Phyllis Frankel (April 8, 1934 to July 14, 2021)

It is with deep sadness that I share the news of longtime member Phyllis Frankel’s death. Phyllis was 87. Our mothers were sisters. She was fourteen years older, the first born of my generation of cousins, and like a light on the road of my life, she led my way first to Hastings and then to the Literature Club.

Whatever Phyllis did, she did well. She was our Recording Secretary for years; her minutes were beautifully detailed. Her presentations were thoughtfully done. We all so enjoyed being in her home when she hosted.

Phyllis grew up in Peekskill and Mount Vernon. She went to Buffalo State Teacher’s College, received two master’s degrees from Hunter College, the first in teaching, and the other, to prepare for her second career, in speech pathology. She married Benjamin Frankel in 1959; their daughters, Faith, Rachel and Eleanor, were all born in the sixties. She and Ben were pleasantly surprised when their 3 girls presented them with 6 grandsons. A granddaughter was born between grandsons four and five, but too late to continue the run of three generations of being the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter. Phyllis was the last. We thought of her as the family matriarch.

Phyllis was one of the founders of Temple Beth Shalom and served as president. She was active in the PTSA and the League of Women Voters.

She had a well-lived life.

- Fran Greenberg

Our Pandemic Year

The posts which follow are mostly minutes of our year on Zoom. March 11, 2020 was our last in-person meeting before we went virtual. We knew 2020-21 was going to be a tough year; we chose (wisely) Humor, Comedy and Satire as our topic. Our readings and our presentations lifted our spirits. What we missed most on Zoom was hearing each other's laughter.  

Now - we're all vaccinated. We were able to meet, finally, unmasked, for the last presentation of the year - Carla's, on Calvin Trillin, June 2. We sat in Carol's garden, the day was warm and sunny. Her peonies were in full bloom. 

For the first time this pandemic year, we could all hear each other's laughter.

Carla Presents Calvin Trillin

Superwoman Carla handled both a move and her presentation in May. 

Jacquie's Reminder Email

"When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery." - Calvin Trillin

Hello Literary Ladies!

Although I was saddened to realize that this Wednesday, May 19th's meeting of The Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson will be the final one for this year's tremendously enjoyable theme of Comedy, Humor, and Satire, I know we are going to have a lot of fun with Carla's presentation on Calvin Trillin because I've already had the best time just choosing a quote for my reminder email. There was this: "As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler." Or, "The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." Or even, "If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come 'Lincolnesque' just means tall?" 

But the quote above in blue won the day because not only did it make me chuckle, but it also made me think; think of our dear Lit Club and the myriad ways our form of exploring different themes and the work of different writers brings added richness to what we experience together. Sharing the words of our writers by reading them aloud gives them new meaning - we hear them differently with each new reader, as well as through the minds and enthusiasm of each presenter. It might not be the 'delivery' intended by the author (ha!) but we are grateful to all our writers for bravely giving up that privilege so that we can find our own way through their thoughts and ideas, leaving our time together a little fuller than when we first came. (Pun intended, with dreams of soon returning to shared luncheons!) 

Although I missed the chance to hear everyone laughing together (or not!) this past year, Zoom still kept us all close and I think we should give ourselves a standing ovation for the new computer skills we all mastered and the creative way we persevered. I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday. Enjoy this beautiful weather!  xJacquie

Christine's Minutes

For our first in person meeting in over a year, thirteen fully vaccinated and hence maskless members of the Literature Club gathered in Carol Barkin’s backyard. We were seated upon a variety of folding chairs. For our benefit the garden was extravagantly displaying its ornaments: bright pink and pale pink peonies were at their peak, chives were topped with lilac pompoms, and mingled all about were Rose Campion (Silene coronaria). Even the landscapers had yielded to the imperative of out literary gathering, and had rescheduled their noisy mechanical ministrations.

President Fran Greenberg rang the bell at 1:40, and it was a treat to hear the ding-a-ling unmediated by cyberspace. The minutes of the previous meeting were read and accepted. The treasury remains at $267.52. Fran told us she is in the process of affixing our club bookplates to the books donated to the library. Connie requested that members please tell her their chosen subjects for next year’s program.

What better way to end a year of humor with one of the most humorous humorists out there? Carla’s presentation was on Calvin Trillin, and her chosen readings had many of us weeping with laughter.

Along with copies of our readings, Carla had for each of us a gift-wrapped Chuckles™, elegantly described by one member as a “madeleine of a 1970s childhood in Poughkeepsie.”

Calvin Trillin was born in Kansas City in 1935. He went to Yale, where he wrote for the Yale Daily News. After serving in the army, he moved to New York City to begin his writing career. He started writing for The New Yorker in 1963, and in 1967 he began writing his column “Uncivil Liberties” for The Nation. Most importantly, in 1965 he married Alice Stewart – yes, the famous Alice of all his stories. They had two daughters, and several grandchildren. She died in 2001.

Trillin has been a prolific writer, with 177 works, in over 463 publications. In 2013 he was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

The club read, with great merriment, dare I say giddiness, selections from Floater, Tepper Isn’t Going Out, and The Tummy Trilogy. Your secretary particularly appreciated an extract from “To Market, To Market” in which their friend Jeffrey, who “had finished second in the other-than-white egg division,” chats about eggs with the poultry vendors. It must be admitted that like Jeffrey, your secretary has been known to turn up her nose at the color of yolks not produced by her own chickens.

One hilarious selection demonstrated Trillin’s technique, while traveling out of town, for deciding whether or not to accept a colleague’s dinner invitation, that is, if the food would be good.

Some members almost laughed themselves into a veritable snort, as we listened to the story of Chubby,  the collie dog, who turned out to be named George. Trillin was the one called Chubby.

Throughout his writing, his wife Alice is often brought in, as a straight (wo)man to Trillin’s extravagant gastronomic adventures. His tenderness for her is palpable.

Trillin’s comic genius is made manifest when he takes the mundane and makes it extraordinary, and hilarious. What is more mundane than finding a decent parking spot in the city? His last novel, Tepper Isn’t Going Out, is about Tepper who enjoys parking for its own sake.

A fine time was had by all. The club looks forward to this September when we can meet in person, and in the spirit of Calvin Trillin, enjoy the delicious lunches prepared by members.

Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary

  

Gita Presents Peter Mayle

Jacquie's Reminder Email 

April 26 Hello Literary Ladies! A note to remind you that we will be meeting this Wednesday, April 28th at 1pm, when Gita will delight us with the musings of Peter Mayle. Although we won't be together to also enjoy what few in the South of France would call "a little nosh" I hope you all will treat yourselves to something special before or during our virtual meeting/travels. Until Wednesday, Jacquie

Christine's Minutes

Thirteen members and one associate met for our meeting via Zoom on April 28, 2021. As usual, we engaged in our pre-meeting exchanges of news, books, and cultural happenings. Most significantly, on this occasion several sightings of the rogue yellow tulip were noted. This yellow (though sometimes blushing to red) tulip has appeared in the gardens of several members, in places where no tulips were planted, and where no tulips were expected to survive the ungulate depredations. Yet, there it was.

At 1:35 President Fran Greenberg rang her bell, and the meeting commenced. Minutes of the previous meeting were read and accepted. Our treasury remains unchanged at $396.52.

Then, with all due fanfare, Connie announced that our program next year will be: "Biography. "A distant second and third were "Drama," and then "Russian Literature. "The 2021-2022 season will begin on September 22.

We have made our annual donation to the Hastings Library, of $129.00, which was used to purchase several books including Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, and others enjoyed by our members.

Then it was time to visit the beautiful south of France with Gita, and Peter Mayle. The books consulted for our trip were A Year in Provence, a collection of vignettes about the author’s adventures renovating his house, and Toujours Provence, short stories about life in Provence. 

Peter Mayle was born in Brighton, England in 1939, but grew up in Barbados, where the family moved for his father’s work with the Colonial Office. Mayle was married three times, the last one being a success. He began his career writing sex education books for young people. In the 1980’s he moved to Luberon, in southern France. His books about France have been enormously successful. In 2002 the French government made him a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) for coopération et francophonie, which sounds to me like he was given the award for speaking French so well.

Members first read an excerpt from A Year in Provence, in which was described a lunch on New Year’s Day. Some listeners may have developed francophone hunger pains at the excruciating detail: the meal started off with three homemade pizzas of anchovies, mushrooms and cheese; then came pâtés of rabbit, boar, thrush and saucission; then duck with wild mushrooms; then a casserole of rabbit civet; followed by a green salad, goat’s cheese, and an almond and cream gateau. The digestifs were made, mais oui, following an eleventh century recipe.

In Toujours Provence, members met the plumber who played the clarinet, and the builders who came to demolish the kitchen, otherwise known as the assault troops. We also learned the merits of rabbits, and heard of the architect’s prospective job designing a new brothel in Cavaillon. For any of us planning a visit to Aix any time soon, we learned the de rigeur of café deportment: first arrive in a red Kawasaki; second, keep your sunglasses on when entering; third, engage in ritual kissing; fourth, keep wearing sunglasses.

Our most pleasant sojourn in France ended with some Provençal wisdom regarding the use of lemon to keep away ants. Mille mercis a Gita.

Respectfully submitted, Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary

Linda Presents Roz Chast

Jacquie's Email Reminder

April 11, 2021: Dear Literary Ladies,Well, thank GOODNESS there is no such thing as this miracle book! If there were, where would that leave us?!?! Just a quick reminder that on Wednesday, April 14th at 1 pm, Linda will be sharing more of Roz Chast's infinite wisdom with us.  Until then, I hope you don't experience every emotion known to mankind! Jacquie

Christine's Minutes

On April 14, 2021, fourteen members attended the meeting of the Literature Club, via Zoom, a program in which we are all becoming quite competent. President Fran Greenberg called upon members in their screen order, and we heard the good news of members becoming fully vaccinated, of grandchildren finally returning to in-person school, and of Linda’s “post-vaccine gallivanting ways”.

Our president rang the bell at 1:34 (an exactitude completely reliant upon the computer which hosts our meeting). The minutes of our previous meeting were read and accepted. Our treasury is ample with $396.52. Much of that will be donated to the library, as usual.

And then, even while separately inhabiting our rectangles on screen, we travelled together, guided by Linda Tucker, into the very weird and comical world of Roz Chast. It must be noted that Linda was more than competent in her use of Screen-Sharing: she has become a master of the medium. The theme of the program was Roz Chast and Existential Angst. Existential, as in existence. Angst, as in a gloomy often neurotic feeling of generalized anxiety. How profoundly appropriate for our pandemic times! Since these minutes will not avail of screen sharing, nor – alas - will they be illustrated by your secretary, mere words must be relied on to spark your memory of certain cartoons. So, we began with Lots of Ducks, then Little Things, Chast’s first cartoon to be accepted by The New Yorker, and Linda’s favorite, Reading the Obits while calculating the ages in relation to oneself.

Following the categories listed on Roz Chast's website: Fairy Tales, Fear and Loathing, Kids and Family, and Unclassifiable, Linda shared with us a wonderfully curated selection of cartoons. Just to name a few, we saw "Gregor S’s Further Adventure,;" "Kant at Camp," "The Delusional World of Free-Range Chickens," "Ralph Nader’s Children," "Our Friend Algebra," "Rebels Without a Magic Marker," "Radiator Cooking."

Roz Chast was born in 1954 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the only child of two educators. She received a BFA from RISD in 1977. She sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1978, and had her first cover in 1986. She has written and illustrated numerous books, including a memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? which won several awards and struck a chord with so many of us with elderly and aging parents. In addition to The New Yorker, she has published cartoons in journals as varied as the Village Voice and the Harvard Business Review.

In a 2014 interview with Steve Martin at The New Yorker festival, Chast discussed her cartooning routine. She generally draws between 5 and 7 cartoons a week, and once something is bought by The New Yorker, she will redraw it and tidy things up. She loves to draw interiors, especially wallpaper and lamps, inanimate objects. She said that her mother “believed in the conspiracy of the inanimate”.

We all enjoyed spending the afternoon in the wonderfully offbeat and idiosyncratic world of Roz Chast’s imagination.

Respectfully submitted, Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary

Our Annual Meeting

Jacquie's Reminder Email

March 8, 2021: Hello Literary Ladies! Just a reminder that we will be meeting on Wednesday, March 10th at 1pm for our annual Annual Meeting. Our agenda will include discussing topics for next year, and the nominating committee will announce the officers for next year. Hopefully some of those meetings will be held in person! Until Wednesday, Jacquie 

P.S. For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath for the third season of Shtisel, I have just learned that it will finally air on Netflix on March 25th! For those of you who haven't seen it, I highly recommend the series.

Barbara's Minutes

Signs of almost spring were shared during chat time by 12 members of the Literature Club. Several of us have crocuses or snowdrops blooming in our gardens, and Mary Greenly reported a bluebird sighting in Connecticut. The other hopeful sign was that all members of a certain age have received at least the first shot of the Covid-19 vaccine, so we could talk of meeting for picnics when the weather turns warmer.

We remembered that it was at our annual meeting a year ago that we last gathered indoors in person. Fran Greenberg, then the nominee for President of Literature Club, could not be with us, because her granddaughter’s nursery school in Brooklyn had closed, and she was providing childcare. In the year since that time Fran has mastered conducting meetings on Zoom, many of us have learned how to share screens, and the Club has continued as a source of camaraderie and comfort as well as literary stimulation. We all learned to wear masks and keep social distance, and none of us contracted the virus. There was even a benefit to Zoom meetings, for members who had moved away were able to attend.

Fran led today’s business meeting, at which the minutes were accepted as read. We elected the nominating committee’s rhymed slate of candidates: Jacquie Weitzman continuing as corresponding secretary, Lori Walsh as treasurer, and Christine Lehner as our new recording secretary. Fran asked members to mail $15 annual dues to Lori. As part of the ongoing business to donate books to the Hastings Public Library, we approved Carol Barkin’s suggestion of Pamela Paul’s Rectangle Time in memory of May Kanfer.

Program Chair Connie Stewart led the discussion of topics for next program year, during which we for the first time eliminated as many topics as we added. New topics are "Black Women Authors: American and International" and "Solely Shakespeare." Among the deleted topics were “Adolescent Favorites Revisited,” although the writer of these minutes cherishes a fond memory of Gene Stratton- Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost. Connie will send us the list of topics. For our first vote, we choose 5 or perhaps 6 topics we like, but without ranking them. In the final vote of whittled down topics, we will mark first, second, and third choices.

In closing my final set of minutes, I promise that I will get copies of all to the Hastings Historical Society and that I will send Fran this past year’s minutes to be posted on the Literature Club blog. It has been a privilege to serve this august yet playful Club.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Jacquie Presents Neil Simon

Jacquie's Email 

Feb 21 Hello Literary Ladies! As I've been preparing for my presentation on Neil Simon this coming Wednesday at 1pm, I have been preoccupied with Broadway, and particularly the theater seasons of the late 60s and early 70s. How many of you can read those words without your mind wandering to the memory of pulling out the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times and delighting in the latest Al Hirshfeld, searching for the NINAs and marveling at his brilliance at capturing the very essence of a character or an actor's performance? As I am still battling to find the words to express to you the time I have been spending with Neil Simon and his many, many plays and screenplays, how I wish I could just sum it all up in just a few, pointed lines! Alas, I cannot, but I can leave you here with a few images to whet your appetite for what I hope will be an amusing afternoon. Please let me know if you will be joining us on Wednesday and would like to read. I will be sharing my screen with the text of the plays we will be reading, but I will cast in advance to keep things moving. Until Wednesday! Jacquie

Barbara's Minutes 

Real estate news dominated the chat time of the February 24 meeting of the Literature Club. Carla Potash is selling her apartment on North Broadway in Hastings and moving to Greystone, and Laura Rice is selling her house on Elm Place and moving to Ossining. Both have been engaged in disposing of many boxes of things.

At the business meeting, led by President Fran Greenberg, the minutes were accepted as read and the treasury reported at still $181.52. Jacquie Weitzman and Carol Barkin are continuing discussions with Hastings Librarian Debbie Quinn about donating books from the club to the library. VP/Program Chair Connie Stewart reminded members to think about topics for the Club’s next program year, and send her ideas, in preparation for our Annual Meeting on March 10.

Jacquie Weitzman enhanced her presentation on Neil Simon with montages and photographs, including an image of the prolific playwright, in her words “the chubby cheeked master of the one-liner, with his signature tortoise shell glasses and shy smile,” who got his start writing sketch comedy for Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar.

As Carol Barkin discovered when she revisited the work of James Thurber for her February 3 presentation, Jacquie found that due to changes in our social attitudes, some of the plays she was reading or movies she was watching were not quite as funny as she remembered them to be. But she chose to appreciate the experiences in these works and the complex, flawed, human characters that Simon created. As she noted, Simon “expressed universal truths while at the same time capturing a very specific time and place. He was a child of the Depression, born and raised in New York, who contributed to the golden age of television, and created what has been called ‘the comedy of urban neurosis,’ while also exploring family relationships, the anxiety caused by feminism and the sexual revolution to a host of middle-aged men and women, and ultimately the importance of finding one’s voice and expressing love and commitment.” With pleasure we read scenes from Barefoot in the Park, Chapter Two, and The Sunshine Boys.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary