Tales of the Tarantula

by Frank Terranella

  Clearly we both have changed physically in 45 years. We were both teenagers the last time we saw each other, and we are now both in our 60s. Our faces show the years. Fortunately, we had exchanged current photographs by email, so there was no problem recognizing each other. We did that immediately. After a welcoming hug, the usually chatty Rosemarie was speechless. I babbled something about 45 years, but we were both in a state of disbelief that we had actually met again after all these years.

  When Rosemarie was finally able to talk, the connection to me was complete. Her voice has not changed in all this time and it immediately brought me back to 1972. It’s amazing how some sounds remain in your memory for decades. I took Rosemarie inside the hotel to meet my wife and we all had dinner together.

  The next day, Rosemarie showed me and my wife the sights of Ottawa and we had a party at her house where I had the chance to meet her husband, children and grandchildren. Rosemarie and I did not get a lot of time together to reminisce, but that wasn’t the purpose of this trip. I drove to Ottawa to see my friend. Talking about old times and catching up on what has happened in our lives in the last 45 years is something we can do by email for years to come.

  It was great to see and hear my longtime friend again and to meet her in her native environment. Much has changed for us in the nearly half a century since we were both in the same room. We have both had longstanding marriages (42 years for her and going on 39 years for me) and we have both become grandparents. We have both had long and successful working careers.

  Although we have led separate lives in different countries for the last 45 years, there is still a bond of friendship born in the 1970s that draws us to each other. And to think that social media (not even dreamed of back then) made our reunion possible. Social media often gets a bad rap due to its many problems, but this is a social media success story. An old friendship was rekindled and it is modern technology that assures that we will be able to keep in touch now without resorting to pen and paper. Thank God! My penmanship has really deteriorated in the last 45 years.

  Harnessing the power of community

  September 2017

  I have noticed that the entire divide in the country comes down to one simple philosophical belief. Some people believe in the power of community to solve problems and others believe that rugged individualism is the way to go.

  I come at this from a Christian perspective. I was raised to believe that love of God and neighbor was the prime directive of Christianity. Pope Francis reminds us continually that this teaching still prevails in the Catholic Church. So it has always seemed to me that loving your neighbor means all neighbors, not just those who look like us or those who we like.

  I was also taught that greed is a sin. Yet I hear people say that greed is the fuel of capitalism and so it is necessary (sort of like fossil fuel). I wonder what that says about capitalism. Is an economic system based on greed suspect? We used to think so. That is why we passed child labor laws and the 40-hour week. That is why we have a minimum wage and consumer protection agencies. Pure capitalism in the guise of unregulated markets runs on pure greed and that’s not a good thing. So we have worked to rein it in with a modified capitalism and protect the most vulnerable in our society from economic survival of the fittest. The stock market is regulated. And companies can’t sell quack drugs and tainted food. As a community we know that’s wrong and so we regulate it. It’s still capitalism, just a kinder and gentler capitalism.

  Now if we really want to fulfill the prime directive, we have to care about our neighbors. That means caring about the poor, the homeless and the victims of disasters – man-made as well as natural. We have to care about their health, their education and their safety. This is the trinity of societal concerns. To care only about safety and neglect the other two is a recipe for a sick society, both literally and figuratively. A just society provides education and health care as a right, just as it provides security by its military.

  Let’s talk first about education. Around the time we were passing laws to regulate markets we also passed laws requiring communities to establish public schools and require young people to attend them. And despite the passage of time, and the fact that a college education is no longer a luxury but a necessity for getting a good job, we do not provide affordable public college education in this country. While state schools are less expensive than private schools, they are still out of reach for many hard-working families. We as a community should see to it that every child who is willing and able should be able to get a four-year college diploma, regardless of how rich or poor they are, without taking on monumental debt. Investing in our children is the wisest investment a society can make. It always pays off in the future. Affordable and even tuition-free college education is what a just society provides its citizens. Yes it costs money, but so does any good investment.

  Now let’s talk about healthcare. It should be obvious (but unfortunately it does not seem to be) that without affordable healthcare, security and education have no value. What good is a safe country where the people can’t afford to stay healthy? What good is an educated populace that dies off due to preventable diseases? Lack of healthcare will always be a more existential threat to the lives of more people than attack from a foreign enemy. We need to think of it as a right, not a privilege for those who can afford it. Every other industrialized country in the world does. Are they all wrong?

  Of course the first thing people say whenever the subject of government-sponsored education and healthcare is raised is that we can’t afford it. The taxes to pay for it would cripple the country. But isn’t it just a matter of priorities? Isn’t it just a different way of paying for the same thing? Instead of paying a private health insurer who cares only about making as much money as possible, we could agree to chip in together as a community and provide it to ourselves and our neighbors on a more humanitarian basis, and without a profit motive. Instead of going deep into debt to pay exorbitant tuition, we could opt instead to use tax money to ease the burden so that smart young people can get the education they deserve without crippling student loan debt. And that would allow many of them to enter less lucrative professions like teaching where their skills are desperately needed.

  The next thing people say is that people will cheat the system. How do we ensure that our tax dollars are not wasted on schemers? This implies that there is no cheating in the private sector. The fact is that there will always be people who will try to get more than their fair share, particularly when Uncle Sam is doling out the benefits. But that cannot be a reason not to help people. That cannot be a reason to just throw up our hands and resign ourselves to a status quo where people are put into bankruptcy trying to heal or educate themselves. The answer is to do the best we can. That is what other countries do around the world.

  But the only way we get our society to the place where we provide a right to education, health and security is to turn down the rugged individualism and turn up the community. We need to actually believe again in the power of all of us working as a community to make a better society, a society that can never be accomplished by working alone, or only with people from our “tribe,” people who look like us.

  We have not tapped into the power of community since the Great Depression when government programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads and parks that we still enjoy today. The untapped power of community in this country is awesome. We see it occasionally when disaster strikes. We saw it after 9/11. We saw it after Harvey and Irma. But we have to have faith in it every day and not just after disasters. We have to believe that we are better off working with others than we will be if we work alone. We have to believe in the power of community to solve our problems.

  This doesn’t take away the profit motive that fuels capitalism. There will still be plenty of opportunity for people to work hard and become prosperous doing it. That’s great. But we need to provide basic necessities to everyone regardless of whether they are winners or l
osers in our market-driven system. We need to simply ensure that everyone in our society is protected not only from foreign enemies, but from ignorance and disease. Isn’t that the kind of society we all want?

  Twins separated by death

  October 2017

  This week I lost another close friend to cancer. Rob Schraft was the type of friend who I would not see for years and within five minutes of reuniting it would be like we were never apart. And my meet-ups with him in recent years were few and far between. Unfortunately, he and I lived in different parts of the United States for the last 30 years. But I cherished the occasions when he would come to see theater in New York. You see theater was Rob’s passion. He earned a Ph.D. in it from NYU at the same time I was getting my law degree at Fordham. He taught theater at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri for many years.

  Rob was a born teacher. He had previously taught at a high school in the South Bronx. He had a knack for getting students excited about theater wherever he taught. And I remember attending a production of Guys and Dolls he staged there. He managed to get kids who probably had never been to the theater not only interested, but enthusiastic about it. His students adored him. And he adored them.

  Rob Schraft with his wife of 38 years, Liz

  Rob seemed to have boundless enthusiasm and being around him you were bound to be caught up in it. His passions when I met him were theater and computers and that matched my passions exactly. In fact, we were often so much in sync that Rob’s wife Liz said we were “twins separated at birth.”

  Most of my interactions with Rob involved theater. I first met him in line in Central Park for Shakespeare in the Park. You see my wife Pat and Rob’s wife Liz worked together at a law firm in New York, and they both thought the two of us would get along. So they sent us off on a sort of blind date.

  Back in those days the free tickets for Shakespeare in the Park were distributed around 5:00, so lines would begin to form around noon. Each person in line could get two tickets. The wives were at work, but I was working as a newspaperman and finished work at noon. Rob also finished teaching in early afternoon. So the wives concocted a plan that the two of us would meet in Central Park and get the tickets. The problem was that we had never met.

  Well, I honestly don’t remember what device we used to identify one another, but I remember the moment in 1979 that we met like it was yesterday. I had heard from Pat that his name was Rob and I assumed that was short for Robert. So I shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Bob, and he immediately corrected me. “It’s Rob as in Robin. My father named me after Robin Roberts.” We sat on the grass in Central Park and had several hours on line together to get to know one another. After that we were fast friends.

  We found so many similar interests. This was the dawn of the personal computer age and we were both in love with computers. And we both loved theater. There was always a new show to talk about. I spent many evenings at the theater with Rob. Always the consummate teacher, he would make me aware of the fine points of the lighting and set design.

  Soon after he earned his doctorate, Rob found his first college teaching job in Georgia. Then he taught in Texas before finally settling down in Missouri. After that, the get-togethers were infrequent, but we managed to get to Missouri a few times, and Rob and Liz and their son John visited us as well. The trips to New Jersey always involved lots of Broadway theater. Each time we got together, it was like they had never left.

  And now he is gone, testimony to the old saying that “only the good die young.” It’s hard to believe and very painful when a friend your age dies. But Rob will always be with us. He made a contribution to the lives of countless students. Rob’s life mattered.

  There are very few people you meet in life who are “friends forever.” Rob was very special in my life as one of these. The physical distance between us didn’t matter. Nothing could break the bond between the twins separated at birth. Nothing except death.

  As Shakespeare noted:

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.

  Check out these hidden gems from forgotten Broadway musicals

  November 2017

  Why do some songs become smash hits and others, just as good, lurk in obscurity? I have wondered about this for many years. If you’re old enough to remember 45 rpm records, you probably have a favorite song that was the B side of a hit. The fact that a song does not reach hit status is often not so much a commentary on its quality but rather on the circumstances of its introduction.

  A good example is the B side of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles. If you turned the record over you found a little rock and roll gem called “I Saw Her Standing There.” Or how about the B side of “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones? It was a song called “Bitch,” featuring one of the best guitar riffs in history.

  In this article I would like to highlight four rather obscure songs from Broadway musicals that I think deserve a listen. They are all from shows that had respectable (but not long) nine-month runs on Broadway. But since neither has ever been revived on Broadway or made into a movie, the shows are as obscure as the songs.

  We’ll start with a 1965 musical called Baker Street. It was a musical adaptation of Sherlock Holmes starring Fritz Weaver and Inga Swenson. The music and lyrics were by the Toronto-based team of Marian Grudeff and Raymond Jessel, who as far as I can see never had another show on Broadway. But this one is very good indeed. It was directed by Harold Prince and, among other things, it marked the Broadway debuts of Christopher Walken and Tommy Tune. Although it ran for nine months, it has never been revived in the last 50 years at any professional theater as far as I can find.

  That’s a shame because there are several great songs in it. I will direct your attention to just two. The first is a lovely waltz sung by Inga Swenson that is every bit as good as anything written by Richard Rodgers. It’s called “I’d Do It Again.” You can hear it on YouTube or Spotify. The lyrics speak of how it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But it is the unspeakably beautiful melody that elevates this from standard Broadway fare.

  Interestingly, although Inga has an amazing soprano voice, she has never again appeared on Broadway. Fans of the ‘80s hit TV show Benson will remember her as the German cook, Gretchen Kraus. And although her name might lead you to think she hales from Scandinavia, she actually was born in Omaha, Nebraska.

  The second number from Baker Street that I want you to listen to is called “A Married Man.” It’s a wonderful song sung by the newly-widowed Dr. Watson about how much he misses his wife. I can’t think of any other song in history that tackles that subject matter. It’s remarkably poignant.

  The song is sung by Peter Sallis, who had a long and distinguished career on stage, films and on television, mostly in England. You may have heard him as the voice of Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films.

  Another rather obscure musical I love is Seesaw, the 1972 musicalization of the hit play and movie Two For The Seesaw. It also ran for just nine months and has never been revived on Broadway despite the fact that the music and lyrics were by Broadway veterans Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, who had written Sweet Charity just before this show.

  The show starred Michele Lee and Ken Howard as an unlikely couple (she a Jewish girl from New York City named Gittel Mosca, he a WASP from Omaha, Nebraska called Jerry Ryan). Dorothy Fields was the perfect lyricist for the Gittel character because she was herself New York-born and bred.

  The first song from Seesaw that I think is a gem is called “He’s Good For Me.” It expresses perfectly Gittel’s lack of self-esteem. In the song, she asks “He’s good for me, but am I good enough for him.” It’s a common feeling that’s easy to understand. I think the song is universal enough that it could be sung by a man or a woman, and it certainly deserves to be sung as part of the Great American Songbook. Cy Coleman’s melancholy
tune matches Fields’ dead-on lyrics perfectly.

  The second song from Seesaw that is worth a place in the American Songbook is one sung by Tommy Tune (yes, he was in this show too). The number, “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish,” is probably the most famous song from Seesaw (but that’s not saying much considering how few people have ever seen the show). It is brimming with the optimism that Cy Coleman brought to all his shows. It’s a giant production number that highlights Tommy Tune’s bigger-than-life persona and irrepressible spirit. For this one I definitely recommend you seek out the video on YouTube. Search for “Seesaw Tommy Tune” and it should come right up.

  Just as we can’t choose our parents, songs can’t choose the shows in which they are introduced. But in both cases, parentage matters. These songs were not blessed with successful parents and so they have had a tougher time making a name for themselves. But if you give these songs (and these shows) a listen, I think you will agree they are rather special.

  Fighting sexual harassment – A plea for unity

  November 2017

  There’s an old saying: Money is the root of all evil. We are seeing the truth of that statement right now in our national culture. Let me give you a good example.

  Sexual harassment has been in the news lately. Many male celebrities and politicians have been accused of actions with women that most people would consider boorish at best and criminal at worst. One of the politicians accused is Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, who is running for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Moore denies wrongdoing, but the allegations against him are credible enough for fellow Republicans to call for him to step aside. Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that when it comes to electing people to the U.S. Senate, there is no presumption of innocence. We have to be absolutely sure that we are electing a reputable person.