An Opinion
The recent political chatter about “Obamacare” before the Supreme Court of the United States got a great deal of media attention. President Obama added fuel to the fire when he declared, “Ultimately, I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
For someone who was a law professor those words were absurd. Even if a bill passed unanimously in the house and senate, it could still be overturned – if the law was in violation of the Constitution.
Viewpoint
None of the four developer proposals to “reinvent” the Nassau Veterans Coliseum is shockingly flawed or disturbing.
A couple of the artist’s conceptions seem like real improvements to the look of the arena building, but it’s not clear that making a cooler coliseum is what we should be looking for. Now that we no longer have to focus on what the public can do for the Islanders hockey team, we no longer need to lock ourselves into merely a newer version of what we already have.
Yet we haven’t unleashed the public’s creativity, and we still haven’t measured or reassessed what it is Nassau County needs, wants and expects out of that site and any remaining space around it. The county government seems resigned to give us Islanders Lite. No NHL hockey? We’ll have minor league hockey. Minor league something.
Eye on the Island
Lawrence Quinn, a former Glen Cove resident and the father of New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, is an Irish-American man of a certain age. So I can only imagine the look on his face when playwright Eve Ensler read aloud graphic passages of her best-known work, The Vagina Monologues, at his daughter’s 1999 City Council swearing-in ceremony.
When Ensler was finished, Mr. Quinn, who was sitting onstage during Ensler’s performance, looked at his daughter and said, “You couldn’t just have had the Pledge of Allegiance?”
Bars Rescued Her
Written by Mike Barry, Mfbarry@optonline.net Friday, 01 February 2013 00:00
Spike TV has a reality program called Bar Rescue wherein nightlife consultant John Taffer revives a troubled establishment’s fortunes with a combination of tough love and managerial expertise.
Before shooting his next segment, Taffer should read Rosie Schaap’s just-released memoir, the highly entertaining Drinking with Men (Riverhead Books). The book examines not only the author’s life as seen through the friends she made while enjoying adult beverages, but also the intangibles that make a bar one you’d like to visit regularly.
“A bar gives you more than drink alone,” Schaap, who currently resides in Brooklyn, writes. “It gives you the presence of others; it gives you relief from isolation. When you are a regular, it gives you community, too.”
Schaap’s book has won favorable reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Observer and, given the subject matter, her promotional tour is— not surprisingly—taking her to South Pub, 629 5th Ave., South Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Wednesday, Feb. 6 at 8 p.m. for a reading, question-and-answer session, and book signing.
Drinking with Men’s chapters are built around bars that played key roles in the 40-something-year-old Schaap’s life, from the taverns she frequented while an undergraduate at Vermont’s Bennington College to the ones she inhabited in New York City, where Schaap taught English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College while a graduate student. There are even odes to watering holes in Dublin, where she spent a semester abroad, and Montreal, site of a memorable long weekend. Today, Schaap writes the Drink column for The New York Times’ magazine, and is a contributor to public radio’s This American Life and npr.org.
The most surprising thing about Schaap, daughter of the late sportswriter Dick Schaap, who grew up in Freeport, and brother of ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap, is that she dropped out of high school to travel with The Grateful Dead, the late Jerry Garcia’s band, an odd decision even for a teenaged wild child. Her parents’ marriage broke up when she was seven, Schaap writes, so her migration from a broken family to a dysfunctional one—the nomadic tribe known as Dead Heads—may not have been illogical at the time. The author eventually secured a high school equivalency diploma and headed off to Bennington College, from which she graduated.
I enjoyed her keen observations about bar culture even though I do not buy into one of the book’s running themes. Schaap leaves readers with the impression that a tavern’s most loyal customers, and I’m talking about the ones who sit on the same stool Every Single Day, are by and large endlessly fascinating people. Based on the examples cited in Drinking with Men, I daresay the personalities of individuals meeting this criterion are more tedious than charming when compared to the population at-large.
Still, Schaap’s winning personality shines throughout the text. There’s a great anecdote near the end of the book, for instance, about how a fellow bar patron successfully recruited her in 2006 to become a fan of the English Premier League’s (EPL) Tottenham Hotspur, a London-based professional soccer team.
To close the loop here, I think Taffer’s Bar Rescue should recommend to some clients that they “adopt” an EPL team as a way to boost revenues. If the live broadcast of a Tottenham game starts at 4 p.m. in England, New Yorkers wanting to catch all the action will need to be in their seats at 11 a.m.