Real Music & Real Estate . . .

 
I grew up in Manhattan, next-door to where Lennon got shot. My parents run an art gallery, still. They have a place in Switzerland and New York. I ran the Switzerland office for a while.

But I got sick of New York. I’m 30, and I don’t want to live in Williamsburg and write a substack about wine. I want out of the arts game.

I want to hang around with oil men, real estate guys, or cowboys. Guys who have never read the New York Times, particularly the Style section.

I had a roommate at Penn — Schwecky from Cleveland. I went a couple times with him to Cleveland and fell in love with the place. People in Cleveland have lawns and they don’t pay $3000/month for a one-bedroom. I got myself a one-bedroom for $1200. Tricked out too. Marble countertops, dishwasher.

I’m using my nest egg (courtesy of my old man)  to buy up Cleveland. I figure I can buy up the whole East Side of Cleveland for what my parents’ NYC condo goes for.

My dad wants me back in New York. But, Pops, what can I buy in New York for 1.5 million? Gornisht. I hang around old Jews here and love it. The whole town – Cleveland’s East Side, at least – is just old Jews. When these boomers hear I’m from New York, they say, “I have a daughter in Brooklyn for you!” I smile. The girls in Brooklyn are all trying to get jobs with my folks at the art gallery.

I’ve made some errors, here, in Cleveland. Like an old Jew had me over for dinner and quizzed me on a couple things, like I guessed a milk chute is “maybe for the seltzer delivery,” and I didn’t know what treelawn means.

I’m not leaving Cleve-town.  I mean, the inner ring suburbs — like where I live — are like Hoboken. Nice. Urban. But not too urban.

When I was with my folks in New York, just going down to the deli for a sandwich was a major proposition. The crowd, the line, the elevator. I got mugged once. Eighth grade. Some kids pushed me over and took my book bag.

I don’t walk much in Cleveland. The roads here are bare — completely empty. There is infrastructure for twice as many people as there are people. My wheels:

fiction

 
I knew a building inspector who could smell rats. He didn’t have to see rat droppings; he could smell rats.

I knew a handyman who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My talent is figuring out if a tenant has skipped out or not. I knock loudly on the tenant’s door. If there’s no response, I yell “maintenance” a couple times and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and step into the apartment. A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff. TVs, for sure. Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out. Some small items are left behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills. Usually enough to fill three or more garbage bags.

The stove is fried. The refrigerator is always missing a plastic shelf. Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.  No socks means no tenant. The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are on the floor. Some good, some bad. I found a tux left behind. The guy was 6-4. I had the pants legs shortened. (He wasn’t a skipper. He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. Who doesn’t? A building manager once phoned me with on-the-scene reporting from a wrecked apartment: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

But occasionally a manager will not react positively. “I’m creeped out,” one manager told me, standing in the common-area hallway while I went into the suite. She was creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts. (Probably because she had to clean it.)

I phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone. I say, “You out?”  Nothing more that than. No lectures about housekeeping. Nobody wants to be criticized on their house-cleaning skills. 

 
Why don’t columnists write about pet peeves anymore? That bugs me.

Why do nursing-home administrators insist on peppy tunes? Oldsters sometimes want to hear contemplative tunes.

Why do eyeglass adjusters have so much power over us? Did they all go to I.U.?

Why do “highly sensitive” people insist on telling us they’re bothered by the labels on their shirts? That’s irritating.

My wife took our electric toothbrush on her trip to Columbus. The electric toothbrush is a “permanent attachments to the dwelling,” ma’am.

What about those phone calls from my kids’ alma maters? I already give zero to my own alma mater.

When my computer messes up, why I do I feel like my arm broke? Why can’t I feel like a mosquito bit my ankle?

What about friends who grow arugula and offer you some? Why don’t they grow dates or figs?

Why do symphony-goers applaud wildly after every single piece? These people nap for 54 minutes during Mahler, then give the conductor multiple curtain calls. Applaud this!

Don’t get worked up over house address signs like “The Smith’s.”

I am worked up!

If you want to discuss cars, first ask: “Do you mind if I talk to you about cars?” Yes, I do mind.

Which is preferable: (1.) “He passed away” or (2.) “He passed.” Both stink. He passed what — Wendy’s?

Who’s nostalgic for mimeo machines? Somebody should be.

 
I came down with a bad case of Anglophilia. This happened decades ago. Via the Cleveland Press, I got a pen pal from Blackpool, England.

Bleak name –Blackpool. Then my Blackpool pen pal moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and that ended our correspondence. He lived several hours away. He was of no use to me any longer.

With no English pen pal, I decided to turn myself into a Limey.

And I’ve been a Brit-by-choice ever since. Everything about Limeyland fascinates me — in an off-kilter way: shandies, tyres with a “y,” cricket, venison faggots, regattas, even the bathroom graffiti. Bear with me. Check this out:

“This is not the place to sit and slumber but the place to fart and thunder.”

“The wall painter’s work was all in vain, the shithouse poet strikes again.”

These lines were on a pub wall in Bath. The year — 1980. You had to be there, and I was. I’ve didn’t visit the grittier parts of England. I didn’t need to see that.

Oh, to be in England.

I frequently go to the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights to see films about England. My favorite  flicks are England-in-the-1950s films, like An Education and Nowhere Boy.

Clevelanders often complain about gray skies, but do Limeys? No, they don’t. They don’t get all cheesed off about rain and clouds.

Snow? I don’t think Limeys even have snow. But they would like it. I certainly do.

 
John Cermak installed a pool table, gun rack and shower in his parents’ basement. He lived down there his entire adult life. In his twenties, John drove a humpy Saab. Had to be a Saab. He showed me how to do oil changes on my car (a Plymouth Valiant) and helped me build a coffee table from pine 2x4s. We grew up across the street from each other.

John especially liked motors, fishing and woodworking, but that’s not the whole picture; he went to St. Ignatius High and graduated John Carroll University as an English major.

When I got into the landlord biz (thanks, Dad), I called John for advice on boilers, blown fuses, leaks and everything else. John was my guru of the physical world.

When John was in elementary school, he mounted a lawnmower engine on a tricycle. The guy knew everything.

John died in 1992 at age 41 from complications of mental illness and alcoholism. He could put away a case of Wiedemann’s in a day. Schizophrenia ran in his family.

A repairman called me and said, “The voltage at the cap is good.”

What’s that mean? If the voltage was good, why didn’t we have power in four suites? The man said, “The inside line, outside, is yours.”

John, you there?

 
Last month I ran into a tenant carrying an electric bass in a case. Or so I thought. Turns out he had a Stratocaster guitar. “I’m storing it for a guy,” he said.

“What do you play?” I said.

“I’m the vocalist.”

“What’s the band?”

“Home and Garden.”

[Later googled: Home and Garden is an avant-garde, post-punk band featuring some former Pere Ubu players. And by the way, the singer pays his rent on time.]

“My son is in a well-known band — Vulfpeck,” I said.

“What?”

“Vulf . . . Peck.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, I guess they’re not that well-known.”

—

I had been trick-or-treating with my grandkids in Chicago several days prior. I played clarinet while making the candy rounds. Two young dads requested a jazz tune, so I played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I can get away with Dixieland because I’m old. The dads seemed OK with it. I asked if they played music. Yes, drums and bass. I didn’t ask them if they had heard of Vulfpeck. The trick-or-treating and my grandkids — the main attraction — threw me off my kvell game.

I bet they knew Vulfpeck!

The Strattons in Ann Arbor, 2010. Random old photo.

—

This reminds me of a Cleveland Jewish News article (3/31/2000) about the father of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen:

“Would you, by chance, be a Steely Dan fan?” Beachwood resident Joseph ‘Jerry’ Fagen inquires wryly. It’s an unlikely question coming from an 80-year-old, but Fagen’s favorite conversation starter affords the opening he needs to do what any parent would do in his shoes: kvell a little.

“Reaching for his wallet, the spry sneaker-clad Fagen produces a computerized list in tiny type of the 13 albums released by his son, Donald Fagen, co-founder of the jazz-rock-pop recording group Steely Dan. His latest entry? Two Against Nature, the group’s newest release, which debuted last month at #6 on the Billboard charts.”

Full CJN article by Susan Rzepka here.

 
This essay is in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

An apartment-building manager in Lakewood texted: “Plaster just fell. Nobody died.”

I’m a landlord. The building — on Detroit Avenue — is 100 years old. I called the tenant and apologized.

In old buildings, plaster — a limestone-and-sandstone paste — is squished between wood lath and joists, and can lose its key over time. “Losing key” means plaster cracks, crumbles and goes plop. Old plaster is often compromised by water leaks, decades of vibrations from Detroit Avenue, and plain old gravity. Things sag, as you’ve no doubt noticed if you’re over 50.

Heads up: Should I replace every bedroom ceiling with modern drywall? Should I pass out helmets to all the tenants?

I like old buildings. Not everybody does. I live in a 99-year-old house in Cleveland Heights. A lot of people prefer newer construction. My parents did, for sure. They grew up poor in the Kinsman neighborhood, and when they moved to South Euclid in 1951, they insisted on brand-new everything. Then, in 1973, they moved to an apartment building – also brand-new — in Beachwood. My parents didn’t want raindrops (from roof leaks) or plaster falling on their heads.

When I was young, I thought people in Beachwood – or, say, Solon, Westlake or Avon — were on the wrong track, with their in-vogue housing choices. Apparently not everybody aspired to be an elitist architecture snob like me. I’ve since mellowed on the subject of housing. To each his own.

Plaster fell onto a barber’s chair on Detroit Avenue. The barber rented a street-level storefront from me. The barbershop owner, Al, told me no one was injured. “But what about next time?” he said.

Good question. I thought about giving Al a reduction on his next month’s rent. The dilemma was how much of a reduction. Al is an Iraqi refugee who has seen more than his share of falling things. He worked at a commissary for the United States military in Iraq.

The plaster in the barbershop ceiling had been slowed in its descent by first hitting modern drop-ceiling tiles – those stippled white acoustical tiles you see when you look up in a barber’s chair, or at a dentist’s office. The drop-ceiling tiles at the barbershop camouflaged the original plaster ceiling. Acoustical ceiling tiles are cheap at Home Depot. I stockpile them. I gave Al half off his rent. Settling — money and plaster; that’s part of my job.

A second-floor tenant, above the street-level storefronts, called.

More bad vibrations? He called during a Browns game. He said, “People are literally stomping above me, on the third floor. I’m having heart palpitations right now. I’m calling the police. If I die, it’s on your head. I was pressing my arms over my ears so hard it took the muscle off the bone by my upper arm.”

“Have you tried earplugs?” I said.

“I had tubes in my ears as a child. I’m not sticking anything foreign in my ears.”

“I’ll send the manager right over,” I said.

“Don’t send her. She tried to kill me.”

“When?”

“Three years ago. She tried to force me to drink a beer. I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

“Is your ceiling shaking right now?”

“It’s rattling badly.”

The Browns lost. Does the team have any extra helmets? The sky is falling.

 
I was at the Fuji Rock music festival, where I hung out with British lads — guys in their twenties. I was at Fuji Rock, in Japan, to see Vulfpeck. The lads were from Leeds.  Japan was so hot, the lads went bare-chested and drank a lot, and were amusingly, obnoxiously inebriated. Jimmy, on meeting a genuine VulfDad — me —  bear-hugged me and said, “I’m the stickiest man you ever met!” It was 95 degrees. The sweat.

Booze, Brits and heat.

No sane tourist visits Japan in July, when Fuji Rock is. The lads repeatedly mentioned how “warm” it was. (Leeds people say “warm” to mean “hot.”) Jimmy said, “There’s moisture everywhere.” He schlepped around a four-pack beer caddy. The humidity was Houston-level.

The Japanese — they can handle it. They don’t drink much in public (except at salaryman bars) and don’t complain about the weather. Air conditioning is generally “low” in Japan, on purpose, to save energy. Another thing, off subject: Japanese restaurants play quality background music — sometimes even Coltrane — on low volume. And everybody talks quietly in public places.

The Brits: total aliens.

—
The above is autobiographical fiction. Yes,  I was at Fuji Rock but I didn’t hang out with Brits. However, I later watched a video about Brits at Fuji Rock. The vid is cued up below. Check out a few minutes.

 
I had an op-ed, “To Life, Marriage and Wine,” in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Here’s the essay:

I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell. My come-on was the wine. The first Saturday of the month, our synagogue passes out free bottles of Israeli kosher wine to married couples celebrating anniversaries that month.

Two friends recently called to say they were separating from their spouses. I look for reinforcement for the institution of marriage wherever I can find it. Alice and I stood on the bimah (altar) with eight other couples while congregants sang along to “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov” (good luck and congratulations). Rabbi Joshua Skoff announced the winner in the anniversary derby, a couple celebrating 55 years of matrimony.

Everybody read from the supplementary prayer booklet: “These couples have come to the synagogue to give thanks for the institution of marriage and for their mutual love and devotion.”

Bert and Alice, Oct. 22, 1978. Columbus, Ohio

One married man had a gray ponytail. There was an accountant in a suit and an obstetrician in a red pantsuit. The Torah portion was from Genesis. The rabbi noted that because Adam and Eve sinned, we are all going to die, which makes things interesting because if we lived forever we’d never get around to doing anything: “Why would you diet if you can put it off for 500 years?”

Our marriage-boosting interlude ended with: “May it be God’s will that these married couples continue to live to a ripe old age together in happiness, lightening each other’s burdens, and reaping a harvest of joy from the seeds of love they have sown in the hearts of their family.”

To life. And free wine.

 
My roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he’s dead.

Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man — a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug Mart.

I shared a duplex house with Ed and two other guys for a couple years in Cleveland Heights in the mid-1970s. I met Ed via the apartments-for-rent bulletin board at Case Western Reserve University. (A major portion of my life revolved around that bulletin board, like I met my future wife via the board.)

Ed was a nonstop liar and enjoyed talking on the phone for hours about bills he claimed he would pay, jobs he had or didn’t have, money he had or didn’t have. He worked as a security guard at CWRU.

His room was filthy, and he stunk, and he smoked nonstop. He could cook. Grant him that. He said the rest of us “lived out of cans.”

Ed had epilepsy, and one morning he went thud on the floor and started foaming at the mouth and bleeding around his tongue. He was about 6-2 and fat, so the thud was real. It rattled the house — and me. Ed should have warned us he had epilepsy. I hadn’t seen a grand mal seizure before (and haven’t since). Ed didn’t take his meds regularly. EMS got him straightened out.

I didn’t see Ed’s obit in the Plain Dealer in 2006. But I googled him after I “saw” him in Lakewood the other day. He died at 59. He had a hard life.

 
Years ago I sent out two versions of Yiddishe Cup on a single night. We did business! But often the effort wasn’t worth the logistical contortions: Yiddishe Cup undergoing mitosis. Very messy.

I named the bands the “A” Band and the “B” Band; I should have called them the red unit and the blue unit. There would have been fewer bruised egos among the musicians. I was fortunate; I always got in the “A” Band.

I didn’t start the A/B band ploy until I was about 15 years into the band biz and had a full stable of subs who knew the Yiddishe Cup Method — whatever that is.

The “B” Band

Heads-up, bandleaders, don’t play the A/B game unless you’re very experienced and totally upfront with the clients. If you lie, you might encounter what the New York boys call a “screamer gig.” That’s when the mom screams, “I didn’t hire this band! Where’s your bandleader?”

Here’s what I said on the phone when booking the “B” band: “Bert Stratton won’t be there. Nobody will notice the difference.”

—

Yiddishe Cup plays 7:15 Tues. (Oct. 14) for Simchat Torah at Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. Free.

 
I gave Livingstone, a tenant, a break on his rent because he called the police after he saw a thief stealing leaded-glass windows from the building entrance. I appreciated Livingstone’s civic involvement. Livingstone was nosy. That’s a good thing.

Two leaded-glass sidelights flanking the front door

Then a vandal scrawled graffiti on a front door. Livingstone wasn’t around. (Different building.) The building manager knew the graffiti “artist.” She even knew his phone number. My manager personally knows this derelict? The tagger hung out at a skaters’ coffeehouse, as did my manager, and had a very recognizable tag.

I phoned the graffiti kid and hung up. What if he was a loony? Let the cops handle it. Then the kid called me. “You just called,” he said.

I hate that.

The Lakewood cops found the graffiti guy and made him clean up the door. His mom helped. The kid was in high school. I didn’t press charges; he and his mom did a good job cleaning the door.

Back to the leaded-glass thief . . . He was caught, primarily due to Livingstone’s accurate ID. The thief sold the windows to an antiques store. He was eventually charged with aggravated burglary and grand theft. He didn’t do any jail time. He paid restitution to me.

 
This was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Friday.

Some of my elderly friends are putting out self-published memoirs or uploading original songs to Spotify. We want our grandchildren to check us out down the road.

I want my grandkids to be able to check me out for 10 years after I’m gone. Ten years is not unreasonable. I’m not greedy like Shakespeare.

I’m not in the Hall of Fame of my alma mater, Charles F. Brush High School. But I play clarinet in Yiddishe Cup, a klezmer band. That might be my best shot at somewhat-limited immortality.

Here’s the plan: I recently donated some of my klezmer band’s memorabilia to the Western Reserve Historical Society — the repository for all-things-Cleveland. WRHS, founded in 1857, is Cleveland’s attic. The auto showroom is the grand living room, with early-20th-century cars, some of which were built in Cleveland. There is a Jordan roadster and a Baker electric car. F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly came up with the name for the golfer in The Great Gatsby – Jordan Baker — from those car names.

I used to drop by the WRHS library to do genealogy research. The only drawback was running into other genealogists who corralled me and talked about their fresh findings. I didn’t want to hear about Uncle Patrick from County Mayo and how he wound up in Kamm’s Corners. Did they want to hear about my grandma Anna, from Austria-Hungary, who lived in the Kinsman neighborhood? Nope.

Sean Martin, the associate curator for Jewish history at WRHS, likes my band and its memorabilia. I have given the society several boxes of expired Yiddishe Cup contracts, publicity photos and press kits. And Sean has given me a guided tour of the society’s back room, where my band’s stuff will reside. The back room is approximately the size of a Dollar Store, lined with shelves of cassette tapes, manila folders, newspaper clippings and VHS tapes.

I even came across the 1932 Glenville High School diploma of produce wholesaler Maury Feren, who used to write local newspaper columns, and do TV spots, about how to choose ripe fruits and vegetables. He said a cantaloupe is ripe when the stem has some give in it. Maury also published a pretty good memoir, Wheeling & Dealing in My World.

I said to Sean the curator, “Is there anything you won’t take here?”

“Funny you should ask,” Sean said. “I was in the basement of the old Fairmount Temple, where they had tapes of every Shabbat service from the 1970s. I don’t think we need every single one of them.”

“Is this like TikTok?” I said. “You hang onto stuff, and maybe a couple years from now, say, Maury Feren the produce guy blows up on social media, and you’re golden?”

“Something like that,” Sean said.

Maury Feren has 5.3 linear feet of archive boxes. Agudath B’nai Israel Congregation of Lorain, Ohio, has 5.8 linear feet — mostly dues cards and temple financial statements. Yiddishe Cup has 1.4 linear feet and counting. Maybe I’ll pay a slotting fee — like the big food companies do for premium shelf space at grocery stores — and I’ll gain an edge over the Maury Feren-types and high-school hall of famers. What price immortality?

 
My cousin Brian Kent is a beast. He didn’t get his beastliness from me — or my side of the family. Brian’s dad (my uncle Bob) married into the family and was a brawler. Uncle Bob had a bashed-up nose from fighting. Uncle Bob used to crash weddings in the 1940s to pick up girls, like at the Cleveland Jewish Center on East 105th Street and the Temple on the Heights on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights. Both high-class shuls. Bob, who was a proste yid from Kinsman Road, got around.

He joined the army. He claimed he wanted to fight for Israel in the Haganah after WWII, but that never happened. He wound up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1949, studying art. He ultimately became an art-education professor.

But we’re not here to talk about Bob. Brian the beast . . . Brian, his wife, Deborah, and I recently biked around Cleveland. On our bike trek, Brian biked down 12 steps at Case Western Reserve University. He biked down the steps, instead of walking the bike down the steps. Brian is no teenager. He’s 65. Later, Brian fell off his bike downtown and got right back up.

Brian Kent out west, 2025. (He lives in Connecticut)

I was the bike tour guide. Starting in Cleveland Heights, we headed toward Lake Erie, via the Cultural Gardens (East Boulevard). We planned on eating lunch at the Marina-at-55^th Street. We were going to get walleye. But the lakefront restaurant doesn’t exist. Ripped down. And I had checked the restaurant’s website, which said it was “open.” So we settled on the Siam Café at East 40th Street and St. Clair Avenue. We saw the former mayor in there. (Had to google his name. Frank Jackson.)

We biked to League Park in the Hough neighborhood. The baseball museum was closed. Hough looked pretty good, actually. Babe Ruth hit his 511th home run at League Park.

We biked past John Hay High, where Brian’s mother (my aunt Celeste Zalk) had gone to high school in the 1940s. Secretarial track.

Returning to the Heights, we stopped at a secret waterfall, which I can’t tell you about, and went to Shaker Square to see how run-down it is.

Brian said the highlights of the trip were the waterfall and the tasty lunch at the Siam Café. For me, the highlight was watching Brian bike down 12 stairs.

Beast.

 
Tokyo had Houston-level humidity and was 96 degrees. The water at the Tokyo swimming pool was at 32C, the lifeguard told me. I googled 32C; that was 90F! It was like swimming in miso soup. Plus, I had to wear a bathing cap, which made the miso even warmer. (You have to wear a cap in Japan.)

Then I found an indoor Tokyo pool, which was cooler, temp-wise. My son the musician sneaked me into his hotel, and on floor 15 there was a three-lane lap pool. No kiddie area. Just lanes. That’s class. I had to wear a bathing cap there, too.

—

I was visiting my daughter’s family in Chicago this summer. It was 93 degrees. No lockers at the Chicago pool. I changed into my swimsuit in the locker room, but I couldn’t store clothes or valuables. I had to take everything to the pool deck. I said to a lifeguard, “What — no lockers?” Alfred E. Neuman-style. The guard said nobody would steal anything.

A couple hundred people —  like in Tokyo — tried to chill in the heat. Nobody stole anything.

—

Cumberland Pool

Cumberland Pool in Cleveland Heights has 14 lap lanes.  Name a pool with more lap lanes. The city adds lanes and reduces the kiddie area, probably because Cleveland Heights is boomer central, with many elderly lap swimmers and lap joggers.

—

My go-to Cleveland swimming pool is the Cleveland Skating Club, which has six indoor lap lanes (and a skating rink). I never have to share a lane, year-round. That seclusion is worth the club dues. I don’t like playing rugby in the water.

Maybe I’ll install a one-person “endless” lap pool/tub where my dining room is. But I haven’t heard much, good or bad, about “endless” tubs.

One last thing . . . in Japan nobody wears flip-flops at pools. It’s all bare feet.

 
MetroHealth hospital said they’d pay me $200 — a portion of a tenant’s rent. The tenant was hospitalized and getting financial assistance.

But Metro didn’t pay, right off. They said they paid. And this was after I had filled out a couple hospital forms and mailed them in, and waited six weeks. Metro said they had sent the payment ACH. I didn’t get it, or maybe I did and was losing my mind.

I reached a Metro employee who said the payment wasn’t ACH, after all. It was a regular check mailed USPS. Metro said the check had cleared. When? Metro even read me the Metro check number. I was nuts, certified by a hospital.

And I didn’t have the check! No sign of it in my bank account or anywhere else. All this aggravation for $200?

A few weeks later Metro contacted me and said, “We’re going to reissue the check and mail it.” This, I assert, is an admission that Metro was nuts, and I wasn’t. (At least for the moment.)

—
Got the check.

—
I had an op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer last week: “The bait-and-switch of our beautiful lakes.”

—
Yiddishe Cup plays TONIGHT (Wed. Aug 27) at 7 p.m. at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion on the grounds of Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. There are chairs. The concert is free. And if you want, you can donate to Magen David Adom (the Israel Red Cross) at the show.

 
I got an email with Michael “Moon” Stevens in the subject line. Moon is, or was, 82, and not too healthy. His obit?

Nope. Moon still “is.” Moon is the original Flint, Michigan, hipster.

Michael “Moon” Stevens grew up with John Sinclair, the well-known jazz aficionado and political nut-job from Flint. One of Moon’s relatives just contacted me about Moon. I know Moon through his sister, who lives in Cleveland.

For decades Moon was a union painter at the Los Angeles airport. He still maintains a cozy pad in L.A., where he’ll spin records for you. You are instructed to sit on his living room couch — in just the right corner — to optimally hear his jazz LPs.

Moon has an almost photographic memory for jazz facts. He gets most of his information from reading jazz bios and LP liner notes. He told me Sun Ra was a “congenital eunuch.” I didn’t know that. He said Joe Maneri was really fat, and Pharaoh Sanders foamed at the mouth and pounded his chest when he played.

When Moon was healthier, he visited Cleveland. One visit Moon was talking to me and his brother-in-law Lewis about Albert Ayler, Charlie Parker, Roland Kirk and Bill Evans. Moon covered all bases. Lewis — Moon’s bro-in-law — said Bill Evans was Jewish.

“How do you know Evans is Jewish?” I said to Lewis. “Do you wake up in the morning and wonder who’s Jewish, and who isn’t?” I do. But why would Lewis — a gentile — think about Jews nonstop?

“I grew up in Greenwich Village,” Lewis said. “New York was a very Jewish town when I grew up.”

“If somebody shoots somebody,” I said, “or if somebody wins the Nobel Prize, I wonder if the guy is Jewish. That’s my M.O.”

Moon said, “Bill Evans wasn’t Jewish. His father was Welsh and his mother was Russian Orthodox.”

Lewis corroborated this on Google.

Impressive, Moon.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays next Wednesday (Aug 27) at 7 p.m. at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion on the grounds of Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. There are chairs. The concert is free. And if you want, you can donate to Magen David Adom (the Israel Red Cross) at the show.

Was Dave Brubeck Jewish? Find out here  . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWvixN_a9Q

 
There was a Playboy bunny in my high school. A future Playboy bunny. The bunny — now 75 —  recently called my daughter in Chicago. The former bunny is a gardener and landscaping consultant. When she saw my daughter’s area code (Cleveland / 216), the former bunny said she had been a party animal in high school —  Charles F. Brush High. My school. She said she didn’t know me.

I was no party animal.

The ex-bunny said she never paid for a drink until she was 30. My daughter said I had been a “nerd.” (Nerd wasn’t even a word in 1968! We were called “dips,” short for dipshits.)

After powwowing with my daughter, I got out my yearbook for the lowdown on the ex-bunny. The ex-bunny had been a blond Jewish majorette. Really?  And I didn’t even recognize her pic. (Hey, it was a big school.)

[Correction: she was no Jew. See postscript at bottom. The future bunny was just an above-average-intelligence, blond shikse. Boring!]

Also, there was a page in the yearbook of National Merit semi-finalists and commended scholars. I wasn’t on that page. The ex-bunny was. Whoa.

My friend Hersky wasn’t on the National Merit page either, and he got a 789 on the math SAT (before the math SAT was recentered, in 1995, which jacked up many math scores). Hersky specialized in numbers and Cliff Notes. He never read a book — and still hasn’t. I read some books — short ones, like The Time Machine and Goodbye Mr. Chips. (I started reading in college.)

In high school, I hung out with many commended and meritorious people, but not the future bunny. She must have been dating. I liked hanging out with people smarting than me. My crowd devoured the Comparative Guide to American Colleges, which we called the Bible. We learned about Reed, Pomona, and Rice. Rice’s freshman class had an incredibly high median math score. Emory was another good school. Swarthmore was harder to get into than Harvard.

Northwestern . . . I flew student-standby to Evanston for an interview. At the Cleveland airport, the ticket agent asked if I was an attaché because I didn’t have any baggage. I didn’t know what attache meant.

I expected some tough questions at Northwestern, maybe about the latest book I had read. I had read a book about Nazis — my favorite subject. The interviewer didn’t ask me anything about books. Instead, he extolled the university’s six-year medical program. (I was pre-med, like everybody else.) Northwestern smelled like dead fish from Lake Michigan. I could hardly breathe. Northwestern was a playboy school.

I flew to Johns Hopkins –a pre-med powerhouse. I talked about Nazis, and then the interviewer segued into mainstream material. He said Twain wrote Ethan Frome. No way! He didn’t catch me. Hopkins was isolated and there was no social life.

I’ll get back to the Playboy bunny eventually.

The admissions interviewer at Washington U. said I’d get in. Washington U. was easy to get into back then, just like Northwestern.

Meanwhile, back in Cleveland, at a cocktail party, my parents ran into a very savvy parent who said the best way to get into medical school was to attend a state school and get good grades. Go to Ohio State and get A’s, which was better than C’s at Harvard.

I wasn’t going to no Ohio state school, folks!! Ohio State was open-admissions then and took everybody. I hadn’t memorized the Comparative Guide to American Colleges to go to no Ohio state school.  Not even Miami U. of Ohio. As a consolation, my parents said I could try for Michigan, Michigan State or Wisconsin.

Michigan didn’t do interviews. Not their thing. Too big.

I got into Michigan early decision. The ex-bunny went to the University of Miami in Florida. More power to her, for getting out of Ohio. Maybe someday she and I will meet up and discuss how we didn’t know each other.

Charles F. Brush High was a big school. Six-hundred thirty-five kids. Yes, there were bigger graduating classes in Cleveland, but not many. And very few had bunnies-to-be.

—

Correction: A Brush alum — who had been to the future bunny’s house back in the day — wrote me: “No Judaica around. Mother and sister were blond and Protestant. No accents. Lived in a goyish neighborhood.” Oops.

I had presupposed the bunny was Jewish because of two things: when talking to my daughter, the bunny had mentioned a South Euclid Jewish neighborhood that she called “Chanukah Heights.”  So I figured the ex-bunny was from there. But she wasn’t. Also, the ex-bunny’s last name is vaguely Jewish — like Lewis, Brooks, or Cole.

 
I have this mishegas, where I detach uncanceled postage stamps from envelopes and reuse the stamps. I get a ton of mail, and some of it has uncanceled stamps.

Deeper: some of the uncanceled stamps are actually my own  — stamps I put on envelopes and, for whatever reason, I don’t use the envelope. Maybe I put a check in an envelope and then notice I’ve put the wrong check in. I rip open the envelope. The stamp is still good. (The envelope isn’t.)

I’ve been around stamps a while. I collected UN stamps and first-day covers. Some plate blocks. When I was in junior high, I took the bus downtown to the Manger Hotel for stamp shows. I was probably the youngest guy in there by about 50 years.

I collected stamps until college. My mother sent first-day covers to my dorm, and I had to tell her to stop. It was too embarrassing.

My stamps

I made $28.47 today, in a half hour, by rescuing uncanceled stamps from envelopes in my office. [39 “forever” stamps X 73 cents =$28.47]

I once had a tenant who used uncanceled stamps from the 1960s to send in her rent. I got 4-centers up until 1992, when she died.

I had the first stamps from Malaysia.

There was a stamp dealer, Mr. Stern, on Superior Road in Cleveland Heights. Alfred Stern: not a Jew. That shocked me. He was a German with a Christmas tree. My mom occasionally drove me to his apartment. He got me the Malaysian stamps.

I subscribed to Linn’s Stamp News from Sidney, Ohio. I had a friend — named Stamps, of all things — who collected coins. He subscribed to Coin World — also from Sidney, Ohio. Stamps collected brilliant uncirculated rolls of coins. I think his dad was into it, too. The Stamps were more like speculators. I was a collector. Still am.

 
I wish I had been in the military. I could have been in, but I didn’t go. I was against Vietnam. I learned quagmire — the word — from Walter Lippmann in Newsweek.

I can take orders and I don’t generally sass people, and I’ve never argued with cops or umpires.

Some of my high school classmates went into the service.  Some are on the war memorial on Green Road. By and large, these deceased guys weren’t in the college-prep classes.

One high school friend — a Jewish guy — went to Annapolis, though. He eventually became acting head of the FBI in Cleveland. I visited him at his office, and we brainstormed on ways to thwart terrorists. I didn’t have much to contribute.

When I was in elementary school, I sent away to the Air Force Academy for photos, and the academy mailed me an application.

I was mistaken for a military man only once, when I represented the Armed Forces at a sign-review meeting at Lakewood city hall. The Armed Forces rented a store from us. A sign-review board member said, “You walk like a military man.”

Atten-hut! Thank you.

The Armed Forces recruiting center housed the four major branches: Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force. The Army turned its basement area into a gym with punching bags and a Nautilus.

In 2008 the recruiters moved out and went across the street to a newer building, and left us with three ratty sofas, a rusty Nautilus, barbells, a mini-trampoline and a punching bag. For starters.

I wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville, Kentucky, re U.S. lease W912QRM504000025:

There is 40 years’ worth of  junk in the basement: 27 chairs, a punching bag, American flag, scrap shelving, metal framing, boxes of “Army of One” promotional material, two bikes, six pieces of Nautilus-like weight equipment, barbells, a mini-trampoline . . .

A 1970s stereo system, file cabinet, and a lot of assorted paperwork, of which I’ve enclosed an invoice from 1991, just to give you a flavor for what’s down there.

The government paid for the hauling. That was my last dealing with the military. “Sgt. Stratton” never happened. Nor did “Private  Stratton.”  I feel somewhat guilty about that. (I know, typical ex-hippie revisionist thinking.)