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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY CLASS NOTES
has died. His obituary will be published
in a future issue of CCT.
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60
Robert A. Machleder
69-37 Fleet St.
Forest Hills, NY 11375
rmachleder@aol.com
Terrence McNally’s play Master
Class had a Broadway revival this
summer starring Tyne Daly as
Maria Callas. Considered by critics
to be Terrence’s finest work, it was
first presented in November 1995
and won the Drama Desk Award
for Outstanding New Play and
the 1996 Tony Award for Best Play.
Two members of the original cast,
Zoe Caldwell (in the role of Callas)
and Audra McDonald (in the
role of a student), won 1996 Tony
awards for acting. The play, based
on a series of master classes held
by Callas at the Juilliard School in
the early 1970s after her voice had
faded and her career had come to
an end, integrates opera selections,
the diva’s penetrating dissection
and reshaping of the performances
of three aspiring opera singers, and
lapses into reflections on her own
rise, fueled by her intense ambition,
from a performer criticized for
being overweight and unattractive
at the beginning of her career to the
triumphant pinnacle of achievement,
acclaimed as La Divina, the
most brilliant and glamorous sop-
rano of an era. Callas’ desires,
insecurities and vulnerabilities, a
burning hatred of her rivals and
of a press that derided her early
performances, and an exposition of
the commitment and sacrifices that
are the price of achieving excellence,
are exposed in impassioned and ofttimes
humorous monologues.
Terrence fell in love with Callas’
voice when he was a youth
growing up in Corpus Christi,
Texas; he found himself moved by
its haunting and unique beauty.
At a time when he was teaching
playwriting at Juilliard he stopped
in to observe a master class being
conducted by Leontyne Price,
and the idea formed from which
Master Class evolved. Although
recordings existed of Callas’ master
classes, Terrence never listened
to them. “The play,” he said, “is
my projection of Callas’ life, not a
documentary.”
Doug Morris assumed the post
of chief executive of Sony Music
Entertainment in July. After serving
as chief executive and then as chairman
of Universal Music Group,
the label he helped found in 1995,
Doug was granted an early release
from his contract at Universal to
join its biggest rival. Doug has been
regarded as a skilled manager of executives
as well as an artistic talent.
In his tenure at Universal its roster
of artists has included U2, Eminem,
Jay-Z, Kanye West, Amy Winehouse,
Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber
and Rihanna; it has commanded
the industry’s largest market share,
with about 31 percent of sales, and
generated revenues exceeding $6
billion a year. The eyes of the industry
are on Doug to see whether he
can achieve the same success for the
Sony label.
Hillel Halkin, author, scholar
and translator, appears as one of
several distinguished talking heads
in a critically acclaimed documentary
released this summer, Sholem
Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness.
The documentary examines the
life of the humorist and storyteller
(born Solomon Rabinovich) using
archival material and, as a Los
Angeles Times film critic put it, “perceptive
interviews with some of the
best thinkers in the Yiddish world,
including academics Dan Miron,
David Roskies and Ruth Wisse;
translator Hillel Halkin; the National
Yiddish Book Center’s Aaron
Lansky; and author Bel Kaufman,
Sholem Aleichem’s 100-year-old
granddaughter.” In the words of
another critic: “Hillel Halkin proves
to be the movie’s sharpest, funniest,
most Sholem Aleichem-like commentator.”
A young man’s gaze moves in
an arc, west, south, east, over the
Hudson River, the George Washington
Bridge, on to the spires of
Manhattan, then the Bronx with its
bank of lights from Yankee Stadium
that illuminate the field as the night
game progresses; he scans the sky
from the terrace of his new apartment
high above the palisades of
Spuyten Duyvil. His knowledge of
the stars and nebulas, informed by
visits to the Hayden Planetarium
and overnight hikes with the Boy
Scouts as a youngster, is limited.
Now, an opportunity to expand
WINTER 2011–12
67
that knowledge. He assembles
the telescope that arrives in a kit
and affixes it to its wooden tripod.
Sky-map in hand, he focuses on an
object in space. The object appears,
a pinpoint of light in the eyepiece.
Adjust the lens to draw it closer ...
but it’s gone. Focus again, sight the
object ... the waft of the gentlest of
breezes seems magnified through
the lens to the intensity of a gale,
and multiple images in the eyepiece
are in violent motion; perhaps it is
only that single point of light, but
it refuses to hold still. The necklace
lights of the bridge, the beacon
of the Empire State Building, the
brilliant nightscape of Manhattan
and the glow from the stadium all
compete with and overwhelm the
sparkling specs in the firmament. A
succession of futile efforts and the
telescope is retired to a place that
time has forgotten.
The man, now much closer to
the end of his string than its beginning,
smiles wistfully at this mem-
Hillel Halkin ’60 appears in the critically acclaimed
documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the
Darkness.
ory as he reads Tom Hamilton’s
latest book, Useful Star Names: With
Nebulas And Other Celestial Features.
Tom, a professor of astronomy for
32 years, now retired, says that his
students always preferred to learn
a star by its name, rather than its
catalog number. “Teegarden’s Star
is so much nicer sounding than SO
0255790.5.” The book is a wonderful,
useful guide for any stargazer;
a compendium in four parts, listing,
alphabetically, the 88 constellations,
providing the names of the
stars, nebulas and galaxies within
each, their brightness and their
location according to the two coordinates
of Declination and Right
Ascension. This old man enjoyed
perusing the lists and finding the
brightest star, Sirius, which has a
-1.46 magnitude and is one of the
closest stars to us at a distance of
8.6 light years; that it is in the constellation
Canis Major (one of the
smallest constellations — 71st of
the 88); and, that its Declination is
-16^42’58” and its Right Ascension
is ... but I’ll let you have the fun
of finding that out in Tom’s book.
Tom advises that he is now at work
on his next astronomy book. And
this old man, inspired by Useful
Star Names, is contemplating the
purchase of another telescope.
Ivan Koota sends his regards to
all and advises that his work was
exhibited in several group shows
in 2011: The Albany Institute of Art
Regional Exhibition; the Roberson
Regional Art Exhibition at the Rob-
erson Museum in Binghamton,
N.Y.; the Albany Center Gallery Regional
Competition; the Woodstock
Artists Association and Museum
in Woodstock, N.Y.; and the Van
Brunt Projects in Beacon, N.Y. Ivan
advised some months ago that he
was working in collaboration with
published author Lenny Mintz on
a book to include Ivan’s Brooklyn
paintings and his collaborator’s
Brooklyn stories. Check Ivan’s website
(brooklynplaces.com) for more
information as to its availability.
A somewhat belated advisory
to classmates from Nathan Gross
that the souvenir compact disc of
the “Sweetest Sixty Suite,” received
after Nathan’s cabaret at our 50th
reunion, will indeed play on a
computer even if a regular CD
player refuses it. Nathan spent his
summer, as he has through the
years, “teaching French in Paris
for the University of San Diego Institute
on International and Comparative
Law. My students in the
past several years have included,
beyond the usual Californians and
Midwesterners, young lawyers
from Russia, Italy, Mexico, Spain
— from all over the map. They
are culturally savvier than our
homegrown varieties; they enliven
the class atmosphere and keep
me returning. I also carry out the
duties of a guide — my training as
a 17th-century specialist comes in
handy during walks, especially in
the Marais neighborhood where
the institute is located. I conduct
a favorites tour of the Louvre in
English, encouraging discussion as
we stand before objects of special
interest to lawyers — the Code of
Hammurabi, for example — and
paintings that have grown on me
over some 40-very-odd years.
Humanities A comes in handy as
we examine a Rubens based on
Herodotus and one of Rembrandt’s
Bathshebas. (We used to read
extensively in the Old Testament
in my own Humanities sections,
including the Books of Samuel as
an example of historiography.) I
am constantly reminded of how
Philip Gould taught how to look
and to see in that one class in Art
Humanities I took. We also visit
Reims where somehow (hardly
somehow, of course: it all comes
from listening closely to the guides
in many past visits, and, mostly,
from my good friend the Internet)
I have become an expert, amateur
but knowledgeable nonetheless,
on the history and sculptural
programs of the gothic cathedral
and the basilica of Saint Rémi. It
seems a far cry from Molière and
Racine, but in essence observing
and asking the right questions is
the practice I learned in college, at
graduate school and while leading