Paul Kornbluth

"A product," he'd always describe himself, "of the Jewish working class of the Bronx."

My dad, outside Larry’s Broadway Beet bodega in 1977.

When I was a child, my father, Paul, used to wake me by suddenly appearing, totally naked (save for talcum powder over certain areas that were prone to chafing), and loudly singing “The Internationale,” the international workers’ anthem:

Arise, ye prisoner of starvation
Arise, ye wretched of the Earth!

In my earliest years, Dad lived in an apartment on East 7th Street in Manhattan’s East Village, down the block from the projects and across the street from the power plant. I’ve been hearing for years that this neighborhood has become super-trendy, but at the time (the early ’60s) it housed people who were, like us, incredibly poor. The corner candy store was becoming, more and more, a front for drug-dealing in the back. And these were old tenements! There was one toilet for each floor; you pulled a chain to flush it. Our bathtub was in the kitchen. Many was the time I’d be happily bathing there while Dad received members of the Royal Bishops, then New York City’s largest and most feared gang, whom he was supposed to be rehabilitating in his capacity as a social worker with the city’s Youth Board. Unless this was one of the periods when he’d been suspended from that job, eventually to be fired. In which case, he’d be supporting himself by working as a mover (“Always bend your knees, my son!”), a dishwasher, a typist (110 words a minute on his Underwood Manual typewriter, which required hydraulic fingers to type a single letter) — and, when none of those jobs were available, by hocking whatever was hockable (often his Underwood Manual or his shiny round pocket watch) or selling his blood plasma.

He actually lived in two apartments on that block, one after the other. He lost the first after, as was his habit, knocking down several of the walls, to improve the feng shui (though I’m pretty sure he wasn’t familiar with that term). Unfortunately, one of those walls, in that first apartment, was a supporting wall. So, after being evicted by a landlord whose patience had finally been exhausted, he moved to an apartment in the next building, and was more careful about his remodeling. Not about fire hazards, though: Dad had a passion for stringing extension cords all over the walls, routed by ingenious holders that he fashioned from wire clothes hangers and his ubiquitous pipe cleaners. He had a large collection of corncob pipes (“because they’re the cheapest!”), which he was continually refilling from pouches of Prince Albert tobacco. I recall one moment when the fire hazard was his own arm: He’d apparently spilled some lighter fluid on it while filling his lighter, so the next time he went to light his pipe, his arm got lit as well. He took little notice of this, simply patting out the arm-fire with his free hand and going on puffing his pipe, perhaps returning his attention to fashioning a new wire-hanger contraption.

In the meantime, East 7th Street continued its decline. The corner candy store completely stopped selling candy; the shelves and coolers in front were bare, and customers briskly made their way into the back. The children on our block had for years occupied ourselves with racing our homemade soapbox cars down the street and competing with fighter kites: you’d make a kite by folding regular notebook paper over a skeleton made of popsicle sticks, attach glass particles to the string via Elmer’s Glue — then go up to a roof or fire escape and try to maneuver your kite in such a way that your glass-encrusted string would slice apart others’; the winner would be the kite-flyer with the last intact string. (I never won.) In those days, however, there was, increasingly, less playing and more out-and-out theft and violence.

Intimidatingly complex plans for building a fighter kite (https://www.kiteplans.org/planos/muk01/muk01.html). Mine were way simpler.

But my dad never lost his powerful sense of empathy for the downtrodden. Once, he and I got back from a walk to find that someone had apparently tried to steal his Underwood Manual from our second-story apartment. Alas, the would-be thief — unable, one imagines, to drag it a little farther, onto our fire escape and down the ladder to the sidewalk — had ended up leaving that enormously heavy machine on our windowsill.

Dad lit his pipe, thoughtfully. “Look, my son,” he instructed me. “Look what capitalism has done! That poor, desperate person was too weak to carry out the typewriter. This is why we need a revolution!”

And who did my father think was going to lead this revolution? Me! I was about four or five years old then, and it was the Sixties, and I knew that I had my work cut out for me.

I forgive Patrick Stewart

Haunted by the Ghost of Monologuists Past.

I haven’t had many chances to win big awards during my decades as a performer. The closest I ever came was in 1992, when my show Red Diaper Baby ran Off-Broadway and was nominated for a coveted Drama Desk Award in the Solo Performance category. Alas, the honor ultimately went to Patrick Stewart for his solo adaptation of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” This victory was achieved despite the fact that Stewart hadn’t even written the original story — nor, I must note, did his show contain any material about being raised by Jewish Communists!

But I try not to be bitter. And over the years, I’ve grudgingly had to admit that Sir Patrick has done some excellent work — and seems, moreover, to be an okay guy. So I want to state this publicly: Patrick Stewart, I forgive you! Let this blot on theater history weigh on your conscience no longer. There’s room in this world for more than one charismatic bald performer. Our feud is kaput — make it so!

Reading …

Wow, this is a super-fun book! A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters totally lives up to the promise of its title (and subtitle). One unexpected — and, ultimately, moving — thing: not only does Gee go all that way back in time, he also goes forward — anticipating the (admittedly far-away) era when human beings cease to be. Which you think would be kind of a bummer — and, okay, there is a lot of poignancy to this section. But there’s also something beautiful — and yes, even hopeful — here as well. In truly accepting the eventual prospect of our no-more-ness, not only as individuals but as a species, we can find ourselves dwelling in the delight, the gloriousness, of miraculously being gifted this brief time to be sentient beings in our awesome universe.

The end

On a recent biking-and-birding adventure, Sara took this photo of two mallards getting down to the important business of capturing their next meal. Clearly opposed to the discredited theory of trickle-down economics, they model a much more practical, bottom-up approach.