It may sound like the setup for an old joke: It’s dinner time and three gentile kids; one Latino, one black and one white, are waiting impatiently for a slow Shabbos elevator to arrive. A Shabbos elevator stops automatically at every floor, relieving Orthodox patrons from having to press buttons, which would be forbidden on the Sabbath (I think it would be a good name for a band; “The Shabbos Elevators”). I recall my Polish grandmother being appalled that I was attempting to work on homework assignments or use scissors on a Saturday. “Shanda!” she called out, as I got on my bicycle. Having escaped pogroms, she came over from Poland, stubbornly refusing to learn English, and so we remained locked in a tense, uncommunicative stalemate.

The punch line from the elevator story comes with a real punch: turns out the kids are hungry athletes from a boxing camp held every summer at Kutshers Country Club, the last of the grand Jewish Catskills resorts that’s still trying desperately to be grand, though dilapidated. It’s still pretty Jewish—talk to any customer or take a look at the dining room’s menu. Rather than being an anomaly, though, the fighters are both upholding a tradition of boxing in the Catskills and helping a remnant to survive.

What I didn’t know when I chose to attend the August 2010 session of Gleason’s Fantasy Boxing Camp was that in just two years Kutshers Hotel would be demolished, purchased by a wealthy entrepreneur with hopes of creating a “wellness center.” And soon the Catskills would be bereft of all the big hotels and resorts, where many people of my parents’ generation would go for vacation and entertainment.

The multicultural gang that participates in Gleason’s Gym Fantasy Boxing Camp gets used to bumping into unfamiliar folkways, whether it’s a female Irish boxer from Boston whispering “what’s kasha??” at mealtime, or boxers in an exhibition round drawing a group of black-hatted Orthodox spectators.

Gleason’s eighth annual camp wrapped at the end of August, and founder Bruce Silverglade, president of the famous Brooklyn gym, was pleased with eight successful years at Kutshers and looking forward to more (this turned out to be the last Fantasy Camp held there-the gym found a more contemporary location for the annual event – I believe it’s Gleason’s gym itself, and that’s a classic place!). “It’s a way to get out of the city and out of the hustle and bustle,” said Bruce. “When professional fighters trained at Jewish Catskills resorts in the last century,” he added, they would go to Kutshers to chop wood and avoid the distractions of women. They would go there to be secluded and work real hard.”

Champs like Barney Ross, Muhammad Ali, Leon Spinks, Archie Moore and Floyd Patterson all set up training camps at Catskills hotels. Because of that, and because of Jews’ own strong history with boxing ( between 1910 and 1940, for example, 27 National Boxing Association titles went to Jewish fighters). It seemed entirely natural to Silverglade to bring an assortment of would-be boxers to Kutshers. That summer’s four-day camp, costing $1,800, included males and females aged 9 to 74, from a variety of skill levels, ethnic backgrounds and locales around the United States. They came to train and to spar with top contenders and champions, and to engage in rigorous training drills, boxing discussions, sparring and ring craft. The camp culminated on a Saturday night with a sparring show that was open to the public. As a journalist and full-on “poseur,” I wouldn’t be in the show, but I did go through some of the training, ate and played pool with the boxers, and got a chance to read to the crowd from my then newly released book. The over-all experience was surreal; most people were friendly and welcoming, but in my training session a sullen “Hector” bullied me and made me cry (even though he knew I was a beginner). I left the session early, and got lost trying to find my “hotel” room and its distinct smell of mold, where I cried, got a migraine, and called my coach from back home in whose class, “Aging Bulls,” I was fully accepted with the other midlife out-of-shape learners.

While Silverglade attempted to re-create the experience of a sports training camp of a bygone era, Yossi Zablocki, the then manager of Kutshers, was trying to save a hotel in desperate need of rehabilitation. Both men contributed for a time to keeping a piece of Catskills history alive, even as other famed Jewish resorts like Grossingers and the Nevele closed.

As the boxers threw punches during our four days there, life proceeded as usual for Kutsher’s other patrons. Retired folks are the meat and potatoes of the place, said Zablocki, a legal aid lawyer from New Jersey who seized the opportunity to invest in the resort when it needed help. In the upper lobby, Jackie Horner led a ballroom dance class for five older ladies, one of many hotel activities, which include Big Bucks Bingo, Justine’s Makeover Face Lift Show (with door prizes), and Hassidic stories told by a rabbi. The movie Dirty Dancing is based on real life, Horner said.

“It’s my true story. There really was a Baby, like in the film, and she was my student,” Horner said as she crossed her slender legs.

Remembering her heyday, Horner said “We danced all day and all night; we were young. There was a pulse; you’d feel it the minute you hit the Catskills. I even taught the boxers to dance.”

Kutshers Country Club had its own impressive history with sports in general and boxing in particular. The century-old resort sprawled across a 1,400-acre campus, with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, an 18-hole championship golf course, tennis courts, and bocce ball and shuffleboard courts. Yet I felt a pervasive melancholy as I wandered the carpeted halls. Outside, a guest named Irwin sat with a few cronies by the lake complaining about the service. No doubt, the place needed some tender loving care. Irwin, who is in his 80s, said he still comes to Kutshers every year. He performed as a comedian for 19 years at the Raleigh, another big hotel. “Wednesday night, I’d open the talent show, white straw hat, cane,” he said. He began to sing: “Another opening, another show…” Then he told an off-color joke, his eyes twinkling under his jaunty cap.

Across the lake, the Saturday night sparring exhibition was about to begin. There were 12 bouts, three rounds each, and everyone would be getting a trophy. There was an “Over 70” pairing. During one of the fights, a small group of Orthodox Jews wandered in and were quietly watching as their little girls, in long frilly dresses, sidled up to the ropes, transfixed. Another tiny Jewish toddler stood on a chair. “Get him! Get him!” she shrieked, her curls bouncing. Her father, who was wearing a yarmulke, pulled her back into her stroller.

There were now three distinct types of headgear in the room: yarmulkes, black hats, and boxing helmets.

Later that night and into the early morning, the campers celebrated in the Deep End Lounge, a disco and bar with windows that looked out onto the indoor pool. In its heyday this was probably quite the hip place to dance. On the stage was the shrine Bruce Silverglade had set up to honor Muhammad Ali and Orthodox young boxer Yuri Foreman. While boxing trainer Martin Gonzalez was cutting loose on the dance floor with some salsa moves, several guests wearing yarmulkes wandered in. They looked confused. “Is this the show?? “ No, they wanted the Stardust Room, down the hall, to hear singers Oneg Shemesh and Chaim Kiss, and maybe a little comedy. The Stardust Room was once host to Jerry Lewis, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, and also to raucous crowds that roared with laughter and applause.

The next day, Silverglade and his crew began to dismantle the boxing rings and pack up the gloves. It was time to ‘break camp.’ The group was slow to leave, as hugs and business cards were exchanged . “Boxing people are family,” said Bronx-raised boxer Al Roth, who I ate matzoh ball soup with in the dining room, as another generation of boxers and boxing Jews left the Catskills in the summertime. Turned out we wouldn’t be coming back, so it was a late-summer homage for Al, many other attendees, and a very, very unusual experience for me.

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Binnie Klein is the author of Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind (SUNY Press, 2010). She is the host of a twice monthly music and spoken word radio show, A Miniature World on WPKN.org Her show is also an Apple Podcast

“I’m off to the reading room,” John says, grabbing a Ring magazine and heading into the bathroom.

I take a healthy swig of water, crush the bottle and throw it in the garbage. I’m thinking about whether I should go to the mall and continue my search for the T-shirt that will make me look smaller, the work-out pants that will elongate my legs. I guess I don’t hear the door of the gym open and don’t realize I am slipping into another fantasy.

“Well! This is vexing! A female combatant?!”

I turn towards the voice – can’t imagine how he appeared so quickly - but swiftness was one of British prize-fighting champ Daniel Mendoza’s greatest attributes. He’s bare-chested, with serious biceps, and he’s wearing very worn but clean pants that taper just below the knee. They’re made of some flannel or cotton, very thick, and there are two buttons at the waist. Across his crotch is a triangle with a button on either side. It’s almost like an inverted diaper. Tall socks meet the bottom of the pants, or knickers -- what to call them? And pointy leather shoes with bows adorn his feet.

“Can I be of aid?” he continues. “Are you being threatened by that rogue?”

“No, thanks. He’s actually my coach,” I say, taking a moment to look at his, well, enormous nose. He’s quite swarthy, too, and his sideburns are so far into his cheeks it’s like they are reaching for that nose. All of his thick burly hair is combed forward from a point at the back of his head. His lips are full, and there’s a bit of sadness in his eyes.

“Well, then I have many questions! I think I have a right to call myself the father of the science of boxing. Prizefighting had lain dormant for years, until myself and Mr. Humphries revived it through our three contests for supremacy. The science of pugilism has been patronized ever since. You’ve heard the poem: ‘Is this the Jew of whom my fancy cherished so beautiful a waking dream?’ That was me!”

I played along and nodded.

“Tis I! And while I am in your presence, we’d best make good use. I’m off to Ireland to lecture on the pugilistic science. I don’t condone your femininity in this pursuit, but I can offer my considerable expertise.”

Boxing tips from Daniel Mendoza! I rewrap my hands as fast as I can.

“But do tell me miss, what are those leather balloons?”

“Oh my god, that’s right – you all didn’t have boxing gloves until 1860! You just did it with your fists!” I say.

“Bare-knuckle, most certainly!” Mendoza assumes the pose I’d only seen in silent movies and antique photographs and sketches – the arms and fists outstretched as if a horse has risen on its hind legs and is ready to prance forward. He makes tight little circles with his fists.

“So what did they call you?” I ask.

“The Star of Israel, sometimes the Light of the East – this was after my first battle with Mr. Humphries. I was paid five guineas, having won of course, and then they gave me the appellation. Miss, do not think me impertinent, but could you be Jewish as well?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, now I understand. You have no man and you are threatened by the slurs – we are both in the battle against injustice and prejudice.” Mendoza picks up one of the boxing gloves and throws it into the air, as if to feel its weight.

“Well, I don’t think I have actually experienced the same . . .” I pick up the other glove, wondering whether he might actually put them on.

“. . . I would never let my wife fight, in fact I promised her I would quit it, but there were times, Miss, so hard to resist . . . I was apprenticed to a tea-maker, and a porter came to the house with a delivery. I offered him a tip, and the porter demanded more, then he made some anti-Semitic remarks about the family I worked for. So I took him out into the street. A ring being consequently formed in the street, we immediately set to, and after a severe contest of about three quarters of an hour my opponent yielded. My second was the esteemed Mr. Richard Humphries. More of him later. Well, the neighborhood was ablaze with the news of this battle and next thing I knew I was matched to another man, and of course I won. But my employer wasn’t too pleased by Mendoza’s activities, and fired him. So I was relieved of my duties quite often, Miss. It was hard to make a proper living. But that’s over now! I can obtain fifty lbs. for each theater appearance in my demonstrations.”

“We shan’t use the leather balloons for now, Miss. Come step to me here, and let’s take a look, shall we?”

I stand next to him. Boxing’s first Jewish superstar is not super-tall. He’s around 5’7”, and probably weighs around 160 lbs. We’re both middleweights; that’s another thing we’ve got in common. I think of Hank Greenberg’s story of towering over most Jewish men, who were 5’3”, 5’4”, as he entered, all 6’7” of him, the synagogue on Yom Kippur to pray instead of playing professional baseball. The worshippers stood, uncharacteristically, and applauded this giant for just walking through the door.

“Miss, a boxer needs to be in a state of equilibrium so that you can move to the left or the right with ease, placing yourself in a diagonal line, so as to place the pit of the stomach out of your adversary’s reach; both knees must be bent, the left leg advanced, and the arms directly before your throat or chin. I see that you are short armed, so your superiority over your antagonist will consist in close fighting; you must therefore endeavour to get within the compass of his arms, and aim short straight blows, which will reach him before he can strike at you, and if he does strike, his fists will go over your shoulder.”

“Dan,” I say, “this is just what John is teaching me! I’ll never be a real puncher, because I’m not tall, I can’t do long powerful hits, but I can try to get in close, stay close and keep boxing, inside.”

“Well, if your adversary is ignorant of boxing – that’s what we’ll be hoping for. Then he – or she, I suppose -- will be awkward and slovenly, and you can take your advantage. In 1780 I dispatched Harry the Coalheaver in forty rounds.”

I start throwing punches at my image in the mirror, shadowboxing with all my might. “Forty rounds – Dan, we don’t go that long these days.”

“What are you inferring? Cowardice?”

“No! No, I mean we have rules. A three-minute round, for example . . .”

“Ah, cowardice, as I thought. We fought until one man lay down, and that took as long as it took. A real battle. Now look sharp now. Parry this riposte by catching my wrist with your right fists, and strike a back-handed blow across my face with your left hand.”

A flurry of giant hands come at me and I slip, weave, and then just frankly step out of the way, to my left.

“I invented that!” Mendoza shouts. “That defensive maneuver! The way you stepped to the left. I didn’t fancy the hard punching; I was the expert at many fast punches and defensive movements, and they served me well. I used this in my second battles with Mr. Humphries . . .”

“This Mr. Humphries,” I pant, while trying again to parry his riposte, whatever that was, “you seem kind of obsessed with him . . .”

“Well I don’t think he truly won that first battle, for I was ill and rather melancholy about my loss of my son . . .”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“. . .and yet he insisted I fight. I endeavoured to establish another match, and we just could not set the terms. First it was this, then that.”

I see that I have to get Mendoza off this subject, so I switch gears.

“Is it true that you were a bounty-hunter for a while?”

“Yes, Miss, but that was a tawdry profession. I left it after a time, although I was excellent at this field. Wouldn’t you rather hear about my fighting for the King of England?”

The toilet flushed from the other end of the gym. John would be coming back.

“Of course, but I really want to know . . .why don’t more people know that the Father of Pugilism was Jewish?”

“Ah,” said Daniel Mendoza, pushing his dark curls off his face and sitting down on the weight bench. “You know, my dear lady. We were not supposed to be tough. We were the scholars. Of course, some men of turbulent and vindictive dispositions have made a bad use of their pugilistic power, and as Shakespeare says: ‘It is good to have a giant’s strength, but merciless to use it like a giant.’ But for self-defense, which goes back to the Roman gladiators, I have created the scientific study, I suppose, for people like you. Although you’re not, pardon, what I imagined. But we cannot stand by while the slurs fly. I could not tolerate it. I do not fathom how anyone could. We are as good and strong as anyone you might bring forward. Just let me have an hour with a man and I will educate him on his own protection. I am the Greatest Fighter!”

I am the greatest, said Muhammed Ali.

We stand looking at each other, our dark eyes locked, peering into each other like animals on opposite sides of cages in a zoo.

“Look after yourself on the cobbles, my dear,” Mendoza says.

“Hey, baby, my pugilistic progeny, my diva of destruction, why are your wraps still on?” John calls out as he approaches me.

“I was just, I mean . . . I wanted another round. Did you know that in the old days they just went till they dropped?” I asked.

Mendoza was gone.

“Sure. And the original ring was just a circle in the sand. Men fought with their bare-knuckles. But you’re not going another round, baby. You’re done for the day.”

John tended to know best.

A boxer needs some rage. My father probably would have made a good boxer. He could have channeled his fury, and in so doing, “left it in the ring.” Boxing would have taught my dad how to keep his cool, develop composure (if you get flustered when someone is coming at you, the odds are you’re going to take a hit), and make his anger work for him rather than against him.

I knew at least some of why my father was angry. He never got to do what he really wanted, and he had a severe case of what Alain de Botton calls “Status Anxiety.”

I knew some of why the early Jewish boxers were angry. They were picked on constantly and everyone assumed they were weaklings. Benny Leonard, lightweight champion from 1917 to 1925, was constantly in a turf war with the Irish in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago. Barney Ross suffered a horrible trauma when he was thirteen –he witnessed a botched hold-up when robbers shot and killed his father. His mother had a nervous breakdown, and when the family split apart, Barney’s younger siblings were sent off to an orphanage. During the German occupation of Poland in 1939, fighter Harry Haft was captured by the Nazis. In the camp he was forced to bare-knuckle fight for the pleasure of the guards, and losers were often immediately executed. Harry never lost a fight, and the sadistic guards called him “The Jew Animal.” He escaped the camp, and in America became a professional boxer.

I knew why my coach John was angry. His manipulative alcoholic mother was a rager who controlled him and his brother throughout their childhood.

Why was I angry? Was it because we were all helpless before our father’s rage? Because my mother’s voice, when she did speak, seemed barely a whisper? Unlike my parents, and so many of the immigrants of their generation, I’d been able to get educated and develop a career that I liked. Sure, I’d had my hurts and disappointments, but I’d had so much more freedom than either of my parents.

Or maybe anger isn’t the issue –maybe it’s competition. If you win, someone else has to lose. After all, without a winner and a loser, sports wouldn’t exist. You have to be willing to go beyond someone else to participate in sports. In my family, if you had drive and hurt someone else along the way, even not deliberately, you were deemed selfish and horrible. Assimilation required suppression of the self. Don’t say too much good about yourself or god will punish you. Don’t stand out. Don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t email the gods.

As a little girl, my fights were about getting out of challenges that I made into fights – being truant on gym days to avoid the sadistic gym teacher, pretending to have my period to avoid swimming lessons at summer camp. I would get close to the edges of life’s excitement and potential successes, and decide there was too much to fear. Well-meaning, comforting hands were always there to pull me back down into the well. It’s okay, it’s okay, come back home. We’re frightened, too.

As a result I’m often been too cerebral, cognitively flooded, introspective, dreamy, ambivalent, paralyzed by nuances. When John teaches me now to slip, weave, block, and feint, what am I literally doing? I’m getting my head out of the way! I’m leaving obsessions behind and entering a state of flow: all things immediate and with consequences. In my work as a psychotherapist I dwell in a land of ambiguity where people beat themselves up. I try to help them fight off the blows inside their heads that they inflict upon themselves. Sometimes I’m the fight manager, and sometimes I am the stand-in opponent, learning their particular fight so I can help them. What are you angry about? I ask. Who are you angry at? What do you really want?

When John took me on, he said it was because he saw something in my eyes -- a persistence, a determination -- that I just would not give up. He may as well have lifted me up into the air and jettisoned my being into a new and heavenly realm.

I was not a quitter. I never really was.

Thank you Barney, Benny, Daniel and John..

This is the third in a series of essays adapted from Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind (SUNY PRESS, 2010)

For essay one:

For essay two:

As I wave a big glove at these guys, I’ve got some more treats for you – next time: I go to camp: Gleason’s Fantasy Boxing Camp!

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After my boxing lessons, I try to keep a notebook of bits of learning:

The Jab is the introduction, the handshake, the animal sniffing at the new rear-end, the establishing punch.

Stretch out and present yourself with a firm left, pull back, don’t throw wildly. Drive, don’t push.

Your reach shouldn’t exceed your grasp (what is my reach?)

Find your range (what is my range?)

Benny Leonard (1896-1947)

Snap it back.

“C’mon,” my coach John warns, “you’re hitting like a girl!”

I’m not even sure what it means to hit like a girl (or a boy for that matter:I was never athletic. I didn’t know at first why I got involved in the game of hurt, as it is called, but in watching the films with John I always admired the choreography and footwork In boxing, where timing is paramount, and champion Benny Leonard was particularly fast and precise. He was small, so defense was important. As far as the aggression itself, a therapist might assume there is one face you want to render unconscious. John says “with women it is the sense of empowerment, with men it is the bully from the 6^th grade.” In one lesson, I had a profound sense of what I came to think of as “collective rage”, as I pounded on the mitts, my mind flooding with images of Nazis and the holocaust. It was visceral.

“What was that?” John says, noticing my intensity.

“Do it again.”

In our four room apartment in Newark, New Jersey, we watched a lot of TV. The television (and we had one of the first in the neighborhood) was like a hearth. Occasionally, the family would go to an actual movie theater. My sister Susan and I were very taken with “West Side Story,” billed as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. But the gang battles in that film about upcoming “rumbles” between the Sharks and the Jets (we had such fun mimicking the songs as we danced around the living room) were tame compared to the real neighborhood brawls on the Lower East Side of New York City in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The best fighters were those who captured the territory, the turf – or had the goods to back up their claim to being the best. The streets were dangerous; if you couldn’t defend yourself, you couldn’t be out there, and future champion Benny Leonard, being small, was often an object of bullying. Kids fought with anything they could find – baseball bats, rocks, even snowballs packed around chunks of coal.

Benny had a sympathetic uncle who took him to The Silver Heel Club to get some boxing instruction. By eleven years old Benny was the boxer of Eighth Street. He not only liked taking on the bullies he was mensch enough to protect older Jewish women if they were harassed on the way to synagogue. By the time Benny “The Ghetto Wizard” Leonard was fifteen-years-old, he had been knocked around in gang wars, illegal fights, and bootleg brawls. Fighters were hungry. Sometimes payment was simply a hot meal, sometimes a few dollars. At first the Irish were in charge of the power structure in the boxing world, and a distinct rivalry was growing between the Jews and the Irish. Benny fought many Irish fighters before he turned professional at just fifteen years old, in 1911, the year my father was born. His mother Minny was fearful that her son would get hurt, like most of the Jewish mothers of fighting sons. He tried to keep his training from his mother, but when the money came in, there was no doubt: he should keep boxing.

Benny was a lightweight, and like most of the Jewish fighters had a sinewy, muscular body. He was considered a gentlemen, and extremely bright. He fought for humanitarian causes, and a journalist once wrote, “Benny Leonard has done more to conquer anti-Semitism than textbooks.” Benny studied fights like a scholar, developing brilliant footwork and clever defensive strategies. He wasn’t considered the strongest of fighters, but the blows themselves were precise, fast, and well-timed, and that made all the difference.

When World War I broke out, Benny joined the army, like my grandfather Barney. But when Benny returned, he got back in the ring, fought everyone, and made a modest fortune, enough to open some businesses. However, he lost everything in the Depression and at 35 had to try again to fight to make money.

After one of my boxing lessons, when I fantasize meeting Benny Leonard, I picture us at the infamous Stillman’s Gym, what AJ Liebling called “The University of Eighth Avenue.” I don’t know how I get in, because there’s no other women there, but that’s the beauty of fantasy.

Benny walks me up the stairs and starts telling me about how he first came to Stillman’s.

“We were all at Billy Grupp’s, that was the gym where everyone trained, up on 116^th Street. But one day, Grupp, he was unpredictable, starts talking about Jews in a derogatory way, well, actually, he was also inebriated, but still he implied that we were the cause of World War I. So I took everyone, I mean I led us right out of there. So we wind up at Stillman’s storefront, first in Harlem, and then eventually the real one, on Eighth Avenue.”

Leonard’s not as handsome or devilish as Barney Ross, but he’s got another head of dark hair that he doesn’t like anyone to muss up, and he’s got this way about him; you feel like you could listen to him forever.

“Right about here, here’s where you’d pay your fifteen cents to the guy with the little glasses, Curley.”

I look up at the tall ceiling and then down again to a row of folding chairs where I can imagine guys sitting, cigars firmly tucked in mouths, occasionally spitting on the floor. There are two raised rings, side by side.

“Who was Stillman exactly?” I ask. We sit down on a couple of the ancient chairs.

“Ah, that’s kind of a mystery. Some say he was a cop once. One thing I know, he was like a piece of sharp metal, and always yelling. No soft side to that fellow.”

The windows look glued shut. Narrow, dented, green metal lockers line the walls.

George Plimpton was a journalist who competed in sports to learn about the games, and boxing was one of them. He was the inventor of “immersion journalism.” Although Plimpton’s trainer begged him to stay out of Stillman’s because he’d probably get some awful disease, he did go there to prepare for his brief experience boxing, and described it this way:

“A dark stairway led up into a gloomy vaultlike room, rather like the hold of an old galleon. One heard the sound before one’s eyes acclimatized: the slap-slap of the ropes being skipped, the thud of leather into the big heavy bags that squeaked from their chains as they swung, the rattle of the speed bags, the muffled sounds of gym shoes on the canvas (there were two rings), the snuffle of the fighters breathing through their noses, and, every three minutes, the sharp clang of the ring bell. The atmosphere was a fetid jungle twilight.”

In other words, Stillman’s was a total dump. The great Angelo Dundee, Muhammed Ali’s trainer, said the windows in the place were “a monument to dirt and grit, never opened and so caked with layer upon layer of filth that even the pigeons had given up trying to look in.” Gene Tunney, the bookish boxer who never quite won the public’s love, said he could not believe the stench: “Let’s clear this place out with some fresh air,” he said. Johnny Dundee, the featherweight champion, reportedly said, “Fresh air? Why, that stuff is likely to kill us!”

“But just two blocks from the Garden, what could be more perfect?” Benny asks rhetorically.

“After sparring, we’d all go down to the bar, the Neutral Corner,” Benny goes on. “Eighth Avenue also had the Ringside Bar. But the Neutral Corner was sweet. You’d find everybody who was anybody there, in the afternoon, siesta time, 3 to 5 pm. Stillman’s was closed during those hours, so you could get a ten-cent beer and listen to the stories.”

“Mr. Leonard, I think you met my friend Steve Acunto there once?” I say.

“Ah, let me see. Small fellow? Wiry? Lightweight? Yes, I recall. I walked into Stillman’s and there he was in the ring. Lou Ambers, great lightweight, real solid jab, was working with him. And I walked right up and said, ‘kid, who taught you that style?’ Because he was boxing like me! And the kid says, ‘I been watching all the films of your fights!’ So I brought him downstairs to Riker’s for a cup of tea and he looked up at me, you know, I was the older fellow, so I held forth for a while and he drank it in. I said it was a rough sport, but there was also a science to it, and that’s the truth. Boxing taught me more than any university. It made a real man out of me. If I had a child and he wished to learn about boxing, I wouldn’t hesitate to introduce him to the finer points. It gave me my life.”

I look around at the two rings in front of us, and imagine all the great fighters that had worked their asses off in them.

“Do. . . you have any questions?” Benny Leonard asks me.

“Yes. I do. There is something. I don’t feel that strong. I mean I feel powerful, but I don’t know if I can ever get my arms to be as strong as a man’s, or other women who are just stronger. Maybe it’s genetic. I don’t know. I use the weight machines, but I don’t know if my right cross is ever going to get more powerful,” I say.

“Listen, my portion of knock-outs is not that impressive. The truth is, I wasn’t so strong myself. But I never made the same mistake twice. I watched everything. I kept my head sharp. Size up your opponent, and develop a strategy, and you’ll do fine. Accuracy, accuracy, and never give up. Someone once said, ‘To rest is to rust.’ Does that help?” Leonard looks at me.

“It will. Just to get a few words from you – I can’t believe it – I read that in the Jewish Daily bulletin they said you were greater than Einstein!”

“Aw, how can that be?” Leonard stares at his shoes.

“Well, the way they figured it, Einstein was known at first in America by only thousands, but millions knew you.”

“The Jewish papers,” Leonard says. “They didn’t know much about prize-fighting, but I guess they appreciated its popularity.”

The stale air in Stillman’s is getting to me, so I say goodbye to Benny Leonard, of whom boxing historian Bert Randolph Sugar, known for his ever-present cigar and fedora, said, “Benny Leonard was like an artichoke—the more you peeled away the more you discovered. Leonard was the nearest thing to a perfect fighter boxing has ever seen.”

In 1947 Benny was working as a referee in St. Nick’s arena in Manhattan. He staggered and fell. At 51, he died of coronary thrombosis.

Leonard competed from 1911 to 1932. He held the world lightweight title from 1917 to 1925, making him the longest-reigning champion in the division’s history.

My coach had lit the flame for me the day he began to teach me about the history of Jewish boxers, and I just kept feeding it.

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For the first installment of “I Threw a Punch and It Threw Me into the Past” about me and Barney Ross

go to:

Stay tuned for the next conversation: with Daniel Mendoza! And a peek at my time at Gleason’s Fantasy Boxing Camp in the Catskills.

This series is adapted from my book Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind (SUNY Press)

“Come on baby, that punch wasn’t sexy – put your hips into it.”

I am learning how to perfect my jab, in an inner-city gym where you can work out for $9.95 a month and then pop next door to the unemployment office to pick up your check.

John “The Punisher” Spehar, my coach, is a 200-pound unusual brute, physically a cross between Bruce Willis and Tony Soprano. His hobby is studying the French Revolution. My Venus of Willendorff belly is flopping as I lurch forward and try to make contact with his leather punch mitts, brown cushions around ten inches; up by his shoulder height they make him look like an angry bear coming out of hibernation.

My hobby for the moment -- is boxing.

I’m mesmerized by my coach, perhaps because he is a happier and more vigorous version of my father. On the road as a traveling salesman, with his Oldsmobile’s trunk stuffed with sample cases, Julius Alexander Klein (aka “Jay”) was funny, warm, clever – beloved by the brokers he visited all over his territory – but at home he left the personable “Salesman of the Year” at the door and in came “Sullen-Man,” full of fury at not actualizing his dream of being a journalist and exuding the malignant depression that fell over my mother, my sisters and me like a moldy blanket.

“Jab, one-two. Jab, jab, blow to the body, blow to the head. There ya go,” John is saying to me.

“The Punisher” is teaching me to crouch like a Ninja, slip and weave, keep my hands up, and send force up from my heavy legs into my middle and out through my arms, using my body in ways I never thought possible. It’s a surprise to feel so exhilarated by my own body and its abilities. My body. What a drag it’s been – what a disappointment! Sometimes it just seemed like a necessary over-sized backpack for my brain. My body has been, um . . . sensitive.

I certainly never knew any boxers while growing up. Although my father had been a track star at Thomas Jefferson High, I never even saw him walk fast. My family was aggressively sedentary and my parents, like many of the immigrant families in our Newark neighborhood, just seemed worn out. I considered myself something of a pacifist, and I thought boxing was horrible.

“No one’s got any balls anymore in this nation,” John is saying. “It’s the worst for men – they get babied, and then they just look to be mothered.”

Simplistic but oddly compelling.

By the hour’s end, my sweat smells like a mixture of bitter oranges, aluminum, and old pastry.

“Okay, baby,” John beams. “Not too shabby.” He knows I’m shot. “Now go hobble over to the water and take a break.”

I walk over to the window ledge and encircle a bottle of vitamin water with two giant gloved hands, like a clumsy baby. Water spurts everywhere and dribbles down my chin. John laughs, and tells me not to worry; it’s a dirty sport.

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I knew when I took up boxing lessons in middle age, to rehab a broken ankle and fight the slide into invisibility, that although many great authors (Ellison, Mailer, Hemingway, Oates), had been drawn to explore the complex elements of boxing and its characters, people would look at me and say: “YOU?” It’s been described as a mirror of society, a sport for the poor, and many of the stories have a basic, predictable sequence: somebody needs to improve his/her economic status, has enough rage to fight, finds a mentor, and struggles to win. Of course these tropes were not my story. I wanted to get more comfortable with my own aggression, and wound up becoming a bit of a historian. I wrote a book, covered a pro fight, interviewed famous boxing celebrities like Burt Sugar and Angelo Dundee on my WPKN radio show.

One session, thinking about boxing as a sport for early immigrants, I asked John:

“Were there ever any Jewish boxers?”

“Absolutely there were! Al “Bummy Davis, Abe Attell, Barney Ross, “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom. In 1930 there were six Jewish champions. Sometimes they took Irish names. Like Mushy Callahan. Light welterweight – real name was Moische Schneir. And they were all very good, too. If you go way back? Danial Mendoza in Britain. Bare-knuckle boxer—he even wrote a memoir.”

Wow. Hearing these names was disorienting. Although I grew up hearing the names of great boxers (my father loved to watch boxing) – Dempsey, Graciano, Ali, Tyson, Frazier…I hadn’t heard these new ones—the ones who sounded like relatives. Strong tough Jews? Boxers? That had not been the image the culture provided me. Weren’t we the weak, pale scholars?

John had lit the flame. I started studying. Between 1910 and 1940, one third of all boxers were Jewish. At one point, Jews held three titles simultaneously. Proportionately, it was an enormous number, and a direct result of the huge migration of Jews from Europe in the late nineteenth century and through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Escaping their countries, or driven from them, Jews wound up in the poorest and most crowded ghetto neighborhoods in the cities. Penniless, speaking no English, many found they could not walk through the streets of New York wearing a yarmulke without being threatened. Not surprising then to read that the Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language lists 392 synonyms for the word “hit,” which most likely come from being on the receiving end and then learning how to fight back. K’nack, patch, tzetle, zet, diokh, hak, to name a few. I watched films. I read the books. I held Daniel Mendoza’s memoir in my gloved hands at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

My father was addicted to the racetrack, and knew some shady characters. He and champion Barney Ross both appear in photographs in tilted fedoras, looking dapper, up for anything, and a bit nuts. When Barney Ross wasn’t boxing, he was an unlucky gambler who loved the track.

One training day after John had told me about fighters throwing up in the ring, he told me that when Barney Ross first stepped into Kid Howard’s small gym on the South Side of Chicago, he was a scrawny fifteen-year-old suffering from malnutrition. When they fought, the Jewish boxers often proudly wore the Star of David on their trunks. “My Yiddishe Mama” was played as Barney Ross entered the ring. I left the gym filled with these images and got into my Subaru. Even my eyeballs were sweating. I started the engine, imagining Barney Ross in the passenger seat looking at me. “Where we goin’ baby?” His voice was a little husky.

I look over at Barney -- “Beryl the Terrible,” “One Punch Rasofsky,” Champion of the World in the Lightweight, Junior Welterweight, and Welterweight divisions from 1933 to 1938. He was adorable, if you could say that about a champ. Thick bushy eyebrows, like those on my father in an early photograph taken before the war, as he leaned against a small plane, jaunted in a thick turtle-necked sweater. Barney also had an impish smile, and slicked-back dark wavy hair.

“Barney, I can’t believe it’s really you,” I said, feeling shy and flirty at the same time.

The sun speared through the gap in his top teeth, and he grinned. “So I heard you say your dad liked the ponies. You know how I got into all that? Al Jolson! He took me to Arlington Park, Chicago.”

He pronounced it “Tchi-cawgo” – just the way my dad did, like the sound of a disapproving crow.

“But I could never pick a winner. After a while Mr. Jolson didn’t even want me near him. He said stay away! He didn’t want to get the curse. The bookies liked me, though. How’d your dad do?”

“Not so great, either. Small gains – then he’d blow it on dinner.”

“Aw, my kind of gent! You were a lucky little lady.”

“I suppose,” I murmured, remembering my father’s pushing food away and glowering. I tried to focus on the turn I was making onto the busy Post Road.

“Cmon! Keep your chin up, whatsa madda? You got troubles? Let me tell you a story. When Itchik my father, god rest his soul, came over here, he didn’t have anything…they called him Isidore, more American-like….”

“Barney! Isidore was my grandfather’s name, too!” I said. “I was named after him. If I was a boy, I was going to be called Benny.” Ohmygod, that’s right. It wasn’t just about that actress Binnie Barnes. There was also the other story, the one before that one – if you were a boy… the name Benny came before the name Binnie. They must have wanted a boy, after my two older sisters. They were all set for that, name picked out and everything.

“You see that? We’re like family – and you’re feeling better already, aren’tcha? He took off his white fedora and brushed off a few straw dots of dust. “Benny – that’s a special name you know, because of Benny Leonard. Don’t forget him. He gave us everything.”

I continued to drive and he continued with his story. The greasy smell of Brylcreem permeated my car. I guess Barney didn’t believe in the old slogan “A little dab’ll do ya” – he must have used the whole tube on that helmet of dark hair.

“….like I was sayin’ he had nothing. There was pushcarts. My mother, god rest her, too, was from Poland…”

“My mother, too, a shtetl,” I said.

“….I’m never gonna get this out, am I? Jes’ kidding you, you’re a good egg. But when I was two we got on the train and went to Chicago. My mother’s uncle had a store there. What a scene, the smells and sounds and crowds. We didn’t have much, but I loved the action, you know what I mean? And there was nothing like the taste of the cholont, only on Shabbes of course. My mother’s hands would be raw from peeling the potatoes. But that’s not the thing, the thing I want to tell you. I heard you say about your dad, and the Murder, Inc goons, well I got caught up, too. The thing is, it was action, but it was you know . . .the usual . . .in the neighborhood . . .we were roaming around, unsupervised, so what do ya get? Gangs!” He reached into the pocket of his suitjacket and pulled out a gold-tipped toothpick.

“I roamed around, too, in Newark, but I was just looking for boys,” I said sheepishly.

“Well, with me it was rough. They called us scheenies. I heard it all – ‘kill the dirty little Jew,’ that kind of thing. They wouldn’t let us swim in the pool so we got physical. Then I’d come on home and my father, the rebbe, he’d see the bruises and he would get out the leather cat-o-nine tails….I got beat even worse at home. So you know I stole, I gambled, everything, fights on the streets.”

“I didn’t have anything like that, Barney. So I don’t know why I box, but you …” The traffic on the Post Road was congesting in that sudden way it often did -- cars battling for their turns into Linens ‘n Things, Trader Joe’s, TGIF, and other chain retailers and restaurants. It was hard to stay focused on what Barney was saying. I kept thinking about the names. Benny, Barney, Binnie. Odd.

“Well, I know you’re a psychologist; I thought you might be interested, you know, in what started the boxing really. I had four before me, they all died. Me, I wasn’t so strong either. Asthma. My tate was a Talmud scholar, a rebbe. He started on the lower East Side, but couldn’t make it there. We had family in Chicago, West Side. I lived in a tenement flat on top of a fish market. Barely two rooms. Hundreds of families shared one bathtub, can you imagine? Anyway, my father opens this grocery store, see, across the street. I was to become a Hebrew teacher; that was his dream. I wasn’t that much of a trumbenik until…” He paused, and took a silk handkerchief out of his pants pocket. The letters B & R were monogrammed in deep red.

I knew what was coming. I had read about it.

“First I heard the shot, then my pa yelling. I was fourteen, and they broke into the grocery store, hoods, you know? They took everything from the cash register and then…they shot him… I saw him on the floor, my father. There was blood. They’d killed him. And after that my mother, she…wasn’t the same…they put her in the hospital, I, couldn’t do anything for her. Me and Morrie, my brother, were sent to cousin Henry, and the others, the others, they were…well, the orphanage. I clenched my fists right then and there and made a personal vow to get them out. And you know what? It made me a better fighter. Every time I fought, I pictured it, kicking Pa’s murderers until they screamed in agony.”

“What a senseless, horrible crime,” I said. I reached out to touch his cheek but his hand went up reflexively, and caught mine in a grip.

“Ow!” I recoiled.

“Pardon me, I just, when I remember I’m back there. You meant well. Well, hey, this is no joke today, huh? I just wanted to tell you this. You’re intelligent.”

I wanted to change the subject. “Is it true? About you and Al Capone?”

“That’s a turn! Capone and I, we were close. He knew everything about my life, what happened to my family, everything. Yes, he was ruthless, but with me he was kind. I did some jobs for him, but this is how he was kind, you see, he told me to beat it, he gave me money to leave the mob. He insisted. He didn’t want that life for me.”

I could tell Barney was feeling better after spilling the details of his childhood trauma. He was flicking his toothpick between his thumb and forefinger.

“For a while I gave up all the Jewish things. You know, I’d taught Hebrew. But I just couldn’t anymore; I didn’t think there was a God. I did say Kaddish three times a day, out of respect for Pa. But the next year it was boxing, all the way. I gotta tell ya, though, ma couldn’t know. You know my real name?”

“Beryl, right?” I said tentatively.

“Hey, you’re all right! Beryl Rasofsky. I had to hide it, the boxing from my ma -- I took on Barney Ross. Didn’t go stupid like Mushy Callahan. We couldn’t have our mothers knowing we were fighting.” Ross said.

“Wow. I thought Mushy was adding the Irish name to avoid the anti-Semitism,” I said.

“Nah. I mean not that there wasn’t anti-Semitism. It was his ma. But my ma found out. To her it was horrible. It made me a a bum. But you know, it saved my life, boxing. I wrote something, let me see.” He fumbled in his breastpocket and pulled out a cocktail napkin.

“Here we go: It wasn’t long before I could feel my chest expanding, my hands hardening, my body toughening and my mind growing sharper.”

“That is beautiful. Seriously, I love that. I feel sharper too,” I said.

“Anyway, I got to be going,” Barney smoothed out his hat. “I could talk all day to you, young lady. You’re a good listener. But I gotta head out to Grossinger’s – they got it all decked out for me as a training retreat. You ever been up there? It’s Ferndale, New York. They got everything there. Runyon’s coming up to write it up. They’re all watching me. I’m kind of you know, the center of it all. You oughta come up sometime. I’m real worried, though. I been reading in the papers about problems in Germany for our people. They’re boycotting our businesses. It’s grim, I tell ya. What do you think, Mrs., what do you think is going to happen with this Hitler guy?”

I pulled over to let him out at Jacob Marley’s, thinking he might enjoy a drink. He liked that sort of thing, and wasn’t training just yet.

“I don’t know, Barney.” We looked at each other. The bushy eyebrows were making a less perky shape, and the tough guy looked worried. “Have a great fight!” I called out as he shut the car door.

“Gezinterhayt, Mrs,” he said, walking backwards while he spoke. “Don’t forget Benny. He was a real scientist. I was, what, fourteen when they shot Pa but I remember – it was just a few months after that Benny Leonard fought Lew Tendler – that was July 1923. Anyway, it was a real pleasure talking with ya.”

There he was, “Beryl the Terrible,” studying the menu outside the restaurant, his hands in his pockets, leaning forward and rocking back and forth on his heels. The crease in his white pants was still crisp as if he’d never sat inside the car.

Eleven days before Barney Ross’ fight, at a rally in Madison Square Garden for George Washington’s Birthday, 20,000 people wearing swastikas goose-stepped outside in big black boots. They shouted “Sieg Heil!”

Back at the Grossinger’s camp Beryl Rasofsky read the continuing bad news from Germany and wrote later that it had strengthened his resolve to fight “like I was fighting for all my people.”

Ross became hugely successful as a lightweight boxer, his fights bringing huge crowds, big purses for the time, and an entourage of celebrities. He is sometimes ranked with Hank Greenberg as the most admired Jewish athlete in America. He retired from boxing in 1938 and at age 32, enlisted in the US Army after the Pearl Harbor attack on New York. In the battle of Guadalcanal, Ross sustained serious injuries while rescuing his comrades from a Japanese ambush. He won a silver star for heroism.

Perhaps his greatest contributions ultimately came through political activism. He was a well-known supporter of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. He was outspoken – criticizing the allies’ apathy towards the Holocaust, and assisting on a committee to rescue Jews.

The Jewish prizefighters’ legacy often extended outside the ropes of the boxing ring.

Barney may never have gotten over the traumatic losses of his early life, and certainly spent plenty of time trying to self-medicate his pains, both physical and emotional. He did beat his addictions finally. The great 1948 boxing film Body and Soul had been commissioned by actor John Garfield (a boxer himself who starred in the title role) to depict the life of Barney Ross, but Hollywood moguls, worried about the taint of the addictions, disguised the details. You can feel him in the story, though. In another film, in 1957, Monkey on My Back, Cameron Mitchell plays Barney Ross, and it’s all about addiction. Ross reportedly hated the film, and I can understand why – it’s a curiously flat story with none of Ross’ troubled childhood in it. It’s Barney the boxer, then Barney the irrepressibly optimistic and stubborn gambler, then an agonizingly long war sequence, and then Barney the morphine addict.

Barney Ross got a small part in a production of “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” “The Pride of the Ghetto” died in his hometown of Chicago, at the age of 57. His first wife’s name was Pearl Siegel. Siegel. My mother’s maiden name.

Brylcreem lost its popularity in the 1960s, when men began to prefer a drier look for their hair.

THIS PIECE WAS ADAPTED FROM Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind (SUNY Press, 2010) by Binnie Klein, available at SUNY PRESS and back order from Amazon.com.

COMING UP!!! Keep reading Open Tuning as Binnie meets Benny Leonard and Daniel Mendoza in subsequent posts!

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So sorry to have been MIA here on Substack. I think I might be suffering from Weltschmerz, and I know I’m not alone. This is a German word meaning “world-pain;’ often described as a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering. This condition interferes with my sense of humor, conviction, vitality, and clarity; which, while a source of determination and purpose for some, hampers my drive to write about any of the topics I’ve explored here on Open Tuning. I do want to come back!!!

Many years ago, I received a fan letter to my WPKN radio show from a supremely talented CT artist, Robert Reynolds, who described the spirit of my show as being “world-weary but with hope for the future.” I felt incredibly seen. We wound up meeting at his then studio in Branford, and made an exchange. He offered me a painting. I was drawn to an image on a slab of concrete propped against the corner. It reminded me of cave paintings. In return I brought him recorded cassettes (yes, it was THAT long ago!) of some of my shows.

Okay, here’s a piece of good news — because curating music for alternative radio continues to be possible during my writing “dry spell,” that effort not only continues (1st and 3rd Thursdays on wpkn.org from 9 - Noon), but is now AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST you can listen to ANYTIME. This is a new feature, so I’ve got seven episodes up of the most recent shows, and I hope to be posting past interviews (mostly with authors and musicians) soon.

While I train my muscles for longer pieces, I want to share a poem, Desert, I wrote a while back (see below). Don’t worry, I’m not in a current state of romantic heartbreak but I’m familiar with the terrain. If there is interest, I’ll do an audio recording of it.

Meanwhile, I wish everyone a safe and healthy holiday, and here’s to a better year in 2026!!!!

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Desert

You dragged me out there, already parched

and opened my mouth so wide I could have drunk

the camel’s portion, saved in a leather pouch

and banging against his side as he lowered himself

to the ground, to rub his wide lips against the sand

You dragged me out there, already parched

and teased me with a drop of your goodness

You said your own portion was barely yours

but smoothed me out against the cool cloth

on the floor of your tent. You hovered,

levitating, animating me with

circles of dew.

You dragged me out there, already parched

and promised more water. It would come, you said

If only I could wait, if only I could trust.

But I saw crows hovering, too, out of place, out of time,

and I stripped off my rags

and went back out onto the sand.

When, did you say? Was, did you say? If, did you say?

You dragged me out there, already parched

And opened my mouth so wide it was an embarrassing sight

but you claimed it was beautiful, that my thirst was beautiful

and I prepared to receive, I opened my heart, I opened my trust,

You said it was right. I felt it was right.

So I lay in the tent, and sometimes out on the sand,

And soon became frozen in the shape of thirst

And I grew ugly like the camel, misshapen, accustomed to

dry and punishing conditions. I grew accustomed. I fell into step.

I did what you asked. I slit everything away, my gender, my sex,

my longing, my tongue. All I saw was darkness and the night.

With my camel mouth I shaped a final question:

If you were parched too

Where did you get your water

In your desert so hard and ungiving?

Binnie Klein

How to write a protest song:

1. Become enraged

2. Feel helpless

3. Feel guilty

4. Listen to folksinger Phil Ochs

5. Walk around house shouting defiant phrases

6. Create more lyrics to go with your phrases

7. Attach a melody

8. Sing it yourself if you can! don’t worry about lack of talent!

9. Or convince a talented musician to give it a go

10. ASAP: film and post anywhere, everywhere……

11. Good luck! we can do these things!
    
    “What you do makes a difference, you just have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

    ~Jane Goodall, 1934-2025
    
    THIS IS OUR SONG “NO KINGS”
    Lyrics and melody by Binnie Klein - Performed by Christopher Mir

AND HERE ARE THE LYRICS AND CHORDS SO THAT YOU CAN TRY YOUR OWN VERSION….WE HOPE YOU WILL DO SO, AND POST YOURS, TOO!

Guitar Intro Dm                                       

Dm
No kings
No kings
No unfit rulers

C Dm
Coming for us on the bullet train
Dm
No kings
No kings
No lying con men

C Dm
Shoving us into the carnival tent

F
No kings
C
No kings
Dm
No kings
F
No kings
C
No kings
Dm
No kings

Dm
No kings
No kings
No mindless bullies

C Dm
Making us crazy and sick again

Dm
Give us back a sun that shines

(C Dm)

Dm
Give us back a sun that shines

(C Dm)

F
No kings
C
No kings
Dm
No kings

F
No kings
C
No kings
Dm
No kings

Dm|
No kings
No kings
We’ve been there before

C Dm
Turn around! Get out! And Shut the Door!

Dm
No kings
No kings
We’ve been there before

C Dm
Turn around! Get out! And Shut the Door!

F
No kings
C
No Kings
Dm
No Kings
F
No kings
C
No Kings
Dm
No Kings
F
No kings
C
No Kings
Dm
No Kings
——copyright Binnie Klein 2025

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You can hear today’s music and words show in the archives for two weeks here:

Binnie on the radio!

We are all waiting for the return of wonder. There’s been some comforting weather lately, where I live in Connecticut, so I stepped out onto the deck with my microphone and laptop and bug spray and produced the Thursday, October 2, 2025 edition of A Miniature World, my radio show which airs on the first and third Thursdays of the month on listener-supported WPKN. Today’s show includes music from Gabriel Yared, MILCK/Sisters of Winter (feat. Raye Zaragoza), Bastille/Pompeii, HAEVN & Neco Novellas/Caught a Light, Orkestra Obsolete/Blue Monday (using 1930s instruments), ANNOUNCE, New Order/Blue Monday, Christopher Mir/Missin Out, Kae Tempest/Love Harder, Sneaks/Looks Like That, David Byrne/Daddy Go Down, Phish/Farmhouse, ANNOUNCE, William Tyler/Highway Anxiety, Perfume Genius/Glory, STATION ID,, Nation of Language/Nights of Weight, Sufjan Stevens/A Running Start, Built to Spill/Strange, Donovan/Hurdy Gurdy Man, Thylacine/Shark Island, Joanna Robertson & Oliver Coates/Gown, ANNOUNCE, Zola Jesus/Changes, Big Words/The Art of Making Love, Annahstasia/Take Care of Me, Ruby Gill/How Chimpanzees Reassure Each Other, Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem “I Am Waiting” from ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’- read by Abu B. Rafique, Cold War Kids/Any Day Now, Ash & Felukah/Ash....

Let me know if you have any questions about any of the artists I might be able to answer!

Next show is October 16, with possible surprise...Keep an eye on the WPKN schedule... (hint: MORE IS MORE)

RIP Jane Goodall, brilliant primatologist and champion of the inner worlds of chimpanzees.

Until next time.....

Binnie

As we commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, an event that many recall as profoundly affecting, even transformational, there are many stories of those who went, and those who didn’t go. But what about those who, well, “almost” got there? Here’s one of those stories-- mine. Binnie and Anne, 2 college girls, start out on the road to become a part of history, but a child's worry about a parent's car unexpectedly changes all that. Above is the audio version (with music tidbits and sound effects) originally aired on Public Radio Exchange.

“I love you baby,” another frizzy-headed boy called out, and I steered the enormous white plastic wheel of the Valiant into the fast lane, stuck my hand out the window and formed a “V” with my index and middle finger, the universal peace sign. “See,” I said jubilantly to Anne, who was sketching wispy spring branches on a purple pad, “We’re all going, everyone!” I pressed the round tinny horn as we turned off Exit 9 of the Mass Pike to enter I-84, the transition itself exhilarating, signaling passage through multiple states. We had gotten a late start, but now we could catch up. I boosted the radio’s volume.

The car smelled of trail mix, cigarettes, and Anne’s handmade blend of patchouli and lavender which hung from her neck in a small suede pouch. We were not lovers, we had never even kissed, but we spent most nights spooning each other in a small single bed in a Boston University dorm. She’d murmur e.e. cummings to me: “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands…”

“…oh happy day, oh happy day, when Jesus washed, oh when he washed…” the radio sang out. All we had in 1969 was AM radio in the car, and we were constantly spinning the dial in search of tolerable tunes. Finally – “I See a Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater. “Hey, look!” A convertible Mustang, plastic flowers on the doors, a daisy affixed to its antenna. Three guys in the backseat passing a joint. Blasts of recognition-honks rang out, smiles widening. A middle-aged man with a crew cut, station wagon full of kids, scowled at us, and we laughed. Ever since I got to Boston, it seemed that the world was filled with young people like myself. There was a cocky vindication in my finally being in step, and it was delicious, a feeling of being unstoppable. You were in the exact center of things, wherever you stood.

Finally, Route 17, a narrow two-lane road that ran through Amish country. Occasionally a farmer on a tractor rolled by and stared, bewildered at the increasing traffic and the bumper stickers, “Bring the Troops Home,” “Question Authority.”

“…..really, stay away,” the DJ was declaring….If you’re thinking of going to the Woodstock Music and Art Festival, forget it! The New York State Thruway is closed.”

“It is not!” we yelled to the voice.

“…and it’s a jam-up, worst in history, bad, and people being treated in makeshift tents. LSD, folks, and it’s not a good trip…A kid on this stuff stared at the sun and went blind. Another jumped out the window thinking he could fly. Scary stuff, folks!”

“Maybe he wanted to go blind,” Anne said. “Maybe it was worth it.”

But images flashed through my mind, crowds of people pressing against each other, some screaming, some crying. They said Hendrix, Joplin, the Airplane, were going to be there, but I didn’t want to be in a bad scene. I was eighteen years old. I was getting scared.

Seven miles later, on Route 17B, we crested a hill and everything came to a stop. VW Beetles, Ramblers, Galaxies, Chevy Novas, packed everywhere on the side of the road, jutting out in crazy angles. People were leaping out of cars, duffel bags and baskets bouncing against their backs. Freaks with hats, freaks with babies, freaks with guitar cases, guys in desert boots, beads and feathers hanging from hats, embroidered jackets studded with buttons, army fatigues. People riding on the roofs of the few cars that were still moving.

“Whoa.” Anne slouched down in the white bucket seat, roused herself, looked out the window, and shook her hair into place. “YES!”

“Hey – girls, get in, come with us, just leave the car, leave it!” A pick-up truck, upside-down American flag, more guys calling out.

Anne began gathering up her belongings, but she slumped back down.

“Binnie, I can’t.”

“What do you mean? What?”

We didn’t know it exactly at the time, but we were only two miles from Bethel, two miles from the Woodstock Festival site, two miles from an historic event that could change our lives, for bad or good.

“We can’t leave my father’s car. What if it gets stolen? He’d kill me.”

“Come on,” I urged, as more and more people emptied their cars of sleeping bags and other supplies to join the stream of concertgoers heading down the access road. “Look, everyone’s leaving their cars.”

We fell silent. I lifted my body up to unstick myself from the vinyl upholstery, brushing sandwich crumbs away with a paper napkin which I then tossed into the empty Wise potato chip bag which was serving as our wastebasket. I reached back and pulled a denim shirt from the backseat. It was getting dark and clouding up.

“Would you be mad at me if I said I really really wanted to leave?” Anne said. I looked over at her face, with its Modigliani-like elegance. I saw Anne as standing in the light, while I was always in the darkness, with my Jewish nose and olive skin. I copied her mannerisms, and coveted her fringe jacket and cowboy boots. A few days before, we’d shared a tab of acid, my first, and I freaked out completely. She held me and told me to focus on the diamond drops of the rain. We met a guy named Bob who called himself “Hellfire.” He often announced his presence by incanting the opening lyric of the song “Fire” – “I am the god of Hellfire and I bring you….Fire!” as if he were the god of some underworld in the dormitory. We each slept with him, although Anne would eventually get pregnant by him and leave school, disappearing forever from my life.

Relief flooded me at the prospect of leaving. So much had been happening that year, too much too fast. My friends were dropping out to join the Weather Underground. I was flunking out of two classes. No one could concentrate.

“I can’t be mad at you,” I said, as she picked up her sketchpad and propped it against her knees for the trip home. She started a drawing involving tiny buds and miniature hills.

“Hellfire’s coming back tomorrow, you know,” she said.

“I think he likes you more than he likes me.” I looked for a way to turn Anne’s father’s car around.

“Sweetie, it’s not true; he told me you’re very sexy and passionate. I’m like the sister he never had.”

“Right.”

We laughed. I suggested evaluating the stock of goodies, and we decided to seek out more munchies at the next gas station.

There was virtually no traffic heading back, and we made it to the main road just before the thunder.

Epilogue, 2025

I wonder sometimes—should “Anne” and I have left her Daddy’s car and joined the eager throng and continued on to this historic event? Someone called the sixties a “cyclone in a wind tunnel” and if you were a teen-ager during key parts of it, you were always out of your depth. I can’t count the experiences I had that I wasn’t ready for. And of course, you could say, “that’s just life!” But I feel a rush of tender protection for that girl who so wanted to be cool. Images push in of events she couldn’t control; the type that happened to many young women. Sometimes I think—what cowards—and sometimes I think—sometimes you just have to turn around and go home.

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I came upon an image of a prize-winning painting by Eliza Muntz. The artist writes: My self-portrait explores the human response to societal trauma. It reflects on the events of 2020 onwards and how we sought uncomfortable solace indoors, often in the dark confines of the bedroom, metaphorically tucked ‘under the doona’. (She’s Australian - the idiom there means ‘under the covers.‘) The Big Malaise is a contemporary commentary on the pandemic and our inability to wake up and return to established routines. The composition centers around my reclining form, draped with bedsheets, my face conveying an uncomfortable grimace.

Her cupped hands made me think of my own body, and its increasing longing for comfort.

I think of the woman I often see standing outside a modest ranch house. She shuffles down her driveway. Or she simply stands, in a flowery housecoat and slippers, staring. Or she bends down to pick up a stray branch. One day she shuts an empty mailbox. One day she holds a small broom. Her hair is grey and short, shapeless. She is always alone, and always coatless, whatever the weather. She seems to be just “outside,” with no purpose. I have a friend who thinks that when people set up lawn chairs in their garages or at the edge of asphalt driveways it’s an inspiring example of making the best out of things. I worry that it’s a symptom of our complete detachment from nature and community.

In the viewing of a passing car or witness, I cannot just be standing in my driveway in broad daylight. I may be mis-read. That is today’s culture. We must always be doing something. Have a stride, a purpose, a direction, a goal, a money-making scheme, a future date, a career strategy, some life upgrade, a re-fi, a next child, another puppy, a better car, relocation, confrontation with a difficult boss, the next book. Our bodies must move so that we are in time, and in a state of mastery. In this way we try to reassure each other, and ourselves.

The artist is 16 years old, but she knows something about “our inability to wake up.”

I don’t want my neighbors or anyone driving by to ever see me the way I see the woman in the housedress. So I have a strategy. Because sometimes, you know, I too am outside my house, and perhaps I appear to have no purpose. Perhaps I appear to be home way too early in the afternoon. Sometimes I get up late, you see. No matter how early I go to bed, I am sluggish in the morning, and often wait quite a while before going outside my house to go to the end of the long driveway and grab the newspaper. I might still be in my version of pajamas – cotton bottoms and a long T-shirt, or leggings with a coat. My hair might be unwashed and a little too full, styled by sleeping.

So here’s the game I play with myself. I set an expression on my face in case someone sees me. A content, bemused expression. I try to bring a lilt into my stride, as if I were happy to be going down my driveway, as if it were just a little task in the middle of a very busy, happy day. I lift the corners of my mouth into a gratified smile, raise my eyebrows just slightly, to give the feeling of hope. If I bend to retrieve the newspaper, I bend quickly, to reassure the spectator that I am not infirm. I am springy, relaxed. I walk briskly back up the driveway, sometimes twirling the newspaper in its blue sack or hitting it against my leg.

If it is unclear that I am getting the paper or checking the mail, I may pause by a tree that still has a few red berries at the ends of parched wintry branches, examine them as if I were conducting a science experiment, reaching my arms high into the tree’s body. Why do I care? I believe we try to reassure each other, and ourselves.

2. I’m in a developmental stage, they say. I’m aging. It’s a whole thing. It’s like being a baby or learning to walk. When I scroll social media (one of my addictive pleasures), I am treated to a plethora of essays, articles and memoir excerpts about “aging well.” I myself have even been interviewed about how well I’m aging. I’m still working, albeit part-time. I don’t even like that phrase, “still” but it conveys just the right amount of admiration and fear. No one seems to want to be working in their seventies. I am actually my best self when I am working, so why would I give that up?

My physician, a tall, beautiful man from a Caribbean island (am I allowed to ask him which one?), who I’ve seen for over twenty years, says, with that beautiful accent, “why don’t you just go travel?? Go! Go! Go!” That’s the last thing I’d want to do. The effort involved sounds alien and exhausting. I think I’m supposed to want that, though. Even my hair stylist asked me if I had a bucket list for… the summer. I’d never even heard that before. It was so disappointing to hear. First, because I liked how she usually spoke very little, in contrast to all previous stylists, who used the bible of conversational phrases and questions: “Got any plans for the weekend? Tried any new restaurants lately? Shall we go shorter for the summer months?”

When Hope (not her real name) asked, I felt like we were going to fall into a well of phony small talk that quickly drains us introverts. I had no plans. Does it count that I was hoping my Stage 2 cataracts had worsened enough for the surgery that I actually craved so that I could read voraciously as I used to, and see the captions on Netflix? As she twisted individual chunks of hair between her slender fingers, readying them for the straightening iron and the styling product, I asked her if she had a bucket list for the summer. Her voice was soft and sweet. I think I heard her say, “oh, yes, I have to go to the beach, to Rhode Island, to Block Island, swim, boat, eat crabs, try new restaurants…..” As she applied the tap, tap, tap of the iron (she had a miniature one), making a sound with it I’d never heard before, I realized I couldn’t quite hear her (should I pursue the hearing aids? Like the cataracts, the last tester of my hearing said it was maybe too soon, but I could consider it….)

I seem to be in a state of “almost…but not yet…”

I filled my voice with conviction. “My husband and I are real homebodies and we have so many passions and hobbies.”

I looked down at the clumps of grey and white hair that would soon be swept away by a girl with a high voice and purple hair.

Does a haircut count as a social event?

3. I have more loungey clothes than going-out clothes. Capitalism exploits this phenomenon. My personal algorithm throws me ads of the silkiest, softest, most sensual-looking “tops and bottoms” – so many made of bamboo. How do they do that. I recall days in my twenties when I worked in office settings unhappily bound by suffocating panti-hose or “tights” that morphed into “leggings” of the future. When these pants arrive from companies with names like planets on Star Trek, they are inevitably too long. I am not tall. That I was promised “petite” or “short” seems to be a complex question of perception or semantics or universal guidelines, like what should my blood pressure be?

I should return the too-long pants, but I have often chosen companies with cryptic return policies, and bad reviews. Sometimes I just leave them in the dresser, duping myself into believing I will get them hemmed, or I will find an inventive way of folding them up.

Because my “still working” is done remotely, in Zoom meetings, the most important appearance feature is how I look from the breast upwards – like the bust-statues of Roman emperors. So bottoms can remain loungey. Styled hair, make-up, decent lighting, earrings and interesting necklaces can create a more vivid sense of my being than actually exists these days. I’ll wash my hair tomorrow….

I hear there’s a Trader Joe’s coming to my area. I tell myself I won’t do instacart but go inside for a packet of seaweed and some fresh flowers because I have to stay “in the game.” In the 1950s there was a board game called “The Game of Life.” Your tokens traveled around the board hitting successes or failures – marriage, jobs, buying real estate, having children. I’d like to see that board again. I’d like to remember the conventional markers, the developmental stages.

Is my current game “Use it or Lose it?” The Eriksonian scholars spoke of 8 Life Stages – the 7th being generativity vs. stagnation – (Now we teach. We’re wise. We pass torches. We leave legacies.) #8 is Integrity vs. Despair. I feel nothing reading those concepts, but I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, unconventional, an individualist. I don’t necessarily recommend the lifestyle, but what can you do? I do think a 9^th stage would be satisfying – Working With Less Than Optimal vs. Sinking into the Couch.

I DO have a bucket list item.. I have had a long-standing fascination with primates, and the women who studied them: Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, etc. When I’m not scrolling loungey clothing, I’m watching chimps jump eagerly into the arms of children and adults, whooping and celebrating contact. In my bucket list, I travel to South Carolina. There’s a chimpanzee sanctuary there. They let you interact with the chimps. I can almost feel their furry arms around my neck. Their lives are not sad, either, as in many other situations.

But to get to Myrtle Beach, I’d have to get off the couch.

4. When did the Swedish concept of “hygge” (coziness) lose its trendiness? Those were my glory days! Thick socks, approval of however many soft cashmere throws you wanted, always a hot mug of something within reach, a tolerably scented vanilla candle lit, a good book and the right music. It’s very touching on the one Monday a month when the “ladies” come to clean - the way they roll up and arrange all the throws on the sectional couch suggests that have no idea what to do with all of them, let alone imagine why someone would have so many. They don’t drape. They bunch. They roll them like towels. The throw pillows are taut like decorations in a brothel. You won’t be sitting. You’ll be laying down soon.

Did someone once say “you can never have too much of a good thing?” It doesn’t seem to be true, after all. Along with societal urgings to travel in later years are warnings not to take too many naps or naps that are too long, lest you begin to show signs of “bed rot.”

There’s plenty to worry about there, especially if you have medical phobias and a vivid imagination. I have an appointment scheduled with my doctor because the various articles about fatigue and napping caution that certain nap lengths and frequency can indicate underlying diseases. I’m pondering how truthful I’m going to be when I see him. He’s quite fit (younger), plays soccer, and may mention scary-sounding conditions for which he’ll order complicated blood tests. Then I’ll spend days worrying about the results.

Meanwhile, I love napping under a soft blanket, my dog by my side. She’s old, too. I often glance at her to make sure she is still breathing.

I put my hand on her back.

We reassure each other.

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I wanted to tell you about a bear I saw

The Pleiades are coming; I was always too lazy

To look up but you always did

I’ve thrown my heart out into the air

But I can’t find you

For a while I wrapped myself

In the blanket of “he’s no longer suffering”

And then, in a film, at the edge of a lake,

People sent lit paper balloons into the sky

They were making wishes--

I cracked open

I can’t re-assemble the pieces

Of my shell

You were so good to me

You saw me

Never a mean word about anyone

Smart and stubborn,

Not really ever happy

But thrilled about

Nature’s wonders

Right before the bear appeared,

Walking upright in the yard,

Wild turkeys sprang into the sky

From their slow, gawky walking

Everything that flew was drawing you

Upwards, and you

Explained flight to me,

As if there was never anything to fear

You chased eclipses, made wine,

And fixed all our cars

You’d want me not to worry now

But you knew why I do

And that was your worry, too

That there was a wonder you would miss

And that you’d have to leave those

You loved too soon

I could say I’ll make sure to

Get out there this evening

And look up at the sky

And I probably won’t

I can barely look at the world

Or hear one of fifty tunes

They talk of signs, totems,

Cardinals visiting, but

What if there’s nothing?

…….just the missing.

Binnie Klein 2025

“Ask the Mountains” audio by Vangelis

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NOTE: The audio of the episode contains music and media clips, for the fuller

experience. The written essay has been edited.

Episode 04

I am having a nightmare, and I struggle to open my eyes to escape, but it doesn’t work. The sky is darkening, and the air is thick with an imminent threat. A woman next to me says, “It’s not so bad if you lie flat. The planes miss us then.” I’m a time traveler wandering through periods of history and now, it’s the 1960s. I am with a crowd of people. We seem to be in a commune, and we are living in Cambodia. I begin to recognize people. I see Marshall and then Alan Ginsberg approaches me and vaccinates me with a huge dose of LSD. “I’m not ready for this yet!” I protest.

I ask questions; “Why do you all sit facing the same direction instead of like a living room?” They asked me, “How did this all happen?” As if I’m a seer because I’m from the future. “What about peace?” I shout as we drive around a battered city. “What happened to wanting that?”

I struggle to wake myself up, but a small, barefoot girl in a long flowery dress reaches for my hand and whispers to me, “Please don’t leave yet.”

For all its nightmarish dystopian imagery, I wasn’t surprised by some of the details of this dream; communes, LSD, Alan Ginsberg and my friend Marshall. It seemed like all my dreams lately were about the past and about Louis and the ten days we spent in Newark. I’m trying to make sense of a time that was still so haunting to me.

This dream of time travel took me back to an even earlier part of my childhood, of watching the movie The Time Machine, one amazing scene had always stuck with me. The Victorian inventor starts up his machine for the first time with what looks to be a big glass doorknob. The machine remains stationary. It’s the world around it that begins to move and there is this view outside the window of a clothing store across the street. The fashions on the display mannequin in the storefront keep changing. Hats come and go, hemlines go up and down. It’s like a flipbook of styles throughout the decades.

I didn’t have a time machine of course or a magical glass doorknob, but I went into the basement for the few pieces of clothing I had saved from the 1960s; a suede purple vest with embroidered stars, a reversible velvet hat with a long tail down the back. The vest was way too tight under the arms when I put it on, but the hat still fit.

I went back upstairs, put on some Country Joe and The Fish, sat at the computer still wearing my purple hat and started checking out TV guide listings from 1967. I spotted Coronet Blue. I remember the star, handsome, blond Frank Converse. It was a show about a guy with amnesia. He could only remember two words; “coronet blue,” and he was on this desperate search for clues about his past. The episode I found was a silly and sanitized take on student rebellion on college campuses starring a very young Jon Voight as a student activist.

The Fugitive was the show that Louis, Gary and I watched during our ten days.

We had all eagerly watched the finale of the show which aired on August 29^th 1967.

Louis was leaving the next week for college.

My husband tracked down the two-part finale and we sat down to watch it together. I didn’t know if my husband knew about the final twist, but I knew what was coming. Lieutenant Gerard was going to be revealed to be the killer.

I was shocked! There was no trick ending! The one-armed man was the killer. I had it wrong, which was very disorienting. I had thought there was one thing at least that had lodged in my brain as fact, but there it was, the video was undeniable.

My daily music ritual in those days started in the mornings before showering, before breakfast, before anything. Barely awake, I would choose an album to start the day. I could create an instant atmosphere with one drop of the needle and back then, we were all not just listening, everyone wanted to learn to play guitar, autoharp and mandolin, including me. Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Bob Dylan. I wondered if I remembered any of the songs. My old guitar was in the closet. The case was threadbare and worn. I took the guitar out and started noodling around. I’ve had this guitar since I was 14, a classical K with nylon strings. There is a faded mark on the body of it where I had glued on a blue star. The star was gone, but my original pink paisley thumb pick was still in the case. I always found the guitar a little difficult to play because it had such a wide neck.

I feel very depressed because up until some years ago I remembered how to do this. I remembered a number of songs that I would play, but I can’t make my fingers bring back the memory. I didn’t think they would ever go away. Damn it! It’s terrible! It’s like losing the memory in your body like you just became completely incompetent. There is a song that Marshall wrote, a little riff. It would be impossible to remember. Maybe he would remember.

I called my friend Marshall and asked about our playing guitars together back then and who he was listening to in those days.

BK: When did you start to play guitar?

M: Oh, I was probably 15.

BK: What kind of guitar did you have?

M: It was a little acoustic. The main thing I remember about it is that at some point, I painted it the colors of the Viet Cong flag.

BK: [laughs] I’m sorry.

M: I did. Half was red, half was blue and then there was a yellow star in the middle.

BK: Wow, signs of radicalism to come.

M: No, by then I was already a radical! That was after I started the Weequahic SDS Chapter [Students for a Democratic Society].

BK: Oh, you’re the one.

M: A bunch of us started it together.

BK: Who taught you to play? Did you teach yourself? What kinds of songs did you learn right away?

M: I just bought chord charts and started practicing chords and then started playing stuff.

BK: You don’t remember songwriters whose songs who wanted to sing?

M: Oh sure! Oh yes, I remember what I was listening to at the time. I think I was listening to a lot of country blues. I was listening to Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Lemon Jefferson and "Lightnin'" Hopkins. Then of course there was the white folk music; Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eric Andersen, Patrick Sky. Then I got into Doc Watson, and I learned some Doc Watson finger-picking pieces. Dave Van Ronk, I listened to a lot of his music and played some of his pieces. I learned “Come Back Baby.” I learned how to finger-pick “Come Back Baby.” I still can play it. I don’t play it a lot, so I don’t play it well.

Eventually I played the mystery riff for him, hoping it might spark a memory.

BK: Memory is coming in dribs and drabs, but I’m going to play you the little tiny fragment and you can tell me whether it triggers anything.

M: Okay.

M: Well, I’ll tell you two things. First of all, that did not sound half bad at all.

BK: That didn’t sound bad? [laughs]

M: I’m being serious. That did not sound bad. That sounded like a guitar player playing a little riff on the guitar. I did not write that nor did I teach it to you. Oh god, I wish we weren’t on different coasts.

BK: I agree. We would work on these pieces together!

M: I know! It would be so much fun getting together and making music.

BK: Oh please, it would be incredible!

BK: I’ll let you get back to your life, Marshall.

M: This is my life!

After I hung up with Marshall, I picked up my guitar and kept strumming. Although I had been trying to retrieve more memories of the actual ten days in the Summer of 1967, I hadn’t gotten quite as many as I had hoped. I still didn’t know why my parents let me stay away so long, how I got back and forth to Newark and where we were staying.

Marshall had one conviction, Louis had another. I still wasn’t sure. I started to form the chords for Richard and Mimi Farina's [Mainline Prosperity Blues lyrics] “Good morning, teaspoon,” a song about cocaine. As I started to sing the lyric, “Give me back my brain,” I got a familiar, uneasy feeling and I needed to stop.

Concert footage was still on the TV. “Please turn that off. Please. Please turn it off.” It was a woozy feeling, a physical one, a feeling of dread that brought me back to a time of too much happening too soon, too fast, of things spinning out of control.

I remember being at a Jefferson Airplane concert in Boston in the Fall of 1969. Just a few months prior, the band had played at Woodstock, the epitome of what the peace and love movement represented.

Four months later, the Airplane played along with Rolling Stones at a concert in Altamont that turned dark and ugly with an audience member being killed.

At the Boston show, I’m sure I was stoned, as was most of the crowd. The band was very fired up, defiant, singing [Volunteers] “Now it's time for you and me. Got a revolution.” Suddenly, a dancer came out from the wings proudly marching across the stage, stomping. She was virtually naked wearing just a see-through American flag. It was exciting. I had never seen anything quite like it before. Now it seemed like anything could happen and I felt afraid. Would everyone wind up on the stage naked? How would it all go? I remember telling myself, “Be cool, be cool.”

Although I had misremembered the ending of The Fugitive TV show, one memory had always been clear and painfully accurate. A few days after that last episode, Louis left for college and I was devastated. Gary retreated back to his darkroom and I returned home to my senior year in Fords, New Jersey. We all dispersed. Our idyllic time together had ended.

Even though Louis and I promised to write and visit, I was dreading our separation, but I told myself the same thing I did often in those years that followed; “be cool, be cool.”

There are two more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk

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I was fourteen and in high school in Newark, New Jersey, when my older sister’s male friends brought Beach Boys albums into our lives. They’d been bringing Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Mississippi John Hurt, Bob Dylan. These long, lanky boys with wild hair and radical politics and tight jeans were teaching me guitar, and I was transfixed by them. But why were they bringing The Beach Boys? We were the bridge between beatnik and hippie, and the Beach Boys’ wholesomeness was as conventional as the neat wave of their hair; nice, preppy boys holding a surf board, goofing around, singing about station wagons and girls.

“Listen to these harmonies – don’t worry about the words,” my mentors said. “The harmonies – they’re brilliant!”

I pretended to get it, because the boys also brought me the Tibetan Book of the Dead, On the Road, Siddhartha, and marijuana. I was just a kid, but they paid attention to my creative side, and they moved through the world with so much more confidence than any girls I knew then. I wanted to be them.

Maybe the little “Surfer Girl” who “made my heart come all undone” was a code for something deeper, and these boys were deciphering it. Maybe the Gidgets and the surfers had secret wisdom. Maybe Moondoggie (the Peter Pan cutie who lives on the beach) had life hacks to offer, and a special understanding of nature from riding the big waves (after all, Moondoggie had his own spiritual advisor, “The Kahuna,” played by Cliff Robertston). We were in land-locked Newark, and could use a little transcendence.

Then there was that… plea… in Brian Wilson’s voice. Was it sadness I heard? “There’s a world where I can go /and tell my secrets to /In my room /In my room.” What would he have to be sad about? Was it just teenage angst? Weren’t the Beach Boys a totem of the comforting postwar bounty and gosh-darn-it enjoyment of life?

Watching “Love and Mercy,” (2014) the dramatization of Brian Wilson’s life, genius, and unraveling, the faces of Paul Dano and John Cusack express more concentrated melancholy in two hours than I could have imagined. It turns out Brian had a lot to be sad about – an abusive bully of a show-biz father, atypical brain wiring that threw him auditory hallucinations, the wackiest in-house psychotherapist imaginable, and an irresistible internal pressure to create new musical sounds. He spends hours in the studio, waiting for the ‘vibes’ to be right. He assembles classical musicians for rock music (ahead of his time), uses barking dogs, whistles, theremins. And truth be told, the Beach Boys never surfed..except for cousin Dennis, who died in a drowning event!

When Brian Wilson was working on the groundbreaking “Pet Sounds,” Mike Love, the outsider cousin, said “Gee, even the happy songs sound sad.” And the brothers tried out Brian’s vision for a time, singing those high, bittersweet odes to a vision of America, of youth, of cars and surfboards and bikinis, but with these new weary, lost tones. “I’m a cork on the ocean” Brian sings over vibraphone and organ in “Till I Die” from “Surf’s Up” (1971) About the song, he wrote: “Lately, I'd been depressed and preoccupied with death…Looking out toward the ocean, my mind, as it did almost every hour of every day, worked to explain the inconsistencies that dominated my life; the pain, torment, and confusion and the beautiful music I was able to make. Was there an answer? Did I have no control? Had I ever? Feeling shipwrecked on an existential island, I lost myself in the balance of darkness that stretched beyond the breaking waves to the other side of the earth. The ocean was so incredibly vast, the universe was so large, and suddenly I saw myself in proportion to that, a little pebble of sand, a jellyfish floating on top of the water; traveling with the current I felt dwarfed, temporary…”

Why two actors, some have asked about “Love and Mercy.” Paul Dano plays Brian in his 20s, producing music, taking LSD, soft, puffy, and awkward, driven by the sounds in his head, both musical and otherwise. John Cusack is the non-productive, reclusive Brian of the 1980s, twitchy, fearful, under the thumb of an unscrupulous doctor. He’s ultimately rescued by love.

I think you need at least two actors to channel all the Beach Boy Grief – we were young once in a way that we’ll never be young again – innocent and silly, just riding the waves and taking a spill now and then, falling in love and wearing matching shirts and making music with our families like nothing bad would ever happen. So much went dark and confused in the 1960s and 1970s. Woodstock, the gentle peace festival becomes Altamont, the violent nightmare, and the swirl of psychedelic music and perception led me far from Newark, and a lot of us ran with the wolves for a time. Brian was saved by celebrity shrink Dr. Eugene Landy, from bed and crippling obesity, but then tormented by him, over-medicated into a child-like obedience and fear of the Daddy who wouldn’t just ground you for taking the Woody out for a drive – he could have you institutionalized.

Paul Dano shows the pre-Woodstock Brian, innocent, experimenting, full of wonder at the notes he saw when he tripped, hopeful that his brothers would come along for the ride and create something completely new and utopian. John Cusack is the post-Altamont wreck, damaged, and bloated by over-indulgence and isolation. No one can know where he’s been, and no one can go where he is.

Listen to their high plaintive voices. I can hear it underneath the beautiful, accomplished harmonies. Fun never sounded so eerie.

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I can’t believe I’m living in this house with Louis. We made out at a friend’s birthday party only a few weeks ago and now we’re sleeping together every night in a grownup queen-sized bed.

I take a loaf of Wonder bread out of the breadbox as Louis pads in on white, athletic socks. We have the place to ourselves for at least ten days and it feels like we’ve been here forever. I’m excited all the time. There’s not much bread left. We’ll have to do an A&P run and get more and maybe some whitefish salad and coleslaw.

Gary is sitting at the vinyl upholstered dinette in the corner of the kitchen smoking a Lucky, head-deep in a book. Louis and I are the mom and dad. Gary is like our child.

Louis opens the refrigerator and retrieves a jar of golden-brown spicy mustard and hands it to me. I pull out a butter knife from the drawer and carry our bounty to the table. I lay out the bread in a wordless ritual. I’m generous with the mustard. It’s my own recipe. .

From a back bedroom, Country Joe and the Fish croon. I feel dreamy and content. “Tonight is The Fugitive,” I say. Louis squeezes my hand. “Ten o’clock” Gary says. “Two more episodes!”

Louis looks over at Gary. “I think I’m going to drop acid for the final episode.” I let go of his hand and stand up. We were finished with our mustard sandwiches. They go down quickly.

“I want to read you something” Gary says. We head into one of the bedrooms and sit cross-legged on the bed. Gary picks up his tattered paperback of Harlan Ellison stories and begins to read his favorite story. “Repent harlequin said the tick tock man.” Gary’s voice scares me a bit.

I’m watching and listening, but very aware of my position on the bed. Do I look good? Louis is stretched out near me. I want them to think I am smart, that I get it, that I get why this science fiction story is everything and why Harlan Ellison is a genius. I’m not sure I fully understand the story, but I know they like it because the harlequin is a revolutionary.

Gary reaches the part where jellybeans are raining down onto the crowd below. It’s an anarchic act meant to fight the tyranny of time and it’s just about the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like I’m in the middle of an animated dream. His voice is getting faster.

Is Louis looking at me? Is my hair falling right? Louis is leaving for Goddard College in a few weeks. I feel like we’re trying to stop time for a bit. Gary and I are dreading it, but I can’t show it. My most important job as a teenage girl is to be cool.

I’m not that comfortable on the bed. I shift and lean back against Louis’ skinny body for support. The Country Joe album ends and although we can hear the sound of the stuck tone arm gently riding the last groove on the vinyl, none of us move.

I met Louis when I was 16 years old. He was my first love. He was a skinny, gentle kid with thick glasses. Even then he was known to be a deep thinker and passionate about social justice. In August 1967, we would spend ten days together that neither of us would ever forget. Our friend Gary was there too, always taking photographs. I still have them.

Since learning of Gary’s death, I had immersed myself in photographs and memories of those ten days. I imagined myself back there and tried to sort out what I could like whose house were we at? Our friend Marshall lived just a few blocks away. Was it his house? His father was living elsewhere with a new wife and Marshall had the house to himself, but Louis had always insisted that we were at Gary’s.

Marshall: No way! No way! The photographs you have of you with your head in Louis’ lap, that was my backyard! There was the shed.

Well, that’s Marshall. We met up in New York recently and talked over omelettes near Grand Central Station and I had the recorder running.

M: It doesn’t make any sense. You went into the den where the TV was and watched whatever that show was.

BK: The Fugitive.

M: I can’t remember what it was, but it was something that you wanted to watch on TV. You were there! You guys were there! You stayed in my mother and fathers’ bed.

BK: Wherever we were, Gary’s, Marshall’s, we made it our house and lived like a little family.

Eben: You know I never asked what the quality of those ten days were. Were they heaven on earth? A mixture of hell on earth?

That’s Eben. I knew him back then as a sweet 15 year-old-boy with blond hair and glasses, now a therapist and musician. We spoke by phone after he responded to my Facebook posts of Gary’s pictures of Louis and me from our ten days in Newark.

E: It sounds idyllic.

BK: It was idyllic. I remember Gary being very focused on both of us. It was as if we were creating some kind of a new family. It was very safe, and it was very beautiful.

E: I think you really hit on something there. I think you’re absolutely right; for Gary, his friends were his family, and this was like an extension of it or a development of it. It would have been so meaningful to him. I think that’s why, when people went away, for him –

BK: It was the worst.

E: Yes, I don’t think I would have said that it was abandonment, but I think he experienced it as that. I think you’re right on the money with the analogy to family.

BK: Do you think that Louis was finding another family too?

E: No, maybe. I think Louis had really a much more intact, together sense of self and psychology. I think Louie was generally a pretty solid individual. I grew up with Louie, but we were never necessarily that close. We were neighbors. He lived across the street from the school. I would see him. He had a bound to him. Do you remember that; his long-legged gait?

BK: Yes.

E: The first step was almost a leap like let’s get into it. Let’s go! He’s another guy that I have very sweet feelings about. He was never rough or insulting or someone hard to deal with. I never felt anything negative about him.

Louis once told me that we didn’t like each other when we first met. In fact, it was when Tom Hayden had come to Newark to organize the first SDS chapter. I don’t remember much about Louis from that meeting. What did stick in my mind is Tom Hayden sitting on the floor and seeing the holes in his socks. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t.

According to Louis, we met again at a party and that’s when something more momentous happened between us. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I called on Eben’s extraordinary memory to fill in the missing details. I didn’t remember that he was there.

E: Well, all I can tell you about that evening is, as good as my memory is, I can’t tell you how I got there. It must have been Marshall or Louis or somebody who said, “We’re going over to Steve’s. His parents won’t be there … birthday.” I wound up there and Louie was there, and Marshall was there, and you were there. I don’t think I knew you. I don’t remember coming with you or who brought you.

But what I do remember is that, at some point, you were upstairs, and the guys were talking about who was going to be going up to – I don’t know, fulfill some mandate, a manly mandate that apparently you were on board with. Now, I wasn’t on that list, which is a good thing because I would have jumped through a window and kept running.

BK: Why? You would have been scared?

E: Oh, absolutely, yes. I think I was 15 going on eight at that point. If I can remember, and I think I do remember this well, Louie was wearing his traditional – everybody had a garb. Marshall had the work boots and they weren’t dungarees, but heavy pants that had a thick cuff that bunched up around those yellow/orange boots.

BK: White t-shirt.

E: Do you remember those work boots?

BK: I do now.

E: I had to go out and get a pair based on loving them so much because Marshall wore them. Louie was wearing his denim blue shirt and his slightly darker dungarees, thin as can be with a mow type-haircut, his black hair coming over. At some point, I don’t know what happened, Louie was the one who ascended the stairs.

BK: The one that I chose. Let’s just insert here that I don’t have any memory of this, but I’m assuming, you know, you put things together. Louis has more of your memory. He remembers, but I don’t recall going up to a bedroom and summoning Louis to be with me.

I didn’t want to believe that I was this confident little New Jersey Lolita. It seemed like some other girl was being described. I hid my shock and embarrassment with frequent laughter while Eben told me the story.

On top of all this, I found out later that Louis had dropped acid that night.

E: At that point, I know I wasn’t doing any kind of substance other than maybe chunky peanut butter. Louie came bounding down, his hair mussed, that “Moe” haircut (3 Stooges) was all over the place. His shirttail was out a bit and he was smiling like “mission accomplished.” I might have misinterpreted what all that meant, but I believe he achieved manhood.

BK: (chuckles) I’m so sorry to be laughing.

E: No, no. Again, maybe these are just my projections.

BK: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so because when I’ve spoken to Louis in the past, he has referenced that. It’s just that I don’t remember the selection, but I know it happened. I don’t remember it being that way like who got to go upstairs and be in the bed with me.

What I certainly know is that there was some kind of making out, if you will, and there was something achieved, but not of the magnitude that he might have hoped. What’s funny is that you said that Louis then came down the stairs triumphant as if he had scored and that I know isn’t true. I’m not saying it isn’t true that he did that. You’ve got a brilliant memory about these things, better than any of us so far, but what I’m saying is, there was nothing to celebrate, not very much. Not very much.

E: Well apologize to Louie if I’m off on this, but the impression that he gave or wanted to give or maybe later gave was that it was more.

BK: Wow. I don’t think you need to issue any apologies. He is so aware.

E: I would have done the same thing!

BK: Well, of course!

I jokingly dubbed Eben my “Memory Man.” He had such a keen recollection of Newark families and street names and stores and teachers. I hadn’t known Eben all that well when we were young. I was getting to know him now. The same group had been important to us both and that group was shrinking. It was the news of Gary’s recent death that had brought us together.

E: It’s somewhat frustrating. Gary passed away only months ago and had you had the opportunity to have his input, it would have been illuminating, but it’s gone.

In the following days, Adele’s song “Hello” blew up. All I heard in my car and stores was “Hello. It’s me. I was wondering if after all these years, you’d like to meet to go over everything. I’m dreaming about who we used to be when we were younger and free.”

More and more comments began to appear under the photo of Louis and me on my Facebook page. Several expressed a similar sentiment; “You have to write this story!” “Tell me more!” that kind of thing. This interest urged me to continue with the story, but I realized I was already in the middle of writing.

Eben had given me some other names of people from Newark and I had set up more phone interviews.

I had begun researching Newark from my years at Weequahic High School and the civil unrest of 1967 which had been just one month prior to my August visit and those ten days. That seemed to stand for a whole world of youthful longing and hope and loss, a sealed sanctuary where my past and even my younger self could be captured and preserved.

One night, I was putting away some things in the basement and I found a small box marked “jewelry and repairs.” Inside were broken pieces, necklace parts and earrings and charms. I pulled out a small circle that looked familiar. It had a peace sign inside simulating the look of stained glass, ringed in gold, but not real gold. I remembered wearing it as a teenager on a very long chain thinking it looked cool that way.

I brought the charm upstairs and looked for another long chain thinking maybe this could be my talisman while I continued going into the past. I found a chain curled up, unused in the back of my jewelry drawer and attached the peace charm to it. I slipped it over my head.

There are three more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk

Coming next in Episode Four of Ten Days in Newark - what did we all listen to? What about concerts? Getting out the guitar….

You can read and hear Episode One, in which an unexpected letter sends me into my 16 year old self and my first love….and Episode Two, in which I learn about real life in the Weatherman collective from Marshall. All episodes have both audio and text, and audio has extra bits!

My friend Marshall said that he spent a lot of time trying to convince me and my best friend Barbara to have sex with him when we were teenagers. I don’t remember that part. He says he was the boy who was always the friend, a source of endless frustration. I just remember him as a warm and funny kid.

The morning after learning of Gary’s death, I wrote to a friend who had invited me to a local temple’s Yizkor service and asked that Gary’s name be added to the list that the rabbi reads of those who have died in the previous year. Marshall immediately came to mind. He would have wanted to stand beside me at the temple when Gary’s name was read, but Marshall was in California, which I had only learned a year ago. I actually hadn’t seen him since 1969 and that wasn’t a very pleasant meeting.

By the fall of ’68, I’m now a student, a college student. I’m a freshman at Boston University. I wasn’t there very long. I was there for three months and dropped out. A lot of people were dropping out. I had this female friend who was also dropping out. We got this apartment and then we lived there at least another year.

Scott (my husband): You’re a year away or a couple years away from high school, but it seems like you left it completely behind you.

BK: Do you mean the Weequahic crowd?

SS: Louis, Marshall and Gary, you weren’t connected with them by the time you got to Boston.

BK: It seems like everybody just dispersed. I didn’t know where Marshall was and I didn’t know where Gary was. I didn’t know where my friend Barbara was.

SS: You had no idea Marshall was in Boston?

BK: It was completely weird the way that I discovered Marshall’s presence in Boston. I was hanging out at the student center. I don’t even think I was a student anymore. Friends were with me.

Then I spot this group, this circle of people sitting. They just seemed very serious, different somehow than the rest of the people hanging out in the student center. They were having a very solemn conversation in hushed tones and there was Marshall! I couldn’t believe it! There he was with the same kinds of clothes he wore as a boy in Newark. There were the stiff yellow work boots and the jeans with the rolled-up cuffs and a short sleeved white t-shirt. That was his uniform.

I walked closer and I must have called out his name in a kind of excited way and he took his solemn steps away from the group and he was not smiling. He came up to me and said, “Don’t say my name out loud, shh, shh.” Then something about we’re anonymous here and we don’t use names. He was very cold. He was not at all the loving, fun-loving boy. I thought we would embrace. I thought we would be thrilled. I thought we would laugh. I thought we would go eat something. You know, just be normal. But he wasn’t acting normal.

I know he was trying to get me interested in the political activity he was in, which wasn’t completely clear to me at that point and I was very frightened because he just seemed angry. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t want to rush into joining them. It was kind of scary. It was very shocking. Here he was this boy that I had watched TV with in Newark, a cold revolutionary and he was mad at me.

Scott (my husband): And that’s kind of how it was left for a long time, right?

BK: That was it!

SS: That was the last time you saw him?

That was the last time. It didn’t seem like he wanted me to contact him. He didn’t even want me to use his name. It was a terrible way to have to remember him.

Then there was an even more terrible thing which was in the ‘70s, I came upon an article in Esquire magazine about radical groups that quoted a 1969 headline from The Chicago Tribune: “Police altercation with activists.” A sentence leaps out at me naming Marshall as a 19-year-old Weatherman seen crawling away with gunshot wounds. I didn’t know if Marshall was alive or dead.

I had heard rumors about him running a taco stand or being in Cuba. I’m not sure why I didn’t try harder to find him. I did feel a little estranged after the way we left things in Boston. He obviously didn’t try to find me. I always assumed he was disappointed in me for not becoming more radical politically.

When it eventually became possible to use an internet search, I would look every now and then, but nothing ever turned up. It wasn’t until 2014 when I tried a search that I finally came across something. I found a clip on YouTube from his 60^th birthday party, a little celebration of him with cakes and candles. I’m not sure I believed it at first. Could that be him?

There he was, older, but it was him, definitely him. And then I hurriedly checked Facebook next. If he was on YouTube, maybe he would be elsewhere. He did have a page, but it was very sparse, almost nothing. I thought, what the heck, I’ll send him a private message through Facebook, not really anticipating that he would check it, but it was worth a shot.

He responded! We started exchanging emails and ultimately had a phone conversation. I was so amazing to hear his voice. We were practically laughing and crying at the same time as we talked. I learned that he had been married several times and had actually been in California for 35 years, owned a restaurant, worked as a medical coder. Then he said, “Of course I was the last person to see Barbara.” “What do you mean?” I asked. Marshall sounded stricken. “Oh god! You didn’t know? I can’t believe you don’t know. She committed suicide.” Everything dropped inside my body. Marshall was very shocked that I knew nothing about Barbara’s death. He just assumed I would have known about it.

The last contact I had had with Barbara was in 1974. We exchanged letters. She had written to me about her life as an aspiring actress and some of her struggles with depression. Then we had a visit and it didn’t go well. From what Marshall had said, it wasn’t so long after that that she died. I was flooded with guilt and worry that I had done something wrong.

We had been such a tight little group; me, Marshall, Louis, Gary and Barbara. We had all loved her. Marshall felt terrible about having to be the one to tell me the sad news. It was hard to recover, especially over the phone.

He went on to say that he was retired now and was able to do some traveling. I was then thrilled to find out that he already had made plans to come East with his girlfriend, so we arranged a visit.

When they drove up to my house in the rental car, I was excited and nervous. Marshall walked towards me, arms out-stretched and we embraced. “I don’t see Binnie,” he said. I could have dropped to the ground in despair, but I kept it together. What did he mean? Was I so completely changed? No small essence of the 16-year-old girl he had known?

I still had all of Barbara’s letters, even notes and doodles from grade school and I had pulled them out in anticipation of his visit. I had also arranged to interview him about his time with Weatherman. I always knew if I ever saw Marshall again, I would want to ask him about it. I had no idea really what his experience had been like and this was my chance.

It was a nice day, so we sat out on the deck. I told him about the bad visit with Barbara and my fear that I had somehow let her down. He felt guilty too and described a visit from her in California. She was depressed and called him from her motel room one night very upset. He went over there and stayed for hours trying to comfort her, but eventually, he had to go home, and she had assured him she wouldn’t do anything to harm herself, but she didn’t keep that promise.

I read him a part of Barbara’s letter from 1974 where she recounts a story from 1969. She wrote: “I was sitting in a film class and before class started, I was looking over the newspaper and read that Marshall had been killed in Chicago. I called the place where Marshall was staying, and he was fine and told me that he had given his identification to some other weatherman.”

Barbara and I had gone through the same shock and worry and misconception about Marshall, but she was able to check on him right away. After hearing what Barbara had written, Marshall clarified that he was in Newark at the time of the shooting in Chicago. He and Louis were actually recruiting for Weatherman before leaving for Boston to officially join their collective.

Barbara had also referenced this in a letter. She wrote: “I was living in an apartment in North Newark and one day, Marshall and Louis and their women, two obnoxious black leather jacket chicks who came in and tried to talk me into coming up to their Boston Weatherman collective and fighting for the revolution. Gary was at my apartment at the time and, unhappy at school and wanting to be around Marshall and Louis, went off with them.

Louis was so bitter. I hardly recognized him. And Marshall just started at me with these hurt eyes.

The two women kept screaming at me for being a bourgeoise revisionist. I ended up kicking them out of my house. It was really a very painful experience.”

When it was time to start the interview with Marshall about Weatherman, I asked him about this run in with Barbara in Newark that she had described and the encounter with me in Boston.

I started by asking Marshall questions about why he joined this radical organization.

M: What I thought at the time when I was 19 and 20 years old was that I was the one who was putting my money where my mouth is and the rest of you were poseurs and that’s why I was such an asshole to you at the time. Of course, it was completely wrongheaded of me.

BK: Why did you join Weatherman?

M: I wanted the world to be just and fair and equal and I wanted the world to be organized along those principles and I became convinced, through a series of accidents and arguments that the idea of bringing down the current order and creating something new at almost any cost was not only appropriate but necessary and essential.

You know, I think there was an element of guilt to it. Part of it was a sense of vast possibilities, but part of it was a sense of desperation and guilt that said, okay, it is necessary that we give everything that we have, including our lives, to try to create the world that we want to live in. That can create a certain kind of fanaticism and blindness to reality.

I think that people in my generation, a lot of us basically were kind of driven crazy by the War in Vietnam and by racism. We saw the war as being so evil and we saw what was being done in our name as so evil and we spent years trying to stop it and we couldn’t stop it.

At a certain point, we just decided that we had to stop it even if the only way we can stop it is by throwing our bodies in front of this machine. We would have done anything. We would have done anything, and we felt like we had to and we owed it to the people of Vietnam. We had this vision of history and what was going on in the world and it demanded of us that we do anything to try to bring down the machine.

BK: Give us a little bit of an idea of what it was like to be with a collective. Literally, what was the physical, daily experience like?

M: It was horrible! It was horrible. There was no privacy. You were supposed to be living up to this revolutionary ideal and we were supposed to be trying to create the “new man” and “new woman.”

One of the mechanisms that we happened upon to try to do this was something called “Criticism, Self-Criticism.” If you can imagine the old encounter sessions where you would stay up for 24 hours in a room with people. Well, imagine that, but the entire time it’s directed at improving one individual person in the room and showing them the error of their ways. Most the time that I was in Weatherman, my primary motivation was trying to avoid being the focus of Criticism, Self-Criticism session, which I pulled off. I was successful at it.

I’ll tell you one story of the worst thing I ever saw in Weatherman, and I was part of it. I did my best not to be involved, but you had to be involved otherwise they would turn on you. I sat through a Criticism, Self-Criticism session of this guy who, admittedly was an asshole, but nonetheless, somehow went through this night-long Criticism, Self-Criticism session about what was wrong with him and how uptight he was.

Somehow, we ended up at a place where it was decided, probably by the women in the room, that he was hopelessly uptight and repressed and that the way to fix his problem was for him to masturbate in front of us, 24 of us. We made him do it and he did it! That was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen in my life! I lived in such terror that something like that was going to happen to me.

I spent most of my time in Weatherman staying in the shadows, not saying anything too controversial. If you were too complacent and you didn’t participate enough, you could become a target at that point. It was a very fine line. You had a balance. I just tried to be a good functionary and do what I was told and not make waves and not get in trouble because I didn’t want this to happen to me.

When I got to leave to go to Cuba and escape that level of madness, I felt very fortunate and very free.

Other than that, you were hungry a lot and you were tired a lot. You’d get up every morning and scrounge around in this big pile of clothes and try to find something that fit you because you weren’t allowed to have personal possessions. You couldn’t have clothes or books or anything that belonged to you. You had no money.

Brown rice and vegetables was a big treat. That was good eating. I did learn to be a very good panhandler and a very good shoplifter.

You got to get laid a lot, but it was sort of anonymous. I didn’t really like having sex in a room with 24 other people. There was no privacy. You weren’t allowed to have personal space. It wasn’t a lot of fun.

BK: Let me tell you a couple of things and you tell me whether they’re true. They took away your books.

M: Oh yeah! They took away everything! You weren’t allowed to have personal possessions, so whatever you had was gone.

BK: Separated couples.

M: Oh yeah. I joined Weatherman with my girlfriend from college. Monogamy was considered a sin, right up there with capitalism. You weren’t allowed to have one-on-one relationships. You weren’t allowed to have monogamous relationships.

Another thing that happened towards the end was there got to be this big thing that if you were just heterosexual, that meant you were a bourgeoise, uptight person. There was a lot of pressure for women to have sex with women and men to have sex with men. I managed to avoid that as well.

There were certain things that I decided – not that I was going to stand up and say, “This is wrong. I’m not going to do this.” But that I would find a sneaky way without exposing myself of getting out of it.

BK: What about this one: everybody get naked and take acid together.

M: Oh yeah, yeah. Although, again, I can’t remember whether I pretended to take it and I pretended I was high or what, but I was not going to do that, but I was not going to say no. I managed to survive that.

One of the best times I had the entire time I was in Weatherman was we had several houses, which were apartments. Somebody had lived in an apartment and then, all of a sudden, 12 people were living in this apartment. We had three of these scattered around. There was some reason why everyone had to be in this one apartment, but they needed one person to stay in this other apartment so that the cops wouldn’t bust it or something like that.

I wrangled that because it was going to be a night that I could be by myself! They let me do it. I remember I went out and I panhandled enough to buy a quart of chocolate ice cream and I went and bought this chocolate ice cream and went to this apartment and sat there by myself and I ate it! It was one of the best nights!

BK: You radical you!

I was relieved; the cold, judgmental revolutionary was gone! My childhood friend Marshall was with me. The visit had been rich and bitter-sweet. “There’s Binnie!” he said at one point looking at me. “Something in the mouth.” We played guitars together. I still liked him.

Marshall had been the one to tell me about Barbara. And now, a year later, it was my turn to deliver some sad news about Gary. I emailed him a note with the obituary.

Later that day, I went to the Yizkor service at the temple. The rabbi read Gary’s name. I stood up.

Gary in a Newark backyard with kitten, 1967

There are four more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk

Coming next in Episode Three of Ten Days in Newark: I travel back in time to my ten days at age sixteen, living with Louis and Gary, unchaperoned, eating mustard sandwiches, watching The Fugitive, falling in love, and creating a safe, ersatz family before Louis’ departure to Goddard College. I talk with Eben, another Newark friend who was there the night of the neighborhood party when Louis dropped acid and shared my bed.

You can read and hear Episode One, in which an unexpected letter sends me into my 16 year old self and my first love….

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As I lifted up the over-sized art book, I could see that something was sticking out of the middle of it. I hadn’t actually opened the book in years and so I had no idea what was tucked inside. It was an ornate and handsome book about Leonardo da Vinci, part of a carefully arranged group of objects on the top of a console table in my kitchen.

The small glimmer of plastic that I spotted turned out to be a see-through folder of black and white photographs. They are photos of me and a boy named Louis in the tall grass of a backyard in Newark New Jersey, where I grew up. I am 16, he is 17.

The photos are old and worn and I must have stuck them in the book to flatten out the corners. But why had they suddenly appeared now?

I look so tiny, not just young, but my body is so small and compact. I am wearing a shirt with rolled up sleeves. I don’t recognize it. Is it his? I’m sitting on a blanket and Louis is stretched out with his head in my lap. He has big, thick glasses on and my fingers are stroking his face.

I remember my worn, brown loafers and my long, straight brown hair. I haven’t had long hair in ages. Everyone had long hair back then. This was 1967 and the straighter, the better. Some girls used to even spread their hair out on an ironing board and then flatten it all down with a hot iron.

There was a photo of another boy too, our friend Gary; curly-haired, sitting cross-legged tapping tobacco into rolling papers. It was rare to see him in the photos. He was always the photographer.

In one picture, a tiny kitten is perched on Louis’ shoulder, but I couldn’t recall its name. There is a cowboy hat tossed on the grass nearby, Louis’. He always wore it during that summer in August.

I was shocked at my seductive pose in another picture, stretched out on the ground looking teasingly but knowingly at the camera. The mood of the other pictures, so somber, so serious. If these pictures had a soundtrack, it would be a cello Adagio mixed with Jefferson Airplane, at least that’s what life felt like to me back then.

I brought the photos into another room. These photos were from a special time in my life when I had come back to Newark for what I think was ten days to stay with Louis in a house. I guess my parents let me. We were no longer living in Newark, but Louis was and Gary was.

I kept looking deeper and deeper into the pictures and tried to remember where we were staying. Was it Gary’s house? Was it our friend Marshalls’? Maybe we stayed there. Marshalls’ mother had died, and his father had moved out with his new wife leaving Marshall on his own at 15 and so he had the place to himself.

It’s hard to look at the pictures because I am not her anymore and there is a part of me that feels like I never was her. She looks so unformed. I think I love her. I think I love that girl. I know I loved that boy. I miss that girl. I miss that boy. But in some strange way, I fear them both.

It was only a few days later when I arrived at my office to find an unusual envelope mixed in with my pile of mail. The address was inscribed in a very familiar handwriting with distinctively tiny cursive characters, I recognized it right away as being Louis’ handwriting. So here was Louis again; Louis cowboy hat boy in the photos I had just found. I hadn’t heard from him in years! Why now?

The letter inside was written on the same type of long-lined yellow legal paper and ballpoint ink that he had used when he wrote me love letters when I was 16 and 17, but I knew that this letter was different from the very first line; “He sipped his coffee from a glass, not a cup, not a mug like his Russian grandparents and mine.” And somehow I knew then that Gary had died.

“Droplets would cling to his mustache. Crumbs would shelter in his beard; tangled, untamed, quintessential. Decades ago he stopped wearing his glasses because he just decided to. He squinted into the light, his vision clear, even if his eyes were sometimes not. He moved slowly, but with deliberate pace. Flannel shirt and wool cap, even on the warmest days of summer. He used to wear my old clothes, dungarees with worn out knees recycled. He sat with me in silence, sharing space and history.”

So, our dear old friend Gary had died. Gary, a strange Newark boy, kind of a wizard, kind of a brilliant hermit. Gary, the witness to our young love that summer. A fixer, a loner, a misfit.

The letter described how Gary and Louis, both living in the same town in Upstate New York for many years had lost touch over the past summer, which was very unusual. They used to see each other just about every week. And then later, Louis found out what had happened. Gary had died of lung cancer in June, “peacefully,” as it was described in his obituary.

Gary had smoked all his life. I remember the Lucky cigarettes and him filling and rolling and turning them. Louis wrote: “A thread has snapped and you of all the people I know understand that because innocence ends, because you loved him and how I was so focused on you and you on me, while he was focusing on us.”

I read the letter over and over. There was this bit of the dreamy past to savor. I wanted to read it and I wanted to think it and I wanted to feel it over and over; that girl and that boy and Gary, who had been this third friend that whole time, the summer in Newark and how incredibly sad I felt that he was gone. I knew I would have to call Louis.

I drove home from my office, Louis’ letter tucked into my appointment book. I put my bag on the kitchen counter. I fed my dog. I walked around the house, turning on lights. I was nervous about calling Louis, but I also wanted to get it done.

I got into my study and took the letter out of the envelope and rewrote his telephone number on a Post It. My husband wasn’t home yet. It was a good time to call. I punched in the phone number. Louis answered, and I recognized his voice, but it was dark and low. The last time we had spoken in 2001, he was more upbeat and familiar, and we had reminisced, but this wasn’t a call for memories about us. This was a call about Gary and about death.

“God!” I said. “I am so sad.” “Me too,” he said. The phone connection wasn’t good, and I was straining to hear Louis’ voice. He talked about how Gary fixed computers at the school and there were people who cared about him. I was so relieved to hear that. Gary had always been an outsider, bullied as a kid, odd, but he had found a place and that place was right where Louis lived.

He was supposed to help Louis put up a backyard pool this summer for Louis’ children, but Gary had been sick. He had lung cancer. He deteriorated in a few months. Eventually, he was in hospice. Every once in a while on the phone, Louis and I breathed together in the pauses or said, “Wow!”

Then there was a change in Louis’ voice as he said, “I didn’t just call to tell you Gary died. I also have a request.” He began by describing a woman who was organizing a memorial for Gary and I couldn’t quite understand who she was; a girlfriend, Gary’s landlady, a special friend. She had gone into his basement apartment after he died and found pottery and origami and photos. I didn’t know Gary did pottery. The woman was planning a memorial at the college where Gary worked.

I wondered what Louis’ request could be. Was he going to ask me to come? No, that wasn’t it. He asked if I could send any photos Gary had taken or ones with Gary in them. It sounded like they wanted my originals. There was no mention of scanning or digital. Louis didn’t sound very tech-oriented in general. “I’ll send them back,” he said a bit impatiently when I hesitated.

I was given this very sobering task. That helped organize me because after we hung up, I felt a bit overwhelmed. There were so many memories. I also felt disappointed. It was as if I were 16 again and was expecting something from Louis when we talked.

Even though this was just a request of me and the delivering of sad news, I felt a bit worried or embarrassed because our connection was so bad on the phone that I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I felt like this old woman who couldn’t even hear anymore. I was starting to feel like wow, I really am old! This was just like, I’m old. I’m old. I’m looking at these pictures and Gary had died, Gary, my age, you know? I’m old.

I knew I had scrapbooks high up in the closet in my study and I brought down the one that I thought would have more examples of Gary’s work that I could send for his memorial. I found photos that Gary had taken of me in Weequahic Park in Newark during a serious photo session. One staged shot captures me in a field of wildflowers.

I remembered spending time with him in his darkroom as he developed his photographs; watching him in that red light turning the paper over and over in the liquid bath with long tongs as the black and white images slowly came to light. I can almost smell the chemicals. We were quiet together during those times. I think he was smoking, but I don’t know if he would do that in his darkroom.

Looking more closely at the photo, it actually doesn’t look like I’m surrounded by wildflowers. It’s really more a field of weeds and I’m holding one up that has a little flower-like thing at the tip and I’m looking down at it and it is a weed, which strikes me as funny because it’s just like the pictures in the backyards of Newark that in my memory were teaming with lush vegetation, but it’s really just that nobody ever mowed their lawns.

I pick up the pictures of Louis and Gary and some of that backyard grass. They look like they’re having a quiet, meditative moment or are deep into one of their discussions about science fiction, Marxism, existentialism. I must have taken that one. Gary’s shoes are off and he is wearing those thick white socks.

Louis always wore them too. I can picture Louis coming into the bedroom wearing them. I remembered the bed we slept in and how we always kept our underwear on. Louis has said that we would marry someday but wanted me to know upfront that he would be a revolutionary.

I had intended to stay on task for the memorial, but I got all caught up in that hazy feeling I’ve had at other times in my life when I start to look at mementoes from the past. I just felt completely flooded because there was so much to see.

One picture is face down. I turn it over and it’s Gary alone in the backyard and he’s holding our kitten. It makes me cry to look at him. He’s so young and so sweet looking. He’s in his cross-legged position on the tall grass and he’s just petting the kitten. He looks like a young poet. His hair is curly and bushy. I can see in the near distance these tall hedges around the edges of the grass.

The last time I spoke to Gary was in 2001. He said that he liked fixing things and didn’t go out much. “Biiinie!” Gary said in that voice that stretched and twisted syllables; “Biiinie, we got ooold!” You maybe, I thought. Maybe you did.

My husband came home. My back was aching from sitting on the floor. “My old friend Gary died,” I said. He picked up some of the photos. “I’m sorry.” I picked all the photos and letters off the floor, slipped them into a few manila folders and headed off to bed.

As I lay there, I thought of how Louis had said that he couldn’t remember Gary without remembering our ten days in Newark in August 1967. I felt the same way. I closed my eyes. I would dream of all of us as I slept.

There are five more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk

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Ritual and Radio

In the Fall of 1968, for almost three months until I dropped out of college, I woke daily in a Back Bay Boston dorm room on a twin bed in a room shared with three other girls. The building had historical grandeur, but the room was a minimalist barracks – we each had a twin bed, a bureau, a bare-bones desk, and a metal wastebasket. Although I was a night-owl, I often managed to wake before the others. I’d tip-toe over to the record crate where we kept our shared collection and quietly flip through the vinyl LPs and choose a song that would usher us into the day. Music had this very high and precious vibration in our young lives, like something generated from another galaxy, and with one drop of a needle on the turntable, I could influence the atmosphere for the day. If I selected “Follow” from Richie Havens’s Mixed Bag, we were guaranteed familiar melancholy and possibly even tears, while “Good Morning!” by the Beatles from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, set a gentler, optimistic tone for the day. What a gorgeous range even just one crate of albums provided! Donovan’s “The Sun is a Very Magic Fellow” from Hurdy Gurdy Man was a morning dose of mystical love that couldn’t hurt you, but if I was feeling mischievous, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones from Beggars Banquet, with its opening of insinuating bongos, was a siren call to make trouble. I could pull out Joan Baez’ first album, and get us all medieval with “Silver Dagger,” her amazingly angelic voice pulling us up towards the sky. I wanted to be Joan Baez. I wanted to be Joni Mitchell, and her song, “Chelsea Morning” from Clouds was the essence of sweetness and another way to kick off a day. Or I could turn to Simon and Garfunkel, the gentle philosophers, with “I Am a Rock” from The Sounds of Silence.

I loved creating the morning’s soundtrack. It was satisfying to watch roommate Connie get out of bed in her long flannel nightgown with the bra underneath, “in case there was a fire,” and rub sleep from her eyes to the psychedelic sounds of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” from Disraeli Gears. She was from the Midwest, a virgin, the square of the group, and probably would have preferred listening to Peter, Paul and Mary, or even “The Hills are Alive” from the Sound of Music.

I could put mischief in the air.

My limited audience would occasionally expand to three and a “half” roommates. Anne lived in a different dormitory, and while the other three were my official college roommates, Anne was my real hippie sister, with her long wild blond hair like uneven straw from a barn stall, a suede jacket with fringes, and cowboy boots. Poking my roommates with wake-up music was harmless, but Anne and I, like a lot of other young women in the sixties, got caught up in what we called “free love” that was really just reckless sex, mostly with strangers. In the category of other experimentation, I recall an unintentional crazed overnight spent after smoking pot laced with heroin (I thought I could hear the trashcans having a sinister conversation outside an open window); inter-state hitchhiking; bad LSD trips; energetic marches against the war (likely the most wholesome of the activities); and ultimately dropping out of school. I was seventeen when I moved to Boston from New Jersey, and I was unprepared for college, particularly in this era. I was a wild child and my parents never really knew what to do with me.

As females, we fancied ourselves bold trailblazers—little did we know how disempowered we were. Anne and I shared a boyfriend, and our college adventures would soon take a turn when she got pregnant from her times with him. We had an awful misunderstanding, a falling out, and after she moved back to Philadelphia, I never saw her again.

Eventually I returned home to New Jersey, moved to New York City, and ultimately, Connecticut, where I had some family, and where I discovered a freeform radio station (WPKN) in Bridgeport and started my life’s long-term love affair with alternative radio. My audition tape got me a show, and I was thrilled. In the early days, I’d lug bags of my well-worn vinyl album collection up the three flights of stairs to the radio studio to get on the air for my Saturday morning shift.

Now there were thousands of albums at my disposal, dwarfing my old one-crate of LPs from those college days. Like all the other programmers, I served as my own engineer. I was armed only with my thermos of Earl Grey Tea, and my fervent desire to share music and poetry with my newly expanded audience.

I turned on the transmitter at 10 am (amazing; we’ve been 24/7 for years now) and began my early Saturday shows with “Good Morning!” by the Beatles, which seems incredibly obvious and corny now. As the years went on, I played less of the old albums, still choosing to weave some of those older favorite and influential songs with newer musical discoveries. It was particularly satisfying to start adding spoken word to the mix, and guest interviews. For me, radio is an audio gallery of potential juxtapositions—what you put next to what—via the wondrous concept of “segues.” Good segues bring gooseflesh and shivers.

I am alone behind the microphone, but in a zone of intimate connection, talking to a miniature world, hoping at least one person is listening, watching the time tick down in readiness for the next song. Sometimes, during a live show, I might have 20 seconds to run down the hall to the record library for just the perfect track to follow what’s going out on the air in the moment. Freeform radio allows hosts to create something personal; above all human--not just like playlists generated by one of today’s streaming services. I treasure it.

A Complete Unknown

I played a fair amount of Dylan on the early radio shows. His music had been a constant in my early teen years and beyond. I first saw him live in 1965 at the Mosque Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, where I grew up. It was the tour where his second half of a show was electric, and people sometimes booed. I went to see the new film about Bob Dylan’s early career, A Complete Unknown, which focused on that transition. I always liked both the acoustic and the electric, but I also understood the sorrow and confusion the purists in the folk movement felt.

The movie was filled with musical performances, and I felt emotional early on, as I seemed to still remember almost every word of the Dylan songs that were featured. I sang along in my head. There they were, insistent and fresh. It doesn’t appear in the movie, but I did have a particular favorite Dylan song that ticked all the boxes in that morning dormitory ritual, something sensual but not threatening, percussive but not slamming, lyrical but accessible, “She Belongs to Me.”

She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back
She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black

The song appears on Bringing It All Back Home, an album whose cover I used to examine as if I were conducting a semiotic study. Who was the figure in the photo with Dylan? Dylan album covers with females were particularly compelling. That one was Sally, the wife of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s then manager. Dylan’s influence on me was like his personality – inscrutable, mercurial, teasing, sad, silly, and full of references to decipher. We knew Woody Guthrie’s influence; we knew some of the fabrications Dylan used in creating his early persona; we knew his wardrobe of vest and hats; and we knew his amazing and prolific talent for storytelling. We knew his sullen glances. We knew about his relationship with Joan Baez, and we imagined which songs were about her. Even in later years, when extensive biographies and memoirs came out, I still wanted to keep him mysterious, like he was my wise, reserved analyst, or rabbi. I could never get through the academic critiques of his songs, or his own revelations about himself. We came to know a fair amount, but what did we really know? Everyone winds up with their own transference to him. He’s built on his ability to draw projections. Maybe that’s what celebrity ultimately is.

It might be hard to understand how I could envy the array of women who were “not treated well” by Dylan, as shown in certain scenes of the movie. I didn’t know any better. I was consumed with hormones in the early years of my fascination, and eager to be chosen by a cool boy, a bad boy. In retrospect, as much as I envied those women, I think I really wanted to be those boys, be where the power and the adoration of the crowd was. I guess I wanted to be all those things; the muse and the artist, the free spirit, a figure of fascination and admiration. “She Belongs to Me” was a perfect song to accompany putting on Anne’s cowboy boots, borrowing her fringed jacket, and sticking my clove cigarettes in the pocket. This was the song to lead me to my next adventure.

You might love, hate, or doubt the veracity of A Complete Unknown, but watching this Dylan film helped me connect more dots for my own life, and reminded me of the power of lyrics themselves, especially ones that expressed such a generational and political connectedness.

When I came home from the movie I pulled out the Dylan albums. I looked at the covers. That morning music ritual in the dorm, of which Dylan was a part, had something to do with my becoming a radio programmer. Singing along in my head, in the theater, I felt a rush of something like embarrassment and loss at how much his early lyrics had haunted me throughout my life, as if my younger self was more important than my present one. I also felt a bit remiss in not following his later songs more closely.

I had more listening to do.

This stack was originally posted by for BordoLines on March 24, 2024. As Bordo’s sister Binnie Klein gets her new OpenTuning stack under way, we thought reposting this would be a fun way to get readers familiar with the unusual story of Binnie’s “third act” as a songwriter.

The story is an interview between two sisters with additional commentary by Susan.

Susan: This past week (March, 2024), an album of gorgeous new songs—“The Quiver”—was released. I’m listening to it right now, dazzled. Most of the lyrics and some of the music were written by my sister, . It’s the premiere album of an indie music project called “In These Trees and Tartie,” and it’s been Binnie’s inspiration, baby, object of devotion, and culmination of years of work. Australian singer Tartie is the vocalist and wrote most of the music—but don’t ask me what “In These Trees” means! Maybe Binnie can explain.

Please allow me to kvell.

Binnie: Yes, please do kvell! And I’d love to explain the project title. For years I’ve been pinning a post-it-note to various bulletin boards where I’ve lived – it’s from a poem by Robert Bly called “Solitude Late at Night in the Woods” and has the phrase ‘’the body is like a November birch facing the full moon/And reaching into the cold heavens/In these trees there is no ambition’”– a notion that is ironically soothing to me, since I’ ve always been pretty ambitious and conflicted about that!’

Susan: What a beautiful image from the Bly poem. But let’s put your conflict about ambition on hold and enjoy my kvelling. This album! Wow!! But I’m not surprised. In a sense, this album has been brewing in you since you were a teenager. Simmering at times, bubbling over at others. And now it’s cooked and ready to be served up. After decades that took you other places—a career as a brilliant therapist, a D.J.of a popular music show on WPKN, a memoir—what looks like a “reinvention” as a songwriter is actually a return. “Ripeness is all,” right? This fruit was ripening all your life.

In our family, we all loved the power and relief of words. But we all had our different ways with it, and there were a lot of unrealized dreams. Our father Yosh’s brilliance at Scrabble and the New York Times Sunday crossword (in ink!) was legendary. And those eloquent love letters he wrote to mommy during WWII, quoting famous writers! Our family inheritance—from him, our eldest sister Mickey, our own childhoods—is full of journals, early experiments, fragments of writing-to-be. Most of them were forced by life circumstances to remain fragments.

You and I were luckier—or maybe more determined, or maybe more desperate—to find room for a writing life, despite the obstacles.

Somewhere along the line—was it because I was praised for it by teachers, was it because it was my way out of shame (for being fat, for being “too sensitive”), was I was living out my father’s unrealized ambitions?—I began to feel most alive when I was analyzing, explaining, talking back. The others branded me as stubborn. I didn’t feel stubborn. I felt anxious and misunderstood. But now, arguing with my daughter I see myself in her. And I now think maybe I was stubborn.

You were always a poet. Unlike me—leaping out of bed every morning to shove my unconscious into submission—you allowed it to have its way. You remembered all your dreams, wrote them down, and transformed them into something more mysterious, magical, delicate, and evocative than argument. Your poems were published, won prizes. How does she do that? (I often wondered.) Where do those images come from?

There’s probably a lot of reasons I was drawn to writing poetry, but it can be summed up in the title of the first poem I wrote, which our father kept in his bureau drawer for years: “Loneliness.” I was a moody kid and I’m a moody adult. I have a permeable psyche. Images intrude, first lines of poems, endless observations that I experience as pressing for expression. Then, too, I wished I could have been a popular cheerleader.

Yeah, you and me both. Wasn’t in the cards. And neither was what we started out wanting to do with our lives. If we’d had any financial resources to fall back on, I know I would have pursued a career as a movie critic. I’m pretty sure—am I right?—you would have continued to center your creative life around poetry.

Depends on how far back you go. As a child, I wanted to be a ballerina or an actress. But I decided I’d do better getting an English degree. I dropped out of college in the era of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, then bounced around as a typist but always writing poetry. Finally finished school and went off to Smith College School for Social Work. The career as a psychotherapist suited my interest in dreams and promised (via private practice) the lure of autonomy.

And I became a university teacher (philosophy—there was no cultural or media studies in those days.) We loved and were good at those “day jobs.” You were—and still are—an extraordinarily attuned and inventive therapist. And I was a pretty great teacher, especially when I was helping students to discover what they really wanted to think and write about (often very different from what was prescribed by other academics.) But we both strained against the suppressions of our own creativity demanded by our jobs, and were always working after hours on other projects. For me, that was mostly unlearning academic habits in my writing. For you, it was mostly keeping the poetry alive through music—and your radio show. How did that come about?

I had visited the radio station WBGO in Newark during some grade school trip. It was the kind of old-fashioned station where they produced radio plays and I was fascinated by the “foley” work (that’s how they do the sound effects…little sets of stairs, coconut halves for horses’ hooves, and so on) and being behind a microphone. Throughout teenage years, I was soothed during many a sleepless night by witty, sophisticated late night DJs on WBAI – Bob Fass, Steve Post….and on WNEW, Alison Steele ,“The Nightbird,” who played whole album sides. Music was my companion.

I thank my parents, who, like many immigrant parents, were otherwise pretty exhausted and uninvolved, for buying a used piano and setting up lessons for me. Mr. Levy came to the house for a few years, and I worked on some Mozart sonatas along with sheet music for Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan. A major influence were the long-haired hippie boys who hung around our apartment playing guitars (Mississippi John Hurt, Tom Paxton, Jesse Colin Young). They taught me some chords, and I got my first guitar, a Kay classic acoustic. (I wanted nylon strings because steel were so hard, but this guitar has an especially wide neck. I still have it.)

To those who know you as a therapist or through your radio show, this new life as a songwriter will seem like a late-life reinvention of self. But to me, who has known you all my life, I see it as a glorious coming-out party for poetic Binnie.

But I want to talk a bit about some of the songs. So many seem to be about either holding on or letting go and starting afresh. You begin with “Orchard,” which I take to be about a relationship that’s over but just won’t let go; you’re ready to “let all the fruits fall down,” but he/she/they—damn them—just won’t let it happen, won’t leave the orchard.

This is such an interesting observation! I think “they” won’t let it happen because I am haunted by their ghosts. I thought at first, in the songs about a particular early heartbreak (Orchard and Sky, Ocean), that the love without closure, the ‘what might have been’ was standing in my way, making me a victim. But after a while of working on these songs, I can see that it was a “co-creation.”

Can you be enmeshed with someone with whom you are separated? I was, until I realized that it was a way of trying to revive my teenage self, her spirit, her sexiness. That didn’t exactly happen! But something else did – I became a songwriter, and I met incredible musicians and developed a bond with my collaborator, Tartie, that is like no other.

.

Tartie is an accomplished singer/songwriter living in Australia who sent me some of her songs for possible airplay on my radio show. I found her voice transporting and very special. So, along with saying “yes’ to her submission, I made a shy inquiry for her to take a look at some lyrics I’d written. “I’ll have a go!” She wrote back, and pretty soon there was an astonishing rendition of “Orchard.”’

It was our first full collaboration, and in producer David Baron we found a most supportive guide. My husband and all-around genius Scott Shapleigh created a storyboard and we found an animator online who did the video. I sent more lyrics to Tartie, and she always came through with gorgeous melodies that enhanced my lyrics.

We were on a roll. So when David said, “You are both really prolific, and there’s such an interesting backstory here…why not do an album?” It was “of course!”

Another of my favorites is “Hailstorm,” which is also—although in a more whimsical, delighted mode—about the “stickiness” of relationships.

This song was such fun to write! And you’re absolutely right; about the ‘stickiness’ of relationships. This song is lighter than some others….a line that didn’t make it to the final version: “thinking of you—I thought of you” is actually my favorite! I adore the images Scott came up with to accompany the lyrics in the video. I love Tartie’s melody and of course, her voice, and the later background vocals from Jen Kreisberg (formerly of Native-American trio Ulali) who brings her signature wailing sound to the production. How lucky was I that she lives in Connecticut?? We got together at her favorite recording studio to get her vocals for “Ablaze” (our climate change anthem) and “Hailstorm.” Thank you, Jen.

At the “letting go” end of things, I love (and can’t stop dancing/bouncing to) “Quiver,” which is full of imagery of opening up, recovery, freshly vulnerable, “budding.” I just love the word itself—“Quiver”—and am really glad you made it the title of the album. But why did you? Or would you rather just let people associate on their own (poets liking mystery and all that…)

Oh yeah, people! You mean people will actually be listening to these songs??? Hold me!

I’m here, darling. Always.

❤ As to the song’s title, and the title of the album, I literally awoke one morning with the word “quiver” on my lips. I said it aloud and went over to the computer. Let’s leave it like an inkblot image! But I will say it’s meant to be positive; and convey the overcoming of obstacles and fear.

And then there’s “Shapes of The Things to Come,” which could easily be applied to the “ripening” and moving forward that is this album: “Why won’t you just move with me through the new shapes of the things to come…We’ll tell our sweet story. We’ll build a better place” The “s” in shapes is perfect—open-ended, multiple. No end to this story.

I’m so glad you like that one. Its meaning still confuses me somewhat. I know that people are in some ways desperately seeking signs of hope in what I consider to be a broken world. I guess it’s a wish, a fantasy.

I love the fact that you can be confused by the meaning of your own words!!

My own fantasy is that everyone reading this will get the whole album. I know our older sister, Mickey, who died in December 2021, would be sending compact discs all over the world if she’d lived long enough to see the project born. I’m glad she did get to hear—and adored—the first two songs.

As soon as I had rough demos of the first two songs, I brought them to her house. The surprise and delight on her face! Everybody knows siblingships are complex. Looking at your sib is sometimes like looking in a funhouse mirror of yourself. But both of you have been the most steadfast supporters of any and all of my creative efforts, and for that I am forever grateful. I hope I’ve been the same.

Absolutely, both to the support and the fun-house mirror of sisterhood. Someday we should do a piece on that! We have some stories to tell….

You can say that again! Hey, and by the way, Thank You! And, um, do you still have those earrings you borrowed?

Sisters don’t “borrow,” babe. They steal.

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Website: In These Trees

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Bandcamp: www.inthesetrees.bandcamp.com.

Virtual CD Booklet here.

This won’t be the most political Substack, but it’s hard to imagine saying, thinking or writing anything these days that doesn’t reflect the upside-down Bizarro world of Superman comics we’ve moved to. So I can tell you where my first post’s title (You’ve Got to Shake Your Fists at Lightning Now) comes from, as I try to catalyze out of inertness and depression brought on by a growing climate of hate, wars, and disinformation, trying to find humor and joy to share with you along the way.

As a radio DJ, new songwriter, and baby-booming child of the sixties, I’ve always loved Joni Mitchell. Bringing home a fresh album (yes, vinyl) and spending a whole afternoon on my single bed with the Indian bedspread, listening and reading the liner notes often made for a perfectly good day; often an inspiring one. In my Substack I’ll be sharing the history of my musical taste, offering recommendations, and celebrating the freeform radio format which allows me to express and curate the items of a VERY long-term relationship; a marriage of sorts, to a great non-commercial radio station, WPKN, out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I work it all out. I’ll post some of my radio playlists, and I’m sure there will be other surprises!

But to start, I’ll zero in on a recent phenomenon, which is that Joni Mitchell came back into my life like a powerhouse and a time machine, and she inspired my Substack’s name: OPEN TUNING (she’s known for her alternate guitar tunings). It’s not that she ever completely left me, but there were a few eras and albums where we were on kind of a break. I never fully embraced the jazz explorations she did, although I’m sure I’m probably missing out on some very special arrangements. There is still time.

I couldn’t be more thrilled that this goddess, this genius of lyric and melody has returned to attention, and that younger folks might be having their own Joni experiences. (If you’re unfamiliar with the Joni renaissance, cruise YouTube for celebrations, Brandi Carlisle tributes, and documentaries.) Joni is still singing! Yes, her voice is deep and slower, and the once graceful flower child walks with a cane, but you can still feel the wit and sensuality and passion.

What happened specifically to me that connects to Joni was that I became a songwriter in the last few years. I’m sure my lyrical sensibility and piano playing have been influenced by her. Although I’ve been writing all my life (poems, essays, a memoir, etc.), I’d not tried songwriting before my unexpected collaboration (I’ll recount the details in another post) with a wondrous Australian singer-songwriter, Tartie, led to an album; yes, an album of 10 songs. We call ourselves In These Trees and Tartie , and the album is called The Quiver (streaming and available on Bandcamp).

In the course of doing the requisite self-promotion for our album in today’s indie jungle, I had help from a terrific PR maven, Howard Wuelfing, who set me up with at least 25 interviews and podcasts and many reviews in just two months (the album came out in March 2024). Recently, I was invited to participate in a format/podcast, “That Record Got Me High,” hosted by music lover Rob Elba. Rob made a simple request: pick an album you love, or an album that has particular meaning, and on a given day you Zoom with Rob, who will be playing cuts from the album while you chat, and you have a lively conversation. Although my record library is sizable, and my heroes are many, it didn’t take me long to pull out my well-worn 1972 copy of “For the Roses” by Joni Mitchell. How much do I love it? I’ve got it both on vinyl and CD. The roster of Rob Elba’s previous podcasts was varied, and not particularly folk-oriented; I worried that he wouldn’t find my choice interesting. Should I have picked Procol Harum, Cream, Brian Eno, Kate Bush, or some devilishly hip electronic dance music?

Rob is an energetic musician and podcaster, and we got along very well! And here’s where we get to shaking fists at lightning. I have many favorite Joni songs (Amelia and He Played Real Good for Free among them), but Judgment of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig’s Tune) holds a special place in my heart. For Elba’s podcast, I picked For the Roses, the underrated album written in retreat, in a two year retirement on 60 acres of wilderness in Canada, when Joni was bitter about the music industry (“Some get nothing though there’s plenty to spare,” she sang in Banquet). For the Roses was sandwiched between Blue (1971), one of her most personal, and Court and Spark, her most commercially successful album. The Beethoven song moved me immensely, as it elegantly evoked another era, and the intense tale of a radical genius who wasn’t accepted in his own time. A complicated musician who also suffered a disability, he was a kindred spirit to her, and because of the rousing call to survival the song evokes, over the years I found myself listening to and playing it on the piano, while singing out the ending words “You gotta shake your fists at lightning now/you gotta roar like forest fire/you gotta spread your light like blazes/all across the sky. They’re gonna aim the hoses on you/show ‘em you won’t expire. ……” That is how I WISH I felt, right now, in December, 2024. I want to play “every chord” that I feel, and scream my contempt and disappointment “to the silent night.”

But I’m not quite there yet. OPEN TUNING is born out of grief, but powered by the unstoppable engine of hope. As a wonderful, devoted fan of my radio show, brilliant artist (Robert Reynolds) once characterized that show (A Miniature World) this way: “World weary but with hope for the future.” I gave him some taped shows and he gave me a painting.

Here's the podcast about Joni with host Rob Elba!

Back to early days: I acquired a classical nylon string Kay guitar when I was around fourteen, when the older neighborhood boys took me to NYC to pick one out. They were teaching me basic chords and finger-picking. My musical education then grew beyond piano teacher Mr. Levy’s Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, extending to Mississippi John Hurt, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Joni? Well, Joni I reserved more for the piano, and there’s a good reason for that. Joni’s guitar-playing was like a trip to an alchemist’s lair, and her tools were alternate guitar tunings and mysterious things like sus chords. Although jazz musician Wayne Shorter told her “you can’t go from a sus (suspended) chord to a sus chord,” she rebelled against that dictum. “These are chords of inquiry,” she said, implying that they built with her lyrical content, and they would eventually resolve when the story was good and ready! I love that way of thinking. Folksinger Eric Anderson taught her a couple of “open tunings,” she has said. “Once I got the openings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. My writing began to come.” There was another, more personal and poignant motivation for learning all this – Joni had polio as a child, and it felt her with some muscle damage in her left hand. It was difficult for her to play a simple “D” chord. Her way to overcome that was genius. She took a deficit (the polio after-effects) and went from simplicity to complexity and soared above limitations. I have always been fascinated by people who survive hardship and come out the other side with something unexpected.

In prepping for my podcast with Elba, I knew references to Joni’s open tunings would come up. I started to go deeper; maybe it was time, although I was and am intimidated by the whole topic. So I reached out to a wonderful friend over in Japan – Stephen Faulk, classical and flamenco guitar builder. What was it all about? And was it true that it could be harmful to the physical construction of the instrument? Boy, did I go to the right source. Check out his thorough and beautiful deconstruction:

From the workshop of Stephen Faulk:

“I imagine Joni Mitchell as a tea or coffee drinker who noodles in the morning or late into the night, working the grips on her guitars tuning machines. Does the fact that she uses lots of different tunings make structural stresses on a guitar? My best guess and opinion informed by looking at and building guitars with non standard tunings is probably not much. Guitars are built to withstand a great deal of string tension, in particular steel string guitars, and the majority of non standard tunings have to do with lowering the bass end strings which lowers the tension, and raising and lowering the treble side strings. Most of the tunings you can arrive at by mixing up a combination of half step and whole step adjustments to the pitch of a string.

Structurally the guitar over time could have problems with the neck. It could bend forward under tension which reduces the viability of playing because it makes the action too high, the strings become difficult to pull to the fingerboard. This is no fun, but the situation can be routinely remedied by skilled guitar repair technicians. Usually changing the pitch of certain strings a half step here a whole step there does not drastically compromise the structural integrity of a well made guitar. Of course if you were to tune all the strings up a half or whole step across the fingerboard over time sustaining the extra tension could damage the guitar. But in the musical reality of the realm of non standard tuning systems lowering some strings is usually the play.

Is it possible to break, bend or tweak a guitar with different tunings ? Sure it’s possible, as possible as it is to damage a guitar with standard tuning. So what’s the big deal? The situation with Joni Mitchell’s tunings is that she routinely employs a dozen or more in regular rotation in her song writing. It simply causes the problem that in a performance setting she has to either constantly tune and retune her guitar, or have several guitars available on stage to change to when playing songs that have very different tunings.

During performances retuning the guitar constantly doesn’t so much pose a structural issue for the guitar, but the strings get cranky and difficult to keep in tune when they are constantly retuned to different pitches. Strings are somewhat elastic and stretch and retract when exposed to hot and cold environments, or are retuned. They require reaction time to stretch after being retuned, and even the heat generated by stage lights on the spot the performers are standing in can cause the strings to expand and constract. (Steel strings tend to expand under hot stage lights and go flat, while nylon strings contract in hot lighting and go sharp.) The performers with songs written in a myriad of tunings have their hands and ears full all the time retuning and listening to make sure under all these conditions that the guitar stays tuned to the tuning they want to sing with. For Mitchell this is a big work load as she uses so many tunings.

In 1995 Mitchell reduced the workload of her alternative tuning management by enlisting the help of a guitar maker who devised a clever solution. He created an interface which is driven by Mitchell’s playing on a single guitar which triggers a sampled synthesizer output changes the tuning automatically. She can play on a regularly tuned guitar, and it’s converted into an alternate tuning she uses by a switch that selects that tuning. Her guitar stays in one tuning while she performs, which is an easier workload to maintain, and magically through the techno-mage gadgetry of a guitar sound engineer expert, the sound coming out of the speakers is a perfect emulation of one of Joni Mitchell’s many personal guitar tunings.”

Thank you, Stephen!

Now here’s a juicy upcoming event: On February 20, 2025 I’ll be airing and interview on WPKN at 11 am on my radio show, A Miniature World, author Paul Lisicky, about his upcoming release Song So Wild and Blue: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell, publishing on February 25, 2024. Paul says:

"Song So Wild and Blue is both a love song to Joni’s Mitchell’s music and the story of how it’s shaped my creative vision. Part memoir, part biography, and part siren song, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for hard-core Joni enthusiasts, aspiring writers, and those seeking a deeper understanding of the scope of her imagination.”

Although there are many biographies of Joni, I’m particularly curious about Paul’s, since it is a very personal appreciation of his feelings of emotional connection to her music.

(Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World and The Narrow Door. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative at Rutgers.)

My next Miniature World radio show on WPKN.org airs Thursday, December 19, 2024, 10 AM - Noon, and is archived for two weeks after that.

I look forward to hearing your stories of Joni discoveries, favorite tunes that have rocked your world, anecdotes about terrestrial radio, and suggested topics for me to write about.

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