Two minutes of pure joy

For all of you who have long since reached your quota of presidential politics, here are two and a half minutes of pure joy from a delightful little person (no bias whatsoever).

Enjoy!

Love,

Rebecca

15 July 2016

Escape to the movies

We managed to squeeze in a few movies over the past few weeks. Actually, I think there were four, but for the life of me I cannot remember what the fourth was, so I will write about the three I remember.

The first bore a long title, “The Music of Strangers:  Yo-yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.” We could not see this without remembering that amusing bit from Emanuel Ax, who proposed a trio with colleagues Yo-Yo Ma and Violinist Anne-Sofie Mutter be named “Axe Yo Mutter.” 

The movie shows scenes from numerous performances by “The Silk Road Ensemble,” a group of musicians first assembled by Mr. Ma in 2000 who have been playing concerts all over the globe. While following the group to various performances, the musicians discuss the role of their music amidst the violent world as well as the challenge of coming together with all their different styles while remaining true to each of their own. The soundtrack is exquisite but the cinematography is also quite breathtaking. If you enjoy music or art or both, you will appreciate this film.

On a completely different note, we saw a movie called “Weiner Dog.” This is not to be confused with the movie we had seen some weeks back about a New York politician. This movie really is about a dog, or perhaps I should say more about the dog’s various owners.

When the movie begins, the dog belongs to a family whose young son is seriously ill. The parents have a troubled relationship, and their inability to care for the dog properly literally makes a mess of their ownership. The dog next goes to live with a young man and woman (Kieran Culkin and Greta Gerwig) who had at one time been a couple and accidentally run into each other just after the young woman has rescued the dog from being euthanized. They eventually end of giving the dog to the fellow’s brother and his wife, a couple with Down Syndrome. From there he lives with a screenwriter (Danny DeVito) who has his own pathology. Weiner Dog’s final home is with an older, unhappy woman (Ellen Burstyn) whose granddaughter visits only when she needs money.

Writer and director writer Todd Solondz has apparently made a number of similar films, but this is the first one I can remember seeing. I would not recommend it all that highly. It was a starkly bleak view of the world. Only the sick young boy, the couple with Down Syndrome, and the dog seemed to be reasonable beings; everyone else was selfish at best or downright mean-spirited at worst.

Earlier today we went to see one of the first showings of Woody Allen’s new release, “Café Society.”  This one has not gotten fabulous reviews thus far, and I know that many people cannot see his films without thinking about some of his unpleasant attributes. But for better or worse, we still enjoy his work. This one reminded me of a James Taylor quip during one of his concerts, “here’s a new song, sounds pretty much like all the old songs.” Woody could say “here’s a new film, pretty much like a lot of the old films.” And that’s just it – he is doing here what so many have enjoyed for so long. Mr. Allen directed but does not appear in this one, but you could say that he has replaced himself and Diane Keaton with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart.

Bobby Dorfman (Mr. Eisenberg) is a fellow who moves to Hollywood where he falls in love with Vonnie (Ms. Stewart) after having grown up in a colorful family in the Bronx.  But Vonnie is also being wooed by Phil (Steve Carell) and when she decides to marry Phil, Bobby returns to New York, where he becomes a part of high society nightclub life and meets and marries Veronica.

I have been struggling the past few days trying to write something about all the horrific things going on in the world right now. But I simply cannot find anything meaningful or inspiring to say. I want to believe that each terrible event is the last, but unfortunately it does not seem to be so. Watching movies provides only a brief escape. When the lights come up, we are still right where we were.

Love,

Rebecca

An exquisitely designed museum

We celebrated our 43^rd wedding anniversary last week, and decided to do something a bit different. Aside from an initial trip in early 1991 when Mount Sinai was wooing Barry to join their faculty and brought the whole family for a week in New York, the two of us have never stayed overnight in Manhattan. We do sometimes talk about how different life would have been living in the City. We sometimes have fun thinking about how much we could now sell one of those $300,000 apartments we looked at, though could barely afford, at today’s prices. As a Midwestern girl, the high crime rate and garbage everywhere simply did not feel like the place for me. Of course much of that has changed, and we would be lucky to find a studio apartment we could afford after selling our 4-bedroom house in Riverdale. The wonderful thing about Riverdale is that it is about as close to the City as you can be and still have a private house, grass, and trees. So while it was nice being in Manhattan, we both came home after our two day adventure and realized how happy we are right here.

We had bought tickets to an Off-Broadway play, “The Effect.” This turned out to be interesting for me because it involved two young people who were participants in a pharmaceutical-company-sponsored study of an anti-depressant drug in development. This is precisely the type of project I first worked on when I joined Pfizer in 1992! In the play, there was no easy happy ending for either the young people or one of the psychiatrists looking after them.

Relative to this, our ending was rather benign: in three independent trials, the new drug addressed neither the symptoms of depression nor some of the side effects seen with existing compounds. The leader of the Clinical team asked me to present the results to our senior management. I assumed it was because he did not wish to be associated with these three negative studies. So I did the presentation, and what the head of Clinical and Scientific Affairs has stuck in my head all these years. “We had a question, and we set out to answer that question. We ran a good study, you did a fine job analyzing and presenting the data, so now we have our answer. That is what we needed.” Perhaps this is not strictly verbatim but I think it is fairly close to what she said.

Ordinarily we might have bought tickets to something a bit more upbeat, but we have been shying away from live musical presentations as part of the traditional observance of the year of mourning for Barry following the loss of his mother. This summer when the grandchildren come, we bought only two tickets for each of the shows, and Barry will just be our chauffeur.

The next day, we had planned to go to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum followed by a visit to the Whitney Museum, but that second part never happened. The 9/11 Museum was far more extensive and beautifully moving than we could ever have expected. If not so emotionally draining there is easily a full day or more to see there, but we were drained after three hours. 

If you are interested in learning more about the museum, you can look on:

www.911memorial.org/museum 

We did not really know anyone directly who was in the Towers that day, but we did have three names we looked for and found. The first was Mark Rosenberg, the husband of the niece of one of our close friends.

The second was Andrew Zucker, a friend of our neighbor’s son, who left behind a loving and pregnant wife.

And the third was one of whom we had just learned, Christopher Quackenbush, the father of the delightful young man who led us on the tour of Citi Field; CJ was just 9 years old in 2001.

What more is there to say?

Love,

Rebecca