Month: August 2006

Joe Costanzo lives

I had a nasty shock a few minutes ago when I found an item online saying Pittsburgh restaurateur Joe Costanzo had drowned in a boating mishap on the Ohio River.

O cruel fate! To go in a few short years from the top of his profession to a failed run for local office to jail time on charges of tax evasion and finally to a watery grave.

But as I read the news item about the drowning victim, I became confused. It said he was 38 years old, two years younger than me. There’s no way he was 19 when I first dined in his award-winning restaurant, The Primadonna, in 1987. After quite a bit of clicking around to sort it out, I discovered that the victim was a different Pittsburgh restaurateur named Joe Costanzo.

I had been hunting for news about “my” Joe Costanzo when I ran across the drowning story. The last I heard of him, he had pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was facing some jail time. Apparently he’d cooked the books of his restaurant in order to cover the expenses of his failed candidacy for some local office. He’d been forced to sell The Primadonna and then had been pinched for the crime.

I was a great Joe Costanzo fan. I still am. His crime might have spoiled it for me, but around the time of his guilty plea he issued a public mea culpa that took full responsibility and expressed genuine regret. It’s too bad that such a thing is as rare and noteworthy as it is, but with it he retained my respect.

Here’s a letter I sent to him in happier times — July 1999.

Mr. Joseph Costanzo, Jr.
The Primadonna Restaurant
801 Broadway Avenue
McKees Rocks, PA 15136

Dear Mr. Costanzo,

Some of what you’re about to read I told you in person last week when I and several friends dined at your restaurant. But I felt it appropriate to tell you again in a more tangible and thorough form.

In the late 1980’s I had just graduated from Carnegie Mellon and had begun my professional career working for the university. Eager to spend my new salary, I seized upon an early glowing newspaper review of The Primadonna. Not knowing exactly where McKees Rocks was, and having no idea how to find Broadway Avenue once I got there, I nevertheless hopped in my car with a sense of adventure and eventually made my way to the finest Italian meal I’d ever had.

Now, that’s no idle boast. Before coming to Pittsburgh for college, I lived in New York City, home to numerous authentic Italian restaurants, and I enjoyed lots of them. Indeed, good Italian food was one of several things I missed about New York when I moved to Pittsburgh. But finding The Primadonna did more than fill a void — for me, it raised the bar.

For a few short years, I was a frequent visitor to your establishment, and I took pleasure in introducing dozens of different friends and relatives to your superb cuisine and unequaled hospitality. Then, alas, in 1992 I took a job in the San Francisco area.

Last week was my first visit to Pittsburgh in seven years, and I made a beeline for The Primadonna. For in those seven years, despite San Francisco’s (otherwise well-deserved) reputation for being home to many of the world’s best restaurants, an exhaustive search failed to turn up even one Italian eatery that offered the faintest shadow of Primadonna’s wonderful hearty food and jovial atmosphere. Everything’s either a pizza joint, or nouvelle, or pretentious, or — worst of all — all three.

(The closest I came in my search was three hours from San Francisco. North Lake Tahoe has a family-owned restaurant called Lanza’s that is hearty and jovial, though not nearly as accomplished in the kitchen as your talented staff.)

To tell the truth, I was a little nervous last week on arriving at The Primadonna for the first time in so long. After treasuring my Primadonna memories for seven years, and after seven years of anticipating another meal there, how could it possibly live up to my expectations? But I needn’t have worried. Everything was fantastic — just the way I remembered, if not better.

After my meal, I shook your hand and told you some of what you’ve just read. Although by now you must be well-accustomed to lavish praise of your restaurant, you seemed genuinely moved by my testimonial. You remembered me from those early days and thanked me with a bottle of salad dressing. Thanks for that touching gesture, but more importantly, thanks for the wonderful times I’ve had at The Primadonna and the ones still to come.

I was pleased to see that your business is thriving and wish you unending success. It won’t be seven years before my next visit to Pittsburgh, and you can be sure that The Primadonna again will be my first stop.

Affectionately,
Bob Glickstein

They colorized Jeannie!

On my first date with Andrea, way back in 1988 (“Did you hear Michael Keaton is going to play Batman?!”), we double-dated with my friend Bruce and Andrea’s roommate Katie. We spent part of the night at a bar called Monsour’s in the “Sliberty” section of Pittsburgh, drinking and dancing in their cheesy backroom disco. At one point the DJ announced a trivia contest. The first person to answer it correctly would win an LP. His question was, “In what year did I Dream of Jeannie premiere on TV?”

I had a pretty good educated guess. I knew that shows like Batman and Star Trek, both of which premiered in 1966 (which I knew because I’ve been a big fan of both and because I was born in 1966), were prominently marketed as being “In Color.” And I knew, from watching too many reruns on TV in my childhood, that the first season of I Dream of Jeannie was in black-and-white. A major studio sitcom like Jeannie would not have premiered in black-and-white at the same time that the networks were premiering their shows in color. So Jeannie premiered in 1965 or earlier — but not much earlier, because by its second year Jeannie was in color, which was still new enough in 1966 that it formed a major part of a show’s promotional campaign; and because it was descended from a line of shows in the ordinary-guy-living-with-someone-or-something-magical genre (including Mister Ed, My Favorite Martian, and Bewitched), a genre that was itself no older than the 1960’s.

So 1964 or 1965. I guessed 1965 — and I was right! I won the LP. (I forget what it was.) Andrea was duly impressed. “And today that woman is my wife.”

(Nowadays I would just google the answer under the table with my Hiptop, but back then men were men.)

Today too I have season 1, disc 1 of I Dream of Jeannie at home from Netflix. We watched a couple of episodes yesterday, and they were in color! Alas, a trivia fact with which I wooed my wife has gone down the memory hole.

At least it makes sense to colorize Jeannie, with its faux-Persian costumes, genie-magic visuals, Florida setting, and parade of Playboy-era sex kittens (on the arm of bachelor astronaut Roger Healey). And to this untrained eye the colorization looks well done. But I will never understand what possessed someone to colorize Dynamite Hands. Dynamite Hands is the first of two “features” in Movie Movie, a film that harks back to the days of seeing double features for a nickel. Dynamite Hands is an affectionate parody of every morality play ever set in a boxing ring (notably Body and Soul). It’s the “B” picture before the main attraction, Baxter’s Beauties of 1933, a Busby-Berkeley-style musical. George Burns introduces the films by saying that, back in the old days, movies were in black-and-white — “except sometimes when they sang, it came out in color.” Dynamite Hands was in black-and-white and Baxter’s Beauties was in color — only someone colorized Dynamite Hands for cable TV, making a liar of George Burns.

Idiots.

Time to ditch AOL

AOL is not your friend.

They use dirty tricks to prevent you from canceling your account. (Someone recorded his attempt to cancel his account. Check it out, it’s unbelievable.)

They censor your e-mail if it’s critical of AOL.

They released your search history along with that of 658,000 other users, complete with identifying information so everyone in the world can tell who did the search for e.g. “cocaine in urine.”

And of course their arbitrary e-mail blocking policies prevent about half of the mail that I send from ever reaching you or any of the other folks on AOL with whom I (try to) maintain a correspondence.

The good news is that there are plenty of better alternatives:

Switch now. Switch now. Switch now!

Greatest hits: reunion dream

The mailing list of my high school graduating class was very lively in the months leading up to our 20-year reunion. One of my classmates wrote that she’d had a dream about the reunion. Here was my reply.

I’ve been to the reunion and it was great! […] Details are foggy of course, since it was all in a dream I had last night.

Hey, I’ve seen this movie. In the coming days you’ll remember a few more details, including a horrible event that takes place during the reunion, such as a murder or a gruesome accident. Slowly you’ll become convinced the dream was actually a premonition. This will be reinforced when you happen upon a crackpot university professor who persuasively confides in you his never-proven theory about the link between time and consciousness, and its implication that we can time-travel in our sleep.

You’ll become frantic trying to remember more detail from your dream in order to prevent the calamity. You’ll try to reproduce the conditions of your slumbering trip to the future, to no avail. Finally you’ll return to the crackpot professor, who has been trying and failing his entire career to send people through time via hypnosis. He tries it on you and soon you’re there, at the reunion that’s now just hours in the future…

The reunion is eerily familiar, but there are key differences from what you remember during your earlier visit. Someone’s white dress is now blue. A funny joke is told by a different person. An old crush who didn’t remember your name now does.

You roam the party in confusion until you recognize the elements of the calamity start to come together — a dropped glass, a raised voice, a distinctive laugh. You rush to the center of the action — and this time you’re the victim. But you’ve saved the life of the earlier victim…

…who awakes in the crackpot professor’s office in your place.

I see Julia Roberts as you…

Dr. In and Mr. Out

Strapping the kids into the car this morning for a trip to the supermarket, Andrea commented once again on Archer’s amazing prolixity. At just 2 1/4 years old, he’s chattier than any ten grownups I know; and his utterances are fully formed thoughts, almost always organized into comprehensible sentences and, more often than not, cohesive paragraphs with a sensible, non-trivial logical flow.

Andrea’s comment to me, sotto voce, was that Archer is far ahead of where Jonah was at that age. I felt that was missing the point, apart from being impolitic, especially as Jonah has always impressed everyone with his intelligence, even as a toddler. I reframed her observation thus: Jonah was always the one taking everything in, examining the world, understanding it, recording it, drawing conclusions about it; whereas Archer is the one who lets everything out, exploring his environment more by engaging the people in it.

None of which is to imply that Jonah can’t be outgoing, or that Archer has no interior life. Far from it!

From Russia With Love^H^H^H^HLike

Speaking of James Bond, I found “The British Censorship of From Russia With Love” extremely interesting. It’s about the cuts made to the racier parts of that film, and for its time it was apparently quite racy indeed. Here’s my favorite:

The use of “Was I” in “Was I as exciting as all those Western girls?” has been changed to “Am I?” The past tense implies that the couple have had sex, while the present tense implies that Bond just finds her attractive.

And while we’re on the subject of From Russia With Love, I might as well mention my theory that the role of Blofeld in that movie was played by Sean Connery. His face is never seen and he’s listed as “?” in the credits. His voice has a thick, phony accent. When the film came out in 1963 it might not have been possible to ID that voice, but from a modern perspective it does sound rather like someone doing an exaggerated aging-Sean-Connery impression. And I think the duality of playing both the hero and the villain would have been irresistible to both Connery and to the producers. Why else hide Blofeld’s face? Why else conceal the actor’s identity in the credits? I would not be surprised if this very theory had currency among Bond fans at the time of the film’s release, but of course there are no Internet archives from that era for me to google.

I stated this theory on Usenet in the 80’s sometime and it was debunked; and the IMDb has Eric Pohlmann listed as the voice of Blofeld. But I like my theory much better. Listen closely the next time you see the movie and tell me I’m not onto something.

"Digital"

It has taken just a fraction of my lifetime for digital technology to totally transform many aspects of life and society, usually for the better (unless you’re one of those weirdos hoarding the world’s dwindling supply of vacuum tubes for that “warm” tube-amp sound — warm tube-amp buzz, says I).

So you might be forgiven for thinking that a “digital prostate exam” sounds like some kind of high-tech 21st-century diagnostic technique, possibly involving a full-color 3-d computer display.

But you’d be oh so wrong. Well, except for the 3-d part. All I can say is, it sure feels analog.

Squeamish no more

It’s a truism that if you’re squeamish, having kids will cure you of it. Thousands of diaper changes (in times of good intestinal health and otherwise), plus occasional helpings of spit-up and vomit on one’s skin and hair, in one’s clothes, and throughout one’s house do the trick quite nicely. But Tuesday night was without doubt the death knell for any remaining squeamishness I had.

Our dog, Alex, is a month shy of her 18th birthday. She suffers from a variety of age-related complaints, including arthritis, nerve damage, and occasional incontinence. She is pretty frail and sometimes needs help simply walking. We seldom leave her alone for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Tuesday night she’d been home alone for just a couple of hours when we returned from dinner. At that dinner, Jonah and I shared a “molten chocolate cake” for dessert, Jonah sitting on my lap as we ate. This was wonderful, father-son-bonding-wise, but it made eating a little awkward, and at one point a piece of cake leapt off my fork on its way to my mouth, bouncing off my shirt and pants and landing on the floor. Being “molten,” it made some big brown stains on my clothes, a portent of what was to come.

Words fail me when trying to convey, in appropriately visceral terms, what we found when we got home, so I’ll have to settle for simply stating the facts:

  • Alex pooped on the living room carpet.
  • She fell down in it and could not get back up.
  • She tried a lot.

We found her splayed on the floor in the center of a tremendous brown circle, smelling bad. Real bad. And clearly traumatized, poor girl.

All of the following then needed to happen at once:

  • Calm Alex down
  • Air her out
  • Clean her off
  • Clean the carpet
  • Keep the kids away from the mess

I got the Alex-related jobs, Andrea got the house- and kid-related ones. Alex and I went out onto the lawn for a while. She was trembling and unsteady on her feet, but after a short while and some soothing talk she was clearly feeling better. So then it was time to get her in the bathtub.

Frail and old though she is, Alex’s coat is still thick and lustrous — when it’s not caked with fecal matter, that is. I spent about a week that night restoring that coat to its rightful sheen. Poor Alex has trouble standing at the best of times, but weighed down with a coatful of water, her feet on bare porcelain, and so soon after lying helpless (and injured from her struggling, most likely) in a pile of shit for who knows how long, was a bit much to ask. So with one hand I supported her weak back legs while with the other hand I directed the handheld shower spray all over her, my third and fourth hands lathering her up with sweet-smelling shampoo. Crippling my weak lower back by doing all this while leaning over the bathtub rim was a given.

A day and a half later and Alex is beautiful again, and seems back to her usual self. I wish I could say the same for the carpet; it’s still discolored and the smell isn’t quite gone. It’s covered with a layer of towels for now. Another couple of assaults with cleaning chemicals and sessions of vigorous scrubbing over the next day or so will tell whether the carpet can be rejuvenated like Alex or whether it will have to be put to sleep.

Keep it in perspective

pale blue dotCarl Sagan taught us to look at the Earth as a pale blue dot, which is how it looked to the Voyager 1 spacecraft in a picture it sent back years ago as it raced to the edge of the solar system.

…every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam […] Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

But with all respect to the late, beloved Dr. Sagan, for really putting things in perspective he can’t compete with this blog post by Dick Hardt.