The Gorillas Always Grab Me

Albany natives are always asking me: Don’t you miss the City? They are unfailingly serious while asking the question, looking me in the eye intently, which is something I’ve observed that people rarely do anywhere. Put it down to my mystique. For a guy who was born in Brooklyn and never left except to move his residence first to Manhattan, then to Jackson Heights, Queens, do you doubt that I have mystique-in-spades in the eyes of my fellow Albanians?

We relocated here in October 2007: the other half of ‘we’ being Rose who is regarded as equally mysterious, rest assured, by her female ‘buds’ on Elm Street. We live in a red brick, three-story row house built in 1871 (the first house either of us has ever owned – the co-op apartment in Jackson Heights doesn’t count since it will always be to my mind an apartment, not a house) on tree-shrouded, rightly-named Elm Street, with a garden you get to by walking through the den and country kitchen on the ground floor (called the ‘garden floor’ by the real estate lady) out to the garden that Rose’s green hand has turned into the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

So in response to my local interrogators, I pause pregnantly while engaging their earnest gaze (I feel I owe them this nickel’s worth of apparent soul-searching, the least I can do) then respond: “The Bronx Zoo, that’s it.” The inevitable look of incomprehension follows once they manage to get their minds around this piece of intelligence. I see the gears whirling in there (Broadway… Neon lights and sirens… The City that never sleeps… The Yankees, the Mets).  Precious little they know about the Dark Side. Anyhow, I’m speaking the truth. The Bronx Zoo has always been my spiritual oasis.

In June, I led a safari into the beating heart of the Bronx: the Zoo. Rose’s two women friends, Rose and myself set out early that Tuesday morning (Can’t go on Wednesdays, it’s free admission for school kids) wearing trusty hiking shoes. The zoo is 265 acres through which the Bronx River flows. There’s a shuttle bus that drops you off at different sites around the park and a ride aboard a monorail through Wild Asia. That Tuesday, we split into two teams to cover ground: Rose and I, and Linda and Norma who are Olympic walkers (Me, I’m a dawdler, Rose is Olympic class). My team’s goal was to make contact with bears, cats, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, sea lions and gorillas. We lost track of our sister team as they headed into the interior.

We first met up with Grizzlies (Alaska brown bears), a surly lot whose open mouth looks like a sewer with fangs. They stand ten-feet tall on their hind legs and, it’s claimed, ‘can knock the head off a bison with a single swipe of a paw’ (How the hell do they know that? I wonder. Did they set up some poor bison for that?). We encountered the Indian Rhinoceros from the safety of the Wild Asia Monorail. He weighs a couple of tons (I’m hazy on the exact number because when they’re talking about someone who weighs more than me, I stop listening). As he stolidly eyed our choo choo train, he couldn’t have cared less that his ugly mug might one day grace a bottle of sunscreen, SPF Rhino. In the next door paddock, Patty the Hippo bathed in her mud wallow, a sensible choice in the 90-degree heat. I would have liked to join her in the pool.

The Formosan Panda is red and small enough to sleep in a tree, which he was doing while the elephants gave us scant notice, intent as they were employing their great trunks to toss dirt on each other’s backs to defeat the flies. The cats on Tiger Mountain were thrilling. Being a cat man, I was awed by the intent padding back and forth of the big, yellow-and-black-striped Siberian tiger; couldn’t help but wonder if there would be time to remark his beauty before he leapt on your back and ate you. After five hours, we rendezvoused with Team Two. Linda and Norma had met up with different species. For example, Bats in the Birds of Prey House. Having single-handedly captured nine bats winging their way around the top floor of my house (they drop down from the attic on very hot days, always after midnight, making me apprehensive that one night the Count himself may appear)—I’ve seen bats. Then the seals, great performers, diving and racing underwater in their contained watery world till they break the surface with a braying sound like a tuba. My observations confirm that only the male sea lions get to bray.

But I can never get enough of the lowland gorillas in their Congo Gorilla Forest. There is a glass wall between us. On their side, the Silverback honchos sit unmoving, silently watching, squatting on higher ground as the females and young go about their business for the paying customers. Then, the giant Silverback decides to amble down close to the glass to check you out. He stares into your eyes, unselfconsciously. He puts one giant hand against the glass in front of you and you put your child’s hand against his. He takes his away, then appears to examine yours before looking up into your eyes. Time stands still as you regard each other… Hey, bro!


When I die, I want to go to the Bronx Zoo.

Robert Knightly

Great Old Movies for Hot Weather

Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush

In a world where the temperature goes up over a hundred outdoors for three or four days running, and hovers around 80 indoors, and the humidity is so thick you can't see into the next block, it's useless to try to write. Instead of producing items of popular culture, it is time to consume them.

My binge of choice is a supply of frozen treats and a string of movies of the sort I used to watch on television when I was fourteen. I would lie on the rug, not so close that my mother would tell me to move back before I ruined my eyes, and get up only for the jingle of the bell on the Good Humor Man's ice cream truck. Lime ice pops. The Million Dollar Movie. Hot weather heaven.

Nowadays Turner Classic Movies usually does the job, but on a day when they're showing crappy stuff from the seventies and eighties Netflix offers some good choices, or I might pull out something I bought off the rack at the drugstore. Amazon also has a nice selection of old movies. If you click on any of my links and buy a movie from Amazon they might send me the price of an ice pop.

There are certain criteria for great hot weather movies. They should not try to make you think. Climate-wise, you can go one of two ways: go with the flow and watch a movie set in the tropics or the burning desert (The Letter,  Kim, Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca) or flee to colder climes and wallow in snow (The Gold Rush, The Road to Utopia). Or you can watch a movie with a lot of water in it. An Esther Williams movie. Captains Courageous. The Hurricane. You can watch a cold-hearted film noir such as Double Indemnity. Or a horror film frightening enough to make you shiver, like Them.

My favorite hot weather movies are in black and white and made way before I was born. I Cover the Waterfront is exemplary. The crimes of the old fisherman are chilling and involve a lot of cold water. The romance of the newsman and the fisherman's daughter is hot. What more could you ask for? Besides a soft, cool rug and an ice pop.

Kate Gallison

Is Aurelio Zen Italian?

Don't get me wrong; I like Michael Dibdin's books. I loved "Dead Lagoon." It did a lot more than entertain me. It taught me enough about how to structure a murder mystery to help me write one. I miss having new books of his. He died much too young. His language, enlivened by his Irish education, is a knockout. You hear the "but" coming, right?

Here it is: I have enjoyed Dibdin's books enormously, BUT only because I willingly suspended disbelief and accepted that Aurelio Zen is an Italian policeman. That is not how he reads on the page. Almost all Dibdin’s “Italians” are, like their creator, essentially English. In the beginning, while reading him, this fact distracted me, kept me thinking about what a strange Italian Zen was. Culturally, all Dibdin’s characters, especially Zen, do not behave like any Italians I know. For instance, at three in the afternoon, when the day is getting to be too much for him, Zen wants a drink – an alcoholic one, not a coffee. Sometimes, he has an espresso, but with a shot of the strong stuff in it. So does whatever “Italian” he is drinking with.

Zen lives with his mother. How Italian is that? Well, yes, we all know that Italy has lots of adult male "mammoni" who are too attached to their mothers to move out of the house. But Zen and his mother don't seem attached at all. He and his mom don't worry about one another, unless there is an immediate physical threat. They don't talk much to one another. She doesn't kiss him hello and goodbye. He doesn't long for her food when he's out of town, which he is A LOT. She doesn't try to ply him with it when he gets home. Their relationship is all too quiet and distant. On the surface they are Italians, but deep down, to me, they seem typically English.

Then there are Zen's attitudes toward his fellow Italians. He looks down on them, which could work, but he hates them for all the wrong reasons. Not, as an Italian would, because they are inefficient or sloppy or cold. But because they are too complex, too difficult to understand. A real Italian would hardly notice this since it would be expected.

It occurs to me that there is a discussion we could have about Zen being atypical, not stereotypically Italian. Couldn't there be an Italian like Zen, who reaches for alcohol in times of stress, whose mother never kisses him or prepares him his favorite dish, who is essentially cool, rather than warm, whose sense of humor is dark and ironic rather than one that laughs at the slings and arrows of life in order to make them bearable? Sure. But why not make him just a little bit Italian, for verisimilitude.

The director and producers of the BBC television adaptations of the Zen books, currently airing on PBS Masterpiece Mystery, have gone Dibdin one better. Zen and almost all the major characters in the series so far are played by English actors. This does not bother me at all. The series takes place in Rome. Since early childhood, I have become accustomed to Romans, especially ancient ones, sounding like upper class Englishmen and looking like Rex Harrison or Richard Burton. Even in the HBO series “Rome,” those hunky centurions and emperors were Englishmen.

The Masterpiece Mystery Zen series, however, does something very odd with the casting. All the educated and powerful characters are English actors and sound very British and classy. Zen’s love interest, on the other hand, speaks English with a thick Italian accent. I suppose that is to make her appear sexier. But also, she is a secretary — not a person with a university degree or a good salary. The everyday people that Zen passes on his way around gorgeous Rome — garbage collectors and waiters, in other words all the negligible people with no status in society — they all speak Italian!

This is the kind of stereotyping that could drive me nuts. But instead I laugh at it. Want to know why? Because that’s Italian.

Annamaria Alfieri

What do Dorothy L. Sayers and Beatrix Potter have in common?

They both aspired to lofty academic heights. Sayers yearned to be remembered as a medieval scholar and theologian. Potter aimed to become a botanical illustrator esteemed by botanists. Although each achieved their goals, they are remembered and acclaimed for their more frivolous, playful works, i.e. the Peter Wimsey novels and the Tales of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, etc.

Could this be because they did their best work when they were relaxed and thought what they were doing didn’t really matter? While writing mysteries and tales for children they were no longer uptight, worrying what their critics and peers might think, and consequently did their best work? Or was their academic work simply less popular with the general population?

Whatever, I’m so glad Sayers and Potter did relax and let their playful side take over now and then, so they could give us some of the most entertaining stories ever written.

Maybe we should all give our lofty ambitions a rest and relax a little.

Robin Hathaway

Can You Tell a Book by its Cover?

by Thelma Jacqueline Straw

The setting was idyllic. Outdoors near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Mountains, clouds, pure clean fragrant air, open cabins, good food, great atmosphere, terrific comrades, wonderful teachers!

The Perry-Mansfield School of the Dance and Theatre, the gold star of Dance-Drama summer training.

We were taught by stars - Daniel Nagrin, Helen Tamiris, Harriette Anne Gray, the best in the field.

We ate, drank, talked dance and theater 25 hours a day!

We bonded. Made instant best friends.

When the session was over, I joined in the drive east with my friend Ginny, who was to become a world celebrity at PBS, as series producer of the famous Adams Chronicles, who would also receive the highest TV honors worldwide for this work.

Ginny also shared her car with two fellow students.

Larry, a handsome, young blond god, a charmer who saught a great future on Broadway. He brought a friend, a nice but quiet young fellow, not terribly gifted, who'd spent the summer sweeping the floors of the theater and filling in for the more handsome, talented actors.

We all felt kind of sorry for him. But he was on his way to the bright lights too. Maybe he'd get to sweep the great floors on Broadway, while Larry shone on stage.

We shared motel quarters, ladies on one side, gents on the other.

All very modest and proper.

At Omaha we parted ways, the others headed for New York, I to my home on a Tennessee mountain, back to teach college prep students modern dance.

Ginny and I were sure we'd soon see Larry's name in huge lights.

Time passed . . .

A few years later, I saw an ad for a hot new film. Everyone was raving about it, coast to coast! And its leading man.

It was called THE GRADUATE.

His picture looked familiar. My companion from the trip east.

He'd said his name was Dusty.

As they say, the rest is history.

Can you ever tell a book by its cover?

P.S. Larry WHO?