The final production of the Arts Project of Cherry Grove (APCG) season, at the Grove’s historic Community House, was “Hot Times: an Evening of Heated Story Telling,” on September 5, for which Joe Anania brought out colleagues Ophira Eisenberg and Adam Wade for an evening of true personal accounts, engagingly told. The performers confided in us as if sharing their tales with a group of close friends, and heat was the theme that ran through them—experiences under pressure—one set literally in a hot climate—involving wrangling with family, friends, co-workers, sex, and the government. A number of them involved food, invariably a topic of interest.
Joe told us about his and spouse Roland Michely’s “vacation from hell” in Santo Domingo, with Joe’s sister, brother-in-law, and mother, staying in a hotel where the air conditioning didn’t work and having dinner in a fancy restaurant where all of them got food poisoning—except for Joe’s mother, who ate only the bread. He also spoke of a bachelor party, with hetero friends in East Harlem, to whom he was not out, and at which he was assigned to find a them a prostitute, Fifi. Fifi kindly covered for him by pronouncing him the biggest stud and urged him to stop lying and come out soon.
Ophira is the youngest of six siblings, who teased her, saying, “You were a mistake!” When she questioned her mother, she said, “No, you were all mistakes.” This introduced Ophira’s tale of losing the tip of her finger when she experimentally stuck it in a hand-cranked meat grinder. Her sister saved the day—and the finger—by locating it in the bowl of ground beef and bringing it to the hospital where, with skin from her buttock grafted on, it was, to everyone’s relief, reattached. Canada-born, she told us about taking the nerve-wracking American citizenship test—and passing it with flying colors.
Adam’s first story was about being ignored at a New Jersey ShopRite deli counter, as women pushed ahead of him. Instead of being discouraged, he befriended the counterman and all of his customers and became “the King of Hoboken.” His other narrative was about being kicked out of high school marching band, but finding confidence when he took a job at the local Greek diner, where he fell for Suzy, the hostess, who turned him on. He wrote her a love poem and finally read it to her. Touched, she hugged him—before she went off with her boyfriend.
It was a warm, fuzzy feeling that “Hot Times” left us with.