the light of Chanukah to its Pikesville neighborhood. Yellow, blue, red, and green bulbs outline the fence while bright white lights spell out “THE CHANUKAH HOUSE” in block letters atop the first-floor awning, and an 11-foot menora fills a corner of the front yard. There’s a train garden, Jewish snowmen, and blown-up toy dradles amid a wide mix of kitschy decorations, including a near life-size fiddler on the roof, a flying, yarmulke-wearing “Hershel” Potter as well as an Adam Sandler-figure belting out it’s “so much funnukah to celebrate Hanukah . . .”
There’s also a glass-enclosed, 3-foot Barbie on the lawn lighting a menora. Why? As the display notes, Barbie was the creation of Ruth Handler, a Jewish businesswoman, who named the doll after her pre-teen daughter Barbara. Nearby, Sora Fleischman’s mother passes out homemade Star of David, dreidel, and menora-shaped sugar cookies.
Soon, members of the Ohr Chadash Academy arrive for the First Night ceremony. Principal Akevy Greenblatt helps two of his third and fourth-grade students oil-lit two large menoras and then, he and Yitz lead everyone in the reciting of the Hanerot Halalu.
Afterwards, the kids head over to pester the aforementioned, diminutive “Chanukah Rabbi,” known for his sense of humor, with questions—per custom.
“Do you have an iPhone?” asks a boy.
“Yes, and I have the Angry Birds app,” replies the ancient rabbi (Yitz’ uncle via hidden microphone). “I play all the time.”
“What’s your high score?” another child shoots back. As the near life-size, plastic rabbi, who somehow possess a twinkle in his eye, hedges—a dozen or so kids burst into laughter.
“How old are you?” asks one young girl.
“I’m very old,” comes the answer in a Yiddish-accent. “You should live to be as old as me.”
Station North
West North Avenue
January 5, 2013
19. Baltimore vs. Brooklyn
“I have been here once or twice and for some reason I like Baltimore,” deadpans Matthew Zingg, a Brooklyn poet, as he steps to the stage at the Windup Space in Station North. “It sort of has a small, non-descript place in my heart.”
Outside the performance space/lounge at the corner of North Charles Street and West North Street, a group of artfully disheveled 20-and 30-somethings, mostly in knit caps, plaid shirts, jeans, and eye glasses, stand near filled bicycle racks smoking cigarettes. Inside, the tables and bar are packed for literary “competition” between poets from New York’s most populous borough and Charm City, which doesn’t mean there aren’t funny asides and wry observances about urban life in both locales.
“We’re city people,” says Allyson Paty, Brooklyn’s second reader. “We pull an invisible bubble out of our own heads and create a protective space around us.”
A copy of the New York Post, always good for a laugh, sits nearby.
Before intermission, Alicia Puglionesi of Baltimore, taking requests from the audience, reads from her “non-verbal” dictionary, a project she’s been working on for a year. She highlights the contradiction in defining actions, which are inherently non-verbal, with words. Someone requests a word from her dictionary beginning with the letter “I,” and she chooses to describe “information,” comparing the term and its movement to a person: “It comes,” Puglionesi says shyly behind her large frame, 80s style glasses, “and never says where it went.”
Later, Eric Nelson, self-deprecatingly admits he’s actually not from Brooklyn, but Queens, which he refers to as “the land of pleasant living,” which of course generates a chorus of boos from the Natty Boh-loving hometown crowd. Bearded and slight, with an open striped sweater vest over mismatched button-down shirt, Nelson recalls his last visit to Baltimore several years with a couple of friends for another poetry reading.
“It was at the Hexagon Space and we’d stayed over night,” Nelson recalls. “The next day, the morning after the reading, we’re walking down the street toward our car and a big jeep pulls up alongside us,” Nelson recalls, “and this guy leans out and says, ‘Die hipster scum.’
“We still laugh about that.”
Sparrows Point
Sparrows Point Road
January 21, 2013
20. Everything Must Go
On a cold, muddy, morning outside the former United Steelworkers Local 9477, men sip complimentary coffee in paper cups before stepping onto chartered buses for a tour of the property that once housed the world’s largest steel mill. Hilco Trading, which bought
Sparrows Point in a bankruptcy sale, is offering previews of the mill’s vast stock of heavy equipment, machinery, trucks, and tools for an online auction of “an industry,” as one visitor—a former Bethlehem Steel worker here—puts it.
At the first stop, everyone exits the bus and two Colorado reps from EVRAZ North America, which operates several smaller mills, inspect 200-ton transport trucks known as “slab haulers.” A rep from O&K American Corp, headquartered in Japan, is also aboard—along with several retired or laid-off Sparrows Point workers, coming for a last glimpse of the corrugated warehouses, tin mills, machine shops, rail cars, and loading docks.
“I came here in 1962, right out of Kenwood High School, into an apprentice program,” says Lawrence Knachel, glancing out a bus window. “We had 27 softball teams. Shipping side used to play the steel
side after work.”
Inside a drafty repair shop, a former steelworker, in the hot tin mill for 39 years, mans a security post, earning a few last, nonunion wages before the place becomes completely barren. A Midwestern manufacturing rep asks what caused the plant’s closure. The ex-steelworker gives the question some thought and shakes his head inside a yellow hard hat. “Everyone has a different reason,” he says finally.
“I’ll tell you, though, the other day I got home and my wife was crying. ‘My grandfather worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘My dad worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘You worked there all those years and now you’re [there] shutting it all down.’”
(Postscript: In 2018, Amazon opened a new 855,000-square-foot “Fulfillment Center” at Sparrows Point.)
Downtown
Water Street
February 9, 2013
21. Pinball Wizard
After 16 games on half-dozen different pinball machines, including a wooden-rail, Art-Deco beauty from 1958, the National Pinball Museum’s “old” pinball machine tournament comes down to the final ball of the last game. Gregg Giblin, a 56-year-old Baltimore plumber, jostling the machine for good caroms, and Mike McGann, 37, a Zen-like software engineer, both lead 48-year-old computer analyst Jack Hendricks by a wide margin.
Crouching, with his left foot forward, Hendricks catches the silver ball with his right flipper, holds it a second, and then sends it ripping through a spinner up the right side—racking 100 points for each rotation. He tries again and misses once, but then spins it twice in a row with deft shots from his left flipper. Next, in almost
