Category: Stories

Jazz piano legend advises to talk less and listen more

Bertha Hope (Photo/Richard Somerville)

Bertha Hope has been surrounded by music all her life. Her father Clinton (Henry) Rosemond was a dramatic baritone singer who traveled all over Europe to perform, she married two legendary jazz musicians – pianist, Elmo Hope and bassist, Walter Booker, and she herself became an award-winning jazz pianist.

In late 2014, after a full career touring Europe and Japan and playing with a diverse group of artists, Hope was named a Living Legend by the Bronx Music Heritage Center at age 78.

Originally from Los Angeles, she has lived in New York City since she moved there with her husband Elmo in 1961. She says her first husband was one of her biggest musical influences, and they met while he was touring in LA.

“I was trying to learn his music, as I was beginning to be interested in the Be Bop era – listening to Billy Holiday and modern jazz quartets,” remembers Hope. “I had a good ear. That’s what I was doing with Elmo’s music, and I was trying to impress him without seeming too school girlish.”

Sadly, Elmo died from heart failure when he was 43 and Bertha was 31. They had three children, and their daughter, Monica, became a singer.

“Being able to talk the same language was wonderful,” says Hope about her marriage. “I was in awe of Elmo. For a long time, I didn’t let him hear me play. I would practice when he wasn’t home. Eventually, we did play together and did an LP. We sometimes went to practice together, but I was always nervous and a wreck.”

She says Bud Powell’s style was also a big influence on her in the beginning, as well as Duke Ellington, and later, Mary Lou Williams. Hope says there have always been women musicians, as long as she can remember, because of the “church influence.”

“Blues and church music have very similar elements,” says Hope, explaining it was most common for women to play the piano. “When I was growing up, I met one woman who played the saxophone in LA…I wanted to play the trumpet, but my mom said it was too masculine.”

So she ended up dabbling with the violin, cello and clarinet, but sticking to the piano, because she says those instruments were acceptable at the time for girls. She sometimes regrets not pursuing the trumpet, however.

“I wasn’t aggressive enough to pursue another instrument,” says Hope. “I wasn’t brave enough to persist.”

She says she was around 12 or 13, however, when she was certain she wanted to be a musician for her life’s career.

“I come from a musical family. I took lessons starting at 3, and in a great public school in Los Angeles, I was exposed to instruments at a very early age,” says Hope. “The first time I realized it was what I wanted to do was when my father asked to help vocalize him. He hired me at age 12. That was my first salary – $7 for the concert. I hardly make that much now.” (laughing)

She says one of her all-time favorite accomplishments in her career was putting the band Jazzberry Jam! together in the late 1970’s. The four-woman band has played at New York City’s Gracie Mansion, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Renaissance Jazz Festival in Indianapolis, and was featured in a 1999 award-winning documentary, “Les Femmes du Jazz.”

“[Forming the band] helped us turn the corner of being a band that worked occasionally to a band that played a lot,” says Hope. “We performed at The West End for eight weeks straight. The people that came to support was mostly musician’s wives, and we still perform today. “

Bertha playing at Minton’s in Jan. 2015 (Photo/Kristina Puga)

Hope is currently in residency at NYC jazz club, Minton’s, where she plays with the Minton Players every other weekend.

If she could tell her younger self one piece of advice about life, with the wisdom she has now, what would it be?

“Stay in school, and stay open. Stay focused. Listen more than you talk. Take in a wide amount of musical experiences, and stay true to yourself. Find people that do the best of what it is you want to do, and try to learn from their experiences.”

January 28, 2015
From reporter to teacher to US Hispanic Heritage historian

Miguel Perez at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. (Courtesy HiddenHispanicHeritage.com)

Miguel Perez, 64, always wanted to be a journalist from as young as he can remember. Since moving to the U.S. from Havana, Cuba as a refugee, in 1962, he has accomplished that dream – and then some.

In 1978, he graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and has worked as a reporter at The Miami Herald and The New York Daily News. He has also been a Spanish-language radio talk show host for the award-winning “Sin Censura,” as well as a political analyst for Telemundo. Today, he still writes a syndicated column and teaches journalism at NYC’s Lehman College.

“I had an uncle in Cuba who was a reporter – he was my role model – I wanted to be like him,” says Perez. “I was teaching myself journalism before I got to school by analyzing articles – it was an obsession of mine…I was lucky to do all this other media, but writing is my first love.”

He says the teaching opportunity opened up to him about seven years ago, and he quit full-time journalism at that time to teach full-time, but his love for writing kept him writing his syndicated column weekly, and another idea developed as well – his Hidden Hispanic Heritage project.

“One thing that motivates me is to educate people, and not even the average American knows about the Hispanic contributions to the U.S. – not even the average Hispanic knows…American history is taught when the British arrived – everything that happened before that is ignored,” says Perez, explaining that Hispanics played a heavy role in the U.S. 200 years before the British. “That is the theme of my work.”

Adina De Zavala, born in 1861. “Texas Legislature passed a resolution recognizing her ‘major role in preserving the Alamo and the Spanish Governor’s Palace’ and for placing ‘permanent markers on some 40 historic sites in Texas, many of which might otherwise be forgotten.’”

He decided seven years ago that he would devote one Hispanic history lesson per column. The past year and a half, he took a sabbatical from teaching so that he could devote himself to traveling the U.S. and writing about the history tour.

“Founded in southern Arizona as a Catholic mission by Jesuit missionary and explorer Eusebio Kino in 1692, San Xavier del Bac still serves the descendants of the Native Americans Kino converted to Catholicism more than three centuries ago.”

“I was on the road for 47 days and traveled around 9,000 miles,” says Perez, who resides in Union City, NJ. “It’s the most exciting thing I’ve done in my life.”

Map showing where Perez has traveled to so far in his Hidden Hispanic Heritage Tour.

He says he’s going back to teaching at the end of this month, but he’s already begun researching more historical sites to visit next summer.

“This history project has become my passion,” says Perez. “I did my last weekly piece this week. Now, I’m going back to monthly till the book is finished. I still have three major states to cover – Florida, New Mexico and California. Maybe I should go to Alaska – there’s a glacier named after the Spanish there.”

As far as what piece of advice would he tell his younger self if he could right now?

“I would do exactly what I did but one more thing – script writing,” says Perez. “With all I know about history now, I wish I had written a couple of movies. Where’s a movie about Thomas Jefferson? He was an amazing person, and I’ve never seen a movie about him. There’s so much more to tell than fiction. And another thing I’d like to do is [Hidden Hispanic Heritage] as a TV series. If Anthony Bourdain could go around talking about food , I can go around talking about history.”

January 14, 2015
Award-winning author celebrates 60 and how writing saved her from her emotions

“I always wanted to jump out of a cake,” says Sandra Cisneros. (Photo/Tracy Boyer)

On a typical day, Sandra Cisneros likes to wake up gently, without an alarm clock, around 9:30am. She stays in her pajamas until 1pm, and then starts writing on her covered terrace until sunset, while surrounded by her five small dogs. Her peaceful lifestyle mirrors her delicate demeanor.

Sandra running on her birthday in Mexico. (Photo/Macarena Hernandez)

This past Saturday night, however, was a bit out of the ordinary. Cisneros went out on the town dressed up as a cake.

The award-winning author of several books, including “The House on Mango Street” and her most recent “Have You Seen Marie,” explains this behavior is unlike her normally introverted self, but she was celebrating an important milestone — turning 60.

“I have never felt younger or happier – now I can take care of me,” she says. “It’s a good time.”

The Chicago-born Mexican-American has always lived a very busy, even if quiet, life.

“I started writing when I was in middle school,” remembers Cisneros about how it all started. “I was in the Chicago Public Library looking through the card catalog. You could tell which cards were fingered more often than others. I was looking at a very soft dogeared card. I thought, ‘This book must be very loved.’ I wanted my own card to be loved and dirty from people touching it – from so many readers looking for it – it was very clear from a young age.”

She says she’s not sure she she chose her life-long career, but it found her.

“It was always inside me,” says the graceful Cisneros. “It was a way in dealing with my emotions. I didn’t have a way to handle all the stimulus before that. I didn’t see it as a career it was more of medicine.”

Cisneros explains that ever since she was a young child, she often felt overwhelmed by stimuli around her.

“I can’t go, to this day, to a supermarket,” she says. “I can’t filter things the way other people can. I didn’t realize that my experience was not common. My mom used to say I was a baby and used to make me feel bad. The only one who understood it was my father.”

She explains although she often felt like an outsider in her exterior world, she says she always had a rich interior world, and writing made her feel less lonely.

“When I don’t have art, my machine stops – it helps balance my life,” says Cisneros, who received her first national award by the time she was 30.

She says thanks to her mom who thought she would become a secretary (her father thought she would marry and become a housewife), she took typing in high school.

“I knew that I couldn’t depend on marrying somebody,” says Cisneros who never married or had children. “Women need to control their money, and they need to control their fertility. It’s your body, and it’s your life. Nobody should get in the way of that.”

In addition to earning an MFA in 1978 and becoming an accomplished writer, Cisneros has held various creative writing teaching positions around the country, and founded two organizations that serve writers: the Macondo Foundation (now administered by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center) and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, which she recently closed down.

After struggling with her emotions throughout her life, she made it her mission to help students going through the same.

“I tell students – the ones that are sensitive – that they have a very important job to be artists,” says Cisneros. “It’s a wonderful thing, and someone needs to be able to translate that for those who cannot.”

She says her sensitivity has not diminished as an adult.

“I have to not be around a lot of people, except when I have to be,” says Cisneros. “I have to rest before I go in public…It drains me.”

After living nearly three decades in San Antonio, Texas, and the past two years in Mexico, Cisneros says she has finally sold her house in Texas and is looking for a new house to be based across the border — where she says she feels the most at home.

“Part of me living in Mexico is finding my retreat to be more private, and do more writing,” says Cisneros, who just finished writing a personal collection of stories called “A House of My Own,” which will be published in October 2015. “It’s all about finding what I need…I know my needs now that I’m older. I think i’m going to be traveling more globally and collaborating with different people. I want to grow.”

And what is the most important piece of life advice she would give her younger self?

“I would tell my younger self not to get so hung up on the men in my life,” says the author. “I had so many men in my life, and now I wish I had more, and I would not get all hung up on one. They are such babies. I didn’t find men who were very mature…You have to find someone where you are the beloved. That’s the only way to settle. Forget about the others. I always take their age and divide it by two. I need to find someone who is 100 years old!” [laughing]

December 24, 2014
93-year-old former plumber memorializes toilet seats through art

Barney Smith (Courtesy Facebook)

Barney Smith is a retired master plumber from Alamo Heights, Texas. At 93, he still treasures the trade that was passed down to him from his father by memorializing damaged toilet seats.

Every day, Smith goes to work in his garage to create art on toilet seats. He houses all of his works of art there as well, as he refuses to sell any. There are so many currently in his garage, that it is now known as the Toilet Seat Art Museum.

“Number 1,156 is the one I’m working on now. I’ve been working on it for several days,” says Smith who spurts out the toilet seat pieces by number, as well as the significance of each, with ease. “I have a catalog, but I have memorized many…”

Smith has made toilet seat art with everything from state license plates to sea shells. He gets inspired by experiences he wishes to remember, and the materials he has available at the moment. Sometimes visitors come by and bring him materials to work with. He says once he even had a visitor came from Seoul, Korea who stayed for three days.

“I get a bunch of stuff, and I say, ‘Okay, what am I going to do here?’,” says Smith, saying his latest project developed because a scooter club member walked in with a light bulb and some spark plugs.

Smith says joyfully that it takes him anywhere from 20 to 200 hours to completely adorn one toilet seat cover.

“It took me 200 hours to find rocks in the Rio Grande River and polish them,” remembers Smith as sharply as if it were yesterday. “My wife and I spent hours on those rocks. We went all the way to Laredo to try to find some pretty ones.”

He says he’s traveled a lot – from NYC (for appearances on “The Today Show,” “The View,” and “The Montel Williams Show”) to the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland.

“I wanted barbed wire from the concentration camps,” says Smith. “I put it in my pocket and took it home, and put it on a toilet seat – that was in 1995. In 1996, we went to Germany and saw the Berlin wall, and all the way down to Austria. We saw the mountains from ‘The Sound of Music’…I picked up a rock and nail from the Berlin Wall and two flags, and I put a piece of the rock from one side of the wall, and the piece of barbed wire on a toilet seat. I’ve got a lot of history hanging up in the Toilet Seat Museum.”

Smith says he got the idea to use toilet seats as his canvas when he was still a plumber. He had gone to the plumbing supply house to purchase materials for a job and noticed a pile of slightly damaged toilet seats that were going to be discarded.

“I took about half a dozen toilet seats to my apartment,” remembers Smith. “I went back to the job, and when I got through that night, I started my artwork. I went back and showed the manager of the store what I was doing, and he told me I could have them all. So I had almost 50 seats to start out with.”

Until this day, Smith says he calls plumbing supply houses for damaged seats. Sometimes, people even bring them to him.

Smith says he gets so many visitors that he now only opens up by appointment only.

“I can’t afford to open up every time someone passes by in their car,” he says, taking his work seriously. “I got someone saying they want to come by this weekend from Georgia.”

Smith says he still has lots of energy to keep making his art, and if he is lucky to still be alive in May, he will be making his 94th birthday seat.

Barney Smith’s birthday toilet seats. (Courtesy Facebook)

“I have two decades worth of birthday toilet seats,” says Smith, who tries to fit all of his birthday cards for each year on each birthday seat. He has three daughters, seven grandchildren, and 12 great grandchildren.

If he had one piece of advice to give his younger self, what would it be?

“I have been married for 74 years. I lost my wife a year ago,” says Smith, adding he met her at the age of 18, and she was 17. “I advise to keep God in the arrangement. Anything that comes your way, ask the Lord if this is His will, or don’t do it. That will keep you together..If God is in the arrangement, you will want to stay together. Our long-lived marriage is because of God in the arrangement. That is my advice to anyone.”

December 16, 2014
“Baking Chez Moi” author, Dorie Greenspan, says always try new things

Dorie Greenspan (Photo/Alan Richardson)

Baker extraordinaire Dorie Greenspan never attended culinary school, yet she has won the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award three times for her numerous cookbooks and culinary magazine articles. Her 11th cookbook also hit shelves just in time for planning desserts for Thanksgiving.

“Baking Chez Moi” is a culmination of Greenspan’s delicious dessert discoveries while traveling around Paris. For the past 20 years, Greenspan has been dividing her time between New York, Connecticut and Paris, but she says she feels most at home in Paris.

“Every time I’m getting ready to go, I’m excited as the first time,” says the 67-year-old in her sweet manner. “I love the way of life, the rhythm of life…There seems to be more time to have dinner together, or meet for a drink, or a coffee at a cafe. I love the way people love food in France. You can buy a little tartlet, and it’s wrapped so beautifully.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Greenspan remembers vividly her first trip to the City of Lights 43 years ago.

“I came back and went directly to my parents’ house and told them they made a big mistake – I was meant to be Parisian,” she says.

Her love of the kitchen, however, wasn’t as evident to her in the beginning.

“I made French fries when I was 13 years old and almost burnt my parents house,” remembers Greenspan. “I started cooking from cookbooks when I got married [while I was in college]. It was a good feeling to cook for my husband and friends. I loved the whole process – the preparation – I loved having people around the table. That’s when I fell in love with it – as I was learning.”

But she still didn’t think to pursue the craft as her career at this point. She graduated from college, started working, went to graduate school and had a child.

“I thought I was going to be an academic in gerontology,” says Greenspan. “But my fabulous husband said, ‘You really love baking – why don’t you make that your career?’”

That’s when she finally gave in to her calling. She self-taught herself with books and people who inspired her.

“I was really lucky when I think about it,” recalls Greenspan. “I went to work for Elle magazine when it launched in America. It had a wonderful food section – so I got to read about the fabulous French chefs. Daniel Boulud had a huge influence on me, and then I worked with Julia Child. I wrote ‘Baking with Julia.’ I didn’t go to culinary school, but I learned from the best.”

These days, she likes to get up early and starts working around 8am.

“What I try to do is write in the morning and do recipe development in the afternoon,” says Greenspan, who spends most of her day in the kitchen – with happy music playing in the background – and sometimes forgets to leave her house until 7pm.

She doesn’t love all the dishes she has to wash afterwards, but it’s all worth it to her.

“I love the sense of happiness that you get when you’ve made something,” says Greenspan. “I’m inspired by ingredients…and there’s something wonderful about starting something from scratch, and then sharing it with other people and making them happy. I love what I do, and because I write about it, I get to pass it along.”

Greenspan says what she’s most grateful for, this year and every year, is her husband and son. She’s spending this Thanksgiving in NY.

Slow-roasted pineapple (Photo/Alan Richardson)

“I’m such a last-minute person, but I know I’m definitely making my slow-roasted pineapple recipe and the custardy apple squares,” which Greenspan says are two of her favorites from her new book. “I think I’m also going to make the desert roses, which are corn flakes treats.”

Custardy apple squares (Photo/Alan Richardson)

Greenspan seems to flow with ideas, which seem to pour effortlessly onto the pages of more books. She’s already working on her next one on cookies.

If she had one piece of advice she could tell her younger self, what would it be?

“What I would tell my younger moi is say ‘yes’ to everything,” says Greenspan, explaining she wishes she started younger doing that herself. “Be fearless, try things.”

November 26, 2014