supremely talented actor/playwright/Minneapolitan Dylan Lamb.

Dylan may insist that because his play is the longer, and comes second, it is the main event and mine is the opening act. But like most playwrights, he is a scruffy-faced lie machine, and should not be trusted.

I wrote "Stella Starlight" as a present to my then girlfriend, now wife, last year for her birthday. It's personal in a way that I often have trouble making my work (but am trying to get better at!), and also includes lasers and sword fights and all that good stuff. It's probably the best thing I've ever written, and if you miss it, your life is null and void.

The reading is at 3 pm, which will happily allow me to miss most of the Titans game. It's happening at:

Joria Productions

260 W. 36th Street, 3rd floor

New York, NY

Make reservations here. Make them! And if you can't make it for some probably deceitful reason, email me, and I'll send you the script. You can produce a reading in your own home!

A Reading In Bushwick That Won't Be Awful

In general, I am opposed to readings. Not reading, mind—I'm reading right now!—but readings, where a roomful of literates sit quietly and endure what may be the least interesting possible spectacle: an author murmuring aloud from his latest book. Readings go on too long, they happen in places I do not want to be, and they require me to drink more white wine than I like. For this, they are to be avoided. 

However, there are occasional exceptions. My friend Robert Norman has solved the problem of the all-too-boring reading by instituting a few informal guidelines. His readings are funny. They are always shorter than a half an hour. They tend to include beer and liquor. And there is one happening tonight in Bushwick, at the Pleasure Jail at Silent Barn. (Silly Bushwick—in my part of Brooklyn, our arts spaces have sensible names.) For what it's worth, I'll be among those reading—recounting the two times in high school that I fielded inquiries from secret admirers, without managing to ever get laid.

This is all part of one of Rob's new projects, a gorgeous little chapbook (I think that's the word for it) called Notes To Girls. He made 300 of these little beauties—an envelope filled with notes, some real and some fake, written by people...to girls. It is a charming project, and totally typical of the kinds of things he makes so well. Come on out, drink some booze, hear a few minutes of reading, and then drink some more.

Loud And Proud And Also Loud: Julius Caesar In Dumbo

A few weeks ago, I took in a bit of Shakespeare near the Brooklyn waterfront, screwing my bladder to the sticking place along the way.  My review of the Donmar Warehouse's production of Julius Caesar is up today at Howlround, and you can read it if you like.

In the teeming yard of an English prison, a convict named Brutus tries to get the attention of a gang of joggers. He speaks of love and honor and fairness, finally winning their approval with a simple question: "Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves," he asks them, "than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?" From the vantage of the prison yard, a single death is a small price for freedom. But as Brutus and his throng soon learn, the transaction is not so simple.

The Donmar Warehouse's Julius Caesar premiered in London last December, and has been imported to Brooklyn to play in a warehouse of our own: St. Ann's, a half a block from the East River in Dumbo. This all female production, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is set in a women's prison, and uses that harsh setting to remake itself into a meditation on the nature of freedom. Compelling but flawed, it is a fine example of the benefits and drawbacks that come with using Shakespeare to make a point about something larger than the play itself.

I walked away from that production feeling very good about it, and wrote the review in that mood. But this was not a love that lasted. The more I thought about the production's noisy tricks, the less I was impressed. Most of the acting was superb, and the first half of the play—when the production's premise was still unclear—was discomfiting in an interesting way. But what's stuck with me over the last couple of weeks is the noisiness of the production, and the shallow flashiness that seemed design to deafen the audience and drown out the text.

I had complex feelings about this production, and wanted that to come through in the review, but reading over my words, I worry that they sound a little too sunny. There are very good things in this Julius Caesar, but they come in spite of the production itself. Even so, I'm glad I saw it, and I'm glad I spent the last two weeks wrestling with the way I felt about it. A perfect production (if there were such a thing) could never make you think the way an ambitious, badly flawed one can.

Two Plays By Me: As Short As You Want Them To Be

Those of you who read this blog may sometimes ask yourself, "Who is this W.M. Akers?! And what gives him the right to talk about theater?!" Well: 

1. W.M. Akers is me.
2. I have absolutely no right to talk about theater. 

While I'm not blathering unfounded gobbledywhatnot about other people's plays, I am writing my own. This month, I've got two short plays in production, both of which are utterly ridiculous, and both of which want you to see them very bad. The relevant info: 

 October 29: As part of their monthly TinyRhino theater/drinking game, the Gowanus theater company UglyRhino is producing my stirring ten minute play "The Most Dangerous Cat In The World"—a comedy about love, evil, and the dangers of the atomic age.

November 2: The wonderful women of Squeaky Bicycle are producing my sci-fi one act "R. For Roxy" as part of the Bad Theater Festival. (Which is not for bad theater so much as it's for unpretentious theater.) While I can guarantee the delightfulness of my play—which is about a lovelorn astronaut composing an encyclopedia in space—I have no idea what the rest of the programming will be like. Let's assume it will be spectacular.

So, come one come all! Or come none, come none! If you do happen to be at either of these events, come introduce yourself. Or if you can't make it, but are interested in reading either of those little tidbits of inspired nonsense, email me.

Does Anybody Want A Play About The Mets?

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Ain't no pathos like Stengel pathos.

This post is not a joke. Bronx Bombers closed Off Broadway Saturday, and though it was been dismissed as (big surprise!) hagiographic pap, it is on its way to Broadway come January. This play, which centers vaguely around the 1977 Bronx Zoo, but features ghostly cameos from Ruth, Jeter and all the rest of the fresh faced Yankee heroes, is not a play for people who care about plays. It is probably not really a play for people who care about baseball, either, since those in the know understand that the only important lesson to be drawn from the sport is how to deal with heartache, 162 games at a time. There is no possibility of heartache in a Yankee story, and so (it seems, anyway, to me) no possibility of real drama.

But there is heartache in Flushing. Permanent, asinine, endlessly churning heartache. A cycle of disappointment and false hope and disappointment that has gone on for some time now—climaxing endlessly, like a bad piece of organ music or a particularly drawn-out high school break up. I speak, as I do too often, of the New York Mets—a team bad enough, beautiful enough, interesting  enough, to deserve a spot on the stage.

Does the horrifying futility of the New York Mets make them a more worthy baseball team than the Yankees? Of course not. Although at this point I'm more comfortable with a losing franchise than a winning one, I'm not Stockholm syndromed enough to suggest that failure is superior to success. (Though some May nights I think it may be.) But as far as tragedy goes, the Mets are Death Of A Salesman . The Yanks are a second rate middle school Thanksgiving pageant. 

Bronx Bombers has a good shot at a long, healthy Broadway run. There are enough fans out there of inspirational codswallop to keep the theater lit up. And the longer it reigns on Broadway, the sharper acid reflux will hit theater-minded Met fans, who expect the offseason to be a time when Mets and Yankees are equal, and will instead be confronted endlessly with nightmares about the pinstriped minstrel show on 50th Street.

So it seems right to even the score. The Mets don't need a play on Broadway, and they certainly don't deserve it. But somewhere in New York there is a 99 seat theater perfect to host a play about misery and meaningless failure and ceaseless anxiety which is a good thing only because it keeps us from worrying about the real problems that life has a habit of tossing our way. The potential topics are endless. Some pitches:

120: A riff on crinkly-faced Casey Stengel and his 1962 Mets, who lost more games than any team in modern history but won the city's heart. 

SATURDAY NIGHT MASSACRE: While the boys of the Bronx Zoo were jibing and jawing and winning championships, the Mets imploded, trading Tom Seaver for peanuts after a nasty Dick Young column soured him on the city.

THE COLLAPSE: A collection of 162 vignettes, telling the story of the Mets' epic 2007 collapse. Or maybe just an hour in the life of a family watching Tom Glavine implode. (Couldn't find a clip of that, so enjoy this vintage Carlos Beltran.)

THE PASSION OF JOHN MAINE: A moment in the life of declining Mets prospect John Maine, whose fastball deserted him just two years after a near-perfect game at Shea Stadium. Based on an article by Patrick J. Flood.

LET'S GO METS—A TRAGEDY: A fantasy based on one of my recurring nightmares, when I'm at a stadium but can't find my seats or see the field. So it's the Inferno , but set on the escalators of crumbling Shea Stadium.

I'm not interested in putting famous sports heroes on stage. What could be more boring than a not-quite-portly-enough Broadway star trying to cigar chomp his way through an impersonation of the magnificent appetites of Babe Ruth? I'm interested, as ever, in the fringe players, the grounds crew, the sportswriters and the fans, whose stubborn refusal to quit on a lousy franchise—badly run, badly managed, badly owned—is a testament to all that is great and stupid about mankind. 

This is not something I want to write on spec. But if there are any Met fan/theater producers out there, or directors, or actors, or anyone who's interested in providing some counterprogramming to Bronx Bombers,   drop me a line.  We can bat around ideas, come up with an outline, get started on a workshop. I like to write about the universality of sports pain, the sadness that comes even in success, the pleasant futility of the whole mess of corporate nonsense. I think it could make for a cathartic night at the theater.

This play is not meant to be self-flagellation. Met fans love to harp on their failures, picking at them like old scars, but most of us understand that this is how most fans feel, most of the time. Most people, even. Like Jimmy Breslin asked in 1962:

“The Mets lose an awful lot? Listen, mister. Think a little bit. When was the last time you won anything out of life?”

Dreaming About Plays Is Easier Than Writing Plays

I've been dreaming of plays a lot this year. Not nearly as often as I dream about zombies and heights and getting inexplicably lost on the subway or late for airplanes or in weird parts of stadiums where I can't see the field, but plays are in there, churning around my unconscious to bubble up while I sleep. Mostly they are terrible, and sometimes merely terrifying, but once in a while they are really wonderful. 

Last night, perhaps in response to that altogether troubling Julius Caesar which I saw at St. Ann's Warehouse last week, I dreamt of a thoroughly modern take on Romeo And Juliet. It started with the audience standing around a square counter, like at the Apple Pan, where the play's opening lines hummed softly in the background, as an actor explained that we were about to see something strange. It was a press preview—I took notes the whole time—and a critic beside me got all peevish about the fact that he was possibly in for a surprise. He left, and the whole lunch counter rotated down through the floor, spiraling into a massive underground gymnasium where a few dozen teenagers sparred with each other: our Montagues and Capulets. 

"Man—they really threw some money at this," I thought, as I noted the disappointing influence that The Hunger Games seemed to have had on the production.

The first act proceeded through the gym, where the kids did all sorts of different American Gladiators-style fighting, and played an ancient Italian form of basketball where the court shrank gradually over the course of the game. For Act II we were transferred to the top of an ice-covered mountain—again, fabulous production values, especially for Off Broadway—that looked like something out of a Lovecraftian dreamscape.

By now the play's narrative had completely collapsed, but the spectacle was enough to keep me happy, since even in sleep I'm a shallow sort of theatergoer. On the other side of the barrier, I saw a pair of water bottles floating in space, and I was gripped by my customary sleeping terror that comes whenever something is suspended in thin air. (Remember that fear of heights I mentioned earlier?) The water poured back and forth from one bottle to the other, and I realized that they were being manipulated by an invisible stagehand, suspended by wire, and pouring the water to simulate a rainstorm. It was terrifying, but in a sublime way, and I noted the effect in my notebook, impressed.

I woke up relaxed and giddy—the same warmth that comes after seeing a really wonderful play, but without ever having to leave my really wonderful bed. As I replayed it in my mind—the best way to remember your dreams, by the way—I was struck by one minor flaw that hadn't occurred to my dream-critic. 

If you're going to go to the trouble to create an invisible floating stagehand, is that really the best way to use him? 

It's all concept, no execution, that unconscious of mine. 

In any case, I'm seeing a real-life production of Romeo And Juliet tomorrow at CSC. Hopefully it will keep me awake.

Questions of Comfort, At The Theater & In The Loo

The performance begins at 7:00 PM and runs 2 hours and 15 minutes without an intermission. . . . We strongly recommend that you use the restrooms at Brooklyn Roasting Company. The St. Ann’s Warehouse restrooms will only be available immediately prior to the start of the performance. For the safety of our audiences and actors, there will be no re-entry to the theater if you have to leave your seat during the performance. There will be no intermission. 

So I was informed this week by an email confirmation of a ticket to the Donmar's Julius Caesar, at St. Ann's Warehouse, which is playing this month just a half block for the East River. This is not a review of the performance—that will come on Howlround, I think, sometime this month—but rather of the particular bit of anxiety engendered by that email. 

 "Two hours fifteen?" it made me think. "No bathroom? Jeez."

(Be here warned that this post acknowledges certain facts of human biology—namely that sometimes men and women have to go to the bathroom.) 

I've been wary of theatrical bathroom problems since February, when I made the mistake of having a couple of beers before Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama. The beers ran right through me, as beers have a way of doing, and I spent the first act of that lovely show in squirming agony, like a five year-old on a road trip with Mitt "No Bathroom Breaks" Romney. Thankfully, that show had an intermission, and I was able to enjoy the second half in comfort. Julius Caesar would offer no such escape hatch. 

We are grown ups, of course, and can control our bladders, but that doesn't mean it's very much fun to do so. Coffee, tea, beer and cigarettes are all wonderful things to have before a play, and all are diuretics. Being told that you have to hold it for two hours plus, I think, is a mental diuretic as well. 

A few hours before curtain on Saturday, I set aside my tea, and looked away from any offers of beer. Water, I sipped sparingly. A trip to the theater had turned into the night before surgery. This proved moot, however, when I reached the theater, and found out that all of my nervous skittering had overlooked an important fact: my ticket was for Sunday, not Saturday. This was a particularly boneheaded mistake, as you could see if you looked at my datebook, which contained exactly one item for the entire week of Nov. 30 to Oct. 6: "Julius Caesar," it said, on Sunday. But who bothers looking at their datebook?

The front of house staff was gracious, and offered to seat me that night for the performance beginning an hour later than I had thought, but I decided I'd rather have my Saturday to myself, and went home. I repeated my procedure Sunday, scorning anything that might later cause a tickle in my bladder, and by the time I arrived at the gloomy Brooklyn waterfront, mouth and bladder were both stone dry. St. Ann's had set up a makeshift lobby inside the adjacent Brooklyn Roasting Company—a cruel gag for those who were about to have their restroom rights stricken—and the winding line for the bathrooms had the nervous buzz of the crowd waiting for the last helicopter out of Saigon. 

I waited by the river—where some civic art-minded goon had thoughtfully woven plastic strips through a chain link fence, obscuring the view of the skyline and Manhattan Bridge—and listened as the Pirates took a 3-2 lead over the Cardinals, on vital sacrifice fly. They were still leading when the Donmar company, dressed as prison wardens, herded us into the space. "There are toilet facilities on the left," they told us, "and we suggest you use them now." Truly, theatergoing is a romantic pursuit.  Behind me, a grizzled Englishman announced, "It's a fucking prison, shut the fuck up. I don't want to live the experience, I just want to watch it."

The auditorium had been given a jailhouse makeover. The seats were plastic, armless and hard, and the only air conditioning was a few ceiling fans which seemed to have no more than ceremonial value. I'm not usually one to whine about a theater, but the seats, heat and explicit prohibition of bathroomery perplexed me. Where is the line between pampering your audience and abusing them? How long can a play get before the value gained by not having an intermission is outweighed by the distracting effects of stiff backs, jittery legs, and overfull bladders? (90 minutes, as far as I'm concerned.)

The Donmar's Julius Caesar moves quickly, and 2:15—or actually 2:00 flat, since that :15 was built in to allow the crowd time to get settled—is wonderfully short Shakespeare. But in a play that breaks so easily into halves—"Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war" is as good an act-out as any in the canon—it seems silly to risk losing your plastic chair-tortured audience by refusing them a chance to stand and stretch their legs. The honorable deaths of Cassius and Brutus, it seems to me, will not make much of an impression on an audience member whose ass is numb.

It could be that I'm making something out of nothing. Last night's crowd survived intact, save for one man who was overcome just before Caesar's assassination, and scurried out towards the bathroom, never to return. When the lights went up at the end of the performance, the grizzled Englishman leapt to his feet, and let out a war whoop of approval. A good play can make you forget discomfort, and this Julius Caesar largely manages. It's a compelling production, but a fiendishly uncomfortable one. Leave your sweater at home, skip the coffee, and bring a bottle of water—to sip on, and never gulp.