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Vol. LXIII, No. 7
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
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Vol. LXIII, No. 7
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
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 (Photo by Tim Pitts)
CUP WINNERS: Members of the Hun School boys’ basketball team display the trophy they earned after beating Lawrenceville 62-44 last Sunday to win the Mid-Atlantic Prep League (MAPL) tournament. The Raiders, now 12-13, will look for another trophy as they start play in the state Prep A tourney this week. For more details on the MAPL win, see page 40.
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Saying there would be difficult decisions to make in the coming months, Mayor Mildred Trotman addressed local merchants about the state of the Borough Tuesday during the Borough Merchants For Princeton’s monthly meeting. Her speech generated a dialogue between business owners who assessed the economic climate from their respective vantage points.
The Borough Administration presented a budget plan to Council last Tuesday that detailed the kinds of cuts necessary to achieve the proposed goal of a zero-cent tax increase.
“It’s a four-sided problem, and if we keep meeting, then maybe things will come together,” observed Princeton Future Managing Director Sheldon Sturges in a recent conversation about the group’s Saturday morning meeting at the Princeton Public Library.
Michael Paul Britto’s video work deals with representation, race, and the way history can be appropriated. In a public conversation last Thursday with Arts Council Curator of Exhibitions E. Carmen Ramos, Mr. Britto spoke about his work currently on display and the inspiration for his art.
Earlier this month, Borough police officers responded to 13 calls of intoxicated or disorderly individuals at Princeton University. Between 2 p.m. on Friday the 6th and 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, 12 students, most of them underage, were transported to the University Medical Center at Princeton, and one was arrested for disorderly conduct and intoxication, Borough Police Lieutenant Nicholas Sutter reported. That particular weekend was rush, or “bicker,” weekend at the campus eating clubs.
Former U.S. Ambassador Tony P. Hall, the longest-serving Congressman from Ohio and three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, recently talked about his book, Changing the Face of Hunger. “Maybe it should have been called ‘Do The Thing That’s In Front of You,’” he said in the “Public Life and Faith” talk he gave at the Woodrow Wilson School last week.
Last spring, the Princeton University men’s lacrosse team struggled to find an identity as it played inconsistently and lost its final two games to miss out on the NCAA tournament.
On paper, it looked like the Princeton University women’s squash team was a virtual lock to win the Howe Cup national team title last weekend at Harvard.
Coming into last weekend’s Mid-Atlantic Prep League (MAPL) tournament, the Hun School boys’ basketball team had dropped four of its last six games and stood at a mediocre 9-13 on the season.
On Valentine’s Day my wife and I watched Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955) on Turner Classic Movies. The genre Hollywood most often violates is the love story, and this was no exception. I have nothing against love stories; my favorite director, Frank Borzage, after all, was a master of romance, so maybe I’m picky, but I didn’t believe, not for a second, that Jennifer Jones’s Eurasian doctor loved William Holden’s American newspaper correspondent, or vice-versa. The only way the movie could manage to evoke that many-splendored emotion was through heavy orchestral flourishes based on the theme song with its soaring signature line, “Love on a high and windy hill,” where “two lovers kissed and the earth stood still.” Nothing stood still when those two kissed except the movie. According to the back story reported on imdb (an indispensable website if you love movies), the two stars didn’t get along. When Holden presented Jones with a bouquet of white roses as a peace offering, she threw them in his face. And she ate garlic before the kissing scenes, in case he got any extracurricular ideas. You can tell. You can almost smell the garlic.
Composer Johann Strauss was already known as the “Waltz King” when he wrote Die Fledermaus, incorporating many of his typical waltz tunes into what has become his most popular operetta. Opera New Jersey selected this operetta, whose dialog leaves a great deal of room for updating and improvisation, for its winter production, and planned several performances of the work throughout the state, the first of which was on Friday night at McCarter Theatre. Presented in English with English surtitles (in a new adaptation by Quade Winter and with additional dialog by Ira Siff), Friday night’s performance revealed a production with a great deal of polish and needing just a tweak here and there before its next showing in Morristown.
Trying to encapsulate the mosaic of Keith Wheelock’s life in these pages is daunting. Diplomat, history professor, entrepreneur, published author, he is also a man who as a Yale undergraduate at 19 led a group of students from Naples to Egypt, traveling third class on a steamer, to meet with then Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser; who later helped facilitate the rescue of thousands of hostages held by dangerous rebels in the Congo; who met regularly with a group of inmates at the Somerset County Jail to discuss short stories under the auspices of the People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos program; who served on the Montgomery Township Committee, Planning and Zoning Boards; and who has recently initiated the inclusion of the This I Believe program at the Princeton Public Library.