The After-Party Party
The two-for-one philosophy of hosting
As most savvy New York hosts know, when you throw a large cocktail party, you can expect approximately 60 percent of the invitees to attend. Of the 40 percent who don’t come, most have a scheduling conflict or illness and are truly sorry to be missing the affair. So, what if you immediately offered these people an alternative—a kind of make-up party? Read more
Waking Up with Charlie Rose—and Some Questions
A new addition reminds us that our town is still king of the morning show
Over many years, Charlie Rose spent a tremendous number of hours in my bedroom. Before discovering the life-altering advantages of the DVR, I often ended my day with Rose on public TV. So his move two weeks ago to the CBS morning program sent my routine into confusion. Read more
Dousing the Flame on Apartment Fires
Fire prevention must become a top national concern
By Bette Dewing
“We often need as much to be reminded as to be informed” are among the wisest words ever spoken. Thank you, Dr. Samuel Johnson.
And we must remember Martin Luther King’s dream of a nation where content of character matters, not skin color. Surely that means not valuing “physical attractiveness” over character. Recent research shows that so-called attractive members of Congress are the ones who get the most TV coverage (“Looks Matter as TV Covers Congress,” New York Times, Jan. 6). Once, the women’s movement denounced this general attractiveness bias, and I’m seeking others concerned that the now decades of related research stored in one of my file cabinets do not go to waste.
Indeed, I recently started going to the EIS Housing Resource Center’s organizing group because of decades of research on a number of frustrating crusades about public safety. How I wish you’d heard the January meeting’s powerful talk on fire prevention by Kevin Anderson, an FDNY Safety Education member. It takes an impassioned speaker like Anderson to effectively inform and remind.
“We must remember,” he said, that fireplace embers caused the fire that killed three little sisters and their grandparents.
“It would likely not have turned deadly if smoke detectors had been working.” These foremost fire prevention tools must be placed up high and checked every month—and several are better than one.
Julie, a savvy business executive, marveled, “He said so much I didn’t know!” like the fact that carbon monoxide detectors must be replaced every five to seven years and extension cords should be used only temporarily, never for high power users like TVs and space heaters, and must be in mint condition and UL approved. I add: Make installing additional wall outlets affordable!
Power strips must be checked for capacity levels. Some lamps, too. Anderson fears screw-in-type fluorescent bulbs because their bases can dangerously overheat, another reason to support the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice bill! (A recent East End Avenue penthouse fire was reportedly lamp-related.)
“And use only battery-powered candles!” he implored.
Throw baking soda, never water, on small grease fires. Keep a large pot cover handy to smother small stove fires, but call 911 and get out with anything larger, especially in a non-fireproof building. No building is entirely fireproof, but those with steel beams and all-concrete walls and floors keep fire contained. Marble floors “crumble with heat.”
Use only fire department-approved window gates and never place anything on fire escapes.
Instructions for devising an escape plan and other vital information is found in the Fire Safety for Seniors brochure that was shared with our group.
“It’s for all ages,” said Anderson but, he stressed, “50 percent of fire victims are age 65 and over.” So let’s study and discuss this life-saving booklet, at least monthly, when we check our smoke detectors. Call 718-281-3870 for a copy.
Build we must on the unprecedented outpouring of public grief and nationwide media coverage of the deaths of Lily, Grace and Sarah Badger and their grandparents, Pauline and Lomer Johnson, to finally make fire prevention a top nationwide priority.
And now two deadly local fires: The Times’ “Fleeing a Fire, Only to Realize That One Child Was Left Behind” tragically reminds us that the family of the 7-year-old boy in Brooklyn did not have an escape plan. The death of a woman, age 38, in a fire in an abandoned Harlem building where she and a friend had reportedly taken shelter did not receive print coverage.
First we must be informed and then reminded, reminded, reminded!
dewingbetter@aol.com
What’s Your Sign?
How to Attract Your Peers Among the Masses
By Jeanne Martinet
I don’t usually travel on the subway with a white plastic Venetian face mask, but that’s what I was doing last Monday night.
I wasn’t wearing the mask, I was merely holding it in my lap. And yet, almost immediately after the train left the station at 23rd Street, a cute guy with super-chic eyeglasses got up from where he was sitting across from me and approached. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you,” he smiled, “but didn’t you just LOVE it?” He wiggled his eyebrows in a conspiratorial fashion, nodding at the mask. Read more
Getting Giddy About Our Grid
The city’s original design team nets positive response—two centuries later
Now that we can go back to ignoring Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire for another three-plus years, let’s concentrate again on city life. Especially since the hottest thing in cold New York this January is the grid. Read more
How to Unhook from Addiction
A new year means new resolutions—here’s how to stick to them
Welcome to your first week of change.
Five days ago, you most likely made a resolution involving one of the big three. With any luck, your agreement with yourself to exercise more, weigh less (always No. 1 on my hit parade) or stop smoking and/or imbibing will last out the week. Read more
2012 Resolutions to Keep
Using Facebook and Twitter to better society
By Bette Dewing
Protecting life and health always tops this column’s mission.
The tragic Christmas morning Stamford, Conn., fire that killed three young sisters and their maternal grandparents prompts an overdue focus on fire-related danger. While unsafe disposal of fireplace embers was the fire’s reported cause, had smoke detectors been installed in the mansion that was under renovation, it might not have been deadly. Read more
Draining the Swamp
Political resolutions for 2012
If I were these people, I would make the following resolutions:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo: I resolve to clean up the Democratic conference in the State Senate by backing good, progressive, honest Democratic candidates rather than collaborating with the Republicans. I vow to remember that in 2016 I will be running for president of the United States, and some Democrats will have long memories and accuse me of being a bad Democrat. I will keep my distance from Rupert Murdoch—people are beginning to talk. Speaking of talking, before my run for president, I really have to get some coaching about my regional dialect. Read more
The Myth of the Lift
Is getting a ride all it’s cracked up to be?
It seemed like a no-brainer at the time. I mean, if you have to go to a funeral in New Jersey and you’re faced with a choice between public transportation (in this case, a bus from Port Authority followed by either a long walk or a short cab ride) and a ride in a friend-of-a-friend’s car, you choose the ride, right? Read more
Relatively Speaking, It’s Not That Interesting
Having high-profile writers interviewed by family members doesn’t really work
Like so many other things, it should work, but it really doesn’t.
The failure in question is having family members interview one another in a public forum. At my neighborhood cultural hot spot, Symphony Space, I have survived two family-ish interviews this year: Katie Roiphe interviewing her mother, Anne Roiphe, and, more recently and even less successfully, Griffin Dunne talking with his aunt, Joan Didion.
The family thing promises some delicious glimpse into the personal relationships in an author’s life. But it does not always deliver. Or it delivers and turns out not to matter much. Our great writers use their lives as fodder in fascinating ways, but when they are not turning the phrase, real life can look dull.
It turns out that knowing someone well and understanding their work—let alone having a talent for coming up with questions—are separate matters. And it does not take long to find out that other people’s family relationships are not necessarily more interesting than our own. My last phone conversation with my mother was about seven times more interesting than Joan Didion’s onstage interview with her nephew.
Ah, Didion. She’s frequently an amazing interview. Now she’s back with a new round of aggressively depressing musings. Blue Nights is looser and less structured, more of an incantation following the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo.
The book is lovely and lyrical and, like its author, uncompromising about life’s harsher truths. The high point of Didion’s appearance Nov. 30 came when a young woman in the audience pressed for a happy ending. She said she wanted a sense of “redemption,” like she got in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Didion, in brutal-but-honest mode, told her young fan, “I wasn’t thinking in those terms.”
It’s instructive that the good moments came when the audience was asking the questions. Dunne is cute, affable and well-spoken, but better at talking about himself than at asking his aunt questions. It’s not a crime; most of us are better at talking about ourselves. It only becomes a misdemeanor when somebody decides to make the private family chatter a public event.
Dunne was a lot less probing about Didion’s work and life than Charlie Rose was on public television.
Earlier this year, the Roiphe-Roiphe team talked on a smaller stage at Symphony Space. They were better, since Katie Roiphe bothered to have enough intelligent questions. Anne Roiphe, promoting her memoir, was fantastic because she cannot be anything else.
Even at the Roiphe event, though, I found myself wondering whether someone with a close personal relationship to the subject usually asks the right questions. Relatives take a writer’s life for granted, being so near to it, and get bogged down in their own story of surviving in a famous person’s shadow.
At the Didion event, with the conversation measly, Symphony Space’s founding artistic director, Isaiah Sheffer, bravely came onstage to ask her a few questions, but she sounded ready to go home.
I hate being bitchy about Didion. She’s a master and an inspiration. I saw her standing outside Lincoln Center this fall at the memorial tribute to film director Sidney Lumet. I wanted to go up and tell her that I love her, but that already happened at my journalism school graduation. Apparently, I should have offered to interview her—even if, to win the job, I have to pretend we are related.
Christopher Moore is a writer who lives in Manhattan. He can be reached by email at ccmnj@aol.com and is on Twitter—@cmoorenyc.
