Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

OHIO LAYERS

by Bert Stratton

dont-go-out1

I had a custodian who enjoyed the Weather Channel and thought the end of the world was coming every day, via hurricanes or snowstorms. I don’t think she ever went outside.

74-degrees1Another employee was also fixated on the weather. He did a lot of indoor apartment painting and wanted every day to be 74 degrees like Costa Rica, so he wouldn’t sweat.

A neighbor of mine asked if I had a winter place in Florida.

I was surprised. I’m not there yet — retirement in Florida.

But I know a klezmer musician — a bushy-haired baby-boomer clarinetist — who is moving to Florida and taking up golf.  So anything is possible.

Maybe my friend will play a freylekhs (hora) by the water fountain on the 16th hole.  (Mickey Katz did that.  His band got paid to surprise a golfer on his birthday.)

Some Clevelanders complain about the cold. Arizona versus Florida.  That is the discussion.

My wife, Alice, and I went to a wedding in Florida last spring, and a guest asked Alice, “Are you still in Cleveland?” Meaning “Are you nuts?  Do you like gray skies, slush and potholes?”

Another Cleveland woman at the wedding said, “The day I hit sixty-two I had to leave.”  She spends the winters in Scottsdale, Ariz.  A third Clevelander, originally from South Africa, preferred Florida over Arizona.  “I like the ocean,” she said.

Last month at a gig in Florida, I ran into a waiter who had lived in Florida and Arizona.  He said summer in Arizona is unbearable. Florida is bearable.

What about Ohio?  Ohio-with-layers in the winter and pleasant the rest of the year.

—

Please see the post below too.  It’s new.   And check out this  video, “Albert Stratton Practicing his Comeback.” The clip is  an Ann Arbor song, taped at The Ark this month.

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2 comments

1 Alan Douglass { 02.16.11 at 9:36 am }

“…and that was Albert Stratton practicing his comeback!”

2 marc { 02.16.11 at 1:57 pm }

My wife loves the Weather Channel. She particularly enjoys watching disasters . . .hurricanes, tornados, etc. She likes Jim Cantore.

I was in Florida a few years ago, visiting an old friend in Boca. He took me to a waterfront restaurant for lunch. It was raining out. I looked out the window and saw the palm trees swaying in the wind and the rain coming down. My wife would have loved it. It looked like Jim Cantore covering a Florida hurricane.

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