WHITE PLAINS CITIZENETREPORTER SETS RECORD VISITS FOR YEAR 7,017,658 VISITS! 2,098,003 VISITORS MADE 6 VISITS A DAY EVERY DAY. 63,330 UNIQUE VISITORS MADE 133,730 VISITS IN DECEMBER. WPCNR AVERAGED 17,284 VISITORS A WEEK, VISITING 31,270 TIMES.

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WPCNR NEWS & COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. July 1, 2019:

Well here we go into the two months of the year when big decisions are made by the Common Council of White Plains when most residents of the city are on vacation.

They do not show up for hearings on important legislation, because the city does not tell the agenda until 3 days before the Common Council meetings. Many of the residents affected therefore do not show up. And the Common Council makes an unpopular vote and never feels the heat.

It wasn’t always like this.

Twenty years ago there was a “Socrates” in White Plains who would take the podium like Aaron Judge stepping into the batter’s box. He was theater with a message. You wanted to have the City Clerk Say “All rise.”

Marc Pollitzer was that Socrates.

The voice of truth, reason, tracer of “what were they thinking,” how the Common Council lost its ways on issues. He was articulate. Reasonable. He’d retrace the dialectic of the Council’s tortured meandering to the verge approval and inevitably force them to keep hearings open for months and improve projects, or dump them all together. He was a one man public defender.

I always looked forward to Marc. He knew the issues. Quoted law in a most interesting way. He was didactic with reasonable precision, without leading the listener into legal quicksand where meaning-well speakers sunk in legal ooze.

He was passionate, firm without losing his cool. The voice of reason. A presenter with presence. Forearmed with facts. Always in a white shirt and open collar.  

He spoke out on the City Center project. The New York Presbyterian Hospital Park giveaway and his impassioned arguments strung out the New York Presbyterian Hospital proton accelerator project so long the funding disappeared. He fought the German School North Street access project that was quietly approved after he died in 2008

He died young on the tennis court prior to a tournament at the Old Ridgeway Country Club. Very ironic considering the last eleven years.

Had Mark lived the FASNY project would have been dead long ago. He was that good and using reason and argument to tie the Common Council and development lawyers in knots.

He was a passionate resident of White Plains who followed the issues. He was more a monitor, always first to smell a Delfino administration ploy.

Other speakers followed him up always. There was Dan Seidel. Alan Teck, Barbara Benjamin, Jack Harrington, Politzer’s co-host on White Plains Television, Peter Katz., Robert Stackpole.

But Marc was one of a kind.

He had courage to call issues as he saw them.

Today we have the dogged Gedney Association that has fought FASNY these many years. FASNY is now In its eighth year of hearings, court proceedings, and still there is no end. It is the process that never proceeds.

We  need, in this “era of the deal” another Socrates, an advocate like Marc, champion of reason and truth to step forward.

There is one such man out there. He even has a goatee like Socrates. He needs a toga though

Often, he gives me a call and gives me his perspective on seminal events like the League of  Women Voters Candidates Forum the other night.

His observation: these are different times. History he told me is moving too fast to cope with today locally and national.  

History (perhaps with the exception of White Plains Downtown Development, the FASNY farewell tour of the New York Court System, the search for a County sales tax bailout which my Socrates says has to be a done deal, otherwise the retailers won’t be able to start collecting it for weeks), is moving too fast for government, the population, the city to cope with.

My Socrates believes retail in downtowns is dead. It simply is not going to come back which means a lot of developers have guessed so wrong and bet too much on a generation that is too much in debt to buy houses and cannot afford the luxury housing being built for them based on  an economy of 15 years ago.

He notes the way we buy and entertain ourselves has changed to where we are dominated by the instant gratification of the Amazons and Googles of the world.

Ideas corrupted by short sighted geniuses of the Facebooks, Snapchats and Instagrams of the world. Phenomenon of diversion that compromise individuals’ ability to pay attention far more than television ever did. Television now is no longer a “vast wasteland” as Newton Minnow, the FCC chairman called it in the sixties. Television and its derivitives all the streamers on the little flixes are a morally toxic swamp.

But it is my wish that my new Socrates besides sharing with the CitizeNetReporter on the phone and laying his Eric Sevareid  analysis on me, share his clairvoyance with the city.

I call upon my secret Socrates and persons who remember the legendary Marc Pollitzer to come on out to Common Council meetings, work sessions, Planning Board Meetings, challenge the hypotheticals city officials and optimistic developers postulate and step up and fill the role of the voice of truth and reason, a 21^st century Socrates for White Plains.

I also hope others will revive and fill the role Marc Pollitzer again—providing the reason and research that shredded the old razzle dazzle and improved the impossible dreams with possible reality.

We need more Socrates, a legion of them to shake up the Common Council into thinking, reasoning, and stop rationalizing their all but automatic approvals that have languished for 11 years and not been built.

So I invite you, my Socrates, those like him to come out and stand up as the jury for the city to provide the expertise, analysis, conclusions, reality that a tired part-time, paid Common Council can apparently no longer do.

But wait is their hope that the next Common Council will be more diligent and energetic and perceptive and clairvoyant than the one of the last 10 years?

They have to do so little to do better.

That’s why I am hoping my Socrates will come forward and lead the way. Encourage the new council to be Plato’s Guardians of the Future with the tool both the historic Socrates and Marc Pollitzer used to do.

It is time

Come on down, read the backup material and ask the questions in the hearings to come. Embarrass the council when their thinking is muddled (a common condition). Teach them gently to become skeptical, don’t accept promises, extract guarantees of performance, and stop creating assets for a company by approving site plans that enhance a property.

The city future depends on the number of Socrates  who come forward.

The city cannot make decisions in a self-congratulatory vacuum. They make bad decisions when they do that.

It’s time.

Put away the cellphone.

Come on down to the Common Council and make yourself heard.

That’s where the real drama is.

It is where the future of your city is determined.

Take charge like Marc Pollitzer did.

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Posted on June 12, 2019 by John Bailey

MARIA BILBAO AND JOSE LUACES (UPFRONT) BRING BACK GLORIA AND THE BEAT AT WBT’S SEXY, SALSALICIOUS, SAMBAMAD CONGARAMA, ON YOUR FEET

White Plains CitizeNetReporter  STAGE DOOR. Theatrical Review by John F. Bailey. June 12, 2019:

You can’t tell them apart.  You can’t hear them apart.

Who are the real Estefans?

Or these Estefans?—The delicious Maria Bilbao, the  swashbuckling Jose Luaces–2019  Photos, John Vechiola, courtesy WBT

Together they bring back the breakthrough Latin entertainers of the 80s Gloria and Emilio Estefan who took the world of sound based on their native Cuba and sold out concerts throughout the world as they broke through to be the first latin superstar singers.

The alchemists of entertainment  Director Donna Drake, Choreographer Rhonda Miller  and Producer Lisa Tiso  at Westchester Broadway Theatre in Elmsford, NY USA have done it again: telling the Estefans’ courageous and uplifting story and performing their music – bringing back the Broadway hit of 2015, and getting Westchester salsa-ing  again, clapping  to the conga, disco-ing to Dr. Beat, and moving to energetic sambaizations. It’s The Miami Sound Machine and their amazing story. Cuban refugees fleeing from the Castro regime to international stardom only to be struck by tragedy and coming back.

Ms.  Bilbao and Mr. Luaces “chem” it up in this real love story that has lasted 40 years (they are still married). From Gloria’s first song, Anything  for You (he’s too old for her, but he’s hooked). As the romance weaves between performances of Miami Sound Machine it grows–the two duet their mutual attraction in such a young lovers’ duet you will remember, I See Your Smile.

Throughout Ms. Bilbao (above)  gets  deep and high into the Gloria Estafan style: holding the notes long and plaintively on the ballads; athleticism  in fast spins, leaps , long arms reaching  for the spots, and swiveling hips with boundless energy while singing at the same time in “Gloria-ous”continuity.

 Her colorata-mezzo soprano the deep intimate sound of commitment and regret and assurance, and rises to the emotions of unbearably sad and joyous feeling. She covers the Malacon.

Gloria’s father’s illness thought to have been caused by his service in the Vietnam war,  makes him an invalid is tastefully and uplifting portrayed and the sacrifices it requires.  Isabella Prestion and Camila Sander are the charismatic little girls who sing of their love for their father, singing  Cuando Sali De Cuba (When I left Cuba), and Tradicio’n. Young aspiring actresses will identify with these two young ladies.

I liked Byron St. Cyr as Gloria’s father (above) who establishes just-right  father-daughter traditions that all we fathers of daughters experience, his missing her when he goes to fight in Cuba, and his declining health after his Vietnam stint show the bonds between daughter and father.

Gloria’s mother played with every bit of assertiveness as Gloria herself, Karmine Alers  flashes back to her stardom in Cuba, and this causes jealousy  on the part of the mother and Gloria the daughter’s growing success. Mom does not want her to marry Emilio.

Allers shows just how good she was in the number Mi Tierra. Allers is so good at spats with Gloria over where Gloria is going with her life and how it hurts the family, that it brings home everyone’s family dramas and conflicts and makes the motivations very real, highlighting the dramatics.

This musical is about family and all that goes with it. The songs all by Gloria Estefan and Emilio Estefan come out of their life experience. That’s why the songs hit home and won an international following.

The first act wraps with the breakthrough hit Conga at a make or break concert in a park attracting thousands in Miami that Emilio conceived as a way of breaking their music into the main stream and leading to their star tours abroad. Mr. Luaces is strong in his negotiating scenes with record executives who claim the Miami Sound Machine is only for the latin audience.

Second Act the  arc of their careers soars. The awesome  effects of a concert given by Gloria and Emilio Estefan are rendered as well as possible at WBT, but Ms. Bilbao and Mr. Luaces more than overwhelm the enthusiastic press night audience with  Conga, Get On Your Feet, Live for Loving You and You’ll Be Mine. Then the famous Kennedy Concert where Gloria sings Cuba Libre.  As conflict grows as the tours continue Gloria and her mother are in conflict over what is happening with her own little sister.

As the group goes on the road on a bus tour, Gloria’s life is changed when at the top of their growing popularity their bus is hit by a truck. Gloria is paralyzed. Is this the end? Of course we know it is not. The staging of the accident comes as a complete surprise with one of the great effects Set Designer Steve Loftus and Light man Andrew Gmoser—so real you think the truck is going to hit the audience. It made me start in fear.

This crisis is a teachable moment. How quickly life as you know it can turn on a twist of fate. 

Karmine Alers, Gloria’s mother and Emilio (Mr. Luaces) combine on the plaintive,  If I Never Get to Tell You sung to an unconscious Gloria as she awaits surgery.  Gloria’s memories flash by as she, herself as a little girl, her father Jose and the ensemble sing of her past in Wrapped.

Through the long recovery of a year, Emilio (Luaces) sings  Don’t Wanna Lose You with a sincerity and a will that transmits in my opinion the will to fight to come back.

Does she come back? She does with her return to the stage at the American Music Awards, singing Coming Out of the Dark.

Having seen On Your Feet during its Broadway run, this revival brings you much closer to the people who lived this rousing, uplifting human drama of self-made success, comflict, adversity through their devotion to each other.

The Broadway On Your Feet thrilled with its booming colorful, astounding pace and special effects and left you with your body throbbing to the beat and delivering the signature of the Estefans’ musical legacy.

The Westchester Broadway Theatre  extravaganza entertains and puts you up close in the midst of  personal drama inspiring you, feeling  the emotions in a very caring way. The final Megamixextravagant finale will have you jumpin’ and longing for Havana. Be careful on those one foot spins!

The musicians all 11 of them just fill the theatre with the Miami Sound Machine style that gets into you when it first took the world by beat. Ole’s to Bob Bray, Jessica Glover, David Dunaway, Brian Uhl, Steve Bliefuss, David Shoup, Crispian Fordham, Jay Mack, Carlos Padon, Yuri Yamashita, you’re ready to go on tour!

This is how family should be. On Your Feet is in every sense a family musical. With the Estefans it’s always been each other and family.

You should try the Cuban Pork dinner before hand with black beans. On Your Feet the intimate, booming, up-close and personal Estafans will be at the WBT until August 4.  Go to www.BroadwayTheatre.com  or call the box office at 914-592-2222.

There is one line from this show that really says it all. When Mr. Luaces is negotiating with a CBS producer who tells him they are only Spanish market recording artists, Luaces is silent. He looks him in the eye and touches his own face and says:

“This is the face of an American.”

On Your Feet  is an American musical by Americans for Americans.

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            Meals on Wheels of White Plains celebrated its 40^th anniversary at the Woman’s Club of White Plains honoring the volunteers and donors who have supported the organization for four decades.

            “There is nothing that can match the incredible dedication of our volunteers,” said Susanna Sussman, Executive Director.  “They come week after week, year after year to deliver fresh meals to White Plains residents who are unable to shop and cook for themselves.”

            Meals on Wheels volunteers deliver hot and cold meals to about 70 clients daily. The meals are individualized to follow prescribed diets.

            On hand at the event were many volunteers, some of whom have been helping for over thirty years.  Also on hand were a number of donors.  “Our donors keep us going,” said board president Paul Schwarz.  “Individual contributions, from $5 to $5,000, provide well over 50% of our annual operating budget.”

            Meals on Wheels was honored at the event by New York State Assemblyman David Buchwald, as well as by the Westchester County Board of Legislators and White Plains Mayor Tom Roach, who declared Sunday Meals on Wheels day in the city.

            Meals on Wheels of White Plains was founded by a small group of citizens, with leadership and inspiration from then County Legislator Carolyn Whittle, who then stayed on MOWWP’s board of directors for its first 20 years.  Now living in California and unable to attend, Ms. Whittle sent a message to today’s volunteers, thanking them for helping to carry on the work she had started in 1979.

            Looking forward to coming years, Meals on Wheels of White Plains is always happy to welcome new volunteers and new contributors, who can both get more information at 946-6878.  As well, anyone needing Meals on Wheels services or information about signing up a client should call that number.

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