book

Getting to Know Marlene Fischer: Cherished Blogger, Now Celebrated Author

November 13, 2020 by Ella Ilan

Armonk resident Marlene Fischer holds many titles. Besides being a mom, wife, lifelong writer, blogger, and a college essay editor, she jokingly adds “food shopper” and “stain removalist” to her list of roles. Raising three boys, it often seemed like food shopping and laundry were her main gigs. Book author, however, is Fischer’s newest title.

Never imagining that she would one day write a book, Fischer just successfully self-published her first book, Gained a Daughter But Nearly Lost My Mind: How I Planned a Backyard Wedding During A Pandemic. (Editor’s Note: Order on the net or inquire at your favorite local bookstore or gift store for availability.)

A new empty nester, with her youngest son away for his freshman year at college last year, Fischer was just acclimating to her new life and blogging about it when the pandemic began. She suddenly found herself with her husband working from home and the two of them sharing a very full house with all three sons and her oldest son’s fiancée at the start of the pandemic.

Navigating meals, everyone’s needs, a never-ending mess, and the challenges of a pandemic became the subject of Fischer’s hilarious and poignant musings on her Facebook page blog, which currently boasts about 12,000 followers.

The title of her Facebook page, “Thoughts From Aisle 4,” was suggested by her oldest son, and derived from her voicemail message on her phone for many years; “Sorry I missed your call. I’m probably in Aisle 4 at the grocery store. I will call you when I’m done.”

“A Source of Light”

Inspired by Erma Bombeck’s irreverent writing, Fischer is relatable and humorous. In addition to posting on topics such as handbag shopping, aging, politics, and random observations about life, many of her posts relay stories about the frustrations and joys of raising her three boys. For younger moms, it brings hope to see that no matter your worries, they all turn out just fine, just like Fischer’s bright young responsible sons. Judging by her followers’ comments, the page has been a source of light, humor and silver linings throughout many months of quarantine. It was easy for readers to feel emotionally invested in Fischer’s excitement over her oldest son’s impending nuptials and the trials and tribulations of planning a wedding during a pandemic. Many could relate to Fischer’s excitement over her relationship with her new daughter-in-law with stories such as being invited by the bride to help choose a wedding dress. Fischer believes the wedding planning was so captivating to her followers because “it was a good distraction for everybody” during the anxiety-ridden quarantine period.

Realizing that the couple’s planned wedding, a large fancy event originally planned in Washington D.C., the bride’s hometown, was no longer possible due to Covid, they decided to get married on their intended wedding date in the Fischer’s backyard with only close family members attending. “My goal was to make it so amazing that they wouldn’t want another wedding,” explains Fischer.

Fischer describes the backyard as having looked magical between the tiki torches, the tables, and the landscaping and plantings that Fischer’s husband had painstakingly tended to for weeks. The family incorporated beautiful and meaningful Jewish traditions throughout the wedding.

The wedding was an Armonk celebration in every way. There was a drive-by parade of local friends and neighbors and it felt like everyone in town was rooting for them to have a great day. Fischer was glad to be able to support local small businesses struggling through the pandemic by patronizing the town’s retailers for the food, attire, and décor.

The ceremony was officiated by Rabbi Joshua Strom of Congregation B’nai Yisrael in Armonk who actually met the bride and groom at a Phish concert in Mexico. The couple’s shared bond with the Rabbi over Phish aligned perfectly with their wedding logo incorporating the Phish logo, Phish shirts for the guests, the bride and groom dancing their first dance on a trampoline to a Phish song, and everyone dancing the night away to a Phish cover band, Uncle Ebenezer.

Still glowing from the wedding, Fischer decided this story had to be a book. Rewriting her blogs and adding material to create a more cohesive story, she successfully wrote her first book, a labor of love, with the help of her long-time best friend and editor Helene Wingens.

A Family Affair

Fischer credits her husband for always being supportive. “I call my husband Mr. Aisle 4 and he often proofs my stuff. It’s really a family affair. One of my boys likes to criticize while the other two like and share everything. We all have our different roles.”

In the meantime, Fischer has held several book signings in town at some of her frequent hangouts including outside the local market. A book signing inside Aisle 4 of the market was not possible due to Covid.

Excerpt from Gained a Daughter but Nearly Lost My Mind: How I Planned a Backyard Wedding During A Pandemic, by Marlene Fischer

“The Battle Royale”

We had a battle going on at my house. More specifically, outside my house. It was my husband vs. the woodland creatures.

My husband had wisely left all the wedding details to me, save one; the garden. He decided to use this opportunity to beautify our yard in advance of the kids’ BIG DAY.

He bought flowers and planted them in the front beds. And the back beds, amongst the rocks. And it was good. But it wasn’t good enough. So, I went with him to the nursery and bought more flowers to keep the other flowers company. I was happy to go because it wasn’t like I was getting out much.

And then he planted those flowers as well. Since our yard backs on the woods, creatures like deer and chipmunks like to nibble on our flowers. To combat this danger, he bought deer repellant. Which sort of smells like a combination of urine and vomit.

Every few days my husband, bless his heart, went outside and sprayed all the flowers. And then we all headed inside and closed all the windows because it smelled that bad. Good luck to any animal who wanted to eat our flowers after my husband had sprayed; all I can say is that they would have had to be really hungry.

Then my husband went back to the nursery a third time and purchased bushes. And he hired people to plant all those bushes because it was too big of a project for him to tackle alone.

He also planted his annual vegetable and herb garden and put a higher fence around it to keep chipmunks and rabbits from enjoying our basil and lettuce. I do enjoy the produce we pick from the garden; we’ve got a real farm to table thing going on. Nothing tastes better to my husband than food he grew with his own hands.

Did I mention the tiki torches? My husband felt we needed tiki torches to keep the bugs away. We were now the proud owners of about twenty tiki torches which he strategically placed around our backyard. He refilled the torches regularly and ordered extra fluid just in case we ran out.

I have to give him credit where credit is due. He transformed our backyard into a tropical paradise. I sort of felt like I was in Hawaii except then I remembered I was in my backyard during a pandemic and not Hawaii.

I really hoped that he would win his war against nature. Because if he didn’t, I feared it would break him.

“If It’s Not One Thing…”

April 18, 2019 by Beth Besen

(L-R): Don Rosenstein, MD and Justin Yopp, PhD Authors of The Group
PHOTO COURTESY of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center

How Programming at Gilda’s Club Helps Those Affected By Cancer

Gilda Radner, and her much-beloved Saturday Night Live comedic characters such as Roseanne Roseannadanna, kept audiences in stitches from the mid-1970s through the actress’s untimely death from ovarian cancer in 1989. Laughter is a gift, and Radner gave most generously. It is in that spirit of giving, and to honor her personal wish that information about her illness be shared to help others fighting cancer, that her husband, Gene Wilder, helped establish Gilda’s Club.

Gilda’s Club is a national network of 22 “clubhouses” dedicated to helping all people living with cancer– patients, their families and friends–free of any financial charges, ongoing obligations or commitments. Local affiliate, Gilda’s Club Westchester*, has welcomed and supported individuals and families in its warmly inviting White Plains clubhouse since opening its signature red doors in 2001.

Help for Bereaving Parents

While Gilda’s Club has a full calendar of regular and ongoing classes, support groups and events, there are often special events as well. And, it’s worth noting, many of these are open to the public without any need of Club Membership. In fact, this coming Monday, April 22nd, from 6 – 7:30 p.m., Gilda’s Club Westchester in partnership with the Bereavement Center of Westchester is hosting a Special Bereavement Parenting Workshop. The workshop will be led by clinical psychologist Dr. Justin Yopp, PhD and psychiatrist Dr. Donald Rosenstein, MD, authors of The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life and co-founders of The Widowed Parent Project.

The Widowed Parent Project began in 2010 with a support group for fathers who had lost their spouses to cancer. From that small original group of widowed men to research that involved more than 400 fathers, to its current commitment to supporting widowed mothers and fathers, the Project is part of the Comprehensive Cancer Support Program at the North Carolina Cancer Hospital and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The highly anticipated evening event is for “parents who have lost a partner to cancer and struggle with experiencing loss as they continue their role as a sole parent.” Yopp and Rosenstein will share their experiences in supporting both widowed fathers and mothers, and provide additional methods for coping with loss of any kind. Children of attendees are invited to come along, and to participate in a concurrent social program facilitated by a professional from Gilda’s Club Westchester’s Children Teens and Families group. Copies of Yopp and Rosenstein’s book will be available for purchase (with all proceeds going to the Widowed Parent Project) and light refreshments will be served.

New Off-Site Cancer Support Group in Northern Westchester

As busy and wonderful as the White Plains clubhouse and its many free programs are and continue to be, Gilda’s Club Westchester’s Director of Clinical Partnerships, Christine Speck, points out that the club’s proximity to people in need can be a deciding factor in determining membership and usage. “Time management is a big part of cancer treatment”, says Speck. Patients have various doctor visits, treatment visits, and also recovery times when they’re just too tired to go anywhere. There’s a lot to consider. Therefore, Speck and her colleague, Programming Manager Debbie Vincent, LMSW, are very excited to announce a new off-site initiative, the Living with Cancer Support Group, especially intended for people in northern Westchester.

Held at the newly renovated Bedford Playhouse, the Group will meet every second and fourth Wednesday from 10–11:30 a.m. beginning in April. It’s worth noting that the Bedford Playhouse is more than a comfortable, convenient locale; it was here that a preview of the thoughtful and moving Gilda Radner documentary, Love, Gilda was screened to great acclaim. The Group “will encourage discussion of personal experiences as well as provide ongoing exploration of emotional and social concerns, while dispensing wisdom and practical advice.” It is open to anyone in active treatment, including those who are not Gilda’s Club Members. Those interested need only sign up ahead of time.

*For further information, please visit Gilda’s Club Westchester website: www.gildasclubwestchester.org

Local Poet Scott Mason’s New Haiku Book Celebrates the Wonder of the World

March 8, 2019 by Stacey Pfeffer

Listening to Scott Mason wax poetic (pun intended!) about haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry, it is clear that he has a true passion for the subject having published close to 400 haiku in edited literary journals or anthologies. And that passion has helped him earn more than 150 awards, including more than 20 first place finishes in international competitions– more than any other North American, in the genre. To coincide with National Poetry Month coming in April and the launch of his latest book, The Wonder Code, Inside Press had the opportunity to sit down with this prolific poet and learn more about this art form.

Mason claims writing and also reading haiku (it is the same in both singular and plural form) has changed his outlook on life. Admitting that it sounds grandiose, Mason claims that haiku has made him “more attentive and more appreciative.” The Chappaqua resident though never intended to become a haiku poet. “If you told me twenty years ago that I would be doing this, I would have looked at you like you have three heads,” he chuckles.

As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Mason majored in art and did a minor in math and physics. He obtained his MBA at Harvard Business School and worked in advertising at Prudential. Following that he consulted for advertising agencies to help them strategize and win new business opportunities. “My background isn’t what people typically think of when they think about poets.”

Always an avid traveler, Mason and his wife Carla Gambescia (the former owners of the now defunct Via Vanti in the Mount Kisco train station) took a hiking trip to Japan in the early 1990s with a company called Wilderness Travel. The tour guide challenged the group to write their own haiku over dinner one evening in the traditional Japanese format of three lines with, five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second and five again in the last line. Mason wrote one but didn’t think much about it at the time.

Fast forward a decade later and Mason found himself wanting to express himself poetically. As he took his first attempts at writing, he noticed that his poems were short and resembled haiku.

He later learned that haiku poems in English do not need to conform to a 5-7-5 structure since English and Japanese word sounds are not comparable in duration. On a whim, he sent some of his poems to Modern Haiku magazine and they accepted one of his haiku for publication.

Since then he has become the co-editor of The Heron’s Nest, an online and print haiku journal with an international readership. Having an analytical mind, Mason sought to figure out why this form of poetry resonated with him so deeply and what characteristics the best haiku have in common. He poured through 9,000 haiku that had been published over the years in The Heron’s Nest and eventually chose his favorites writing each one on index cards. He sorted through them and found to his surprise that the poems wound up naturally being organized into five piles. “Each poem had one common denominator and that is wonder. Now wonder is both a verb and a noun and they operated on me in both ways. These poems brought me to wonder in some ways but also caused me to wonder in a verb sense,” explained Mason.

The five groups also had some imperative that eventually formed the five chapters of The Wonder Code. So for example, think small was an imperative and the haiku in that particular pile all focused on things like small animals or bugs. It struck Mason that this was the “diametric opposite of our culture and our times. Each haiku seemed to offset some aspect of our Western culture that tend to estrange us from wonder. Americans want big cars, big restaurant portions. Bigger is better is our credo but there is so much wonder and beauty in small things.”

Mason is gratified that this book has been so well-received in the haiku community but hopes to expand its readership to a wider audience. Kirkus Reviews magazine noted that is “ a superb haiku collection for readers who thought they didn’t like poetry, richly expressive and very accessible.” The first five chapters feature haiku written by various authors and the last chapter features haiku written by Mason. The book also received a Kirkus Star which signifies a book of exceptional merit.

As we wrap up the interview, Mason reminds us that “haiku is the people’s poetry. It is the opposite of elitist and truly treasures the everyday.” Mason will be giving a presentation on “Looking at Nature the Haiku Way” on March 27 from 7-8:30 pm at Teatown in Ossining–a place where he enjoys hiking and of course has inspired many of his haiku. Tickets are available at teatown.org/events/haiku-way where his book will be available for purchase at the event.

Haikus

By Scott Mason

how deer
materialize
twilight

Venetian canal –
lifting fog reveals
another mask shop

summer moonglow
the crescent
of toe prints on sand

Creating Winter Warmth

November 24, 2018 by Stacey Pfeffer

Last winter was one of the coldest and snowiest on record. It was also the winter that I was on an endless pursuit for a warm winter coat as I was house training a new puppy and seemed to be outdoors for an ungodly amount of time. As I am of short stature and particularly picky about my sartorial choices, I finally found my coat at the end of the season and instead looked for other ways to warm my heart and soul during that relentless winter.

As I look out my window while writing this column, snow has blanketed my backyard and beautiful icicles are forming on my pine trees. It is the first snowfall of the season and my kids couldn’t be happier. Me? Not so much…I have to wrap up this edition and was hoping to finalize it instead of having a dreaded snow day.

But as I’m leafing through the pages herein, I come across Dan Levitz’s beautiful essay on how winters actually help with community and family bonding. And I wholeheartedly agree. With an unanticipated early dismissal yesterday, my neighbor on the cul-de-sac invites my kids and I over for a playdate. The kids get busy to work on crafts and us moms get busy imbibing a nice glass of wine while the snow picks up. That morning while I was on my “bread and milk” run before the snowy Armageddon hit us, I asked her if she needed any groceries too. If there’s anything I learned after living here for seven years is that we have to help each other out if we are going to survive the long winter.

And help we do…just perusing through Facebook last night there were several messages about the MetroNorth schedules and which roads/highways to avoid (practically all!). After spending admittedly too much time on social media, I put my iPhone down and curled up with a good book. As a source said in Anna Young’s article about local book clubs– “There’s nothing like having a cup of tea with your book with the fireplace going. It’s perfect.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s the best antidote to a cold winter night.

Wishing you a holiday season filled with warmth,

My Travels Started In The Chappaqua Library

October 24, 2018 by Ben G. Frank

“I travel the world.”

It’s now the summer of 2018, and I hold the copy of my fourth edition of A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe (Pelican Publishing), 752 pages, with photos, maps, a bibliography and index and say to myself:

“And to think it all began in the Chappaqua Library.”

I picture driving down Quaker Road on Saturday mornings to the library. That’s the day many fellow residents did their chores, such as ferry their kids to soccer, basketball, and other sport games; while others play tennis, golf, enjoy the pool clubs or sleigh riding in Gedney Park, depending on the season.

I spent my Saturdays in the library: First, doing research to prepare myself for forthcoming trips to exotic lands such as Tahiti, India, Morocco, Cuba, Monaco, and Peru. And then, once I landed in Europe, for instance, I people-watched on the Champs-Elysees and the Via Veneto; I stared at stately statues in London; I danced at a bar mitzvah party in Marseille; I prayed in the oldest functioning synagogue in the world, the Atlneuschul in Prague; and I spent hours at the Shoah Memorial and Holocaust Center in Paris.

In Tudela, Spain, I wrote in the new edition of my travel guide: “There are no Jews in Tudela. But I went anyway. You see, Tudela is the birthplace of my namesake, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. In the 12th century, he became the first Jewish travel writer, pioneering an entire branch of writing.

Like that travel writer: I chronicle the Jewish world of Europe; I record the Jewish population and describe the people; relate their history; comment on their rulers and define the Jewish Community.”

I also made sure that my travel book would be a practical, anecdotal, and adventurous journey through Jewish Europe, including in the text: kosher restaurants, cafes, synagogues, and museums, plus cultural and heritage sites.

Years after the first edition of A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe came out in 1992, a Florida woman reminded me of a phrase I used in my first travel guide. Like most authors, I felt good when a reader of one’s work, recalls a specific quote. The saying in question dates back to early 1930s-Poland, a decade later the site of the Nazi death camps. Then, Alfred Doblin, writer and novelist, wrote: “I realized I didn’t know any Jews, So, I asked myself and I asked others: ‘Where do Jews exist?’ I was told: ‘Poland.’ And so I went to Poland.”

This writer also went to Poland. Only my comment after the Holocaust was: ‘Someplace along the Polish road, you will shed a tear.’ It’s true, said the woman who remembered my quote.

After sojourning to those far off lands–24 countries in Europe alone, I would return to Chappaqua and, yes, spend Saturdays in the library, checking observations against fact. And so it went for the better part of the wonderful 37 years that my wife, Riva, resided in the hamlet including the years our two sons, Marty and Monte, were at home, until they left the nest.

What, therefore, is the essence of A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe? My publisher put it succinctly: “This newly updated handbook from travel historian, Ben G. Frank, guides travelers through Jewish customs, neighborhoods, and historical sites in Europe. From kosher dining in France to memorials in Scandinavia, Frank combines practical information, intriguing stories, and an enlightening investigation into the Jewish contributions to European history.”

Not only did I include travel information for the tourist, I always wanted to update the political and social conditions, as well as historical information on Jewish life in Europe. Country by country, I discussed the rise of anti-Semitism, hate speech and hate crimes, especially in East Europe, as well as the rising nationalism in nations such as, Hungary, Poland and Austria.

I uncovered an interesting phenomenon: European Jews are not only immigrating to Israel but many are relocating within Europe. In fact, Jews are moving from France to the UK, from the UK to Germany, and from Turkey to Spain and Portugal.

Thinking about my new work, I believe this new edition of A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe will help the reader understand the past history of Jews in Europe, as well as the present and the future.

So, let’s travel. As the Chinese say: “the journey of a 1,000 miles begins with the first step.”

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