For a chubby little (but not to remain so in comparison with my contemporaries) boy who didn't always quite feel like he 'fit in', I was extremely comfortable and quite content with those other aspects, situations, or 'worlds' to which I would retreat when I was ostracized. Not that I was literally or frequently ostracized by my peer group throughout childhood, let me must say that I did not feel that I always BELONGED.
I had what I considered to be a reasonable number of friends in whose company I reveled many a long, hot summer afternoon. Timmy Buckley, from two doors away in our block of row-homes in the Eastern part of Baltimore County just past the city-line, my BEST friend. But I also enjoyed the company of, singly or sometimes in groups with various of them, the three Bodell brothers, Keith Smith, Jimmy Theiss, Joey Markwordt and on occasion, Ronald Weber. Never a greedy person, I thought then as I do now, that this was a sufficient number of friends. And they were good friends on whom I could rely for some good, old-fashioned kid-play. Later, in school, new friendships would develop and likewise some of the older ones would dissolve. But such is the way of the world. Right?
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. . . The Thin Man(1934) (Thanks to IMDB.com) I just love THE THIN MAN films. Myrna Loy and William Powell had great, comic chemistry, the cases are convoluted (until you've seen them enough to remember the culprit) and the characters are so comically dated, caricatures of gangster (not gangsta) movie thugs. The incessant drinking, the opulent wealth and the endless one-liners. There's something musical about the production of the films that I cannot explain. They are however, always enjoyable.
Reporter:
Say listen, is he working on a case?
Nora Charles:
Yes, he is.
Reporter:
What case?
Nora Charles:
A case of scotch. Pitch in and help him.
Marion:
I don't like crooks. And if I did like 'em, I wouldn't like crooks that
are stool pigeons. And if I did like crooks that are stool pigeons, I
still wouldn't like you.
[On the motley group of guests present]
Nora Charles:
Oh, Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people.
Nora Charles:
Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the
nuts?
Nick Charles:
The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking.
Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a
dry martini you always shake to waltz time.
Nick Charles:
How'd you like Grant's tomb?
Nora Charles:
It's lovely. I'm having a copy made for you.
Nick Charles:
I'm a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.
Nora Charles:
I read where you were shot 5 times in the tabloids.
Nick Charles:
It's not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids.
Nick Charles:
Oh, it's all right, Joe. It's all right. It's my dog. And, uh, my wife.
Nora Charles:
Well you might have mentioned me first on the billing.
Nora Charles:
You know, that sounds like an interesting case. Why don't you take it?
Nick Charles:
I haven't the time. I'm much too busy seeing that you don't lose any of
the money I married you for.
Nora Charles:
Take care of yourself
Nick Charles:
Why, sure I will.
Nora Charles:
Don't say it like that! Say it as if you meant it!
Nick Charles:
Well, I do believe the little woman cares.
Nora Charles:
I don't care! It's just that I'm used to you, that's all.
Nora Charles:
All right! Go ahead! Go on! See if I care! But I thinks it's a dirty
trick to bring me all the way to New York just to make a widow of me.
Nick Charles:
You wouldn't be a widow long.
Nora Charles:
You bet I wouldn't!
Nick Charles:
Not with all your money...
Nick Charles:
Say, how did you people happen to pop in here?
Lieutenant John Guild:
We hear this is getting to be sort of a meeting place for the Wynant
family, so we figured we'll stick around just in case the old boy
himself should show up. Then we see this bird sneak in, we decide to
come up. And lucky for you we did!
Nick Charles:
Yes, I might not have been shot.
Nick Charles:
Now don't make a move or that dog will tear you to shreds.
Tommy:
Say, I'm getting out of here.
Nick Charles:
No, you stay here.
Tommy:
If I stay, I know I'm gonna take a poke at him.
Nick Charles:
Then I insist that you stay.
Nick Charles:
Hey, would you mind putting that gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm
a very timid fellow.
Nora Charles:
You idiot!
Nick Charles:
[to the gunman] Alright, shoot! I mean, uh, what's
on your mind?
Nick Charles:
Now my friends, if I may propose a little toast. Let us eat, drink and
be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Nora Charles:
You give such charming parties, Mr. Charles.
Nick Charles:
Thank you, Mrs. Charles.
Nick Charles:
Now how did you ever remember me?
Dorothy:
Oh, you used to fascinate me. A real live detective. You used to tell me
the most wonderful stories. Were they true?
Nick Charles:
Probably not.
Nora Charles:
How many drinks have you had?
Nick Charles:
This will make six Martinis.
Nora Charles:
[to the waiter] All right. Will you bring me five
more Martinis, Leo? Line them right up here.
Gil:
Could I come down and see the body? I've never seen a dead body.
Lieutenant John Guild:
Why do you want to?
Gil:
Well, I've been studying psychopathic criminology and I have a theory.
Perhaps this was the work of a sadist or a paranoiac. If I saw it I
might be able to tell.
Lieutenant John Guild:
Yeah, that's a good idea. But don't you bother to come down - we'll
bring the body right up to you.
[Nick has revived Nora after knocking her out to keep
her from being accidentally shot by Joe Morelli]
Nora Charles:
You darn fool! You didn't have to knock me out. I knew you'd take him,
but I wanted to see you do it.
Lieutenant John Guild:
[laughs] There's a girl with hair on her chest.
Reporter:
Well, can't you tell us anything about the case?
Nick Charles:
Yes, it's putting me way behind in my drinking.
Nora Charles:
What's that man doing in my drawers?
Baltimore has certainly enjoyed its
share of eccentric eateries over the years, but perhaps none
so endearing—certainly none so enduring—as Martick’s Restaurant
Français. Patrons had to ring a bell to gain admittance to the dimly lit
and eclectically furnished dining room, where mismatched silver and
china topped the tables and a multifarious array of works by local
artists graced the walls. It was funky and shabby and utterly unlike
anywhere else.
The restaurant’s inimitable founder and chef, Morris Martick, died
Dec. 16 of lung cancer at the age of 88, having literally spent his life
there. He was born in the building—214 W. Mulberry St.—and grew up
working with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters in various
enterprises operated there by the Martick family: a grocery store and
then a speakeasy during the Prohibition years. (Rumor has it a gin still
remains in the building’s basement.)
Martick’s own first incarnation of the family business was running a
bar/jazz nightclub during the 1960s. By all accounts, it was an island
of Bohemian refuge in an otherwise conservative city. Painter Raoul
Middleman used to hang out there, and Martick gave him his first
show—hanging his paintings above the bar. “This was when segregation
laws were still in effect,” Middleman recalls. “And I had a friend I
really wanted to have see this show, my first show, but he was black,
and it was against the law for him to enter the bar. But Morris just
said, ‘Bring him on in.’ He could’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for
doing that. He thought segregation laws were stupid and he lived by his
beliefs. I always respected him for that.”
Former Martick’s employee Steve Pampinelli says Martick used to
recount how Billie Holiday once sang there in the nightclub days. “It
was actually against the law of segregation, but he would let black
folks in anyway,” Pampinelli says. “So when Billie Holiday sang there,
she was actually there as a patron. When people realized she was there
everyone got really excited and asked if she would sing, and of course
she did.”
“Morris really only left Baltimore twice in his whole life,” recalls
Scotty Stevenson, who worked at Martick’s from 1977 through the mid-’80s
and off and on for several years after that. “He was gone briefly
during WWII while he was in the Air Force—he was in Alaska, according to
him because ‘That was where they sent all the fuck-ups.’ But then he
came back and took care of his mother until she died in 1959, and ran
the jazz club until, he said, he got tired of the drunks and the
musicians. So he closed down in 1967 and went bumming around France for a
couple years really learning how to cook. He had always liked to cook,
he was a natural at it, but that was when he really educated himself in
formal technique. Then when he came back, he fixed the place up and
reopened as a French restaurant.”
That was in 1970, when Martick’s Restaurant Français had two dining
rooms on two floors, a maitre’d, tuxedoed waiters, and a genuine French
chef from Paris. According to Alex Martick, who survives his brother at
the age of 83, “I don’t know where he found that chef, but the man was a
goddamn drunk. He’d call downstairs for bottles of brandy, supposedly
to cook with, but he’d be drinking it himself. Then when he was good and
drunk he’d come after my brother.”
Stevenson recalls hearing the tale as follows: “One night the chef
came after Morris with a knife, and that was that. Morris was left with a
French restaurant but no French chef, and that was when he started
running the kitchen himself. Then the monkey suits and the maitre’d
evaporated, and it all became the artists and the musicians.”
It was a natural evolution, Stevenson explains, because “almost
everything in that restaurant Morris had done himself anyway—the stained
glass, the painted tile, the albino rattlesnake skin wallpaper. He was
an artist himself, he drew and painted, so he was always at home with
artists and musicians.”
Anna Oldfield, who put herself through college working in Martick’s
kitchen from 1985 until 1991, says, “Nobody worked harder than Morris
himself. He was simply always there, cooking and doing anything that
needed to be done. So anyone who worked for him got into that same zone,
that you just did everything necessary to make it work. That 75 people
were going to come in and somehow, in this little kitchen at the top of
these impossibly steep stairs in this crazy little house with a bunch of
crazy people, you were somehow going to get it together and make these
amazing French meals.
“The way it worked was inexplicable, but transformative for the
people who worked there—the ones that stayed, anyway,” continues
Oldfield, who went on to get her doctorate and now teaches at Coastal
Carolina University in South Carolina. “I was there for five years, and
in that time at least 50 people came in who had been hired and they’d
run screaming their first night. Literally run out the door in the
middle of their shift.”
“I always thought there was a little roulette wheel running in
Morris’ head, and when he met you the ball either landed on ‘family’ and
he treated you like family, or ‘intruder’ and he would chase you away,”
Stevenson says. “It makes sense because everything in that building was
his childhood—if you were banging the pots in the kitchen he’d yell at
you, ‘Stop hitting the pots!’ which is exactly what his mother had
yelled at him. Anything he yelled at you had been yelled at him
growing up.”
“Morris was challenging and irritable and he yelled at everybody all
the time. But you could yell right back,” says Katie Brennan, who began
her Martick’s career in 1985, at the age of 16—and began a friendship
with Martick himself that carried through the next 26 years.
“We’d get these Culinary Institute kids who’d be like, Oh I’m
gonna work at Martick’s and be a chef apprentice, and the first
question he’d always ask them is, ‘How long do you cook this piece of
fish?’” Brennan recalls. “And they’d start this analysis of what kind it
was and how thick and blah blah, and Morris would just shout, ‘Till
it’s done, damn it, till it’s done!’”
Martick was famous for his pâté, profiteroles, and, above all else,
bouillabaisse. “That bouillabaisse took literally days to make,”
Oldfield recalls. “You’d have to bone the fish and make the stock in all
these stages, sometimes boiling, sometimes barely simmering it, and add
all these different things at just the right times. It was a kind of
cooking that hardly anyone does anymore, because it takes so long and is
based entirely on instinct. He was such a master of that, and he never
used a recipe. He always improvised, which is why if you went there
twice and got the same dish, it would not be exactly the same.”
Jeff Smith, the Baltimore-born chef-owner of Chameleon Cafe in
Lauraville, worked briefly in Martick’s kitchen. “Even in a short time, I
learned a lot working there,” Smith says. “He definitely did things
differently from anywhere else I had ever worked.”
The brutal working conditions at Martick’s were famous among
employees—Brennan and Oldfield both recall a thermometer in the kitchen
that routinely pegged out at its top reading of 115 degrees F—and over
the years there were many tales of Martick working in his underpants, if
he bothered wearing them at all. “I worked there with a guy who had
been with Martick on and off over the years,” Smith recalls, “who told
me that Morris would be in the shower—his bathroom was between the front
and back kitchens—and customers would come in, and Martick would just
step out of the shower, put an apron on, and start cooking, his wrinkly
old ass hanging out while he was cooking this amazing food. I never saw
it with my own two eyes, but this was the legend.”
After a heyday running from its 1970 opening to the mid-’80s,
Martick’s Restaurant Français began to slowly fade from its original
eminence. Stevenson says that the opening of Harborplace in 1982 drew
diners downtown, away from Martick’s, as did the subsequent opening on
nearby North Charles Street of Louie’s Bookstore Cafe by Jimmy Rouse,
who had waited tables at Martick’s. “Louie’s drew a lot of clientele
away from Martick’s, but Morris never held a grudge,” Stevenson says.
“He would actually go and eat there almost every night. He used to sit
there at the bar, telling Jimmy everything he was doing wrong.”
“What I took from him was to not be scared of being unique,” Smith
says. “The way he just did things the way he wanted and didn’t care what
anybody else thought. The guy just had a lot of guts, and held out to
the end. I know what it’s like when it’s slow in your restaurant. It’s
scary and hard to come to work, day after day when it’s slow like that,
and he did it for years. I have a lot of respect for him.”
Martick ran his eponymous restaurant for 35 years, closing to the
public in 2008. He remained there, living in the building where he was
born, and carrying on the friendships he’d made over eight decades of
life, many of them at the center of Baltimore’s creative circles. “There
are so many people in Baltimore whose early networks and friendships
were made by working at Martick’s over the years,” Stevenson says. In
his later years, according to Brennan, Martick kept busy going to the
movies and Pimlico race track. As late as 2010, according to Pampinelli,
he was still “running a business hauling people’s trash out of their
basements or helping them move house. We’d make a few extra bucks
hauling stuff to the city dump in that board truck of his.”
In October, however, he collapsed while walking down Howard Street
and was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. “It went pretty quickly
there, at the end,” Brennan says. “A lot of people didn’t even realize
he was sick. I didn’t know literally until the night before he died. I
got [to the hospital] just in time. I got to give him a hug and a kiss
and tuck him in when he fell asleep.”
Memorial plans are still tentative, but Alex Martick says that a
celebration of his brother’s life is in the works for January. In a
Facebook tribute to Martick, amid a plethora of reminiscences both
affectionate and profane, Oldfield wrote:
I am overwhelmed with a combination of terrible sadness and
memories that range from ridiculous to hilarious to truly tender. We
were so very very very lucky to know Morris, he was like a planet that
made an alternate gravity where people like us could thrive. He defied
every law of physics [and] lousy boring stuff that people are supposed
to do and I’ll bet y’all don’t know how close you were to having that
walkin [refrigerator] fall in on your heads when you were having dinner.
. . . Now that we’re all 50 or whatever we can maybe start to
appreciate his absolute refusal to give in to all the thousands of
things that drag people into those small compromises that destroy your
soul. Morris never gave up. I’m only just beginning to get everything
that he was saying to me all that time
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Yesterday's blog about Fishbone is gone, not a trace-not a link; the entire blog site is now different, did not play my parts well in spite of many hours of practice and familiarity; the drummer's electronic drum kit malfunctioned therefore we did not play with drums tonight; best friend/wife/love of my life isn't feeling well; the later it got the more I needed to accomplish; nodding off as I try to write this; sons are driving to Los Angeles early next week; packing, truck pick-up, return from visiting friends must all be done effectively to carry off the packing and departure; elder son flying back home Saturday morning; wishing I could make a living from music; and blogging; getting sleepy; having difficulty finishing this; need extra rest; have too much to do; drummer has very ill relatives; 2012 is an election year; need to write more but don't have much time; three sons celebrated their visit tonight; thinking about MD crabcakes; hoping that's what the boys ate; getting later and sleepier. . . feeling like a crazy person!
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. . . check out Fishbone.
These guys have been around since the early 80s and still YOU HAVEN'T HEARD OF THEM???? Music, brains, chops, dedication, longevity, heart, soul & humor. . . what more do you need?
It's bout damn time.
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. . . The birth story of Jesus was designed to introduce the adult Jesus of Nazareth as the one who would fulfill all the expectations of the Jews. Matthew's gospel portrays Jesus as a new and greater Moses, accompanied by the same signs that marked the birth of Moses'. The birth story is very similar to the story of Santa Claus. Both are beautiful and filled with meaning. Both stories capture a TRUTH that human words cannot fully contain.
Christmas should capture a truth that human words and actions can never fully contain or express. May we understand that truth, this and every Christmas, and apply that truth in our interactions with ALL humanity. . . throughout the entire year.
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". . . the symbol of Santa Claus . . . is the personification of the spirit and joy of giving. . .the miraculous birth tradition disappears as history, but it re-emerges as powerful and shaping narratives that provide a primary insight into the meaning of Jesus. To journey into the heart of these narratives is to journey into the Christian claim that God was present in this man Jesus and that this experience compels us to come and worship. Frankly, this transition from history to poetry is that which will save the meaning of Christmas in our postmodern world. . ."
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