Stacy Horn

The pictures below are from the Grace Church archives, they’re undated shots of a televised holiday service. I zoomed in on the cameras, which say Dumont, as does the label on the cameraman’s jacket in the first shot. I googled the name briefly and learned that Dumont was a television network which ran from 1946 – 1956. In New York they aired on channel 5, which I will always think of as WNEW. Why would they change that?? WNEW was perfect.

That reminds me, my friend Brett Leveridge has started a New York City tour company, Avenues and Alleys. He knows so much about New York that he didn’t even study for the test the city gives to license tour guides and he passed. That is unfathomable to me. Knowing his love of NYC, and his friendly easy-going nature, I’m sure his tours are fabulous.

I am feeling so nostalgic these days. Yesterday I watched The Student Prince and it made me kinda sad. It used to air regularly on channel 13 (PBS) but they never put it on anymore. Posting this picture, researching Dumont, it’s all about wallowing in that feeling.

I think this guy might have been standing on an organ.

This is the entire shot. They’re shooting in front of the altar, looking right. That is where we stand to sing and where the orchestra plays. The choir furniture is moved away and we take over.

I spent some time researching the people named in all the plaques on all the chairs and lecterns and various objects around the church. Like “In memoriam Cornelius R. Disosway and Eliza his wife, 1801-1889, 1814-1897.” (More wallowing.) But I didn’t finish. (Disosway was a prominent NYC lawyer.) Actually, I don’t think any of that research made it into the book so I should post about it some day. I uncovered some decent stories, they just didn’t really fit with the story of singing.

Although the thing I’m contemplating doing instead of laying around on the coach all day doesn’t really count as “industry.” I just read that they’re going to be filming the new Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises up on the 59th Street bridge today. Someone shot this incredible video of them filming in the Wall Street area last week and this looks fun. Maybe the action will be too far away to really see anything good though.

From Union Square yesterday. The guy telling his story and the woman interviewing him look so nice. (That girl on the right … unfortunate shot timing)

I woke up and I forget the reason, but all of a sudden I HAD TO right there and then do a few things I’ve been putting off. It had to be NOW! So over my coffee I figured out how to add the plugin (Sociable) which puts icons at the end of every post so people can share them if they want, and I added buttons on the right to make it easier for people to follow me on twitter, email me, etc., again, if they want.

Making changes always freaks me out because I’m terrified of damaging something badly, perhaps irreparably. And that’s because in the early days of Echo (the online service I run), when I had to learn Unix and do everything myself, like rebuilding kernels, sometimes I did! My phone would ring off the hook with users understandably freaking out and the trauma and pressure was so great I’ve had this fear of making updates ever since.

So right now, even though the changes were relatively simple, my heart is pounding. It will stop in a minute, when I finally start to believe I didn’t break my blog, the world won’t end, and everything I’ve worked so hard for hasn’t been destroyed.

Buddy on the desktop, do-tah-do-tah-do, Buddy on the desktop, I’m so in love with you! (The song I just sang to him.)

I wanted to share a couple Veterans Day links. First, PostSecret’s Soldiers Secrets. Painfully honest, and touching. And some snapshots and stories from the Home Fires section of the New York Times. All the stories were moving, but the first picture and story, Tessa Poppe’s, was so sweet.

A flag on Perry Street.

I admit I haven’t been following the story until I woke up this morning and saw on the news that there was a riot in response to the firing of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. For those of you who also haven’t been following the story, briefly:

A Penn State graduate assistant named Mike McQueary witnessed an assistant football coach named Jerry Sandusky rape a boy in the locker room shower in 2002. McQueary told his father who told him to tell Paterno, who then told athletic director Timothy Curley and the senior vice president of finance Gary Schultz. All Curley and Schultz did was tell Sandusky, “who mentored children through a charity program, not to bring children into the football building.” (From Gothamist.)

“Despite a powerful eyewitness statement about the sexual assault of a child,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General said, “this incident was not reported to any law enforcement or child protective agency, as required by Pennsylvania law. Additionally, there is no indication that anyone from the university ever attempted to learn the identity of the child who was sexually assaulted on their campus or made any follow-up effort to obtain more information from the person who witnessed the attack first-hand.”

It is beyond comprehension. A total of nine boys have come forward to say they’d been sexually assaulted by Sandusky. So Sandusky has been charged, as well as Curley and Schultz who were charged with perjury and failure to report, and the president of the university stepped down. And now Paterno has been fired.

The rioters and other protestors and supporters are saying Paterno has been scapegoated. They might have a case if he was the only one charged, but he’s not and even if he was, he’s still guilty of not calling the police. A child was raped. And his response was to tell the school athletic director and vp of finance? And when he saw that nothing was done, he just left it at that? You can continue to love and support someone while also acknowledging that they did not do the right thing. All three of them are guilty and all three are suffering the consequences. With all the wrongs in the world, and there are so many terrible things happening all the time everywhere, this is what you riot about? Come on. Pull yourselves together. Reach out to the families of those children (now adults probably) and show them some support. Do some volunteer work somewhere.

I have mixed feelings about McQueary. I wish he had done more, and deep in his heart he must also wish he had done more. But he was young, and intimidated to a certain extent—I think the Milgram experiments explain his lack of response. Which brings me to another guilty party here: McQueary’s father. His father was the first adult who didn’t call the police. He utterly failed his son in that moment, and set a terrible example. I just can’t judge McQueary as harshly. Update: I’ve since learned McQueary was 28 at the time, and the boy he saw being raped was 10. I no longer cut McQueary any slack.

This is the picture from the our 2011 holiday concert program. Among other things, we’re singing Randall Thompson’s Peaceable Kingdom, which I thought was appropriate given the subject above.