MuseLetter \’myüz-‘le-tər noun
1: a personal message, inspired by a muse of one's own creation, addressed to a person or organization, in the course of which, the sender becomes absorbed in thought; especially turning something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively.
2: a letter from a poet, or one who envisions oneself as such, in which he or she “muses” on that which is perceived to be news, or newsworthy, usually in some ironic or absurd way.
poem by Ron Vazzano; photo by the Artemis II astronauts
Quote of the Month
Word of the Month
As encountered in the April 27, 2026 issue of The New Yorker in a piece on Secretary of Education Linda McMahan...
1: the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine
broadly : tacit agreement to behave as if something is real, sincere, or genuine when it is not
2: the playacting involved in maintaining kayfabe
Etymology
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, finds the earliest citation to be from an issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, yearbook for 1988.The word is unquestionably older, however. It is used in a letter to the sports editor of the Chicago Tribune (May 4, 1971) concerning a fight between Dick the Bruiser and Angelo Poffo is signed "Mark Kayfabe," a name presumably made up from mark "the victim of a con" and kayfabe.
Used in a Sentence
But the kayfabe will continue on both sides until morale improves, with leaders working on promo skills instead of real solutions.
—Ian Chaffee, Fortune, 31 Dec. 2025
"It Depends"
Brooks on through Tennessee turn to Frost
We start out in diapers unable to walk
We end up in diapers unable to walk
Needing at the beginning
Needing at the end
To be attended to.
By the kindness of mothers
By the kindness of strangers
Don’t get up. We’re only passing through.
We won’t be gone long—you come too.
o
Yankee Stadium and a Hockey Jersey Giveaway
On a nothing of a Friday evening in April, there was a special promotion at Yankee Stadium. A free hockey jersey to the first 18,000 fans to arrive for the game, between the Yankees and the Kansas City Royals. What’s a hockey jersey doing inside a baseball park? Isn't it meant to be in a place of ice?
The promotional minds of the corporate-minded, know no bounds. I should know. I was once in the advertising world and sat in on many a blue-sky meeting trying to come up with something no one has ever thought of. And how to use it to reel in the masses. I can imagine this meeting: “Hey, how about giving away a hockey jersey?” “At a baseball game?” “Why not? They’ll come for anything free. They came for that Snoopy plush toy promotion, didn't they?" "Yes, but at least Snoopy was wearing a baseball cap."
That was where I once was; this is where I now go. To be one of over 40,000 expected at the Stadium that night. Ah, but only the first lucky 18,000 will win the prize. I am determined to create such luck.
It is imperative that I secure this blessed piece of sportswear, not for myself, but for my son. He too, a baseball and Yankee fan, and a fanatic of all sports, really. But he has an excuse. At age 37, he does it for a living; being a play-by-play announcer for all of Tennessee Tech University sports. At 80, and long retired from the day job, what’s my excuse for such fanaticism?
I will gift him this giveaway as a substitute for that once classic moment between father and son; a game of catch. That the movie Field of Dreams recaptured in such a unique way, as to cause this grown man to weep on the way home that night in the car.
The days of the car long gone, I’m on the subway heading up to da’ Stadium. Early in the day for a game that doesn’t start until 7:05 pm. Though the gates will open two hours before. And at least two hours before that, the masses and me, will come to form a line to ensure that we will be among the first arrivals admitted to the park. Doing the math, that’s about 4 ½ hours before game time.
But going to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium has always been about something more than what will be played out in between the foul lines. How about remembrance of the first time my father took me there in 1953. I was 7. Only 6,981 in attendance that afternoon. (I’ve looked it up). Different time, different place. A post-war America, full of optimism, hard at work, with little time to break away to go see a game on a weekday afternoon. But somehow there we were.
“Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors,” you’d hear from embittered Dodger and Giant fans, in that 3-team New York City of the ‘50’s. Yes, it started for me at the original Yankee Stadium, aka, “The House that Ruth Built.“ My father is now gone over 50 years; not from a house he ever owned or built. Just an apartment on the Lower East Side. I can’t help but think of that game with him well over 70 years ago, every time I come here.
And now, I've incorporated a ritual stop-off prior to the game, at the Twin Eatery Bar. It’s a Greek family-run business that I’ve established a personal contact with, by way of a happenstance that can only happen in New York.
I informed them on a visit some seven years ago, that my partner and I were going to the isle of Corfu. Whereupon I learned that that is where they come from. And as it turns out, they still have an uncle living there at exactly the location at which we’d be staying.
We came back with pictures of us with that uncle, and of the isle itself. Now every time I stop in at the “Twins” for the best Italian sausage and peppers this side of Arthur Avenue, I’m given a beer on the house to wash it down. Amidst the swelling crowd at this "popular place, that has often been praised for its friendly staff and pre/post-game atmosphere."
Which on this afternoon, would now be followed by the challenge of standing in line for 2 ½ hours, at this rather advanced age. Alert the paramedics! But in the face of a world ironically becoming ever more remote, despite all the technology creating the illusion of being present, this is the reality of being present. The actual being there. Out of your bubble. Standing in line. Along with real people. Of every shape and size; every ethnicity and coloration. And, oh yeah, the bonus? There was a ballgame played, which my beloved Yankees would win 4-2 in dramatic fashion.
Upon Going to See Death of a Salesman
When I first heard that Death of a Salesman was coming back to Broadway, my first thought was: What? Again? Hadn't it been done to death? Which sent me scurrying to see how often it had appeared, and the various Willy Lomans who had strut their hour, or three, upon the stage. For those who might be so equally obsessed...
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1949 : Lee J. Cobb
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1975 : George C. Scott
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1984 : Dustin Hoffman
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1999 : Brian Dennehy
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2012 : Philip Seymour Hoffman
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2022 : Wendell Pierce
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2026 : Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane? He of perpetually arched eyebrows? He, a musical comedy Broadway star doing a tragedy? He, who I remember as Joseph Lane; my headshot beneath his in a rag-tag of a publication on the New York theater scene? Something called Resume. Circa: 1976 (The actress in the lower left headshot on the cover, is a young Fran Drescher of The Nanny fame.).
Joseph Lane would go on to become a legend in the theater. Ron Lawrence would go on to become a legend in his own mind.
Nathan Lane would give a dynamic performance, playing a classic role in a way you've never quite seen it played before. Ron Vazzano would watch in admiration and awe. This is not your father's Willy Loman. This is not your father's Death of a Salesman. This is not, thank God, your father.
Volume 1 A GUIDE FOR PRODUCERS * AGENTS * MANAGERS First Edition
But the real reason for going to see this production, wasn't to see if Nathan Lane could make the transition from light to dark, but to check in on director Joe Mantello's unique vision, in looking at this old chestnut through a different lens.
In an article in the Times shortly after the play opened, he said that the play's published text that was taught in schools as a pillar of American theater on the American Dream, and so full of stage directions in published form, kept cluttering up his mind. So, he asked the Arthur Miller estate whether there was a version available, stripped of all that, that he might have a look at. There was. From 1948. A year before the play first opened on Broadway.
In going through it, he found how impressionistic, and basically bare the set was as in the original script. And how much of what Miller imagined was created with lighting, not extensive use of props and overly-detailed set pieces. As so much of Broadway theater tends to be.
Mantello embraced the play's abstractions, what with its displaying of the past and present concurrently; different times being present in the same instant. The past and its relationship to the present has always been vital to Miller. Which is something that resonates personally with me.
There wasn't a description of a literal house in which the Loman's lived in the original script. And in fact, at the very outset, Willy Loman steps into a "pinpoint traveling spotlight." A lonely, isolating image. Which led to Mantello mounting the play in a cavernous industrial garage-like setting.
One critic, somewhat disparagingly said of it, "It's a garage that's part cathedral, part Birnam Wood and part Hades." Exactly. The very point.
When Willy slowly drives onto stage and wearily steps out of that old car (another brilliant touch by Mantello) well, Toto, we're not in Great American Dream territory anymore. Might we have stepped into a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy? Might there be something more, than we've ever seen before? Attention must be paid.
Another dramatic innovation made by Mantello, was that the Loman boys, Biff and Happy, appear and reappear as Miller originally intended. As their current and past selves, played by two sets of actors. Who smoothly morph and intertwine with each other. At times all four being on stage at the same time. First time that's ever been done in a production of this play.
It was said in a review, that this device served to make the play seem more cinematic. Beyond that, for me, it further emphasized that underlying Miller theme, inherent to some degree in all his plays: how the past tends to shape the present.
We get a better sense now, of how Willy's relationship with his sons came to be. And why it is as fractured as it is. In fact, what has emerged at Mantello's hand, and that of the highly spirited performances of all the "Loman" actors--- with a particularly stunning performance by Laurie Metcalf as perhaps the gutsiest Linda Loman you will ever see; this is not your mother's Mildred Dunnock--- that this is more of a play about a dysfunctional family than a dysfunctional American Dream. I felt at times as if I was watching Long Day's Journey into Night. A feeling not underlined with derision, but with fascination.
Inevitably, comes the death of Willy Loman. "A small boat looking for a harbor" as his wife describes him at one point. He steps back into that car that has been sitting on stage the whole time, a vehicle as broken down as the man who drives it, and slowly backs out of that garage. With the audience wildly applauding Nathan Lane's performance as he departs. Some perhaps thinking that this long day's journey of a play is over. But wait, a patch of burial ground suddenly appears through a sleight-of-hand in set design. Let us not forget the funeral.
Linda sits graveside, and we mouth some of her words we knew were coming. "I can't cry. I don't know what it is, but I can't cry."
I couldn't either. But I know what it is. Coming through that murky garage, clear as day, is that Willy Loman is no Everyman. And that the fault lies not within the American Dream, but within Willy. Who somehow came to believe, that "riding on a shoeshine and a smile" were the only tools ever needed to realize that dream. That charisma and personality were all that it took to win the day. Maybe it took Nathan Lane to make this clearer, as to how absurd such a belief can be. Though it's not as if Lane's going off-script. It's all there exactly as Miller wrote it. But maybe his small statue only tended to emphasize his overbearing feistiness. The rattle of a little man.
Lane's Loman is not lovable. He's boorish and bullying. Though in watching a hulking Lee J. Cobb's portrayal in a TV performance (in 1966?), I never came away feeling that he was in any way lovable either. A victim of a system that had betrayed him? (Was Lee J Cobb ever lovable in anything?) Willy Loman's behavior is cringe-worthy. Toeing the line on being abusive, if not indeed, stepping over it. No Willy, I can't cry.
Though I did notice tears throughout the audience. But for whom do these tears toll? Willy? Linda" The kids? The whole damn thing?
I especially wondered about the high school kids who were there at that matinee, who were obviously on a school trip to watch come alive, what was required reading. What were they thinking? Death of a Salesman is no video game. Just one of the best pieces of American literature ever written. Brought to the stage here in wonderfully unexpected ways.
The standing ovation in the packed house, was organic and deserved. Often such audience gestures are perfunctory. You've paid a king's ransom for a ticket. You'd had better have enjoyed it. But this one was well deserved.
