Late Saturday Afternoon in Long Island City: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents Aristophanes' "Plutus" at Queensbridge Park

We saw a really nice production of Aristophanes' Plutus late this afternoon in Queensbridge Park. Presented by the Curious Frog Theatre Company, which also has been staging the Romeo and Juliet we enjoyed last Sunday in Prospect Park, the production did a good job of making an enjoyable 100 minutes out of what we've always thought Aristophanes' least funny and interesting comedy.

Unlike Lysistrata - which we've loved teaching the last three spring semesters at the School of Visual Arts - or The Clouds or The Frogs or his other comedies, in this late play, produced three years before his death, Aristophanes is not commenting on a current situation in Athens or satirizing a particular individual or event. Plutus is kind of an allegory about wealth. Critics classify it as the only extant ample of ancient Greek "middle comedy," between the "old comedy" plays listed above and the later "new comedy."

We'd read the play and found it pretty boring, so we were interested to see what Curious Frog could do with this rarely-produced comedy (as near as we can tell via a New York Times search, it hasn't been offered in the city since 1963, when an organization called the Group of Ancient Drama, Inc., presented it at the Fashion Institute of Technology).

As it turned out, Curious Frog managed to make Plutus both surprisingly fast-moving and relevant with a skillful seven-person ensemble directed by Whitney Aronson performingly engergetically in a beautiful setting.

The script by written by Whitney Aronson and Reid Aronson, while maintaining the basic storyline, employed everyday language, contemporary references and broad humor. It was already over the top in ancient Greece - the big emphasis on flatulence for laughs - but the adaptation and the choices made in the play definitely improved Plutus from what we can recall numbed us on the printed page.

As the somewhat dense Chremylus and his much smarter and wittier slave Cario, Derby Thomas and Jodie Pfau had some wonderful bits of business and worked off each other effectively, whether they were bantering or doing slapstick. Like the other talented actors, they sometimes directly addressed the audience and broke character as they acknowledged the artificial nature of the farcical situations. They worked really well in tandem and in scenes with the other characters, most of whom played multiple roles as well as served as the chorus.

Some things were played for pure slapstick. Beforehand, the audience were shown YAY and BOO signs, and they were employed cleverly at moments. There was a parody of Don McLean's "American Pie" (with a big sheet of the most relevant lyrics for us to sing along with) and parodies of other pop songs like "The Chapel of Love."

There were echoes of burlesque dancing and vaudeville routines, references to Bernie Madoff (given a Greek name) and some moments that were just so slapsticky-absurd that the audience couldn't help laughing.

These included shtick like the times Serge Castillo - who played Blepsidmus, Mercury and the Honest Man with different comic accents - stormed off ranting in Spanish in response to another character. (He's good on the guitar, too.)

Or when Nick Maccarone (who was very good in Romeo and Juliet, which will play one last time tomorrow in Astoria Park at 4 p.m.), lumbered maniacally about as the Dishonest Man with a Groucho mustache and a carrot-Pinocchio nose.

As the blind god of wealth Plutus, Allen Sermonia (whom we also admired in R&J) succeeded in being funny without skirting the offensiveness of milking visual impairment unduly; of course Plutus is also smelly and filthy (it's still okay to make fun of that as much as you can!), and after his cure, Sermonia mocks the over-the-top triumphalism of contemporary athletes.

Lauren Ashley Smith was probably the most charming in the cast, light and ingratating whether she was Chremylus' daffy wife or Cassandra or the Oracle, and as the Chorus's lead, she had a sweet singing voice - actually the whole cast was pretty tuneful.

Larissa Dzegar proved so versatile that it took us a long time to realize that this actress was both the goddess Poverty - which the hapless Chremylus and his entourage finally learn is a necessary spur to human progress and happiness - and the hysterically funny Old Woman (picture Estelle Getty in Golden Girls talking like Melina Mercouri) reacting to her abandonment by her young airhead boyfriend, Nick Maccarone.

The humor in Aristophanes is not subtle, and the Curious Frog company took advantage of that in their delivery, the musical numbers and their stage business. We were also impressed with the way they gracefully and unobtrusively made changes in the set. And there's actually woven into the play a final short lecture, complete with flip chart, by the god Mercury (Serge Castillo), relevant to our current financial near(?)-disaster.

This was definitely a Plutus for the Great Recession, and far better than we expected from our experience reading Aristophanes' final comedy. Again, we were happy to give a contribution into one of the Greek-themed (like a diner "We Are Happy to Serve You" coffee container) containers used as props and then as a collection plate. We hope Curious Frog will return with two new productions as good as the ones they performed brilliantly this summer.

We're grateful to Curious Frog Theatre Company and to the MTA for the weekend subway constuction that made our trip from Williamsburg to Queensbridge Park such a snap, just 4 stops on the G train and then a shuttle bus took us back and forth - only three passengers each time - to the F train Queensbridge stop not far away from our destination. A lot better than the usual schlep!

Thursday Night in Cobble Hill: Nicholas Thompson and "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War" at Book Court

Tonight, with a fall chill in the air, we took the R train to Court Street and then walked down to Cobble Hill to the great indie bookstore Book Court to hear a fascinating reading and talk by Nicholas Thompson, whose new book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, has gotten glowing reviews and a lot of praise from people we trust.

We were impressed by the passages that Johnson, Nitze's grandson and an editor at Wired Magazine, read from his book and look forward to reading his account of the two friends, who were what one critic called "the Jefferson and Adams of the Cold War," often on opposite sides in foreign and defense policy disputes and whose long lives included over half a century of active engagement in the highest levels of government at the most dangerous time in American and world history.

The Washington Post review had a good overview:

For much of the past half-century, Kennan and Nitze formed a classic odd couple, battling over cold war policy both while in government service and out. Kennan was a learned diplomat and historian who had witnessed Stalin's show trials and purges as a young man stationed at the Moscow embassy. He went on to draft the basis for cold war doctrine by famously warning of Soviet intentions in his 1946 "Long Telegram," only to retreat from his prescriptions, leave government service and devote himself to warning of the perils of an arms race that threatened to obliterate the planet. Nitze was an inveterate hawk who attached great importance to the balance of nuclear firepower between the Russians and Americans. He formulated the foundation for American nuclear strategy in the early 1950s and occupied numerous government posts for presidents from Truman to Reagan, while persistently sounding alarms about Soviet nuclear intentions and capabilities. . .

In his 1947 "Mr. X." article in Foreign Affairs, Kennan laid out the doctrine of Soviet containment -- essentially the intellectual scaffolding of the cold war. Then he spent the next decades disavowing his authorship of it. Thompson observes that Kennan later wrote that he felt like "one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly watches its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster."

Nitze would have none of this. According to Thompson, "Nitze was in sync with the times, far more confident than Kennan in his country's ability to do good." In 1950, he presided over the drafting of Document NSC-68, which rejected Kennan's recommendation that America forswear first use of nuclear weapons; the document also called on the United States to fight communism worldwide and to invest in a massive arms buildup. Decades later, Thompson writes, Nitze crossed out a line in a student's master's thesis which argued that in NSC-68 he had advocated military containment over political means. In the late 1950s and in the '70s, Nitze warned that America was in danger of becoming the weaker combatant in the superpower contest and needed to rearm. . .

Towards the end of their lives, however, Nitze and Kennan reconciled their differences as the Cold War's end prompted Nitze to endorse the abolition of the weapons whose existence he had once done so much to promote.

We're particularly interested in the Cold War these days because this term we have the privilege of teaching a course in Cold War Literature at City College of New York - we've already read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Quiet American with our students - so it was very interesting to get the perspective of Nicholas Thompson's book, which as the New York Times review noted, "succeeds admirably in blending biography and intellectual history, painting colorful portraits of complicated men who embodied conflicting strains of American thinking about foreign policy."

Thompson began by making note of the presence of his little son, who "knows about six word and one of them is book." He talked about the genesis of the book, when his grandfather Nitze in 1999 had an op-ed in the New York Times saying "I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons" and got a letter from his old friend George Kennan, who said he loved the op-ed and was glad they were finally "in complete accord." Thompson had not realized the closeness of the adversaries' friendship - they attended each other's family weddings - and the parallels in their lives made Thompson realized he could tell the story of the American Cold War from a unique vantage point.

As Nitze's grandson, he had access to Nitze's papers, including a trove apparently known only to a janitor at Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, which he founded. Thompson also got access to a lot of Kennan's papers, including the diaries he kept over the years.

Thompson begins his story at the end of World War II, with Kennan in Red Square on V-E Day and Nitze interrogating Albert Speer in Berlin and then going on to Hiroshima to report on the effects of the atom bomb. He was able to get a wonderful start to his narrative, starting from the point of view of Martha Mautner, then a clerk in the American embassy in Moscow eager to go out on a date for the evening, when Kennan comes in asking her to stay late and send what became known, famously, as the Long Telegram.

Thompson read two excerpts from Kennan's diaries, the first from April 1951 when he and Nitze, working together on the Marshall Plan, began to have seriously divergent views on the conduct of the Cold War and defense policy. Kennan's unsparing self-criticism and perhaps even self-hatred in this entry reminded us more of Dostoevsky's Underground Man than the diplomat and scholar we'd known of.

The second excerpt from Kennan's diaries, from 1957, as he pondered a lecture he needed to give on the BBC, toys with being "honest" and suggesting that the U.S. should be merged with Canada and Britain with a new capital in Ottawa as well as banning cars and drastically reducting population, was also eyebrow-raising.

Thompson mentioned that neither man achieved his goal of becoming Secretary of State or Defense. Nitze, in particular, while much more congenial in person than the rather cold Kennan, seemed unable to resist being totally blunt and impatient when he thought the person with whom he was speaking was somewhat dense in not agreeing with Nitze's views - even if that person was the President Kennedy or President-elect Carter.

Thompson's editor is also Jimmy Carter's, and the editor gave Carter the manuscript of The Hawk and the Dove; after reading it, the former president said, "Nitze always was a horse's ass."

Kennan also tended to be self-destructive in his dealings with his superiors, as when, being considered for a top post in the Eisenhower administration and was asked to write a policy paper, Kennan wrote a devastating critique of everything in Eisenhower's foreign policy.

It's a tribute to both men that they endured. Nitze worked for ten presidents and was fired by most of them, but he kept being listened to. People always paid attention to whatever Kennan wrote about foreign policy. While neither of the subjects of Thompson's book sound like a very nice person, Nitze sound like a wonderful grandfather and Kennan probably was, too.

The Book Court audience was small, fifteen to twenty, but were appreciative of Thompson's discussion and digressions. On everything from Nitze challenging JFK's fear of his own generals starting a nuclear war on their own during the Cuban missile crisis and Nitze's trying to manipulate a somewhat befuddled Reagan at Reykjavik to the weirdness of Svetlana Stalin's letters diagnosing what she thought was Kennan's deep unhappiness, Thompson is a compelling storyteller.

So we're really looking forward to reading The Hawk and the Dove.

Late Sunday Afternoon in Prospect Park: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents "Romeo and Juliet" at Litchfield Villa

Summer's lease hath all too short a date, but summer returned for one more Sunday, and so did our watching Shakespeare in the park. On a beautiful late afternoon, we sat on the grass off Prospect Park West by Litchfield Villa saw an excellent informal. but sleekly professional, production of Romeo and Juliet by the Curious Frog Theatre Company.

The Astoria-based Curious Frog Theatre Company's self-described mission:

to present new, modern and classical works with the goal of showing a new, multicultural perspective through non-traditional casting that does not hinder understanding or believing a work, but rather enhances the work in an innovative manner and fosters fresh perceptions

In this Romeo and Juliet, company director Reneé Racan Rodriguez has succeeded admirably. It's a fast-paced, well-acted production that seems stripped to its essentials without sacrificing any of the beauty of the language or the vibrancy of the classic tragedy of thwarted barely-mature love.

Rodriguez adapted Shakespeare's text so that, we presume, it could be played with minimal scenery (the only substantial piece serves as a bench, bed and bier) in various parks around the city. Also, this Romeo and Juliet features just six actors (Curious Frog's other summer production, Aristophanes' Plutus, employs a cast of seven).

Rodriguez also directed the play and played both Lady Capulet as a martini-drinking, social-climbing, somewhat distracted matron and Mercutio as a bustier-wearing, punkish gal-pal to Romeo and Benvolio who's more macho than either of them. You might think she'd be wearing too many hats here, but somehow she pulls it off like a magician's sleight-of-hand.


She's written that in looking to adapt Shakespeare's work, she wanted to strive for "a reflection of love in our society today" but as she cut, she "felt something dark emerge," that

every single character. . . contributes one defining moment, one choice that directly contributes to the tragic demise of the two lovers. How would that translate to where we are now?

When I ride the subway, walk the streets, range the airports, almost everyone I see is on a cell phone or MP3 player. We see people in their most intimate moments - and they are complete strangers. The peopole who we know, though, are the ones we are forever texting and emailing but rarely ever see fact to face.

Reading that in the program, we had a heart-sinking feeling, but in fact in this production we don't get some didactic exploration of technology in our lives: Romeo's ever-present iPod buds, Juliet's laptop "friending" and the cell phones several characters carry are subtle additions, signifying something but not detracting from the stage business, which is essentially face to face - though with a couple of tragic exceptions. (If you really stop to think about it, effective cell phone use could have mitigated most classic tragedies.)

The audience, about 40 to 50 with several groups of passersby stopping to stay till the end, sat on the grass, not all that far from the sidewalk and street of Prospect Park West with its cars, yelling kids, barking dogs and the B-69 bus. Behind and above the performance area was the imposing castle of Litchfield Villa, a good enough suggestion of Renaissance Verona as you're likely to find in Prospect Park.

But the six-member cast, dressed mostly in fairly informal contemporary clothes, dealt well with the exigencies of performing onsite outdoors. Leo Giannopolous, who played Romeo, used the audience particularly well, sitting down at one point between a little boy and his parents and addressing some of his comments to the kid. We're glad we didn't realize that at one point Nick Maccarone, a loose and playful Benvolio, literally jumped over us to get "onstage."

Maccarone also played Paris, and like the other three actors playing dual roles, he was able to create distinct characters so that there was never any confusion. He even managed to modulate his voice differently so that even when the scene changes were lightning quick near the play's end, it was clear when he was Benvolio and when he was a Paris whose fragility is barely hidden behind his noble formality.

Director Rodriguez, as we said, also played two characters who could not be more distinct, and she succeeded with both. As a somewhat unstable Tybalt who appears to be suffering from both ADHD and PTSD from some war (the Marines T-shirt was a nice touch) and as a less dithery, more cunning Nurse (still sympathetic, she also appears to be a greedy shopaholic, at one point loaded down with shopping bags from Macy's and specialty stores), Shannon Pritchard was excellent.

As Prince Escalus, the blazer-and-rep-tie-wearing Allen Hope Sermonia seemed to be channeling Tony Blair - not a bad choice - but Sermonia worked wonders with the role of Friar Laurence, who comes across not only as a gentle, well-meaning and bemused counselor (most of his advice is actually pretty bad) but also, like the Nurse, somewhat self-serving.

The unceasing action, in which scene followed scene in different parts of the stage area on the grass, seemed to fade in/fade out as in a film when it's done seamlessly. Romeo and Juliet has a lot of joking around, and this production emphasized the essentially frivolous nature of the characters who get caught in a tragic situation that here seems more the result of stupidity than anything else.

To that end, Elizabeth Spano's Juliet comes on like a Catholic-school Valley Girl at first, but gradually reveals a depth so that the airheaded Juliet seems a pose she'd adopted and feels free to discard once she sees the depth of Romeo's devotion. It's not that love and teenage lust isn't present in her performance - superficially, Giannopoulos' Romeo looks like a hunky lunkhead in his V-neck T-shirt, but early on, he suggests that that, too, is a pose - but it's clearly more than that.

Giannopoulos was superb, to the point where the production seemed to pivot more on his variegated performance than anything else. But in the play's title, Romeo comes first after all, and he may have the most complex emotional dilemmas of any of the charcacters.

Some bits of business were especially done, and the sword fights were staged well. Except for Juliet, the actors playing the younger characters were incredibly graceful and very physical. There was a lot of roughhousing among the friends Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio (Maccarone moved especially fluidly even when he wasn't jumping over us).

As a fight between two women, the battle between Pritchard's Tybalt and Rodriguez's Mercutio was amazingly resonant. It could have gone really wrong, like one of those cringe-worthy Dynasty catfights, but instead here we had two very strong and strong-headed women. Anyway, kudos to fight choreographer Jacob Grigolia Rosenbaum, assisted by Rocio Mendez, and to the movement director, Marie Morrow.

And, yeah, although we didn't quite tear up at the end, we did get a catch in our throat. For us, the production was quite successful. We were impressed that so many little kids managed to maintain their interest as the play wore on; they clearly couldn't have been understanding everything, so either Park Slope parents are doing a better job in raising well-behaved children than anyone lets on or else the Curious Frog troupe managed to pull off an impressive feat in this Romeo and Juliet.

We're pretty sure it's the latter, and we're really grateful they gave us a chance to see Shakespeare in the park again in the waning wanton air of summer. Curious Frog Theatre Company's last weekend is coming up next Saturday and Sunday: September 19 is Plutus at Queensbridge Park, and September 20 is R&J at Astoria Park.

Saturday Morning in Midwood: Breakfast at Brooklyn College

Forty years after we started as a freshman at Brooklyn College in the fall of 1969 - we actually took our first course, Poli Sci 1, that summer - we were back on campus this morning as we have been on Saturday mornings since January 2008.

We're lucky enough to be teaching a 9 a.m. to noon class, The Short Story, for the wonderful Borough of Manhattan Community College's weekend BMCC@Brooklyn College program.

We've also been teaching classes for BMCC on the BC campus on Friday evenings - so we were here until 8:15 p.m. last night teaching a creative writing workshop. It's all been incredible, being back on this campus where long ago we had so many of our formative experiences.

We finished our B.A. in Poli Sci here in June 1973, then came back for the start of Brooklyn College's MFA program in creative writing from 1974 to June 1976. Before we moved to Florida, we taught day and evening sections of remedial writing for the English Department as well as the old Veterans Outreach Program and the Liberal Studies for Adults Program during the spring 1979 and fall 1980 semesters.

So all around us are memories. We took these pics on this damp silent morning as we made our way from the Hillel Gate to our classroom in Boylan Hall, stopping to sit on a bench and have a bite to eat.

Here's a view of parts of Gershwin Hall, the outdoor amphitheater and Whitman Hall. Our June 1965 graduation from Meyer Levin Junior High School (J.H.S. 285) at Whitman Auditorium was the first time we stepped on the campus.

Our friends from college who have not been at BC for years wouldn't recognize a lot of the campus. The library has expanded to what seems like four times its size in the old days, and these parts of the library are seamless additions to the old building we knew in the 70s.

We get here early on Saturday mornings, taking the B48 bus from the corner of Lorimer Street and Metropolitan Avenue around 7 a.m. The route takes us through the Latino and Hasidic south side of Williamsburg and then through Bedford-Stuyvesant and what we call Crown Heights but may be Prospect Heights.

Neighborhoods in Brooklyn don't have the same names we knew growing up in the 50s and 60s, or represent different parts of the borough. At Franklin Avenue and Eastern Parkway we get off the bus for the 2 train to the last stop, Flatbush Avenue-Brooklyn College.

Looking back to the Hillel Gate where we have to show our photo ID to the security guard, we can remember when anyone could get on any college campus without an ID. (The technology may not even have existed back then for photo IDs; our driver's licenses didn't have pics of us, either.)

As a junior and senior at Midwood High School in 1966-68, we'd often take a shortcut through the BC campus on our way from the Flatbush Avenue B41 bus or our Grandpa Herb's car on the days when he picked us up on his way to work at the Slack Bar on Fulton Street from his apartment in Rockaway.

We once went up to the bell tower of what used to be LaGuardia Hall late one Friday in the fall of 1970. A friend of a friend somehow had a set of keys to a lot of buildings and he took us up to the top, via a series of fire-escape-type ladders, at a time when the campus was otherwise deserted. Somehow we overcame our extreme fear of heights and were really impressed with the view. It was thrilling.

In those days, there was never any sound coming out of the bell tower. Now it chimes every fifteen minutes, and when we got out of our class at noon today, it played a long sweet melody. Brooklyn College stands in for Yale in the TV show Gossip Girl.

Although the Georgian buildings have the same dignity they did back in the day, like a lot of New York City, the campus was run-down and tacky in the 1970s.

This cat is one we've seen before. He used to be a lot skinnier.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, kids who in retrospect look like hippies - um, that would be us - sat on the quadrangle and other places until it was mostly dirt and only patches of scraggly grass. The gingko trees and others seemed pretty but less majestic 35 years ago, and where the cat is standing there was one of four ugly temporary buildings to handle the overflow of baby-boomer students (more than twice as many as today).

The prefab temporary buildings were called T-1, T-2, T-3 and T-4 and we wrote in a school paper suggesting a "name that temp" contest to give them more memorable monikers. We suggested the one housing the Financial Aid offices should be called Monty Hall.

We can't tell if Whitehead Hall always had this much ivy or we just don't remember it. Back in the 60s and 70s, Whitehead, built in 1962, was the "new" building, and it held the social sciences departments like economics, poli sci, sociology ("sosh") and anthropology ("anthro").

In the Whitehead basement, about a month before our graduation, we were one of two students - our friend Carole Robinson was the other - who appeared along with Dean Nathaniel Jones and some alumni on a CUNY TV show about new careers or something. We wore a fake-velvet turquoise Edwardian sports jacket and came down with the chicken pox the next day.

When the show finally came on TV, our family and girlfriend were excitedly watching in our house's "finished" basement. At the first glimpse of ourselves, we ran upstairs screaming and only came back to watch after being coaxed that we didn't look or sound "that bad."

The Whitehead cafeteria was here when we were undergrads. The student radicals used to hang out here, as opposed to the fraternity and house plan kids who hung out in the much larger Boylan Cafeteria. By the time we were in grad school, it had become Kosher Country or maybe Kosher King, a low-rent, short-lived McDonald's/Burger King clone.

Now there's an addition to the building and all of it is the Library Cafe, open at all hours, with lots of computers for students. It's a comfy place with some tables, counters, and plush chairs and couches. They proudly serve Starbucks coffee here too, though never when we're there on Friday evenings and Saturdays.

This Saturday morning, we got our usual perfect oatmeal and venti unsweetened black iced tea at the Starbucks on the corner of Hillel Place and Kenilworth Place. It was the wonderful Greek greasy spoon Sugar Bowl in our day.

"Lime rickey for Blondie Boy," Andreas would say when we came in. (Old photos taken from the now-gone Brooklyn Junction blog.)

This looks toward the lower campus, to the quadrangle. This is Boylan Hall. It's pretty odd these past few terms to be teaching English for BMCC in rooms where decades before we took Afro-American Literature I with Prof. Dan Mayers or Dosteovsky in Translation with our favorite BC Russian professor, Spencer Roberts.

Sometime in 1971, a student came up to our second-floor LaGuardia Hall office of The Ol' Spigot, the day session (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, "CLAS") student government newspaper, to complain that his bike had been stolen from the unlocked bicycle racks here. We were assigned to write an article and found a bunch of students whose bikes were also stolen.

Both student papers published editorials calling for better security, and the college created a little guardhouse for one of the Wackenhuts - the BC-contracted private security force back then - to stand watch over the bicycles.

In August 2002, when the 2003 edition of The Best 345 Colleges, published by the Princeton Review, ranked Brooklyn College number one in the country for the beauty of its campus, it caused much hilarity among our friends from undergrad days, who thought the designation must be a joke.

Most of our friends have lived outside New York for years - back in the 1970s we'd all sit around talking how none of us could wait to leave the city (we waited till January 1981, when suburban Fort Lauderdale and a job at Broward Community College beckoned). We tell them it's a lot prettier these days than it used to be. Whoever did the landscaping performed the highest of mitzvahs.

This is the front entrance to the library. In our day, in a different form - no side door, no grand steps, just a creaky revolving door in the entrance to the tattered lobby where we hung out amid forlorn-looking chairs and lumpy discount couches - this was the entrance to LaGuardia Hall.

LaGuardia housed the student affairs offices and student organizations - student government, newspapers, yearbook, etc. - and some random college offices as well as the day-care center our friends successfully fought for in 1970.

BC didn't have dorms, of course - it will soon have one - but LaGuardia Hall was basically where we lived from 1969 to 1975 or so. A lot of our current close friends, including our BFF whose family's Williamsburg house serves as Dumbo Books HQ, we met in LaGuardia Hall. This plaque is really the only thing left to indicate that LaGuardia Hall existed.

At the base of the bell tower is the clock, which didn't work that well back when Lindsay and Beame were mayors and John W. Kneller, who passed away recently, was Brooklyn College president.

It was most famous because a ball was stuck between two numerals - I think it was within "III" - and was visible in every photograph. How they got it out - or when - we have no idea. In the two years we've been working on campus, the clock has been working perfectly.

So we sit on our bench in front of the former LaGuardia Hall with 40 minutes to go before class - teachers really need to be in the room at least ten minutes early to set up and put stuff on the board - with our oatmeal and iced tea and have our breakfast.

The campus is mostly still at this hour on a Saturday morning, the only sounds occasional chirping by birds. Back in the 60s and 70s, there were never any classes on weekends, and we came only for the library and special events like films, plays, and sit-in strikes.

As we get up to leave, we can look towards Bedford Avenue to see the brand-new West Quad and the new big building across the street. While we were students here in the 70s, they built an overpass over Bedford Avenue and steps leading to the quad (now, we suppose, the "east quad," destroying the Bedford Gate entrance. (Photo courtesy the indispensible Forgotten New York.)

A hideous cubelike structure called the Plaza Building went up. (Old overpass pic courtesy of the great Flatbush Pigeon blog.)

When we taught a class in the Plaza Building's basement in the fall of 1980, we'd sometimes have to walk through an inch or more of water as it flooded frequently. The only nice thing about the structure was the view of the campus from the overpass, as in this pic Jeffrey W. posted to Yelp:

The Plaza Building and overpass were demolished four or five years ago, replaced by the West Quad building, which is a big improvement.

The pics here are only from a small part of the campus, the part we traveled on our way to class. There are many more beautiful places on the Brooklyn College campus, like the lily pond - again, back in our day it wasn't as pretty as in this pic from the BC website.

On the G train going home after class, we saw a hipster with a Gators T-shirt and asked him who UF was playing today. "Troy," he told us. "It will be a slaughter." He had been, of course, a University of Florida undergrad; we went to law school there and later worked at UF, so we go "Go Gators!" too.

But we're pretty loyal to Brooklyn College and we even served on the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association and wrote the "Class Notes" for its bulletin from our graduation in 1973 till when we moved to Florida in 1981. (There's stuff about that from 1978 in our new book, Autumn in Brooklyn.)

So we're really grateful to Borough of Manhattan Community College (we've taught at seven community colleges in three states and BMCC is really well-run: start there, go anywhere) for giving us the privilege of coming back to the Brooklyn College campus to teach.