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.

In Which I Begin Jumping On The Islanders Bandwagon

A friend took me to the first ever NHL game in Brooklyn last weekend. I was charmed by the sight of an organist in the antiseptic Barclays Center, and so I wrote about him: 

Paul Cartier is an air traffic controller, and monitors flights around the country from an FAA facility at Long Island's MacArthur Airport. The job offers unique stress—a friend of his was manning the radar for the second plane hijacked on September 11, and understood the scale of that disaster before almost anyone else in the country—but it doesn't get to Cartier. In the morning, he is happy to get out of bed. At night, he goes to the Nassau Coliseum, to watch hockey and play the organ.

Paul Cartier has been playing the organ for the New York Islanders off and on since 1979. He was there during the Stanley Cup days, when "it was just the PA and the organ—no rock, no nothing, no DJ." He was there during the lean, leaner and eventually leanest years that followed, when recorded music took over a progressively more zombified coliseum and the organ was pushed to the sidelines. Today, he said, "I don't play a whole lot other than the clap stuff, and the little ditty to get the crowd going.

"I used to play a little bit for warm ups and stuff, but as with everything else, advertising becomes the key. So they kind of lost out on that."

On the second-to-last Saturday in September, in a place where advertising is not just lucrative subtext but something like the entire point, Cartier and his organ made their Brooklyn debut at Barclays Center. The Islanders came, too.

 Read more here, my friend.

Morning Thoughts on The Amphitheater Of My Dreams

Often, the dreams I remember best are the ordinary ones. Entirely too often, my unconscious entertains my sleeping self with images of commuting, so that when I wake in the morning, I feel like I just got off an eight hour subway ride. (That's where Bronx Bound​ came from, I think.) Sometimes this is stressful, sometimes its fun. Last night it was a blast, as I dreamt I was riding the subway all over town to meet a buddy of mine, and kept bumping into fun people from high school. The transit details were  accurate in a way they usually aren't—no dragons in the conductor's booth here—right down to a dramatic moment as we rode the F train around the bend at the Smith Ave/9th Street stop.

I looked out the window and saw an amphitheater in Gowanus—a slightly run down, wood-and-steel bandshell, with seats for maybe eighty people and a stage appropriate for theater and film. It was a grey night, and the crowd was mostly empty—that the place was located underneath the train tracks probably didn't help—but I defended the theater to my friends. "Go there on a hot summer night," I said, "and it's the best place to watch theater in New York."​

I woke up sorry it wasn't real. There are a few excellent performance spaces in the area around the Gowanus canal, but because the neighborhood was until quite recently a fetid stinkpot, there are few places to be entertained outdoors. (Gowanus Grove is a notable exception. I've thought about going a few times, but have never seen the point of paying a $10 cover to stand around outside. You can do that for free in parks.) And aside from the beleaguered Brooklyn Lyceum, there are no grand stages anywhere in the neighborhood. This imaginary amphitheater solves all those problems.

Programming would be confined to summer months. If we had heat lamps, maybe we could stretch it into the fall. In a typical week, we'd have one or two plays running in rep, with film screenings on weekend nights and matinees during the day. We could have concerts, late night dance parties—anything and everything to piss off the neighbors and draw tourists from North Brooklyn. There would be a bar in the front, obviously, and enough artisan lightbulbs and distressed iron to earn us two or three Times​ style section gushes—"Hipster Theater, Under The Summer Sky"—in the first month of programming. It wouldn't take long for this to become a warm-weather institution, where people come for the party, stay for the theater, and never even notice that they're enjoying a marginal art form.

​All I need to make this work is a lot of money and a decade or two experience running a performing arts space. Until the Brooklyn gods smile down on this project, I'll have to content myself by hoping to return to my amphitheater in my dreams. Tonight I hope I visit it on a rainy night, when the canvas tarp has been run out, and the audience is huddled together, intent on the performance, rain in the background and the Gowanus Canal oozing along just a few blocks away.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.