Rock legend Ozzy Osbourne\’s father-in-law has intervened in the Higher Crumpsall/Higher Broughton Synagogue row with the Synagogue Council to settle the shul\’s debt with a burial board.
Aside from the exposure to new music and techniques and the camaraderie of being with peers, one purpose of the convention is to explore the role of cantor as klei kodesh (literally, holy vessel), or clergy member, a position that transcends music-making, said Joseph Gole, senior cantor of Sinai Temple, a local co-chair of the convention.
Thousands of screaming girls. Packed nightclubs. Love-crazy fans. Ron Gartner has seen it all.
That is, on television, of course.
In real life, Gartner is an up-and-coming singer who, while not exactly drawing the sorts of crowds that come to Eminem shows, is packing the social halls of senior centers across the nation singing the tunes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and other big-band and Motown standards. His fans may be closer in age to Bob Hope than Britney Spears, but Gartner is quickly becoming the newest big thing in the senior-home entertainment circuit.
Originally a denizen of what he calls the shmatte business — the garment industry — Gartner, 58, is building a second career by singing big-band favorites in nursing homes, senior centers and gated retirement communities all over the country. Now, on the eve of the release of his first CD, \”Someone Like You,\” Gartner is bringing his show to Southern California for two performances, on April 10 at Leisure World, a gated community in Laguna Woods, and on April 13 at the Indian Ridge Country Club in Palm Desert, where Gartner is playing the Desert Cancer Fund Dinner Dance.
Johnny Childs, blues musician, has come a long way from his old life as an ultra-Orthodox hoodlum. He started off in Brooklyn as Yonah Krohn, the unruly third child in a family of 10, who would sometimes briefly steal the fancy cars outside synagogues and take them for joy rides. He left home when he was 12 because his parents didn\’t want him corrupting his younger siblings, and at 14, while in a group home, his life gained focus after he discovered the dulcet strains of blues music.
Sam Glaser\’s music is considered contemporary spiritual. He started out as a rock \’n\’ roller in the \’80s, touring nightclubs in Southern California, but, in 1991, Glaser started keeping Shabbat, and his music changed accordingly.
When Andrzej Szpilman was 12, he furtively rummaged through a chest high on a shelf of a closed wardrobe in his Warsaw home. Inside the closet, he found 10 copies of a book and, recognizing his father as the author, hid one in his third-story bedroom. \”I read it and received a shock,\” said Andrzej Szpilman, 46, a dentist and record producer who immigrated to Germany in 1983.\n\nThe book was \”Death of a City,\” his father, Wladyslaw\’s, grittily brutal, dispassionate 1946 memoir of hiding in and around the Warsaw Ghetto. Since Roman Polanski turned the book into a searing film, \”The Pianist\” — which won four National Society of Film Critics Awards and is up for two Golden Globes on Sunday — Szpilman has become one of the best-known Holocaust survivors in history.
During Orange County\’s annual \”Chanukah Concert\”, a corner of Costa Mesa\’s Performing Arts Center is transformed into an all-Jewish music store featuring CDs recorded by some Reform cantors who participate in the performance.
\”They don\’t have much opportunity to put their CDs up for sale,\” said Dr. Gordon Fishman of Newport Beach, who co-produces the concert with his wife, Hannareta. She and some friends supervise sales, which this year include works by Ruti Brier, Nancy Linder, Shula Kalir-Merton and Arie Shikler. Also available are CDs by the Orange County Klezmers, who play at the concert intermission.
Dr. Gordon and Hannareta Fishman fell for Newport Beach in 1956 while he served as a medical intern in Long Beach. The couple even considered putting down roots until they inspected a local phone book. But their hope turned to disappointment and shock at finding three other opthomalogists already listed in Corona del Mar.
If RockFour comes bearing an agenda, it is decidedly more in tune with the Beach Boys\’ Brian Wilson than with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
As a kid in Queens, N.Y., Richard Milner\’s nickname was Dino, while fellow Jurassic-geek Stephen Jay Gould was Fossil Face. For Milner\’s 1954 Reform bar mitzvah, Gould gave him — what else? — Roy Chapman Andrews\’ classic, All About Dinosaurs.
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