By Jerry Tallmer
I wonder if anyone else but me remembers an absurdity called The Ski Lodge that once briefly existed on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village. It is not to be believed that even such a deep-dyed-in-the-wool Greenwich Villager as Grace Paley ever heard of it, or ever heard of Stanley Myron Handelman, for that matter, but it is Stanley Myron Handelman and Grace Paley who appeared in the obituary pages within five days of one another last week, he at 77, she at 84, carrying with them into the beyond two totally opposed expressions — voices — of Eastern European immigrant-based Jewish-American humor.
The Ski Lodge, a few steps down (as I vaguely remember) on the south side of the block, was a vast, lonesome, would-be nightclub on the walls of which had been posted (again, ridiculously) big, bold, vivid skiing posters from all over the western United States. I don’t know what the Beat Generation was supposed to do — ski into nirvana?
Anyway, it was good skiing weather on the long-ago evening I went to review, at some press agent’s invitation, a new stand-up comic’s opening performance at The Ski Lodge on St. Mark’s Place. My lady and I mushed through the snow, maneuvered down the steps and entered the poster-happy catacomb — only to find that the entire audience consisted of one other couple and ourselves. Four people. Seated, willy-nilly, right up front.
And Stanley Myron Handelman came on — bitched about the weather and how tough it had been for him to wend his way thither — stared down at the four of us — and proceeded for the next 45 minutes to tell us what jerks we were, to our faces. Us four. We four. All four of us. Captive audience.
Insult comic, they call it.
Many of the people in Grace Paley’s stories insult one another from time to time, and some wield insults all the time, but the one person who is not insulted, and whose intelligence is never insulted by a Grace Paley story — but sharpened, deepened, nourished, awakened — is you, the reader, the audience.
Grace was that way person to person, too. She always called out the best in you, even if it was just a “Hi ya!” on the sidewalk, or to hand you a flier about an upcoming march — for peace, for women, for the environment — or a drop-in by her at the newspaper to bring you up to date on some neighborhood or civic crisis.
She always made me feel better, even when she was perhaps at that moment not particularly happy herself. The last I remember was when she was reading some poetry — hers and husband Robert Nichols’s — at a Theater for the New City event a year or two ago.
“She was always wonderfully encouraging” is how T.N.C.’s Crystal Field remembers her, and I do, too. Grace could be tart — she was congenitally tart — but she was not demeaning. Grace Goodside Paley was born and bred in Brooklyn, Stanley Myron Handelman was born and bred in the Bronx, and that vein of immigrant-based Jewish humor was all they had in common. But with what a difference. And if Grace Paley had ever seen — ever blundered into — that spooky St. Mark’s Place Ski Lodge, just imagine the magical short story she could have spun around it.
