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The Pastrami vs. Lox Debate

My synagogue hosts the recent traditional Purim debate, which in the past has been on the relative merits of hamantaschen vs. latkes. This year, however, they changed the topic to Pastrami on Rye vs. Lox with Bagels. I was proud to represent Team Pastrami. Here are my prepared remarks:

I turned 60 this past Sunday, which means I am the perfect person to stand before you and advocate on behalf of well-preserved meat.

I am speaking of pastrami. Pastrami, which is not merely a Jewish food — it is a Jewish-American food. Pastrami as we know it now did not exist in the old country. It came from southeastern Europe, principally Romania, which is another reason why I should be representing pastrami, because I am one-eighth Romanian. I’m am also currently two-thirds pastrami. We ate at Katz’s Delicatessen on Sunday, and I’m still digesting that sandwich, it was that big.

So, it was a Romanian thing, but the Romanians made it mostly from geese. I read this on the internet, so I know that it’s true. The Romanian Jews then came to America, and when I say America, I mean of course the Lower East Side, because that is as much of America as we could get to back then. And what did they find when they got to the Lower East Side? They found poverty. They found tenement living. They found prejudice. They found hard work. What didn’t they find?

Geese, ladies and gentlemen. They didn’t find geese. Geese in America were things you found on golf courses on their winged migrations from Canada to wherever geese go when they’re not in Canada. Probably Boca, looking for more golf courses. And this was back when golf courses did not let Jews play, so the geese were safe. And when the geese heard that the Romanian Jews had come to New York and were looking for them, waving bags of Kosher salt, they did the smart thing. They got out of town.

So the Jews couldn’t make their traditional brined goose dish. But they were in America, and what does America have more of than anything else? Cows!

You kids are too young to remember the way it used to be in New York City, when giant herds of cows roamed the streets, clogging up intersections and slowing things down on the subways because they kept getting stuck going through the turnstiles, which to this day are not particularly cow-friendly. They also used to wander onto the railroad tracks. One of the first jobs available to the Romanian Jews was to ride on the front of locomotives, shooing away the cows. Then someone invented the cow-catcher, and the Romanians were all put out of work. But this led to a remarkable discovery. One of the cows wasn’t so lucky. It was hit by a Long Island Railroad Train, so a Romanian Jewish cowcatcher took a side of beef home to his wife. It was too big to keep forever, and they didn’t have refrigerators then, so he said to his wife, “Syl, remember that thing we used to to with the geese back home? What if we tried that with these cows that are all over the place here?” And they did, and it was good. So, there were two beneficial effects — the Jews had something good to eat, and the city no longer has a cow problem. If you don’t believe me, look outside and tell if you see any. This is why. And since Jews knew all about marketing, they took the Romanian word for it, pastrama, and made it rhyme with salami. And this is another reason pastrami is a Jewish-American food — because when it came here, they made it change its name.

Lox — lox isn’t even from here. Fish aren’t American. They’re sneaky creatures who hide in the oceans, plotting and scheming, waiting to attack. If there is one lesson we learned from watching “Jaws,” it’s that you can’t trust a fish. They wait for the right moment and swim under our walls, going upstream to feed our land enemies, the bears. And if lox is so Jewish, how come the one Latin phrase all Jews know is “Nova Scotia?” It’s Latin. It’s Canadian. It means New Scotland. This is food trying to sound fancy, trying to act like it’s better than the rest of us.

And we haven’t addressed the whole carbohydrate situation. Again, I am the perfect choice to be expounding on this, because I have been told that I have a rye sense of humor. Pastrami is meant to be eaten on rye bread, the only bread that comes with the word “Jewish” attached to it. It was Jewish then, it’s Jewish now, and it will always be Jewish and too big to fit in a standard toaster, you have to do one-half, then flip it, and it never really matches up right in the middle, but I am digressing.  Bagels, on the other hand, have become assimilated. They have lost their Jewish identity. You can buy them frozen. They have flavors, now. Flavors that God and the Jews never intended for them. I say unto you that blueberry bagels are an abomination, and don’t get me started on the jalapeno ones. And the reason they have had the mad food scientists inject them with all of these weird food additives is because, let’s be honest, bagels don’t have much flavor themselves. It is not surprising that the bagel symbolizes the number zero, because that’s how much flavor it has. They are carbohydrate delivery systems for whatever you put on them. And let’s talk about how they keep. Rye bread, you wrap it, you put in a bread box if you have one although sometimes the rye bread is bigger than a breadbox so it’s a good subject for Twenty Questions and I’m digressing again, but rye bread keeps its softness and its flavor. A bagel — you leave it in the ordinary atmosphere for more than thirty seconds, you’ll need a diamond saw to slice it. So if you have a piece of lox, which is really just spoiled fish, and you have it with cream cheese, which is really just milk gone bad, then you might as well put the whole, slimy, decaying mess on the densest chunk of carbohydrates ever created. But if you want something with flavor, something with complexity, something with cultural history that with each bite will remind you of your ancestors and with each sandwich may hasten you to join them, then there is no better choice then pastrami and rye.

Oh, and what you put on it — I prefer a little mustard, others like cole slaw — but that should maybe be a topic for the next debate. Thank you.

Speech for the 2019 NEO Concert, The York Theatre, March 4, 2019

I believe that a fundamental component of being a creative artist is self-delusion. My own began in 2003 when I saw a terrible musical that had made it all the way to production with a large cast and orchestra, and thought, phht — I can do better than that. That phrase, and the phht noise is an essential part of it, is the first step of your journey into madness.

You have to convince yourself that you can write a musical; that the musical you’ve written is good; and that others will see and understand this and agree with you to the point that they will put this musical on. The first two parts are all you, but the last part — this is where the York Theatre comes into it. To all of this year’s crop of NEO winners, I want to be brutally honest about what the York’s role is in all of this. The York Theatre is an enabler.

How does it do this? By connecting you with other crazy, self-deluded people. People who are convinced that they can create theater — not just theater, but your theater. The show that for years has played only in your mind in a continuous loop, causing you to hum off-key in the subways or speak in different voices in public parks, has suddenly been yanked away and entrusted to a team of strangers with talent. And this is New York City, which means that the talent pool they will be drawing on is the greatest musical theater talent pool in the world.

I know this from experience. I have done workshops in other states. There are talented people in other states, but not as many. You might get cast members who don’t read music, or who will confess, I’m really a straight actor, but my agent thought I should try musicals. Not here. The York does it right. They cast it right. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had was sitting down with my composer, Joy Son, our director, Annette Jolles, and Seth Christenfeld, the producer slash god of casting at the York, and suggest people for our show. Which became a lot of me saying, “Holy cow! You can get him? She might do it?” And you look at clips on youtube for people you’ve never heard of and say, “Cast them! Now, before someone else does!” And you end up with the best of all possible casts, which is to say, the best cast available that week.

And because they are New York City musical theater actors, they will learn the score in two and a half days, leaving you two more to finally hear what the show sounds like outside of your head. It will be very different. I write with my imaginary floating repertory company supplying the voices. Nick and Lauren have been members for years. But now you have different voices, different faces, different bodies inhabiting your characters, and you get to see whether the work will hold up with these new people, if the lines and songs and scenes make sense. And you will find yourself saying, “That’s a terrible line. Who wrote that terrible line? Oh, right.” and you cut it. Or, “How self-indulgent were we to think that song needed a second verse?” and you cut it.

But then you see the things you hoped might work actually work. You came into the week with a twelfth draft that you thought was perfect, and come out with a thirteenth draft that’s even more perfect and ten minutes shorter. And then it gets performed in front of a knowledgeable musical theater audience, because this is the York. For one performance, a group of self-deluded people comes together to support your delusion, and all of a sudden, it’s a mass delusion. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ve made something worthwhile and rewritten reality. And the sad and beautiful part is, it happens only once, and you’ll never see that particular collection of performers do that particular version of the show again. But you’ll know that maybe your choice to do this was not so crazy after all.

The great Lily Tomlin once said, “Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.” My hero Tom Stoppard said, “ You’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else.” To all of my self-deluded colleagues, I wish you the best, and enjoy the long strange trip you’re about to take.

Synchonicity and Murder

In the first year of the Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, they rotate the lyricists with the composers for each project. The final project is a ten minute musical. Having gotten in with no real musical theater experience, I was panicky and insecure about having enough time to write one in three weeks. My solution was to start writing it long before I knew who I would be paired up with, which was grossly unfair to my unknown composer.

Nevertheless, I forged ahead, picking a classic macabre murder story to musicalize, because I thought it would be perverse fun. Fortunately, I was paired with a young composer named Matt Frey, who not only accepted what I had done, but ran with it with his own musical craziness.

The middle section was an extended scene for the three crime scene officers. Matt’s music caught the insanity of my lyrics, switching meters practically every measure: 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, 6/8.

While this was happening, my day job as a public defender took me into a real murder case. It was one involving a great deal of forensics, including one area that was new to me — blood splatter analysis. This was before the Dexter books and series made it cool. I was working with a mentor, Tom Klein, who was the Roving Murder Guy at Legal Aid. He set up a meeting with the Crime Scene Analysts working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

I arrived early, and waited outside for Tom. Since I had some time to kill, I called Matt to talk over changes in the musical. About halfway through the conversation, it suddenly occurred to me that I was talking about a crime scene song in a murder musical while waiting to talk with crime scene analysts in an actual murder. Synchronicity.

And that was one of those moments when I realized that my life had gotten weird even for me.

The musical is getting its first performance since its debut [and closing] performance in the workshop. Come to the Cornelia Street Cafe on Monday, January 22nd. It can’t help but be better than when we put it on, because I won’t be singing this time.

It’s Gravity! A song in honor of Albert Einstein and the validation of gravity waves

IT’S GRAVITY!

by Alan Gordon

I. [Swing tempo]

WHEN A MASSIVE BLACK HOLE

LIKES ANOTHER BLACK HOLE

VERY, VERY MUCH,

THEY CIRCLE FOR EONS, THEN THEY TOUCH.

IT’S GRAVITY!

 

AND WHEN THOSE HOLES ARE DONE,

THEN THE TWO BECOME ONE,

AND FROM THIS COSMIC EMBRACE

COMES A RIPPLE THROUGH THE FABRIC OF SPACE.

IT’S GRAVITY!

 

WE DON’T KNOW IF THEY DERIVE PLEASURE,

‘CAUSE BLACK HOLES WON’T GIVE OFF ONE GLEAM.

BUT THE RIPPLE IS SOMETHING WE CAN MEASURE,

AND THAT’S SOME PLEASURE THAT WILL MAKE A LASER BEAM.

 

GIN A BODY MEET A BODY

COMIN’ THROUGH THE SKY,

AND THEY HAVE WHAT EACH OTHER CRAVES,

IT’S GRAVITY!

LET’S MAKE SOME WAVES!

 

II.

I DON’T WANNA SEEM CRASS,

BUT YOUR BODY HAS MASS,

SO IT NATURALLY ATTRACTS.

I CAN’T HELP IT IF MINE REACTS.

IT’S GRAVITY!

 

AND IF THE SHORTEST LINE

BETWEEN YOUR BODY AND MINE

COMES ACROSS AS SLIGHTLY CURVED,

THAT LINE’S FINE, SAYS EINSTEIN. DON’T BE UNNERVED.

IT’S GRAVITY!

 

THERE’S NO LIGHT FOR US TO KEEP OUR EYES ON.

BLACK HOLES WON’T EVEN LET OFF A SPARK.

IT’S TRAPPED BEYOND THE EVENT HORIZON,

BUT SOME THINGS ARE BETTER WHEN THEY’RE DONE IN THE DARK.

 

SO, COME HERE, YOU LOST SOUL,

‘CAUSE YOU KNOW I CAN’T CONTROL

HOW THE UNIVERSE BEHAVES.

IT’S GRAVITY!

THAT SPACE-WARPING GRAVITY.

IT’S GRAVITY!

LET’S MAKE SOME WAVES!

R.I.P., Lew Soloff

I was saddened to hear of the death of the great Lew Soloff. If you hadn’t heard of him, start with the original Blood, Sweat and Tears albums — that’s him on trumpet on “Spinning Wheel.” He went on to be one of NYC’s top session men, playing for everyone there was.

When I was in high school in NJ, our jazz band would go every year to a clinic at Indian Hills HS. Soloff was there as a clinician. In between, he and fellow trumpeter Jon Faddis wandered into the auditorium and started to play “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” in thirds with as corny and rinkitink a style as you could imagine. Then, right at the point where we were all laughing, they took it up about two octaves and blew us away.

In the 80’s, I once went into the city with my dad. We went to hear a concert of avant-garde music at the MOMA Summergarden, then down to the Village Gate to catch the George Russell big band. Soloff was at both gigs. We chatted with him about the coincidence, and he was gracious, modest and grateful.

When Wynton Marsalis started with Jazz at Lincoln Center, he did an Ellington concert from the original charts. He had Soloff on the Cat Anderson chair, which meant that he took the high notes. At one solo, he hit a note so outrageously out in the stratosphere that all of the other trumpeters, the best in the business, turned and stared at him. He just shrugged and kept playing on.

He will be missed.
Give him a listen here.

Dak’s Law

“Right now I feel like I could take on the whole Empire myself.”

Recognize that quote? Of course, you do. Dak [or Dack, depending on the source] was Luke Skywalker’s gunner in the battle scene early in “The Empire Strikes Back.” The moment he uttered those fateful words, every thinking being in the theater knew that he was toast.

As a writer and as a viewer, I am irked when I am aware of the writing — which is to say, when I am aware of the open manipulation of my sympathies. When this happens, it creates the opposite effect. Instead of being sympathetic, and later saddened at the sudden and wholly unanticipated demise of said sympathetic and startlingly wrongly optimistic character, I sit there thinking, “Really? They’re doing that?” And the inevitable demise has no impact whatsoever.

Don’t get me wrong. Writing is manipulation. But good writing doesn’t let you know it’s happening. The use of this particular cliché undercuts the surprise, the shock, the pathos. Maybe I am oversensitive to it, but my resentment is at the clumsiness of the attempt, of the contempt of the writer for his/her audience. [I await the comments of any of my readers who wish to point out instances of my doing exactly this. Never said I was perfect.]

What brought this to mind was the mini-series “Fargo,” set in the same world as the great Coen brothers movie. Dominated by the brilliant performances of Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman and Allison Tolman, the plotting and writing have been gleefully perverse, giving me a great deal of pleasure in the twists, never mind that the three hitmen and the one amateur murderer have been exceptionally careless in leaving behind video evidence, fingerprints, witnesses and so forth.

But along comes Episode 9, “A Fox, a Rabbit and a Cabbage.” Lester’s approach to Malvo is both dangerously stupid and extremely out of character, forcing the plot points, but that’s just bad plotting. The invocation of Dak comes from the monologue of Lester’s new wife, Linda — a sad story of her sad childhood, and how her hopes that her Prince Charming would come and here he is in the form of Lester and isn’t everything going to be wonderful. And we immediately know that she is doomed.

It happened in “Dexter,” on Rita’s last episode in Season 4. She expressed her hope in the future and delight that everything seemed to be working out well for them at last, and I felt sadness at the termination of Julie Benz’s contract. Robert, my son, said he saw her death coming from the first episode of that season. Somewhere, Dak was yelling, “Girl! Get out of town now!”

So, here endeth the lesson. If you want to surprise your viewer or reader, don’t tell them the character is going to die. We may still like the character — but we’re not going to respect its creator.

Tell Me a Story

“Tell me a story, Vince.”

That was the first line of my first published short story, “A Dry Manhattan Story,” in the April, 1991 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.  I have always loved the voice in fiction of one character telling a story to another. It gives life to both the teller and the listener, allowing for narrative and commentary simultaneously. It is best done on a journey or by a roaring fire. (I have used both in The Widow of Jerusalem and An Antic Disposition,and arguably those are my two favorite books among those that I have written.)

Fiction writers have it easy in one sense. We are limited only by our imaginations and our talents. We can set a story anywhere, anytime, restricted only by what our aesthetic dictates. Selecting the restrictions and imposing them is part of the fun.

But what if someone else imposed the restrictions? What if they were the following: A. The story has to be told orally, not in writing. Okay, I know how to talk. B. The story has to relate to a one or two word theme that will be given to you. No problem—that can trigger my imagination in interesting new ways. C. It has to be five minutes long. Uhh, tougher. Sometimes getting me to shut up is more difficult than getting me to write. D. The story has to be true, drawn from your own life.

Gulp.

Enter The Moth. Founded in 1997 in NYC by George Dawes Green, The Moth holds story-telling evenings, open to all. Hundreds of people jam into a café or bookstore for the weekly StorySLAMS, and a few dozen intrepid (or narcissistic) souls drop their names into a bag. Ten are selected at random. An emcee, usually a comedian, holds forth in between the tales, and panels of volunteer judges score the tale-tellers on a scale of one to ten. The highest score earns the teller the right to compete against other winners in a quarterly event called the GrandSLAM, held in an even larger venue. The winner gets—nothing but bragging rights.

The program has expanded across the nation, adding events with longer stories and a radio show on NPR, earning a Peabody Award along the way. It remains one of the best bangs for the buck anywhere. And it’s a rush, as I can attest from experience.

I had been approached early in The Moth’s history about participating, but felt that my talents were better suited to fiction. Two years ago, however, I thought of one story from my past. I came in, was picked—and won on my first time out. Since then, I have been in two more StorySlams and two GrandSLAMS.

I have found that it takes a different set of gears for true life tale-telling. The narrative voice belongs to a character named “Alan Gordon,” who is an aspect of me slightly larger than my daily persona. The Procrustean nature of the time limit becomes a major factor—do I stretch or do I cut? I usually shape it in my head rather than committing to paper for the freedom to improvise if inspiration pops up mid-performance, as it frequently does.

My second StorySLAM win was for a theme that you’d think would be in my wheelhouse: Mystery. But mysteries in fiction are common. Mysteries in real life—not so much. Yet it was musing upon the paradox of a mystery writer lacking mystery in life that led me to the winning story, which I literally composed on the subway ride from Queens to the Manhattan venue. What was it? Well, it’s a tale best told out loud—and it will be. It’s going to be featured on the radio show and podcast sometime in 2014. The details will eventually be posted at www.themoth.org. Until then, you can check out the site for events near you, the radio schedule, and current podcasts. And if you have a tale to tell, come on down and give it a try.

But remember—you only have five minutes. And it has to be true.

Gulp.