June 8, 2025
# 1716
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Cover and Story
World Oceans Day
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Заход солнца над Белым морем около острова Ягры
Schekinov Alexey Victorovich (старый ник «Xxxl») - Белая ночь над Белым морем.
Permission details
Released into the public domain (by the author).
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Commentary
The restaurant culture of the 50s and 60s North End was very different from what we have today.
Especially the personalities that stamped their enterprise with themselves.
Each restaurant was unique, from Tecce's to Felicia's to the Blue Front, the European, the Italian Canteen, and the several others.
We all served great food and added our idiosyncrasies.
At Dom's, aided and abetted by our rock and roll clientele, we were pretty freewheelin'.
This letter captures the spirit of the place.
On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 11:41 AM Steffon Long <steffonlong@gmail.com> wrote:
REMEMBERING DOM’S by Steffon Long
PREFACE : I’m still working on Street Stories about my chaotic gypsy life beginning with my days at U. Mass, Boston through to ending up on the streets of San Francisco for six months [2003] after over 40 years as a ballet dancer / teacher / choreographer / director in NYC, San Francisco, Tehran, Ireland, London, Germany, Spain, Norway, Amsterdam, Germany, Alaska.
Always during “in-between times” working as a waiter and/or bar tender employing the skills I learned at Dom’s Restaurant. Yesterday I did some research about Dom’s for my book, and was fortunate to find a link to Dom's, An Odyssey on Word Press, and from there I ordered Dom's, An Odyssey on AMAZON, and it just feels right to, in a weird kind of way maybe[?], to say thank you for what you gave to me when you gave me the job at DOM’S. Because of what I learned from you I was able to work as a waiter at legendary Reno Sweeney’s NYC [Reno Sweeney was an intimate cabaret located at 126 West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, where Holly Woodlawn and many other downtown acts performed.], assistant manager at My Old Dutch [Green Park, London], and The Old Union Inn / Pub [Old Windsor, UK].
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At the end of August of 1971 Belinda and I had just returned to Boston from our second trip hitchhiking across the country, and we were crashing with our friends Nancy and Jake at their apartment in Jamaica Plain. I was out of money and out of work. The morning after our return I saw an ad in a newspaper that said Dom’s restaurant was looking for a waiter. I’d never been a waiter before, but I’d eaten in restaurant before, how had can it be right [?] You walk up to the table, ask them what they want, write it down, take the order to the kitchen, give it to the chef, pick up the food when it’s ready, take it to the table, serve it and when the patrons are finished give them the bill, and after they’ve left grab the tip from the table. I decided to apply for the job and lie about my experience as a “waiter”. I threw on my best bell bottom jeans, a t-shirt [probably my Jefferson Airplane t-shirt], and made my way to the North End - one of my most favorite neighborhoods in Boston.
You [Dom] interviewed me - either he [you] believed my lie about having been a waiter at Red Coach Grill, or he [you] had a good feeling about me, or he [you] didn’t care if I was lying, because he [you] needed a waiter immediately, so I began working that evening.
“How hard can it be?” I was in for a surprise: it was a demanding job in one of Boston’s finest restaurants, but I’m a bright guy and have an amazing work ethic - [thanks for doing that Mom and Dad], and I was made for the job - in fact when I left about a year later to move to NYC to become a ballet dancer Dom’s [your] final words to me were that it was a pity that I was leaving - “you would have a fine career in the restaurant industry etc” . . he [you] was [were] probably right, because I loved the job - loved everything about it. For the first few nights I trailed a waiter - followed him around, learning what was expected from me - helping him out when he needed it - learning the tools of working in a first class restaurant - serve from the right remove from the left, or is it the other way around - how to carry the giant oval trays that we were to carry over head - straight arm up. The most alarming thing was serving clients food from copper bottomed oval pans.
The interior of Dom’s was elegant, but unpretentious and the ambience one of calm. The music was a bit eclectic - Bob Dylan, rock music, occasionally symphonic, maybe even opera - not loud - just audible. The last time I ate in a few restaurant in NYC the music was so loud that one could barely hear table mates talking.
Brilliant interior design.
The wall at Dom’s was hung with sixty boxes on which the artist of the month tacked 18” squares of masonite, each piece a work of art.
My favorite thing about Dom’s was the weekly cooking classes. Unlike other restaurants where I’ve worked one didn’t just peruse the menu and memorize what was in each dish - you had to learn how to prepare everything from beginning to plate. I remember washing lettuce, and perhaps this is a false memory, but I remember actually being in the kitchen watching how the chefs prepared the food - including Dom’s wonderful desserts. A month after I began working there, I was promoted to Captain.
A favorite memory is how some clients would leave a joint rolled up in our tips. One evening a client gave me a joint after his party was seated. It was the first table to be seated, so I went with a co-worker to the staff room downstairs and we smoked the joint. Shortly after I returned to the kitchen to check on the food I found it was ready, I went back out to the dining room, but I couldn’t find my waiter, so I picked up the food, and walked out into the dining room with the giant oval tray overhead and as I was approaching the table and beginning to lower the tray to the jack stand I lost control of it, the tray tipped and the food landed on the floor. The clients laughed - the man who had given me the joint laughed the loudest, patted me on the arm and said, “Good stuff eh…” I looked over at Dom [you] standing in the doorway to the salad prep area and he [you] rolled his [your] eyes, shook his [your] head and left the dining room, and I was never reprimanded about the incident.
Tips were so good at Dom’s that a few weeks after working there I had accumulated enough money to move into a beautiful garden apartment on Philips Street, Beacon Hill.
Because of working at Dom’s I am sure that if I had not been successful as a ballet dancer I would have gone to Le Cordon Bleu to learn everything about the industry - maybe even to BU to learn how to run a business.
I recently resigned from a teaching position because the poorly designed ballet program wasn’t fulfilling my goals as a teacher - complicated - meanwhile I am searching for another position and working at the wine, beer snack bar at the MASONIC Auditorium here in San Francisco. Guess that about it - can’t wait for Dom's, An Odyssey to arrive, and after I’ve read it I will pass it on to my co-workers.
Sincerely,
Steffon Long
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Kat’s Gen Z Corner
Anime-ify Your Life
Had a lot of fun discovering ChatGPT’s ability to create anime versions of your photos. Here are some of my favorites.
My momma and me — this is the cutest photo of her. So sweet.
Obese Uma hanging out in her newly cleaned litter box. It’s her unbothered facial expression that makes this fantastic. And the belly rolls.
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Tucker’s Corner
This week a good friend went to see the revival of Glengarry Glen Ross in NYC and it got me thinking about how incredible David Mamet’s play really is. Now I haven’t seen the play but I’ve watched the film adaptation roughly 1000 times so I thought I would write a piece on how this play, these words are still incredibly relevant to us all today.
Glengarry Glen Ross
“We’re a dying breed,” says a real-estate salesman to his colleague near the end of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross.” It’s meant as an elegiac statement of solidarity, but there’s nothing friendly about it, and nothing noble, either. Instead, the line has a predatory subtext. It suggests that if guys like this are going extinct, it’s because they’re killing each other off.
The plot of Glengarry Glen Ross hinges on a competition: the employees at a branch office of the shady NYC real estate firm Premiere Properties pitted against one another by their parent company in an act of pure, Darwinian capitalism. It’s survival of the fittest amongst lame ducks. After outlining the incentives for the victor and the runner-up—a Cadillac El Dorado and a set of steak knives, respectively—swinging dick Blake (Alec Baldwin), having driven his BMW all the way “from downtown...from Mitch and Murray...on a mission of mercy” clarifies the stakes of this month’s sales contest even further. “Third prize is you’re fired,” he says, flatly. There are four men on the sales team.
Mamet’s masterpiece premiered in 1983, at a moment when the promises of the ’60s counterculture had been eaten alive by the profit motive. It was adapted for the screen in 1992, but Glengarry Glen Ross endures because its themes are timeless. In fact, it’s currently celebrating a revival on Broadway. It’s a perfect time to revisit this film (or play if you can get to NYC) because we’re living in an historic moment of antagonistic masculinity.
Director James Foley assembled a world class cast for his film adaptation. And with good reason. The script begs for actors who can flex their thespian hackles as well as their show muscles. Jack Lemmon plays the downward trending veteran salesman Shelley “The Machine” Levene and his performance informs this liked but not well-liked man far outside the confines of the film. Al Pacino was nominated for his performance as Richie Roma, equally gifted at curse-craft as he is as a silver-tongued salesman. It’s almost unfair that Alec Baldwin nearly steals the show in his one scene, an extra few pages that Mamet penned for the film adaptation. In a script full of quotable lines I guarantee most of the ones you’ve heard come from Baldwin himself.
Revisiting this 40-year-old script 2025 once again proves that things really haven’t changed much at all in America. Glengarry Glen Ross is packed with locker room talk that’s still touted by the likes of President Trump and his nearest and dearest. The film is absent of any significant female characters, other than multiple and suggestive references to absent wives and girlfriends. The men’s exchanges take the form of verbal fencing with characters consistently lashing out and smacking each other below the belt.
The worst offender in the gutter mouthed Olympics of this movie belongs to Roma, who’s bottomless slew of playground insults underline his oversexualized lexicon. While Shelley, Moss, and George (Alan Arkin) are sitting through Blake’s accusatory “sales conference,” Roma is in a Chinese restaurant bar laying his best lines on lonely, wretched James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce), a married man who mentions his wife compulsively but nevertheless gives the impression of discreet, insecure homosexuality. Though Roma misses Blake’s lecture about sales taking “brass balls” he too spends his time trying to relate to Lingk through stories of masculine sexual experience.
The Roma-Lingk relationship has been interpreted within Glengarry Glen Ross’ overtly masculine framework as an opportunistic, predatory seduction. Lingk’s after-the-fact attempts at reneging on the deal—showing up at the office, eyes down, stammering apologies—are shaded by what feels like lover’s guilt. Power, and the ways it gets expressed, complicated, and sublimated through language and inflection—has always been Mamet’s great theme, dating back to the 1987 film House of Games and its talkative card sharps. Glengarry’s dialogue is divided between characters like Blake and Roma, with their alpha-male vocabularies, talking victory laps around their opponents, and weak willed stammerers like Lingk and George, who simply aren’t equipped to do battle.
It’s George who gets dominated in the script’s most brilliantly written scene, centering on a thought experiment that gets stealthily redeveloped into an ultimatum. Here, Mamet defines the difference between “speaking” and “talking” (“we’re just speaking about it;” “we’re not actually talking about it?”) while melding George’s anxieties about completion (“I can’t push through”) with the economic and intellectual insecurities that would let him get bullied incrementally into becoming his colleague’s accomplice. “Because you listened,” Moss chides George when asked why he’d try to turn him into an accessory, emphasizing the perils in Mamet’s universe of providing a sympathetic ear. If Moss is the character most humiliated by Blake’s dick-measuring tirade (“See this watch? This watch cost more than your car”), he’s also the one who internalizes and regurgitates the same language of intimidation, which works well with a mousy opponent like George, but fails when clashing the next day with Roma.
The cash strapped, self-deluded Shelley is the film’s designated neuter. His arc concludes with getting his balls cut off in front of the whole office. Shelley the character is certainly in debt to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman but “The Machine” is a new kind of male loser. Lemmon’s primary duet partner in the film is Spacey, and their big back-and-forth, in which Shelley tries to bribe Spacey’s Williamson—the office manager, and a cold fish—into releasing the premium leads plays on the generational theme previously drawn out by having young buck Baldwin bad-mouthing so many hallowed, middle-age-and-older actors. (Foley consistently shoots Spacey lurking in the background of Baldwin’s close-ups, like a henchman).
Shelley’s primary point of contention with Williamson is that the younger man lacks experience,.Blake’s curt order to Shelley during their lone interaction to “put that coffee down...coffee is for closers” is defiantly proven by Shelley closing an $80,000 sale with a reluctant couple, and yet, in Mamet’s cruelest twist, closure proves irrelevant when the clients’ check is destined to bounce. “They’re insane,” Williamson smirks, twisting the (steak) knife once and for all, luxuriating in a final act of verbal castration. “They just like talking to salesmen.”
The subtext of Glengarry Glen Ross is that, for all their anger and resentment, these salesmen like talking to one another; we get that these are arguments they’ve had before. Not that they have much choice for companionship, as their form of labor has rendered normal human relationships almost impossible. (One wonderful detail I always come back to: when Shelley artificially inflates his position during phone calls by interjecting orders to his non-existent secretary, her name is “Grace,” rather pathetically indicating a quality he lacks). The glee that Mamet takes in articulating their hostilities keeps his play—and the movie made from it—from reducing to a simplistic capitalist analysis, or even a critique. He’s even more interested in syntax than morality, and even before his post–9/11 slide into MAGA territory, he toggled brazenly between ignoring and belittling political correctness. (One notable change between the movie and the play is the omission of several ostentatious, anti-Indian tirades, drawn from the author’s observation of industry racism during his year-long immersion in a Chicago real-estate office; their insidious sentiment is conveyed simply in the movie through Pacino’s incredulous pronunciation of the surname “Patel” as a catch-all for the deadbeat leads he and his co-workers refuse to chase any further.)
Death of a Salesman is a no-dry-eye-in-the-house tragedy; Glengarry Glen Ross is more like an anthropological study, closer in some ways to the Maysles’ pavement-pounding 1969 documentary, Salesman in that its true protagonist is a way of life, or a discipline. And, like that film, Mamet withholds judgment on said discipline and its participants or at least refuses to impose it from above. Even after George utters “God, I hate this job” he picks up the phone and resumes trying to sell. No one in this story learns a single thing and because of that they all remain miserable lonely men. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a lesson for the ages.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
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Six Word Stories
“Lonely park, childhood laughter echoes faintly.”
AI’s interpretation:
This phrase evokes a deep sense of nostalgia and solitude. The "lonely park" suggests emptiness, perhaps an abandoned or quiet place that once held life and energy. "Childhood laughter echoes faintly" implies that happy memories linger, but they are distant—reduced to echoes rather than present reality.
The author may be reflecting on the passage of time, the contrast between past joy and present loneliness, or even the way memories can haunt spaces long after people have gone. It carries both warmth and melancholy, painting an image of someone standing in a place that was once vibrant, now left only with traces of what used to be.
Winslow Homer - Snap the Whip (Butler Institute of American Art)
Winslow Homer - Bridgeman Art Library: Object 213713
Snap the Whip is an 1872 oil painting by the American artist Winslow Homer.[1] It depicts a group of children playing crack the whip in a field in front of a small red schoolhouse. With more of America's population moving to cities, the portrait depicts the simplicity of rural agrarian life that Americans were beginning to leave behind in the post-Civil War era,[2] evoking a mood of nostalgia.
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BOOK CLUB
one of the most successful Italian cookbooks, out sold Julia child. I posted 5th edition for the beautiful picture. All 6 are must have! Top shelf!!
Lisa's Neck of the Woods
The Art of Sauntering
From the Nature king himself - Thoreau:
“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.”
Walking, of course, is one of the basic movements of us humans. Most people who walk regularly have a fit bit type watch device where they measure their steps to achieve the arbitrary 10,000 steps per walk. They have a goal, and rarely stop to smell the roses or notice what’s around them.
But as Thoreau points out, there is a difference between walking and sauntering. Sauntering implies a slower walk with no destination or time frame restricting the walker. The “art of walking” is to use all of your senses to immerse yourself in what is around you (preferably in a natural setting). It is then that you give Nature its due, enjoying each plant or tree and allowing the time to touch and smell and appreciate their beauty.
When I lead a forest bathing session with clients, I have an exercise where I provide them with a small picture frame, and ask them to hold the frame near a plant, tree, water, or ground. It is amazing how your perspective changes when the scene is framed. A magnifier effect is created that enhances the beauty and uniqueness of nature.
Give it a try sometime, and take the time to saunter.
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In the Mail
This from dear Sally C:
Most old men I meet are strangers, but even a gesture as simple as a polite nod and a smile exchanged in a grocery store aisle warms my heart.
What is it about them that appeals to me? I grew up in a household full of men (I have four brothers and no sisters), and believe this must be a primary reason for my fondness for men. I’ve worked in male-dominated fields (ship-building, engineering) and played in same (living history reenacting) where I get to hang around men. I’ve been thoroughly soaked in testosterone.
Maybe that’s it: Old men have a singular scent, a masculine one common to men, but distinctly that of old men. Does their life experience alter or concentrate or cure or distill or purify their hormones? As a female, am I genetically programmed to find comfort in that kind of maturity?
The scent always brings my grandfather to mind. He used to bounce me on his knee, singing the chorus to “My Pony Boy” modified as “My Pony Girl.” I remember my father’s masculine scent clearly, although he died before joining that separate breed of “old men.” I don’t always notice a scent, but even one that escapes awareness can influence our perception of something or someone, or add to our personal library of sensory experiences.
Is it that I acknowledge them as MEN, in our degenerative culture of white-male bashing, of denigrating masculinity, of rejecting and denying the importance of a father figure in the family? I think these old men appreciate being seen, recognized, accepted, and valued for what and who they are, what they were born to be, what they have accomplished as decent human beings. As men. Not as the problem, but not as the solution, either. Not as perfect, god-like idols, but not as irredeemable degenerates, either. As men, with designs and delusions, fancies and failings, no different from those of the other gender.
As men.
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Last Comment
The Boston Celtics suffer from surfeits of talent and payroll commitments.
The challenge over the summer for Brad Stevens, the general manager, is long-term rebuilding and short-term competitiveness.
Jaylen Brown is frequently mentioned as trade bait. Any deal involving JB would, by definition, be a blockbuster.
Can Stevens shake up the lineup without diminishing the Celtics achievements?
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