A Conversation with Santa   In addition to family events, we went as always to the holiday party at the Merchants House Museum on East Fourth Street. The building dates from the 1840's and is a story by itself. We had a great time at Ulrika's Swedish restaurant for the Luciafest, although Lucia and her four handmaidens never showed up this year because of a mixup. As always, Battery Park City had Santa appear at the corner of our building in early December with cookies, hot cider, and hot chocolate.

But of particular interest this year was the holiday party that the South Street Seaport Museum held, which always ends with us walking a block in the cold, carrying candles, to sing carols on the waterfront in front of the historic sailing ships Wavertree and Peking.

This year there was a variation. There is always a Santa talking to the kids and this year he read the entire text of "The Night Before Christmas". I had Bev sitting in front of a pillar and I was scurrying around bringing back refreshments and chatting here and there. Finally the President of the Museum started to talk about the year's events, and we couldn't hear a thing. I made a comment to the person next to me that next year they should invest in a PA system. The person agreed, and when I turned around, I found I was talking to Santa. As it turned out, we both disregarded what was being said and had a half-hour conversation about theater, starting with what we were just commenting on, the sound systems. Santa commented about the sorry state of amplification on Broadway stages, where you can see mikes hanging under hairlines and around the face. I pointed out that someone like Ethel Merman didn't need amplification, since she was a self-described belter ("belta") who could belt out a song to the back row of the balcony. I mentioned that Bev and I had seen her in the 1960's in the cavernous City Center in a revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” [2005 Series 3]. Santa said he had met Merman, but never worked with her. Most of his theatrical work was on the road. He said he played Frank Butler some 1000 times.

Our conversation outlasted the inaudible speech. At one point, a volunteer joined us. She pointed out that in the early ninties, the New York Times conducted a survey of the best New York department-store Santas, rating them from one to four candy canes, yet the South Street Seaport Santa was given five. He said he had a contract with the Seaport, which has run for sixteen years so far, and he cleared his theatrical schedule each year in December. I should mention that this Santa looked a bit distinctive, wearing a short, green-plaid apron.

Finally, it was time to go carolling with candles at the ships, so I turned to Santa and said "By the way, this is Bev, and I'm Vince."

This guy was really good. He smiled, winked, and said slowly: "And I'm Santa".

So he really must have been, right?

Wonderful Town   In the 1930's, Ruth and Eileen Sherwood left Ohio to come to seek their fortune in New York City. They famously found a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, which Ruth wrote about. It was made into the movie "My Sister Eileen" in 1942, with Rosalind Russell playing Ruth. About a decade later, it was made into the successful musical "Wonderful Town" by Betty Comden and the late Adolph Green, with music by Leonard Bernstein (what a pedigree for a show!). Among the songs are "Christopher Street", with a tour guide leading tourists around a major Greenwich Village thoroughfare, the lament to leaving Ohio, and a conga with Ruth and a string of Brazilian naval officers.

We had been sitting home too much, so I got us tickets. Ruth was played by Donna Murphy, who we knew from her television work, and who is credited with being the force that holds the show together. She is unfortunately not yet too well known beyond Broadway. She and the show were great.

Afterwards, we decided to once again stand at the stage door, cold as it was. People from the show kept coming out and signing autographs for those that collect them, but that is not what we do. Finally, after a half hour, Donna Murphy came out. I didn't at all recognize her. Her famously very long hair had been hidden in the show under a short wig, and she was now wearing a pillbox fur hat, and I just didn't recognize her at first. After she signed most of her autographs, I went into my usual handshake mode and asked her if she'd like to shake Beverly's hand. Of course she did, and held on for quite a while, chatting and stroking Beverly's hand to the point where I felt I had to make some sort of joke about maybe we should all do a conga line now. It was very nice.

Civilization   Let me digress for a moment. I don't care for stretch limos. They are the most pretentious things I've ever seen. Wealthy people might use fancy cars, and perhaps long ones, but not stretch limos, which are for prom nights and over-excited brides and grooms who want to give what they think is a wealthy appearance. I also don't care for the bulkiness of SUVs unless you really need one as a truck or to chauffeur kids around, but that's a personal opinion. In any case, as we drove off from "Wonderful Town", I turned into Times Square and stopped at a light at 47th Street. All of a sudden I saw in front of me not one, but two STRETCH SUVs! First a white lo-o-o-ng stretch SUV, then a black lo-o-ong stretch SUV pulled into Times Square. My chin dropped, because I knew that for sure I was witnessing The End of Civilization as We Know It.

Incredible Irony   There is a bit more connected to the Wonderful Town story. First let me say, that if you've seen the opening to "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", you will have noticed two signs saying Gay Street and Straight Street. There is no Straight Street in Greenwich Village, but there actually is a Gay Street. It’s presumably named after someone named Gay, and it's one of the most charming streets in the Village. It's just one short block long, and has a bend in the middle, adding to its charm. The houses along it are among the oldest, dating from I think the 1820's. It is just off Christopher Street.

The Sunday before Christmas, the New York Times Real Estate Section ran a feature article pointing out that the Sherwood sisters didn't really live directly on Christopher Street, which was a bit of poetic licence. Their basement apartment was actually around the corner on Gay Street. They pointed out that a certain woman now owned the building in question, and that a gentleman had lived in that same basement apartment for some thirty years. The two of them had attended a performance of Wonderful Town, to their amusement, but the gentleman was more interested in contesting the proposed expansion of the Christopher Street station of the PATH subway line from New Jersey as being detremental to the old buildings, than in any literary notoriety.

The article led tourists to the building in question during Christmas week, many of whom would actually sing the lament from the show:

That may seem like a lot of fun, but in the wee hours leading into Christmas day, literally Christmas day, an electrical fire broke out in a lamp cord underneath a pile of papers the man was preparing for his protest, and the resulting fire killed him. Talk about fifteen minutes of fame. Christmas was on a Thursday. This guy had four days of fame following the newspaper article. You can't make stuff like this up. No one would believe it if you claimed it to be fiction.

Folk Etymology II   I have a few more examples of folk etymology, going from the obvious to the more esoteric. You may have heard the term "Old-Timer's Disease". For someone who doesn't realize there was a Dr Alzheimer, that's a perfectly logical development.

More esoteric: the German word for "alone" is "allein". If someone feels very, very alone, the term is "mutterseelenallein", which divides into: mutter-seelen-allein, "mother-soul-alone". It's become a valid word, but how overly romantic: "alone as a mother's soul". Actually, that doesn’t make much sense. It turns out it's just folk etymology. At one point the French term "Moi, tout seul" had apparently been common (me, all alone) and that developed into "moi-tout-seul-allein". German speakers not recognizing French turned it into mutterseelenallein.

At the risk of losing everybody, try this one: there are pipes lined with white material called Meerschaum pipes. Meerschaum is seafoam. What does that have to do with the white material in these pipes? Nothing at all.

Apparently these pipes were made by a person or company called Kummer. It was a Kummer pipe, in German a "Kummer-Pfeife" in French a "pipe de Kummer". The folk etymology happened in the French version, then spread wildly back to German, then English. French speakers didn't recognize what they were saying in "pipe de Kummer", and it developed into "pipe d'écume de mer". Say both versions out loud and you'll hear the difference more readily than reading it.

"Écume" is foam and "écume de mer" is seafoam. This change in French was retranslated back into German as Meerschaum, and so it remained.

One last quickie that is not folk etymology, but just some fun. A window over a door, used for ventilation, is a transom. German for "What is that?" is famously "Was ist das?" The French for "the transom" is "le vasistas". Go figure.