Gerry Yukevich
Jon Lipsky’s inspiring and unique career as a playwright, director, acting professor and dream researcher ended in March 2011, when he died at his West Tisbury home after a long illness. But now a handsome compendium of eight of his best plays has been published, and Mr. Lipsky’s robustly imaginative personality jumps up from these pages like a frisky friend who returns to announce, “See that! Did you really think I was gone?”
The two-volume set (almost 800 pages) has been meticulously edited by Bill Barclay and Jonah Lipsky, Jon’s son.
On a lucky-for-me Saturday in New York city in 1988 I scored twice at the Times Square same-day, cheap ticket booth — single (back row) tickets to two big hits: Sondheim’s Into the Woods (Bernadette Peters) and Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods (Sam Waterston and Robert Prosky).
In Bandstand, his exciting new caper novel, Jib Ellis dances nimbly through a millennium of Viking, Knights Templar and pirate buried treasure lore to weave a gold-threaded contemporary tapestry of beguiling wit and vision.
THE GREATER JOURNEY: Americans in Paris. By David McCullough. Simon and Schuster, New York, N.Y. May 2011. 558 pages, photographs. $37.50 hardcover.
The ancient signatures on the yellow horsehide were hard to read. But when I first held that old baseball in my hands in the early 1950s, I had barely learned to spell my own name, let alone decipher the signatures of old Pittsburgh Pirates players. My grandmother Mimmie never commented on the relic, which she kept, oddly, in the upper right corner of her sewing machine table.
THE ADDICT: One Patient, One Doctor, One Year. By Michael Stein. William Morrow. March, 2009. 275 pages. $25.99.
A medical license is a license to ask questions. Ordinary conversation disappears quickly in my office. Business has to be taken care of.”