Steel Train, a band of brothers — OK, classmates — from northern New Jersey, began in the proverbial garage and now is on the fast track, with late-night spots on David Letterman and Conan O’Brien.
The band’s concert tomorrow night at Webster Hall in Manhattan marks another 2010 accomplishment. Already this year they’ve released their third full-length CD, “Steel Train,” played at Radio City Music Hall, and performed their single “Bullet” on the Late Show with David Letterman.
The Steel Train nucleus had modest beginnings. Jack Antonoff of New Milford and Daniel Silbert of Tenafly first crossed paths in elementary school at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County in New Milford, where they also met Evan Winiker, whose family moved to Teaneck in time for him to begin the sixth grade at Schechter.
At 90, Bernstein used to be, and still is, a number of other things: a music promoter, a family man, an author, and — most notably — the impresario who brought the Beatles to America and organized their landmark Shea Stadium concert in 1965.
Long retired from show business, and semi-confined to his 19th-floor Upper East Side apartment with troublesome leg ailments, Bernstein has found a new vocation: nourishing his house plants with baked goods.
A potted plant next to his living room table bears the remnants of snacks past. Bits of éclair hang from the leaves, discarded embers of pastry suspended above a graveyard of napoleons, bagels, and various unidentifiables.
Turns out Old King Cole is still a merry old soul. In the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades' newest entry in the Professional Children's Theater Series, "Princess Fiona Escapes From the Shoe," a young princess finds herself in Fairy Tale Land. Spurned by the Littles (Bo Peep, Jack Horner, Miss Muffet), befriended by an Itsy (Bitsy Spider), and ultimately saved by the king, Princess Fiona begins the play by running away from the old woman who lives in a shoe.
Confused? You're not alone.
"Nobody else knows the story either — it's not like when you do Beauty and the Beast and everybody knows it," said Deborah Roberts, head of the JCC's School of Performing Arts and artistic director of the Palisades Youth Theater. Roberts, who is producing the play, rewrote Neil Berg's original script for her youth ensemble.
They say that the olfactory sense carries the most sentimental significance; that one smell, more than a touch, a taste, or even a sight, can trigger memories of time seemingly immemorial. Nostalgia, in this sense, is a nostril product, and smells often determine mood: A smell can remind someone, wistfully, of home, or a specific person, or a place, or even an isolated time. In my case, smell is episodic: I remember stories when I breathe in foods or places or people, and I unconsciously catalogue each smell, awaiting the next opportunity in space-time to revisit a particular scent.
Outside a tent at the Camp Bisco campground are, from left, Yisroel Jacobsen (Passaic), Joseph Leichman (Queens), Yehudah Charytan (Queens), Yehuda Katz (Far Rockaway), and Aryeh Moskowitz (Washington Heights). Photos by Yehudah Charytan
A recent Saturday offered a cold, overcast sky and intermittent fits of rain to thousands of Hunter Mountain campers. A little before noon, while most of Camp Bisco's revelers donned muddy sweatshirts and reported to the concert stage, a considerable contingent stayed behind at its campsite. Like John Goodman in "The Big Lebowski," this group doesn't roll on Shabbos.
Where there is improvisational music, especially on the east coast, there are Jews. Venues all over New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Hoboken are crawling with people wearing yarmulkes and knee-length skirts, as well as other, less conspicuous Jews, who often feel compelled to talk to or compliment the more observant sect. Summer music festivals, especially, have become a haven for musically inclined Jews to interact, since the environment has a deep-rooted spiritual bent. Plus, with just a modicum of forethought and planning, it is easy to observe Shabbat and kosher.
Ken Thimmel of All American Collectibles in Fair Lawn holds a baseball signed by famed pitcher Sandy Koufax.
In 1965, Dodgers great Sandy Koufax picked Yom Kippur as the one day on which he would not pitch a baseball game. And — since his retirement at age 30 the following year — the pitcher has made a habit of picking just one day a year to sign autographs. Fiercely private, with little regard for fame, Koufax has turned down multimillion-dollar book deals and speaking engagements with as much determination as he used to strike out ',396 batters in his 11-year career.
This year's lucky beneficiary of Koufax's once-a-year autograph signing is Franklin Lakes resident Ken Thimmel, whose Fair-Lawn based All American Collectibles purchased a bounty of Koufax-autographed baseballs, bats, jerseys, and photographs. Thimmel's 16-year-old business has a long history of donating memorabilia to charity events —"over 500 a year," said Thimmel — and it is that philanthropic spirit, he said, that helped convince Koufax to sign for his company.
"Sandy does one signing a year, at best. There are about 1,000 dealers that want to do a signing, and about 30 that have the financial wherewithal," said Thimmel. "Only [we] and [trading-card company] Upper Deck got a deal this year. They got signed baseball cards, and we got some limited edition items, including some exclusive photos that have never been seen before."
Those interested in obtaining some rare Koufax autographs can log on to allamericancollectibles.com or call Thimmel at 1-800-WOODY-64. It may be the last chance for a while: Thimmel heard that Koufax turned down a huge book deal a few years ago, insisting that he had "nothing to say."
"Sandy is the nicest guy in the world," said Thimmel, who sat with Koufax during the signing. "He just doesn't like the stardom. He hasn't done a public appearance in years. I know that Yogi Berra got him to do something, and they're good friends — and Yogi is the greatest living Yankee — but it still took Yogi three years to get Sandy to do it. But it's no disrespect to anybody."
One might assume that the last several weeks have provided a bit of respite for Tamir Cohen. The Nahariya municipal worker, fresh off the plane from Israel, seemingly comfortably bided his time in Teaneck while chaperoning two 15-year-old swimmers from the rocket-ravaged city in northern Israel. Cohen took Kobi Berko and Morina Korektor to the JCC on the Palisades for swim practice and ushered them about town during their down time, while Kobi and Morina wait to participate in next week's Maccabi Games this week in Stamford, Conn.
But Cohen, whose wife and two children remained in Israel during his two-week trip, faced an unprecedented challenge on a Tuesday afternoon last week: trying to find his car in the Garden State Plaza shopping center.
"The mall is really, really big. I think my wife would like it more than me," said Cohen in heavily accented English. "It's also very complicated. You can lose yourself, and it's not easy to find the car."
Before he came to the States, Cohen's biggest worry was finding his car — or any car —on Nahariya's streets. He said that the city, usually teeming, was a "ghost city" when Hezbollah rockets were falling unpredictably. After the first attacks, Cohen brought his two young children to stay with his parents in a safer location, while he and his wife remained in Nahariya to work.
Having already committed to chaperone Kobi and Morina to the Maccabi Games, Cohen left with the two youngsters, and his fair share of reservations, early on Sunday morning.
"I didn't want to leave my family during this war, but we scheduled to come to the Games before [the war started], and I didn't want to disappoint Kobi and Maorina," said Cohen. "I'm having a good time here, but my heart is there."
Kobi, who has been swimming for four years, was happy to be in America for the first time, and especially to be competing in Connecticut. "On the one hand, I want to be in America, because it's safer, but, on the other hand I want to be with my family," he said in Hebrew. Kobi added that he talks with family every day.
When asked last week how things would unfold, Kobi answered — without specifying if he was referring to his hometown's plight or his swimming — with just one word: "Nitgaber," we will overcome. Perhaps he meant that, after his next trip to the mall, he would find the car.
If golf was once considered an "old man's sport," it certainly shed that label in '00', when 9-year-old Luke Edelman first began to swing a 9 iron. Now 1', the Franklin Lakes resident is the No. 1- ranked golfer in his age group in Bergen County, and has won six tournaments.
Like most golfers — and kids — his age, Luke's favorite player is Tiger Woods. But Luke wasn't a golf fan in '000, when Tiger won the U.S. Open with a 1'-under-par '7', and beat the rest of the field by a stunning 15 strokes. "Golf was an old man's sport then," said Luke, who attends Saddle River Day School.
On April 4, Jamie Adler took a day off and decided to spend it playing poker. He paid the $5 buy-in, and kept on winning until a '8-player field whittled to Adler and just one other player. Adler "popped two pair, went all in," he related, and won himself a seat at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
Adler, who lives in Tenafly, started playing poker in college. A casino denizen since high school — "We had the worst-looking fake ID's ever, and we'd go down to Atlantic City and play blackjack and roulette" — Adler didn't dabble in Texas hold-'em until much later. Once he started playing, though, he started picking up how to read the other players, even over the Internet.
"Real-life poker is a lot different from Internet poker, but not completely different," said Adler, '4. "Even though you can't see a player's face [on the Internet], you get a lot of reads on their betting patterns."
Matthew Konigsberg did not swim in the Hudson River in the New York City Triathlon, but his mother is not at all pleased. Konigsberg, who was featured in this space on June ' ("A fish in dirty water"), suffered a spinal compression fracture and fractured his right ankle while training just outside of Safed, when he fell down a 40-foot ravine in northern Israel. While he suffered no permanent damage, and will be fully recovered in a couple of months, Konigsberg is still on the mend, and was nowhere near ready for the July 16 Triathlon.
Konigsberg, a Rutgers University law student who lives in Hoboken, said, "My parents weren't happy about the Hudson River situation, but I don't think they are happy about what happened either. Of course, this entire ordeal was traumatic for them too. My parents have been the best nurses, driving me back and forth to doctor's appointments and such. They were very upset that I fell and am injured."
