Real Music & Real Estate . . .

 
(From the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer, Mother’s Day).

My mother sent me a letter about dope. This was my freshman year of college. The fifth floor of my dorm was called the “dope floor.” You name it, we had it: heroin (“scag”); marijuana (“grass”); and cocaine. Some guys even sniffed gasoline from cars at the nearby parking structure. That was called “hitting the tank.” Many of the heavy dopers eventually dropped out. This was at the University of Michigan, where the Hash Bash – a celebration of marijuana – started.

I got harassed for non-toking by my dormmates. I was a mama’s boy. The boys on my floor couldn’t believe I didn’t partake. Two inner-city Detroit boys, in particular, were quite often amused by me, calling me “Expletive-deleted Bert!” and ”Bert be trippin’. That Expletive-deleted be trippin’. You be trippin’, Expletive-deleted!”

The Detroit boys were charismatic. They wore berets and used a lot of Black slang. They wore silky colored underwear and put Vaseline on their skin in the winter. This was all new to me – a white kid from South Euclid. The Detroit boys were from Cass Tech, a Detroit science-magnet high school. They were pre-med, like almost everybody on our dorm floor. The Cass boys aced inorganic chemistry that freshman year. But they did too much dope. That was a problem. The Cass guys were gone by sophomore year.

Tune in, turn on, drop out. Many did. The Jewish boy from New Jersey stopped studying altogether and giggled a lot. It seemed like he was high almost every waking moment. He dropped out and drove a cab around Ann Arbor. The Italian boy from Chicago dropped acid, dropped out and became a brakeman in Chicago, in imitation of Jack Kerouac. I saw the Chicago boy a couple times after college. His primary concern was passing the periodic railroad-mandated drug tests.

My mom wrote me regularly. (Phone calls were expensive back then.)

Here’s her letter to me from October 1968.

Dear Bert,

We had a wonderful visit with you last weekend. It was great seeing you and finding that you haven’t changed — you’re still the same old nudnik that we love! Still, I have a worry. I only wish I could express myself well on paper so I could be sure to reach you.

Bert, you’ve always had a strong will and mind of your own. I’m praying that you use your good judgment and not be swayed by good fellowship and badgering. What I’m leading up to is this: marijuana. I’m not sure, but isn’t that the same thing as pot? Whatever it is, it scares me. What does it do for you? You don’t need pot to tell you it is a beautiful day. From the time you were a child, it has always been a pleasure to go places with you. You were the first to see the horses, the water, the points of interest.

You have the makings for a wonderful, happy life. You have it in yourself. Keep it that way. Don’t let the boys tease or try to shame you into doing something you don’t need and know isn’t right.

Love and Kisses,

Mother

That was 57 years ago. I confess, I smoked marijuana the following year and periodically after that. But not that much. I never bought, Mom! And I haven’t toked in decades. (My mother, Julia Stratton, died in 2004.)

Julia Stratton, 1967, age 47.

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It was cold in her apartment. But did she have to call the city on me? It was September and the heat was hard to regulate. (Fall is the hardest season because the outdoor temperature fluctuates so much.) She hadn’t paid her rent, either. It was the 20th of the month. Also, she bad-mouthed my building manager and ripped down curtains in the hallway.

Bad stuff. But I could handle it, except her calling the city on me. She was way-late with the rent, yet she felt she could drop a dime on me?

I first rented to her 10 years ago, at another building. I didn’t remember her other than I had marked “late payer” on some notes I kept.

. . . I’ll wait her out and not renew her lease. Just five months to go. Or better yet, she doesn’t cough up the rent this month, and I evict her.

Now she’s texting my onsite manager: “You’re too old! I don’t like your tone! And the way my rent gets paid is none of your business!”

Now she says she’s moving. Yes.

Nope. We go to court.

She tells the magistrate she has medical problems, and she tells me she has been laid off from her schoolteacher job for hitting a kid. “It isn’t true,” she says. “But it’s in court, so I can’t get another job.” The magistrate gives her five days to move out. Her son is up from Florida, and he guarantees she’ll be out.

“I’ve never been late,” she says to me.

“You’ve never been on time,” I say. (I keep my cool. I’ve been listening to Sam Harris’ meditation app.)

She’s still here. Five days later. She says, “My son has arthur-itis and is in pain, and it’s raining. I’ll be out by noon tomorrow.”

“We go to court at 11:30 am tomorrow if you’re not out by 10 am,” I say.

She says, “I was telling the kids to put away the toys in class and I tapped one with a toy, and then this boy, Armani, started crying and said he got hit on the head, and he went to the office. I got escorted out of the building. It has ruined my life.”

She has a record; the City of Cleveland criminal docket has all the particulars. I don’t usually look at Cleveland, because most of my action is in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas and the city of Lakewood. She has evictions, traffic violations and the school-related assault case.

“I’ll be out by 10 am. I’m a good person,” she says.

Today. 10 am. There’s a U-Haul truck in the alley. I’ll wait her out. No court.

5:03 pm.

She’s gone.

Note to self: Don’t rent to her a third time.

Down and out in Lakewood, Ohio

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert 2-3 pm Sunday (May 11). Mother’s Day. Beachwood, Ohio, library. Corner of Richmond Road and Shaker Blvd.

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I went to the Cleveland Clinic for tendinitis, caused by playing clarinet too much. The pain started in my right thumb and then went all over. The doc told me to bring my clarinet to the appointment. He was a violinist and regular attendee of the Marlboro Music Festival. He was a neurologist with a side hustle — music-related injuries.

The doc quickly shipped me off to a PT — the  real fix-it person at hospitals. The PT was good. He said, “You can’t stop playing. You’re a professional.” Right on.

But my thumb was not good (although it did eventually get better in a year and a half). I don’t know why it got better. I even drove down to Cincinnati to see a doc there who specializes in clarinet players. You do extreme things when, say, lifting a coffee cup feels like a bag of potatoes.

Cincinnati didn’t help. Musculoskeletal problems — they’re hard to put a finger on. An older friend said, “Just wait until your internal organs go.”

Waiting  . . .

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I was on stage at Severance Hall (home of the Cleveland Orchestra) this month. My first time. Then I got kicked off.

I was at an Itzhak Perlman concert, featuring klezmer music. One of Perlman’s sidemen told me to come on stage post-show to chat. He was packing up his tsimbl. Then a security guard shooed me off. No biggie. I’ve played Severance Hall before.

The Severance Hall lobby. For a wedding.

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, has played Carnegie Hall.

The Carnegie Hall Cinema. Alan accompanied Laurel and Hardy shorts at the Carnegie Hall Cinema in 1985. Alan was in the Kleveland Klezmorim at the time.

At Severance Hall, there was a line backstage to talk to Perlman. I was more interested in connecting with Perlman’s sidemen. These sidemen are my heroes. For instance,  Perlman’s klez-music director, Hankus Netsky, has influenced me, for the better, for the past 37 years. I first ran into Hankus at KlezKamp (the late, great, annual Catskills-based klez convention). Hankus was on staff at KlezKamp, and I was a student. KlezKamp was a little “scene” — a veltele. There were nametags, workshops, break-out sessions, dance concerts.

Perlman’s Cleveland concert was sold out. Half the audience, it seemed, was there to see Perlman-the-classical-violinist and didn’t realize the show was going to be hardcore klez. Perlman’s sidemen were Pete Rushefsky, Andy Statman, Ilene Stahl, Judy Bressler, Lorin Sklamberg, Michael Alpert, Frank London, Jim Guttman and Netsky, among others.

I told clarinetist Andy Statman that I occasionally play his evocative “Song of Redemption,” and I told bassist Jim Guttman about a KlezKamp photo he and I are in from 1987. Guttman is in a lot of KlezKamp photos. Doubt he was interested in my pic.

Guttman once told me his favorite gigs are nursing homes because the audiences are so appreciative. Great. (I play my share of nursing homes.)

How do you get to Severance Hall?

The Severance Hall stage.

Go to a klezmer convention. Here’s my badge:

—

Henry Sapoznik and Adrienne Cooper founded KlezKamp, which ran from 1985 to 2015. My family attended about 10 of these gatherings.

Greg Selker started the Kleveland Klezmorim in 1983. My wife, Alice, encouraged me to attend  Greg’s klez workshop at the Cleveland Heights JCC in 1987. Greg had met Hankus Netsky and trumpeter Frank London at the New England Conversatory.

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I wasn’t always this religious. I used to be more religious. I first started going to shul regularly right after college. I was a paralegal at the time. I thought I was going to go to law school. I worked at this firm called O’Connor, Joseph and Welch. I got my birthday off (St. Patrick’s Day) because of O’Connor, and Mr. Joseph didn’t mind I wanted two days off for Passover. One night, in the office after-hours, I decided to answer an incoming call, trying to be helpful. I said, “O’Connor, Joseph.”

The phone caller said, “Do you know who I am? I’m Welch and I hate it when people answer the phone ‘O’Connor, Joseph’!”

I said, “Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“Good.” I hung up and quit. Screw lawyers and their big egos. I enrolled in a non-denominational rabbinical school in Boston. I learned Hebrew; I studied Talmud; I spent a year in Israel; and all that time I was playing clarinet and saxophone. People started calling me “the jazz rabbi.” Fact: there’s an actual “jazz rabbi,” Greg Wall, who lives in Connecticut and is 10-times better than me on horns. Make that 100-times.

I eventually got a job at a Jewish nursing-home complex in Cleveland. I led services, played some jazz standards and “Hava Nagila,” and did some grief counseling. But the job wasn’t that satisfying. I wanted to engage in deeper “shrink”-style counseling. I wanted to meet up with Jews-on-the-go behind closed doors and hear all their secrets. I wanted to discuss high-stress moments: birth, life, marriage, divorce, death, tennis. (I play tennis with a rabbi. The guy kicks my ass.)

I never did become a pulpit rabbi. I applied for six synagogue jobs and got one half-baked offer — not a real pulpit. The Hillel in Norman, Oklahoma. I didn’t want to hang out with kids.

I got no decent job offers because I had too much hate in me, and that, no doubt, came across in my job interviews. For one thing, I was obsessed with Nazis at the time and wanted to stomp them. (I was about 35 years too late.) My hero was Abba Kovner, the Vilna ghetto fighter. I even attended — almost daily — the Demjanjuk trial in Cleveland, and that guy wasn’t even a Nazi, just an adjunct.

I went into real estate. That, as it turned out, was a perfect fit.

—

fiction

[illustration by Ralph Solonitz]

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My latest essay in the Cleveland Plain Dealer . . .

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — I want to be more than just another number with the folks at the Internal Revenue Service. I write “landlord/bandleader” in the “occupation” blank on my taxes. Maybe the word “bandleader” piques somebody’s interest at the Cincinnati IRS processing center. Maybe “bandleader” conjures up Benny Goodman or Jon Batiste and makes an IRS worker’s day more interesting. Or maybe nobody looks at my returns in Cincinnati.

In the 1980s, I had an in-person audit. I went to the downtown Cleveland federal building solo, without a lawyer or accountant. I knew about taxes. My father had taught me. He didn’t teach me how to fix cars, but he did teach me how to fix taxes. My dad used to keep two sets of books — one in pencil and one in pen. He gave the government the pen version (with creative math), and he kept the pencil version (with the real numbers). My dad had grown up on Kinsman Road during the Depression and was a self-made man.

The auditor didn’t find anything wrong with my taxes. That’s how the second generation often rolls: legit numbers. The auditor gave me an $80 credit for some “supplies” I had forgotten to claim.

I think about taxes. Not just in April. Taxes are interesting.

Here are some tax pointers for this season:

Schedule C/Business income: The government looks closely at sole proprietors’ expenses. As a bandleader, how should I list the candy bars I buy for my sleep-deprived, van-driving keyboard player? For instance, are his Milky Ways a “meal”? Or are they just “maintenance”? What if my drummer wears a bright-red suit on stage? Can he deduct the suit — and the dry-cleaning costs — as a business expense? Yes. But if he wears the suit offstage, as well — in real life — then, no deduction. It’s just a suit.

Qualified Dividends: Every year, I try to remember what qualified dividends qualify for. (They qualify for lower capital-gains tax rates.)

Schedule D/Capital gains and losses: In 1977, my wife-to-be, Alice, bought a couple shares of a Vanguard mutual fund. Did anyone other than Alice and Vanguard’s founder, John Bogle, own mutual funds in 1977? A smart business move — me marrying Alice.

Supplemental income and loss: Income from royalties and rental property are reported on the same Schedule E form. Why are such different sources of income on the same form? Are there many more “landlord/bandleaders” out there than I know about? I know an accordion player from Parma who owns a shopping-strip center on the West Side. I don’t know any other musicians collecting rent on the side. The most my band ever received in royalties was $45.56. That’s why I own rental property.

Depreciation/Form 4562: Buildings have different life expectancies than, say, people. Apartment buildings fully depreciate in 27½ years. Commercial buildings (like shopping strips) last 39 years. You don’t need to know that, unless you’re me.

Self-employment tax/Schedule SE: The tax on Social Security and Medicare is effectively 15.3% for a self-employed person. A salaried person pays only half that — 7.65%. That’s worth pondering about, if you’re a self-employed, small-business owner.

Maybe I’ll make somebody’s day in Cincinnati this month. I try to make my tax returns interesting. Just not too interesting.

—

(Illustration by Ralph Solonitz)

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Waste Management wants $2035.24 for taking away my old dumpsters. I rent the dumpsters for trash removal at my apartment buildings. I’m on a lease. (Landlords can be tenants!)

I’ve used WM for 13 years. Do they still love me? No, they regularly overcharge me, assessing extra charges (“overages”) because my dumpsters are too full.

I think I’ll take my dumpster needs and talents to Rumpke. Ever heard of them? Fun name. Rumpke is a regional company, out of Cincinnati. Rumpke say they won’t charge me overage fees or removal fees when my lease is up.

But what to do about the $2035.24 the gonifs in Chicago (WM’s HQ) want? Two grand to take away my 11 dumpsters? Should I ignore Chi? Maybe WM will forget about me. WM is huge; there are even WM dumpsters in Japan; I’ve seen it in the movies.

Garbage haulers and coin-op laundry guys . . . they’re  all originally Mob-related, started decades ago. I remember a coin-op laundry operator from Chicago trying to turn me into an indentured servant. It was almost impossible to get out of the contract with them. (“Coin-op” refers to rental washers and dryers in my buildings.)

I’m not thrilled about sending $2035.24 to Carol Stream, Illinois. Is that a real town or just a Mob post office in the middle of nowhere?

—

Update: WM didn’t forget about me, and I paid half, $1017.62. Matter settled.

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I got an email from a literary agent: “Just read your op-ed in the New York Times and have spent the past couple hours reading everything you’ve written. Your op-eds are rooted in your personal experience, yet have universal appeal.”

Nice! Do I write a book about real estate? And then I would lecture at the Cleveland JCC Jewish Book Fair and sell product. But the writing game is so formidable, so competitive, even locally. How many more books does the world need? A thousand? Have you read Bart Wolstein’s Crossing The Road to Entrepreneurship or Maury Feren’s Wheeling and Dealing? These authors were both Clevelanders who died shortly after self-publishing. Simon’s book is about real estate and Feren’s is about selling vegetables.

Veggies. Why not. How about french fries? My son Ted was astounded in 1990 when I gave up french fries at the Fort Erie, Ontario, Burger King. I said, “No more greasy fries.” We were on our way to Toronto to see the new Blue Jays stadium.

Chicken . . . I often wound up at the KFC on Shattuck Avenue (a hangout with absolutely no countercultural status) when I hitchhiked to California in the 1970s.

KFCs are hard to find lately. Where did they all go?

A burger book? Sonic Burger, In-N-Out, Steak n Shake. What about Arby’s — the non-burger? I liked Arby’s roast beef sandwich with Arby’s Sauce. And add a Jamocha shake. In Cleveland there was an Arby’s knock-off, Beef Corral (a k a Barf Corral), owned by the Modzelewski brothers, former Browns players.

When my daughter Lucy was little, she designed a coat-of-arms for me that read “No Fries.” That’s my legacy unless I crank out a real estate book.

The real estate book . . . in 2016 I wrote a proposal, outline and sample chapter, and my lit agent got no takers for the project. Here are some sample chapter titles from the proposal: “Build an Ark: this place is flooding,” “Booms, bubbles and cash flow,” “We have standards,” “Job #1: get the money in the bank,” “Gotta serve somebody,” “Pull the trigger,” “Never on Sunday (because the tradesmen are on their boats in Lake Erie),” “Quasi-Legal Advice,” “Renting the American Dream,” “Jazz and Real Estate.”

I wouldn’t entirely rule it out, the real estate book, just yet. Or some sort of book. AKs like me like to self-publish about french fries, burgers, real estate, whatever.

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I ran into a funny rabbi the other night. Happens. Some rabbis are funny. Rabbi Matt Eisenberg told me he is the “second funniest rabbi in Cleveland.” Why number-two? He explained he came in second in Cleveland’s Funniest Rabbi Contest in 2011. Fourteen years later, he’s still funny. He did a clever Purim shpiel based on Fiddler on the Roof.

I was a judge at the funniest rabbi contest once, but not the year Rabbi Eisenberg participated. I was a judge a couple years later. The winner that year wasn’t even a rabbi. The funniest rabbi in Cleveland in 2013 was a doctor/mohel — Kiva Shtull.

The judges made comments after each rabbis did their shtick. We rated the ravs. Afterward, an audience member said to me, “You were very nice in your comments.”

Why not?  Author Theodore Dalrymple wrote (about “comedian” Boris Johnson of England), “Telling a joke that falls flat is an excruciating social experiment.” Telling original jokes, non-stop, in front of 200 people at the Schmaltz Museum of Jewish Heritage — that’s not for the faint of heart or your typical pulpit rabbi. I had stocked-piled complimentary adjectives in advance. My arsenal was droll, gut-busting (didn’t use that one), cheery, sharp, zany, wacky, witty and perturbing.

Nobody was perturbing, unfortunately.

I gave the highest rating to the mohel, who moonlighted as the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Shalom in Bainbridge Township, Ohio. He got wry, droll and zany. (The shul went under about a year later. I don’t know why.)

I just rediscovered a video of Dr. Shtull’s comedy routine. It holds up, at least for the first couple minutes. I’m not sure if Rabbi Eisenberg — the second funniest rabbi of 2011 — has a video. Probably. But check out Shtull’s shtick. Listen at least till you hear the word Chabad — around the two-minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxd4_oGjeso

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I put a latch on my bedroom door to keep my parents out. I was a grown-up — in my early twenties. I was at my parents’ Beachwood apartment, the Mark IV (featured a couple weeks ago in a Klezmer Guy post). The Mark IV was later called The Hamptons and is now The Vantage. I was listening to John Handy’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival” on my record player. There was talk about real estate and bridge games. I pondered some prospective book titles:

Suburban Nightmare

Rebounding from the Bar Mitzvah Trail

Confessions of a Bar Mitzvah Wino

He played Clarinet Between his Legs

Unstuck Pads

The Bar Mitzvah-Goer

Maybe I thought about bar mitzvahs because I never had one. I was Confirmed, Reform-style. (In my adulthood, I did leyn Torah a couple times.)

I swam in the Mark IV apartment pool and got in an argument with an old guy — maybe 65. He said, “You’re going to bump into my grandkids and you’ll be sorry you did!”

Lay off, man. (I love grandkids — 50 years later.)

My dad considered selling me his beater car, a Plymouth Valiant, so I could drive away from Beachwood. He said, “But if you get the car, what are you going to do to support it?”

“I’ll get some money somewhere. I’ll rob a bank.”

“You do that and I’ll wipe my hands of you!”

Simmer down, Dad. I bought the car, but I didn’t drive too far. I went four miles west to Cleveland Heights and rented a room in half-a-house.

Where else could I have gone? Boston was too collegiate. New York? I had been there and had had my ride towed. New York is a tough town for cars. Go back to Ann Arbor? Too many kids there. California? Too hard to get to.

Tough times . . .

My dad said, “You don’t know what a tough is!”

Change your place, change your life. I met a girl via the ride board at Case Western Reserve University. (A lot of my life revolved around that CWRU board.) The girl was Jewish, cute and English. A true trifecta. We hitchhiked to California, and somewhere near Knoxville she told me she was going to meet up with her boyfriend in California. Bummer road!

Because of the “chick” factor, we even got rides from truckers.

I ran into the English girl again, in Israel a year later. She said nothing had materialized with the “boyfriend” out west (and nothing much happened with me and her in Eretz Yisrael).
California . . . I said cheerio to the English woman and hitched back east solo.  When I walked into my parents’ apartment, my dad said, “Isn’t that a pistol.”

I guess it was. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “Life was too good to us. We had to ask for trouble.” I looked for trouble, somewhat unsuccessfully.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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(This essay was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday.)

Even if you’re rich, you can’t always get what you want. For example, you can’t buy Horseshoe Lake, which straddles Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights. An assortment of neighborhood high-rollers, medium-rollers and salt-of-the-earth ex-hippies tried to save Horseshoe Lake. These lake-lovers funded lawsuits against the cities of Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

We fought the law and the law won.

I was a founder of Friends of Horseshoe Lake. We paid for the lawsuits and an engineer’s evaluation of the defunct dam. We wrangled a couple thousand signatures on a petition to save the lake, but not enough people cared.

Horseshoe Lake when it was a lake. (Photo by Lucy Stratton)

The Sewer District is going to turn the former lake — which was drained almost six years ago — into a boardwalk and nature preserve. They plan to rip down some trees and put in a paved service road. Is the road a homage to the never-built Clark Freeway that the county wanted to put through the Shaker Lakes area in the 1960s?

I have a friend who lives a mile from Horseshoe Lake. He lives near Lower Shaker Lake. He said, “I have my lake. I don’t care about yours.” The notion of NIMBY (Not in my Backyard) doesn’t travel well; you get about a mile from the Horseshoe Lake, and not that many people get worked up about its disappearance.

Granted, there are more pressing issues than Horseshoe Lake, like crime, housing matters and leaf blowers. But how many boardwalks and little playgrounds do we need? We already have the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes. Even a “lake feature” is lacking at the upcoming Horseshoe park. The Sewer Board is spending $28.7 million – up from the original $14 million – and that doesn’t include another $8.6 million for amenities, which supposedly Shaker Heights and somewhat-financially-strapped Cleveland Heights are expected to cover.

The Sewer District and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources claim the goal is to prevent a flood disaster downstream in University Circle. Nobody has died from a flood there, but you never know. Every hundred years a person might die in a storm under the Cedar Road Rapid tracks. And I might get hit by a bus tomorrow.

I live about a football-field away from the late great Horseshoe Lake. I used to live several miles away and visited often. Horseshoe Lake was calming. It was blue and serene. I couldn’t bike out to Lake Erie that often; that’s a six-mile schlep from Cleveland Heights. The Metroparks aren’t too close to the Heights either. Speaking of which, our lawyer talked with Metroparks’ people, and the park system wasn’t highly motivated to save Horseshoe Lake. On a stroll around the Heights, I ran into retired Cleveland city planner Bob Brown. He said he thought the Sewer District’s plan for the Horseshoe area “doesn’t look so horrible.” I hope Bob is right.

In winters I used to walk across the frozen lake. There were signs posted against it, but the water wasn’t that deep, and I figured if I fell into the lake. it would be a classy exit. Now what can I fall into? A playground amenity? No, thanks.

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The Mark IV apartments, Beachwood, Ohio

I’m at my parents’ apartment near I-271. So loud — the highway. I’ll hitch down to Cedar-Taylor to get some air.

I’d like to see Sleeper and American Graffiti.

Cleveland . . . it makes one stop and think. I’m thinking of Boston and New York.

The history of the Jews. My parents grew up in the Kinsman neighborhood. Ezra lived in Babylonia.

How do you get the girls if you don’t go near them?

I left my heart in Sandusky.

My friend Chap drove his Corvette up and down Mayfield Road with 11 other Corvette drivers. Chap has a 350-hp engine with headers, minus emission controls.

I saw Sleeper. I resented the Jewish stereotypes.

Stan Smith vs. John Newcombe.

Never write about a place you haven’t done time in. And detail-for-detail-sake is useless.

I don’t want to live here.

—

Recap:

My dad said, “I’m sure you’ll be a success some day.”

At what? Whatever, I should do a good job of it. My father never said to me, “What are your plans? What do you see yourself doing in ten years?” That would have been cruel.

My post-college days were hell, but not that hellish. My mother lined up blind dates for me. The dates were usually with daughters of my mom’s friends. I took the girls to bars and restaurants and ordered 7&7s. That was my booze repertoire: 7&7.

Then I got feedback about the dates from my mother, who picked up tidbits at bridge games. Some of the girls liked me, some didn’t. One date thought I was “a little weird.”

She was weird. She had no business dragging me through her dad’s kangaroo court (his living room had World War II medals on the wall). What are my plans? What do you do?

What’s an apricot sour? That’s what the girl ordered at the bar.

Chap asked me to go to the Corvette rally at Manner’s Big Boy, Mayfield Heights. He had a brand-new 1974 ’Vette. He said, “You think you’re too good for my ’Vette, Stratton. You’d prefer a VW bus with a hippie slut. Why not try real chicks and real cars . . . Friday night at the Strongsville Holiday Inn, it’s crawling with chicks and ’Vettes. No, you’d rather be in Cleveland Heights. Any city that has a bumper sticker like that is a losing proposition.”

When my sentence (nine months) at the Mark IV was up, I moved to Cleveland Heights, into a double, sharing it with three guys I met off the Case Western Reserve rooms-for-rent bulletin board.

I’ve been in Cleveland Heights ever since, and I haven’t seen Chap in more than 35 years. He doesn’t hang around klezmer concerts, for one thing. Alice knocked on the door of the Cleveland Heights double in 1977, looking for a room to rent. Mom’s Dating Service, RIP.

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This acclaimed animation is from the guys over at Challah Barbaric. The vid (below) may seem, at first glance, to be navel-gazing. It’s not. It’s magic. The two main characters — a sleazy guy and a bug-eyed naïf — turn the cutthroat world of real estate into something warm and fuzzy and slightly erotic  — or robotic.

The landlord in the vid is so pompous at first. Then more so. The plot twist: the young lady draws forth the landlord’s humanity and even a Peter, Paul and Mary lyric.

Should I rent to a Stripper? 2:57 minutes. United States . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSzSE1QHnpA&t=1s

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My time is worth $107.98 an hour.

I lost two harmonicas at a gig yesterday. I never lose anything. And I had bragged about finding my wife’s Visa card, which had been missing for a day. Alice considered calling the 800-number and canceling. No, Alice, that’s nightmare city. Alice walked in the snow for four miles looking for the Visa card, which she thought might have fallen out of her pocket while biking.

She didn’t find the card. I found it in the bedroom under a bed. I don’t know how the card got there. I always use a flashlight to search for missing stuff. That’s my trick; the flashlight helps me focus.

My harmonicas were in a gig bag, which I hadn’t fully zipped. I think the harps wound up in the snow in the parking lot at a nursing home, where I had a gig last night. I didn’t “hear” the harps fall in the snow. The last time I lost something was a ski cap — also in the snow.

I think I’ll order two harps on Amazon, $107.98 total. The harmonicas will arrive tomorrow. I don’t feel like driving 16 minutes each way to the nursing home to look for the harps. That’s 12 miles round-trip — a significant haul by Cleveland standards. And then another half hour looking for the harps.

I’ve called the nursing home. So far, nothing.

My two choices: 1) pay $108 for two harps, or 2) drive 32 minutes, plus spend time looking for the harps in the snow. And don’t forget the depreciation on my car.

(“Yesterday” was actually Jan. 16, 2025. I bought the harps.)

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Nobody is tall in my family. I was 5-feet-2 in ninth grade. But I played on the football team! I rode the bench; the coach wouldn’t put me in. He thought I’d get killed. He had me drill with a similar five-foot guy, who also never saw action.

My parents wanted me to play tennis. Figures.

I suited up for the Benedictine game. The head coach wanted “a lot of presence,” as he put it, so he brought the entire 9th-through-12th-grade team to the game– frosh (including me), JV, and varsity. This was 2002, when Benedictine had Ray Williams, who went on to win the “Mr. Football” award for best high school player in Ohio. He signed with West Virginia University.

Ray Williams

Our coach warned us all year about Williams. About 80 of us got on the school bus for Benedictine. We were a presence. And then in the very first play, Williams ran with it and we knew we were toast.

Williams wound up an accessory to a murder, so he never played at West Virginia. He played some at Toledo, but I think he screwed that up, too. And then he played a bit at Shaw University in North Carolina. I wonder what happened to him. There’s a documentary about him, Mr. Football, but it apparently has never played anywhere.

All I know is Ray Williams was an absolute beast at Benedictine. I watched him absolutely crush for 40 carries a night. Everyone knew who was getting the ball, every snap, but no one could stop the kid.

For the record, I’m now 5-feet-9, in my thirties and playing tennis.

(fiction)

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Ted Stratton was on Jeopardy 20 years ago. On January 21, 2005, to be exact. That afternoon I went to Hillcrest cemetery to tell my parents about the impending evening show. Snow covered all the flat-level headstones at Hillcrest. I found “Siegal” but not “Stratton.” However, I think I made successful contact with my parents.

But how about connecting with the president of the United States? What if George W. Bush declares war on some country today and the Jeopardy show doesn’t air tonight?

I emailed everybody about the show. I played tennis. But I couldn’t concentrate on no tennis game!

I knew, in advance, the outcome of Ted’s Jeopardy game; I had been to California for the taping three months before. But I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody the result. The day of the airing (and cemetery visit), a friend said, “Bert, you wouldn’t be throwing a party tonight if Teddy hadn’t won.” Maybe. I didn’t answer her. I planned to host a viewing get-together. I worried some more about W. and war.

Ted faced a Boston book editor and “a graduate student originally from Johnson City, Tennessee,” which is Jeopardy-talk for “This guy from Tennessee is now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, running a lab at MIT.”

Ted was formidable, don’t ever forget that. For instance, he cleaned up in the category of “Our Lady,” about Catholic shrines, like Our Lady of Czestochowa (Poland) and Our Lady of Gethsemani (Kentucky). Ted — a recent Brandeis graduate — knew his Catholic shrines.

(There’s a play-by-play of all recent Jeopardy games on J! Archive, a site run by Robert Knecht Schmidt, a Clevelander and former Jeopardy contestant.)

Going into Final Jeopardy, Ted was in second place, the Boston editor and defending champ was in third, and the Tennessee grad student was in first. The Final Jeopardy category was “Fictional Children.” The question was “This boy, introduced in a 1902 book, flew away from his mother when he was 7 years old.”

Merv Griffin made a fortune on the Jeopardy think music, which he wrote. And he owned the show, too, which he sold to Sony.

I felt like I was watching my kid line up a 50-yard field goal at the Ohio State-Michigan game with a second left on the clock. I was helpless to affect the result. That’s the craziest part about being a parent — all the collateral, out-of-your-control joy and pain. (And it never ends until you end.)

The Boston editor answered, “Peter Pan.”

Correct. She went up to $10,900.

Ted said, “Peter Pan.” He went up to $13,399.

The Tennessee student said, “The Little Prince.” He went down to $7,900.

Alex Trebek announced: “The new champion, Ted Stratton, a reporter from Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”

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The Challah Fame hosts its annual business seminar next week. (The Challah Fame is in the former Beef Corral at Warrensville and Cedar roads, South Euclid, Ohio.)

Klez Biz.  Biz hundert un tsvantsik.

The program . . .

Lori Lippitz, director of the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, speaks on KIS / Klezmer is Simple. “Never play for free, but if you feel like it, no problem.”

Henry Sapoznik, co-founder of KlezKamp. “No ‘Hava Nagila.’ Ever.”

Stanley McChristyl, retired US Army general. “Hire klez musicians with military backgrounds. How to find them? Check out the cats in the Israel Police Orchestra.”

Michael Winograd, clarinetist. “Learn to play ‘Sid’s #1’ in all 12 keys.”

Hankus Netsky, director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. “Who’s in charge of this 11-piece klez band? I am — sometimes!”

Alan Douglass, pianist. He has played klezmer for 42 years in Cleveland without annoying any klez musicians. “Except one or two.” Learn Midwestern mores.

Steven Greenman, violin. “Klez Etiquette. Is 15 minutes too long for a doina? Nope!”

Alan Greenspan

This year’s seminar closes with a concert featuring Alan Greenspan, age 98, on saxophone, followed by his speech “The straight emes: how to dance the arts/commerce tango.”

Be there.

—

Greenspan went to Juilliard and played saxophone in big bands.

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My latest Cleveland Plain Dealer essay . . .

A LONG MOVIE, ONE LESS TENANT AND A GUITAR

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — The new Bob Dylan movie, “A Complete Unknown,” is too long and a bit too “unknown” — too much about Dylan-from-nowhere. And it’s two hours and 20 minutes, with 40 songs. I like biopics from somewhere — and shorter. How about Dylan’s year at the Sammy fraternity house at the University of Minnesota, followed by his odyssey to New York’s Greenwich Village? That would have been better.

Maybe I’m not enough of a Dylan aficionado. I’m a fan, but not a fanatic. Irwin Weinberger — who used to play in my klezmer band — is a super-fan. Irwin has been to Duluth and eaten at Zimmy’s Deli in Hibbing, Minnesota. Irwin loved every bit of the movie. When Irwin and the klezmer band played weddings and bar mitzvahs, Irwin would often — by request from listeners — veer from the klezmer music into Dylan, singing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Tangled Up in the Blue” without a cheat sheet. The trick was getting Irwin to stop after two verses.

A tenant left his guitar behind. (My day job is managing apartment buildings in Lakewood.) The tenant said he was going home to Kentucky, taking only what could fit in his car. He said he wasn’t renting a U-Haul because he didn’t have a valid driver’s license. The manager at the building told me the suite was dead-bolted from the inside. I said, “Well, if the place starts to smell, let me know.” Every so often a tenant dies in a suite.

I tried to open the door with the regular key. That, surprisingly, worked. Locks can be finicky, particularly in old Lakewood buildings; you’re never sure you’re getting in until you’re actually in. The suite was above an Indian restaurant and a butcher shop on Detroit Avenue. I found a wooden chair, the guitar, some heavy-metal CDs, a book of Shakespeare plays and Charles Bukowski’s “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” The guitar was a Chinese Martin knock-off with a solid-body case. The case, alone, was worth something. I’ll give the guitar back to the tenant if he returns, but I doubt he will. I also got some postage stamps from the apartment. Nobody wants stamps except me, apparently. I pay a lot of my bills by mail. I’m 74.

When I was 26 . . .

Years ago, I learned a few guitar chords, and now I want to try again. How about, “Dear Landlord”? … “Dear landlord, please don’t put a price on my soul.” Life is complicated. I hunched over the guitar, pressed my fingers to the steel strings, and strummed hard. An acoustic guitar is probably the least ergonomically friendly instrument around. I’m not a 20-year-old made out of rubber.

Dylan mostly plays piano these days. I can see why. He’s 83.

Maybe a tenant will leave me a piano. But please, not a rotted-out 400-pound upright with worn-out strings, dampers and hammers. I “inherited” that piano from a tenant in September. It cost me $500 to junk.

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Teddy, then 11, insisted we go to Disney World. He wasn’t abiding his mother’s posturing about how Disney World would deliver no “sense of mastery” to him. Let’s go!

This would be Ted’s second Disney trip. He had been to Orlando five years previously with his grandmother, sister and me.

The repeat trip turned out to be the greatest family trip of all time. Ted and his siblings, Lucy and Jack, went absolutely nuts for Figment, Miss Piggy and the Ninja Turtles. And Epcot was cool. The kids spent some time on the floor there — Lucy on top of Jack in the Moroccan restaurant lobby, putting him in a full-nelson.

Ted had researched the vacation, using Unofficial Guide to Disney World. (This was 1993, pre-Web.) Teddy devised our personalized Disney itinerary. We got on popular rides at odd hours and walked in counter-intuitive directions. This was before priority passes and VIP lines. This was when America was Sweden.

Prior to the Disney trips, I had been a snob about amusement parks. If an amusement park was new-ish, we weren’t going.  It had to be old and rickety. We had gone to Memphis (Avenue) Kiddie Park, Geneva on the Lake, Kennywood in Pittsburgh, and Conneaut Lake Park in Pennsylvania. Conneaut was the best; it had a carnie booth of caged chickens playing tic-tac-toe. You bought corn kernels from  a gumball machine and fed the kernels to the chickens, to motivate them to play tic-tac-toe. The contraption was like out of a B.F. Skinner behavioral-science experiment.

Conneaut closed in 2010. Luna Park closed in 1929. (I didn’t make it to that one.) Euclid Beach Park — the classic Cleveland amusement park — closed in 1969. Geauga Lake, for some reason that was never on my radar.

Disney forever.

—
Teddy’s itinerary . . . This is just the first page (the next two pages are lost to history). 1993. Typed on a Compaq x386. WordPerfect 3.1.

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The Western Reserve Historical Society is the Cleveland-version of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, minus the religion angle. The historical society has extensive genealogy records. When I walked out of the society’s library, I ran into a library-goer from Chicago. She said, “We just found out something really interesting about our grandparents.”

Genealogy . . . ugh. Get away from me.

This library encounter was pre-internet days. In the archives, I found out my parents had lived two doors from pianist Chick Chaiken on Kinsman Road in 1930. I didn’t tell the Chicago woman that, and I didn’t tell her that Chick’s brother, Bill, had been a major investor in The Graduate. But she told me some stuff about Chicago, unfortunately.

I like the concept of genealogy — like if your ancestors were pioneers in the Western Reserve, then learn about the Western Reserve, or if your grandparents were Polish Jews, then read Isaac Bashevis Singer. Look at the big picture. I don’t want to hear about how your grandfather — and everybody else’s grandfather — ducked the czar’s army to come to America.

On the other hand, you’re probably interested in my grandfather . . .

Albert Zalk (1885-1950). Photo probably 1940s.

My mother’s father, Albert Zalk, came over from Europe first-class. He grew up in Eishyshok, near Vilna, Lithuania. He went to Germany to study Torah. In Cleveland he made pomade for blacks during the Depression. He was in Mississippi in the 1920s, residing at first in a rooming house in Duncan, in the Mississippi Delta. Then he started dry-goods stores in Louise and Yazoo City. The Delta: birthplace of the blues. A lot of Jews settled in small towns. My wife’s family comes from Clarksburg, West Virginia. Bob Dylan: Hibbing, Minnesota. All these folks ran “Jew stores” — mom-and-pop hard-goods stores on the main drags.

After Mississippi, Albert returned to Cleveland, mostly fundraising for the Jewish old age home. He, himself, never owned a house.

I’ve donated some Yiddishe Cup memorabilia to the historical society. If you want to know when, and where, Yiddishe Cup’s first gig was, check out the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland Jewish Archives. Or better yet, I’ll tell you here: our first gig was at the Mayfield Road JCC, Cleveland Heights, 1988.

Band genealogy? Don’t get me started.

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