Bruce the Blog

Last Friday, I roved over to The Terrace Club on Route 6N in Mahopac to catch Class Action, a popular Yorktown rock ‘n’ roll cover band fronted by Gary Cusano, a lawyer by day and fierce rocker by night. Gary and Company have been very generous and kind to our Harrison Apar Field of Dreams Foundation, twice donating their services to help us raise money.

I like to support those who support our efforts and it helps that I really like to “lounge” around on a Friday night to chill after the work week, socialize, and listen to thumping music. Class Action does justice to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Billy Joel, The Rolling Stones and the like.

On Friday night, The Terrace Club was packed for the 10:00 p.m. performance. Before I left home, Elyse asked if I expected to see anyone I knew. “Probably Rob Reiss,” I told her, referring to a Yorktown physical therapist who is a friend of the band’s and with whom I played some pocket billiards when Class Action played a few months ago at O’Malley’s in Mount Kisco. Sure enough, Rob WAS there with wife Margot.

Asking the bartendress to start a tab for me, she asked my name. “First or last,” I asked, as if it mattered. There’s not too many Bruces, so that would have worked without my tab going to another Bruce down the mahogany or vice versa. But I chose my surname. “Apar,” I recalled it was.

At that moment, the gentleman occupying the stool to my left (I was standing, my preferred position when I’m hanging out — and there were no stools left anyhow) turned, looked at me, and fairly blurted, “Bruce Apar!”

When you’re in the news business, you’re not sure if that shock of recognition will be followed by an embrace or a sucker punch. Fortunately, in this case, I was embraceable.

It was someone I hung out with in Westhampton Beach 30 years ago as a half-shareholder in his summer house. He has a video of me he’s been wanting to give me for a couple years. I can guess what’s on it, and so can Elyse, who happened to be dating this person when she met me. I think the video I can wait to see involves a swimming pool, a raft, and a snorkel. Ankles aweigh!

This person was at The Terrace Club with someone other than his spouse. Later, another person I know entered the restaurant with two persons other than his spouse, but that’s because she is his ex.

It was then I realized we must all have happened upon a secret meeting of the Mid Life Crisis Men’s Club to which we were subliminally invited. I must have RSVPed without knowing it. My own MLC includes entertaining thoughts — serious, almost-ticketing thoughts — of traveling solo to Santa Fe to stay at the vacation home of a Syracuse U. frat brother who’s invited me several times. It seemed a good opportunity for early April, when Elyse and Elissa (with college friend in tow) and I are scheduled to be in Vero Beach at her parents. I figured “Lucy” (my nickname for Elissa since the day she was born — with red hair) would be otherwise occupied with her pal, as would Elyse with her folks, so I wouldn’t be very missed.

I was getting pretty excited about bacheloring it with my friend Norm in stunning Santa Fe, where his backyard views go on forever, and the days are filled with leisurely hiking, museum-going and soaking in Mother Nature in all her glory.

I found cheap airfares, surfed online for events we could attend and — then it hit me. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Lucy will be out of college in two years, off on a life of her own, and how many family vacations do we have left?

How many more times will I be playing golf with my father-in-law Buddy, an octogenarian who shoots his age. His love of golf is manifest in his and Roz’s backyard, which looks out over their golf community’s 14th fairway.

Then there’s the painfully obvious missing piece of our family that my absence would only magnify. And so it was Tuesday morning getting ready for work that I reversed course, calling Elyse to tell her it was ixnay on the Santa Fe. I spoke about my wanting to be there for her, for Lucy and for her parents. “You mean because they would think it’s wrong if you weren’t,” asked Elyse. “I think it’s wrong” was my reply, fairly boasting that I had figured something out for myself and felt the conviction deep inside me without compromise. It was a character building moment that was virtually tangible, excuse the oxymoron.

“I have to say I’m happy,” she told me. She had not objected one iota to my previous plan to go west, middle-aged man, part of her ethos to “not tell you what you should do.” Hmmm. Can I have that declaration etched in marble perhaps and cemented to our front porch for all to see? I’ll get back to you on that. I said that I knew she wasn’t very sanguine about my solo act and knew she was muting that dismay. I was happy to hear her say she was happy about my paternalistic decision to be a family man at the right moment.

Meanwhile, back at The Terrace Club, I was single too, for the simple reason, as I told someone who inquired, “Where’s Elyse,” that our body clocks seem to run counterclockwise to one another, so “I come alive at night when she’s ready for bed.”

Just to prove my point, on Saturday night, after a full day of reading Curious George to preschoolers at the Jefferson Valley Mall Book Blast, then rushing to a special meeting of the Yorktown Athletic Club board, on which I sit, Elyse and I were two of 300 laughing our assets off at a five-temple comedy night at Yorktown Jewish Center that featured three very funny standup acts.

It was over about 11:00 p.m., and my evening was only getting started. I headed for one of my several homes away from home, Colonial Terrace in Cortlandt Manor (Travelers Rest being another), where The Foundation for Excellence in Yorktown Schools was holding its annual casino night fundraiser, with a late night after-party that seemed tailor made for my nocturnal schedule’s event hopping. I got there 11:30 and most of the crowd was still enjoying the evening.

On Sunday afternoon, Elyse and I enjoyed the off-center comedy Kimberly Akimbo at The Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls (which I reviewed in this week’s North County News).

It’s been a quiet week so far, which is fine by me because I could use the break, but the fun resumes Friday with a Rocky Patel open house at Doc James Cigars in Shrub Oak, where owner Adam DeSiena is hosting Rocky himself to promote some new smokes. Then it’s on to the grand opening in Peekskill of Birdsall House, a highly anticipated brewery.

Saturday we’re off to New Jersey for the bat mitzvah of another Syracuse U frat brother’s daughter, then to the Lakeland Education Foundation Casino Night at Colonial Terrace, honoring my pal Chuck Newman, where a record crowd of 320+ is expected. That’s some turnout. No surprise, cause Chuck is some kind of special guy. I’d love to stay for the dinner, but a St. Patty’s Day biennial house party is waiting in Yorktown, and it’s a doozy.

But first some personal grooming to attend to. Thursday night I’m trying a new place to get my head handled, Michael Robert Salon on Lexington Avenue at Route 6 in Mohegan Lake, next to Augie’s Restaurant, then I’ll swing by to say hello to “Augie” herself — Audrey Hochroth — and husband Sal Barone.

Maybe they’ll even let me sneak in a private audition for their Augie’s Idol Season 2, which begins April 13-14. Oh, you mean judges don’t have to audition? Never mind then.

I’ve heard tell that people get contact lenses so they don’t have wear to glasses all the time, thus dispensing with all those old, lame jokes about “Four Eyes,” which nobody ever really hears anymore anyhow, but we’re talking here about seeing, not hearing.

Well, I’m not those people. I’m people who just got contact lenses for the first time ever (see Blog Entry 03.02.10, “Lens Me Your Eyes”) within a hair’s breadth of my big birthday that isn’t 50. When people my age negotiate a mid-life crisis by going the “I don’t need no stinkin’ bifocals anymore” route, it’s not such a simple event. It’s more of a drawn-out process.

I thought, in my “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty” naivete, that acquiring contacts meant losing eyeglasses for the most part. But, as the inimitable John Belushi might say, nooooooooooooooooooo, not in my special needs case.

I’m nearsighted, and wear glasses to see distances. Although nine out of 10 doctors say I could read or do close work sans glasses, I never take them off because the lower portion of the lens is ground to clarify very short distances .

My new contacts, contrariwise (one of my favorite obscure words), are not bifocals. While they have done wonders for the totally blurry world I know without glasses, which now is in high definition with my contacts, but any object that comes within about four feet of my face is now a blur because the unifocal contacts don’t compute that distance. That’s the problem. The solution? Don’t ask.

But before we get there, let me bore you to tears with the trivial news that on Day 4 of becoming a contact lens addict, I achieved the Olympian Gold Medal nirvana of removing the contacts from each orb in a single try. That compares with the dozen or more attempts it took me on Day 1 to both put in and remove the contacts from each eye. Keep in mind that the technique I was shown for removing the soft lens was to pinch it as it sat on my cornea. Sounds like fun, huh? Miraculously, now that I’m with the program, the contact lens removal procedure seems easy and, more important, it works pretty well! I’m starting to master installing them as well.

My opthalmologist — apparently following the similar advice of my wife Elyse, a lifelong contact lens wearer — recommended I buy what Elyse calls “Cheaters,” but what the drugstore displays drily label “Reading Glasses.” They are about 20 bucks, unless they have a fancy brand name like Gel, in which case they cost more than twice as much.

Dr. Dieck wrote on a piece of paper that I should get 1.75-power cheaters when working at a computer terminal (about 2-3 feet from my face) and 2.50-power glasses for extremely close-up reading. Elyse scoffed at the seemingly absurd notion of having to obtain two sets of reading glasses. She surmised if I split the difference and got 2.0-power glasses, it would suit me just as well.

Being her husband, I of course didn’t listen to that reasonably sage advice. I went with the guy with the medical degree. Oh, I also needed non-prescription sunglasses, he told me, to put over my contacts, then I’d really have it made in the shades.

Shopping in A&P, I espied an endcap display of attractively-packaged “High Definition” sunglasses. And to think they’re not even made with plasma or LCD! When I found out they cost 10 bucks … SOLD! Then, upon donning them, I realized they revealed the anatomical asymmetry I never before noticed of one ear being much lower on my head than the other. Either that or the El Cheapo glasses are so poorly mass manufactured they don’t sit squarely on my noggin. Back to A&P they will go. I’ll upgrade to a pair from CVS maybe.

So, to sum up, my lifelong dream of having contact lenses that would rid me of those unsightly spectacles once and for all has resulted in my owning and variously using the following inventory of eyeball enhancements:

1 pair prescription contact lenses (prescribed by doctor to wear maximum 6 hours a day until acclimated)
1 pair prescription eyeglasses to wear when not wearing contacts
1 pair prescription sunglasses that clip on over the eyeglasses
1 pair 1.75 reading glasses for computer terminal work
1 pair 2.50 reading glasses for extreme close-up work like reading
1 pair off-the-shelf El Cheapo sunglasses to wear over the prescription contact lenses
1 huge headache trying to keep all the above organized and within easy reach
1 huge lanyard on which all the above can hang to keep within easy reach and which I conveniently can use to hang myself with if I ever decide to end it all instead of contending with the quintuplet-lenses monster that my contacts have created

Do the math. Contact lenses x 5 pair of lenses = 10 eyes. How did that happen?

When I mentioned the angle for this blog to Elyse, she started laughing heartily. She’s my reliable one-woman focus group. Then she added, “I can see [our late son] Harrison laughing his head off at you with the contacts. He’d be making jokes right and left.” Her invocation of Harrison’s soaring sense of humor started me crying my head off.

I told her the burst of emotion also been pent up. I had thought since the weekend about how in his glory Harrison would be with my alma mater, and his fave college, Syracuse now Number 1 in the NCAA basketball rankings. Can’t remember the last time, if ever, that happened. How I wish he was here to enjoy that with me. Two weeks after we lost Harrison in March 2003, two weeks after he had filled in his NCAA bracket with Syracuse in the Final Four, the Orange for the first time won the NCAA Championship.

It didn’t exactly help keep my tear ducts dry that just last night was the Jewish anniversary of his passing, known as his yahrzeit, and we still tonight had the ritualistic 24-hour candle burning to commemorate the solemn occasion.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my new contacts. The question really, though, is whether my eyeglass solution is half empty or half full? I’m sure Harrison would have the answer. And I’m sure it would be funny as all heck and he’d have me doubled over, laughing so hard I’d be crying. Like now.

There is a page elsewhere in this blogosphere of mine titled “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty.”It’s enough to make you sixty to decide a decade past your half-century mark that contact lenses might be a good idea. I acquired eye lamination for the first time in my life yesterday, to be exact.

I remember like it was yesterday when I first found out I needed four eyes instead of two. My spouse — who happened not to be the same person that proudly carries that mantle today, but enough about either of them — was getting on my case (some things don’t change even when spouses do) in the motor vehicle I was driving that I didn’t see the exit sign in time. I don’t understand what her problem was with me traversing three lanes, from the passing lane (which apparently is news to those slow-witted types who sit there without a clue they are in a passing lane, not a sitting lane, and are supposed to get back to the middle lane after passing cars in the middle lane), to the slow lane in one not-so-smooth move.

So Wife 1 — ahem — “sugggested” I get an eye exam. This was probably some 35 years ago. Wouldn’t you know it. She was right. I needed glasses.

I’ve had ‘em ever since, but after 35 years of gazing at the world with my cranium under pressure, I thought it was about time I escaped from the plastic prison. It’s not as if I didn’t get the focal point a long time ago.

Wife 2 wondered aloud why somebody of my — ahem — maturity (or maybe she said age) would first want contacts at this stage of existence. It was then I realized she didn’t get the memo about the mid-life crisis that visits men of a certain age. Somebody could make a fortune sending email blasts about men’s mid-life crisis to women, charging a premium for addressing it to their wives, or at least to their current wives. Their former wives likely would just laugh upon receiving it, relieved that they missed that milestone.

So March 1, 59 years 346 days after I arrived on earth, my eyeballs lost their virginity to Bausch & Lomb soft lenses. Let it be recorded that this fateful fall from grace occurred in the Mt. Kisco office of Dr. William Dieck. It was quite a learning curve enduring the tutorial of taking the contacts out and then putting them in. As Brenda, the affable lab technician, told me, some people can’t wear contacts simply because they can’t stand to have anybody touch their eyeballs, not even with their own hands.

When Brenda first put them in, she told me to cool my heels (not in those words) in the waiting room for about 10 minutes to adjust to the new sensation. I ambled around the eyeglass store that abuts the doctor’s office and of course immediately and impatiently hightailed over to the nearest looking glass to eyeball my newly naked visage. Whoa! To me, it seemed, jeepers, creepers, what a pair of peepers you  have, grandma.  My eyes seemed notably larger, like I had the lead in a high school production of Mr. Magoo Goes to the Opthalmologist, except without his glasses. (You know, high school shows can’t always afford all the props.)

I must have tried putting the lens in and removing it a dozen times in each eye. The same fiasco recurred that evening at home as I tried taking the lenses out. Then again in the office Tuesday as I endeavored to put them in at about 3:30, timing it to follow the good doctor’s direction that I try not wearing them more than six hours a day for the first week to acclimate myself.

Once the contacts were in at the doctor’s office, though, I quickly liked the liberation, as I told Dr. Dieck, who chuckled in a way that seemed to say, “OK, pal, whatever you say.”  No sooner was I in my car, calling Elyse to tell her mission accomplished, than I reflexively went to adjust the glasses that no longer were bridging my nose.

I was off to find drugstore reading glasses the doctor said I’d need now to do close work, which is part and parcel of my profession.  Plus I’d need a pair of cheapo sunglasses when wearing the contacts.

Getting the little suckers in and out isn’t my idea of the jollies, but once they’re in place, so far, so good.

I’m trying my darnedest to conjure some contact lens humor. It’s slow going, but I envision light at the end of the tunnel. I have a penchant for puns and, let’s face it, my jokes don’t get any cornea than that.

To no one’s surprise in medialand, there was a rash of emails flooding our inboxes today that started with the fateful phrase, “Due to inclement weather …  is cancelled.”

Except for one such email that stood out — for the wrong reason.  In fact, it almost caused Grammar Geek to gag on his thesaurus (talk about an endangered species). This email spoke of “in climate” weather. It was sent by a school district. From someone whose title is “Key Communicator.” Sigh.

Discretion being the better part of pallor, we’ll refrain from identifying the school district to protect the guilty, but movie fans will recognize the municipality as the very tony east coast moviestar colony made famous in “Fatal Attraction.” And anagrammarians might visualize its name as a combination of sleeping furniture and the most famous American automaker. But I don’t want to identify the fancy shmancy town whose school district made such a stunningly uneducated gaffe.

Other than evoking the studied inarticulateness of 1960s standup comic Norm Crosby — a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show who made a career out of purposely mispronouncing words in the service of humor for the masses — “in climate” (the sender of course intended the word to be “inclement”) proves my long-held theory that subliteracy largely derives from the tendency of people to spell and pronounce words based not on understanding basics of the English language — relegating it to the English languish — but on intuitive (and more problematically, counter-intuitive) phonetics. Witness those who say “supposably” instead of  the correct “supposedly” or “hone in on” instead of the correct “home in on” or “for all intensive purposes” instead of the correct “for all intents and purposes.”  There are many more such examples that we don’t have thyme for.

Meanwhile, back at the meteor-illogical ranch, with the accuracy of some forecasts lately, I worry more when the prognosticators predict little or no snow. How often, or so it seems, have we been forewarned about an avalanche of frosty flakes only to have the little kiddies disappointed the next morning when the school bus stops on time at the corner as always.

That makes it all the more bemusing that nowadays school districts can’t wait to cancel classes a day in advance on the strength — or weakness, as the case may be — of a forecast. It’s like a doctor treating a patient for pneumonia after hearing the sniffles because, well, you just never know what it might turn into.

Why, when I was a kid in the rough-and-tumble former potato fields of Long Island’s western Nassau County, I had to trudge a whole block to school in the snow. In my galosh-shod feet. It had to snow 18 inches for school to be canceled. Or maybe it was 8. You know how big things look when you’re four feet tall. But let’s not nitpick. Back then, men were men, and kids were kids and snowmen were snowmen. A little frozen precip was hardly reason to bypass readin’ and writin’.

Not in the weather-wimpy 21st Century, though. When I told my wife Elyse that the schools already were canceled for Friday by 6:00p Thursday, she told me how Thursday counted as a school day even though students were dismissed at 10:00 a.m. and a school district needs to use up those snow days.

I looked at her in disbelief: “Oh, that’s nice. Early dismissal means today they didn’t learn much of anything, but here we are conversing casually about some bureaucratically-bungled rulemaking that dictates it still can count as a school day?” As the non-commital slacker types are quick to say … whatever.

The way I look at it, with the snow-drift-high school taxes we are privileged to pay, what business is it of mine or yours how far in advance classes are canceled. If anything, it probably is more cost-efficient and stress-reducing to plan ahead. I get it. I’m a lowly taxpayer: just shut up and pay up, like a good little lemming.

Here’s an idea for a revisionist rubric: Let’s teach kids math by having them count snow days. That’ll work just swell.

Playing with great relish the role of truculent network TV executive Arthur Jensen, actor Ned Beatty bellows across a forbidding boardroom slab of wood at posthumously-awarded Best Actor Peter Finch in the film classic “Network”: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?!” Later in his show-stopping diatribe, he says, “That is the natural order of things today.”

I have my own natural order of things, except I insist they also apply to others, not just to me. They include being a sensible, mature, well-mannered motorist who parks where there are parking spaces and puts on headlights when necessary so other cars can see mine because that’s one good reason God gave us headlights.

I don’t deny it’s an Obsessive Compulsion I possess — or am possessed by — one of several (”My name is Bruce and I’m an OCaholic”). It’s when people step outside of MY norm, which can mean something as seemingly inconsequential as parking outside of the yellow lines or parking inside the blue disabled parking lines without the requisite permit. This stuff, I am sorry to say, drives me batty. I’m sorry, that is, for the objects of my scorn, not for myself. I’m sorry they are Rudimentary People, to paraphrase the title of Judith Guest’s bestselling 1970s novel-into-film that won Oscars for Best Picture, for director Robert Redford, for supporting actor Timothy Hutton and for writer Alvin Sargent.

Rudimentary denotes something simple in the extreme, or in the first stages of development. It also can be seen as a slightly euphemistic, softer way to say, “rude.” That’s how I view the inconsiderates who park in the middle of driveways at public buildings, like the Starbucks in Yorktown, where I recently jawed at whom I don’t doubt was a very nice woman behind the wheel but whom thought nothing of planting her SUV in the driveway to effectively block those entering and prevent two cars from passing in opposite directions, as the driveway is designed to allow.

Such folks, without meaning to ostensibly, create disorder.

My disorder disorder includes cryptic voicemail messages that say nothing except, “call me,” or that, instead of telling me the topic of the call, waste the caller’s breath and my aural cavity on superfluous, gratuitous, hypothetical reasons about why I might be excused for not calling back (”deathbed,” anyone?).

Gee, thanks for the cheery thought, as well as for proscribing the acceptable limits of my behavior. Of course, I know the caller was jesting about the deathbed remark, but don’t forget, I’m talking about a disorder here on both ends, wherein humor is in the mind of the phoneholder.

My response to such rudimentary behavior as cryptic calls is simple: none. Am I being a big baby about it? That’s a definite probably. That’s what happens when an immovable brat meets an irresistible baby: stasis.

I ran into a rudimentary person of the third kind at food boutique Iron Tomato on Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains Friday afternoon. My bosses Carla Chase, Frank Rich and I had just finished a very productive meeting with a Westchester County government official and went to grab lunch.

At cafeteria-style Iron Tomato, you first get your food, either from a deli counter or a shelf, pay for it, then find a table. There is no wait service. It was 1:00 p.m., high lunch time, and so three open seats together were scarce at first. When I spotted a couple of tables-for-four with only one person seated, I told Carla I would grab one of them while she finished the transaction and Frank was parking the car.

I approach a window-side table where a lovely young knitted-capped woman is reading a paperback and thoughtfully has her boots perched on the seat directly across from her and her coat draped on the chair next to her. As I quickly discovered, they really were symbological signs that read, “Stay Away.” That’s usually my cue to invade the space of someone so presumptuous to think they own a public space that is readily capacious and available to others as well.

“Anybody else sitting here,” I ask rhetorically and with a modicum of patience evident in my tone because I know her type, who also can be found on Metro North trains where a certain kind of rudimentary passenger thinks nothing of putting a briefcase on the seat next to him even during rush hour when seats are scarce, or doing the same with a piece of clothing, both of which belong on the overhead rack. That’s another case where I purposefully would take the seat occupied by a briefcase to make my point that such a person was not going to passively intimidate me into not sitting there. I’m not sure I ever said it, but I know I used to think to say to one of these beauts, “Maybe I should try to sit on the overhead rack so you can keep your briefcase on the seat.”

Miss Iron Tomato Paperback already is not suffering my presence gladly, to say the least. She fixes a kind of stare on my visage and actually says to me, “What do you want me to do about it?” The subsequent exchange was not at all pretty, but also not loud, although I peripherally noticed some patrons enjoying our ultimate bickering contest. She says I’m rude not to ask her permission to sit there. I reply, “I don’t think so.” She says she didn’t realize it was a “community table” (when in fact at a cafeteria, that’s exactly what it is). I ask if one person like her controls all four seats at the table and tell her I don’t need her permission to sit there. She says she sits there every day. I resist the urge to say, “Well, you’re the most convincing undercover security guard I’ve ever seen” and instead say, “Good for you.” She moves to another table rather than bearing to sit across from yours truly the rest of the time.

Both she and I make a mutual point of glaring at one another for good measure, both of us (I am convinced) trying strenuously not to let the inevitable subcutaneous smirk surface, because we both realize how ridiculous is the entire episode that just transpired.

As I take momentary leave of our newfound acquisition (being the table) to get some condiments, I see my new best friend going over to chat a bit with Carla, no doubt assuring her I’m the only one in our party she thinks is rude. Well, thank goodness for small favors.

When Paperback Polly is leaving, she says to Carla, “Nice talking with you.” I turn to her and say, “Have a nice day!” I was not being facetious. She understandably ignores me. I would too if I were her, but I’m not. I’m an old(er) guy who has learned once I vent, even to a stranger, life is too short not to quickly put it aside and get on with the niceties of existence, precious as they are. One day, I’m sure she’ll feel the same way. At least I hope she does. And I hope that day is today.

Please go to the “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty” page for today’s Bruce the Blog. Thank you and have a nicer day than yesterday but not as nice as tomorrow.

It was rockin’ last night at Jeanne and Rich Credidio’s 12 Grapes Restaurant, Music and Wine Bar on Division Street in Peekskill. Did I mention Wine Bar? Will Van Sise and band were in a guitar-driving groove that had more than just me tapping their feet, clapping their hands and bopping in place.

Since I was flying solo while the missus was out of town on business, it was a lot of fun hooking up unexpectedly there with Yorktowners Katharine and Liam Carroll, fellow lovers of good live music and, from what I found out, among the most faithful patrons of 12 Grapes, dining there at least once a week. We couldn’t keep still listening to the great covers of The Rolling Stones, Allman Brothers, Procol Harum and other super groups of our bygone era. Make no mistake. Our generation’s harking back to those sounds that always will resonate in our body and soul now and forever more is no different than our parents swooning in the 1960s and ’70s to Crosby’s croon or to the Glenn Miller and Dorseys Big Band sounds of the ’40s.

Part of what makes 12 Grapes virtually unique in this region is the unwavering passion and particularity that perfectionist Rich Credidio brings to seeking and booking acts. He not only has a very keen eye and ear and chops for reeling in established musicians — thus making his venue in the Hudson Valley a destination house even for Manhattan-centric performers — but also prides himself on nurturing young, undiscovered talent from all over the country.

And no ones enjoys the music, the food, the diners — providing warm, personal service and creating an intimate, fun ambience — more than Jeanne Credidio, a former “Mad Woman,” as in Madison Avenue advertising executive, in her previous life.

Between Jeanne and Rich, they run a social club of sorts that is sophisticated in its professional operation, behind the scenes, but is casual and anything but snooty in its customer experience and contact. Rich told me last night they just renovated the kitchen and, musically, he’s “taking it to another level” in the caliber of talent he and Jeannie present.

All I know is that this creative, commercially savvy couple don’t seem capable of hitting a sour note ever, as demonstrated by their continuing success and growth and spreading reputation. (Oh, and Jeannie, you’re right. That Cambria chardonnay is primo.)

See you guys real soon. Thanks for having a great party place where a “bachelor for the night” like me can hang out and chill out. More important, Elyse got home from her Vegas business trip safe and sound. Fortunately for me, during her two-day stay there, Tiger apparently wasn’t in town. I’ve heard about how well he scores even when not on the golf course.

Well, you know, we all want to change ourselves.

My 2009 New Year resolution worked out pretty well, if I don’t say so myself. And I don’t have to. Everybody else keeps saying so for and to me. But that was about 43 or so pounds ago.

The best, most apt comment came from Chris Sciarra of CS Construction, when we kibbitzed, along with Yorktown attorney laureate Al Capellini and sportsdome mogul CJ Diven, at Murphy’s Bar + Grill for the Yorktown board’s inaugural after-party on New Year’s Day.

After CJ insisted he never realized how tall I was when I was about 45 pounds heavier, and that I looked six inches closer to the ceiling now, Chris had had enough of the weight-loss talk and said, “The problem is that’s all anybody ever talks about with Bruce when they see him nowadays. That story’s over.” Hey, I couldn’t agree more, Chris. You’re right. Now, the story is 2010 resolutions.

 I resolve to …

• Go to bed early (er than 1:00 a.m.)
• Go to the gym at least 3X a week
• Water down the wine on social occasions (wine has water in it, doesn’t it?)
• Take dance lessons
• Take golf lessons
• Take more golf lessons
• Learn how to play golf
• Learn how not to play golf badly
• Come up with witty ripostes when my buddies make fun of me playing golf badly, like, “Well, excuuuse me for not going to medical school!”, or, “I can guarantee you it’s not because I’m distracted by lots of girlfriends in Las Vegas!” (Hey, wait a minute, my wife Elyse is on her way to Vegas right now, but it’s on business, or at least that’s what she told me)
• Stop playing golf 
• Go on a diet of screens emitting electronic beams
• Bulk up on more bound texts
• Update my blog daily

And you?

As we prepare for the last year of the first decade of the 21st Century (regular readers of this space will know I’m a stubborn little cuss who refuses to understand, let alone acknowledge, how a year ending in -9 is the end of a 10-year period. Makes no sense to me. (In all fairness to other wrong-headed points of view, I must admit my friend Bob Kleinman of Somers pointed out to me recently over sushi at Hanake Sushi in Yorktown — a great sushi place, by the way — that the first year of life begins at 0 and ends with a first birthday. So, the first day of life is 0, analogous to the first day of the first year of a decade, and when you count 1, you’ve already used up a year. OK, point taken.

On the last day of the year, running on the treadmill today at the gym, listening to my iPod, my thoughts turned to, of all strange people, Jim Morrison, lead singer and muse of The Doors. You know, the guy who reminds some people of Val Kilmer and who Oliver Stone has a thing for, like JFK.

Morrison sang about The End and, apropos of today, “You know, the day divides the night, the night divides the day, try to run, try to hide, break on through to the other side, yeah!”

That’s what we’re doing today and tomorrow, New Year’s Day, breaking on through to the other side of the calendar. Flip a page, flip a year, but NOT a decade…just yet.

Reading in The Rupert Murdoch Journal about one critic’s picks for top jazz albums of the year, I selected two I’d like to try. Once upon a century, that meant having to buy an entire LP and paying for a bunch of tracks (or cuts, as we called them) that you’d rarely if ever listened. You were paying a full-album premium price for the privilege of hearing a couple three songs you really liked.

No more. Today, thanks to the digitization of life, we can sample the world at our digits, formerly known as fingertips. So, I’ll go on iTunes, look up those year’s best albums and decide by listening to a few free seconds of some of the tracks if I want to buy individual songs or the full album.

I like this new way of sampling the world, and look forward to doing it for all sorts of diversions and necessities until the time comes when they decide to a la carte me away.

Happy New Year to all and to all a good (and safe) night. Make some serious noise. See you on the other side.

Okay, first that header. No, it’s not about a depleted jar of a branded ice tea powder mix. Nester is among those misnomers we’ve come to take for granted, even if they don’t make much, or any, sense. In avian terms, a nester is like a bird feeder. While it’s commonly assumed the “nester” in empty “nester” refers to the parents of children no longer living under the same roof, “nester” in fact means the home itself. So, Elyse and I are not nesters, we’re denizens of the nester, or nestees.

If you think about it (and believe me, I do), the same misnomer status obtains with the commonplace term “homophobia.” It’s actually a colloquialism rooted in a derogatory expression, not in the discipline of etymology. Broken down, homophobia literally means “fear of homo.”

Etymologically, the prefix homo- denotes two or more people or objects  or concepts alike in characteristics, hence homogenous to mean a group of similar things or homonym to mean words that sound alike, or, more to the point, homosapien to mean the species to which we all belong — human beings.

Applying the stringent rules of grammar, then, the coinage homophobia connotes fear of those similar to you, which is virtually the inverse of its common usage to mean fear of those different from you.

So, that’s my linguistics prologue to kick off an entirely unrelated topic. 

Which is this clarion call to arms: Empty nestees of the nesters unite!  You know what that’s about.

My creative idol Stephen Sondheim said, “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.” I say, when you’re an empty nestee, you got no kids around, you’re a familyless man. A little dramatic, I know, but please don’t revoke my poetic license.

Well, when you’re an empty nestee, there’s nobody around who doesn’t need to pop a cocktail of pills every day (some prescribed by physician, some prescribed by paranoia). There’s nobody around who doesn’t need to unbed during the graveyard shift to find relief in the loo. There’s nobody around who isn’t performing nose and ear and unibrow electrolysis before or after every shower.

When the kids hightail it to college or marriage or just lives of their own (”how rude!,” as Elyse would — and does — say) outside the cozy comforts of womb sweet womb, the peace and quiet are enough to drive you crazy.

Well, now it’s the year-end holiday season, when the kids who are doing who knows what in college are, for the winter interregnum, doing who knows what at home. You know what that’s about. Even when they are rumored to be home from the University of Tiass (This is a stickup, sucker: give me all your money to pay for the next four years for the rest of your life), there’s still, it seems, nobody home except for those who fulfill all aforementioned obligations that accompany the aging process.

Our daughter Elissa has been home ever since that fateful Friday a fortnight ago when I drove six hours in one limbs-in-limbo day to pick her and her friend up at their dorm and ferry them back to what used to be their forlorn norm before being liberated from high school and the ‘rents (that would be us oldsters).

It’s not that playing collegial chauffeur isn’t fun. It’s just that in the course of the arctic expedition to the snow belt of New York State, the mind drifts in aimless mischief to visions of sugar plum fairies, dental surgery, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and colonoscopy, which for some reason reminds me of the time my car was rear-ended, pushing its tailpipe clear into the Corinthian leather interior like a sneaky snake named Alger Hiss presumably up to no good, but later acquitted of all allegations, thanks to a clean bill of health.

So ask Elyse and I where Elissa has been since she got home? Go ahead, ask us. No, really, I mean it. Take your time. We have no place to go. It’s she who has all the places to go that we don’t know about. We might be able to have a clue were it not for the lithium battery sadly losing its will to live on the homing device we surreptitiously attached to Elissa’s ankle as she was unconscious one day at 2:00 in the afternoon (or maybe she was just sleeping).

Attempts at humor aside, she’s really a good kid. Actually, she’s a great kid, who was pleased as spiked punch to attend a SUNY school (at Oneonta), not that that has anything to do with her being a great kid and all.

True, there are some subtle benefits to having a kid in the SUNY system. Thanks to state subsidies, the thermostat in our house overnight is only set at about 40 (and only that high because Elyse is a compassionate and forgiving god of budgetary prudence, aka tightwad), compared to what the thermostat might be set at if our darling daughter were matriculating at a private school. I don’t even want to think about that alternate university universe. By contrast, kids who perform random acts of matriculation at state colleges only get letters to their parents reprimanding them. Thank goodness for small-school favors. We are truly blessed. And, like most college kids, she is truly blissed.

At least Elissa had the enterprise and thoughtfulness to share a small part of her generous holiday downtime with a local pizzeria, a humanitarian effort for which she is cutely, if not handsomely, compensated. She worked there last summer and the owner flipped for her. Granted, in his business, flipping is part of the daily routine, but let’s not pick nits, and, while we’re at it, I like mine half pepperoni, half mushrooms, and don’t forget to hold the anchovies!

Even though Pizza Princesa Elissa was assigned evening hours, all the way to closing time, she, like her nocturnal paternal forebear, is a night person, so we know she won’t get home pasta her bedtime, which means there’s little danger of her being pie-eyed, in the sober sense of the word, plus she stands to make some decent spending dough, which she’ll knead back at college, where she’s a sister in Phi Sigma Sigma (the sorority was so nice, they named it twice), either that or they ran out of letters and had to double up. These are, after all, recessionary times. Damn you, Ben Bernanke).

It goes without saying that the vessels of the genes from whence Elissa sprang will be sad when she must return to the Land of Oneonta in the mist of the midst of January. We’ll miss missing her at home, and look forward with eager anticipation and total bemusement to the next time she’s home when once again we won’t know where she is, but also once again will be secure in the knowledge of where she surely is not: hanging out with the decidedly uncool (except when it’s 40 degrees overnight) empty nestees.