Different Slants

Between January 3rd,2008 and April 13th, 2008, after Rick Munden and I agreed to see if we could create a blog that people would actually read, I wrote thirteen off-the-wall movie reviews of favorite old movies plus much more that I felt would interest people.  Except for review # 12, in which I argued that Amy Adams wasn’t sexy enough to keep three men on a string in a British movie I otherwise liked very much, and in the process attempted to define screen sexiness and suggested it could be a good parlor game, most people didn’t read my reviews. I regret that.

However, hundreds read # 12, so I guess, as they say, sex sells.

I have since revised my opinion of Miss Adams and her charms.  Some women get much better as they mature, and she seems to be a good case for that.  But then, who am I to say?

If you are intrigued, go to the list on the right of this page and look at the list of categories, you can click on Katzman’s Cinema Komments.   I think you will find my eccentric take on the movies is well worth your time.

I quit writing reviews to concentrate on all the other true stories since posted.   They are worth your time too, as are Rick’s stories. 

As far as Roger Ebert, in 1970 he ran a class at the University of Chicago Extension in Downtown Chicago called (cleverly) Film Criticism, which I took twice.   We got to know each other a little, especially when he found out I was selling thousands of Chicago Sun-Times with his column in it at my wooden newsstand in Hyde Park every week.   His class was wonderful and well attended.  I missed a couple of the classes when my newsstand burned down that winter, but that’s another story.

He was very generous with his time, was completely unpretentious despite his growing fame and remained friendly to me through the years.  When Bob’s Newsstand closed in 1985 after 20 years, when I was thirty-five and out of work, he offered to see if he could get me a job as a writer at the Sun-Times.  About a month later, I did get a call from someone at the Times offering me a chance to work for them.  I turned it down because I must have thought I had something better going, which it turns out, I didn’t.  I have often wondered which way my life might have gone if I had decided to say “yes” to the opportunity.  But the point is, Ebert kept his word.  Character, man.

Ebert and I share something else, unfortunately, besides a love of the movies.

(Read on …)

The Inevitable Postscript…five months later  

In 1963, my immigrant Grandmother, Celia Warman from Poland, gave me a $1,000 United States Savings Bond as my Bar Mitzvah gift, as she did her three grandchildren before me, to help me pay for my tuition to college in five years.  For the Jews, education is more important than gold. 

She couldn’t know, as I myself didn’t know, that I would leave home suddenly the very next year, at fourteen, and have to find a way to support myself.  But the Bond remained in a box, as time ticked by. 

By August 1965, at age fifteen, I opened a newsstand in Chicago’s Hyde Park with a friend, Rick Munden, whom I’d met three years earlier in 6^th grade at Caldwell School on the South Side of Chicago.  It was seven days a week and hard, hard work, especially in Chicago’s terrible winters.  Whatever you may imagine about the “romance’ of running a wooden newsstand when Chicago was the last city in America with four daily newspapers, well, somehow I didn’t see it that way. 

Rick decided to move on in December of 1966 and I stayed there, renaming my little corner of the world “Bob’s Newsstand”.  You may possibly be wondering, what does this have to do with Sarah? 

It’s coming.

And once again, it’s eerie, man.

In 1968, I was accepted at the University of Illinois, when tuition there was $50 a quarter.  I hear it’s somewhat higher now.  At that cost, the newsstand could pay for it, and my grandmother’s Bond slept on in the box.  I entered the school in September, 1968, and was diagnosed with cancer in December, that same year.  The surgery was done on my Christmas vacation, removing the left side of my jaw, and I went right back to school in January 1969.  

I dropped out in September 1969, deciding that I didn’t need college to figure out my future, and instead concentrated on running my still wooden newsstand.  But, on a Saturday night, November 28, 1970, the bone dry structure filled with a thousand Sunday newspapers, burst into flame and was totally consumed in hours.  It lit up the night sky and hundreds watched it burn.  I had been home sleeping for a couple of hours before the midnight shift, and when someone called me, I, too, was one of those watching my future turn to ashes.  There was no insurance for wooden newsstands, which surprised no one. 

The next day, standing in front of the remaining charred floor and a few still upright two by fours, I stood on the corner selling newspapers to shocked customers.  I was numb.  There was no heat and no roof.  My several thousand dollars worth of magazine inventory also burned up in the fire.  I felt bewildered and crushed. 

Then I remembered: The Bar Mitzvah Bond. 

(Read on …)

Part Eight (the final part): 

What went wrong, and then right…at Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah; My undelivered toast and the eerie and unexplainable 1958 incident.   

About a week before Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah party, I asked her to see if she could find a CD she could borrow from the temple’s library that played the traditional Jewish celebratory song, Hava Nagila.  When people have weddings, Bar or Bat Mitzvah’s or any significant Jewish or Israeli celebration or party, this is the song that’s always played, and then the people joyously dance to a folk dance called the Hora. 

The Hora usually involves a large outer circle with everyone holding hands and dancing in a clockwise direction.  Then, inside of that circle is another one, going in the other direction, usually with the married couple or the person being honored in the inner circle.  The music is played loudly and raucously as the circles spin faster and faster, with more and more people joining in as people overcome their shyness.  The song goes on for a long time, or until everyone passes out. 

I’m not much of a dancer, but this is one I never miss.  Or that was until, at my middle daughter Rachel’s wedding in December, 2008, it went on for too long, and too fast, twisting back and forth as the dance requires until my knee blew out and I wore a brace on my leg for about a month after that.  But man…it was a great wedding! 

So, the point is, this extremely frugal Bat Mitzvah had no band and no slick DJ.  I figured we could use the temple’s sound system and existing equipment to play dance music for the kids in general and Hava Nagila for the Hora, in particular.  It mattered to me. 

At this point in the American Jewish Diaspora, there are probably more Christians, and even Moslems, too, that have been to so many family celebrations over the last one hundred years, that there are now collectively more of them who know about this dance, than the total number of Jews in this country. 

(Read on …)

When the senior doctor (and the fourth person) finally had the opportunity to read my x-ray results and came in to discuss things with me, he informed me that I had two broken ribs.  He seemed incredulous, having heard from the earlier doctors how much pain I was experiencing, and no sleep, and then he asked me, with that exasperated tone people reserve especially for idiots, 

“Why did you wait a week to come to the hospital?  You might have had a punctured lung, or worse.” 

I thought to myself about how much work I still had remaining to do, those last three days I had to empty out my store.  I had deliberately left the hardest task for last, because I didn’t want to do it at all.  Disassembling a ten foot wide, eight foot tall rack, that only used ten square feet of floor space but held, incredibly, four thousand copies of Life Magazine from the Sixties.  I was proud of how well I’d used the limited storage space, and how durable the rack was, but never dreamed that one day I’d have to remove it.    

But to make that storage capability possible, I used two inch thick shelves, many steel brackets and a bracing buttress to keep the whole wall of Lifes from falling on the steel shelving two feet away from it.  It was very hard to build and, even if I felt fine, it still would have been very strenuous to take apart.  But I didn’t feel anywhere near “fine” and it took me two hours to salvage all that wood, instead of about thirty minutes.  I ended up drenched and exhausted. 

I thought about the thousands of pounds of lumber I had to load into trucks those last days, aided by several people who volunteered to help me do what I couldn’t do alone.  One of them, interestingly, was the president of my synagogue, evidently a hands-on guy, Mike Rosen, who spent long hours sliding the twelve to sixteen foot long shelves into the truck while I did my best to stack and sort them for unloading while staying inside of the truck. This was the morning after the accident.  It hurt to stand and it hurt to breathe.  But I had so much hard work to do.

I was still unaware of my broken ribs, but Mike could see how much difficulty I was having carrying the long planks to the truck, so he suggested that he do that part while I sort the planks by size, and not have to lift so much.  I looked at the guy, an executive who travels the world for a national company, and whom I assumed lifted nothing heavier than a laptop and a cup of coffee while flying over the continent.  He was only a bit younger than I was, so I told him my concern was that he might have a heart attack from the sudden increase in work, and I wasn’t kidding.  People do what they do, and I didn’t want someone to die while helping me. 

(Read on …)

The ceremony, falling off the ladder, and the hospital incident, but not in that order   

Part Six 

The actual religious ceremony, which Sarah shared with another boy, went flawlessly. 

The temple’s longtime rabbi, Jonathan Magidovitch, provided a comfortable setting that made the event both special for two participants and less tense for them as well.  Although he has done this probably hundreds of times, he nevertheless makes it seems fresh each time he addresses the child and blesses them.  I know he set Sarah at ease, to the limited extent that can be done as one hundred people were watching her, with half of them Christian relatives who couldn’t read Hebrew nor were familiar with the temple’s patterns and customs. 

Sarah was also assisted in her chanting the ancient melodies of the Hebrew prayers by the temple’s beautiful cantor, Lynda Dresher, who has a soaring voice and, initially, was a major reason I joined the temple in the first place.  When I was a child, there were no female cantors or rabbis either, so this, to me, is real progress in both equality and the quality of a religious experience.  With three daughters, I want no barriers to them. 

Sarah’s speech was an important part of the event, where she thanks people who have helped her to get to where she was, at the podium, but also to make a declaration of faith and how Judaism mattered in her life.  Not so easy to write at thirteen, but her speech was flawless and flawlessly delivered.  Many people said so to Joyce and me later on at the party. 

While our synagogue has many interfaith marriages, this was the first joint Bar/Bat Mitzvah I’d ever been to where BOTH of the children were blondes.  The concept of somebody supposedly”looking Jewish” may soon have no meaning.  Still, there was a degree of culture shock for me, being the grandchild of exclusively dark brown eyed, dark brown haired Yiddish-speaking Eastern European immigrants. 

 But I thought Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah in particular rather pushed the envelope on interfaith family events. 

Without too much elaboration, this is who participated: Besides Joy and I, and her sisters, Rachel and Lisa, and later David, all Jewish, Sarah’s grandmother Helen Bishop was there (her actual father’s mother) and she’s proudly Lutheran.  Joy or I drive her to her church on Sundays.  Her grandfather, Robert Coffin (her actual mother’s father), is Swedenborgian, people who follow the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborgen (1688-1772) Swedish founder of the Church of the New Jerusalem.  This is a rare case where there are less of his followers in the United States than there are Jews, not that it’s a contest or anything.  

Her (other) handsome older brothers were part of the ceremony, too.  William Nelson, 17 and Robert Nelson, 15, both Catholic, were there with their adoptive mother, Judy, whom Joy and I view as a sister to us and Sarah sees as an aunt.  Actually, it’s not all that confusing to any of us.  Religion has never seemed to be an obstacle to love, in any of our families.  Sarah had also been to Will and Robert’s Communions and nobody tries to convert anyone to anything else.  It’s confusing enough as it is. 

Lastly, and frankly, the most fascinating to me, was (Aunt) Sarah’s new baby niece, Natalia.  This beautiful child, with dark brown eyes and dark brown hair, is the seemingly unique combination of the following countries and peoples: English, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Byelorussian, Norwegian, Danish, Northern Ireland, Native American (Ottawa, Ohio and Ojibwa Tribes) Mexican and best of all, Basque!  And Jewish. 

I can’t wait until someday, someone says to her, on a playground:  

“Hey, Talia!  So…where’s your family from…?” 

All of these wonderful moments occurred on Saturday afternoon, September 12^th 2009. 

(Read on …)

So, all the volunteers gathered, and started putting all the pieces together.

I schlepped all the food from home. Rana and Bruce, Dana Kruger, a grown-up childhood friend of Sarah’s older sister Rachel, was there, too.  Donna was commandeering the kitchen, doing six things at once.  Joy was setting tables and others were blowing up balloons with helium and making little table decorations in Sarah’s colors.

I did whatever I was told to do.  Bruce brought in the cake.  A man’s job.  All the place settings were distributed, carefully, making sure that family members who couldn’t stand each other weren’t sitting at the same table.  Then there was the Republican table and the Democrat table, and so on.  Complicated.

As we left the party room, Donna pulled me aside in the kitchen.  I didn’t resist.

She informed me that she wasn’t accepting any payment for her work at the party.  I was stunned at this news, and immediately protested that she was wonderful to make the offer, but she had worked so hard and deserved to be paid.  Besides, I told her, I already had the money ready for her.

But she brushed all that aside with a gesture of her hand and this “Don’t you get it?” look on her lovely face, saying,

“I believe in karma—what comes around, goes around.  Besides”, she continued, “you’re out of work now and I’m not.  Ya know you’re gonna need it.”

Not willing to let her do this to herself, I persisted and told her I really wanted to pay her for making the party possible because there was no one else who could have done what she did for us.

Donna is Italian and Catholic, or is it the other way around?  She fixed me with this This-Discussion-Is-Over look in her dark eyes and said in that unmistakable Italian way,

“Don’t worry about it.  Enjoy your party.”

I did as I was told.  One thing I’ve learned is not to argue with a determined woman, Italian or not.

Catching up to Joyce who was going into the temple’s sanctuary for Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah ceremony, I said nothing about it, but, feeling a little disoriented by my unexpected moment with Donna, I thought to myself,

Where do people like that come from?

But, her tribe increased.

A week earlier, Sarah’s older brother David had filmed her riding a horse she liked very much at a place where she worked, periodically, taking care of other people’s horses.  This came about in a spontaneous way, when the person (whom I am electing not to identify) who gave the riding lessons, was somehow able to figure out that Sarah was not just another rich kid from Barrington or Lake Forest.  I found out about this person, and this situation, after the fact.

(Read on …)