JACKIE ROBINSON DAY 2008: METS VS. YANKEES?

Last night on NY1, sportscaster Tom McDonald compared how the Mets and Yankees recognized Jackie Robinson Day, which recognizes the date in 1947 when Robinson played his first Major League Game, with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson's number 42 has been retired from baseball, but on April 15 all players may choose to wear it in honor of the exceptional athlete who officially broke baseball's color barrier and, as McDonald pointed out, subsequently put up with more insults and threats in one season than many people ever face in a lifetime.

McDonald noted that the Mets players went out on the field wearing 42, but that no Yankee player did so other than Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano (who was, apparently, named after Jackie Robinson), and Mariano Rivera, whose number is 42 anyway. (He has special dispensation to continue wearing the number despite its retirement.)

McDonald, a big admirer of Robinson, was very disappointed by the Yankees. I felt the same way: "What's with those Yankees...are they racists? The Mets are so much better!" But then I started thinking, which of course means big trouble. Basically, I thought about how I tend to resist uniform behavior, if you pardon the expression.

I don't like situations where people are expected to display uniformity, even when the uniformity seems to be for a good cause or at least be harmless. I look at how people in Congress wear American flag pins, and think about how Barack Obama has been criticized because he doesn't wear a pin, and I get back to basics like "You can't tell a book by its cover." People are more than what they wear. At least most of the time, right?

And isn't a big part of the Jackie Robinson story about being considered according to ability and accomplishment instead of appearance?

So I guess I'll give the Yankees a pass on this one. I'm glad the Mets fell in line with the 42 thing—and I'm glad the new Mets stadium will have a kind of shrine to Robinson—but I'll try not to make too much of the puzzling behavior of the Yankees.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

ACCESS-A-RIDE STRIKE

I've had trouble finding online guidance for Access-A-Ride users even though the strike by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 against van companies contracted by the MTA is already underway.

NY1 encourages strandees to call Paratransit Reservations at 1-877-337-2017 for guidance.

Here are the MTA's Guide to Access-A-Ride and Guide to Accessible Transit. Here's the website for the Disabled Riders Coalition.

WWW. "So now we've got round-the-clock news for the city. It wasn't so long ago that a 1-hour news show for New York seemed like a radical thing. Now 24 hour news is like some kind of addiction. I bet it's just a matter of time before you stop seeing all the grannies looking out their windows."—Diary entry by M. L. of New York, NY, September 11, 1992


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

BRIAN CHARLES ROONEY: TURN ME ON...TURN ME UP! NY1 just did a piece on high-voiced male singers...and inexplicably omitted sopranist Brian Charles Rooney, who amazed me in The Threepenny Opera. Rooney is pretty excited about his new show, Turn Me On...Turn Me Up!--and so am I.

A Playbill article by Andrew Gans indicates that the versatile Rooney's program will include works by Kurt Weill, Wolfgang A. Mozart, The Doors, Madonna, Jefferson Airplane, Heart, and Queen.

It's scheduled for 8 pm on Monday, April 30, 2007 at the Zipper Theater (336 W. 37 Street). As the theater's website puts it: "Find yourself transported from a salon caught between Victorian England and the Weimar Republic, to a Glam Rock Discotheque of 1980s-esque proportions, to the simple, yet emotional environs of revolutionary and socio-political defiance." How could anyone resist?

As for the show's title, I think it comes from "Music Time" by Styx. Here's the great video!



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