Bruce the Blog

What appears to be the first bona fide debate between the two declared candidates for New York’s 99th Assembly District has been scheduled for Wednesday, August 27, at Yorktown Stage, starting at 7:00 p.m. That’s when incumbent Assemblyman Greg Ball and challenger John Degnan will square off in an event hosted by a non-partisan third-party, North County News, which has absolutely no stake in who is elected.

The moderator will be independently selected by North County News, which will ask if the person identified meets with each camp’s approval. The moderator will pose questions derived from the newspaper’s archives of stories covering both candidates and issues of the day. The questions will betray no bias toward one candidate or the other and reveal no prejudicial leaning on hot-button issues. Audience members will be invited to pose questions of their own.

If all the above seems painfully obvious to any reasonable, well-informed person, the need to exercise ethical, fair and thoroughly impartial procedures to justify using the word “debate” is not obvious to everyone, even including those who are holding what they inaccurately call a “debate.”

A local group that has its heart in the right place, but is misinformed about the proper way to stage a debate, is holding a totally partisan event this Friday at Yorktown Town Hall that more accurately should be called a press conference.

It’s quite a feat to announce a debate for two elected offices and work it so that only one candidate for each office shows up. Here’s a preview of how that is accomplished, borrowed from an imaginary primer that might be titled, “How to Turn a Debate into a Duh-Bait.”

Why “duh-bait”? Because people who put on a debate that is set up to explicitly favor one candidate are insulting the intelligence of the candidate on the other side; as if the prey don’t know (duh!) that they are being baited instead of debated.

1) Have the duh-bait hosted by an organization that actively engages in partisan politics and has made known which candidates it favors, ensuring their opponents have valid reasons for staying away. It takes two to debate. It takes one to duh-bait.

2) Schedule and announce the duh-bait date without first consulting all the candidates to confirm they are available.

3) Select a moderator who has campaigned for one of the candidates and collected signatures on a petition required to get the candidate’s name on the ballot.

4) Select a panel of questioners that includes only those who agree with one of the candidate’s agendas and take a hard line against the views of his opponent.

I’m writing this by candle light. Not really. Not at all. But it might as well be that way.

When you’ve lived in the quaint development of Pinetree Estates in the hamlet of Yorktown Heights since its inception in 1993, you become resigned to living a little like a pioneer, after a fashion. It’s not unlike residing in a historical restoration village, except my neighors and my family are reluctant re-enactors. We don’t even play them on TV. (And if these are estates, I’m Tiger Woods. Got to give the developer props, though, for imagination, and gall.)

Churn that butter. Wash that laundry against stones down by the stream in the wetlands buffer zone. Acclimate yourself to the certainties of life, including death, taxes, and loss of power when the barometer so much as hiccups.

Okay, so I exaggerate a tad. In all sincerity, when I speak truth to power companies, I say it with just as much love they show their customers. For the sake of very, very, very momentary forgiveness, and semi-fair play, the companies we have in mind herein remain nameless, if not blameless.

And who the heck are we to complain anyhow about being deprived every now and then, like clockwork, of modern-day extravagances like electricity and light. 21st Century Man, and Woman, have it so cushy compared to our forebears, it’s embarrassing. If Thomas Edison meant for us to have the luxury of lux all the time, he would have invented the sun instead of the tungsten bulb.

You need to do as the song says — look for the silver lining. Deprivation, like membership, has its privileges. The Proud Pioneers of Pinetree are so accustomed to doing without power whenever the weather stubs its toe that we arguably are of hardier stock than other locals who are coddled by the constant comfort of artificial empowerment. We challenge you to a softball game! (but check the standings in our Sports section before you accept — easy for me to say; I haven’t been on the roster since the French were encamped at French Hill.)

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Without electifrication, I kinda like sitting on my porch on a Wednesday night (this being July 23) with my friend David Steinmetz, sipping some vino – we crushed the grapes ourselves, don’t you know — and puffing on cigars we rolled with our own pampered hands, or maybe they were purchased at the new Doc James store in Katonah opening July 26 under the ownership of Anthony DeVito and Tony Scaglione and Adam DeSiena (how’s that for product placement, guys?). This is the life. And we are powerless to do much about it.

We’ve come a long way since I grew up in the 50s and 60s on Long Island, when power outages were so rare, they actually were newsworthy events. In Pinetreeland, they are mundane, casual occurrences that, from all appearances, seem to barely faze the utility companies that have the remarkable fortitude to tolerate them and act as if they never occur.

Depending on the power supplier, when you call to report the outage and inquire, sheepishly, when power might be restored, they may even imperiously inform you that they do not provide such impertinent information, no doubt muttering something under their breath about the unworthy slackers who happen to be their customers. “Shut up and shop more often at Yankee Candle,” they might as well be saying.

It now is going on three hours that Pinetree has been powerless. But who’s complaining? Not the Energizer Bunny. His batteries never looked so good.

In the age of Internetworked mobile devices, please sir, can we have online updates as to the progress being made toward power being restored? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Shut up and go to sleep, we imagine being told, and when you are awakened at 4:00 a.m. by the revenge of the TVs and lights and cable boxes, beepers and buzzers, then, and only then, will you know when you’ve been granted the alienable right to have power restored.

Yes, yes, no, no, we are not worthy, we are contrite and, worse, Power Hungry! Please accept the humble suggestions below as a modest token of gratitude for your teaching us the ways of becoming one again with nature by sacrificing the corrupting influence of electricity and light and all that overheated, overrated nonsense that our foredads and moms did without for eons.

If the once-in-a-creation discoveries of wheel and fire were good enough for them, who are we to complain?

We’re truly thankful that the stability of the power grid to which we are so tenuously connected seems to be increasingly vulnerable, and that the keeper of its flickering flame exhibits scant solutions for how to stabilize, let alone improve, the situation. After all, it’s for our own good, and we know it.

How can I ever repay Big Brother & the Power Company for its selfless, patriotic efforts to toughen up a society that has become sickeningly soft in its underbelly? Thought you’d never ask.

Here are the “Top 11 List of Suggestions for the Powers that Be” to shine a light on the ingenious infrastructure that guarantees we will lose power at the flick of a tree switch being snapped in wayward weather. (We add the 11th as a backup just in case one of the other 10 unexpectedly loses power.)

1. Adopt as your new logo a log cabin in tribute to the Spartan lifestyle we all must seriously consider returning to at once, especially if we are chronically powerless customers of a power utility.

2. Enclose some futuristic form of paper-thin flashlight in utility bills each month for the inevitable power outage that is reliably, always just around the corner.

3. Hold free seminars on how the average billpayer can breed a mutant form of giant fireflies, corral them in their own gated community in your backyard, and train them to light up on command during regularly scheduled power outages.

4. Distribute calendars each December published in conjunction with the Farmer’s Almanac that forecast the most likely dates when power outages will occur, and cross-promote it with flashlight, battery and candle makers.

5. Hire Debbie Boone to perform at free concerts that take place when homes lose power, where, in the tradition of a rain dance, she will restore morale, if not power, by leading group sing-alongs of “You Light Up My Life” until dawn, or until your refrigerator food spoils, whichever comes first.

6. Issue rebates of an eighth day of the week – or the cash equivalent of lost revenue of a workday — to compensate those who are deprived of valuable hours of productivity during a blackout, resulting in that lucrative proposal not being ready for the morning meeting with a big customer.

7. Try to impersonate a competitive supplier instead of a monopoly by mailing a letter of apology to customers with a plan for how you intend to minimize power outages. Do not date it April 1. That would be redundant anyhow, since your customers have long since gotten the hint that you already take us for fools every day of the year.

8. Fire underperforming managers and hold all managers’ feet to the fires that easily can be found in the homes of customers who have lost electricity during the winter months.

9. Invest heavily and immediately in alternate power sources, like solar and nuclear energy.

10. Hold a no-rules contest where the prizes are power generators awarded to any family with infirm children or elders whose medical condition is severely compromised if their electrical assistive devices do not work due to a recurring failure of competency over which they have absolutely no control.

11. Hire ex-Senator Phil Gramm as your spokesman to remind customers to stop whining just because they have to stumble around in the dark for several hours every other Wednesday or so.

[This is an extended version of the July 16 Talking Points column on page 8 of NCN]

As much as I love all types of music, with advancing age has come increasing appreciation for interludes of silence, especially when I am inside the ultimate boom box — a motor vehicle. There, resisting the pull of satellite radio, I can listen to the beat of my heart, the rhythm of my soul and the lyrics of my mind. We’re all composers of life.
Whether it’s Shakespeare’s “food of love” or love of food, moderation in maturity heightens experiences simply because something that becomes more rare becomes more valued.
The same applies to discovering talent who also happen to be your neighbors. Just as there is the rising influence of hyperlocal media – such as this newspaper – there is hyperlocal talent that we will be hearing from more frequently and loudly, thanks to the democracy of digital distribution that is accessible to millions of individuals rather than controlled by a few music and movie moguls.
Hyperlocal talent – or local hypertalent — is everywhere around us. It was in full view and full voice at Travelers Rest last Friday for a fundraiser to support students in the performing arts.
Appropriately enough, in the audience with her family was Angelina Joyce-DiBart, a XX-year-old performer who sang in the Jenna’s Dream Choir and could be on her way to bigger things on the stage. Her parents Kevin Joyce and Patricia DiBart set a great example for both their offspring and for other parents as prominent donors to the schools’ stage productions through the First Nighters of Yorktown, akin to a sports team booster club.
Jenna’s Dream is named in m emory of the daughter of Monica and Craig Schulman, a Broadway leading man who is the fundraiser’s headliner. One audience member remarked to me how remarkable he found it for Craig to shift his whole persona from The Music Man’s “Ya Got Trouble” to the drama of Les Miserables’ “Bring Him Home.” Whatever the song, his voice never fails to thrill both those who’ve heard him and those who haven’t ( CraigSchulman.com).
Barbara Borok is Membership Coordinator of First Nighters and a first-rate vocalist and songwriter with her guitarist-vocalist-songwriting spouse Michael. They perform as New Middle Class and their songs are brilliantly original and entertaining, but are better heard than described, so check them out at NewMiddleClass.com. The couple is working on a second CD they hope to release in the first half of 2009.
Also on the bill at the Cabaret was Spyro Gyra’s Jeremy Wall, whose keyboard playing is magical, and a newly formed Sixties revival band, Not Fade Away., which had the crowd dancing the night away in short order. The group’s frontman sang and played with the legendary Dion of Runaround Sue fame. Both he and another band member are longtime Yorktowners. You also can catch them on some Thursday evenings starting at 9:30p at The Heights Bistro in Yorktown.
The Cabaret Dinner Show was produced by two local organizations, Jenna’s Dream and our family’s Harrison Apar Field of Dreams Foundation, which is closely affiliated with and donates to First Nighters.
There was another kind of star talent in our midst without whom this and many other fundraisers would not be possible or productive: Travelers Rest proprietor Dave Paganelli. It’s no surprise that he and wife Nancy have been honored several times this year alone by local organizations such as Yorktown Chamber of Commerce and Circolo da Vinci, which said it was the first time that the same name was nominated on every member’s ballot. If there are more giving and sincere people than the Paganellis in these parts, I haven’t met them.

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