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      in Music

      Scenes From a Marriage, Patinkin-Style

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      Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody were mystified when some of the videos they made with their son while waiting out the pandemic in upstate New York were viewed more than a million times.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesThe Great ReadScenes From a Marriage, Patinkin-StyleMandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody’s charming, irreverent pandemic-era posts led to unlikely social media stardom. Will the vaccine end their run?Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody were mystified when some of the videos they made with their son while waiting out the pandemic in upstate New York were viewed more than a million times.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 3, 2021Updated 1:27 p.m. ETMandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody have been together since their first date nearly 43 years ago, a giddy daylong romp through Greenwich Village that began with brunch and ended with them making out on a street corner. “I’m going to marry you,” he declared. “You’re going to get hurt, because I’m not going to marry anyone,” she replied.Their wedding was two years later, in 1980. But like many long-term couples, their partnership has thrived in part because they are away from each other so much. Grody, 74, is an Obie Award-winning actress and writer; Patinkin, 68, finished the final season of “Homeland” last year and spent the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 on a 30-city concert tour.In March, they left Manhattan for their cabin in upstate New York and embarked, like so many of us, on something radically different: months of uninterrupted time together. The result is a matter of public record, because scenes from their marriage — in all its talky, squabbly, emotional, affectionate glory — are all over social media, courtesy of their son Gideon, 34, who started recording them for fun and then realized that there was a vast demand for Patinkin-related content.Patinkin said that “being with my family holed up for 11 months has been one of the true gifts of my life.” Grody urged their son Gideon, who made their videos, not to portray them simply as an “adorable older couple” but to “get some of our annoyance in there.”Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesFor months, people have scrolled through Twitter, Instagram and TikTok to watch Grody and Patinkin debate, declaim, snuggle, bicker, horse around, play with their dog, Becky, obsess about politics and display their (lack of) knowledge about such topics as text-speak and the New York pizza rat. More recently, the world has followed along as they got their first doses of the vaccine (“one of the few benefits of being old,” Patinkin wrote).Now, as they near the first anniversary of all that togetherness, they say that except for desperately missing their older son, Isaac, who lives in Colorado and recently got married, they feel lucky to be together. “There’s no question,” Patinkin said. “Being with my family holed up for 11 months has been one of the true gifts of my life.”As this phase of the pandemic nears its end, do they plan to turn their unlikely social-media fame into a family sitcom or reality TV show? No, says Gideon, although they have gotten endless inquiries. For one thing, his parents can barely operate the video functions on their phones, and eventually he will again have to leave them to their own devices. “Once the world is vaccinated and living life is back in vogue, I might have to teach them how to do selfie videos,” he said. “That should be something.”After the first few videos last spring, Grody exhorted Gideon not to portray them simply as an “adorable older couple,” she said. “You have to get some of our annoyance in there,” she told him.What annoyance? In dueling interviews, the couple outlined the many ways they irritate each other. Patinkin hates the way his wife amasses old newspapers, like a hoarder. Grody hates how, when she fails to answer her husband’s calls, he redials incessantly — three, four, five times — until she picks up. She likes podcasts; he likes rewiring the house. She is a “social maniac,” Patinkin said; he “likes humanity in general, but very few specific people,” Grody said.In one video, they tell Gideon how they celebrated their anniversary the day before.“It began lovely, and turned into an absolute fight,” Patinkin says. “Both of us lost.”“I apologized and that made dad cry,” Grody says. “We’ve always connected through weeping.”The response was so positive, with people posting that the couple reminded them of themselves or their parents or just brought joy at a dark time, that Gideon now advises other young adults confined at home to embark on similar projects. “I became astonished at how much I could get out of them,” he said.Their efforts expanded this summer and through the election. Patinkin has long volunteered for the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, and Gideon encouraged his parents to use their growing social media base — now 250,000-plus on Twitter, 155,000-plus on Instagram, 940,000-plus on TikTok — to work for Democratic candidates in the presidential and Senate elections.The couple took part in virtual fund-raisers; did endless phone banking; danced, sang, cooked and goofed around. Enlisting the services of the writer and director Ewen Wright, they recorded TikTok campaign spots, like one in which Patinkin tells young people to get their parents and grandparents to vote, and then twerks to a remix of the song “Stand By Me.” Mystifyingly to them, some of their videos have been viewed more than a million times.Will the show go on? After their cameraman — one of their sons, Gideon — is vaccinated and returns to his daily life, Patinkin and Grody will be left to their own devices, literally.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York Times“I don’t understand this stuff,” said Grody, who on one video can be seen trying to explain what she thinks TikTok is: “a communication tool” that encourages “young people to meet various kinds of other young people.”All the while, Gideon kept filming, adding new nuances to what has turned into a portrait of a complex marriage.It has not been without its adversities. (“They are an exquisite mess, but theirs is a deeply rich joy,” is how Gideon put it.) For one thing, there is Patinkin’s self-proclaimed moodiness. Once, he related, he was so unpleasant in the car en route to visit a relative that Gideon, then a teenager, said, ‘Dad, if you can’t get it together, don’t come in.” (He didn’t come in.) Another time, he felt so trapped and sulky before Thanksgiving — a difficult time of the year for him — that he decided to fly to New Orleans to spare his family, only to change his mind and demand, successfully, to exit the plane before it took off.“Everyone in the family knows I’m a (synonym for jerk),” Patinkin said. “But they know me and they love me and they forgive me, and that’s why I feel safe. The word ‘safe’ is such an operative word at this moment.”By that he meant the pandemic, and how lucky it is to be with someone who makes you feel secure in a time of insecurity.“There have been times during this whole period — sometimes I don’t even know what triggered them — there are times when I wake up and I find myself weeping, and she holds me and no words are spoken,” Patinkin said of his wife.“I married a woman who knew a guy was nuts, and she has loved me and stood by me and educated me and politicized me,” he continued. Or, as Grody said: “I used to say that I was supposed to marry a rock so I could be the lunatic, but instead I married a lunatic and I’ve had to be the rock.”They have separated twice in the course of their marriage, once for six months, the other for eight months.“We spoke to each other every day; we saw each other every day,” Patinkin said. “We couldn’t be apart.”“It was ridiculous, to tell you the truth,” Grody said. “I would say, ‘Don’t you know we’re supposed to be separated?’ As difficult as our problems were, it was far more difficult to be without each other.”They love describing how they met. They told the story in separate interviews, each observing that the other would focus on totally different details.Her version includes noticing her future husband in a 7Up commercial, circa 1970, a full eight years before they met. She then noticed him again in 1975, in his debut theater performance — the premiere of “Trelawny of the Wells,” which also starred Meryl Streep, Mary Beth Hurt and John Lithgow. She found the young Patinkin so appealing from afar that she turned to her then-boyfriend and said, “He’s my type — what am I doing with you?”Patinkin’s version includes how he went to her house for dinner soon after their fateful initial brunch and found that, living in a tiny walk-up in Little Italy, she stored her sweaters in the oven. Mis-following a recipe, she served him chicken covered in raw bacon.“I felt that I had lost my mind,” he said. “I was knocked out by her.”“When I look at Mandy, I see all of the Mandys I’ve ever known, from the person he was then to the person he is now,” Grody said.Credit…Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesPatinkin brought up “The Princess Bride,” in which he played Inigo Montoya, a swordsman trying to avenge his father’s death — and which at heart is about the search for true love.“I have found true love,” he said, “and first and foremost, I have it with my wife.”Grody feels the same way.“When I look at Mandy, I see all of the Mandys I’ve ever known, from the person he was then to the person he is now,” she said. “I’m still in love with his face.”In November, the couple appeared together in a video for the Jewish Democratic Council of America. They toasted the election results, exhorted everyone to stay safe. And then he sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in Yiddish, as his wife wept quietly beside him.“To have known somebody all these years, and to have lived this life together, and to have weathered the brutalities of intimacy — it’s a daring thing,” she said. “It’s an astonishing thing.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Best Comedy of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBest Comedy of 2020Comedians like Leslie Jones, Chelsea Handler and Hannibal Buress adjusted to the new abnormal, turning to Zoom, YouTube, rooftops and parks.The pandemic halted most live performance but comedians adjusted and adapted. Clockwise from bottom left: Leslie Jones, Eddie Pepitone, John Wilson and Ziwe Fumudoh.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Rahim Fortune for The New York Times; Troy Conrad; HBO; Chase Hall for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 5:59 p.m. ETThe comedy boom finally busted. Not only did the pandemic shut down comedy institutions, but New York clubs like Dangerfield’s, which was half a century old, and the stalwart The Creek & the Cave closed for good, as did the city’s branches of the improv powerhouse, the Upright Citizens Brigade. At the same time, comedians adjusted to the new abnormal, transitioning to Zoom and Instagram Live, and to shows in parks and on rooftops. It was a period of experimentation and stagnancy, contraction and accessibility, despair and occasional joy. In a low year, here were the highlights:Funniest SpecialDo you find an angry blue-collar guy yelling about being high on molly funny? Does the phrase “Stalin on Spotify” amuse you? Do pivots from ragingly unhinged roars to an NPR voice make you lose your breath in laughter? No? Not to worry: Eddie Pepitone will still delight. An overlooked master of the form, he’s perfected a persona of the silly grump that makes anything funny. Smart comedy that aims for the gut, his new special (available on Amazon Prime) is titled “For the Masses,” but he jokes that is by necessity, in one of several insults of his audience: “I would be doing jokes about Dostoyevsky if it wasn’t for you.”After leaving “Saturday Night Live” in 2019, Leslie Jones had a viral year that included the Netflix special “Time Machine.”Credit…Bill Gray/NetflixBest Complaint About 20-SomethingsLeslie Jones made the most of her first year after “Saturday Night Live.” Not only did she go viral roasting the clothes, furniture and décor of cable news talking heads in social media videos, but she made a dynamite Netflix special, “Time Machine,” where she castigated today’s young people for failing to have fun. “Every 20-year-old’s night,” she preached, “should end with glitter and cocaine.”Best 20-Something CounterAbout six weeks after the release of Jones’s special, the breakout young comic Taylor Tomlinson made an impressive Netflix debut with “Quarter-Life Crisis”; in it, she says she’s sick of people telling her to enjoy her 20s. “They’re not fun,” she said exasperated, in one of many cleverly crafted bits. “They’re 10 years of asking myself: Will I outgrow this or is this a problem?”Best Opening GambitBy describing her special in detail, beat by beat, at the start of Netflix’s “Douglas” — Hannah Gadsby’s follow-up to “Nanette” — she seemed to be eliminating the most important element of comedy: surprise. But like Penn & Teller deconstructing the secrets of magic while hiding some new ones, she just found a new way to fool you.In his YouTube special “Miami Nights,” Hannibal Buress told a story about an encounter with a police officer that led to his arrest.Credit…Isola Man MediaBest Closing StoryIn his funniest and most stylish special, “Miami Nights,” on YouTube, Hannibal Buress ended on a 20-minute story about an unsettling encounter with a police officer in Miami that led to his arrest. It’s a master class in comic storytelling that sent himself up, skewered the police, hit bracingly topical notes with throwaway charm while adding on a coda that provided the visceral pleasures of payback. It’s stand-up with the spirit of a Tarantino movie.Best Silver LiningOne nice side effect of the shutdown for live comedy is that in transitioning to digital, local shows became accessible to everyone with an internet connection. So it was a nostalgic treat that the weekly Los Angeles showcase Hot Tub, which pioneered weird comedy in New York before moving to the West Coast, once again became part of my comedy diet, via Twitch. While there were many new faces, much hadn’t changed, like the eclectic and adventurous booking and the dynamite chemistry of its hosts Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler.Best Alfresco SpecialStreet comedy, a subgenre of some legend, was all but dead when the pandemic pushed stand-up outdoors. By the fall, several comics, like Chelsea Handler and Colin Quinn, even made specials there, working crowds whose laughter did not echo against walls. The sharpest was “Up on the Roof” by the workhorse comic Sam Morril (it’s his second punchline-dense special of the year), the rare person to translate New York club comedy to rooftops (with the help of cameras on drones).Cole Escola portrays a cabaret performer in his YouTube special, “Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola.”Credit…Cole EscolaBest Sketch ComicWhen comedic dynamo Cole Escola produced his own special featuring deliriously bizarre characters wrapped in pitch-perfect genre spoofs, and released it on YouTube under the title “Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola,” he was surely not trying to embarrass networks and streaming services for never placing him at the center of his own show. But that’s what he did.Best New Talk ShowThe charismatic Ziwe Fumudoh has long been comfortable creating and sitting in the tension between the comedian and the audience in small alt rooms, but in her interview show on Instagram, she repurposed this gift for cringe and applied it to probing conversations on racism with guests like Caroline Calloway and Alison Roman. It made for essential viewing during a protest-filled summer.Best Siblings“I Hate Suzie” provided serious competition, but the best British comic import this year was “Stath Lets Flats,” which found a home on HBO Max. This brilliantly observed office comedy focuses on the mundane travails of an awful real estate agent and his sister. Jamie Demetriou (who created the show) starred, along with his real-life sister Natasia, better known in the United States because of her dynamite deadpan in the FX vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows.” The show is cringe comedy whose beating heart comes from their relationship. Look out Sedaris siblings. A new talent family has arrived.The stand-up comic Beth Stelling released a special on HBO Max titled “Girl Daddy.”Credit…HBO MaxBest Debut SpecialThe stand-up comic Beth Stelling’s pinned tweet is from 2015: “I’ve been called a ‘female comic’ so many times, I’ll probably only be able to answer to ‘girl daddy’ when I have children.” This year, she released a knockout special on HBO Max titled “Girl Daddy.” It’s a virtuosic performance, conversational while dense with jokes — with a portrait of her father, an actor who works as a pirate at an Orlando mini-golf course, that manages to be scathing, loving and sort of over it, all at the same time.Best Experimental ComedyIt’s a good sign for adventurous work that last year’s winner (Natalie Palamides’s solo shocker “Nate”) is now a Netflix special. But the revelation this year was HBO’s “How To With John Wilson,” a kind of reality show about New York City that pushed formal boundaries while unearthing the hidden and the overlooked in poignant, funny new ways.Best DirectionIn one of her final projects, Lynn Shelton masterfully shot the latest Marc Maron special “End Times Fun,” on Netflix, demonstrating that great direction doesn’t need to be about showy camera movements. Her shot sequences emphasized and played against Maron’s jokes, working together effortlessly, like dancing partners that intimately know each other’s moves. Two months later, in May, she died of a blood disorder. Memorializing her movingly on his podcast, Maron, her boyfriend, said: “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Black Student Expelled After Mother Complains About 'Fences'

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Race and PolicingFacts on Walter Wallace Jr. CaseFacts on Breonna Taylor CaseFacts on Daniel Prude CaseFacts on George Floyd CaseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Black Student’s Mother Complained About ‘Fences.’ He Was Expelled.A dispute about the reading of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play in an English class escalated at the mostly white Providence Day School in Charlotte, N.C.Faith Fox and her son Jamel.Credit…Travis Dove for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 5:30 a.m. ETWhen the mother of a Black ninth grader at a private school in Charlotte, N.C., learned last month that his English class was going to be studying August Wilson’s “Fences,” an acclaimed play examining racism in 1950s America, she complained to the school.The drama, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and was adapted into a critically praised film starring Denzel Washington in 2016, is about a Black family and is peppered with racial slurs from the first page.Faith Fox, a lawyer and single mother, said in an interview that she imagined her son’s mostly white class at the Providence Day School reading the dialogue out loud. She said her main concern was that the themes were too mature for the group and would foster stereotypes about Black families.After a round of emails and a meeting with Ms. Fox, the school agreed to an alternate lesson for her son, Jamel, 14. The school also discussed complaints with the parents of four other students. Ms. Fox’s disagreement escalated. She took it to a parents’ Facebook group, and later fired off an email that school officials said was a personal attack on a faculty member.On the day after Thanksgiving, the school notified Ms. Fox that Jamel would no longer be attending the school, the only one he had ever known.His mother called it an expulsion. The school referred to it as “a termination of enrollment” that had to do with the parent, not the student. Either way, what was meant to be a literary lesson in diversity and inclusion had somehow cost a Black 14-year-old his place in an elite private high school.Jamel had recently made the school basketball team and said in an interview that he hoped to graduate as a Providence Day lifer. “I was completely crushed,” he said. “There was no, ‘Please don’t kick me out, I won’t say this, I won’t say that, my mom won’t say this, my mom won’t say that.’” He is making plans to attend public school in January.This year has brought a reckoning with race at many American institutions, including schools. When widespread street protests erupted after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, young people across the country used social media to expose racism at their schools. At Providence Day School, Black students shared stories of discrimination and insensitivity on Instagram, and the school was among many that released statements against racism.“For the Black members of our community, we see you, we hear you and we will act,” the statement said. The school also revised its bias complaint process and created alumni, faculty and student diversity groups.But Ms. Fox said, she felt the school’s treatment of her son proved this was all just lip service.“You can have the important conversations about race and segregation without destroying the confidence and self-esteem of your Black students and the Black population,” Ms. Fox said in an interview. Just over 7 percent of the school’s 1,780 students are Black, about 70 percent are white, and the rest identify as members of other minority groups.A spokeswoman for the school, Leigh Dyer, said last week that officials were “saddened” that Jamel had to leave.“As a school community, we value a diversity of thought and teach students to engage in civil discourse around topics that they might not necessarily agree on,” Ms. Dyer said. “We have the same expectation for the adults in our community.”The Nov. 27 termination letter cited “bullying, harassment and racially discriminatory actions” and “slanderous accusations towards the school itself” by Jamel’s mother.Ms. Dyer provided a statement that said Ms. Fox had made “multiple personal attacks against a person of color in our school administration, causing that person to feel bullied, harassed and unsafe” in the discussions about “Fences.” It also said Ms. Fox had a history of making “toxic” statements about the faculty and others at the school, but did not provide examples.Ms. Fox denied this. “Instead of addressing the issue they’re trying to make me seem like an angry, ranting Black woman,” she said.The New York Times reviewed emails and Facebook messages that Ms. Fox provided and also interviewed two other Providence Day parents who said they had similar concerns about the play and about a video the school used to facilitate conversations about the racial slur. They spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their children.The school had notified parents in early November about the lesson plan in an email. Noting the frequent appearance of the slur in dialogue, it said that students would say “N-word” instead when reading aloud. It said time would be “devoted to considering the word itself and some of its more nuanced aspects of meaning.”The email included a link to a PBS NewsHour interview with Randall Kennedy, a Black professor at Harvard, discussing the history of the slur while using it repeatedly.“It wasn’t something that I thought was appropriate for a roomful of elite, affluent white children,” Ms. Fox said.Her son was also dreading the lesson, which he would have attended via video because of the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s really awkward being in a classroom of majority white students when those words come up,” Jamel said, “because they just look at you and laugh at you, talk about you as soon as you leave class. I can’t really do anything because I’m usually the only Black person there.”Ms. Dyer, the spokeswoman, said the school had introduced the study of “Fences” in 2017 in response to Black parents who wanted more lessons addressing race. In past years, there had been only one complaint about the play, she said.After her son was offered an alternative assignment, Ms. Fox posted about “Fences” to the Facebook group. Other parents said they too had concerns about the play and the PBS video. One comment directed her to an online essay by a student from a prior year who described the “dagger” she felt “cutting deeper and deeper” with each mention of the slur in the video.That’s when Ms. Fox sent an email to the school’s director of equity and inclusion, calling her a “disgrace to the Black community.” Ten days later, Jamel was kicked out of the school. Ms. Fox said that she was surprised but that she does not regret sending the email in the heat of the moment.After Jamel’s expulsion, a letter signed by “concerned Black faculty members” was sent to parents of the four other students who had complained, arguing the literary merits of “Fences.” It said great African-American writers do not create perfect Black characters when they are trying to show the “damaging legacy of racism.”That is a view held by many critics and academics. Sandra G. Shannon, a professor of African-American literature at Howard University and founder of the August Wilson Society, said schools should not shy away from the “harsh realities of the past.”Katie Rieser, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, said “Fences” is taught widely in middle school and high school, but she also urged that it be done so with care.“It’s telling a story about a Black family that, if it’s the only text or it’s one of only a few texts about Black people that students read, might give white students in particular a sense that Black families are all like this Black family,” she said.Ms. Fox said the fight to be heard as a Black parent at a predominantly white private institution had been “exhausting.”She recalled when Jamel came home upset in elementary school after a field trip to a former slave plantation. After she complained, the school ended the annual trips, she said.The other day, she said her son told her he finally understood “why Black Lives Matter is so important and is not just about George Floyd and all of these people dying in the streets, but it also has to do with how we’re treated everywhere else.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More