As Art Carney was puckering up, whistling his Elmer’s tune” to the 6A elevator Avenue H apartment some 7 decades earlier, little did he know Elmer Schnitzer ....Leonard, his younger brother, their energetic mother and father(a practice of dentistry) living on the 14th Street side, got the sidewalk drift.
The Carneys from across the street, living above the Bohack grocery store..the corner of Avenue H and Rugby Road (14th Street).... The stretch reaching back back back to the Greek island of Crete, an Aristotle Onassis Maria Callas Jackie Kennedy distance from Cyprus ..
II
Theseus, son of Aegeus the King of Athens, is charged to kill the minotaur in his labyrinth.
“Did you ever think sir, that you were destined to destroy the monster. That it wasn’t a myth, after all?”
“Without Ariadne’s help, the minotaur’s torso wouldn’t be hanging in Bohacks window. My role was that of a Greek shepherd. A compassionate shepherd. Not a blustering CEO of a monster”
“But the monster saw himself as a horn empowered bull: crippling the vulnerable crushing the fragile oppressing the weak among us
“Dominating our consciousness in the snorting bloodthirstiness of his labryinth. the center of his King’s castle.”
III
“This wasn’t any Vienna Boys Choir on tour” said Theseus, thinking ahead of himself....
Siegfried on his Rhine journey quest, arranging “Tristan and Isolde”... for his murderous struggle with the MINOTAUR and his demoniac cries, enscribed in the Epithalamium of Catillus.
“How does that grab you, folks. ”, Ariadne, the King’s daughter, distracts the monster’s take of himself.... akin to the Angels in Faust tempting Mephisto from cashing the bargain he made with Faust..
“Putting your soul out there,”cried the Devil in disguise ”Rush hour in Hong Kong,” the harmonic language dripping with lustful cadences, the passion going to the Trojan Horse...
Abraham Chasens , scribbling the notations, his wife Constance Keene, at the keyboard .Charlie Chaplin’s David Raksin scoring “Modern Times” for an aroused Dionysius.... emerging from the innards of the Trojan USC belly.
IV
The Cretan struggle exhausted Theseus... abandoning Ariadne’s amore to sleep, she surfacing on Naxos, awakening as Dionysius’s wife, Theseus launches for Athens, forgetting to loft the white sail. His father, the King, thinking his son gone, commits suicide.
V
Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks composer, set the Theseus-Ariadne minotaur to Ariadne aux Naxos.......as thou his dissonance could ever survive that puckering up whistle of Art Carney ”Elmer’s tune”, the recipient being young Straus, occupying the 6 A elevator apartment, Avenue H side..
The treachery of Pearl Harbor hovering ......capturing Straus’s own awakenings..... not to be cast as cannon fodder across our Aegean sea of eternity.
The Big Apple, awaiting the first snow flakes, December 6, 2009
