Archive 2009 back to 2004

Since the start of the decade, I’ve published four books, continued the gossip column in England that I started in 1996, my free search engine Philosopedia has had over 2,000,000 hits, and I've paid off half the mortgage of my West Village apartment that now is worth ten times more than the remaining mortgage balance. But the biggest event of the decade was being adopted by 12-year-old Ligardy in 2004. As we ended the year, he had applied to art schools (Corcoran, FIT, Parsons, Purchase, SVA), made sure he was not incomplete on homework, and finished his 44-page inventory of my art holdings (Cocteau, Dali, Knaus, Leger, Picasso, Santry, Termonfils, Weschler).

I have not lost any inner circle friends, and he has gained new friends but laments that some of his grade school Bushwick/Brooklyn friends have been raped, killed, jailed, or are on drugs. At the start of the year, like a celebrity, I was finishing rehab for my kneecap surgery and now am 99% recovered. At the end of the year, the two of us could think of no low points whatsoever but heard his mother’s happiness in telling how we have raised “our son.”

Wyman Rousseau (NCHS '59) met his teacher for the first time in five decades at the Tavern on Jane, 26 December 2009. Wyman has led Unitarian congregations in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, retiring in 2008. He recalled teachers' names (Streeter, Hallett, Murphy, and his drivers ed coach, Sikorski). He also related how his mother was pleased when I asked to play her Wurlitzer organ after having been invited for dinner all those years ago. When Wyman refused to attend his own Baccalaureate service, I predicted accurately that my thoughtful student would likely succeed as a liberal minister. Wyman's wife, Maia Williams, heard a few tales her husband had never told her about. . . .

The Blizzard of '09 finally brought some snow, but only 6" to 8" in the West Village.

Next morning, a Sunday, Eighth Avenue (on the right) was all clear but 4th Street (left) had only one lane plowed. Ligardy had made it home to Brooklyn by subway from his last class at Parsons in Manhattan; friends in Connecticut said they had received up to 11''; and friends in Iowa said they still have the 16" of snow from a week ago. I called my policeman buddy to see if he was in jail but, no, he had driven from Connecticut to Virginia in his 4-wheel pickup, was able to go up inclines that other cars could not, and after a 13-hour drive in the blizzard made it to almost the North Carolina border where he owns a rental property. Oh, and one of his tires blew, he had to change it in a blizzard, and he has no spare to get back on.

Ligardy got a 55 in U. S. Government (!) but was absent only one day in the just-finished marking period. Yet, he has a grade average of 85. Last year he had a 94 in US History. His current 12th grade teacher (a dean, no less) flunked him for having been tardy 10 times, nine because of subway slowness from Brooklyn to Manhattan and one because he was in the nurse's office with a sprained ankle. In Connecticut, I told him, teachers didn't flunk students if they provided written excuses. "I already know how unfair life is," he smiled as he opened the new MacBook that I'm trading for his Acer laptop. Like a good pragmatist, he now gets up at 05:30 instead of 06:00 in order to get from Brooklyn to school in Manhattan well before the teacher's first class. He can now see when she is tardy.

Peter Ross (my techy, the Mac genius) took me to see Burn the Floor on Broadway, one that featured 1940's and other decades' music. Australia's Maksim Chmerkovskiy of Dancing With the Stars and the Australian movie star Kym Johnson were featured, but the couples from New Zealand, Britain, Italy, Slovenia, and Malaysia were flawless as they demonstrated the waltz, the foxtrot, the tango, the Charleston, Quickstep, 4/4 rhythm, cha cha, samba, paso doble, rumba . . . and World War II's lindy hop and jitterbug. Except for songs that were sung, no words - just dance, lights, movement, gracefulness, beauty!

The segment called Latin Quarter brought back memories of my entering its stage door to go up the steps with Sammy, whose Sammy Fields Band played for the nightly performances. The scantily clad gals, whose shoulder braces were strapped to a rope on a pulley, were pulled over the dancing and merrily drinking nightclubbers, who looked up at what seemed like flying almost naked angels. Unnoticed was my pulling feathers off their gowns as I shoved them off from where they were anchored upstairs so they could fly over the revelers. Add plucking B'way showgals' feathers to my resumé!

After the show, I took Peter to see the Hell's Kitchen bar (Cleo's Saloon, on 46th) where I hung out during the 60's to 90s. Asked how I liked the show, I said, "We white boys can really dance up a storm!"

What we didn't know was that back on 45th Street, in the breezeway at the Marriott, a cop had shot at a vendor, who shot back with a 30-bullet handheld submachine gun that weighed 6 pounds and was stolen in Richmond last October. Gunman Raymond Martinez dropped and lay dying while tourists watched. He had been peddling self-made compact disks to tourists and was stopped by 41-year-old plainclothes Sgt. Christopher Newsom. . . . Peter and I returned to our safe West Village, home of Rachel Uchitel (one of golfer Tiger Woods's many prostitutes who cost maybe 60Gs for kinky several-girl "transgressions"), ex-Mrs. Paul McCartney (Heather Mills), and nightclubs where the A-listers (including Woods) flock nightly after midnight.

At a party upstairs in my co-op, Luis (who works at Beasty Feast, where I buy pet supplies) took the photo of his girlfriend Nancy tempting me with a Garden of Eden apple . . . only it was a chocolate-covered strawberry.

Professor Tim Madigan often visits during his holiday break from St. John Fisher’s College in Rochester, his stated mission being to bring me couth. We had a first-rate time with Stephan and David Shaw, the imaginative founders of Unemployed Philosophers Guild who gave us Schopenhauer finger puppets:

    http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Unemployed_Philosophers_Guild

I wrote them up, adding the nude Adam and Eve cups that come alive when hot coffee or tea is added:

    http://www.philosophersguild.com/index.lasso?page_mode=Product_Detail&item=0965

We had T’Day dinner at the Village Den with techy Peter Ross - we chose duck or Virginia ham, not pedestrian turkey. Peter than started a YouTube podcast in which Tim interviewed me in 3-segment clips about Omaha Beach – we covered my path from Ft. Leavenworth to Ft. Knox to Ft. Dix and on to Liverpool, Southampton, and Easy Section of Omaha Beach, getting chosen by the Adjutant General to be a chief clerk of Hq Oise, which supplied all the divisions in Europe from 1944 to 1945. For post-production, Ligardy maybe will introduce Tim and also ask questions.

Making sure I got couth, Tim took me (front-row seats) to Zero Hour, the new play written by Jim Brochu in his one-man show about Zero Mostel.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS9vguPd8c

How that man can act! Before the play started, I talked with the two couples sitting next to us about how at Sardi’s after seeing Zero in Rhinoceros I was invited to talk with him, laughed that he’d gotten there before I had just seen him onstage, and worked with Jerry Bock recording some songs for a proposed B’way play that had not yet been named. “What do I file the tapes under?” I’d asked Jerry. The play hadn’t yet been titled, he said, so put it under Tevye. “How do you spell it?” I had to ask!. . . Zero in the play told how he had been chosen in the various roles he’d played, mentioned Tevye and Sardi’s, and all eyes who had heard my story now turned toward me.

Meanwhile, Brochu sketched on a pad all through both acts while describing his difficult life, his having a leg smashed when a city bus slid on ice into him, the ordeal of being blacklisted and refusing to cooperate with Senator McCarthy’s inquisition, and being invited by President Johnson 10 years later to perform at the White House. The names he threw out were almost all familiar to me. At the end of the grim but witty play, Brochu showed the sketch and, like Mostel, he’s a very good watercolorist.

[I saw the play and took the above curtain call photo on Friday night, wrote the above on Saturday, and on Monday The Times published a review that, although praising Brochu's acting, did not include the words blacklist or fiddler but did include Brochu's lover's name, Steve Schalchlin, by mentioning their 2006 off-Broadway memoir with music, The Big Voice: God or Merman?]

Nearby St. Clement’s is Cleo’s Saloon (formerly Town & Country Bar) where Fernando and I hung out during the almost three decades we lived in Hell’s Kitchen and ran the recording studio. To my surprise, Joey, one of the bartenders recognized me although I’d not been there in years and as I approached said “Varg

as!” Then, and it was over 2 decades later for Fernando died in 1989, he remembered his driving him crazy by putting many coins in the jukebox and repeating the 1970s song “Joey, Joey, Joey” until he couldn’t stand it any more. Freddy, he said, always sat in the same seat in the corner, remembered how he showed anger by making movements of his jaw and lips, grinding his teeth, without talking, and how - when he was slugged by another drunk and fell backwards onto the floor - Joey had taken him to the hospital. Madigan took two good photos. What’s amusing is that Joey confirmed stories I’d told Madigan and others years prior.

Madigan has seen all the major places where I have lived and worked, so he photographed me at 425 West 45th (S. Sontag still lives there, but she’s not Susan.)

It's the tale of Mama Dadda, Papa Dadda, and their three little Daddas . . . as told by a former soldier in an occupying army.

In 1944, fortunate not to be in a division but assigned as a chief clerk of the top supply headquarters in the Little Red Schoolhouse and stationed for over a year in Reims, I was adopted by Commandant René Picard, his wife Marie, and their daughter Simone and son Jean-Marie - they named me Jacques-Francois Picard. John Wynne, René's great-grandson, found my website, and we have been in touch ever since he graduated from high school in 2007.

In 1994 when I returned to Omaha Beach, a Normandy woman (Bernadette) and her Moroccan husband (Abdesalem Dadda) invited me to stay with them near Saint-Laaurent-sur-Mer. It's amusing to think of Mama Dadda and Papa Dadda! I believe I had their son Farid's room, for he was at school studying pharmacy. Their teenage daughter Kaltoun aspired to being an Olympic gymnast/luttiste.

Samira, then 12 or so, and I had great fun together - she allowed me to name her new kitten Pepsi. Samira has now married (Denis), has a little boy (Noah) that has just begun school, and lives in the valley of Isére in Savoy near the Alps. What fun to receive easily downloadable photos of her, Bernadette, and Abdesalem (uh, if you have Windows 7, or else you'll need to copy and paste because she does not have a Mac) of her, Bernadette, and Abdesalem.

My translation of her e-mail is that she loves to recall when I visited at the time of the 50th reunion of the D-Day landing. Her mother and father are well, she spends time raising her son who has now begun school, and she likes the photos of my Siamese (Nano) and black-and-white (Tico),

for they remind her of Pepsi, the black and white I named 15 years ago. In short, her mother who had lived during the sad time when an occupying army (the Nazis) controlled her life was not at all unhappy when the GI's as an occupying army arrived in '44 and left in '46. . . .

I'm no dendrologist, but I do have two favorite loves: one in Dominica, one in Manhattan's Central Park. I'm standing there with the one in the Botanic Gardens, a 40-acre site that's part of Roseau. Little 5' 10" 88-year-old me, and Brobdingnagian centuries-old nameless tree! I took the photo years ago, but I get a high just looking at the scaled-down 36" x 48" picture on my monitor's screen. . . . I didn't make it to Connecticut to see the foliage this year, but I took the "C" subway just six stops to 81st and shot photos of the bottom part of the weeping willow that I visit as often as possible. This year, I got lost in the nearby Rambles, unfortunately finding my way out without being molested - it's not a place to visit at midnight without protection. Below is how the weeping willow looks from a distance,

The $1B amphibious transport dock - the New York - made with 7.5 tons of World Trade Center steel arrives, preceded by three helicopters and carrying 360 sailors and more than 200 marines. Look closely, and you might see a person on the High Line park to the right of the peace sign. The ship has docked uptown near The Intrepid and is open to the public. It will be commissioned on November 7th and remain in Manhattan until November 12th.

My photos, taken from my co-op apartment building's rooftop, show how close New Jersey is, just on the other side of the Hudson River. See the 8 photos at The New York Times.

The Feminist Press at the City University of New York held its 39th Anniversary Gala Reception at 583 Park Avenue on October 23rd. The fund-raising event drew a large group. It cost $25,000 to be in the Laureate's Circle, $2,500 for couples, and $325 just for the cocktail reception. As the limo drove us to the event, I continued coaching Taslima about how to pronounce words in the 3-minute speech about the plight of women in our patriarchal world. Tall and regal Arianna Huffington and Taslima I advised never to lose their accent. I told Huffington she was great on Jay Leno's show the night before. Senator Gillibrand sent a message from Washington, where she's working on the health insurance bill and other important matters. I'm not biased, of course, but Taslima easily stole the show. . . .

Peter Ross took me to Tello's for my 88th, about the 8th time he's helped celebrate my birthday since becoming my computer techy in 2001. My apple tart had only 1 candle, but otherwise all was 5-star!

I've had quite a few 88th birthday dinners. At my hangout - Fedora's, on October 29th - Terry Klemensen and Catherine Dentinger along with Janet Higbie, my old friend New York Times editor, threw me a really memorable party. We had a great meal, with the usual fabulous dessert (except my apple tart was the only one with the candle). Terry and I compared growing up in Minburn and Clarion, easily remembering that Fedora's eggs à la russe back home were just called deviled eggs whether one was Methodist or Lutheran. Janet and I explained our connections with Dominica. Terry told how he's taking courses at Hunter College. When the dessert arrived with the candle, everyone in the entire restaurant sang alone. I rose, thanking everyone for inviting me to speak but I said I wasn't going to give a speech. . . . I had arrived for dinner straight from school, where I picked up Ligardy's 1st quarter grades: 95s or 90s in art history, art, and Italian (!); 80s in English (!); 70s in health and government, and a 65 in statistics (for not completing all the simple assignments!). Dr. DeCarlo the principal called him the school's "model student," Dean Oliveri who had had such trouble with him previously was pleased at seeing all the 90s, and art teacher Jack DeMartino continued to be our best advisor about where and how to apply to college. So it wasn't just the two cuba libres that made me high - everything is happening just right. . . .

My major journalism teacher died of pancreatic cancer on August 19th. On October 19th, I joined many CBSers and others who memorialized Don Hewitt (14 Dec 1922 - 19 Aug 2009), the creator of 60 Minutes. On the elevator going up to the 5th floor of Lincoln Center's Rose Theater at Jazz Center, who should I be standing next to (OK, so I followed him in) but one of my favorite journalists, fellow atheist Andy Rooney. "We're neighbors," I said, "New Canaan." The man who fought in the same war with me, and whose writing in Stars and Stripes that my Hq. Oise distributed to all soldiers in Europe, smiled before I dared tell him that he looks more than 2 1/2 years older than I am.

Many think I'm crazy, egocentric, Iowa-folksy, or just plain name-dropping when I show the same interest Hewitt always did, that of talking to and writing about people. The more different they were, the better, because they had different stories. True, I've gone out of my way to interview Ultra Violet, Peter Ustinov, Tiny Tim, Jimmy Smits with his Surinamese father; I've written over 4,000 brief biographies in Philosopedia; and Ligardy is slowly getting over being shocked that his dad talks to so many foreigners and asks them "Tell me a story," even about sex and religion. (At the memorial I struck up an acquaintance with my seat mates, a former announcer at Radio WOR and a worker at CBS who liked Hewitt's goal of wanting to make sure that whatever was included would appeal to "a Kansas City milk man," for example, "or else not be used." If there are still Kansas City milk men, I'd be all for it. Even in e-mails from former students or my building's employees, I ask, "What's new and exciting?" What I read decades ago about Hewitt has stuck with me.

Fager, after the memorial for Hewitt's friend Walter Cronkite, asked Hewitt what he thought of it and was not surprised at the response: "It could have been half as long." (Hewitt, who retired in 2004, would have been disappointed that his own took 85 minutes.) Leslie Moonves, when he headed the entertainment section, recalled that several times a week he would hear Hewitt call out, "Kid, I've got a great idea for ya." Morley Safer likened Hewitt's celerity and humor to that of Bugs Bunny - the man paraded everywhere around CBS, listened but always had the last say, demanded the best of everyone, and didn't like coffee. Hewitt boasted he could cut the Lord's Prayer in half and make it better, had no patience for bad storytelling, had the seat of his pants as his muse, and "had the itchiest ass in history." Morley also got laughs when he said that Hewitt "had the attention span of a fruit fly on acid." Philip Scheffler, who once had been executive editor of "60 Minutes" but now is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University, cited Hewitt as absolutely being one of the handful of top journalists (and he included New Canaanite Red Smith, a name that only old-timers would remember - by the way, I always salute when I pass the house in which Smith, no relation, lived). Family member Bill Cassara showed a video tribute in which his great-uncle pretended to sing "New York, New York," asking if Frank Sinatra's voice could be over-dubbed so that it would appear that he was lip-syncing. He and Sinatra had once been friends, but Hewitt feared him after one incident the two had - my translation: Hewitt must have had solid evidence of Sinatra's gang connections. Actor Alan Alda spoke of their being neighbors and had stories that illustrated Hewitt's always thinking about new television segments, even up to the week he died.

Didi's mother Frances and her stepfather Richard S. Salant are arrested c. 1968, or at least stopped in New Canaan, Connecticut, by New York City Mayor John Lindsay.

Didi Goldmark, who was one of my New Canaan High School students, died on the first of the month. In writing my memories, I was able to find photos of New York City Mayor John Vliet Lindsay's landing in a police helicopter in her step-father's New Canaan yard. See my scandal-riden article, written with my autobiography in mind.

I have a confession, folks. In my 37+ years of teaching, some have accused me, because of my liberal bent, of turning my students into Unitarians. I have always denied this. But Wyman Rousseau (NCHS '59) has just sent me the above photo. In 2008, after 40 years in the Unitarian ministry in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, he retired! Fortunately, we Unitarians don't believe in sin. . . .

To celebrate, FANNY's Dennis Middlebrooks and I took her to a downtown to the I Tre Merli Italian restaurant (with a Bangladesh server who did not recognize her and with a beautiful young Siberian waitress who said, no, she had not lived in a gulag camp and the Italian restaurant could not supply my order for chop suey). With us is Brooklyn lawyer Carolyn Roxon.

First, we went to an office party at Scholars at Risk, at which were quite a few from other countries. To the beauty from Barbados, I asked if she knew the name of the person who wrote their national anthem. She was so embarrassed, saying she'd been taught that in 1st grade. Then she learned that the author of "Day-O" and most of Harry Belafonte's songs was my friend and Variety client for two decades, the father of calypso. When I said Irving, she had no problem with the last name, Burgie.

I'd never before watched the popular telecast, Dancing With The Stars, but upon seeing two couples doing the immoral 1920s Charleston I didn't change channels and greatly enjoyed watching others dancing the lambada, the two-step, and other dances I never mastered (my excuse always being that I was playing piano in my college band). My mouth dropped when the program's orchestra leader's name was pronounced: Harold Wheeler !

At the time Burt Bacharach chose him to be the first black director of a Broadway band, Promises, Promises, he was a recording studio client who pleaded with me to find him an apartment at 411 West 45th in Times Square next to mine at 425 West 45th so he could do the dance arrangements and orchestrate the play about a person needing to find an apartment in Times Square. He was desperate, was splitting from his wife, wanted to sell his Renault, would even go on the casting couch - because he often accompanied Gilbert Price for free, I found him a great place next to mine, about as close to the Shubert on 44th as anyone could get. I took his new wife to lunch - she turned out to be the famous actress Hattie Winston. The only favor I ever asked was for Harold to play at my companion Gilbert Price's memorial service - when Gil couldn't afford to pay an accompanist, Harold had always volunteered and was seldom paid. So now although I know that Harold has done all the arrangements for Dancing With The Stars, I'd long known that he conducted the Academy Awards orchestra (bringing up the music when anyone spoke overtime) and arranged songs for top stars as well on Broadway for Hairspray, Dreamgirls, The Wiz, and Full Monty.

Harold, if you're reading this at the age of 66, your child is older than mine but I'm two decades older! How about having a manhattan in Manhattan on 44th at Sardi's?

Taslima Nasrin returned from a week in Italy, where she spoke at the U of Udine to journalists and translators about the problems of translation. She brought tales of how restaurants close around the noon hour, how she startled the large assemblage by breaking the news that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize (she had been Amnesty France's nominee in 2005), and how she was so busy meeting people and answering questions about the Bengali language that she didn't have time to buy a pair of Italian shoes. . . .

The Executive Committee of the Bertrand Russell Society invited her to join us for brunch, and we discussed possible future programs for the group. In the photo (l to r), Warren Allen Smith, Dr. Thomas Riggins (NYU, philosophy); Dr. Eric Walther (retired, Long Island U, philosophy); Ligardy Termonfils, visitor; and Dr. Taslima Nasrin (New York University, Resident Scholar, eminent Southeast Asian feminist activist).

Afterwards, Taslima and Ligardy came up to my roof at a time when one of the big Norwegian cruise ships was passing on the Hudson River between us and New Jersey. It had gone upriver this morning while I was reading my newspapers. From Taslima's apartment windows downtown, she sees the ships arriving and leaving the next day. It's the sunrises, the sunsets, and the sailboats that make every day such a joy.

With the GI Bill after serving as the Adjutant General's Chief Clerk in Reims, I told Arnold, I had started a major in philosophy at the University of Chicago and attended a lecture by his namesake. Mr. Schoenberg, using an overhead projector, put something like his "Drei Klavierstücke Opus 11, No. 1" up onto a large screen and began explaining.

PHILOSOPEDIA IS FOR SALE- I tried unsuccessfully in 2008 to turn Philosopedia over to a board of directors that included Iceland's leading philosopher. Hoping to keep my free online search engine alive for decades (its 3,300 pages have had over 2,400,000 "hits" this year), and using Tom Sawyer's fence-painting episode as an inspiration, I've offered it for sale @ $100K. The first to respond have been philosophers from Botswana and Uganda, unlikely buyers. But I am receiving offers to buy the various books and items of art that I've listed for sale.

Taslima Nasrin, writing a long e-mail from Italy, said "our" lecture at the U of Udine in Italy was a hit ("People loved my lecture. I have no idea why"); she was treated like a star ("Star treatment makes me more isolated, which is worse than a hotel isolation"); she was the only one interviewed; Udine's mayor, a computer engineer, knew about Tagore but did not know his and her language is Bengali nor that she had been physically attacked in Hyderabad; an actor during a performance about Shakespeare's sonnets got a clever phone call from Shakespeare telling what he thought about his sonnets; and "women are oppressed everywhere," even in Italy. . . .I represented her at a Feminist Press office party in CUNY's building which once was B. Altman on 34th and Fifth Avenue, telling about her being unable to attend because she's in Italy. What a prize, having them come out with The Revenge, for which I've only polished the first 35 pages. . . .The person in charge of the forthcoming October 22nd gala ($25,000 to sit in the Laureate's Circle) introduced me as Taslima's partner, "the person who edits her work, not her sexual partner" I corrected to great laughter. . . .

My Costa Rican friends are aghast at what's happening in Honduras, where the elected president (Manuel Zelaya) is holed up in the Brazilian Embassy while his supporters are being gassed and beaten just like back in the old Banana Republic Days. One of my former students, former Foreign Minister and Supreme Court judge Dr. Guillermo Perez-Cadalso, is on the wrong (even illegal) side of the fight, I feel - the U.S., the U.N., and other governments have said they won't recognize the upcoming November 29th presidential elections if they're conducted under current conditions. . . . Zelaya supporter and Honduran radio talk show host David Romero further heated the situation, saying, "There are times when I ask myself if Hitler was or was not correct in finishing with that race with the famous Holocaust. If there is a people that do damage in this country, they are Jewish, they are Israelis." He later apologized, saying his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia, a non sequitur.

Meanwhile, Costa Rican ex-President Rafael Calderón (1990 to 1994), the son of President Rafael Angel Calderon Guardia (1940 to 1944), has this month been convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison for having received at least $520,000 in 2004 from a loan by the Finnish government to the country's social security system. Fernando's and my first apartment in Manhattan (244 West 103rd St.) was obtained with the help of Harold Bonilla, Costa Rica's consul general who lived next door - Bonilla claimed it had been rented by the Calderon father for a mistress he could no longer afford, so the first day when the telephone rang we rushed to get a new number.

Three Americans (Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the U of California, San Francisco; Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins; and Jack W. Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital) will share this year's Nobel for their work in cell biology. Ligardy and I are sure that in Greenwich last year we met one of the people who chose the Nobelists, Hungarian-born Swedish biologist George Klein - he asked for me to visit where he and his wife Ava were staying for a few days with his son, and we worked out his entry in Philosopedia (where he spells his name Georg). While Ligardy quickly sketched his likeness (and he scribbled his name in the lower right), Dr. Timothy Madigan, our friend who teaches philosophy in Rochester, NY, asked about Klein's new The Atheist and the Holy City, which the important biologist autographed, "To Warren, My Newly Found Educator, George."

The Cunard ship as seen from my rooftop 6:30 pm on September 27th.
The ship is passing roughly where the small plane hit a helicopter earlier this month,

and it's where Capt. Sully's ship floated after landing on the Hudson and losing no lives whatsoever.

(left) On his 17th birthday 17 September 2009, Ligardyand I celebrated at our hangout, the Village Den, 225 West 12th Street, in the West Village. This makes our 6th birthday celebration together. Although his mother became a citizen when she came from Haiti and Ligardy has had his Green Card since he was 6, he only got a passport at the end of September - US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand helped us iron out a detail with Immigration.

(right) On his 44th birthday, my indispensable techy Peter Ross and I for the 8th time celebrated his birthday, this year at Philip Marie Restaurant, 569 Hudson St. in the Village. At a neighboring table, a young Frenchman hearing me mention France thanked me for having been a liberator! Mon dieu!

On September 13th, the weeklong commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Hudson's arriving in New York City was celebrated. The photo on the right that I took from my roof in the West Village shows Staten Island in the center, the Wall Street area on the left, and on the right is the old U.S. Customs House (where I got my first job as a commercial census intern and where Monica Leibowitz rented an apartment for $4,000/month when it became a condo).

Below, the replica of Hudson's ship leads the parade, as seen from the rooftop at 31 Jane:

On 9/11 it was rainy most of the day. The two searchlights that have thrown their beams into the sky annually since 2001 did not appear clearly until around midnight, whereupon I took a photo from my window of what is like a Georges-Pierre Seurat pointillist painting. Memories: mistaking the 2nd plane for one that I had assumed was going to take photos; the stench that made me close my windows; the clouds of smoke that went eastward, not northward toward my building; seeing the southernmost building fall first, then the uptown building that had been hit first; my photographing the event from my windows; the closing of all streets from 14th Street downtown; being unable to convince Mayor Giuliani to allow representatives of gay and nonbelievers to be allowed to enter the area in the following week for a memorial although he allowed religious and political groups; still being asked how it felt, in comparison with my having been on Omaha Beach and Reims in 1944 and 1945, to have been attacked by al-Qaeda group leader Mohammed Atta and his religious terrorists.

When Ligardy and I read in The Times that a famous artist once had his studio just around the corner from us, we went to the place but could not get past the front door to see if a nude might be descending the staircase. At an art store across the street, we learned from a man whose apartment overlooks where Marcel had had his studio that the artwork above the doorway was old and referred to a company that rented out space to artists. Quiz: who was the artist, and what student is writing an exclusive essay about the artist?

Walking back, I passed through Abingdon Square Park, named after the 4th Earl of Abingdon (1740-1799), where I often sit and read and, when in the nursing home a few feet away, Peter Ross wheelchaired me. . . . At the end of the park, I took a photo of The Rembrandt, my 17-story co-op with its magnificent rooftop that gives me a panoramic view of all of downtown Manhattan as I read the morning papers. Just to its left is the new 1 Jackson Square expensive glass condo that will be ready for occupancy soon. The tall building further down is one of many real estate ventures built by Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., JFK's father.

Taslima Nasrin invited Ligardy and me for a Bengali lunch that she hastily prepared upon her return from India (another unsuccessful trip to try to obtain her belongings). She then left for Savannah, Georgia, for a short visit with our friends Jane and Alan Levin, after which she will return to fill out the calendar year as a resident scholar at New York University's English Department. Ligardy starts 12th grade at Manhattan's Gramercy Arts High School on September 9th, after a successful summer in which he worked 15-hour weeks for Philosopedia, earned his 5th "A" for college-level art classes (this time at Parsons, where he has learned much about Photoshop), played a lot of basketball, got to the nearest national park (Sunken Forest on Fire Island), and finished much artwork.

I, Monsieur Ligardy Termonfils, do announce, utter, proclaim, avow, and affirm that the following statistics are true as of August 27, 2009, so help me Gramercy Arts History Teacher Donner:

There are 11,694 total pages in the Philosopedia database. 5,341 files have been uploaded.

There have been a total of 2,213,674 page views, and 33,116 page edits since the wiki was set up.

Gabriel (Lito) DeSilva, now 60 and married with four children, was son #2 that I helped raise. He was "hired" to help protect son #1 (Luis Fantuzzi), where on Manhattan's 103rd Street he looked after the much smaller 10-year-old in my building. Upon graduation, Lito and I failed to keep in touch. But in the Philosopedia entry I have made for him, he got his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MA in art at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. He's an inspiration for present son Ligardy, who on August 19th had a "eureka!" moment upon finding that the GraphicConverter program can teach much about PhotoShop. Lito's resumé is included in full.

Lito's entry has photos of three of his works that I own as well as memories of my taking him to Connecticut, "my first venture out of the ghettos of New York City to experience such situations as life in New Canaan, Connecticut, and on an Iowa farm." Yes, this summer Ligardy and I stayed on that same Iowa farm with the Keith Sextons where Lito had in 1962. After getting both acting lessons, they got a job in a 1963 TV program with George C. Scott (in which as unruly students they had to learn how to throw paper airplanes in the classroom that Scott was teaching).

I once asked Larry Lucie what he taught at Manhattan's Community College. He was rhythm guitarist on hundreds of sessions at Variety Recording, and he often was accompanied by his wife Nora Lee King, who spent time lots of time waiting for him in my office. She was surprised that I taught English in Connecticut, telling Larry that was why I wasn't at work every session. What a surprise to read The Times (20 August 2009) and find that he has died at the age of 101. A soft-spoken Southern-like gentleman, always smiling, he and his wife once invited me to visit when they lived at Manhattan Plaza. He prized the guitar he held like a baby. Its case, however, was scarred from being carried so often and so far. I'd not known he had worked with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton. He knew well but never worked with Sun Ra.

Thanks to having been inspired by Rudie Kagie, the bicycle-traveling journalist from the Netherlands, I have recorded a Philosopedia entry for Sun Ra, the major jazz composer and performer who was a friend of my companion Fernando Vargas and me for over three decades:

When a small plane after taking off in New Jersey at the Teterboro Airport smacked into a helicopter that had just taken off at the helipad nearby on 23rd St., all 9 passengers died. A Coast Guard boat was off Jane Street for 3 straight days. Ligardy and I went up to the roof to see it and some of the small NY police boats still searching for the missing 2 bodies not yet retrieved. . . . Ironically, the incident happened exactly where, after Captain Sully successfully landed his plane earlier this year, it floated on down to Jane Street. . . . Ligardy now has successfully finished 11th grade, passed 5 college-level art classes (FIT and Parsons), applied for his passport, and can't wait until school starts in September (something not many students I know are looking forward to). We work together almost daily on Philosopedia. This summer we've compiled a complete inventory of my art collection. He takes the photos, I provide the words, and he figures out the layout and colors. The inventory is 42 pages long.

Gilbert Price "teaching" one of my Advanced Placement English classes at New Canaan High school

A Catholic priest told Ms. Brashear (a self-described "recovering lawyer" in the Seattle area) about Gilbert Price's suddenly being found on YouTube:

Using my own funds, I sent Gil to Morocco to get the feel of what it was like in the desert-area around distant Timbuktu, which would not have been a good place to have visited. This was helpful à la Stanislavsky, but to my chagrin he spent only a few days, returned to Spain, and spent the last few days cruising.

'''Ann Brashear''', finding me online, also found one of the two Catholic priests that I chose to open as well as close the memorial service that I arranged for Gil at St. Malachy's Church (the Actors' Chapel, at 239 West 49th Street). Gil's entire family came. One of the priests, Father Phil Wallace, in August 2009 has gotten in touch. I had chosen him and another Maryknoll priest to say the first and last words at the memorial. Father Phil tells me that he was ordained in 1965 and Gil and his mother attended in mid-June his first Mass celebration "and upstaged me when Gilbert sang Ave Maria."

I had not known that Gil had a half-brother who with his father was working in an auto shop, and for the first time I met his father (who once had been a comic performing with Redd Fox). Wiz arranger Harold Wheeler played piano, "Timbuktu" director-choreographer Geoffrey Holder spoke eloquently and dramatically (“Gil, Gil, I know you’re up there looking down at us”), and noted sportscaster Dick SchaapI obtained as M.C. (His wife and Gil met at some kind of AA meeting.)

Once awakening me on a weekday in the middle of the night, Gil phoned to say he had been dropped off at a diner near my Connecticut apartment in Stamford. I brought him home, we were both exhausted at 02:00, and at 06:00 we had a quick breakfast before arriving at school. The above photo shows him answering questions about the theatre to students in my Advanced Placement Class. He also volunteered to meet music teacher Jane Hilton and others. Memories, memories. . . .

- I called to the Vienna cemetery office. Mr Gilbert Price (born in 1942) was buried at the Feuerhalle-Simmering cemetery (Simmeringer Hauptstrasse 337, Vienna) in January 1991 in grave No. E11/82. The plan of the cemetery is at http://www.wien.gv.at/kultur/friedhoefe/orte/pdf/feuerhalles-d.pdf. The Feuerhalle cemetery in Vienna is located in the vicinity of the Zentralfriedhof.

Karen Murphy, the actor almost all of whose plays I've seen since she graduated from New Canaan High School in '73, is on Broadway in 9 to 5, which started back in May. It's a musical featuring Dolly Parton's music and lyrics, one that Ligardy and I couldn't see together until he finished his 11th grade high school classes in June and his Parsons College art class in July. Parton's play is risqué and titillating and delightfully anti-patriarchal.

We met Karen at the stage door when she arrived, and she met us afterwards, taking us back to the dressing rooms, the green room (with a table and poker chips), the various props (one with four attached urinals, another with a fake wall in a bathroom stall), and the elaborate stage with two trap doors (up from which actors and props rose or descended), and a memorably complex system for adding back-light effects (one that is something like the zipper on the old Times building that flashes news headlines). What an experience to stand onstage (the largest in the area) and look out at 1,611 empty seats! Here we are backstage with Karen, who plays an amusing office typist who tipples on the job, then gets a make-over and is the most beautiful gal in the place:

Then on to Sardi's, where José has been serving me drinks for at least 20 years:

You can sit at the bar if you're with your dad - the gals were with their daddies, also.

I asked Ligardy to take a photo of me on 45th Street, where I lived for over 3 decades.

(On September 4th, Robert Burck dropped out of the race for Mayor of New York City, returning to Times Square with his guitar strategically positioned over his white skivvies and earning last year, according to a financial disclosure form he had been required to make by the city, between $100,000 and $250,000.)

Ligardy, upon finishing his college-level intensive art class at Parsons, showed his comic strip. It's about a little boy who kicked his soccer ball so high it tried to touch the clouds, but it fell into a lady's yard. The bad lady built a wall so high he couldn't retrieve the ball, no matter how hard he tried. When his mother asked if he had talked with the lady, he told her no, she's a bad witch. But his mother gave him an idea. So he rang her front doorbell, and she kindly returned the ball. Moral: Bad people might not be bad after all.

Ligardy's student friend, Andreas Bariseel from Clermont-Ferrand, France - he was a guest of my neighbors (Sharon, Anita, and Emery) for the Macy's fireworks and for a Yankees-Oakland baseball game before returning home.

On le Quatorze Juillet, what better way to celebrate than to be host for two Parisian professors from La Sorbonne? Dr. Matthias Girel and his Egyptologist wife Dr. Gaelle Tallet joined Ligardy and me at the Jane Street Tavern. I quizzed Ligardy as to which came first, the Romans, King Tut, or the Greeks (he scored 100%), he showed a basic understanding of pragmatism (the subject for which Dr. Girel is an expert), and Gaelle got many questions about her upcoming archaelogical Egyptian dig in January. I got questions about Philosopedia, inasmuch as I want entries for both. And we had a long sunset talk on the roof about their 4-year-old at home with a friend; Matthias's original contributions about philosopher W. K. Clifford's being the only atheist in the 1870s Metaphysical Society; and how when I was Jacques-François Picard in 1944 we Picards bought nothing on the black market, found much-needed provisions for les veuves, and how, when the Archbishop (whose predecessors had crowned all the kinds of France) asked me my religion, he diplomatically handled my responding that I was a devotee of Voltaire (one of the church's most detested critics). They were intrigued that their friend philosopher Tim Madigan (an expert on W. K. Clifford) is Ligardy's and my long-term friend. As of 1 September 2009, Dr. Girel will be on a permanent position at l'Ecole normale supériure, which as he described it is my idea of how the humanities should be contemplated by scholars, with interdisciplinary studies.

On my rooftop with Molly and Dorothy - just above Molly's head is 7 World Trade Center, the first building to have been built at Ground Zero since 7/11/2001

Unitarian-Universalist minister Dorothy Emerson is the Bicentennial Coordinator of Margaret Fuller's 200th birthday on 23 May 2010. Fuller edited ''The Dial'', after which Ralph Waldo Emerson (no relation) was its editor. I have helped publicize the bicentennial, and after taking her and her partner Molly to lunch at my hangout, the Village Den, I took them up to the roof to give the two Medford, Massachusetts, residents a panoramic view of Greenwich Village and the Wall Street area.

In mid-month, Taslima Nasrin left for Italy to attend a Napolipoesia poetry festival, and after coming back from Italy she'll be going to on the 22nd to a poetry conference in San Francisco. We're working together on editing new poems. The letter to India's Prime Minister Shekh Hasina, to be allowed to return to West Bengal, has not been honored.

Honduras is in the news. Guillermo Cadalso Arias, a former student in 1968 who once was a Supreme Court Judge and also the country's Secretary of State, is one of many who have favored ejecting President Manuel Zelaya as the nation's leader. Guillermo e-mailed me that the democratically elected Zelaya was no longer wanted - which I found unusual, because Guillermo teaches constitutional law. On July 5th, the military did not allow Zelaya to return. For 40 years as Costa Rican Fernando Rodolfo de Jesus Vargas Zamora's companion, I heard and regretted how all the Central American states were treated by the U.S. as banana republics, I am not at all in agreement with Guillermo, my former student, nor have the Central American presidents been . . . nor would Fernando have been.The Organization of American States (OAS) has voted to suspend Honduras as a member. . . . When Fernando and I visited the OAS in Washington to take advantage of a 19th century law that Costa Rica would not draft citizens of the U.S. if we didn't draft Costa Ricans, we met Ambassador José Echandi at the Embassay. "Nano!" he said as he opened the door for they were once neighbors and the ambassador was friends with Fernando's father. He took us inside for a stiff drink on an early Sunday morning (sic!), later taking us into the secret telegraph room - I think I may be the only Gringo ever to have been inside that room, taken by the person who later became President of Costa Rica - the other President Fernando introduced me to was José Figueres Ferrer, who on a visit to Columbia University advised the two of us to drive in a Jeep down the new Pan-American Highway, then sell the Jeep to more than pay for our trip; he also wanted Fernando, who was studying radio engineering at RCA Labs on the northwest corner of Horatio Street and West 4th near where I now live, to set up the country's first TV station. In short, I've never before written about this but remember that time fondly.

This year the Macy's 4th of July fireworks was nearby on the Hudson, rather than the East, River. As a result buildings had to limit visitors to insure that the roof could hold them. Over 100 of my co-shareholders at 31 Jane threw a party on our roof, a tickets-only occasion complete with gourmet food, wine, and hard cider (that was donated by a shareholder whose company is in Upstate New York). Even shareholder and actor Victor Garber was there to see, hear, and smell the 40,000 firecrackers that went off almost in front of our building at Captain Sully's landing strip (a/k/a the Hudson River):

I was able to get 3 extra tickets and took (l to r) Peter (my computer techy), me, Andreas (a 17-year-old summer art student from Clermont-Ferrand, France); and son Ligardy (on a summer scholarship where he and Andreas are taking college-level classes at Parsons).

As the sun started to set, up to 100 boats and schooners appeared, the most we'd seen in years.

Thoughts on the 4th of July: The Statue of Liberty has been re-opened, and just as I did in 1944 while on my way to Normandy, visitors now can again climb the 354 steps to its crown. In 1944, when my Liberty Ship left from downtown Manhattan for Liverpool, Bournemouth, and then Omaha Beach, I recall that only a small electric light bulb could be detected as the ship passed, for it was during a blackout. . . . I keep being asked if Michael Jackson did any recording at my and Fernando's Times Square studio. No, but Elvis PresleyMusic Corporation did, and his checks had his photo on them. Unusual, but I was reassured that they certainly wouldn't bounce. . . . .

Upon reading in The New York Times that their reporter David Rohde had escaped from the Taliban after being held for 7 months, I recognized the name. Upon contacting Rohde, who was in my 1960 English class at New Canaan (CT) High School (a wag has said that I keep in touch with every human being I ever met), I learned that it was his son and namesake, and it had been an unbelievably stressful seven months that he and his wife Kristen had worried about his welfare. But, yes, the father not only remembered being in my class almost 50 years ago but cited the names of all his teachers from 2 through 12 (unable to recall his first grade teacher). Quite a feat!

The Villager editor in his column recently mentioned my having helped plant a tree in the Thomas Paine park, adding that I had complained that the press had not covered the event. But Michael Winship, a senior writer for the Bill Moyers Journal in the next Villager wrote that the event had been filmed and that "While we did not show the actual tree planting, we did air a brief excerpt from a speech that was made at that event, as well as footage taped in New Rochelle. We followed these with an extensive discussion of Paine's life and legacy with the historians Richard Brookhiser and Harvey Kaye. The segue that led out of the segment was the singing of the 'Tom Paine's Bones' song that Smith mentioned."

"Hello, Archbishop Dolan, if you see the million of us today be sure to tell everyone!"

For over 5 years, I and the Veterans of Stonewall Group (VOS) headed the annual gay parade. Marching arm-to-arm with transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, one year I had to almost carry Ray the last block of the 4-mile-long parade - she wouldn't take off her high heels! I took the above photo of the Sons and Daughters of Sylvia Rivera, remembering how controversial she was and how I wrote about her for the Greenwich Village Villager as well as covered her funeral parade (a horse-drawn hearse traveled with her bride from the Stonewall Inn to the Hudson River, where her ashes were scattered).

"You look great, Mayor, for having been resurrected," I said to my neighbor Victor Garber on our co-op's elevator as he was rushing somewhere with Reiner. He was not sure what was meant, so I said Milk, the movie in which he (Mayor George Moscone) and Harvey Milk were assassinated, and he smiled. Further chatting, he said that yes he knew my Grandfather Spencer Smith's town of birth, Aylmer, quite near his own in London, Ontario. . . . John Benjamin Hickey is experiencing great reviews not only for being the Earl of Leicester who woos two rival queens in Mary Stuart but also for his parts (Galloway) in Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen and Deputy Mayor LaSalle in The Taking of Pelham. John rushes out the door in plenty of time to get to each of his 8 weekly performances on Broadway.

To replace the Mac laptop that was stolen from his apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I arranged for a new Acer, the less expensive brand that has sold almost as many laptops as Dell. Peter transformed it into a Mac that is as good as or even better than the stolen computer. In his college-level art classes at Parsons, a Mac computer is a must.

Francis Virella, Ligardy's 9th grade friend, traveled with us down Sully's landing strip (a/k/a the Hudson River), where the American Airlines pilot miraculously landed without causing any fatalities. We took the 3-hour Circle Line tour around Manhattan Island, starting where Captain C. B. Sullenberger's plane crashed, then past the Statue of Liberty, up the East River, through the Sputen Dyvil, then under the George Washington Bridge to the port near where I lived for decades in Hell's Kitchen. It's the end of their school year, and they're betting on whether Francis will be a sophomore and Ligardy will be a senior.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared Thomas Paine Day on 8 June 2009, and freethinkers from New England as well as the West Coast arrived to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of the great revolutionary's death. I helped plant a tree at the Thomas Paine Park that is directly across from the New York State and Federal Court buildings, near City Hall. Afterwards, I celebrated with Michael, the bartender at Marie's Crisis, 59 Grove Street, the site where Paine died.

Ligardy at the new charter school, Gramercy Arts High School, will be a senior at the end of June. Excelling in art and history, he now has had experience in drama, both as a playwright (Freeze, about how I met his father that he only saw three times), as an actor (many improvisational works), and now as a movie actor (a GI pleading with our leaders to work for peace, not war).

Judge Sonia Sotomayor lives near me in the West Village at 3 Bedford Street (near 6th Avenue, although I'm near 8th Avenue). Her 980-square-foot apartment is on the 5th floor, and its market value is about $985,000, although in 1998 she bought it for $360,000 and still owes $381,775 on her mortgage. When you're in the public eye - and she certainly has been for she may be appointed the Supreme Court Judge who will replace David Souter - all such personal details come out. For example, she hit an $8,283 jackpot while visiting a Florida casino with her mother in 2008. At Christmas she is known to buy more than 60 presents for her nieces, nephews, god-children, friends' children, and members of the court staff. She owns 1/3 of a Florida condomininium, worth about $20K. She drives a white Saab. She made $205,330 last year. A nominal Roman Catholic, she joined the American Philosophical Society in 2002. She's divorced and has no children. Drew Barrymore lives on the same street, and The Times has said she lives "in Greenwich Village, one of the more expensive neighborhoods in perhaps the most expensive city in the country."

"And how did you get along with your father when you were sixteen?" I asked Kwame Appiah at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "I was off at boarding school much of that time," laughed one of the major American philosophers who is the grandson of Britain's Sir Stafford Cripps, Clement Attlee's Labour Party leader in the late 1940s. I had told him about my helping raise Ligardy Termonfils after his Haitian father was assassinated, and straight-son-gay-father were happily managing well. He was pleased to be told. "Do you know about the African Philosophers' Platform?" I also asked, hearing from him that he'd received an e-mail about it just recently but had not had time to follow through, then guessing that I was responsible. Yes, I told him, explaining that it has been difficult to remain anonymous in what is supposed to be an all-African site meant entirely for Africans. "Very, very good," said the prof who teaches at Princeton but lives with Henry Finder, editorial director of the New Yorker, in nearby Chelsea.

"Do you remember the teenager who told you about Salman Rushdie's performing in Zoo Story?" I asked Edward Albee after the Academy ceremonial. "Yes, and Rushdie confirmed this to me recently," our #1 living playwright responded. Told how Ligardy is doing at school, for he'd actually sent him and received back a handwritten letter, Albee added, "That will help make it easier in the future," by which I think he was saying that gays one day will not be categorized as being unfit to raise kids."

Albee was wearing a shiny jacket. Appiah (APP-ee-uh) was dressed much as he is shown in the above picture. Anna Warm, retired New Canaan High School English teacher whom I took as my guest for the second time (and my 42nd time since 1968 when Priscilla Robertson asked me to escort her), was dressed so richly that Academy member and former New Canaanite Edward Hoagland thought she'd been one of the young award winners and embarrassed her by telling how cute she looked ("a weak come-on line!" Anna smiled, laughing that when I approached and said "New Canaan," he looked a bit sheepish at having been recognized). Low point was poet Louise Glück's Blashfield Address ("Look, she still uses the umlaut," joked two nearby visitors sharing our box in the mezzanine.) High points were informal comments by Leon Kirchner (who received the Academy's Gold Medal for Music) and Suzanne Farrell (who received the Academy's Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts and emphasized that ballet must not be overlooked as a key part of the humanities, that unlike music and literature ballet involves complete improvisation and individual interpretation. As usual, The New York Times did not send a reporter to cover the colorful and inspiring ceremonial.

Whitney Crothers Dilley, my Connecticut student back in 1983, has approved the latest revision of her Philosopedia entry. The US Embassy in Taiwan has asked her to speak soon about Ang Lee's new film. Like Ligardy's dad, she joked, "My dad leads a colorful life, and it has certainly been a blessing for me."

In this month's issue, I reveal what the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden knew about the following scandalous chap - I dug deeply to find the never-before-published photo. Click the above title of the magazine.

Curtain Call at Are We Writing Loud Enough?, a sold-out performance at the Vineyard Theater.
Ligardy is the 2nd from the left (tallest in the cast), and Francis is on the right

Gramercy Arts High School junior Ligardy Termonfils and freshman Francis Virella (our buddy the saxe player who also lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and who looks up to him) performed at the O. Henry High School on 17th Street and on May 11th were two of the outstanding actors in the Vineyard Theatre Student Company's show, Are We Writing Loud Enough?, a work sponsored by the Anne Frank Center USA. I was a proud parent at both performances.

Dr. Denise DiCarlo, principal of Gramercy Arts High School, was present, as was Ligardy's art professor for the just finished Parsons Saturday classes for which he had earned a scholarship.

Ligardy got an offer after the play from Young Playwrights Inc. (founded by Stephen Sondheim) to perform his play, Freeze, based upon how he learned from me about his father, whom he never knew.

Dr. Taslima Nasrin and I are spending time in her New York City apartment working on her next book (the 32nd?), poetry, and speeches here and abroad. Together, we saw Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin in Waiting for God. Previously, she had seen it in Bangladesh, India, France, and England. Because extremist Muslims want her killed because of her ideas, I call her "the most dangerous woman in the world" (whose ideas would expose their religion) and call Salman Rushdie "the female Taslima Nasrin." I have edited the larger part of her work since we met in a Mexican cave.

(left to right) Peter from Serbia; Taslima from Bangladesh-West Bengal-Sweden; Warren from Iowa; NYU Student Avman Mirza from Bangladesh; Dennis and Carolyn from Brooklyn.
Photo by Peter Ross from All Over

• God and the Philosophers - by American philosophe Paul Edwards - has just been published (Prometheus, 2009). Dr. Timothy Madigan compiled it for publication after Edwards died. In an introduction he describes how he and I in 1995 arranged a three-part series of lectures by Edwards on Nietzsche, Freud, and Reich, at the New School for Social Research. Following his death, Madigan and I were the first allowed into his apartment, during which time Madigan located the precious drafts of the book and we found his disassembled orgone box, for he had been a patient of psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. In 2005, after Paul's death 9 December 2004, I helped throw Dr. Edwards, editor of Encyclopedia of Philosophy, into the Hudson River - my son Ligardy, standing next to me (I'm wearing the beret), photographed our dumping of Paul's cremains into the river per his Will, explaining the next day to fellow 10th graders and teachers, "Yesterday, I threw a teacher into the river."

I started my 5th year as Ligardy's parent, this year at Gramercy Arts High School, a new charter school at the Washington Irving High School campus. The month went fairly smoothly - he was only been suspended once (cancelled because of a dean's mistaken ruling about kids wearing scarves).

Dr. Timothy Madigan (from Rochester's Saint John Fisher philosophy department) rented a car and took Ligardy and me to Stamford where we met Simon, my buddy the policeman,

then to see where I'd lived in New Canaan on Millport Avenue, then to the 50th reunion of New Canaan's Class of 1958,

Madigan and Ligardy with '58ers Warren S. Smith (!) and Nancy Norling with her husband Parry.

then to Greenwich to meet the Hungarian-born Swedish physician Georg Klein, who helps choose candidates for Nobel Prizes in medicine.

At the railroad station . . . English teachers Peg Sherry and Nancy Hugo . . . . Arrested by Bill Marabella

where Coach Kathy Mitchell met us as the train pulled in and Tory Hicks drove us to the Waveny Castle, which Ligardy had seen on the outside several times but now saw on the inside. Guillermo Perez-Cadalso from Honduras, who has been a Supreme Court Judge, was one of over a hundred ex-students and spouses that I was happy to greet.

I've now arranged to be trustee of my estate, which will allow my Executor to avoid my Will's being probated (and contested by any cousins). Contemporary Authors Revised will update my entry. I've now written 3,740 entries for Philosopedia, which to date has had more than a million "hits."

Ligardy has now earned two A's and an A- in college-level art classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Also, the high school junior has gained an inch and now is 6' 1".

Although the co-op building's roof has been closed all summer because of repairs, we again were able to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. Root canal work again, but by the time Ligardy and I went to Iowa in July all was well.

In Iowa, it was amazing to meet Dale Sexton again after three decades, this time taking a 15- instead of a 12-year-old to live on his Rockwell City farm. How Ligardy helped Dale's grandchildren Brent and Alex wash his son Keith's pig to be shown at a county fair, how he made page one of Adel's Perry Chief (BIG CITY TEEN VISITS RURAL IOWA), and how I met cousins I didn't know I had is described online at:

Paul Senter and his wife Verda King Senter, my schoolmates in Rippey, Iowa, met us in Des Moines, and Paul later accompanied us to the county museum in Perry and also to Rippey.

I entertained Dr. Peter Stone of Stanford U' political science department, Michelle Rourke of the University of Northern Iowa, Rudie Kagie of The Netherlands (we're one of three or four scholars and researchers who knew jazz big band leader Sun Ra), and was interviewed about my having been a Stonewall Inn rioter in 1969 for a New York 40th anniversary issue.

Taslima Nasrin dared to return to India in the midst of Scholars at Risk's Dr. Robert Quinn's and my attempts to get her a resident scholar position at New York University. I'm editing her Women Have No Country, which she wrote in Kolkata before fleeing from fundamentalist Muslims for her life.

Ligardy and I went to Lincoln Center to hear Edward Albee being interviewed on his 80th birthday by his ballet star friend Marian Seldes, after which as he exited Ligardy asked if the playwright knew Salman Rushdie played Jeremy in a Pakistani TV production of The Zoo Story. An account of what happened thereafter, how he wrote that the two are losers, with photos of Albee's letter to Ligardy inviting him to keep in touch with a fellow loser, is at

Ligardy's one-act play, Freeze, which is about how his father met me and how he knows much about his assassinated father from what I have told him, was performed at the Vineyard Theater on 15th Street. Ms. Barbara Scott, his English teacher, presented him with the unopened letter from Albee that I gave her. The hundred or so students seeing his play were understandably surprised and happy. In the final marking period, Ligardy earned a 75 in English. He's now a junior. Following is my Father's Day gift, his self-portrait.

Albee will be disappointed that Ligardy the Loser ended with sophomore grades of 99 phys ed, 97 global history, 95 in both art classes, 75 English, and 70 earth science - the reward is a trip planned to Iowa in July. Oh, and 55 in math, the reward being no trip to the Bahamas or Canada. But we just might both go to Dominica for their Independence Day in November.

On my way to the theater on June 21st, I thought I saw a familiar face at the 14th Street station.

"John?" I inquired, gingerly approaching the man with the razor-thin moustache who is sometimes dubbed the Pope of Smut.

He smiled yes.

" I wrote ''Cruising the Deuce'', the book you used as a prop in one of your works last year."

"Oh, I loved that book!" he said, clapping and extending his hand.

Fortunately, my computer techy Peter Ross was there with his cellphone camera.

I introduced John Waters to Peter, and we were introduced to his friend.

The next night at the Tony Awards, Waters was one of the first presenters. Cry Baby, a play based on his movie set in the 1950s, won four Tony nominations but closed after 68 performances. Hm, couldn't it have lasted just one more?

Taslima Nasrin went with me to Scholars at Risk, and that organization which is at New York University is trying to find a resident-writer position for her in some American university, preferably one in New York City.

There's Taslima with me and her niece (Suhrid, my son #11 who has changed his name to mine and is now Allen Reza). That's Ligardy's self-portrait on the wall behind Allen. The artwork behind my iMac is one of two colorful hexes by Anita Weschler, the sculptor whose Humanist statue I donated to the Institute of Humanist Studies in Albany.

Son #1, Fantuzzi, who never fails to get in touch with me on Father's Day, performed at a psychedelic art gallery and introduced people to me as being his surrogate father since he was 9.

G&L Humanist, for which I had a quarterly column since 1996, ceased publication as a magazine. However, it now is going online as a monthly, and I've been asked to continue my "Scene From Across the Pond" column.

Taslima Nasrin has arrived from Sweden, and we went to Scholars at Risk to see if the representative at New York University will be able to find her a resident scholar position at any city university. We're also working to arrange a Type O Visa, for regular visas are only for 90 days.

Anna Warm and I attended the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, her 2nd visit with me, my 40th.

Ligardy and I went to Lincoln Center on April 17th to hear Edward Albee being interviewed by Marian Seldes, his long-time friend. She is the daughter of noted critic and author Gilbert Seldes, niece of pioneering journalist George Seldes, a dancer who began her career as a dancer with the American Ballet. The occasion was to celebrate Albee's upcoming 80th birthday, and he spoke with satisfaction and humility about his life as a playwright, after which he wittily answer questions from the hundred or so well-wishers who had come to hear him.

As Albee was exiting, Ligardy approached and asked if he knew that Salman Rushdie had played the part of Jerry in a Pakistan television production of The Zoo Story. Albee asked his name, where he went to school, and when he had read the play. The 6' tall 15-year-old said he read The Zoo Story in his English class at Washington Irving High School near Union Square in Manhattan.

Danny Garvin, a fellow June 1969 Stonewall Inn rioter, and I met for the first time in years. He is employed by my old alma mater, Columbia University. Although he's two decades younger, my health is better.

Sean McManus of New York interviewed fellow freethinker Dennis Middlebrooks and me at Fedora's restaurant about freethought, non-belief, and Philosopedia. . . .Frank DiGiacomo, who in a filmed interview atop my co-op's roof had interviewed me for the front-page New York Observer story about Philosopedia, has a big story about Xbox, PlayStation, and technology in the March 2008 Vanity Fair. . . . Robert Axel, the psychologist whose role in the off-off-Broadway play was to play me as the Stonewall rioter in 1969 who had been on Omaha Beach in 1944, stars now in Knock 'Em Dead. On opening night of the murder mystery, I was called to the stage as a judge of who was the murderer - I mistakenly picked Axel, not the big-boobed dummy comic. . . . Ligardy and I are midway through reading and evaluating Macbeth. . . . When he told me he was going to write about Langston Hughes, I asked if he'd like to go with me and stand on Langston. Stand on top of him? Yes, so we went to the Schomburg Library in Harlem, where the librarians were pleased to show us the room, under the floor of which his cremains lie, and also showed us my donation of material about Langston's protege, Gilbert Price. . . .

I accompanied Janet Higbie New York Times copy editor, shown in her new office the week they moved from 43rd Street, to a Haitian nightclub in Brooklyn. She is author of Eugenia: The Caribbean's Iron Lady, the Dominican who became 3rd Prime Minister after my friend Edward LeBlanc secured the island's independence in 1979. We heard Buyu Ambroise (booEEyou) and his neat Haitian combo perform - when they played a composition by Frantz Casseus, Buyu announced that I had recorded the famous composer's Haitiana LP, so I stood and waved. Few of my friends know that I went to Haiti three times, knew the nation's first psychiatrist (we lived at the International House - I helped Louis Mars, son of the Ambassador to France, with some of his Columbia U assignments), befriended Tele Haiti's manager who introduced me to many musicians, caroused with many of the "primitive" artists, and met the President's bodyguard Lima Charles-Pierre, who was assassinated (37 bullets) and whose son Ligardy I'm helping raise.

The school rule is that you may not wear hats inside. On the last day before winter vacation, while putting on his backpack and about to pick up school items with the other hand, Ligardy took his hat from the floor and placed it atop his head in order to pick up the school items. Someone grabbed his hat, so he ran after the person, finding he was heading for the office of the head of security, Dr. O. Here was given the option of leaving the hat until after vacation or being suspended for 3 days. It was cold outside, he couldn't go home to his mother without a hat, and he asked for the hat. As he was leaving, Dr. O said "It's the holiday season - give him 5 days," apparently a joke. On the first day after vacation, no problem. But on the second he found he could not enter the school with his pass, that he had in fact been suspended for 5 days. Thereupon "the hat incident" took up several hours of my time, two visits to the school, a letter to the principal, a letter to the chancellor, telephone calls, and finally a ruling by Dr. O not to give a detention but to reduce the suspension to 3 days, adding that Ligardy was being "manipulative."

My letter to each teacher to cover his absence:
Please excuse Ligardy Termonfils for his absences – he was suspended for having temporarily put his hat on his head in order to put his backpack on, which I feel is different from not following the school rule about not wearing hats.

Then with Ligardy's help, I listed what had occurred during "home schooling, 3 to 8 Jan 2008."

TRAVEL
1 Visited Apple store - showed an employee on an iPhone Langston Hughes entry that I helped post on Philosopedia.org
2 Completed suspension not for wearing a hat but for putting it on my head.

COMPUTER
1 Somehow deleted Warrens Desktop background
2 Touch-typed from 5 wpm with no accuracy to 19 wpm with 94 percent accuracy; devised a chart I drew to help me know what letters are with which finger.
3 Continued Mavis touch-typing.
4 Learned to make an é and à

PSYCHOLOGY
1 Analyzed a one-armed character, from Jerry Springer (id, too high; ego, low; superego, low)
2 Learned not to question a martinet

SCIENCE
1 The aquarium had a high alkaline level; reduced by putting Sodium Biphosphate.

ENGLISH/VOCABULARY
Derma = skin
Martinet = one who abides by the rules completely
Octothorpe = #
Kowtow = behaving in an extremely submissive behavior
Cliché examples: Have a nice day, or Bigger and better

1. Did outlining

HISTORY
1 Discussed the presidential election that happened on Thursday Jan 3 - watched CNN reporters
2. Caucus = A close meeting for people on the same political party
3. Iowa is 12.4 percent black and chose Obama
4. Helped Warren write letter for Taslima Nasrin to President Hans-Gert Pottering of the European Parliament to help her in her crisis in India

LUNCH
Cooked neighbor Anita’s Cornish hen for 2 minutes and 40 seconds

MATH
lease, will, trustee, Xcel

ART
1. Sketched a character in my black book
2. Worked on “Art I Have Seen,” collection of pieces
3. Worked on one of my comic pieces.

PHYS ED
Climbing with Warren to the 11th floor

Ligardy's first visit to a nightclub started by our looking into Chez Josephine just long enough to see what the expensive restaurant looked like – but, no, Jean-Claude Baker came to greet us. Ligardy had no idea this was Josephine Baker’s adopted son and, in fact, didn’t know who she was. I thanked Jean-Claude for his recent postcard and picture (red toenails) . . .

             http://www.chezjosephine.com/jean-claude.html

. . . introduced Ligardy (“A very difficult name, monsieur”), Jean-Claude learned that Ligardy couldn’t speak French, then found Jean-Claude was taking Ligardy on a tour of the place where diners must have wondered, ending by giving him a big photo of Josephine and showing him the upcoming $60 Valentine’s Day menu (plus drinks, tax ,and 20% gratuity). Well, Josephine had adopted him (and Jarry), so he empathized when I told him I’m helping raise Ligardy, whose father was assassinated in Haiti. (Ligardy’s mother and aunt will be incredulous when they are told.)

Across the street at the West Side Café, Marvin Weitz was heard saying to two of his guests, “OK, children, let’s go in.” Recognizing him as Karen Murphy’s husband, I said “we two children” would gladly follow him, and then he remembered Ligardy and I had been to their place in Riverdale.

So: Ligardy’s first visit to a nightclub.

After taking a few photos before the show started, we finished eating just as the lights dimmed. Christine Pedi sang Sheldon Harnick songs (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “She Loves Me,” “Tenderloin,” “Fiorello,” “Rex”) with class and sophistication, and we diners laughed in all the right places. Then Karen Murphy performed, Ron Abel still at the piano – in fact I’ve never known a pianist who was so a part of his instrument, as if they two were welded, and he did all the arrangements for both singers.

             <http://www.ronabel.com/>

Karen’s songs ranged from the ultra-sophisticated (a slight movement of her eyebrow brings laughter) to the familiar to the cultured, urbane, sensuous. No two songs were sung in the same voice, and she has such a polished sense of showmanship. I’ve seen Karen in many of the comedic works in which she has performed, and she’s just consummate!

Pedi then did an amusing set – diners chose from a basket names of different singers, and she sang “Twelve Days of Christmas” (swans, geese, French hens, turtle doves, partridges in a pear tree, remember?) as a dozen different singers would do the song: Liza, flayling her arms; Judy, hesitating with hands waving; Bette Davis puffing from an imaginary cigarette; Hepburn, shaking with Parkinson’s; Eartha Kitt meowing the words; etc. Ligardy didn’t really recognize most, but his favorite was the Elaine Stritch imitation – I’ve a lot of coaching to get him acquainted with performers other than David Chappelle.

In an essay for his high school English teacher, Ms. Scott, he wrote that the evening was greater than New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, he was the only teenager in the room. And he was quite embarrassed when Ms. Pedi called him “gorgeous.” Well, he really is!

Meanwhile, we’ve again received a free MoMA pass for 2008 – his favorite so far is Puryear, who he didn’t know is African American.

<http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/martinpuryear/flash.html>

In mid-January, Ligardy and I entertained Anna Warm and Michael Roedel, on whose ranch we've stayed for two summers in New Mexico.

• In May, Warren attended the annual conference of the Bertrand Russell Society at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. See photos he took in Rochester of the Bertrand Russell Society Chapter and also at the Canadian conference. Be sure to click the Slide Show, which makes the viewing easy.

•   Other: Taslima Nasrin's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005;
                 the late Edward O. LeBlanc, Premier of Dominica;
                 Arthur Miller's Memorial;
                 Tsunami photos from Sri Lanka;
                 the final days of philosopher Paul Edwards;
                 the Sir Arthur C. Clarke plaque;
                 recent writings, including "What is Ground Zero Like Today?

December - Paul Edwards, one of the best-known American philosophers and a friend for five decades as well as a professor (whose class at New School I audited under a pseudonym for we hadn't seen each other for decades), died a year ago. On December 10th, several of his other friends and I took his cremains and, as per his wishes, scattered the ashes into the Hudson River at 68th Street. Ligardy accompanied me, taking photos that will accompany an article I'll write for a philosophic newsletter. Then the 13-year-old I'm tutoring worked up a paper, "The Funniest Funeral I've Ever Attended," to give his 8th grade teacheres who, I'm sure, will be impressed one way or another - as he exited after taking the photos, he saw boys sliding in the snow down a long slope; their father kindly let him tumble and slide four times down the hill while I shot more photos. . . .John Waters, known to most as the master of bad taste, asked for and received my permission to use my Cruising the Deuce as a prop in a movie he currently is shooting. . . . Taslima is in India, but we keep in touch regularly. . . . Tim Madigan visited during the Xmyth vacation, so I ran Camp Smith with camper Ligardy in a sleeping bag and Tim on the sofa. Peter Stone and wife Rachel visited, Peter helping tutor Ligardy in 8th grade math. . . . Tim, Peter, Rachel, and I attended one session at the American Philosophy Association.

November - On Veterans' Day on the Mall in the nation's capital, I marched with Atheists in Foxholes and spoke of my 1944 experiences on Omaha Beach. Citing Vanity Fair that 70,000,000 evangelicals now attend 200,000 churches and many get their news from their pastor, not newspapers and books, I said that if we were to remain a democracy, not become a theocracy, our next battle will not be Omaha Beach . . . but Omaha itself. . . .My biographical entry is now listed by Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia at <http://wikipedia.org>. . . .

October - I finished editing Taslima Nasrin's twenty-somethingth book, Phera (Homecoming) - on October 7th when she was not chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005, I e-mailed that just to have been nominated by Amnesty France was sufficient award. . . . I have submitted Cruising the Deuce for a possible non-fiction Randy Shilts Award . . . . The Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana has Cruising the Deuce. . . .I've written a possible Wikipedia listing. . . . On my 84th birthday, I made a bet with my publisher, Lyle Stuart, that I'd come to his memorial service rather than vice versa - a gambler, he once won $245,000 playing baccarat in Atlantic City, so we'll see who's the loser this time. . . . My cyberbuddy Peter Ross treated me to a birthday dinner (on the 27th) at my (and the late Charles Kuralt's) favorite restaurant, Beatrice Inn, two days before the venerable place closed - I'll miss Alberto, who had been a waiter there for decades. At the next table, we met New Yorker cartoonist John Kane, another macaddict. . . .I was arrested. Simon, his wife Patricia, 9-year-old Marie, 13-year old Ligardy, and I were driven up to the covered bridge just before Kent, Connecticut, where we saw the beautiful fall foliage. . . . I took Ligardy to see the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, and although he preferred seeing Batman, Superman, and musical names I did not recognize, my favorite was seeing the Pope French-kissing one of his monsignors. The Deli Man carried dead body parts and took orders for sandwiches. A man with a huge penis shot jism into the audience. Girls with pasties abounded, several Bushes, but this year no O.J. Simpsons.

September - I made two podcasts, so now I definitely feel a part of the new century - one is about Taslima Nasrin's two books for sale at chelCpress, and one is about my interview with William James - a shady character from my past - an hour-long podcast which will be available to reviewers of my Cruising the Deuce. These will be available to anyone having an iPod. . . . My British column outs my having been with James Dean at Julius's bar back in the 1950s. . . . Ligardy entered 8th grade, is now a teenager (13), and is a half-inch taller than I am - teaching vocabulary has certainly changed - now I've shown how to put the cursor on the word, do a right click, click look up, and click definition. . . .I returned to Waukee, Iowa, for a ceremony at my Grandfather Spencer Smith's Old Hotel, the oldest structure in this Des Moines suburb's town - Peter Ross, my cybergeek, accompanied me, and I drove him 400 miles around my old stomping grounds while he took 400 digital photos that I will transmit to local libraries. . . . My advisory committee and I cancelled the African online school we were advising - a junior student of chemistry headed a group that did not take our recommendations. As a result, I formed the African Philosophers' Platform, helped in part by encouragement from Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah.

August - After much planning, as its Chancellor (a term given me by students at Ibadan University in Nigeria), I've founded African Online School of Philosophy. One of the first to agree to be an advisor, incredibly, is famed philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. . . . Surprisingly receiving a year's, not a half-year's, visa from India to go to Kolkata, Taslima Nasrin celebrated by taking an Indian intellectual, her sister's husband, her sister, and daughter Srot with me to Swing 46, a jazz club on Restaurant Row. . . . Finding that Willy James is still alive, I interviewed him about our subcultural experiences back in the old days. I learned that he'd been arrested near the White House in Washington when only 12, had been busted several times, sold drugs even in prison, did a record 23 times of something he loves to do, and now I'll have a tape that verifies events I described in my Cruising the Deuce. . . .Dr. David White, my buddy the philosophy prof, dutifully took "The Humanist" from Rochester to Albany, where the statue greets people arriving at the Institute of Humanist Studies there. . . . I took 12-year-old Ligardy Termonfils to Rhinebeck to see the airshow (to which years ago I'd taken Lee Harley), but weather conditions didn't allow us to go up for a spin in one of the two-winged single-propeller World War I planes. We did go to Commodore Vanderbilt's place and to President FDR's gravesite at nearby Hyde Park. For his 13th birthday, I got him a printer-scanner that works with his G-4 Mac. Either I'm getting shorter, or he's getting taller than me.

July - A Dallas County, Iowa, reporter asked to interview me by telephone, and the story will be published in my hometown's county newspaper in August. . . .Eric Walther, a retired Long Island University philosophy prof, spoke to our Bertrand Russell Chapter at the nearby Jane Street Tavern - co-owner Horton Foote Jr. greeted us, and Taslima Nasrin joined in. . . .When Tim Madigan visited, he took me to the English Speaking Union, an organization for which he has become Rochester's lead man. We had another memorable brunch with Sylvia Kahan, and Tim bought from Peter Ross the Mac laptop that should give him lots of fun. . . .Phyllis Ross, who heads a very large black psychiatrists' group, invited me to see the Harlem Dance Theater perform and Peter accompanied me. Afterwards we had good discussions with many of the dancers, finding most are not from this city. . . .

June - The FBI, replying to my request under the Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts, has informed me it does not have a file on me. I had thought that, maybe because I was book review editor of The Humanist at the time fellow secular humanist Corliss Lamont was cited for contempt by Congress, I might have a file, I don't. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has told me he has no file, either, and he's furious! . . . . I'm one of many who has come up against theft of identity - Citibank, PayPal, and I have cleared my record, for I made no purchases in the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, and France. Furthermore, I didn't buy a Western Union money order in Chicago. I enjoyed reporting the grand larceny to the local 10th Precinct . . . .

May - John Waters, the filmmaker with the pencil-thin moustache on his upper lip, wrote to say that at the May 5-9 Maryland Film Festival, "I did hold up your Cruising the Deuce and mentioned it when I was introducing the French film, 'Porn Theatre'." How Divine, and I do refer to the star he found in 1972, who devoured a refrigerator in his first film, Pink Flamingoes! . . . .

I have created webpages for New York City's and the island of Dominica's Bertrand Russell groups, and they are beginning to
get many hits.

Andrea Cousins, another of my unforgettable New Canaan, Connecticut, students decades ago, logged onto my webpage and downloaded my "Hymn of the Pantheist." The daughter of one of my inspirations, Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins who contributed as I did to the Westport Unitarian Society, she emailed that when she was in 4th grade she had a conversation with her dad:

Me: "Daddy, what should I say when the other kids ask me what religion I am?"
NC: "Tell them you are a Pantheist."

I still laugh when I think how her dad let me bring some students to their house, and we Dewey-decimalized all the books downstairs in their large house. He then couldn't find anything, he told me! On several of my visits there to tutor Hiroshima Maiden Shigeko Niimoto, Norman and I played duets, he on the organ and me on the piano. We developed a great rapport, I was teacher for all four of his daughters, and at his memorial held in the New York City Society for Ethical Culture I shared laughs with Shigeko, Andrea, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who gave me his Moscow mailing address to be forwarded to a mutual friend in Sri Lanka, Royston Ellis).

I JetBlued to Rochester on the 12th and met with the Bertrand Russell Society chapter, then journeyed to McMaster U in Canada with David Henehen, Phil Ebersole, and Tim Madigan to the annual meeting of the Society. I left my two new books with the McMaster librarian and we had our photos taken next to Berty's desk and books.

The New York Public Library has my autographed Cruising in its Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the 42nd Street Library has a copy, as does the Jefferson Market Library here in the Village and the Gay Center Library on 13th Street. . . .

For the 38th successive year, I attended the annual ceremony of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Guare's awarding the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres to Joan Didion was a high point. Roger Wilkins, nephew of Roy Wilkins, talked about the language of liberty from a black's viewpoint. Inducted into the Academy were architect Maya Lin, landscape architect Laurie Olin, architect James Stewart Polshek, artist Cindy Sherman, sculptor Kiki Smith, poet Rosanna Warren, and playwright Tony Kushner (who gave me his address when I simply asked if he had a doorman, and next day I took him a copy of Deuce). VIPs getting awards were Shigeru Ban, Charles Mee, Shirley Hazzard, Jane Freilicher, Joan Didion, and James Levine. Best-dressed: Ned Rorem, but I didn't get to ask him about receiving Deuce.

Gossip From Across the Pond has arrived. Neighbor and Cabaret star John Benjamin Hickey received it as well as Deuce. . . . I sent consignment copies to friends I grew up with in Iowa; fought with during WW II; taught at Columbia U, Bentley School, or New Canaan High; was employer for at the recording studio; or are friends here in Greenwich Village.

The memorial for Arthur Miller on 9 May 05 at the Majestic Theatre on 44th Street was memorable indeed. As I hurried to get to the end of a long line waiting to enter, Edward Albee passed me on the street. "Mr. Albee," I said twice to get his attention, "I'm the one who just sent you my book, Cruising the Deuce, this week." "I don't think I got it," he replied, asking what it's about. "Cruising on 42nd Street back in the 1940s and 1950s. I mention you," I explained hurriedly. He smiled. "Oh, but you're not one of the cast," I added, and he laughed, then turned the corner maybe to flee from the madding crowd and prepare for speaking at the memorial. It was a friendly scene, and I was awed by his somewhat straight, not curved, front teeth. Poor Albee, for his companion died of bladder cancer this month: Jonathan Thomas, a Canadian who had studied mathematics and art history at McMaster and whom I once met when he was waiting for Albee to speak to gays at the 13th Street Center.

The Majestic was filled to capacity. The speakers and performers were superb, and I found fault only with one programming note.

Film producer Robert Miller, Arthur's son with Mary Slattery, received cheers when he read from the letter his dad had sent to the House Un-American Activities Committee, explaining why a creative artist is known by his work and actions, not by responding to a public official who was asking him to reveal his or his friends' political views and affiliations. Film director Rebecca Miller, Arthur's daughter with Inge Morath, read one of her dad's moving poems. Rebecca's husband, London-born actor-filmographer Daniel Day-Lewis, intoned with dignity part of a Miller reminiscence, "Echoes Down the Corridor." Joan Copeland, Arthur's sister, enacted a scene from her brother's The American Clock, ending the scene while sitting on the grand piano's stool and dramatically showing her character's frustration - she loudly took the piano's keyboard cover and slammed it down. It was in her Manhattan apartment that her brother had received hospice care before being taken to Roxbury, Connecticut, where at the age of 89 in February he died from a heart condition and cancer.

Former Senator George McGovern was stately, speaking with emotion of his friendship with Miller and his love for Death of a Salesman. Like Miller, he said, he had known what it is to be depressed - imagine how it felt, he said to the audience's laughter, when in an election for President he had lost 49 of the 50 states! Also, a brief letter of consolation was read from Bill Clinton.

Estelle Parsons read the speech Linda Loman gave at her stage husband's funeral in Death of a Salesman. Pianist/composer Bill BolcomMichael Sommese in touching aria from the composer's opera, A View from the Bridge.

Tony Kushner read a long work praising Miller, reading so fast that extreme concentration was needed to comprehend what he uttered so profoundly. Miller, the one who had inspired him to become a playwright, once sat in front of him at a play and he had had to repress his desire to reach forward and touch the head that had come up with the idea that one of our main purposes in life is to determine what relevancy we each have to the survival of the race.
Edward Albee was eloquent in his blunt Quaker- and humanities-like way, saying he was outraged by New Criterion's "vile and sniggering unsigned editorial" to the effect conservatives should be happy now that Miller is dead. Many are the playwrights, he said to loud applause, who matter, and some who do not because they don't teach us anything and "do not render ourselves coherent." Arthur, he closed, "was a writer who mattered a lot!"

Bill Coffin, pastor emeritus of Riverside Church, often called the Rockefeller Baptist Church on the Hudson, was the one objectionable speaker, I felt. Yes, he had been Arthur's friend for years. But although he said Arthur was an atheist, he knew God had a special place for him up in Heaven. Talk about a cavalier and out-of-place plug for the theists' vested interests! Fortunately, this "religious" intrusion was followed by an inspiring film tribute, pictures of Miller in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Connecticut he loved – the final shot was of Charlie Rose's asking how he hoped to be remembered at a memorial, and Arthur responded laconically, "As a writer!"

Of interest is that no mention whatsoever was made of Miller's son, Daniel, who suffered from Down Syndrome, or of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.

March - From New Delhi, I have received a copy of Taslima Nasrin's All About Women (Rupa & Co., 2005), a collection of poetry that I edited, along with her 20-somethingth book, Love Poems of Taslima Nasreen. . . . I finished drafts of Cruising the Deuce and also of Gossip From Across the Pond, my books #3 and #4, and sent them off to the publisher, chelCpress. . . . My friend Royston Ellis is off to Singapore to lecture on the QE2. His article about the Seychelles makes me want to join him. . . .Kentucky Attorney Edwin F. Kagin's Baubles of Blasphemy (Freethought Press, 2005) includes my blurb for his book that it is "the ideal antidote against theistic fissiparousness." . . . New York's Daily News (25 Mar 05) carried my letter about Columbia U Professor Joseph Massad, accuse of being anti-Semitic: "If Columbia were to fire anyone who espoused unpopular views about religion, it would be a sure sign that theocracy has replaced democracy." . . . John King, who was in my English class at New Canaan High but who later built his own recording studio and passed up the chance to buy mine (as did Sean "P. Diddy" Combs), is in the news. Rapper Foxy Brown claims she doesn't owe his Chung King Studio (an inside joke, for his recording studio is near Chinatown). John, if quoted correctly, is right when he says clients are not allowed to remove master tapes unless they're completely paid for.In preparation for book #5, about my recording studio, I've gotten in touch with all my former employees. One, William Wittman, is a key person in Cyndi Laupur's group:

February - I accompanied 12-year-old Ligardy Termonfils and his mother to Parent-Teachers' Night at his Brooklyn school. . . . I've busily been tutoring him, commencing with handwriting. We see Broadway works, go to historical sites, and telephone at night.

January - Doug Fishbone, who lives across the hall from me, has shaken up the British art scene. First, he created a self-portrait out of kebab meat, then displayed a (real) caged Arab,then installed a pile of 30,000 bananas in Trafalgar Square (much as he once had done in Peru, Costa Rica, Poland, and Brooklyn). I publicize him here in Greenwich Village - a British critic in Arena has written, “While his sculptural works have the biting wit of a brilliant one-liner, his videos, such as the sublimely funny The Ugly American are what you’d get it you gave Woody Allen a bag of chronic and a better therapist.”

December - In the 2005 Who’s Who in the World I’m listed in the section called Arts: Literary. . . .London's New Humanist had me submit an article about where I stand concerning Bush's re-election - I have written that I am completely against the present administration and lament the fact that much of the liberal and progressive legislation of the recent past now risks being overturned, that in light of the conservative Supreme Court it may take two to four decades to get our republic back to its Enlightenment-inspired foundations. . . . The Humanist Heritage Program has invited me to describe my experiences over a six decade period of the institutional history of the American Humanist Association - my critique is filled with barbs - omnium hellium may brokium loosum when it is published. . . . I raised hell because The New York Times took so long to publish an obituary for philosopher Paul Edwards, the eminent compiler of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy who kindly wrote this blurb for my book: “Religious fundamentalists will hate it.” Paul, who wrote the intro for Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, had just finished The Confusions of Heidegger and philosopy professor Tim Madigan and I had been pressuring him to finish his God and the Philosophers. . . . A Hunter College student (Diane, a Sierra Leone gal married to a Columbia U prof of classical Greek) did a photographed interview with me about my memories of Omaha Beach. . . . John Wynne, a 14-year-old in North Carolina, finding on the web that I had known his great-grandfather, did a two-hour telephoned interview with me. He correctly had his ancestors’ names, but I was able to add that his Great-grandfather René Picard had rosy cheeks, was a commandant in the French Foreign Legion, and headed the Reims Cathedral’s St. Vincent de Paul, taking me to meet the Archbishop after I arranged for a ton of food and clothing to be sent from Iowa farmers to French widows. John was especially amused to hear that I had taken his grandmother to see Frankenstein and had introduced her to the U of Virginia major she eventually married. He was particularly elated that I put his photo up onto the web: <http://wasm.us/ws_kids.html>. . . . At a New Year’s party in my building, Harley Davidson guys warned against having the Alice B. Toklas brownies along with my champagne - on the roof at midnight, over a dozen of us watched fireworks in distant New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Queens.

The Humanist, my statue created by Anita Weschler, joins Dr. Tim Madigan's ethics class
at St. John Fisher's U in Rochester, New York

October - Months ago when someone from the Italian government contacted me about the possibility they might nominate Taslima Nasrin for a UNESCO award, I responded in the affirmative because she receives many such e-mails. On October 12th, Taslima (for whom I’m something like an agent, secretary, and publicity director combined) received word that a committee headed by Andrés Pastrana Arango, former President of Colombia, and endorsed by UNESCO Director-General Koïcho Matsuura, had awarded her the Laureate of the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence. “Wow,” she phoned from Paris, finding it includes $100,000 cash. We then went on to the next projects: on International Philosophy Day November 18th, I will be speaking in Rochester (a humorous talk about teratology) and she will be addressing philosophers at the University of Lille in northern France. . . .

September - In 1976 when a Presidential Guard pointed his rifle at me, explaining that I couldn’t stand in front of Baby Doc Duvalier’s Presidential Palace in Haiti, I got into a conversation with him and another guard, explaining that my studio had recorded Franz Casseus’s Haitiana with its famous “Mecie bon dieu.” Lima, the bodyguard, brought four other guards to my hotel that evening, I threw a party, and as captain of Haiti’s volleyball team he always stopped to see me when the team passed through New York on its way to European events. Refusing to work for the Aristide government, who knew he was a munitions expert, he was gunned down by ex-priest Aristide’s goons. His body contained 38 bullets. When his brother gave me the news and said that my friend Lima had a wife (separated) and 12-year-old son, Ligardy, in Brooklyn, I got in touch. I since have given the 7th grader a Dell computer on his birthday, took him to the Museum of Natural Science, and tutor him nightly by telephone. A high point was returning a T-shirt his dad once gave me. . . . Françoise Sagan’s obituary in The Times cited Barnard College’s Professor of French Serge Gavronsky, my Bentley student who fled Hitler in 1941 and who has kept in touch since 1949. . . .I dedicated the Sir Arthur C. Clarke plaque at the Hotel Chelsea, receiving plaudits from the manager, Arthur’s agent, Arthur’s biographer, and Arthur himself. I arranged and paid for the entire plaque and ceremony in what will be but a literary footnote. . . . Mensa sent me acknowledgement that I’ve been a continuous member since 1964. . . .

August - I have now taught 8th graders in Montevedeo, Uruguay, for a total of three weeks. Their teacher (Monica Methol, my ex-student and a daughter of NCHS Spanish teacher Reyna Piola) assembled them in her school’s language lab, and we communicated by computer using X-Chat Aqua. After class, they play hookey by e-mailing me their pictures and other greetings - I get asked many questions about Britney Spears, Shrek, and Pokémon. . . .Two publishers are considering my book #3, and leading sexologist Vern Bullough has written its foreword. Book #4 will be autobiographical and is about the Variety Recording Studio I founded in 1961 - I’ll relate the important part independent studios played in the development of the music industry then. Book #5 will be in the form of a disc and contain photos of the original correspondence from Russell, Santayana, Schweitzer, Steinbeck, etc., received in my writing Book #1.

July - I got Simon out of jail and took him, his wife, and 8-year-old daughter on a Norwegian cruiseliner to Bermuda for a week. Last year I took them to his native island of Dominica, where he hardly relaxed because he drove 800 miles around the small island, showing his daughter where he’d lived, gone to school, hung out, etc. A Stamford cop who works overtime in the jail (and clocked 400 hours total one month), my ex-student really got to relax this time. His wife, however, got seasick the first day (we had 15 foot swells, noted by The Royal Gazette in a front-page story when we arrived. It was my first cruise - it’s much better for couples than for singles.

June - I attended at Plymouth State College, Plymouth, New Hampshire the 31st annual meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society, held this year in the Robert Frost House (where Frost taught in a normal school in the 1910s, something I’d not known about) . I drove the 666-mile round trip from Manhattan, taking with me Dr. Peter Stone (political theorist at Stanford), Dr. David Goldman (psychiatrist), and Dr. Taslima Nasrin, whom I introduced with the announcement that Amnesty France has nominated her and a group of feminists for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005. The oldest continually elected board member of the Russell Society, I favored our call “for an immediate withdrawl under UN auspices of U.S. forces from Iraq and the creation, under UN auspices, of a secular democratic state in Iraq by the Iraqi people themselves.” The vote for was nearly unanimous. Present were members from as far away as California and also from Italy, Portugal, England, and Canada.

December 2009 . Since the start of the decade, I’ve published four books, continued the gossip column in England that I started in 1996, my free search engine Philosopedia has had over 2,000,000 hits, and I've paid off half the mortgage of my West Village apartment that now is worth ten times more than the remaining mortgage balance. But the biggest event of the decade was being adopted by 12-year-old Ligardy in 2004. As we ended the year, he had applied to art schools (Corcoran, FIT, Parsons, Purchase, SVA), made sure he was not incomplete on homework, and finished his 44-page inventory of my art holdings (Cocteau, Dali, Knaus, Leger, Picasso, Santry, Termonfils, Weschler). I have not lost any inner circle friends, and he has gained new friends but laments that some of his grade school Bushwick/Brooklyn friends have been raped, killed, jailed, or are on drugs. At the start of the year, like a celebrity, I was finishing rehab for my kneecap surgery and now am 99% recovered. At the end of the year, the two of us could think of no low points whatsoever but heard his mother’s happiness in telling how we have raised “our son.” Now, on to the 2010s: Gramercy Arts High senior weekend party; $140 graduation at New York University, cap and gown, yearbook, diploma case; visit to Corcoran art department in Washington, DC; and whatever else transpires on the road to college! . Wyman Rousseau (NCHS '59) met his teacher for the first time in five decades at the Tavern on Jane, 26 December 2009. Wyman has led Unitarian congregations in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, retiring in 2008. He recalled teachers' names (Streeter, Hallett, Murphy, and his drivers ed coach, Sikorski). He also related how his mother was pleased when I asked to play her Wurlitzer organ after having been invited for dinner all those years ago. When Wyman refused to attend his own Baccalaureate service, I predicted accurately that my thoughtful student would likely succeed as a liberal minister. Wyman's wife, Maia Williams, heard a few tales her husband had never told her about. . . . . Dennis Middlebrooks, Warren Allen Smith, Carolyn Roxon, Taslima Nasrin FANNY celebrated the news from Scholars at Risk that Taslima Nasrin will be a resident scholar at the University of Connecticut from January to June 2010. Previously, she had had the position at Harvard and New York University. Called the leading Southeast Asian feminist, one who is without a home and a country, Taslima has also officially received a U.S. visa, available only after she returns to Sweden to pick it up at the American Embassy. . . The Blizzard of '09 finally brought some snow, but only 6" to 8" in the West Village. From one of my windows, I watched a neighbor (in black, standing, extreme lower left corner) observe what had been expected would be a 10" to 12" snowfall. The 40+ mph wind blew wildly, leaving part of my building's roof with no snow next morning but snowbanks elsewhere. Next morning, a Sunday, Eighth Avenue (on the right) was all clear but 4th Street (left) had only one lane plowed. Ligardy had made it home to Brooklyn by subway from his last class at Parsons in Manhattan; friends in Connecticut said they had received up to 11''; and friends in Iowa said they still have the 16" of snow from a week ago. I called my policeman buddy to see if he was in jail but, no, he had driven from Connecticut to Virginia in his 4-wheel pickup, was able to go up inclines that other cars could not, and after a 13-hour drive in the blizzard made it to almost the North Carolina border where he owns a rental property. Oh, and one of his tires blew, he had to change it in a blizzard, and he has no spare to get back on. . Dr. Dr. Dr. Taslima Nasrin (has an M.D. and two honorary Ph. D's) is back from a month in Europe, she's working on another volume of her autobiography, and I'm helping edit one of her books for a German publisher. She took me to a party in her downtown studio building, a 27-story place overlooking the Hudson River that is filled with 20- and 30-somethings paying over $2,000/month rent. She remains the talk of the town throughout Southeast Asia and, unlike in the States, in France, England, and Sweden. Ligardy got a 55 in U. S. Government (!) but was absent only one day in the just-finished marking period. Yet, he has a grade average of 85. Last year he had a 94 in US History. His current 12th grade teacher (a dean, no less) flunked him for having been tardy 10 times, nine because of subway slowness from Brooklyn to Manhattan and one because he was in the nurse's office with a sprained ankle. In Connecticut, I told him, teachers didn't flunk students if they provided written excuses. "I already know how unfair life is," he smiled as he opened the new MacBook that I'm trading for his Acer laptop. Like a good pragmatist, he now gets up at 05:30 instead of 06:00 in order to get from Brooklyn to school in Manhattan well before the teacher's first class. He can now see when she is tardy. Together, Ligardy and I have applied online to 5 colleges, are receiving character letters from two of his former Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) profs, two from his Parsons New School art professors, and one from his employer (uh, Philosopedia - for two summers he was on the payroll and did all the adding of photos to biographical entries). If he should be chosen to spend a month in Paris to study art, who better to write a character letter for him than the feminist with a fatwa who speaks at UNESCO and is invited to state functions in Paris: Taslima! She wrote that if he is in Paris when she is, she'll meet the class and introduce them to VIPs in the humanities. If and when he makes it to the Louvre, he wants to follow in his dad's footsteps and mount the steps he did in 1944 to see Venus de Milo soon after Paris was liberated. . Peter and Warren at Cleo's bar Burn the Floor Eve, the Apple, and Warren Peter Ross (my techy, the Mac genius) took me to see Burn the Floor on Broadway, one that featured 1940's and other decades' music. Australia's Maksim Chmerkovskiy of Dancing With the Stars and the Australian movie star Kym Johnson were featured, but the couples from New Zealand, Britain, Italy, Slovenia, and Malaysia were flawless as they demonstrated the waltz, the foxtrot, the tango, the Charleston, Quickstep, 4/4 rhythm, cha cha, samba, paso doble, rumba . . . and World War II's lindy hop and jitterbug. Except for songs that were sung, no words - just dance, lights, movement, gracefulness, beauty! The segment called Latin Quarter brought back memories of my entering its stage door to go up the steps with Sammy, whose Sammy Fields Band played for the nightly performances. The scantily clad gals, whose shoulder braces were strapped to a rope on a pulley, were pulled over the dancing and merrily drinking nightclubbers, who looked up at what seemed like flying almost naked angels. Unnoticed was my pulling feathers off their gowns as I shoved them off from where they were anchored upstairs so they could fly over the revelers. Add plucking B'way showgals' feathers to my resumé! After the show, I took Peter to see the Hell's Kitchen bar (Cleo's Saloon, on 46th) where I hung out during the 60's to 90s. Asked how I liked the show, I said, "We white boys can really dance up a storm!" What we didn't know was that back on 45th Street, in the breezeway at the Marriott, a cop had shot at a vendor, who shot back with a 30-bullet handheld submachine gun that weighed 6 pounds and was stolen in Richmond last October. Gunman Raymond Martinez dropped and lay dying while tourists watched. He had been peddling self-made compact disks to tourists and was stopped by 41-year-old plainclothes Sgt. Christopher Newsom. . . . Peter and I returned to our safe West Village, home of Rachel Uchitel (one of golfer Tiger Woods's many prostitutes who cost maybe 60Gs for kinky several-girl "transgressions"), ex-Mrs. Paul McCartney (Heather Mills), and nightclubs where the A-listers (including Woods) flock nightly after midnight. At a party upstairs in my co-op, Luis (who works at Beasty Feast, where I buy pet supplies) took the photo of his girlfriend Nancy tempting me with a Garden of Eden apple . . . only it was a chocolate-covered strawberry. . November 2009 . Thanksgiving – Stephan Shaw and Tim Madigan in Brooklyn at Unemployed Philosophers Guild Professor Tim Madigan often visits during his holiday break from St. John Fisher’s College in Rochester, his stated mission being to bring me couth. We had a first-rate time with Stephan and David Shaw, the imaginative founders of Unemployed Philosophers Guild who gave us Schopenhauer finger puppets: http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Unemployed_Philosophers_Guild I wrote them up, adding the nude Adam and Eve cups that come alive when hot coffee or tea is added: http://www.philosophersguild.com/index.lasso?page_mode=Product_Detail&item=0965 We had T’Day dinner at the Village Den with techy Peter Ross - we chose duck or Virginia ham, not pedestrian turkey. Peter than started a YouTube podcast in which Tim interviewed me in 3-segment clips about Omaha Beach – we covered my path from Ft. Leavenworth to Ft. Knox to Ft. Dix and on to Liverpool, Southampton, and Easy Section of Omaha Beach, getting chosen by the Adjutant General to be a chief clerk of Hq Oise, which supplied all the divisions in Europe from 1944 to 1945. For post-production, Ligardy maybe will introduce Tim and also ask questions. Making sure I got couth, Tim took me (front-row seats) to Zero Hour, the new play written by Jim Brochu in his one-man show about Zero Mostel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS9vguPd8c How that man can act! Before the play started, I talked with the two couples sitting next to us about how at Sardi’s after seeing Zero in Rhinoceros I was invited to talk with him, laughed that he’d gotten there before I had just seen him onstage, and worked with Jerry Bock recording some songs for a proposed B’way play that had not yet been named. “What do I file the tapes under?” I’d asked Jerry. The play hadn’t yet been titled, he said, so put it under Tevye. “How do you spell it?” I had to ask!. . . Zero in the play told how he had been chosen in the various roles he’d played, mentioned Tevye and Sardi’s, and all eyes who had heard my story now turned toward me. Meanwhile, Brochu sketched on a pad all through both acts while describing his difficult life, his having a leg smashed when a city bus slid on ice into him, the ordeal of being blacklisted and refusing to cooperate with Senator McCarthy’s inquisition, and being invited by President Johnson 10 years later to perform at the White House. The names he threw out were almost all familiar to me. At the end of the grim but witty play, Brochu showed the sketch and, like Mostel, he’s a very good watercolorist. [I saw the play and took the above curtain call photo on Friday night, wrote the above on Saturday, and on Monday The Times published a review that, although praising Brochu's acting, did not include the words blacklist or fiddler but did include Brochu's lover's name, Steve Schalchlin, by mentioning their 2006 off-Broadway memoir with music, The Big Voice: God or Merman?] Nearby St. Clement’s is Cleo’s Saloon (formerly Town & Country Bar) where Fernando and I hung out during the almost three decades we lived in Hell’s Kitchen and ran the recording studio. To my surprise, Joey, one of the bartenders recognized me although I’d not been there in years and as I approached said “Vargas!” Then, and it was over 2 decades later for Fernando died in 1989, he remembered his driving him crazy by putting many coins in the jukebox and repeating the 1970s song “Joey, Joey, Joey” until he couldn’t stand it any more. Freddy, he said, always sat in the same seat in the corner, remembered how he showed anger by making movements of his jaw and lips, grinding his teeth, without talking, and how - when he was slugged by another drunk and fell backwards onto the floor - Joey had taken him to the hospital. Madigan took two good photos. What’s amusing is that Joey confirmed stories I’d told Madigan and others years prior. Madigan has seen all the major places where I have lived and worked, so he photographed me at 425 West 45th (S. Sontag still lives there, but she’s not Susan.) "Joey, Joey, Joey!" . . It's the tale of Mama Dadda, Papa Dadda, and their three little Daddas . . . as told by a former soldier in an occupying army. . In 1944, fortunate not to be in a division but assigned as a chief clerk of the top supply headquarters in the Little Red Schoolhouse and stationed for over a year in Reims, I was adopted by Commandant René Picard, his wife Marie, and their daughter Simone and son Jean-Marie - they named me Jacques-Francois Picard. John Wynne, René's great-grandson, found my website, and we have been in touch ever since he graduated from high school in 2007. . In 1994 when I returned to Omaha Beach, a Normandy woman (Bernadette) and her Moroccan husband (Abdesalem Dadda) invited me to stay with them near Saint-Laaurent-sur-Mer. It's amusing to think of Mama Dadda and Papa Dadda! I believe I had their son Farid's room, for he was at school studying pharmacy. Their teenage daughter Kaltoun aspired to being an Olympic gymnast/luttiste. - Bernadette (Mama Dadda) and grandson Noah - Daddy Dadda and daughter Samira . Samira, then 12 or so, and I had great fun together - she allowed me to name her new kitten Pepsi. Samira has now married (Denis), has a little boy (Noah) that has just begun school, and lives in the valley of Isére in Savoy near the Alps. What fun to receive easily downloadable photos of her, Bernadette, and Abdesalem (uh, if you have Windows 7, or else you'll need to copy and paste because she does not have a Mac) of her, Bernadette, and Abdesalem. . .http://skydrive.live.com/play.aspx?path=/photomail/%7B33ec0c37-eb5e-470e-9808-e6683e863baf%7D&image=E2529E71AF90CCB7!171&imagehi=E2529E71AF90CCB7!169&CID=-2138472661933568841 . My translation of her e-mail is that she loves to recall when I visited at the time of the 50th reunion of the D-Day landing. Her mother and father are well, she spends time raising her son who has now begun school, and she likes the photos of my Siamese (Nano) and black-and-white (Tico), for they remind her of Pepsi, the black and white I named 15 years ago. In short, her mother who had lived during the sad time when an occupying army (the Nazis) controlled her life was not at all unhappy when the GI's as an occupying army arrived in '44 and left in '46. . . . . . The Yankees Tickertape Parade . . . . . When Harry Clark Smith first saw me play baseball, my dad told my mother, "Ruth, let's buy Warren a piano." The third base for the Portland farm team of Chicago Cubs in the 1910s who had a .400 batting average, he knew he had made a good decision when he saw me playing basketball against Bob Feller when I was in 8th grade and Minburn High's arch enemy was Feller's Van Meter High School. The only time I remember going to a game with Dad was in Chicago, where we laughed at how long Satchel Paige took to come in from the outfield to pitch. When my parents made their one trip to New York City, Fernando was elected to take him to watch the Yankees while I covered our recording studio, making sure the 7' Kawai grand piano had been tuned for clients. Gramercy Arts H.S. teachers gave tests on the day the winning Yankees' ticker tape parade occurred, so Ligardy elected me to take photos - he didn't want to miss school, but I saw hundreds of students at the parade who were playing hookey. In my six decades here in Manhattan, I've still never seen a baseball game in New York . . . but I still play my digital Roland piano. . . . Ticker-tape parades I've seen: General Douglas MacArthur (1951); Queen Elizabeth II (1957); Charles de Gaulle (1960); John F. Kennedy (1960); President Dwight Eisenhower and V.P. Richard Nixon (1960); John Glenn (1962); Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders (1969); Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins (1969); Pope John Paul II (1979); Nelson Mandella (1990); .John Glenn (1998); NY Yankees (2009). . . I'm no dendrologist, but I do have two favorite loves: one in Dominica, one in Manhattan's Central Park. I'm standing there with the one in the Botanic Gardens, a 40-acre site that's part of Roseau. Little 5' 10" 88-year-old me, and Brobdingnagian centuries-old nameless tree! I took the photo years ago, but I get a high just looking at the scaled-down 36" x 48" picture on my monitor's screen. . . . I didn't make it to Connecticut to see the foliage this year, but I took the "C" subway just six stops to 81st and shot photos of the bottom part of the weeping willow that I visit as often as possible. This year, I got lost in the nearby Rambles, unfortunately finding my way out without being molested - it's not a place to visit at midnight without protection. Below is how the weeping willow looks from a distance, 3 November 2009 . The $1B amphibious transport dock - the New York - made with 7.5 tons of World Trade Center steel arrives, preceded by three helicopters and carrying 360 sailors and more than 200 marines. Look closely, and you might see a person on the High Line park to the right of the peace sign. The ship has docked uptown near The Intrepid and is open to the public. It will be commissioned on November 7th and remain in Manhattan until November 12th. . My photos, taken from my co-op apartment building's rooftop, show how close New Jersey is, just on the other side of the Hudson River. See the 8 photos at The New York Times. . . October 2009 . Feminist Press's 39th Anniversary Gala Reception, 583 Park Avenue . Dr. Taslima Nasrin A Crossing Borders Honoree of the Feminist Press 22 October 2009 . Taslima and Arianna Huffington were the honorees along with Rhonda Copelon and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand . . Dr. Taslima Nasrin, an FP writer, Law Prof Rhonda Copelon, Warren Allen Smith . . Allen Reza, Warren Allen Smith, Arianna Huffington, Author, Dennis Middlebrooks . . Taslima and her nephew Suhrid, my son #9, a physics major at Hunter College who has changed his name to Allen . English Consultant Smith, Taslima, and Dennis Middlebrooks (my Executor) . The Feminist Press at the City University of New York held its 39th Anniversary Gala Reception at 583 Park Avenue on October 23rd. The fund-raising event drew a large group. It cost $25,000 to be in the Laureate's Circle, $2,500 for couples, and $325 just for the cocktail reception. As the limo drove us to the event, I continued coaching Taslima about how to pronounce words in the 3-minute speech about the plight of women in our patriarchal world. Tall and regal Arianna Huffington and Taslima I advised never to lose their accent. I told Huffington she was great on Jay Leno's show the night before. Senator Gillibrand sent a message from Washington, where she's working on the health insurance bill and other important matters. I'm not biased, of course, but Taslima easily stole the show. . . . ' ' . Peter Ross took me to Tello's for my 88th, about the 8th time he's helped celebrate my birthday since becoming my computer techy in 2001. My apple tart had only 1 candle, but otherwise all was 5-star! . . I've had quite a few 88th birthday dinners. At my hangout - Fedora's, on October 29th - Terry Klemensen and Catherine Dentinger along with Janet Higbie, my old friend New York Times editor, threw me a really memorable party. We had a great meal, with the usual fabulous dessert (except my apple tart was the only one with the candle). Terry and I compared growing up in Minburn and Clarion, easily remembering that Fedora's eggs à la russe back home were just called deviled eggs whether one was Methodist or Lutheran. Janet and I explained our connections with Dominica. Terry told how he's taking courses at Hunter College. When the dessert arrived with the candle, everyone in the entire restaurant sang alone. I rose, thanking everyone for inviting me to speak but I said I wasn't going to give a speech. . . . I had arrived for dinner straight from school, where I picked up Ligardy's 1st quarter grades: 95s or 90s in art history, art, and Italian (!); 80s in English (!); 70s in health and government, and a 65 in statistics (for not completing all the simple assignments!). Dr. DeCarlo the principal called him the school's "model student," Dean Oliveri who had had such trouble with him previously was pleased at seeing all the 90s, and art teacher Jack DeMartino continued to be our best advisor about where and how to apply to college. So it wasn't just the two cuba libres that made me high - everything is happening just right. . . . . Younger friends of mine do not know that, in addition to teaching in New Canaan, Connecticut, and owning Variety Recording Studio in New York City, I was a journalist in the 1970s. My syndicated column, "Scene From Manhattan," appeared for several years in a newspaper in one of all English-speaking West Indian islands (plus Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Venezuela's Isla Margarita, and Belize's Bay Island, from which place that had no electricity Garifuna musicians came to record several LPs at my recording studio). CBS prexy Richard S. Salant was the only other New Canaanite at that time who was a member of the International Press Institute. My major journalism teacher died of pancreatic cancer on August 19th. On October 19th, I joined many CBSers and others who memorialized Don Hewitt (14 Dec 1922 - 19 Aug 2009), the creator of 60 Minutes. On the elevator going up to the 5th floor of Lincoln Center's Rose Theater at Jazz Center, who should I be standing next to (OK, so I followed him in) but one of my favorite journalists, fellow atheist Andy Rooney. "We're neighbors," I said, "New Canaan." The man who fought in the same war with me, and whose writing in Stars and Stripes that my Hq. Oise distributed to all soldiers in Europe, smiled before I dared tell him that he looks more than 2 1/2 years older than I am. Andy Rooney and a friend - his wife of 62 years died in 2004 Jeff Fager, Executive Producer of "60 Minutes," speaking under the huge picture on the screen at the Don Hewitt memorial . Even the second tier was full when Jeff Fager told what it had been like to have worked with Hewitt, whom Mike Wallace, 91 and in a wheelchair, once called "an unpredictable dynamo whose creativity made '60 Minutes' the most successful primetime broadcast in television history." I got a brief glimpse of Diane Sawyer. Hewitt's favorite 4 words, "Tell me a story," I had learned about years ago, and it along with his penchant not to waste time has been my inspiration for decades. What a challenge it would have been had I applied for a job at CBS after graduating from Columbia U rather than choosing to teach. Many think I'm crazy, egocentric, Iowa-folksy, or just plain name-dropping when I show the same interest Hewitt always did, that of talking to and writing about people. The more different they were, the better, because they had different stories. True, I've gone out of my way to interview Ultra Violet, Peter Ustinov, Tiny Tim, Jimmy Smits with his Surinamese father; I've written over 4,000 brief biographies in Philosopedia; and Ligardy is slowly getting over being shocked that his dad talks to so many foreigners and asks them "Tell me a story," even about sex and religion. (At the memorial I struck up an acquaintance with my seat mates, a former announcer at Radio WOR and a worker at CBS who liked Hewitt's goal of wanting to make sure that whatever was included would appeal to "a Kansas City milk man," for example, "or else not be used." If there are still Kansas City milk men, I'd be all for it. Even in e-mails from former students or my building's employees, I ask, "What's new and exciting?" What I read decades ago about Hewitt has stuck with me. Fager, after the memorial for Hewitt's friend Walter Cronkite, asked Hewitt what he thought of it and was not surprised at the response: "It could have been half as long." (Hewitt, who retired in 2004, would have been disappointed that his own took 85 minutes.) Leslie Moonves, when he headed the entertainment section, recalled that several times a week he would hear Hewitt call out, "Kid, I've got a great idea for ya." Morley Safer likened Hewitt's celerity and humor to that of Bugs Bunny - the man paraded everywhere around CBS, listened but always had the last say, demanded the best of everyone, and didn't like coffee. Hewitt boasted he could cut the Lord's Prayer in half and make it better, had no patience for bad storytelling, had the seat of his pants as his muse, and "had the itchiest ass in history." Morley also got laughs when he said that Hewitt "had the attention span of a fruit fly on acid." Philip Scheffler, who once had been executive editor of "60 Minutes" but now is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University, cited Hewitt as absolutely being one of the handful of top journalists (and he included New Canaanite Red Smith, a name that only old-timers would remember - by the way, I always salute when I pass the house in which Smith, no relation, lived). Family member Bill Cassara showed a video tribute in which his great-uncle pretended to sing "New York, New York," asking if Frank Sinatra's voice could be over-dubbed so that it would appear that he was lip-syncing. He and Sinatra had once been friends, but Hewitt feared him after one incident the two had - my translation: Hewitt must have had solid evidence of Sinatra's gang connections. Actor Alan Alda spoke of their being neighbors and had stories that illustrated Hewitt's always thinking about new television segments, even up to the week he died. I left with a catharsis. I appreciate far more being with journalists and musicians than being with educators. Today, it was as if I'd been with the gods on Mount Olympus. . . . . . . . Didi's mother Frances and her stepfather Richard S. Salant are arrested c. 1968, or at least stopped in New Canaan, Connecticut, by New York City Mayor John Lindsay. . Didi, daughter of 33 1/3rpm inventor Peter Carl Goldmark, with her step-father, CBS executive Richard S. Salant (Photos by Don Souden, another of my students) . Didi Goldmark, who was one of my New Canaan High School students, died on the first of the month. In writing my memories, I was able to find photos of New York City Mayor John Vliet Lindsay's landing in a police helicopter in her step-father's New Canaan yard. See my scandal-riden article, written with my autobiography in mind. . . . . . . . I have a confession, folks. In my 37+ years of teaching, some have accused me, because of my liberal bent, of turning my students into Unitarians. I have always denied this. But Wyman Rousseau (NCHS '59) has just sent me the above photo. In 2008, after 40 years in the Unitarian ministry in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, he retired! Fortunately, we Unitarians don't believe in sin. . . . . . . . Taslima Nasrin has been nominated by Pennsylvania freethinker Margaret Downey for the 2010 Richard Dawkins Award. Previous winners: James Randi (2003, inaugural award); Ann Druyan (2004, Mrs. Carl Sagan); Penn and Teller (2005); Julian Sweeney (2006); Daniel Dennett (2007); Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2008); and Bill Maher 2009). . To celebrate, FANNY's Dennis Middlebrooks and I took her to a downtown to the I Tre Merli Italian restaurant (with a Bangladesh server who did not recognize her and with a beautiful young Siberian waitress who said, no, she had not lived in a gulag camp and the Italian restaurant could not supply my order for chop suey). With us is Brooklyn lawyer Carolyn Roxon. . First, we went to an office party at Scholars at Risk, at which were quite a few from other countries. To the beauty from Barbados, I asked if she knew the name of the person who wrote their national anthem. She was so embarrassed, saying she'd been taught that in 1st grade. Then she learned that the author of "Day-O" and most of Harry Belafonte's songs was my friend and Variety client for two decades, the father of calypso. When I said Irving, she had no problem with the last name, Burgie. . . 1960s 2000s Harold Wheeler, one of the best pianists I've ever known. . . . . I'd never before watched the popular telecast, Dancing With The Stars, but upon seeing two couples doing the immoral 1920s Charleston I didn't change channels and greatly enjoyed watching others dancing the lambada, the two-step, and other dances I never mastered (my excuse always being that I was playing piano in my college band). My mouth dropped when the program's orchestra leader's name was pronounced: Harold Wheeler ! At the time Burt Bacharach chose him to be the first black director of a Broadway band, Promises, Promises, he was a recording studio client who pleaded with me to find him an apartment at 411 West 45th in Times Square next to mine at 425 West 45th so he could do the dance arrangements and orchestrate the play about a person needing to find an apartment in Times Square. He was desperate, was splitting from his wife, wanted to sell his Renault, would even go on the casting couch - because he often accompanied Gilbert Price for free, I found him a great place next to mine, about as close to the Shubert on 44th as anyone could get. I took his new wife to lunch - she turned out to be the famous actress Hattie Winston. The only favor I ever asked was for Harold to play at my companion Gilbert Price's memorial service - when Gil couldn't afford to pay an accompanist, Harold had always volunteered and was seldom paid. So now although I know that Harold has done all the arrangements for Dancing With The Stars, I'd long known that he conducted the Academy Awards orchestra (bringing up the music when anyone spoke overtime) and arranged songs for top stars as well on Broadway for Hairspray, Dreamgirls, The Wiz, and Full Monty. Harold, if you're reading this at the age of 66, your child is older than mine but I'm two decades older! How about having a manhattan in Manhattan on 44th at Sardi's? . . . Taslima Nasrin returned from a week in Italy, where she spoke at the U of Udine to journalists and translators about the problems of translation. She brought tales of how restaurants close around the noon hour, how she startled the large assemblage by breaking the news that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize (she had been Amnesty France's nominee in 2005), and how she was so busy meeting people and answering questions about the Bengali language that she didn't have time to buy a pair of Italian shoes. . . . The Executive Committee of the Bertrand Russell Society invited her to join us for brunch, and we discussed possible future programs for the group. In the photo (l to r), Warren Allen Smith, Dr. Thomas Riggins (NYU, philosophy); Dr. Eric Walther (retired, Long Island U, philosophy); Ligardy Termonfils, visitor; and Dr. Taslima Nasrin (New York University, Resident Scholar, eminent Southeast Asian feminist activist). Afterwards, Taslima and Ligardy came up to my roof at a time when one of the big Norwegian cruise ships was passing on the Hudson River between us and New Jersey. It had gone upriver this morning while I was reading my newspapers. From Taslima's apartment windows downtown, she sees the ships arriving and leaving the next day. It's the sunrises, the sunsets, and the sailboats that make every day such a joy. . When Arnold Schoenberg and his wife Nancy Bogen prepared dinner for me, we fellow 31 Janestreeters had great fun conversing about his father's tale concerning Beethoven's piano and her talk about being a college professor teaching English as a second language. Arnold, whose full name is Arnold Greissle (GRYcell) Schoenberg, is the famous musician's oldest grandson - he speaks quite a few languages just as she has written quite a few books. But I scolded them for not yet having walked over to the new High Line park, which they can see from their windows that overlook the Hudson River. While dining, I counted five people walking in the park the short distance away. . With the GI Bill after serving as the Adjutant General's Chief Clerk in Reims, I told Arnold, I had started a major in philosophy at the University of Chicago and attended a lecture by his namesake. Mr. Schoenberg, using an overhead projector, put something like his "Drei Klavierstücke Opus 11, No. 1" up onto a large screen and began explaining. In one section, see, he showed what tonal effect he was achieving. "Wait," he yelled to the audio-visual aide. "Turn that over." Surely enough, what many had always said of Arnold's work, that it sounded like noise, the music was upside down and now even looked like noise. This reminded me that once when Fernando was playing a tape for Sun Ra that had just been recorded, Fernando had it on backwards. "Leave it that way," Sunny said, realizing he had obtained an effect he hadn't thought about doing - this wasn't the famous 1986 John Cage Meets Sun Ra. Geniuses all! . PHILOSOPEDIA IS FOR SALE- I tried unsuccessfully in 2008 to turn Philosopedia over to a board of directors that included Iceland's leading philosopher. Hoping to keep my free online search engine alive for decades (its 3,300 pages have had over 2,400,000 "hits" this year), and using Tom Sawyer's fence-painting episode as an inspiration, I've offered it for sale @ $100K. The first to respond have been philosophers from Botswana and Uganda, unlikely buyers. But I am receiving offers to buy the various books and items of art that I've listed for sale. . Taslima Nasrin, writing a long e-mail from Italy, said "our" lecture at the U of Udine in Italy was a hit ("People loved my lecture. I have no idea why"); she was treated like a star ("Star treatment makes me more isolated, which is worse than a hotel isolation"); she was the only one interviewed; Udine's mayor, a computer engineer, knew about Tagore but did not know his and her language is Bengali nor that she had been physically attacked in Hyderabad; an actor during a performance about Shakespeare's sonnets got a clever phone call from Shakespeare telling what he thought about his sonnets; and "women are oppressed everywhere," even in Italy. . . .I represented her at a Feminist Press office party in CUNY's building which once was B. Altman on 34th and Fifth Avenue, telling about her being unable to attend because she's in Italy. What a prize, having them come out with The Revenge, for which I've only polished the first 35 pages. . . .The person in charge of the forthcoming October 22nd gala ($25,000 to sit in the Laureate's Circle) introduced me as Taslima's partner, "the person who edits her work, not her sexual partner" I corrected to great laughter. . . . . My Costa Rican friends are aghast at what's happening in Honduras, where the elected president (Manuel Zelaya) is holed up in the Brazilian Embassy while his supporters are being gassed and beaten just like back in the old Banana Republic Days. One of my former students, former Foreign Minister and Supreme Court judge Dr. Guillermo Perez-Cadalso, is on the wrong (even illegal) side of the fight, I feel - the U.S., the U.N., and other governments have said they won't recognize the upcoming November 29th presidential elections if they're conducted under current conditions. . . . Zelaya supporter and Honduran radio talk show host David Romero further heated the situation, saying, "There are times when I ask myself if Hitler was or was not correct in finishing with that race with the famous Holocaust. If there is a people that do damage in this country, they are Jewish, they are Israelis." He later apologized, saying his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia, a non sequitur. . Meanwhile, Costa Rican ex-President Rafael Calderón (1990 to 1994), the son of President Rafael Angel Calderon Guardia (1940 to 1944), has this month been convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison for having received at least $520,000 in 2004 from a loan by the Finnish government to the country's social security system. Fernando's and my first apartment in Manhattan (244 West 103rd St.) was obtained with the help of Harold Bonilla, Costa Rica's consul general who lived next door - Bonilla claimed it had been rented by the Calderon father for a mistress he could no longer afford, so the first day when the telephone rang we rushed to get a new number. . Three Americans (Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the U of California, San Francisco; Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins; and Jack W. Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital) will share this year's Nobel for their work in cell biology. Ligardy and I are sure that in Greenwich last year we met one of the people who chose the Nobelists, Hungarian-born Swedish biologist George Klein - he asked for me to visit where he and his wife Ava were staying for a few days with his son, and we worked out his entry in Philosopedia (where he spells his name Georg). While Ligardy quickly sketched his likeness (and he scribbled his name in the lower right), Dr. Timothy Madigan, our friend who teaches philosophy in Rochester, NY, asked about Klein's new The Atheist and the Holy City, which the important biologist autographed, "To Warren, My Newly Found Educator, George." . . . . September 2009 . Queen Victoria The Cunard ship as seen from my rooftop 6:30 pm on September 27th. The ship is passing roughly where the small plane hit a helicopter earlier this month, and it's where Capt. Sully's ship floated after landing on the Hudson and losing no lives whatsoever. There's lots going on in Jane Street, the West Village - including raccoons rattling garbage cans at 03:00! . (left) On his 17th birthday 17 September 2009, Ligardyand I celebrated at our hangout, the Village Den, 225 West 12th Street, in the West Village. This makes our 6th birthday celebration together. Although his mother became a citizen when she came from Haiti and Ligardy has had his Green Card since he was 6, he only got a passport at the end of September - US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand helped us iron out a detail with Immigration. (right) On his 44th birthday, my indispensable techy Peter Ross and I for the 8th time celebrated his birthday, this year at Philip Marie Restaurant, 569 Hudson St. in the Village. At a neighboring table, a young Frenchman hearing me mention France thanked me for having been a liberator! Mon dieu! . Henry Hudson's Half Moon, a replica (Center) The Dutch ship HNLMS Tromp . On September 13th, the weeklong commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Hudson's arriving in New York City was celebrated. The photo on the right that I took from my roof in the West Village shows Staten Island in the center, the Wall Street area on the left, and on the right is the old U.S. Customs House (where I got my first job as a commercial census intern and where Monica Leibowitz rented an apartment for $4,000/month when it became a condo). . Below, the replica of Hudson's ship leads the parade, as seen from the rooftop at 31 Jane: . . . . On 9/11 it was rainy most of the day. The two searchlights that have thrown their beams into the sky annually since 2001 did not appear clearly until around midnight, whereupon I took a photo from my window of what is like a Georges-Pierre Seurat pointillist painting. Memories: mistaking the 2nd plane for one that I had assumed was going to take photos; the stench that made me close my windows; the clouds of smoke that went eastward, not northward toward my building; seeing the southernmost building fall first, then the uptown building that had been hit first; my photographing the event from my windows; the closing of all streets from 14th Street downtown; being unable to convince Mayor Giuliani to allow representatives of gay and nonbelievers to be allowed to enter the area in the following week for a memorial although he allowed religious and political groups; still being asked how it felt, in comparison with my having been on Omaha Beach and Reims in 1944 and 1945, to have been attacked by al-Qaeda group leader Mohammed Atta and his religious terrorists. . When Ligardy and I read in The Times that a famous artist once had his studio just around the corner from us, we went to the place but could not get past the front door to see if a nude might be descending the staircase. At an art store across the street, we learned from a man whose apartment overlooks where Marcel had had his studio that the artwork above the doorway was old and referred to a company that rented out space to artists. Quiz: who was the artist, and what student is writing an exclusive essay about the artist? . Ligardy has his shirts and pants pressed, all ready for Day One September 9th of his last year in high school. He's one of 1.1 million public school students. Some New Canaan parents at the school where I taught for three decades were being warned about allowing their kids to watch President Obama's speech on September 8th, the Administration's having been successfully pressured by a religious group and wealthy political conservatives who refuse to accept their loss at Obama's having won the election - fellow retirees and many of my former students are sickened by the town's new reputation. . . . However, it was Ligardy who pleaded that we watch together. "Cool," he said with an approving smile at the end, highly impressed at what adults would find sage but standard advice but which he found contained a welcome personal challenge. Although aiming to better himself, he said Obama added another reason: to be a better citizen for his country. When the President recommended finding a friend as a guide, I got an unexpected but most welcome hug - I entirely credit the value system instilled in him by his mother and grandmothers and aunts. . . A replica of the Dutch ship Half Moon that led explorer Henry Hudson in 1609 to the shores of what is now New York City was followed by a parade of over a dozen naval vessels that I photographed from the roof on September 8th. The night before Hudson arrived 400 years ago, one of his crew was killed with an arrow to his neck. Today his crew could have been confronted by similarly deadly dangers. . . Although it was Labor Day and a million attended the West Indian Parade in Brooklyn, Ligardy (holding the Haitian flag) and I toured the High Line, the city's newest park which we can see from our roof and which now is a tourists' destination. Ligardy on the High Line Warren, after and before. . A walk in the West Village neighborhood is always provocative. On a weekend, I headed the few blocks over to the Westbeth Artists Housing, the world's largest artists community at 55 Bethune Street, to see Paul Muranyi's solo exhibit, 32 oil on canvas paintings ranging in price from $110 to $2,800. Many of the imaginative works were about hurricanes and scenes of nature including meteors. I know Paul from Fashion Institute of Technology and our interest in Mac computers. . . . In the Westbeth lobby is his neighbor and my favorite painter/sculptor Karen Santry's Dalmatians Jump for Joy. Karen and I are still waiting for Dominica to invite us so that I can "hand over" to the Commonwealth the two paintings of Premier Edward O. LeBlanc that I commissioned her to paint to be donated to the country. Walking back, I passed through Abingdon Square Park, named after the 4th Earl of Abingdon (1740-1799), where I often sit and read and, when in the nursing home a few feet away, Peter Ross wheelchaired me. . . . At the end of the park, I took a photo of The Rembrandt, my 17-story co-op with its magnificent rooftop that gives me a panoramic view of all of downtown Manhattan as I read the morning papers. Just to its left is the new 1 Jackson Square expensive glass condo that will be ready for occupancy soon. The tall building further down is one of many real estate ventures built by Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., JFK's father. . Taslima Nasrin invited Ligardy and me for a Bengali lunch that she hastily prepared upon her return from India (another unsuccessful trip to try to obtain her belongings). She then left for Savannah, Georgia, for a short visit with our friends Jane and Alan Levin, after which she will return to fill out the calendar year as a resident scholar at New York University's English Department. Ligardy starts 12th grade at Manhattan's Gramercy Arts High School on September 9th, after a successful summer in which he worked 15-hour weeks for Philosopedia, earned his 5th "A" for college-level art classes (this time at Parsons, where he has learned much about Photoshop), played a lot of basketball, got to the nearest national park (Sunken Forest on Fire Island), and finished much artwork. August 2009 . Emmy Ruth Lima Harry Ligardy, 16 Warren, 16 I met Ligardy's dad, Lima Charles-Pierre, one of Haitian President Jean-Claude Duvalier's bodyguards, when he pointed his rifle between my eyes and ordered me to move from where I was standing in front of the Presidential Palace. After the original commotion and he and other guards learned that I was Frantz Casseus's friend (one of Haiti's best-known musicians), I suggested we have a beer. To my surprise that night he and four of his fellow guards came to my little hotel, I ordered rounds of drinks, Lima and I compared our growing up in a farming area, we agreed that it would have been fun if we had grown up together, and the next day instead of my needing a taxi he drove me to the airport and stayed in touch until his assassination in 2003. I did not meet Ligardy's mother, Emmeline Termonfils, until 26 August 2004, when Lima's brother in Brooklyn gave me the news that Lima was dead and that Emmy and Ligardy lived in Brooklyn's Bushwick section - they came the next day, and we've been a close threesome ever since. Ironically, it's Lima's son who has been growing up with me. My dad, Harry Clark Smith, was a scout for the Chicago Cubs, traveling to all states west of the Mississippi. He spent winters grain-elevator-sitting in Canada, playing chess, and driving around in Cudsworth, Saskatchewan. While in South Dakota as a scout he picked out my married mother, Ruth Marion Smith, in the little town of Conde and whisked her away to Minburn, Iowa, population 328. Ligardy has helped scan a hundred or so photos this month that I might use in my autobiography. The question came up, who was the more handsome 16-year-old, the one with prominent cheekbones like his father's . . . or the other whose pimples had been Hollywoodishly air-brushed? . . . . Oh, to be sweet 16 again! . PHILOSOPEDIA HAS OVER 2,200,000 HITS . I, Monsieur Ligardy Termonfils, do announce, utter, proclaim, avow, and affirm that the following statistics are true as of August 27, 2009, so help me Gramercy Arts History Teacher Donner: There are 11,694 total pages in the Philosopedia database. 5,341 files have been uploaded. There have been a total of 2,213,674 page views, and 33,116 page edits since the wiki was set up. That comes to 2.83 average edits per page, and 66.85 views per edit. Ligardy Termonfils V.P., Philosopedia Statistics Intern . On the 5th anniversary of our meeting (26 Aug 09), I took Ligardy and his 10th grade friend, Francis Virella, to a national park less than 2 hours away from Times Square, the little-known Sunken Forest at Sailor's Haven on Fire Island. It's incredible to find a 300-year-old-and-more primal forest just footsteps from the Atlantic Ocean (near where in 1850 a ship wrecked, drowning Dial editor Margaret Fuller, her husband the Marquis of Ossoli, and their son. Henry David Thoreau the next day could find only Ossoli's coat. The child's body was found, but not the bodies of his famous parents.) Despite the operations I've had on my leg, I walked over 5 miles with them as we saw sassafras leaves (from which root beer is made), holly trees (related to the evergreen and 2-stories tall), buttereflies, a dead box turtle, unusual flowers and flora, seashells, even a meadow vole that scared Francis by touching him when it jumped across the sidewalk. The wooden walkways are memorable, and we walked a mile or so from Sailor's Haven to Cherry Grove, where I showed them that in 1960 I house-sat a home rented by Audiosonic - Fernando and the other engineers came out from Friday night to Sundays, and I stayed the rest of the week, collecting cash from any who wanted to stay a night. The place had been built by New Yorker founder-editor Harold Ross, who died in 1951. My neighbor was the friendly but feared literary critic Leslie Fiedler. No one had electricity, we used gas lanterns and stoves, and the place then as now was élitist and known mainly to the cognoscenti. It now has been handsomely refurbished, complete with a large swimming pool in the back. I left a note in the mailbox, saying I'd lived there in 1960. After eating, we had time for the two to take a long walk up and down the coastline. They saw many straight and gay couples sun-bathing in the nude and took it all in stride. Ligardy compared the day with one in New Mexico where two summers ago at another national park we had walked for miles to see where Indians had carved places to live out of mountains' soft clay. On the ferry ride back, I spotted an inchworm on my pants, telling Francis about Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" and carefully taking the inchworm all the way in the taxi to the train station, depositing it gently in the grass. "Yeah, but you're guilty of just having upset the ecosystem!" Ligardy cracked. Whereupon we discussed the difference between "natural selection" and "selective in-breeding." Always the teacher! . Gabriel (Lito) DeSilva, now 60 and married with four children, was son #2 that I helped raise. He was "hired" to help protect son #1 (Luis Fantuzzi), where on Manhattan's 103rd Street he looked after the much smaller 10-year-old in my building. Upon graduation, Lito and I failed to keep in touch. But in the Philosopedia entry I have made for him, he got his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MA in art at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. He's an inspiration for present son Ligardy, who on August 19th had a "eureka!" moment upon finding that the GraphicConverter program can teach much about PhotoShop. Lito's resumé is included in full. Lito's entry has photos of three of his works that I own as well as memories of my taking him to Connecticut, "my first venture out of the ghettos of New York City to experience such situations as life in New Canaan, Connecticut, and on an Iowa farm." Yes, this summer Ligardy and I stayed on that same Iowa farm with the Keith Sextons where Lito had in 1962. After getting both acting lessons, they got a job in a 1963 TV program with George C. Scott (in which as unruly students they had to learn how to throw paper airplanes in the classroom that Scott was teaching). . I once asked Larry Lucie what he taught at Manhattan's Community College. He was rhythm guitarist on hundreds of sessions at Variety Recording, and he often was accompanied by his wife Nora Lee King, who spent time lots of time waiting for him in my office. She was surprised that I taught English in Connecticut, telling Larry that was why I wasn't at work every session. What a surprise to read The Times (20 August 2009) and find that he has died at the age of 101. A soft-spoken Southern-like gentleman, always smiling, he and his wife once invited me to visit when they lived at Manhattan Plaza. He prized the guitar he held like a baby. Its case, however, was scarred from being carried so often and so far. I'd not known he had worked with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton. He knew well but never worked with Sun Ra. . Thanks to having been inspired by Rudie Kagie, the bicycle-traveling journalist from the Netherlands, I have recorded a Philosopedia entry for Sun Ra, the major jazz composer and performer who was a friend of my companion Fernando Vargas and me for over three decades: . http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Sun_Ra Sun Ra, my only friend who claimed to have had green blood and been born on Saturn, also has a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ra .. Rice University's Dr. Anthony B. Pinn (Harvard Divinity School, 1994) is shown standing with me under Dr. Felix Adler's portrait at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. His August 16th platform was on "The Nature and Meaning of African-American Humanism," and I find him the leading black intellectual and one of the six most articulate other intellectuals on the subject of what I term "humanities humanism." An expert on Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, he will be an ideal person to advise me about categorizing humanists: http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Anthony_B._Pinn . Mary Lamb, one of my students in 1973 who now lives in Houston, Texas, and I dined at Fedora's - she's heard about my hangout, and tonight 88-year-old Fedora met her and confirmed all that I've said about the place. . When a small plane after taking off in New Jersey at the Teterboro Airport smacked into a helicopter that had just taken off at the helipad nearby on 23rd St., all 9 passengers died. A Coast Guard boat was off Jane Street for 3 straight days. Ligardy and I went up to the roof to see it and some of the small NY police boats still searching for the missing 2 bodies not yet retrieved. . . . Ironically, the incident happened exactly where, after Captain Sully successfully landed his plane earlier this year, it floated on down to Jane Street. . . . Ligardy now has successfully finished 11th grade, passed 5 college-level art classes (FIT and Parsons), applied for his passport, and can't wait until school starts in September (something not many students I know are looking forward to). We work together almost daily on Philosopedia. This summer we've compiled a complete inventory of my art collection. He takes the photos, I provide the words, and he figures out the layout and colors. The inventory is 42 pages long. . . Rudie Kagie, the Dutch journalist who has written about Sun Ra and me, ordered what I did (beer, deviled eggs, salad with blue cheese dressing, home made lasagna, coffee, and home made apple tart) at Fedora's. Fedora, now 88 and the owner of the oldest family-owned restaurant in Manhattan, is one of the few clients she calls by name. Although in the hospital for two weeks with a bad back, she got wild applause tonight from everyone as she made her grand entrance at 8 p.m. Rudie upon exiting stopped at the entranceway to see the Times article and photo that she has posted and that describes how during the June 1969 riots I used her place as a refuge. When I told Fedora he had arrived on his bicycle, she was puzzled as to how he crossed the ocean on a bicycle just to dine at her place - she loves to be teased. Then she learned he actually had arrived by bicycle. . . . Rudie and I had great fun reminiscing about Times Square in the days we both wrote about the place - I'd forgotten about Sally's Bar, and we both regret that we'd not known each other when Sun Ra recorded with me on 46th and also on 42nd Street. . Gilbert Price "teaching" one of my Advanced Placement English classes at New Canaan High school . A Catholic priest told Ms. Brashear (a self-described "recovering lawyer" in the Seattle area) about Gilbert Price's suddenly being found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djs5DzaHK7c She kindly found me on FaceBook this week, and I was both startled and ecstatic to be able to see and hear Gil sing. Happy? Well, it brought the tears immediately. Gil and I were co-companions for over two decades, a fact that next to no one in Connecticut knew about although most around my recording studio knew. The story about each song on the above YouTube selections: - Feeling Good (1965) - Anthony Newley had arranged a "cattle call" upstairs at Variety Arts on 46th Street, for he was looking for an attractive white showbiz-type tenor for a play, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, that would star him (Cocky) and Cyril Ritchard (Sir). A long line of tenors formed, Newley asked each to approach, each was given a copy of "Feeling Good," a studio pianist was present to accompany each of them, and one by one they did their Broadway best as Newley watched. There was a break, during which Gil ran downstairs to my recording studio, showed me the music, I temporarily ejected someone in Studio A, and inasmuch as the song had never before been heard we tried to figure what speed and what effects Gil would use. He didn't sight-read, so I pounded out the melody line. We settled upon a slow sentimental pace working up to a booming crescendo at the end. Rushing back upstairs, he heard a few others, then heard his name. - It was long before American Idol's Simon Cowell, but Newley seemed to be paying special attention to Gil as he commenced the first few bars of the song he had just composed, and a revealing smile indicated he might be making a decision. At the end, as others in line applauded, Newley said that he had not been looking for a black, had not wanted a baritone, had not wanted a person of Gil’s size, “but you’ve got the greatest fucking voice I’ve ever heard!” Gil was hired on the spot, and his character (re-named The Negro) stopped the show with "Feeling Good," creatively placed as a hit in Act 2, 8 times a week for the 6-month-long run. At the Shubert Theatre on West 44th, no less! On matinee days, Gil came to Fernando's and my apartment, 425 West 45th, where he had his own hideaway key. - I've Gotta Be Me - Although I've never before seen this clip, it appears to have been filmed at an Ed Sullivan (or maybe Merv Griffin) show, on which he appeared several times (always with my Iowa parents watching - he would talk to them by telephone afterwards). Gil owned no black suit or bow tie, and he stood somewhat rigidly as if it were one of his first nationally broadcast events. In later Red Skelton shows, he danced, sang, and acted like the veteran he had become. - Old Man River - I've no idea who assembled this clip but, wow! Gil was on Mervin Griffin telecasts numerous times (and on Sullivan maybe 7 or 8). The photos that show Gil's wide-open mouth, his tongue flat, reveal how he made the sound that Mrs. Paul Robeson once declared (hiring him to sing at one of her parties) was so similar to the timbre of her husband's voice. (Gil unsuccessively showed me how to project, placing my hand on his lower stomach so that I could feel how to do it - I told him my college speach teacher had tried the same, also unsuccessfully. So he performed. I just wrote about it, protecting him from the IRS by dutifully sending his completed tax forms to every state in which he had performed across the country, each having its own W2 form.) - Night of My Nights - Someone illegally captured a B'way performance of Timbuktu (a musical fable based on Kismet) in which Gil is the Mansa of Mali. For the complicated plot, hear Gil in the play for which he was nominated for a 1978 Tony Award: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gilbert+price&search_type=&aq=f - The original must be somewhere. In my autobiography I will go into detail about how director-choreographer Geoffrey Holder was both a help and a problem - I had no problem asking Geoffrey to speak at Gil's memorial. Gil had major problems, however, with Eartha Kitt and Melba Moore. Two cast members - Jimmy Justice, who often was Gil's pianist, and brilliant baritone Bruce A. Hubbard - remained friends for years. . Using my own funds, I sent Gil to Morocco to get the feel of what it was like in the desert-area around distant Timbuktu, which would not have been a good place to have visited. This was helpful à la Stanislavsky, but to my chagrin he spent only a few days, returned to Spain, and spent the last few days cruising. . '''Ann Brashear''', finding me online, also found one of the two Catholic priests that I chose to open as well as close the memorial service that I arranged for Gil at St. Malachy's Church (the Actors' Chapel, at 239 West 49th Street). Gil's entire family came. One of the priests, Father Phil Wallace, in August 2009 has gotten in touch. I had chosen him and another Maryknoll priest to say the first and last words at the memorial. Father Phil tells me that he was ordained in 1965 and Gil and his mother attended in mid-June his first Mass celebration "and upstaged me when Gilbert sang Ave Maria." I had not known that Gil had a half-brother who with his father was working in an auto shop, and for the first time I met his father (who once had been a comic performing with Redd Fox). Wiz arranger Harold Wheeler played piano, "Timbuktu" director-choreographer Geoffrey Holder spoke eloquently and dramatically (“Gil, Gil, I know you’re up there looking down at us”), and noted sportscaster Dick SchaapI obtained as M.C. (His wife and Gil met at some kind of AA meeting.) I supervised the sound, lighting, publicity . . . and tears. Once awakening me on a weekday in the middle of the night, Gil phoned to say he had been dropped off at a diner near my Connecticut apartment in Stamford. I brought him home, we were both exhausted at 02:00, and at 06:00 we had a quick breakfast before arriving at school. The above photo shows him answering questions about the theatre to students in my Advanced Placement Class. He also volunteered to meet music teacher Jane Hilton and others. Memories, memories. . . . . Ann Brashear has heard from a friend in Bratislava who wrote, - I called to the Vienna cemetery office. Mr Gilbert Price (born in 1942) was buried at the Feuerhalle-Simmering cemetery (Simmeringer Hauptstrasse 337, Vienna) in January 1991 in grave No. E11/82. The plan of the cemetery is at http://www.wien.gv.at/kultur/friedhoefe/orte/pdf/feuerhalles-d.pdf. The Feuerhalle cemetery in Vienna is located in the vicinity of the Zentralfriedhof. . Karen Murphy, the actor almost all of whose plays I've seen since she graduated from New Canaan High School in '73, is on Broadway in 9 to 5, which started back in May. It's a musical featuring Dolly Parton's music and lyrics, one that Ligardy and I couldn't see together until he finished his 11th grade high school classes in June and his Parsons College art class in July. Parton's play is risqué and titillating and delightfully anti-patriarchal. We met Karen at the stage door when she arrived, and she met us afterwards, taking us back to the dressing rooms, the green room (with a table and poker chips), the various props (one with four attached urinals, another with a fake wall in a bathroom stall), and the elaborate stage with two trap doors (up from which actors and props rose or descended), and a memorably complex system for adding back-light effects (one that is something like the zipper on the old Times building that flashes news headlines). What an experience to stand onstage (the largest in the area) and look out at 1,611 empty seats! Here we are backstage with Karen, who plays an amusing office typist who tipples on the job, then gets a make-over and is the most beautiful gal in the place: . . Then on to Sardi's, where José has been serving me drinks for at least 20 years: . You can sit at the bar if you're with your dad - the gals were with their daddies, also. I asked Ligardy to take a photo of me on 45th Street, where I lived for over 3 decades. Yo, Ligardy, who's that other guy! . (On September 4th, Robert Burck dropped out of the race for Mayor of New York City, returning to Times Square with his guitar strategically positioned over his white skivvies and earning last year, according to a financial disclosure form he had been required to make by the city, between $100,000 and $250,000.) . . July 2009 . Bloomberg News reporter Thom Weidlich and Dr. Peter Stone (Stanford U., Political Science Dept) met me at the Jane Street Tavern for dinner, and then I took them over to the nearby High Line, the unique park built 30 feet above the ground on an old train track line. Thom, Peter, and I are Bertrand Russell Society members. Peter's new book will be published by Oxford U Press. Thom's article in yesterday's papers is about the poor ponzi scheme billionaire whose jail cell has defective air-conditioning: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aMxbFY2lM.80 . Thom and Peter with the Frank Gehry (ask.com) building in the background. . On the day after their last college-level art class at Parsons, Andreas Bariseel and Ligardy watched Oakland beat the Yankees at the new stadium. Andreas then took Air Italy to Rome, on to Paris, and finally to his home in Clermont-Ferrand, France, back with his 22 cats and prepared for his last year in high school. . . Ligardy, upon finishing his college-level intensive art class at Parsons, showed his comic strip. It's about a little boy who kicked his soccer ball so high it tried to touch the clouds, but it fell into a lady's yard. The bad lady built a wall so high he couldn't retrieve the ball, no matter how hard he tried. When his mother asked if he had talked with the lady, he told her no, she's a bad witch. But his mother gave him an idea. So he rang her front doorbell, and she kindly returned the ball. Moral: Bad people might not be bad after all. . . . . Oops, in that final scene isn't that a thing flying away on a broomstick? . . Ligardy's teacher, Ms. Leah Hayes, with her father. . . Ligardy's student friend, Andreas Bariseel from Clermont-Ferrand, France - he was a guest of my neighbors (Sharon, Anita, and Emery) for the Macy's fireworks and for a Yankees-Oakland baseball game before returning home. . Photo by Ligardy Termonfils . On le Quatorze Juillet, what better way to celebrate than to be host for two Parisian professors from La Sorbonne? Dr. Matthias Girel and his Egyptologist wife Dr. Gaelle Tallet joined Ligardy and me at the Jane Street Tavern. I quizzed Ligardy as to which came first, the Romans, King Tut, or the Greeks (he scored 100%), he showed a basic understanding of pragmatism (the subject for which Dr. Girel is an expert), and Gaelle got many questions about her upcoming archaelogical Egyptian dig in January. I got questions about Philosopedia, inasmuch as I want entries for both. And we had a long sunset talk on the roof about their 4-year-old at home with a friend; Matthias's original contributions about philosopher W. K. Clifford's being the only atheist in the 1870s Metaphysical Society; and how when I was Jacques-François Picard in 1944 we Picards bought nothing on the black market, found much-needed provisions for les veuves, and how, when the Archbishop (whose predecessors had crowned all the kinds of France) asked me my religion, he diplomatically handled my responding that I was a devotee of Voltaire (one of the church's most detested critics). They were intrigued that their friend philosopher Tim Madigan (an expert on W. K. Clifford) is Ligardy's and my long-term friend. As of 1 September 2009, Dr. Girel will be on a permanent position at l'Ecole normale supériure, which as he described it is my idea of how the humanities should be contemplated by scholars, with interdisciplinary studies. On my rooftop with Molly and Dorothy - just above Molly's head is 7 World Trade Center, the first building to have been built at Ground Zero since 7/11/2001 . Unitarian-Universalist minister Dorothy Emerson is the Bicentennial Coordinator of Margaret Fuller's 200th birthday on 23 May 2010. Fuller edited ''The Dial'', after which Ralph Waldo Emerson (no relation) was its editor. I have helped publicize the bicentennial, and after taking her and her partner Molly to lunch at my hangout, the Village Den, I took them up to the roof to give the two Medford, Massachusetts, residents a panoramic view of Greenwich Village and the Wall Street area. . In mid-month, Taslima Nasrin left for Italy to attend a Napolipoesia poetry festival, and after coming back from Italy she'll be going to on the 22nd to a poetry conference in San Francisco. We're working together on editing new poems. The letter to India's Prime Minister Shekh Hasina, to be allowed to return to West Bengal, has not been honored. . . . Honduras is in the news. Guillermo Cadalso Arias, a former student in 1968 who once was a Supreme Court Judge and also the country's Secretary of State, is one of many who have favored ejecting President Manuel Zelaya as the nation's leader. Guillermo e-mailed me that the democratically elected Zelaya was no longer wanted - which I found unusual, because Guillermo teaches constitutional law. On July 5th, the military did not allow Zelaya to return. For 40 years as Costa Rican Fernando Rodolfo de Jesus Vargas Zamora's companion, I heard and regretted how all the Central American states were treated by the U.S. as banana republics, I am not at all in agreement with Guillermo, my former student, nor have the Central American presidents been . . . nor would Fernando have been.The Organization of American States (OAS) has voted to suspend Honduras as a member. . . . When Fernando and I visited the OAS in Washington to take advantage of a 19th century law that Costa Rica would not draft citizens of the U.S. if we didn't draft Costa Ricans, we met Ambassador José Echandi at the Embassay. "Nano!" he said as he opened the door for they were once neighbors and the ambassador was friends with Fernando's father. He took us inside for a stiff drink on an early Sunday morning (sic!), later taking us into the secret telegraph room - I think I may be the only Gringo ever to have been inside that room, taken by the person who later became President of Costa Rica - the other President Fernando introduced me to was José Figueres Ferrer, who on a visit to Columbia University advised the two of us to drive in a Jeep down the new Pan-American Highway, then sell the Jeep to more than pay for our trip; he also wanted Fernando, who was studying radio engineering at RCA Labs on the northwest corner of Horatio Street and West 4th near where I now live, to set up the country's first TV station. In short, I've never before written about this but remember that time fondly. . . Fernando and José . . . This year the Macy's 4th of July fireworks was nearby on the Hudson, rather than the East, River. As a result buildings had to limit visitors to insure that the roof could hold them. Over 100 of my co-shareholders at 31 Jane threw a party on our roof, a tickets-only occasion complete with gourmet food, wine, and hard cider (that was donated by a shareholder whose company is in Upstate New York). Even shareholder and actor Victor Garber was there to see, hear, and smell the 40,000 firecrackers that went off almost in front of our building at Captain Sully's landing strip (a/k/a the Hudson River): I was able to get 3 extra tickets and took (l to r) Peter (my computer techy), me, Andreas (a 17-year-old summer art student from Clermont-Ferrand, France); and son Ligardy (on a summer scholarship where he and Andreas are taking college-level classes at Parsons). . As the sun started to set, up to 100 boats and schooners appeared, the most we'd seen in years. . Photo be Neal Rosenberg on the 18th floor . Promptly at 9:20 pm, 40,000 firecrackers started to go off. What a sight, whether you were at 23rd, 34th, 42nd, or 57th Street! . Thoughts on the 4th of July: The Statue of Liberty has been re-opened, and just as I did in 1944 while on my way to Normandy, visitors now can again climb the 354 steps to its crown. In 1944, when my Liberty Ship left from downtown Manhattan for Liverpool, Bournemouth, and then Omaha Beach, I recall that only a small electric light bulb could be detected as the ship passed, for it was during a blackout. . . . I keep being asked if Michael Jackson did any recording at my and Fernando's Times Square studio. No, but Elvis PresleyMusic Corporation did, and his checks had his photo on them. Unusual, but I was reassured that they certainly wouldn't bounce. . . . . Upon reading in The New York Times that their reporter David Rohde had escaped from the Taliban after being held for 7 months, I recognized the name. Upon contacting Rohde, who was in my 1960 English class at New Canaan (CT) High School (a wag has said that I keep in touch with every human being I ever met), I learned that it was his son and namesake, and it had been an unbelievably stressful seven months that he and his wife Kristen had worried about his welfare. But, yes, the father not only remembered being in my class almost 50 years ago but cited the names of all his teachers from 2 through 12 (unable to recall his first grade teacher). Quite a feat! . The Villager editor in his column recently mentioned my having helped plant a tree in the Thomas Paine park, adding that I had complained that the press had not covered the event. But Michael Winship, a senior writer for the Bill Moyers Journal in the next Villager wrote that the event had been filmed and that "While we did not show the actual tree planting, we did air a brief excerpt from a speech that was made at that event, as well as footage taped in New Rochelle. We followed these with an extensive discussion of Paine's life and legacy with the historians Richard Brookhiser and Harvey Kaye. The segue that led out of the segment was the singing of the 'Tom Paine's Bones' song that Smith mentioned." . June 2009 . Holy Hera, now look what I started back in June 1969! The dozens have turned into hundreds, then into thousands, now into many millions, all fighting for everyone's human rights. . . . "Hello, Archbishop Dolan, if you see the million of us today be sure to tell everyone!" For over 5 years, I and the Veterans of Stonewall Group (VOS) headed the annual gay parade. Marching arm-to-arm with transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, one year I had to almost carry Ray the last block of the 4-mile-long parade - she wouldn't take off her high heels! I took the above photo of the Sons and Daughters of Sylvia Rivera, remembering how controversial she was and how I wrote about her for the Greenwich Village Villager as well as covered her funeral parade (a horse-drawn hearse traveled with her bride from the Stonewall Inn to the Hudson River, where her ashes were scattered). . "You look great, Mayor, for having been resurrected," I said to my neighbor Victor Garber on our co-op's elevator as he was rushing somewhere with Reiner. He was not sure what was meant, so I said Milk, the movie in which he (Mayor George Moscone) and Harvey Milk were assassinated, and he smiled. Further chatting, he said that yes he knew my Grandfather Spencer Smith's town of birth, Aylmer, quite near his own in London, Ontario. . . . John Benjamin Hickey is experiencing great reviews not only for being the Earl of Leicester who woos two rival queens in Mary Stuart but also for his parts (Galloway) in Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen and Deputy Mayor LaSalle in The Taking of Pelham. John rushes out the door in plenty of time to get to each of his 8 weekly performances on Broadway. . Ligardy taught me about transforms 4 or so years ago: Let's see, where does this piece go? A finished Arctic Drill Transformer To replace the Mac laptop that was stolen from his apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I arranged for a new Acer, the less expensive brand that has sold almost as many laptops as Dell. Peter transformed it into a Mac that is as good as or even better than the stolen computer. In his college-level art classes at Parsons, a Mac computer is a must. . Stonewall was the subject of my June 25th talk to NYC Atheists which, to my surprise, was attended by fellow freethinkers Taslima Nasrin (I thought she was in Amsterdam, not New Amsterdam), Carolyn Roxon, and Dennis Middlebrooks. Mainly, I described what gays have done since I participated in the June 1969 riots to advance up from being second-class citizens. The group has raised $10K and has placed ads on buses throughout the city: . Although there are 7 decades difference between parent and son, Ligardy on June 26th caught up with me - at last, we're both seniors! His final average as a junior is 81.25 (a B-). Low in math and science, he is high in art (A+) and history. We've both been inspired by his art and history teacher, both career teachers, as well as the charter school's administrators (for the first time, for last year we had different views). This year he has grown in drama and - a sign of maturity - is positively self-critical. However, once again I've not at all been inspired by his English teacher or his math and science teachers. Because he has developed a new interest in design, I've put in my order for a black baseball cap with 3 silver stars on the front (such as he has on his T-shirt above) and one of his diabolical patches on the side. This summer he has an art scholarship at Parsons, a truly top college just down the street from his Manhattan pied-à-terre. . Reading my article in the 24 June 2009 Villager that starts, . . I “outed” a straight. Not a gay. A straight! Listen up. . . http://www.thevillager.com/villager321/figuringout.html . . Ligardy designs his own clothes now. He's off to a friend's Graduation. . . Francis Virella, Ligardy's 9th grade friend, traveled with us down Sully's landing strip (a/k/a the Hudson River), where the American Airlines pilot miraculously landed without causing any fatalities. We took the 3-hour Circle Line tour around Manhattan Island, starting where Captain C. B. Sullenberger's plane crashed, then past the Statue of Liberty, up the East River, through the Sputen Dyvil, then under the George Washington Bridge to the port near where I lived for decades in Hell's Kitchen. It's the end of their school year, and they're betting on whether Francis will be a sophomore and Ligardy will be a senior. . Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared Thomas Paine Day on 8 June 2009, and freethinkers from New England as well as the West Coast arrived to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of the great revolutionary's death. I helped plant a tree at the Thomas Paine Park that is directly across from the New York State and Federal Court buildings, near City Hall. Afterwards, I celebrated with Michael, the bartender at Marie's Crisis, 59 Grove Street, the site where Paine died. . Ligardy at the new charter school, Gramercy Arts High School, will be a senior at the end of June. Excelling in art and history, he now has had experience in drama, both as a playwright (Freeze, about how I met his father that he only saw three times), as an actor (many improvisational works), and now as a movie actor (a GI pleading with our leaders to work for peace, not war). Technical Sgt. Ligardy Termonfils-Smith Movie Star Ligardy on the Big Screen Wearing my Eisenhower jacket with my medals Curtain Call for Ligardy's Drama Group and the Dance Group 2nd row, the small face in the center . I took a walk one recent Sunday and shot this picture at 3 Bedford Street. Judge Sonia Sotomayor lives near me in the West Village at 3 Bedford Street (near 6th Avenue, although I'm near 8th Avenue). Her 980-square-foot apartment is on the 5th floor, and its market value is about $985,000, although in 1998 she bought it for $360,000 and still owes $381,775 on her mortgage. When you're in the public eye - and she certainly has been for she may be appointed the Supreme Court Judge who will replace David Souter - all such personal details come out. For example, she hit an $8,283 jackpot while visiting a Florida casino with her mother in 2008. At Christmas she is known to buy more than 60 presents for her nieces, nephews, god-children, friends' children, and members of the court staff. She owns 1/3 of a Florida condomininium, worth about $20K. She drives a white Saab. She made $205,330 last year. A nominal Roman Catholic, she joined the American Philosophical Society in 2002. She's divorced and has no children. Drew Barrymore lives on the same street, and The Times has said she lives "in Greenwich Village, one of the more expensive neighborhoods in perhaps the most expensive city in the country." . May 2009 Lyle Stuart agreed to publish my Who's Who in Hell in 2000 without even seeing the total book, just an outline of a work that he'd dreamed about publishing for years. When he called the staff in to meet me, he described such liberal terms that they were nonplussed, but he said I had been an English teacher and Barricade Books wouldn't need to pay anyone to proof-read the 1,200+ pages I'd written. Jeff Nordstedt, he said, was to be in charge of planning the biggest volume he'd ever published. Jeff's the one who chose the font, the hellish looking alphabet letters, and the library-quality book cover. What fun we had at a time that Jeff, when the company moved from Fifth Avenue to Fort Lee, New Jersey, set the new offices up with brand new Mac computers Lyle loved controversial subjects and published the extremely critical Anarchist Cookbook; Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich; The Sensuous Woman; The Sensuous Man; The Marriage Art; Where Did I Come From? (a book for youngsters about sex). His The Secret Life of Walter Winchell (1953) pitted him against the most powerful columnist in the 1940s and 1950s - Winchell sued him, lost, and with the $8,000 judgment Lyle started Lyle Stuart Inc. in 1956. He was editor of Music Business (1946-1948); business manager of MAD (1952-1954); and president of Citadel Press (1970-1989). For retailer and philanthropist J. C. Penney, who didn't know he was an atheist, Lyle was paid to write a tune, “Go to Church on Sunday Morning.” When Lyle wrote Running Scared about Steven A. Wynn's being the "emperor" of Nevada who had ties to the Mafia, Wynn sued him and won a $3.1 million libel judgment from Lyle - later the judgment was reversed. So, with the Wynn lawsuit not completely settled, he cautiously had his wife, Carole (equally controversial for her 39 Sex Fantasies for Women), sign the contract to protect me in case Wynn started another lawsuit. Lyle died of a heart attack 24 June 2006 and his Barricade Books filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2007. As one of the creditors, for I was owed royalties, I worked with Carole and the bankruptcy court to hold off collecting what I was owed on the 1,000 copies of the $125. book. In 2009, she has been able to get the company out of bankruptcy. So this month, I've started to receive royalty checks again. Meanwhile, Who's Who in Hell is free, online as Philosopedia. When I got the second check on the last day in May for books sold several years ago, I could only regret that I'd not had the time to write the 5th book since reaching 80: Lyle Stuart: A Biography of Sorts. The gossip I'd have included! . "And how did you get along with your father when you were sixteen?" I asked Kwame Appiah at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "I was off at boarding school much of that time," laughed one of the major American philosophers who is the grandson of Britain's Sir Stafford Cripps, Clement Attlee's Labour Party leader in the late 1940s. I had told him about my helping raise Ligardy Termonfils after his Haitian father was assassinated, and straight-son-gay-father were happily managing well. He was pleased to be told. "Do you know about the African Philosophers' Platform?" I also asked, hearing from him that he'd received an e-mail about it just recently but had not had time to follow through, then guessing that I was responsible. Yes, I told him, explaining that it has been difficult to remain anonymous in what is supposed to be an all-African site meant entirely for Africans. "Very, very good," said the prof who teaches at Princeton but lives with Henry Finder, editorial director of the New Yorker, in nearby Chelsea. . "Do you remember the teenager who told you about Salman Rushdie's performing in Zoo Story?" I asked Edward Albee after the Academy ceremonial. "Yes, and Rushdie confirmed this to me recently," our #1 living playwright responded. Told how Ligardy is doing at school, for he'd actually sent him and received back a handwritten letter, Albee added, "That will help make it easier in the future," by which I think he was saying that gays one day will not be categorized as being unfit to raise kids." Albee was wearing a shiny jacket. Appiah (APP-ee-uh) was dressed much as he is shown in the above picture. Anna Warm, retired New Canaan High School English teacher whom I took as my guest for the second time (and my 42nd time since 1968 when Priscilla Robertson asked me to escort her), was dressed so richly that Academy member and former New Canaanite Edward Hoagland thought she'd been one of the young award winners and embarrassed her by telling how cute she looked ("a weak come-on line!" Anna smiled, laughing that when I approached and said "New Canaan," he looked a bit sheepish at having been recognized). Low point was poet Louise Glück's Blashfield Address ("Look, she still uses the umlaut," joked two nearby visitors sharing our box in the mezzanine.) High points were informal comments by Leon Kirchner (who received the Academy's Gold Medal for Music) and Suzanne Farrell (who received the Academy's Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts and emphasized that ballet must not be overlooked as a key part of the humanities, that unlike music and literature ballet involves complete improvisation and individual interpretation. As usual, The New York Times did not send a reporter to cover the colorful and inspiring ceremonial. . Whitney Crothers Dilley, my Connecticut student back in 1983, has approved the latest revision of her Philosopedia entry. The US Embassy in Taiwan has asked her to speak soon about Ang Lee's new film. Like Ligardy's dad, she joked, "My dad leads a colorful life, and it has certainly been a blessing for me." . Since 1996 I've written a gossip column in gay & lesbian humanist. In this month's issue, I reveal what the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden knew about the following scandalous chap - I dug deeply to find the never-before-published photo. Click the above title of the magazine. . Professor Karen Santry of the Fashion Institute of Technology, showing me one of her several Kabuki Dancer works at an art show in Brooklyn. She was my AP student back at New Canaan High School in Connecticut, and we've been buddies ever since. I commissioned her to paint the two oils of Dominica's Premier Edward LeBlanc that we hope to turn over to the Commonwealth yet this year. Janet Higbie, now The New York Times (Culture) editor, greeted me at the show and introduced me to the art crowd that had come from all over. She wrote the autobiography of Dominica's 3rd Prime Minister (Eugenia Charles) - I wrote the foreword to the biography by Judge Irving André of Dominica's 1st Prime Minister (Edward Oliver LeBlanc). . . . The art show was attended by several others from New Canaan, Connecticut, besides Prof. Santry: Ben Guerrero was there (Pedro's son, on the right, above) where his children Alexander and Hanna Guerrero had works shown. Susan Guerrero, now a New York Times journalist (Real Estate Section), helped publicize the event. . Dr. Simon Critchley, Chair and Professor of Philosophy at New School University, asked to have lunch with Dr. Timothy Madigan and me at Chat & Chew on East 16th Street. Over mojitos and beer, he told of having just given an oral test with two other profs to a student who had done well. He asked how much time I spend daily on Philosopedia (16 hours, and he knew about bots, the robotic nuisances that make computers talk to each other, resulting in my having to delete the bots and their hidden Viagra ads) - we previously had corresponded about his Philosopedia entry. Mainly, we talked about Wallace Stevens, Jacques Derrida, deconstructionism, and Paul Edwards's orgone box (and how Ligardy and I threw Dr. Edwards into the Hudson River). He learned that I'd studied with New School's aestheticist Horace Kallen and encyclopedist Paul Edwards, as well as the University of Chicago's centenarian metaphysician Charles Hartshorne. Critchley has over 20 in his department, and he and Madigan shared stories about the state of philosophy these days. For me, he autographed the 30,000th copy of his Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage, 2008): "For Warren, Morbidly Yours, Simon." . Horton Foote Jr. speaking about his father Edward Albee speaking at the memorial (Photo by Sra Krulwich/The New York Times) (Photo by Warren Allen Smith) Horton Foote wrote plays "about families and homes, about love and loss and, as much as anything, about death," said Patrick Healy about the May 11th memorial attended by over 700 for the late Oscar (for his screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies) and Pulitzer Prize (The Young Man From Atlanta) winning playwright held at Lincoln Center and attended by Edward Albee, Romulus Linney, actors Robert Duvall and Harris Yulin (he failed to include Matthew Broderick), and his four children: Walter, Daisy, Hallie, and Horton Jr. (my friend who manages my hangout (the Jane Street Tavern) across the street. "Horton never wrote a character in any of his plays. Horton only wrote people," said Albee, comparing Foote to Chekhov in that respect. Accounts of the author's humor were included, particularly by Horton Jr. who told when 10 about finding a dollar bill and being commended, whereupon he stole two $5 bills from his dad's room and pretended to have found them - his dad commended him but said, first, he wanted to see the serial numbers, explaining that he kept track of all his paper bills' serial numbers. Horton Jr. ended with a memory of his mother and father as being like two loving swans, their wings extended - his voice broke at the word "wings." Horton, a Christian Scientist who died in Hartford, Connecticut, was buried in Wharton, Texas, where he had lived most of his life in the same house. . Curtain Call at Are We Writing Loud Enough?, a sold-out performance at the Vineyard Theater. Ligardy is the 2nd from the left (tallest in the cast), and Francis is on the right Gramercy Arts High School junior Ligardy Termonfils and freshman Francis Virella (our buddy the saxe player who also lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and who looks up to him) performed at the O. Henry High School on 17th Street and on May 11th were two of the outstanding actors in the Vineyard Theatre Student Company's show, Are We Writing Loud Enough?, a work sponsored by the Anne Frank Center USA. I was a proud parent at both performances. Dr. Denise DiCarlo, principal of Gramercy Arts High School, was present, as was Ligardy's art professor for the just finished Parsons Saturday classes for which he had earned a scholarship. Ligardy got an offer after the play from Young Playwrights Inc. (founded by Stephen Sondheim) to perform his play, Freeze, based upon how he learned from me about his father, whom he never knew. . Dr. Taslima Nasrin and I are spending time in her New York City apartment working on her next book (the 32nd?), poetry, and speeches here and abroad. Together, we saw Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin in Waiting for God. Previously, she had seen it in Bangladesh, India, France, and England. Because extremist Muslims want her killed because of her ideas, I call her "the most dangerous woman in the world" (whose ideas would expose their religion) and call Salman Rushdie "the female Taslima Nasrin." I have edited the larger part of her work since we met in a Mexican cave. . Despite an initial recovery in 2003, the wild toad population faces another catastrophe with the introduction of chytrid fungus, which continues to decimate amphibian populations all over the world - amphibians are the canaries in the coal mine of our global environment. Kihansi spray toads were wiped out by the fungus, and today they survive only in collections in the Bronx and the Toledo zoos. Janet Asimov and I, who are greatly concerned, hope you are also. Help, by joining efforts by the Wildlife Conservation Society: http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Endangered_Species . . Two of my favorites on television, Jay Leno and Anderson Cooper, were on recently, Leno asking about the journalist's view of the news and finding that Cooper likes American Idol. My problem now is that I can't focus on what Cooper is saying, for I keep looking at his hair. Only my barber knows for sure. So Rudy the Russian says I have cowlicks similar to those of his client from CNN, the one with the silverish-color hair pictured on the magazine cover on the left, the one whose gym is nearby, the one who fidgets with his Blackberry while Rudy cuts away, the one who lives quite close to me, but in Chelsea. The super-star-journalist only pays $15 - a senior citizen, I only pay $12. And he doesn't live alone. (Photo is not by a Blackberry but by the iPhone I'm holding in the photo.) . I've begun spending time on an African Philosophers' Platform website that I started several years ago. It's a chance to get coverage for Basil Fadipe, my surgeon-friend in Dominica - click LATE NEWS at the following: http://africanosp.org/ . Dom - Racquel Dom DeLuise who died in his sleep on May 4th following a long battle with cancer, was the person who was directly responsible for my breaking a record - because of him, I failed for the only time in my 37 1/2 years of teaching to get my students' written work back to them by their next class period. (Fellow colleagues did not appreciate being told this by their classes.) Students by the hundreds will confirm this, and they likely will remember my excuse. As I wrote then, I loved teaching. I was absent only one day for the entire 37 1/2 years (I sat too close to a sunlamp and I was so blind I had to ask the telephone operator to dial Headmaster Kenney for me), mainly because I didn't want to miss the fun. Like the clown who told us at a school assembly one day, "I've never worked a day in my life!" I disliked being absent for class trips or other school-sponsored events, because it meant stacks of assignments to correct, usually until midnight. And somehow, probably because I feared complaints that I ran a recording studio on Wednesday nights and on weekends, I got every (repeat, every!) paper and every exam back by the students' next class period! No exceptions! Oh, there was an exception: one Wednesday night I went to Joe Allen's after handling the financial business at the recording studio, and actor Dom DeLuise hailed me and a Costa Rican friend, Frank Vega, over to his table where he was sitting alone but waiting for a date. He didn't know us - he just didn't want to sit all alone. He might have been in town preparing for Fatso (1980). The date, it turned out, was actress Raquel Welch. I stayed on so long I didn't get home until 2 a.m., too late to correct papers. And what did I talk about with the 1960's sexpot? Her teenager, homework, parenting of high schoolers. . Karen Murphy (NCHS '73) opened in 9 to 5, the Dolly Parton play based on the 1980 film that spawned two sitcoms. At the 30 April 2009 opening, Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Tracey Ullman, and Kathy Gifford were in the audience. The Daily News gave the play 3 out of 5 stars. The Associated Press wished the 1980 feminist revenge comedy could have been better. USA Today liked it, saying "Get Out and Stay Out" was a show-stopper. Times critic Ben Brantley was a bit underwhelmed. NY1 has a video review. Gay critic 80-year-old John Simon, now with Bloomberg.com, found the humor "consistently crude and lowbrow" and mindful of old-style musicals. On Live May 1st, the cast gave a live performance, and everyone in the television audience got tickets to a performance. NCHSer Murphy got her own Drama Desk nomination for Vaudeville Man and 9 to 15 got 15 Drama Desk nominations. TheaterMania cites the choice secondary role played by Karen "as a booze-saturated secretary" who delivers "a smile-inducting performance." Nancy Russell-Tutty, her drama teacher at NCHS, is understandably thrilled! . Kenneth Paul Block (26 July 1924 - 23 April 2009) Prof. Karen Santry of Fashion Institute of Technology Karen '66 (a 2008 photo) Karen Santry (NCHS '66), one of my memorable students, now a professor of note at FIT, invited me in 1999 to a show featuring works by her friend Kenneth Paul Block, fashion designer of clothes for several U.S. Presidents. I attended but told her I'd have to leave early in order to accept an invitation by painter Paul Cadmus to his 95th birthday party. Overhearing me and to our surprise, Block asked if the two of them could accompany me, so without reservations for them the three of us left his own show and taxied to Fifth Avenue and 57th to the D C Moore Gallery, meeting Cadmus as well as his companion and model Jon Andersson - Cadmus always introduced himself as "a humanities humanist like Warren." Except for helping wheel Chuck Close's wheelchair into the elevator and saying hello to neighbor and painter Jack Levine, the high point was seeing Karen and Mr. Block amidst so many VIPs in the art world. (Cadmus died 5 days later, so it was prescient that the party had been scheduled two weeks in advance.) I hadn't realized that Block was so famous until reading this morning's May 1st Times and seeing he had posed and sketched the social elite: the Duchess of Windsor, Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lauren Bacall, Barbra Streisand, Sophia Loren, Catherine Denueve, and on and on. . . . Why the above photo that I took came out as it did, I'm not sure, but it's not been Photoshopped. I could claim that I'm an artistic abstractionist who purposely highlighted Karen's scintillating eyes. April 2009 Louise Glück Glück (pronounced Glick) is the major poet who will give this year's Blashfield Foundation Address at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I escorted historian Priscilla Robertson in 1968 when she received one of the Academy's awards, and somehow I've received her tickets (as a journalist) ever since. This will make my successive 40th year! None of the 250 members (the original members of which included Henry Adams, William and Henry James, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) has attended that often. Not even the Academy's staff. In past years I've taken my best buddies (Dr. Taslima Nasrin, for whom I edit her poetry and to whom I introduced Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; Anna Warm, who joined me in speaking to Leopold Senghor, Senegal's poet-President who was on the staff of Free Inquiry with me the year he gave such a memorable address; Detective Simon Blanc, who had just read The Invisible Man and when standing next to Ralph Ellison asked him what he did; techy Peter Ross, who visiting Sir Ian McKellen talked with us and erroneously assumed we were a couple; and my new son Ligardy Termonfils, my official photographer who, when he took pictures of me, left VIPs wondering which Academy member I was). In past years, I've taken many high school colleagues, one high school student (yearbook editor Nancy McDiarmid), and 42nd St. librarian and Jane Street tenant Don Fowle). I've asked Anna Warm to attend this May 20th, the first who will have attended twice. Gore Vidal, a 1948 photo by Carl Van Vechten From Philosopedia: In 1995, after leaving unanswered many offers to become listed as Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism, he was approached by Warren Allen Smith, whom he had never before seen. “Mr. Vidal,” he was told in a dour voice, and brusquely, “you and I are in love with the same man!” Conversation in the vicinity hushed. A publisher’s representative approached. The novelist was taken aback, looking quizzically ahead and wondering what was about to transpire. After a studied pause, during which Smith looked somewhat stonily into his eyes, Smith relaxed. “Lucretius.” “Oh,” Vidal laughed uproariously, “and Tiberius and Apuleius, too?” The amused Vidal then accepted an envelope containing a copy of Free Inquiry along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a typed statement, “I agree to be listed as a Humanist Laureate,” under which was a “Yes” and a line for him to sign his name. In Smith's mail two days later was the envelope, in which, indeed, was the signed agreement. On 20 April 2009, Vidal agreed to be Honorary President of the American Humanist Association. "I especially liked John Benjamin Hickey as that spineless, seductive spinmeister, the Earl of Leicester," wrote The New York Times critic Ben Brantley in his praise for Mary Stuart, the Broadway play that opened on April 19th. In our apartment building, I majestically bow to the Earl when we meet. I marvel at how there's no trace of his Texas accent in the Friedrich Schiller 1800 play about politics and power in which Brantley praises Harriet Walter as Elizabeth I and Janet McTeer as Mary, Queen of Scots. In his role, "He exudes charm and cunning as Leicester, who has affections for both monarchs," wrote David Sherwood in Backstage. Variety describes him as "the oiliest of silver-tongued survivors." Liam Neeson attended opening night one month after the tragic death of wife Natasha Richardson to see his pal, John. On the elevator, I dared to ask John if he was active in either queen's religion. Without hesitation he said he was raised Protestant but was not a believer. Eventually, I'll interview him journalistically for publication and possibly include him as a "humanities humanist," the term I use in Philospedia for those who, like me, are disinterested about religion, who rely on the humanities for their positive philosophic outlooks. Cathy Russell, NCHS '73, receives the Guiness Book of World Records honor from a representative of the company - actor Michael Brian Dunn looks on. Cathy's role is that of a psychiatrist, and Michael is one of her badly-in-need-of-therapy patients. Cathy received the award for having missed only 4 of 8,963 performances since the off-Broadway play started on 18 April 1987. (Photos by Ligardy Termonfils, the son I have been helping to raise, going on six years) Ron Russell-Tutty, Nancy Russell-Tutty (Cathy's high school drama teacher), Kathy Murphy (also an NCHS '73er who dropped by after performing in previews of 9 to 5 for Cathy's post-performance cocktail party, and me. Hamming it up while the Russell-Tuttys sit beneath an Al Hershfeld caricature of Cathy. Ligardy thanks Cathy for our front-row seats. It was spring break, but he spent the week at a drama Vineyard Theater boot camp where as a junior he studied acting. On Saturdays he has a scholarship to attend art classes at Parsons, the college he hopes to enter to specialize in graphic arts. Cathy and her partners in crime. (From l. to r. Don Noble, executive producer Armand Hyatt, Catherine Russell, Robert Emmet Lunney, Michael Brian Dunn, and Richard Shoberg. Photo by Todd Cross) Victor Cortes Fernando Vargas, Warren Allen Smith, Back and Front Liners for CD, Manuel Salazar: Costa Rica's Forgotten Tenor I have named Victor Cortes of San José as distribution manager in Costa Rica for the chelCpress's Manuel Salazar: Costa Rica's Forgotten Tenor that Fernando made from original 78rpm records and after his death in 1989 I put out with entirely Spanish liner notes (with the aid of NCHSers Monica Methol and Reyna Piola). The strategy is to stock the CDs in all the gift shops of tourist hotels, for Salazar was Caruso's competitor (except you can't convince any Carusoite). Previously, the U.S. Ambassador was provided with several hundred for use as gifts to visiting dignitaries. Smith the roué, Segal sculptures, Stiliana In 2003, an 11th grade student (Stiliana Dimkova) at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, interviewed me about my having been a June 1969 Stonewall Inn rioter. Nearly 800 oral interviews have been collected in the American Century Oral History Project - I find that I'm pictured there, my beret making me look like a real roué. Also, her paper is in the project's archives, with more pictures. http://www.americancenturyproject.org Now Professor Maurie Mercier of Washington State University (Vancouver) has asked for permission to use the interview as one of 50 from 1860 to 2000 intended for classroom use in U. S. History survey courses, something that will be published by Palgrave Macmillan yet this year. http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/ Don't get in trouble, and no one remembers. Get in trouble, and historians come running. . . . My friend and editor when I wrote for Free Inquiry, Dr. Timothy Madigan teaches philosophy at St. John Fisher College in Rochester (where he has let me teach several of his ethics classes when I visited). Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the UK has asked me to review his W. K. Clifford and The Ethics of Belief (2009). Clifford, who died in his thirties of TB in 1879, was an "evolutionary epistemologist" who tried to marry the Kantian philosophy about a priori knowledge with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Allen Reza took the above photo as I commenced the review. Vince Gillen Former FBI agent, college professor, and the lawyer that General Motors hired to conduct an investigation of Ralph Nader, Vince Gillen has been the subject of a part of the autobiography I'm working on. In the early 1990s, he helped me when I headed the Secular Humanist Society of New York. He attended meetings, then offered his apartment as a place to meet. Knowing he'd be out of town, he lent me the keys to his beautiful apartment in Battery Park City that overlooked the Statue of Liberty. With trepidation, I accepted the keys and held at least two meetings there in his absence. Being a chum of a person who checked on Nader's personal life, I once told him I was writing Who's Who in Hell because I didn't want non-believers to be forgotten. No one dies so long as someone remembers, I said. "Yes, he retorted, "like Tomás de Torquemada!" Some of his remaining family members have helped by providing his photos and approving an entry in Philosopedia: http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Vincent_W._Gillen Robert Delford Brown My minister and Dadaist friend, Robert Delford Brown, died in March. I joined his church - the First National Church of Exquisite Panic, Inc., and got Sir Arthur C. Clarke to join also. The church actually was the name of his art studio. The jovial artist allowed my Secular Humanist Society to meet in his 13th Street Paul Rudolph house, where we worshiped Who - as to whether or not gods exist, we agreed, "Who knows!" Brown, unlike other ministers, did not claim that he could get you to Heaven or Nirvana - he claimed he could get you to Nevada, then sketched road maps to show the way. Ironically, he died by accidentally drowning in the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he was scouting locations for an art project in the river, one involving a number of rafts. http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Robert_Delford_Brown Dr. Basil Fadipe, Roseau, Dominica When first we met, Dr. Fadipe wrote an analysis that was quite far off: "I recall meeting Warren about two years ago. I was having breakfast at one of the local hotels on a Sunday morning and my eyes caught a glimpse of this figure; it was a rather distinguished-looking figure and I couldn't help but continue looking at him wondering who he might be. There were present many Caucasian guests in the dining room but he simply looked so different and so distinguished in all his ways for that morning. One thing I was sure of from his mien; this must be a man who 'lives by his brain'; maybe even a Nobel prize winner in the past. He looked and walked intellectual, if I could say that." We dined together several times and I helped him set up a Dominican Bertrand Russell Society chapter. Following one meal we had a memorable conversation about my lord and his Lord (Russell, Jesus) alongside one of Dominica's 365 rivers. I've gotten around to adding an entry for him in Philosopedia. http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Correspondence%2C_Basil_Fadipe Allen K. Reza, Warren's Muslim Son Suhrid Kamal spent a summer with me when he was a teenager, courtesy of his Aunt Taslima Nasrin. Now a graduate physics student at Hunter College, he has changed his name to mine - Allen Reza -and plans this summer to return to his home in Mymensing, Bangladesh, to conduct research in rural development and work with underprivileged children, for which credit will be give toward his M.S. and eventual Ph. D. Such a humanitarian goal, putting what he learns here to practice in his country, inspires me greatly. Son #11, he's well-acquainted with Son #12 (Ligardy Termonfils). John Benjamin Hickey "Hiya, neighbor!" said John Benjamin Hickey when I visited his dressing room after seeing Janet McTeer (Mary Stuart) and Harriet Walter (Elizabeth I) in Peter Oswald's Mary Stuart. John had a broad British accent that I'd never before heard this Texas native use - he plays the crafty and ambitious Earl of Leicester who in the play woos both queens, a reputation not unlike that he has had since as a co-op board member I voted for him to join us as a shareholder and resident. He closes Act I with the audience's applause, and all laugh at the end of Act II when it is revealed he skips England and saves his life by fleeing to France. On Broadway I saw him in The Crucible and Cabaret (for which he got me a front table at the old Studio 54 stage). On the stage and in movies, he often is in the nude and always unforgettable. Despite Mary Stuart's religious theme, it was one of the best serious dramas that I've seen in a long time - I liked it because it depicted the hypocrisy in church and state circles that existed then. Today's audience can easily deduce that times have changed only a trifle. Tom Longden Des Moines Register "Famous Iowans" reporter Tom Longden included me in his Des Moines Register April 5th column, despite my having been an Empire Stater and a Nutmegger for the last six decades. My Hawkeye connection is having been a teenage paperboy for his newspaper, one who won a ride in its autogiro (a predecessor of the helicopter in the 1930s), and photographed the injured in a Piper Cub that crashed at the Iowa State Fair. Longden and I are getting fan mail from afar, including one from the retired editor of The Tribune who laughed at my telling how I was given $1 to rush the photo by taxi to the newspaper, but I took a 5¢ streetcar and saved the change. http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009904050337 George Segal, Gay Liberation Devin Dwyer Columbia University journalism student Devin Dwyer is writing about my having been a June 1969 Stonewall Inn rioter. The 26-year-old Minnesota-born student pursuing his M.A. taped me near the George Segal outdoor statues as well as inside the bar where the rioting started that resulted in an annual heritage of pride parade. In addition to the interview I gave to a Brazilian magazine, Dom, I'm getting inquiries to go on record further before June, particularly because Iowa and Vermont have become the 3rd and 4th states that allow same-sex marriage. Although at the time I thought the week's rioting was just "a happening," it has become a symbol of a minority's fighting against unfair treatment. "Gossip From Across the Pond," my column that has been published in England's G&LH's journal since 1996, features a high school photo of Chester Kallman, W. H. Auden's lover - to my knowledge, it's a journalistic scoop. . . . Be-bop saxophonist Charlie Parker had a nice Christian funeral service, after which his wife lamented on PBS Radio that he had no interest in and was not a member of any of the organised religions.. . . .Teller, the illusionist of Penn and Teller, won't like what I wrote about him. Instead of saying I'm 87, I've been saying I'm 95, avoiding negative comments about being old and receiving commendations that I'm "sure staying in shape." Calcutta's The Telegraph on March 29th reported that Taslima Nasrin "is now in New York with her sister Yasmin. She was suffering from acute depression after losing her brother Kamal who committed suicide at the end of last year." I immediately informed the journal, as well as The Times of India and The Hindu of India, that Taslima "lives in New York City, not with her sister, is not suffering from depresion, and her brother who is in good health did not commit suicide at the end of last year." This shows the extent to which extremist Muslims will go in attacking my friend with the fatwa! . . . She recently prepared a great Bengali dinner for me in the Wall Street area at her new digs that overlook the Hudson River - I help edit speeches that she currently is giving at the University of Ghent in Belgium and the European Parliament. We Skype to avoid telephone charges. Before she left for Europe, we had brunch with Allen, her Muslim nephew Suhrid (my Muslim son, a physics major at Hunter College) who took my name to illustrate my being part of the family - his Muslim dad, of course, did not commit suicide. At my desk with Taslima and Suhrid (my Muslim son Allen) March 2009 DOM, a Brazilian magazine, has asked me to write an article about my being a rioter in June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn. I've submitted a seven-pager about the human rights event 40 years ago. The reporter tells me it will be translated into Portuguese. . . . Gramercy Arts High School officially opened its art gallery, the only one in any New York City school. Ligardy's proud teacher - Mr. Jack DiMartino - and parent attended the opening. Mr.Jack DiMartino, art teacher, Gramercy Arts H.S. Parent LT Ligardy is teaching me not only tidbits about PhotoShop but also about how to use my new digital camera. Here he is with Yamil, our doorman, and Scott, his Manhattan pied-à-terre's super: On my Sunday morning walk to brunch, I went over to 37 West 10th, the 5-story building where Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson lived when they married 14 May 1928. Their son Michael was born there on 20 June 1930. Gossip had it that at breakfast they both hid behind their Times, talked at the same time as the other, and didn't listen. They divorced 2 January 1942. (The Nobel Prize-winning novelist's 3 June 1950 postcard to me saying he was a naturalistic humanist, not a believer, was stolen years ago and was not included in my donation of correspondence to Harvard's Houghton Library - whoever sells or shows it will eventually be charged and the card will be returned to my estate.) The house is a block from the post office and the library, the one I use and was used by E. E. Cummings, who lived across the street on Patchin Place. It's close to Julius's bar, the one dating back to 1826 where gossip has it (in London's G&L Humanist) that I was almost picked up by a famous cultural icon (but we had no place to go). I've gotten beyond page 400 in my autobiography, one that I'll finish too late. It was a summer in the 1960s I'm now writing about. A Connecticut teacher 180 days a year, I was co-owner the other 185 days of Variety Recording Studio with my companion, Costa Rican Fernando Vargas. A gay client had asked him if he would repair his hi-fi, so off to his Greenwich Village apartment we went. After being introduced to the host and while Fernando worked on the hi-fi and the host retired to the kitchen to prepare dinner, Fernando suggested I play the piano. "He can play anything," the host was told. "Tenderly," Fernando requested, and because it was my Mother's favorite I knew it well and played it on the excellent piano that I wished we had at the studio. Out from the kitchen came Jack Lawrence, who to my surprise had written the words and lyrics (and also wrote "If I Didn't Care," "All or Nothing at All," and "Play, Fiddle, Play." During the meal of spaghetti and meat balls, the host laughed at the many other practical jokes I'd endured . . . such as making me believe for years that our studio engineer Joe Cyr was the brother of burlesque stripteaser Lili St. Cyr. Lawrence at the age of 96 died March 15th, having retired to West Redding, Connecticut, with his son Richard. He'd legally adopted his younger companion, Richard Debnam, in 1979. Debnam redesigned the Playhouse, a 499-seat house at 359 West 48th Street that was named the Jack Lawrence Theater and operated until sold in 1987. I saw the leading hoofer, Savion Glover, for his March 17th performance and have advised friends who don't know about him to see the following: Dr. Houston Brummit, the psychiatrist who gave me my first computer (a Kaypro) to help him write a book, introduced me to Glover, then a teenager. There may have been equally good hoofers in the past, but this 35-year-old performs a consummate, theatrically historic program without words. He's a positively incredible percussionist! For her birthday, Ligardy and I got his mother an iPod shuffle. When Cliff at Apple asked who the gift was for and was told for a person who looks like his mother, it turned out that he's Haitian too. . . .UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Bill Clinton, and musician Wyclef Jean were in Haiti this month to encourage international aid for recovery and reconstruction efforts. . . . Ligardy has helped me use my iPhone more efficiently, and I've been shown how the complex PhotoShop program makes drawing possible. . . . ."My dad has never called 911," Ligardy can say, "but 911 calls him all the time." (Our mutual friend, Simon the cop, in his new 8-hour position as detective answers calls in Stamford "and Friday the 13th we got some crazy ones!") The De Niro Group showed the late Rita Hermann's apartment in my building on the 3rd floor - the 2-bedroom is listed at $1.595M. It overlooks noisy 8th Avenue and doesn't have my panoramic view of all of downtown Manhattan (including the almost finished Trump Hotel, which is higher than the nearby Woolworth Building). Ralph Mercado, the Latin Music impressario, had been in a two-year battle with cancer but died on March 10th. He, along with Joseph Papp (NY Shakespeare in Central Park) and Maurice Levine (American Jewish Committee), was one of the bigger clients at my Variety Recording Studio. Mercado's biggest stars were Tito Puente and Celia Cruz. His Fania label produced Eddie Palmieri (whose Tico label got me into Sing Sing Prison twice when we recorded Eddie Palmieri Live at Sing Sing) and Tito Nueves the salsa singer. His RMM checks never bounced, and studio manager José Gallegos remembers our having done many recordings for him. I always marvelled at the Bach-like precision salsa pianists could obtain on a keyboard. And there was one day when I asked one of the colorful musicians Mercado was promoting - La India - if she knew who the lady was with a child in her arms. "My husband," she responded. Karen Santry rates a "Karen in Wonderland" article in the Real Estate section of the 8 Mar 2009 New York Times, complete with pictures of her colorful studio apartment in Westbeth, the storied artists' housing complex in the far West Village very near me. She knew that fellow New Canaan High student Deborah Baldwin was writing it and that a photographer (Casey Kelbaugh, also with a New Canaan connectiction) had taken photos. But I was the one who e-mailed her that the article was online even before she could buy the newspaper. Mention is made that she not only painted David Bowie in his famous leather jacket, learned printmaking from Andy Warhol, but also was commissioned to do formal portraits of P. Diddy and the former prime minister of Dominica - "in the grand 19th-century salon style," Deb correctly reported: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/realestate/08Habi.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=deborah%20baldwin%20santry&st=cse Taslima Nasrin now has her ID and office at New York University, where she is a visiting scholar. I've helped her by working with Scholars at Risk to get her the residency. She still needs an apartment, so I spent a day walking around the Wall Street area where, amazingly, many studios and bedroom apartments are available (although far too expensive for my tastes). Dennis Middlebrooks, who is co-President of FANNY, also walked with her to find a studio or one-bedroom. She has found an apartment on Washington Street near Ground Zero She recently spoke on feminism at Indiana University. Ligardy and Taslima love each other, and she sees how much he has grown, intellectually and physically. Taslima and Dennis are two of my six closest friends. Not only do I help edit for her but also for Suhrid, her nephew who stayed with me one summer and now is working for his M.S. in physics at Hunter College. http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Taslima_Nasrin February 2009 Ligardy's first collage, which he turned in at his college-level Parsons Saturday class. Collages are easy, but his interest is in drawing. Ligardy is not succeeding in failing, alas! He wittily promised Edward Albee that, like him, he was going to flunk out of school. Albee surprised by writing back that grades are not that important. At the end of the 3rd marking period, Ligardy's scores show he is failing to fail. He is earning 100s in two art classes (and now has a free Saturday scholarship to attend art classes at Parsons). He is earning 80s and 90s in global history, geometry, and English (his 80 is the highest in that subject to date), and a 65 in science. How embarrassing to have to tell our #1 playwright that you are not succeeding in failing! Postscript: 26 Feb 2009 My son Ligardy just phoned, right after Manhattan's Gramercy Arts High School let out, not at 9 pm when he usually does. Now what! As I often do, I asked how - like Albee - he was succeeding in failing. "Terrible!" he responded. "I got called to the auditorium this afternoon. . ." "Oh, no-o-o!" ". . . and the principal gave me a certificate. . ." "Don't tell me you were caught running up the stairs?" ". . . and it said I made the honor roll!" Surely enough, in the last marking period except for a 65 in science, all his grades were 80 and above for the first (!) time since 7th grade when first we met. "Sorry, Dad!" I told him, sounding as serious as I could, that, of course, he'd be punished. "Not at Primitivo! Again?" Yes, we go to many restaurants in the West Village, but this Italian osteria is where he especially likes the octopus. Meanwhile, dad and son are ecstatic about President Barach Obama's first few weeks in office. . . . I was among the first to review God and the Philosophers by Paul Edwards. This I did in my regular Gay & Lesbian Humanist column, which I've been writing regularly since 1996. The book's foreword is by my #1 philosopher friend, Tim Madigan - after Edwards died, Tim and I got permission to enter his apartment, where Tim found the unfinished manuscript. The British editor features Wilhelm Reich's "orgone box," the controversial contraption invented by Ilse Ollendorff's husband. The Dutch journalist Rudie Kagie, my interviewer I took the only known photo of philosopher Paul Edwards A 2009 Netherlands book, pilze hats kosmischerweise wenig, has a long interview with me by Rudie Kagie about the controversial big band director Sun Ra. Kagie drew me out more than anyone else has done concerning not only my relationship with Sun Ra but also my 40-year companionship with Fernando Vargas. I have posted the 12-page interview on the web, including many photographs. Did I let it all hang out? Yep! Woofers, tweeters, testicles, how I eased a corporate shareholder out of his stock, why Sun Ra and his 20 or so musicians slept on my recording studio's floor, details about how a lathe could cut 78's, 33's, and 45's, January 2009 • On January 20th, Inauguration Day in Washington, D.C., I e-mailed the above pictures to some friends. But wait! Wasn't it frigid that day, yet I was only wearing a sweater? I couldn't have fooled Carl, our former Ambassador to Nepal and the son of the famous anthropologist Carleton Coon - we were two who had spoken on the Mall in 2005 at an "atheists in foxholes" conference. Meanwhile, e-mails not only congratulated me for having been one of the several million who were invited by President Barack Hussein Obama to speak . . . to how did the leaves get on the trees . . . to how with a Mac could I have faked my picture on the jumbotron (on the left in the picture on the right). Actually, with Dr. Jennifer Svahn - who had just completed the second of two laser therapies (surgery without knives) - and I watched together as the President was sworn in as our 44th President. From the operating table, I then walked (without cane, for the varicose veins she treated were partly the cause of my legs' having swollen) to the Jane Street Tavern across the street here in New York's West Village. Here, about 50 of us watched in silence as the remarkable events took place. Silence, that is, until George W and his wife climbed up into the helicopter that would take him to Texas. The silence continued when the propeller blades started turning. But the second the helicopter was an inch off the ground, however, our noise was so loud it could have been heard as far downtown as Ground Zero, as far uptown as the New York Times Building. • Ligardy's latest artwork - he has just won a free-Saturday-classes scholarship at Parsons. Brooklyn Teenager In A City of Eight Million Kelsis, A Classmate • Photos of Ligardy by Warren • "Airplane down on Jane!" On January 15th my building's super yelled this, running to his apartment and pointing over to the Hudson River 3 blocks away. Despite the cane, I climbed to the roof and, surely enough, numbers of little boats were scurrying around in the middle of the river, halfway between New Jersey and Jane Street, where I've lived since 1990. The plane that had made an emergency landing 35 or so blocks up-river had floated down to Jane! Back to my apartment, I had a better picture on CNN, learning that Pilot Chesley Sullenberg of US Airways Flight 1549 had been forced down after geese had clogged both of the plane's jet engines. "Miracle on the Hudson," Daily News headlines blared the next day. "Miracle?" and "Thank God!" Well, give credit where it's due. Don't thank the supernatural for sending the geese into the motors in the first place. How insulting! Rather, credit the pilot, his crew, the engineers who designed the plane, the cops, firemen, ambulance drivers, hospital workers - all humans - who knew their job and had planned for such an eventuality! The last one off the plane, he walked the entire plane, twice, making sure that no one was left behind. • I'm in another movie, this time a documentary about restauranteur Fedora Dorato. Producer Bruce Johnson brought a camera crew from Rhode Island, and he interviewed the 87-year-old restauranteur and a few of her old-time patrons. The documentary is not yet available, but I used a computer program called "Grab" and grabbed the following two photos from the movie - I am being interviewed in my apartment, she at the restaurant: In 1952, Fedora and her husband Henry bought the 1920s building at 239 West 4th St., so when asked to talk about the place I mentioned that hers is the oldest family-owned and operated restaurant in Manhattan and that for nostalgic reasons she maintains the place as it was from the beginning. It still has its pressed metal ceiling, its small intimate tables, its phone number (CHelsea 2-9691 with a phone booth that has a rotary-type phone, and its dedicated waiters ("Fedorables"). Her specialty remains prawns Florentine, and I'm quoted as saying, "The charm of the place is that she just changes the light bulbs." While a teacher in New Canaan, I often brought two exceptional (the best and the weakest) students on Wednesday nights to dine, after which we toured my recording studio. My 85th birthday was celebrated here with Bertrand Russell Society members and friends - Ligardy told them that he thought his biological father left him nothing but that he had left him me, his new father. In June 1969 when I was a Stonewall Inn rioter, it was here, my hangout since the early 1960s, that I ran for safety. • FANNY, which Dennis Middlebrooks and I founded in 1998 to expedite humanist matters, threw a welcome-to-New York dinner at Fedora's for Taslima Nasrin on January 15th. Working with SCHOLARS AT RISK, I've helped arrange for "the woman without a country" and "the most dangerous woman on Earth" to apply for U.S. citizenship and also try to get a residency permit with New York University's English Department. Fedora, who is 8 months older than I am, welcomed each of us and knew Taslima from previous visits. We made plans to find Taslima a place to stay (Brooklyn, Newark?), and she described the terrible life she has had since leaving West Bengal. She also told of her extensive speaking throughout Europe (where she is well-known), including being with President Sarkozy in Paris. (left to right) Peter from Serbia; Taslima from Bangladesh-West Bengal-Sweden; Warren from Iowa; NYU Student Avman Mirza from Bangladesh; Dennis and Carolyn from Brooklyn. Photo by Peter Ross from All Over • God and the Philosophers - by American philosophe Paul Edwards - has just been published (Prometheus, 2009). Dr. Timothy Madigan compiled it for publication after Edwards died. In an introduction he describes how he and I in 1995 arranged a three-part series of lectures by Edwards on Nietzsche, Freud, and Reich, at the New School for Social Research. Following his death, Madigan and I were the first allowed into his apartment, during which time Madigan located the precious drafts of the book and we found his disassembled orgone box, for he had been a patient of psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. In 2005, after Paul's death 9 December 2004, I helped throw Dr. Edwards, editor of Encyclopedia of Philosophy, into the Hudson River - my son Ligardy, standing next to me (I'm wearing the beret), photographed our dumping of Paul's cremains into the river per his Will, explaining the next day to fellow 10th graders and teachers, "Yesterday, I threw a teacher into the river." December 2008 • Philosopedia, which I founded as a free search engine in 2005, received 2,800,000 "hits" in 2008. The largest number came from the United States, followed by Austria (953 hits in December), the UK, Canada, Ireland, France, Switzerland, and on to Tuvalu (28 hits) and the People's Republic of China (13). • Seeing Sean Penn in Milk, the just-released biographical film about Harvey Milk (the first openly gay man to be elected in California as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors), has led to all kinds of reflections. My having been a Stonewall Inn rioter in 1969 helped the human rights cause, I feel, for my present State Senator Tom Duane and my City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn (#2 only to Mayor Michael Bloomberg) won their elections as openly gay candidates, a feat (like a black's becoming President) that would have been inconceivable a few decades earlier. Like Milk, I was discreet about my personal life: straight in Connecticut, gay in Manhattan. Unlike Milk, I felt forced by society to be closeted - a gay student years later told me it was good that I did, for even someone who worked in town for the Congregational Church had been fired. In retrospect, and knowing my liberal bent, I wonder if my reason for not being a rebellious activist like Milk was financial - my companion and I needed the income to insure that we could run our recording studio from the 1960s until 1990 (a downside being that we worked with Jim Boothe on "Jingle Bell Rock"). In Manhattan, we had no one like Milk to stir up the agitators (although I was one of the first members of ACT UP, attending the planning meetings at Cooper Union's famed auditorium). . . . Penn's acting was incredible, even in the scene when he was shot several times. Not shown was how San Francisco Mayor George Moscone was assassinated. Just before Xmyth on the elevator of my co-op building, Victor Garber (who played the Moscone role) was every bit alive, and I congratulated the six-time Emmy Award-nominated actor who is a neighbor. . . . The bottom line is that I think organized religious groups are as bigoted as ever, that yes it's not as dangerous now to have been born an ethnic as it is to have been born gay. But President-Elect Barack Obama has chosen a person, Rick Warren, to give the invocation at his inaugration who recently compared marriage by loving and committed same-sex couples to incest and pedophilia. The righteous Christian has repeated the Religious Right's big lie that supporters of equality for gay Americans are out to silence pastors. He has called Christians who advance a social gospel Marxists. He is adamantly opposed to women having a legal right to choose an abortion. Patriarchy, unfortunately, is alive and well. • "Warren, I was just robbed." "Where? You're OK? " "Bushwick, between Weirfield and Wyckoff. 6:40, 20 minutes ago. I waited for the bus, it didn't come, I started walking home. The person came from the other direction, asked me what time it is, then showed a knife and said, 'Give me everything in your pockets.' I said I didn't have anything." "What'd he look like?" "6' or 6' 1", late 20s or early 30s. ACG boots, black jeans, brown hood, black vest, dressed perfect as a thief, I couldn't see his face." "Race?" "Sounded black. Couldn't see. Said give me you coat." In 20-degree weather, Ligardy walked coatless the long distance home to Halsey Street, Aunt Liz and his mother happy he wasn't hurt. I called Brooklyn's Precinct 83 to give a report by phone. "No, you have to come here to make the written report." "No thanks. Bye." Another unreported crime. . . . • Ligardy was on hand December 3rd when I returned to my apartment after being discharged by the nursing home. And a day or so later, he wheel-chaired me to the grocery store where I stocked up on at least a week's groceries. Wow, he's a son who's really a son! We worked on a project in which he inquired about who I had voted for and against in every election going back to 1944 (Norman Thomas, for my absentee ballot arrived at my foxhole after FDR had been elected). In the last semester of US History, he'll be a step ahead because he now has heard my stories about Warren Harding, Alfred E. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, and other names teenagers know know nothing about. He entitled his paper, "A Conversation With My Father About Presidents." I continue to be asked if I have adopted him. No, he, his mother, and two of his grandmothers adopted me as his father - Ligardy literally had only seen his biological father, who was assassinated in 2003, three times before leaving Haiti in October 1998 as a 6-year-old. • Dr. George Klein, the Swedish expert on cancer who advises the Nobel Committee about candidates for the Award in Medicine, autographed his The Atheist and the Holy City, "To Warren, my newly found educator." Yes, he did enjoy my interviewing him for Philosopedia. . . . Dr. Peter K. B. St. Jean, the Dominica-born criminologist, autographed his Lessons from Grand Bay: Prospects for Maintaining Low Crime in Dominica, Nature Island of the Caribbean, "To Warren from Peter, Keep working to improve quality of life for all our people." . . . For Philosopedia, Royston Ellis provided me with additional material about his having been Britain's foremost exponent of "Beat Poetry" in the 1960s, and more about his and John Lennon and the Beatles' major connection and their Liverpool performances. November 2008 • My October 18th kneecap surgery will end when I leave the Greenwich Village Nursing Home on December 3rd – see my pleasant room, below. I still cannot walk, but the swelling in my right leg will have stopped in several weeks, I no longer need IV antibiotics, and I’ll still need to use a walker and a cane until then. What a joy it’ll be to be back in my apartment. . . . • Tony Accardo, who succeeded Al Capone and who some say gave the signal for the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, shared my bed one summer in the 1940s when I was a dude rancher in Montana. “The #1 gangster shared your bed?” Well, yes, as did, uh, some other colorful people over the years. For example, pianist Oscar Levant (but I’ll relate that 1940s Kentucky story later - it includes Emily Davenport, one of the major donors then to the Louisville Symphony Orchestra.) . . . . In my cabin at the Montana ranch was Accardo’s 12-year-old son. When his father drove from River Forest, Illinois, to visit his homesick son, Tony Jr. and my cabin pre-teens were on an overnight pack trip with our horses. So Tony Sr. slept in my bed and his two chauffeurs slept in other campers’ beds. Although I’ve pleaded for a photo from him for six decades of our correspondence, Tony (now a retired projectionist union member, I think) finally had his daughter send me a photo. Here he is with a grandchild: Does this add to my reputation of keeping in touch with everyone I’ve ever met? • Philosopedia was first to cite Michael Jackson’s becoming a Muslim. From my bedside, I’ve done much updating this month, but it would take a staff of helpers to really make Philosopedia into a first-rate website. • Simon Blanc, my buddy the Stamford policeman whom I helped bring here from Dominica in 1976 and who was my roommate in Hell's Kitchen as well as in Stamford, has been promoted to Sergeant. When first he arrived, he took several tries before passing his high school equivalency certificate. While in the New York Army National Guard for six years, he rose to the rank of E4, Specialist 4. Little by little he has earned his Bachelor of Science degree at Fairfield University. Except for Fernando, my roommate for the most years, Sergeant Blanc (oh, that sounds so beautiful) will likely have retired and earned his Master's Degree before his daughter gets to college. The Stamford Advocate front-paged the story : Simon's nephew, Terry, took the following photos. The first is of Stamford Mayor Dannel P. Malloy's swearing Sgt. Blanc in, The second is of the new sergeant's expresssion of thanks that he is a member of such an excellent police department. • Ligardy has brought friends of his to meet me all these years, partly because parents appreciate. The latest two were also art students, one a sophomore, the other a freshman - it's obvious that he's a model for them. • I likely will be in the nursing home for the rest of November, but I do scoot over to my apartment a block away to see the cats, write checks, and keep in touch. The pain levels are slowly diminishing, he food remains way above average, and I love to meet new people. October 2008 I strongly advise the following: Do as I did, and spend your first time in a hospital on your 87th birthday! Experiencing deep pain (9 1/2 out of high 10) in my swelling right leg, I asked the doorman to call an ambulance that arrived in the few minutes it took me to pack my toothbrush and underwear and e-mail Ligardy, his mother Emmy, and Peter my computer techy that I was in serious trouble. Off to Beth Israel Hospital, I arrived at 03:00. While still in the triage section, I was amazed that Emmy was there at 10:00, teaching me how to piss in the little plastic container - what a support she has always been! By the end of the 2nd or 3rd day, physicians had narrowed the cause of my swelling leg either to "fake gout" or to "septic arthritis of the knee." What a relief to hear that blood clots were not involved, and surgeon Dr. Ashta explained that to insure there was no infection under the kneecap that he'd make a 6" incision, wash out the area, and use 22 staples to hold the skin together. With Ligardy looking on, a doctor using what looked like a turkey baster stabbed the area and in one fell swoosh he collected 20cc of water - Ligardy's jaw dropped, and I gritted my teeth much as my own father had illustrated when he displayed courage at a time he was in pain. I don't even remember being put under, but - when I came to and looked - surely enough 22 staples were there on my swollen kneecap, now no longer red (no infection) although the area remained hot. Dr. Ashta, Hungarian-born and a person like Dr. George Klein with no interest in religion ("Religion interferes in my work as a surgeon."), later was blunt in saying that the swelling might persist for two months, that I'd need daily IV treatments at a nursery home, and that he was satisfied with the progress so far. Hospital roommates included Miguel Rolda, who helped advise the Chinese patient who had apparently been a bar brawl. Despite having no shoes, the chap somehow escaped and was brought back from a place three blocks away. When his wife and two grandchildren arrived to take him home, he was still barefoot - he so trusted Miguel and me because we advised him to say yes to what the nurse was asking that he wouldn't leave until he embarrassedly thanked us both in Chinese. My Oxford Medicare Advantage insurance surprisingly is paying for everything, including a stay at the Greenwich Village Nursing Home, two blocks from my apartment. Talk about a progressive place: in her 90s the lady who inspired the dramatic character Auntie Mame died here (leaving an unpaid alcohol bill). I've a sunny room, excellent food, TV, and a chance to meet more Caribbeans than had I vacationed there. Haitian nurses and helpers also are numerous, all eager to meet Ligardy when he comes several days a week after school. Janet Asimov was the first to telephone, and she had just fallen on a city bus and I made her laugh that my room had an extra bed that I'd reserve for her - she, Ligardy, and I are close. She finds that my raising Ligardy in such a progressive way is like a textbook case, and her praise borders on hyperbole. . . . Muslim friends Yesmean, Milon, Asha, and Suhrid brought flowers and candy. . . . Karen Santry of the Fashion Insitute of Technology arrived with plants and the most exotic of candies. . . . Anna Warm arrived on Halloween, and I made sure she didn't dare get near the crazy crowds for the city's annual parade for children. . . . My very first student (Ted Nelson, Bentley School '50) arrived with camera, tape recorder, and Marlene - for their record, she had me tell in detail my memories about Mrs. Jean Holm, the grandmother who raised Ted, and about Ted's mother, actor Celeste Holm. They're impressed at my easily recalling so many details (all positive about the grandmother but not about Ted's mother who had, however, invited us to her dressing room in 1952 at the Lyceum after Annie Christie). Ted teases me for my being imprecise in Philosopedia as to his having coined "http." "OK, write what it should be, and I'll post it in a newyorkminute!" I tell him. Earlier in the month in Harlem, I spoke about my memories of Langston Hughes. . . . I was interviewed by CUNY journalism student Brian Winkowski, who filmed a blog about my many ventures. . . . I saw "Wig Out" and met its actors. . . . Mom lived to be 84, I've made it to 87, and Dad died when 88. . . . September 2008 I started my 5th year as Ligardy's parent, this year at Gramercy Arts High School, a new charter school at the Washington Irving High School campus. The month went fairly smoothly - he was only been suspended once (cancelled because of a dean's mistaken ruling about kids wearing scarves). Dr. Timothy Madigan (from Rochester's Saint John Fisher philosophy department) rented a car and took Ligardy and me to Stamford where we met Simon, my buddy the policeman, Simon, Ligardy, Tim then to see where I'd lived in New Canaan on Millport Avenue, then to the 50th reunion of New Canaan's Class of 1958, Madigan and Ligardy with '58ers Warren S. Smith (!) and Nancy Norling with her husband Parry. then to Greenwich to meet the Hungarian-born Swedish physician Georg Klein, who helps choose candidates for Nobel Prizes in medicine. Madigan, Ligardy, Dr. and Eva Klein Ligardy then accompanied me to the 40th reunion of the '68ers, At the railroad station . . . English teachers Peg Sherry and Nancy Hugo . . . . Arrested by Bill Marabella where Coach Kathy Mitchell met us as the train pulled in and Tory Hicks drove us to the Waveny Castle, which Ligardy had seen on the outside several times but now saw on the inside. Guillermo Perez-Cadalso from Honduras, who has been a Supreme Court Judge, was one of over a hundred ex-students and spouses that I was happy to greet. I've now arranged to be trustee of my estate, which will allow my Executor to avoid my Will's being probated (and contested by any cousins). Contemporary Authors Revised will update my entry. I've now written 3,740 entries for Philosopedia, which to date has had more than a million "hits." July - August 2008 Ligardy has now earned two A's and an A- in college-level art classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Also, the high school junior has gained an inch and now is 6' 1". Although the co-op building's roof has been closed all summer because of repairs, we again were able to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. Root canal work again, but by the time Ligardy and I went to Iowa in July all was well. In Iowa, it was amazing to meet Dale Sexton again after three decades, this time taking a 15- instead of a 12-year-old to live on his Rockwell City farm. How Ligardy helped Dale's grandchildren Brent and Alex wash his son Keith's pig to be shown at a county fair, how he made page one of Adel's Perry Chief (BIG CITY TEEN VISITS RURAL IOWA), and how I met cousins I didn't know I had is described online at: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Ligardy_In_Iowa Paul Senter and his wife Verda King Senter, my schoolmates in Rippey, Iowa, met us in Des Moines, and Paul later accompanied us to the county museum in Perry and also to Rippey. I entertained Dr. Peter Stone of Stanford U' political science department, Michelle Rourke of the University of Northern Iowa, Rudie Kagie of The Netherlands (we're one of three or four scholars and researchers who knew jazz big band leader Sun Ra), and was interviewed about my having been a Stonewall Inn rioter in 1969 for a New York 40th anniversary issue. Taslima Nasrin dared to return to India in the midst of Scholars at Risk's Dr. Robert Quinn's and my attempts to get her a resident scholar position at New York University. I'm editing her Women Have No Country, which she wrote in Kolkata before fleeing from fundamentalist Muslims for her life. June 2008 Ligardy and I went to Lincoln Center to hear Edward Albee being interviewed on his 80th birthday by his ballet star friend Marian Seldes, after which as he exited Ligardy asked if the playwright knew Salman Rushdie played Jeremy in a Pakistani TV production of The Zoo Story. An account of what happened thereafter, how he wrote that the two are losers, with photos of Albee's letter to Ligardy inviting him to keep in touch with a fellow loser, is at http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Albee%27s_Sophomore_Friend Ligardy's one-act play, Freeze, which is about how his father met me and how he knows much about his assassinated father from what I have told him, was performed at the Vineyard Theater on 15th Street. Ms. Barbara Scott, his English teacher, presented him with the unopened letter from Albee that I gave her. The hundred or so students seeing his play were understandably surprised and happy. In the final marking period, Ligardy earned a 75 in English. He's now a junior. Following is my Father's Day gift, his self-portrait. Albee will be disappointed that Ligardy the Loser ended with sophomore grades of 99 phys ed, 97 global history, 95 in both art classes, 75 English, and 70 earth science - the reward is a trip planned to Iowa in July. Oh, and 55 in math, the reward being no trip to the Bahamas or Canada. But we just might both go to Dominica for their Independence Day in November. __________ On my way to the theater on June 21st, I thought I saw a familiar face at the 14th Street station. "John?" I inquired, gingerly approaching the man with the razor-thin moustache who is sometimes dubbed the Pope of Smut. He smiled yes. " I wrote ''Cruising the Deuce'', the book you used as a prop in one of your works last year." "Oh, I loved that book!" he said, clapping and extending his hand. Fortunately, my computer techy Peter Ross was there with his cellphone camera. I introduced John Waters to Peter, and we were introduced to his friend. The next night at the Tony Awards, Waters was one of the first presenters. Cry Baby, a play based on his movie set in the 1950s, won four Tony nominations but closed after 68 performances. Hm, couldn't it have lasted just one more? Taslima Nasrin went with me to Scholars at Risk, and that organization which is at New York University is trying to find a resident-writer position for her in some American university, preferably one in New York City. There's Taslima with me and her niece (Suhrid, my son #11 who has changed his name to mine and is now Allen Reza). That's Ligardy's self-portrait on the wall behind Allen. The artwork behind my iMac is one of two colorful hexes by Anita Weschler, the sculptor whose Humanist statue I donated to the Institute of Humanist Studies in Albany. Son #1, Fantuzzi, who never fails to get in touch with me on Father's Day, performed at a psychedelic art gallery and introduced people to me as being his surrogate father since he was 9. G&L Humanist, for which I had a quarterly column since 1996, ceased publication as a magazine. However, it now is going online as a monthly, and I've been asked to continue my "Scene From Across the Pond" column. May 2008 Taslima Nasrin has arrived from Sweden, and we went to Scholars at Risk to see if the representative at New York University will be able to find her a resident scholar position at any city university. We're also working to arrange a Type O Visa, for regular visas are only for 90 days. Anna Warm and I attended the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, her 2nd visit with me, my 40th. Anna, cocktail in hand - Warren on the left, Mark Twain on the right? April 2008 - Ligardy and I went to Lincoln Center on April 17th to hear Edward Albee being interviewed by Marian Seldes, his long-time friend. She is the daughter of noted critic and author Gilbert Seldes, niece of pioneering journalist George Seldes, a dancer who began her career as a dancer with the American Ballet. The occasion was to celebrate Albee's upcoming 80th birthday, and he spoke with satisfaction and humility about his life as a playwright, after which he wittily answer questions from the hundred or so well-wishers who had come to hear him. As Albee was exiting, Ligardy approached and asked if he knew that Salman Rushdie had played the part of Jerry in a Pakistan television production of The Zoo Story. Albee asked his name, where he went to school, and when he had read the play. The 6' tall 15-year-old said he read The Zoo Story in his English class at Washington Irving High School near Union Square in Manhattan. "No, I didn't know that about Rushdie," Albee said, remaining on the top step in order to speak eye-to-eye with the tall chap. He then asked how Ligardy was doing in school, what he liked best. Flustered, Ligard said he liked his English class and was beginning to prefer plays to novels. Ligardy wrote to our greatest living American playwright, and received the response below. For the entire story, [http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Albee%27s_Sophomore_Friend click]. March 2008 - Danny Garvin, a fellow June 1969 Stonewall Inn rioter, and I met for the first time in years. He is employed by my old alma mater, Columbia University. Although he's two decades younger, my health is better. February 2008 - Sean McManus of New York interviewed fellow freethinker Dennis Middlebrooks and me at Fedora's restaurant about freethought, non-belief, and Philosopedia. . . .Frank DiGiacomo, who in a filmed interview atop my co-op's roof had interviewed me for the front-page New York Observer story about Philosopedia, has a big story about Xbox, PlayStation, and technology in the March 2008 Vanity Fair. . . . Robert Axel, the psychologist whose role in the off-off-Broadway play was to play me as the Stonewall rioter in 1969 who had been on Omaha Beach in 1944, stars now in Knock 'Em Dead. On opening night of the murder mystery, I was called to the stage as a judge of who was the murderer - I mistakenly picked Axel, not the big-boobed dummy comic. . . . Ligardy and I are midway through reading and evaluating Macbeth. . . . When he told me he was going to write about Langston Hughes, I asked if he'd like to go with me and stand on Langston. Stand on top of him? Yes, so we went to the Schomburg Library in Harlem, where the librarians were pleased to show us the room, under the floor of which his cremains lie, and also showed us my donation of material about Langston's protege, Gilbert Price. . . . I accompanied Janet Higbie New York Times copy editor, shown in her new office the week they moved from 43rd Street, to a Haitian nightclub in Brooklyn. She is author of Eugenia: The Caribbean's Iron Lady, the Dominican who became 3rd Prime Minister after my friend Edward LeBlanc secured the island's independence in 1979. We heard Buyu Ambroise (booEEyou) and his neat Haitian combo perform - when they played a composition by Frantz Casseus, Buyu announced that I had recorded the famous composer's Haitiana LP, so I stood and waved. Few of my friends know that I went to Haiti three times, knew the nation's first psychiatrist (we lived at the International House - I helped Louis Mars, son of the Ambassador to France, with some of his Columbia U assignments), befriended Tele Haiti's manager who introduced me to many musicians, caroused with many of the "primitive" artists, and met the President's bodyguard Lima Charles-Pierre, who was assassinated (37 bullets) and whose son Ligardy I'm helping raise. January 2008 - The school rule is that you may not wear hats inside. On the last day before winter vacation, while putting on his backpack and about to pick up school items with the other hand, Ligardy took his hat from the floor and placed it atop his head in order to pick up the school items. Someone grabbed his hat, so he ran after the person, finding he was heading for the office of the head of security, Dr. O. Here was given the option of leaving the hat until after vacation or being suspended for 3 days. It was cold outside, he couldn't go home to his mother without a hat, and he asked for the hat. As he was leaving, Dr. O said "It's the holiday season - give him 5 days," apparently a joke. On the first day after vacation, no problem. But on the second he found he could not enter the school with his pass, that he had in fact been suspended for 5 days. Thereupon "the hat incident" took up several hours of my time, two visits to the school, a letter to the principal, a letter to the chancellor, telephone calls, and finally a ruling by Dr. O not to give a detention but to reduce the suspension to 3 days, adding that Ligardy was being "manipulative." My letter to each teacher to cover his absence: Please excuse Ligardy Termonfils for his absences – he was suspended for having temporarily put his hat on his head in order to put his backpack on, which I feel is different from not following the school rule about not wearing hats. Then with Ligardy's help, I listed what had occurred during "home schooling, 3 to 8 Jan 2008." TRAVEL 1 Visited Apple store - showed an employee on an iPhone Langston Hughes entry that I helped post on Philosopedia.org 2 Completed suspension not for wearing a hat but for putting it on my head. COMPUTER 1 Somehow deleted Warrens Desktop background 2 Touch-typed from 5 wpm with no accuracy to 19 wpm with 94 percent accuracy; devised a chart I drew to help me know what letters are with which finger. 3 Continued Mavis touch-typing. 4 Learned to make an é and à PSYCHOLOGY 1 Analyzed a one-armed character, from Jerry Springer (id, too high; ego, low; superego, low) 2 Learned not to question a martinet SCIENCE 1 The aquarium had a high alkaline level; reduced by putting Sodium Biphosphate. ENGLISH/VOCABULARY Derma = skin Martinet = one who abides by the rules completely Octothorpe = # Kowtow = behaving in an extremely submissive behavior Cliché examples: Have a nice day, or Bigger and better 1. Did outlining HISTORY 1 Discussed the presidential election that happened on Thursday Jan 3 - watched CNN reporters 2. Caucus = A close meeting for people on the same political party 3. Iowa is 12.4 percent black and chose Obama 4. Helped Warren write letter for Taslima Nasrin to President Hans-Gert Pottering of the European Parliament to help her in her crisis in India LUNCH Cooked neighbor Anita’s Cornish hen for 2 minutes and 40 seconds MATH lease, will, trustee, Xcel ART 1. Sketched a character in my black book 2. Worked on “Art I Have Seen,” collection of pieces 3. Worked on one of my comic pieces. PHYS ED Climbing with Warren to the 11th floor Ligardy's first visit to a nightclub started by our looking into Chez Josephine just long enough to see what the expensive restaurant looked like – but, no, Jean-Claude Baker came to greet us. Ligardy had no idea this was Josephine Baker’s adopted son and, in fact, didn’t know who she was. I thanked Jean-Claude for his recent postcard and picture (red toenails) . . . http://www.chezjosephine.com/jean-claude.html . . . introduced Ligardy (“A very difficult name, monsieur”), Jean-Claude learned that Ligardy couldn’t speak French, then found Jean-Claude was taking Ligardy on a tour of the place where diners must have wondered, ending by giving him a big photo of Josephine and showing him the upcoming $60 Valentine’s Day menu (plus drinks, tax ,and 20% gratuity). Well, Josephine had adopted him (and Jarry), so he empathized when I told him I’m helping raise Ligardy, whose father was assassinated in Haiti. (Ligardy’s mother and aunt will be incredulous when they are told.) Across the street at the West Side Café, Marvin Weitz was heard saying to two of his guests, “OK, children, let’s go in.” Recognizing him as Karen Murphy’s husband, I said “we two children” would gladly follow him, and then he remembered Ligardy and I had been to their place in Riverdale. So: Ligardy’s first visit to a nightclub. After taking a few photos before the show started, we finished eating just as the lights dimmed. Christine Pedi sang Sheldon Harnick songs (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “She Loves Me,” “Tenderloin,” “Fiorello,” “Rex”) with class and sophistication, and we diners laughed in all the right places. Then Karen Murphy performed, Ron Abel still at the piano – in fact I’ve never known a pianist who was so a part of his instrument, as if they two were welded, and he did all the arrangements for both singers. <http://www.ronabel.com/> Ron Abel, Christine Pedi, Karen Murphy at Curtain Call Karen’s songs ranged from the ultra-sophisticated (a slight movement of her eyebrow brings laughter) to the familiar to the cultured, urbane, sensuous. No two songs were sung in the same voice, and she has such a polished sense of showmanship. I’ve seen Karen in many of the comedic works in which she has performed, and she’s just consummate! Pedi then did an amusing set – diners chose from a basket names of different singers, and she sang “Twelve Days of Christmas” (swans, geese, French hens, turtle doves, partridges in a pear tree, remember?) as a dozen different singers would do the song: Liza, flayling her arms; Judy, hesitating with hands waving; Bette Davis puffing from an imaginary cigarette; Hepburn, shaking with Parkinson’s; Eartha Kitt meowing the words; etc. Ligardy didn’t really recognize most, but his favorite was the Elaine Stritch imitation – I’ve a lot of coaching to get him acquainted with performers other than David Chappelle. In an essay for his high school English teacher, Ms. Scott, he wrote that the evening was greater than New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, he was the only teenager in the room. And he was quite embarrassed when Ms. Pedi called him “gorgeous.” Well, he really is! Karen the Torch Goddess with Ligardy Meanwhile, we’ve again received a free MoMA pass for 2008 – his favorite so far is Puryear, who he didn’t know is African American. <http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/martinpuryear/flash.html> In mid-January, Ligardy and I entertained Anna Warm and Michael Roedel, on whose ranch we've stayed for two summers in New Mexico. <>2005 - Following is a run-down of what happened during 2005 and 2004: • On 10 Dec 2005, friends of Dr. Paul Edwards scattered his cremains into the Hudson River. • Warren is webmaster for a unique new website, African Philosophers' Platform. Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton has helped. • In September, as a last hurrah, he returned to his native Dallas County, Iowa - see the photos. Or read his talk. • In May, Warren attended the annual conference of the Bertrand Russell Society at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. See photos he took in Rochester of the Bertrand Russell Society Chapter and also at the Canadian conference. Be sure to click the Slide Show, which makes the viewing easy. • In May, he also attended for the 38th consecutive year the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Details about meeting Tony Kushner and others are in his blog. Last year he talked with John Guare, Jamaica Kincaid, and I. M. Pei. • NEW: Warren's and two of Taslima's books can now be purchased from chelCpress.com • Take a look Warren's five kids. • Blog stuff - wassup? • Other: Taslima Nasrin's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005; the late Edward O. LeBlanc, Premier of Dominica; Arthur Miller's Memorial; Tsunami photos from Sri Lanka; the final days of philosopher Paul Edwards; the Sir Arthur C. Clarke plaque; recent writings, including "What is Ground Zero Like Today? You are looking above at a Greenwich Village roué and sybarite, an avid theatregoer seen above backstage on 25 Nov 2003 with one of his former recording studio clients who now is on TV in "West Wing" and once was the star of "NYPD Blue" - Jimmy Smits is shown when he was the star on Broadway in "Anna in the Tropics." Jimmy introduced his Surinamese father the day the photo was taken. . . . On 13 Feb 2005, Cristo wrapped Manhattan's Central Park up - Warren is the guy with a beret. On the left is the homepage's cybergenius, Peter Ross. In the center is 12-year-old student Ligardy Termonfils, whose father Warren met in Haiti three decades ago. Upon learning the father was assassinated with 37 bullets by Aristide's goons in Haiti last year, Warren has stepped in to help look after and tutor the Brooklyn 8th grader. Warren attended the 2-day inaugural of the Appignani Center for Bioethics at 777 United Nations Plaza on 23 April 2005. The conference was arranged by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and funded by Mr. Louis Appignani (2nd row). Attendees were from Bangladesh (1st row), Norway (1st row), Nigeria (Ololade Olakanmi, 2nd row), Venezuela, England, Canada, The Netherlands, and elsewhere. He is shown quoting from one of his books. Read his conference notes. December - Paul Edwards, one of the best-known American philosophers and a friend for five decades as well as a professor (whose class at New School I audited under a pseudonym for we hadn't seen each other for decades), died a year ago. On December 10th, several of his other friends and I took his cremains and, as per his wishes, scattered the ashes into the Hudson River at 68th Street. Ligardy accompanied me, taking photos that will accompany an article I'll write for a philosophic newsletter. Then the 13-year-old I'm tutoring worked up a paper, "The Funniest Funeral I've Ever Attended," to give his 8th grade teacheres who, I'm sure, will be impressed one way or another - as he exited after taking the photos, he saw boys sliding in the snow down a long slope; their father kindly let him tumble and slide four times down the hill while I shot more photos. . . .John Waters, known to most as the master of bad taste, asked for and received my permission to use my Cruising the Deuce as a prop in a movie he currently is shooting. . . . Taslima is in India, but we keep in touch regularly. . . . Tim Madigan visited during the Xmyth vacation, so I ran Camp Smith with camper Ligardy in a sleeping bag and Tim on the sofa. Peter Stone and wife Rachel visited, Peter helping tutor Ligardy in 8th grade math. . . . Tim, Peter, Rachel, and I attended one session at the American Philosophy Association. November - On Veterans' Day on the Mall in the nation's capital, I marched with Atheists in Foxholes and spoke of my 1944 experiences on Omaha Beach. Citing Vanity Fair that 70,000,000 evangelicals now attend 200,000 churches and many get their news from their pastor, not newspapers and books, I said that if we were to remain a democracy, not become a theocracy, our next battle will not be Omaha Beach . . . but Omaha itself. . . .My biographical entry is now listed by Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia at <http://wikipedia.org>. . . . October - I finished editing Taslima Nasrin's twenty-somethingth book, Phera (Homecoming) - on October 7th when she was not chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005, I e-mailed that just to have been nominated by Amnesty France was sufficient award. . . . I have submitted Cruising the Deuce for a possible non-fiction Randy Shilts Award . . . . The Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana has Cruising the Deuce. . . .I've written a possible Wikipedia listing. . . . On my 84th birthday, I made a bet with my publisher, Lyle Stuart, that I'd come to his memorial service rather than vice versa - a gambler, he once won $245,000 playing baccarat in Atlantic City, so we'll see who's the loser this time. . . . My cyberbuddy Peter Ross treated me to a birthday dinner (on the 27th) at my (and the late Charles Kuralt's) favorite restaurant, Beatrice Inn, two days before the venerable place closed - I'll miss Alberto, who had been a waiter there for decades. At the next table, we met New Yorker cartoonist John Kane, another macaddict. . . .I was arrested. Simon, his wife Patricia, 9-year-old Marie, 13-year old Ligardy, and I were driven up to the covered bridge just before Kent, Connecticut, where we saw the beautiful fall foliage. . . . I took Ligardy to see the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, and although he preferred seeing Batman, Superman, and musical names I did not recognize, my favorite was seeing the Pope French-kissing one of his monsignors. The Deli Man carried dead body parts and took orders for sandwiches. A man with a huge penis shot jism into the audience. Girls with pasties abounded, several Bushes, but this year no O.J. Simpsons. September - I made two podcasts, so now I definitely feel a part of the new century - one is about Taslima Nasrin's two books for sale at chelCpress, and one is about my interview with William James - a shady character from my past - an hour-long podcast which will be available to reviewers of my Cruising the Deuce. These will be available to anyone having an iPod. . . . My British column outs my having been with James Dean at Julius's bar back in the 1950s. . . . Ligardy entered 8th grade, is now a teenager (13), and is a half-inch taller than I am - teaching vocabulary has certainly changed - now I've shown how to put the cursor on the word, do a right click, click look up, and click definition. . . .I returned to Waukee, Iowa, for a ceremony at my Grandfather Spencer Smith's Old Hotel, the oldest structure in this Des Moines suburb's town - Peter Ross, my cybergeek, accompanied me, and I drove him 400 miles around my old stomping grounds while he took 400 digital photos that I will transmit to local libraries. . . . My advisory committee and I cancelled the African online school we were advising - a junior student of chemistry headed a group that did not take our recommendations. As a result, I formed the African Philosophers' Platform, helped in part by encouragement from Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. August - After much planning, as its Chancellor (a term given me by students at Ibadan University in Nigeria), I've founded African Online School of Philosophy. One of the first to agree to be an advisor, incredibly, is famed philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. . . . Surprisingly receiving a year's, not a half-year's, visa from India to go to Kolkata, Taslima Nasrin celebrated by taking an Indian intellectual, her sister's husband, her sister, and daughter Srot with me to Swing 46, a jazz club on Restaurant Row. . . . Finding that Willy James is still alive, I interviewed him about our subcultural experiences back in the old days. I learned that he'd been arrested near the White House in Washington when only 12, had been busted several times, sold drugs even in prison, did a record 23 times of something he loves to do, and now I'll have a tape that verifies events I described in my Cruising the Deuce. . . .Dr. David White, my buddy the philosophy prof, dutifully took "The Humanist" from Rochester to Albany, where the statue greets people arriving at the Institute of Humanist Studies there. . . . I took 12-year-old Ligardy Termonfils to Rhinebeck to see the airshow (to which years ago I'd taken Lee Harley), but weather conditions didn't allow us to go up for a spin in one of the two-winged single-propeller World War I planes. We did go to Commodore Vanderbilt's place and to President FDR's gravesite at nearby Hyde Park. For his 13th birthday, I got him a printer-scanner that works with his G-4 Mac. Either I'm getting shorter, or he's getting taller than me. July - A Dallas County, Iowa, reporter asked to interview me by telephone, and the story will be published in my hometown's county newspaper in August. . . .Eric Walther, a retired Long Island University philosophy prof, spoke to our Bertrand Russell Chapter at the nearby Jane Street Tavern - co-owner Horton Foote Jr. greeted us, and Taslima Nasrin joined in. . . .When Tim Madigan visited, he took me to the English Speaking Union, an organization for which he has become Rochester's lead man. We had another memorable brunch with Sylvia Kahan, and Tim bought from Peter Ross the Mac laptop that should give him lots of fun. . . .Phyllis Ross, who heads a very large black psychiatrists' group, invited me to see the Harlem Dance Theater perform and Peter accompanied me. Afterwards we had good discussions with many of the dancers, finding most are not from this city. . . . June - The FBI, replying to my request under the Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts, has informed me it does not have a file on me. I had thought that, maybe because I was book review editor of The Humanist at the time fellow secular humanist Corliss Lamont was cited for contempt by Congress, I might have a file, I don't. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has told me he has no file, either, and he's furious! . . . . I'm one of many who has come up against theft of identity - Citibank, PayPal, and I have cleared my record, for I made no purchases in the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, and France. Furthermore, I didn't buy a Western Union money order in Chicago. I enjoyed reporting the grand larceny to the local 10th Precinct . . . . May - John Waters, the filmmaker with the pencil-thin moustache on his upper lip, wrote to say that at the May 5-9 Maryland Film Festival, "I did hold up your Cruising the Deuce and mentioned it when I was introducing the French film, 'Porn Theatre'." How Divine, and I do refer to the star he found in 1972, who devoured a refrigerator in his first film, Pink Flamingoes! . . . . I have created webpages for New York City's and the island of Dominica's Bertrand Russell groups, and they are beginning to get many hits. Andrea Cousins, another of my unforgettable New Canaan, Connecticut, students decades ago, logged onto my webpage and downloaded my "Hymn of the Pantheist." The daughter of one of my inspirations, Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins who contributed as I did to the Westport Unitarian Society, she emailed that when she was in 4th grade she had a conversation with her dad: Me: "Daddy, what should I say when the other kids ask me what religion I am?" NC: "Tell them you are a Pantheist." I still laugh when I think how her dad let me bring some students to their house, and we Dewey-decimalized all the books downstairs in their large house. He then couldn't find anything, he told me! On several of my visits there to tutor Hiroshima Maiden Shigeko Niimoto, Norman and I played duets, he on the organ and me on the piano. We developed a great rapport, I was teacher for all four of his daughters, and at his memorial held in the New York City Society for Ethical Culture I shared laughs with Shigeko, Andrea, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who gave me his Moscow mailing address to be forwarded to a mutual friend in Sri Lanka, Royston Ellis). I JetBlued to Rochester on the 12th and met with the Bertrand Russell Society chapter, then journeyed to McMaster U in Canada with David Henehen, Phil Ebersole, and Tim Madigan to the annual meeting of the Society. I left my two new books with the McMaster librarian and we had our photos taken next to Berty's desk and books. The New York Public Library has my autographed Cruising in its Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the 42nd Street Library has a copy, as does the Jefferson Market Library here in the Village and the Gay Center Library on 13th Street. . . . For the 38th successive year, I attended the annual ceremony of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Guare's awarding the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres to Joan Didion was a high point. Roger Wilkins, nephew of Roy Wilkins, talked about the language of liberty from a black's viewpoint. Inducted into the Academy were architect Maya Lin, landscape architect Laurie Olin, architect James Stewart Polshek, artist Cindy Sherman, sculptor Kiki Smith, poet Rosanna Warren, and playwright Tony Kushner (who gave me his address when I simply asked if he had a doorman, and next day I took him a copy of Deuce). VIPs getting awards were Shigeru Ban, Charles Mee, Shirley Hazzard, Jane Freilicher, Joan Didion, and James Levine. Best-dressed: Ned Rorem, but I didn't get to ask him about receiving Deuce. Gossip From Across the Pond has arrived. Neighbor and Cabaret star John Benjamin Hickey received it as well as Deuce. . . . I sent consignment copies to friends I grew up with in Iowa; fought with during WW II; taught at Columbia U, Bentley School, or New Canaan High; was employer for at the recording studio; or are friends here in Greenwich Village. The memorial for Arthur Miller on 9 May 05 at the Majestic Theatre on 44th Street was memorable indeed. As I hurried to get to the end of a long line waiting to enter, Edward Albee passed me on the street. "Mr. Albee," I said twice to get his attention, "I'm the one who just sent you my book, Cruising the Deuce, this week." "I don't think I got it," he replied, asking what it's about. "Cruising on 42nd Street back in the 1940s and 1950s. I mention you," I explained hurriedly. He smiled. "Oh, but you're not one of the cast," I added, and he laughed, then turned the corner maybe to flee from the madding crowd and prepare for speaking at the memorial. It was a friendly scene, and I was awed by his somewhat straight, not curved, front teeth. Poor Albee, for his companion died of bladder cancer this month: Jonathan Thomas, a Canadian who had studied mathematics and art history at McMaster and whom I once met when he was waiting for Albee to speak to gays at the 13th Street Center. The Majestic was filled to capacity. The speakers and performers were superb, and I found fault only with one programming note. Film producer Robert Miller, Arthur's son with Mary Slattery, received cheers when he read from the letter his dad had sent to the House Un-American Activities Committee, explaining why a creative artist is known by his work and actions, not by responding to a public official who was asking him to reveal his or his friends' political views and affiliations. Film director Rebecca Miller, Arthur's daughter with Inge Morath, read one of her dad's moving poems. Rebecca's husband, London-born actor-filmographer Daniel Day-Lewis, intoned with dignity part of a Miller reminiscence, "Echoes Down the Corridor." Joan Copeland, Arthur's sister, enacted a scene from her brother's The American Clock, ending the scene while sitting on the grand piano's stool and dramatically showing her character's frustration - she loudly took the piano's keyboard cover and slammed it down. It was in her Manhattan apartment that her brother had received hospice care before being taken to Roxbury, Connecticut, where at the age of 89 in February he died from a heart condition and cancer. Former Senator George McGovern was stately, speaking with emotion of his friendship with Miller and his love for Death of a Salesman. Like Miller, he said, he had known what it is to be depressed - imagine how it felt, he said to the audience's laughter, when in an election for President he had lost 49 of the 50 states! Also, a brief letter of consolation was read from Bill Clinton. Estelle Parsons read the speech Linda Loman gave at her stage husband's funeral in Death of a Salesman. Pianist/composer Bill BolcomMichael Sommese in touching aria from the composer's opera, A View from the Bridge. Tony Kushner read a long work praising Miller, reading so fast that extreme concentration was needed to comprehend what he uttered so profoundly. Miller, the one who had inspired him to become a playwright, once sat in front of him at a play and he had had to repress his desire to reach forward and touch the head that had come up with the idea that one of our main purposes in life is to determine what relevancy we each have to the survival of the race. Edward Albee was eloquent in his blunt Quaker- and humanities-like way, saying he was outraged by New Criterion's "vile and sniggering unsigned editorial" to the effect conservatives should be happy now that Miller is dead. Many are the playwrights, he said to loud applause, who matter, and some who do not because they don't teach us anything and "do not render ourselves coherent." Arthur, he closed, "was a writer who mattered a lot!" Bill Coffin, pastor emeritus of Riverside Church, often called the Rockefeller Baptist Church on the Hudson, was the one objectionable speaker, I felt. Yes, he had been Arthur's friend for years. But although he said Arthur was an atheist, he knew God had a special place for him up in Heaven. Talk about a cavalier and out-of-place plug for the theists' vested interests! Fortunately, this "religious" intrusion was followed by an inspiring film tribute, pictures of Miller in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Connecticut he loved – the final shot was of Charlie Rose's asking how he hoped to be remembered at a memorial, and Arthur responded laconically, "As a writer!" Of interest is that no mention whatsoever was made of Miller's son, Daniel, who suffered from Down Syndrome, or of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe. <> Taslima's and my letter to India's president has not resulted in her receiving Indian citizenship. She will receive another honorary doctorate on the 16th, and we worked on her speech for the American University of Paris. On the 31st she meets with UNICEF officials and French ministers about girls' education globally, and we came up with a good draft of a speech. April - Deuce has arrived, and the first copy was sent to the person who wrote the foreword, Dr. Vern Bullough, past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. Danny Garvin, a fellow Stonewaller, was the first to praise the book's accuracy, and Green Beret manager Vic Catala detected that a person I did not name was in fact Jim Boothe, who wrote "Jingle Bell Rock". . . .Others who received the book: Ned Rorem and John Waters. I am a participant now in a study by the Kinsey Institute. . . . Met many interesting bioethicists at a UN NGO conference. Canada's oncologist who interviewed me last year at the UN for the British Columbia Humanist Association, Dr. Robert Buckman, bought drinks for me and a new friend, Ololade Olakanmi, a Nigerian-born junior who is pursuing a B.A. in biology and philosophy at Grinnell College in Iowa. Olo spoke about pig-to-human transplantation. Buckman described in detail Joan of Arc's type of epilepsy, one that neuroscience now understands is the product of one particular area of the brain (the right temporal lobe), and he illustrated how if her problem had been with the left temporarl lobe, she would not have heard God tell her to kill the non-Christians. It was good again seeing Babu Gogineni, who heads the International Humanist and Ethical Union; Larry Jones and Matt Cherry of the Institute for Humanist Studies in Albany; and meeting Louis Appignani, who founded the UN Center for Bioethics. March - From New Delhi, I have received a copy of Taslima Nasrin's All About Women (Rupa & Co., 2005), a collection of poetry that I edited, along with her 20-somethingth book, Love Poems of Taslima Nasreen. . . . I finished drafts of Cruising the Deuce and also of Gossip From Across the Pond, my books #3 and #4, and sent them off to the publisher, chelCpress. . . . My friend Royston Ellis is off to Singapore to lecture on the QE2. His article about the Seychelles makes me want to join him. . . .Kentucky Attorney Edwin F. Kagin's Baubles of Blasphemy (Freethought Press, 2005) includes my blurb for his book that it is "the ideal antidote against theistic fissiparousness." . . . New York's Daily News (25 Mar 05) carried my letter about Columbia U Professor Joseph Massad, accuse of being anti-Semitic: "If Columbia were to fire anyone who espoused unpopular views about religion, it would be a sure sign that theocracy has replaced democracy." . . . John King, who was in my English class at New Canaan High but who later built his own recording studio and passed up the chance to buy mine (as did Sean "P. Diddy" Combs), is in the news. Rapper Foxy Brown claims she doesn't owe his Chung King Studio (an inside joke, for his recording studio is near Chinatown). John, if quoted correctly, is right when he says clients are not allowed to remove master tapes unless they're completely paid for.In preparation for book #5, about my recording studio, I've gotten in touch with all my former employees. One, William Wittman, is a key person in Cyndi Laupur's group: Cyndi and William February - I accompanied 12-year-old Ligardy Termonfils and his mother to Parent-Teachers' Night at his Brooklyn school. . . . I've busily been tutoring him, commencing with handwriting. We see Broadway works, go to historical sites, and telephone at night. January - Doug Fishbone, who lives across the hall from me, has shaken up the British art scene. First, he created a self-portrait out of kebab meat, then displayed a (real) caged Arab,then installed a pile of 30,000 bananas in Trafalgar Square (much as he once had done in Peru, Costa Rica, Poland, and Brooklyn). I publicize him here in Greenwich Village - a British critic in Arena has written, “While his sculptural works have the biting wit of a brilliant one-liner, his videos, such as the sublimely funny The Ugly American are what you’d get it you gave Woody Allen a bag of chronic and a better therapist.” 2004 December - In the 2005 Who’s Who in the World I’m listed in the section called Arts: Literary. . . .London's New Humanist had me submit an article about where I stand concerning Bush's re-election - I have written that I am completely against the present administration and lament the fact that much of the liberal and progressive legislation of the recent past now risks being overturned, that in light of the conservative Supreme Court it may take two to four decades to get our republic back to its Enlightenment-inspired foundations. . . . The Humanist Heritage Program has invited me to describe my experiences over a six decade period of the institutional history of the American Humanist Association - my critique is filled with barbs - omnium hellium may brokium loosum when it is published. . . . I raised hell because The New York Times took so long to publish an obituary for philosopher Paul Edwards, the eminent compiler of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy who kindly wrote this blurb for my book: “Religious fundamentalists will hate it.” Paul, who wrote the intro for Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, had just finished The Confusions of Heidegger and philosopy professor Tim Madigan and I had been pressuring him to finish his God and the Philosophers. . . . A Hunter College student (Diane, a Sierra Leone gal married to a Columbia U prof of classical Greek) did a photographed interview with me about my memories of Omaha Beach. . . . John Wynne, a 14-year-old in North Carolina, finding on the web that I had known his great-grandfather, did a two-hour telephoned interview with me. He correctly had his ancestors’ names, but I was able to add that his Great-grandfather René Picard had rosy cheeks, was a commandant in the French Foreign Legion, and headed the Reims Cathedral’s St. Vincent de Paul, taking me to meet the Archbishop after I arranged for a ton of food and clothing to be sent from Iowa farmers to French widows. John was especially amused to hear that I had taken his grandmother to see Frankenstein and had introduced her to the U of Virginia major she eventually married. He was particularly elated that I put his photo up onto the web: <http://wasm.us/ws_kids.html>. . . . At a New Year’s party in my building, Harley Davidson guys warned against having the Alice B. Toklas brownies along with my champagne - on the roof at midnight, over a dozen of us watched fireworks in distant New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Queens. November - On UNESCO’s International Philosophy Day, November 18th, Taslima Nasrin spoke at the University of Lille in northern France and I spoke (humorously about teratology) in Rochester, New York, to faculty and students of five universities and colleges. Taking my statue, Anita Weschler’s The Humanist, I taught two ethics classes and a religion class at St. John Fisher College - photos were immediately put up onto the web, and no students went to sleep. . . . The Humanist, my statue created by Anita Weschler, joins Dr. Tim Madigan's ethics class at St. John Fisher's U in Rochester, New York October - Months ago when someone from the Italian government contacted me about the possibility they might nominate Taslima Nasrin for a UNESCO award, I responded in the affirmative because she receives many such e-mails. On October 12th, Taslima (for whom I’m something like an agent, secretary, and publicity director combined) received word that a committee headed by Andrés Pastrana Arango, former President of Colombia, and endorsed by UNESCO Director-General Koïcho Matsuura, had awarded her the Laureate of the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence. “Wow,” she phoned from Paris, finding it includes $100,000 cash. We then went on to the next projects: on International Philosophy Day November 18th, I will be speaking in Rochester (a humorous talk about teratology) and she will be addressing philosophers at the University of Lille in northern France. . . . September - In 1976 when a Presidential Guard pointed his rifle at me, explaining that I couldn’t stand in front of Baby Doc Duvalier’s Presidential Palace in Haiti, I got into a conversation with him and another guard, explaining that my studio had recorded Franz Casseus’s Haitiana with its famous “Mecie bon dieu.” Lima, the bodyguard, brought four other guards to my hotel that evening, I threw a party, and as captain of Haiti’s volleyball team he always stopped to see me when the team passed through New York on its way to European events. Refusing to work for the Aristide government, who knew he was a munitions expert, he was gunned down by ex-priest Aristide’s goons. His body contained 38 bullets. When his brother gave me the news and said that my friend Lima had a wife (separated) and 12-year-old son, Ligardy, in Brooklyn, I got in touch. I since have given the 7th grader a Dell computer on his birthday, took him to the Museum of Natural Science, and tutor him nightly by telephone. A high point was returning a T-shirt his dad once gave me. . . . Françoise Sagan’s obituary in The Times cited Barnard College’s Professor of French Serge Gavronsky, my Bentley student who fled Hitler in 1941 and who has kept in touch since 1949. . . .I dedicated the Sir Arthur C. Clarke plaque at the Hotel Chelsea, receiving plaudits from the manager, Arthur’s agent, Arthur’s biographer, and Arthur himself. I arranged and paid for the entire plaque and ceremony in what will be but a literary footnote. . . . Mensa sent me acknowledgement that I’ve been a continuous member since 1964. . . . August - I have now taught 8th graders in Montevedeo, Uruguay, for a total of three weeks. Their teacher (Monica Methol, my ex-student and a daughter of NCHS Spanish teacher Reyna Piola) assembled them in her school’s language lab, and we communicated by computer using X-Chat Aqua. After class, they play hookey by e-mailing me their pictures and other greetings - I get asked many questions about Britney Spears, Shrek, and Pokémon. . . .Two publishers are considering my book #3, and leading sexologist Vern Bullough has written its foreword. Book #4 will be autobiographical and is about the Variety Recording Studio I founded in 1961 - I’ll relate the important part independent studios played in the development of the music industry then. Book #5 will be in the form of a disc and contain photos of the original correspondence from Russell, Santayana, Schweitzer, Steinbeck, etc., received in my writing Book #1. July - I got Simon out of jail and took him, his wife, and 8-year-old daughter on a Norwegian cruiseliner to Bermuda for a week. Last year I took them to his native island of Dominica, where he hardly relaxed because he drove 800 miles around the small island, showing his daughter where he’d lived, gone to school, hung out, etc. A Stamford cop who works overtime in the jail (and clocked 400 hours total one month), my ex-student really got to relax this time. His wife, however, got seasick the first day (we had 15 foot swells, noted by The Royal Gazette in a front-page story when we arrived. It was my first cruise - it’s much better for couples than for singles. June - I attended at Plymouth State College, Plymouth, New Hampshire the 31st annual meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society, held this year in the Robert Frost House (where Frost taught in a normal school in the 1910s, something I’d not known about) . I drove the 666-mile round trip from Manhattan, taking with me Dr. Peter Stone (political theorist at Stanford), Dr. David Goldman (psychiatrist), and Dr. Taslima Nasrin, whom I introduced with the announcement that Amnesty France has nominated her and a group of feminists for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005. The oldest continually elected board member of the Russell Society, I favored our call “for an immediate withdrawl under UN auspices of U.S. forces from Iraq and the creation, under UN auspices, of a secular democratic state in Iraq by the Iraqi people themselves.” The vote for was nearly unanimous. Present were members from as far away as California and also from Italy, Portugal, England, and Canada. I ride my bicycle often with Peter Ross, my 39-year-old computer specialist. We have brunch and evening dinner at least once a week. Alone or with Peter, I cover from 50 to 200 blocks at a time.

Where's the food?	There's the food!	At The Park, a snitzy nightclub.


At Eleanor Roosevelt's Statue, 72nd and Riverside Drive	Peter at 72nd and Riverside Drive	Peter at The Dakota, where John Lennon was Murdered


Warren at The Dakota	Collared at Bank Rock Bridge in Central Park	Willow Tree, Central Park November 2004


Ligardy, my 12-year-old Brooklyn student, and Peter my actor-computer wiz.	Ralph Nader at Cooper Union - Podium was used by Abe Lincoln	Larry Kramer at Cooper Union November 2004