Quote of the Day (Melissa Rauch, on Malls and ‘The Jersey Girl in Me’)

“The funny thing is, I have zero sense of direction. I’m terrible with maps. But drop me in a mall anywhere, and the Jersey girl in me is activated. I can find the food court, I can find an exit, I can find the Claire’s boutique, I can find the Wetzel’s Pretzels in no time.”—American comic actress Melissa Rauch quoted by Kathryn Shattuck, “That’s Melissa Rauch Crying One Seat Over,” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of Melissa Rauch at the PaleyFest 2013 for The Big Bang Theory, was taken Mar. 13, 2013, by Dominic D.

This Day in Television History (‘Sopranos’ Debut Overturns Convention—and Ideas About New Jersey)

Jan. 10, 1999—HBO hated the title, believing that potential viewers would mistakenly believe it was about opera. 

But with the airing of the pilot for The Sopranos, listeners found themselves amid something far more unusual, even stranger: the physical and emotional landscape of New Jersey mobster Tony Soprano, who, after a family of ducks flies away from the swimming pool they have made their home, has an anxiety attack, sending him to a psychiatrist.

American audiences confirmed what the HBO suits couldn’t grasp: that it was possible to distinguish the TV sopranos from those found in Milan’s La Scala.

It helped that six seasons gave viewers time to absorb multiple plotlines; voters awarded it 21 Emmys; and critics hailed it as among the most significant dramas in TV history, inaugurating an era when showrunners used the greater creative freedom of cable TV to present a series of complicated anti-heroes seldom seen in such abundance on the small screen.

In addition, though, the series share some elements with opera as a venerable form of musical theater: figures whose names frequently ended with vowels; very specific locations; and characters erupting volcanically, ranging from silliness to tragedy.

Let’s discuss those locations. The HBOs suits would also have preferred that the series be shot in Los Angeles or New York (cities not only glamorous, but also convenient for them to visit and interfere with).

But series creator David Chase (who, incidentally, modeled mob boss Tony Soprano’s mother Livia on his own mom) knew what he was doing in shooting off the beaten track. 

Though interior locations were generally at Silvercup Studios in New York City, most exterior shots took place, as noted in Nathan Miranda’s post on the “Screen Rant” blog, in Northern New Jersey.

It was, admittedly, cheaper to shoot the latter, as the show’s crews would have had to pay not just the New York establishments they wanted but other businesses on the street who’d object to all the customers they’d lose during shooting, and parking would not be as ample as in the Garden State.

More important, the exteriors of shops, diners, and other establishments lent the feeling of authenticity for which Chase was striving. 

He knew these Northern New Jersey streets intimately, having grown up there. In the oral history he compiled with Michael Imperioli, Woke Up This Morning, Steve Schirrippa recalled Chase saying that New Jersey “was like another cast member.”

In the pilot episode, for instance, Centanni's Meat Market was named after an establishment in Elizabeth, but was actually shot in Kearny. 

New Jersey also provided for a variety of locations crucial for the series' ambiance.

Longtime viewers are most familiar, of course, with the Soprano family's home, featured at the end of the title sequence. 

The roughly 5,600-sq.-ft. estate in North Caldwell came to symbolize the American Dream to which Tony and his associates aspired, and whose creature comforts Tony's wife Carmela craved, despite her gnawing doubts about his "profession."

At the other extreme were locations that placed a premium on grittiness: 

*the real-life strip joint on Route 17 that served as the mobsters' "Bada Bing" hangout (itself a winking reference to a James Caan ad-libbed line from The Godfather); 

*bakeries and diners in North Arlington and Kearny, respectively, where killings took place; and, 

*abandoned buildings in Newark that remind Tony's crew of unwanted depths, even as they continue to exploit the current residents of these mean streets.

Over the years, entire tours have been created centering around these and other locations. 

I have a feeling that they will continue to be popular, because, for all the atrocities committed by its characters (including, joltingly, in the "College" episode, in which viewers saw the protagonist of a series actually murder someone), The Sopranos reminds us, again and again, that they can be found in our neighborhoods, our schools, our eateries, and our stores. 

They are, in other words, all too human and like us, despite our wish that it was otherwise.

During much of its original run, I groaned a little inside when people outside New Jersey would refer to it as "The Sopranos State." I wish they had not crowded out another, more  positive state association dating back to my high school days: to Bruce Springsteen.

But at least those outsiders did not associate New Jersey with vapidity, as so many would do with reality shows like "Jersey Shore" and "Real Housewives of New Jersey."

Instead, the show highlighted for millions the creative talent in the state, including, from my own Bergen County, actors James Gandolfini (from Park Ridge), playing Tony, and Vincent Curatola (Englewood), playing Johnny Sack.

This Day in Literary History (Edmund Wilson Sr., Disappointed Supreme Court Hopeful and Dad of Literary Critic, Dies)

May 15, 1923—Edmund Wilson Sr., a former Attorney General of New Jersey and father of his namesake, the preeminent “Lost Generation” public intellectual (pictured here), died at age 59 in Red Bank, N.J., in the home that had given him and his only son little psychic comfort.

The influence of fathers on their famous literary progeny could comprise a book in itself. The relationship of Wilson, father and son, was especially fraught. Though the father won great recognition and financial rewards in his life, his fame has been completely overshadowed by that of his only child (to such a point that, while there are few useful photos of the father, there are quite a few--including the one I have here--of the son.)

Through much of a career that in which he was universally recognized as America’s leading literary and social critic, Edmund Wilson Jr. (who dropped the suffix early on) rebelled repeatedly against his father. Easier said than done.

Edward Sr. (whom I will designate as “Senior” from here out to distinguish him from his son) and several brothers had attended Princeton University in the 1880s and 1890s—which, when combined with his high reputation in legal circles, virtually assured entrance to that Ivy League school for his son.

But, if Senior furnished “Bunny” (the nickname given the future literary titan in childhood by his mother) with a standard for culture set very high, he also bequeathed him with a genetic and environmental legacy that the young man tried but failed to shed: depression all enveloping. 

Though I had read works by and about the more famous Edmund Wilson for years, I had never come across anything about his background until I read Christopher Benfey’s 2007 New Republic review of a biography of the critic that highlighted the filial relationship.

As I read about Senior’s late-life decline into lassitude from his earlier peak, I was reminded of nothing so much as Richard Simon, who, having been sidelined at the firm he co-founded, Simon and Schuster, became increasingly sullen, remote and frail—an atmosphere of alienation and emotional unavailability that daughter Carly memorialized in her first hit song, “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” (I wrote about this psychodrama in this blog post from 13 years ago.)

Even at an early age, Senior’s achievements were substantive. He lost only one case in his entire career, and that was early on. Despite being appointed by a GOP governor (and being a Republican himself), his reputation for integrity was burnished when he secured guilty verdicts against 200 members of the Republican political machine in Atlantic City, including the boss himself, Louis “the Commodore” Kuehnle, Jr., in a case that Senior personally prosecuted.

The prestige accruing from this successful prosecution was so significant that the recently elected Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson (no relation to the AG), seriously considered nominating him to the Supreme Court after his victorious 1912 campaign for the White House.

Instead, Wilson chose three other men: John Hessin Clarke, who only served on the court for six unhappy years; Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, and a leading liberal voice on the court for the next two decades; and James McReynolds, an argumentative, racist, anti-Semitic blight on the bench all the way into the FDR administration.

I was unable to discover why the President passed over Senior. But already since his mid-30s, Senior had, according to an essay his son wrote in the mid-1950s, “passed into the shadow.” Evidence of this “neurotic distemper,” exhibited most obviously early on in hypochondria, became more pronounced as time went on.

In his final years, as his bouts with mental illness became longer and more frequent, Senior shuttled back and forth from home to sanatoria that he would check himself into in the vain hope of relief.

At some point early on, “Bunny” became aware of his parents’ profoundly dysfunctional union. (His mother had become deaf after doctors told her that the mentally unbalanced senior would probably not return to his old routine.)

The knowledge profoundly discomfited him. In an early skit he wrote, “The Sane Tea Party,” his father is depicted as “hopeless hypochondriac” Elgrim Sexton, whose face is ‘lined with the worry and anxiety of dying many deaths.” His uneasiness grew until, in his mid-30s, he had “an unexpected breakdown”—the same age that his father began to exhibit profound unease.

Two decades later—and especially after “Bunny” inherited the old stone house in Talcottville, NY, that his father had regarded as a refuge—Wilson’s feelings towards his father softened.

For one thing, he may have begun to identify with his father’s sense that, like Hamlet, “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” Senior was dismayed by the excesses of the Gilded Age following the Civil War, and loathed serving as an attorney for railroads, the epitome of corporate corruption in that era.

Bunny, who served as a nurse and as a translator at General Headquarters in WWI, felt acutely the postwar malaise that gripped other writers of his generation such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (a classmate of his at Princeton). The Roaring Twenties, much like the Gilded Age, profoundly disappointed those who had hoped for a better world.

Second, Bunny realized that, though he exhibited the same melancholy that had undone his father, he also possessed an openness to people with different points of view, and a similar searching, restless intelligence. Though a Republican, Senior would talk to anyone—including, unusually for someone in the business circles he frequented, Socialists.

Bunny’s biographer called his dad “a kind of instinctual Jeffersonian Democrat with a Tory coloring—a libertarian who had little faith in either big government or big business. His greatest desire was to be left alone.” In the same light, Wilson—who had briefly embraced Marxism during the Great Depression—arrived at a fundamental distrust of the uses of government, perhaps best expressed in the title of a cantankerous later piece, “The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest.”

Leon Edel, the editor of Bunny’s diaries, linked the habits of mind shared by father and son when he wrote of the “taproots of the son's imagination, his ability to live himself into the past as few historians have done, while maintaining a cool detachment (as his father had done); his supreme power of summary and utterance—qualities of both literature and the law.”

Radio Quote of the Day (Bob and Ray, on a Corrupt Mayor of 'Skunk Haven, New Jersey')

Journalist [played by Bob Elliott]: “The story of this man’s trial has been front-page news of most newspapers across the country for the past several weeks. He is the corrupt mayor of Skunk Haven, New Jersey, Mayor Ralph ‘Moody’ Thayer. Mayor Thayer…?”

Mayor Thayer [played by Ray Goulding]: “Thank you…”

Journalist: “…Down through the years, through your various administrations, you've managed to riddle each and every department with corruption, from the top all the way through even to the visiting nurse association. I’d like to ask you a question, and don’t answer right away. Give it a little thought. Would you say it's easier to be corrupt now than it was, oh, ten or fifteen years ago?”

Thayer: “Oh, my, yes! Here ten or fifteen years ago it was a disgrace to be corrupt. Now it's a rich, fertile field. I would recommend it to anyone with a devious mind, who is willing to put in long, long hours without working hard.”—Bob Elliott (1923–2016) and Ray Goulding (1922–1990​), “Corrupt Mayor” routine, in their Bob and Ray: The Two and Only LP (1970)

I came across a transcript of this skit (which I have only reproduced in part) while leafing through Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, Tom Davis’ 2009 memoir of serving as a writer and occasional on-air performance in the early years of Saturday Night Live. I did a double-take when Davis wrote that he and his SNL partner Al Franken “owe no greater debt than to Bob and Ray.”

I was so surprised because SNL humor, especially in its formative years, has tended towards an edgy, irreverent brand of humor seemingly at odds with the older Boston-originating radio comedy legends. (Indeed, in a 1984 interview with Bill Wedo of The Morning Call, Goulding, in a none-too-subtle slap at this style of humor, noted, “You watch them doing jokes about cripples. I don't see anything funny about a cripple.")

Nevertheless, in an appearance on the TV show, the initially reluctant Bob and Ray were convinced by Franken and Davis to perform a skit mocking Rod Stewart’s “"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

I have another reason for liking Bob and Ray’s “Corrupt Mayor” skit: It evokes knowing chuckles and nods of recognition from anyone hailing from New Jersey. Despite its small size, the state enjoys a well-earned reputation as one of the most corrupt states in the nation. In fact, a 2019 review of political scandals in the Garden State referred to “A Jersey Tradition,” and Steven Malanga’s article from the same year in City Journal castigated “The ‘Miserable’ State.”

What makes this tradition so long-lasting—and such a rich source of comedy for the likes of Bob and Ray—is its bipartisan. In a 2014 post on the burgeoning “Bridgegate” scandal, I took note not only of the culture of contempt that then-Governor Chris Christie imparted to his aides, but also to the arrogance of his Democratic predecessors over the prior decade, Jim McGreevy and Jon Corzine.

“Skunk Haven,” indeed! Pick any spot on the map and you won’t be far from the home and power base of today’s counterpart to Mayor Thayer!

Quote of the Day (Patti Smith, on Her NJ Cultural Upbringing)

“In our house, we had very little except for books. We had no money. But in 50s America people would dump books. Whole libraries. Or someone died. So we had beautiful books because my family would go to a church bazaar and buy them for pennies. Really, no one wanted them.” —Singer-songwriter, poet, and memoirist Patti Smith, on her cultural upbringing in southern New Jersey, quoted in John Heilpern, “Conversation: Out to Lunch With Patti Smith,” Vanity Fair, November 2015

(The image accompanying this post, of Patti Smith performing at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, was taken by her sister, Kimberly Smith, on Dec. 31, 2007.)

Clown Time Is Over: Christie Leaves Jersey Commuters in the Cold

To start the new work year, I waited 40 minutes in sub-freezing temperatures for a bus, any bus, with an empty seat to take me on my morning trip into the Port Authority building in midtown Manhattan.

But when you get right down to it, Chris Christie left fellow New Jersey commuters in the cold for his entire eight years in office—not only waiting in vain for service that could respond to events in the 21^st century, but just to maintain levels already achieved.

In his final weeks on the job, New Jersey’s governor has gone public with his annoyance at successor Phil Murphy for posing with a large cutout photo of Christie in his infamous beach image from this past summer. (“It sends a really terrible message to people about if you say you want to bring people together.”)

Too damn bad, I say. After years of public service, you’d think that Christie would have long since developed a hide thick enough to match his belly—particularly since he has been so adept at pouring on his critics scorn as thick as his holiday turkey gravy.

I hold no brief for Murphy, who, in his year-long media saturation campaign, took a page out of fellow plutocrat Jon Corzine’s electoral playbook.
 
But give Murphy points for recognizing that the state’s infrastructure is a disaster; for starting his own “Time’s Up” movement by warning low-accomplishment, high-salaried appointees that they should be seeking other work soon; and for pointing to the person who, more than any other in the state’s dismal quarter-century of recent transportation history, is responsible: Christie.

Over a year ago, I identified Christie as a leading member of the “Pig Pen” of conservative GOP officeholders, commentators and operatives who aided the rise of Donald Trump. For that craven attempt to curry favor with the Chaos President, he will bear the full brunt of historians’ judgment.

‘Sad,’ ‘Pathetic’—and a Punchline

But in the meantime, with a 15% approval rating (lower than even his sorry predecessor Corzine), New Jerseyans have already delivered their own judgment of Christie’s (mis)leadership. Increasingly, that judgment can be summed up in words often used in the tweets of the GOP nominee he endorsed sooner than any other governor in the nation: “sad” and “pathetic.”

The cause of his fall was also the reason behind his abysmal transportation record: his headlong, misbegotten campaign for the Presidency, a pursuit that not only was a waste of time but catnip to late-night comics. He went from a colossus in his state—an incumbent who swamped his hapless rival in his 2013 re-election campaign—to a figure of derision. 

By the end of the first week of February 2016, he had made 190 stops in New Hampshire to secure a primary win in that state, more than any other candidate, according to NECN's candidate tracker. While he was away, his energy was distracted as the legislature squabbled over how to adequately fund a nearly broke fund to repair state roads.

Even before rivals such as Trump took a swipe at him as an absentee governor, New Jerseyans had come to the same conclusion. The suspension of his Presidential campaign, in the vain hope that Trump would dangle a significant post in his administration, left him the most broken of lame ducks for nearly two years before he left office.

Nobody had dared cross him while he was riding high. After his campaign crashed, nobody could stop deriding him. (As one example among many, David Letterman: "Governor Christie was asked, 'Do you think this will hurt your chances of being president of the United States?’ And he said, 'Hey, we'll close that bridge when we come to it.'")

The governor is a famous Bruce Springsteen fan. But in his final 24 hours leading the state, he should heed not “Born to Run” but another tune by a Seventies rocker: Elvis Costello’s “Clown Time Is Over.”

Bridgegate Didn’t Start Christie’s Transportation Mess

A post of mine from four years ago on Bridgegate reviewed that rank abuse of power in the light of two other Christie transportation failures: 

*dropping the ARC Tunnel project under the Hudson—not just a project he previously backed in talks with the Obama administration, but one that was already funded, under construction and desperately needed to relieve traffic congestion. However, pathologically tax-averse GOP primary voters needed to be appeased at all costs. (The full consequences of terminating ARC won’t be appreciated until 2020, when Amtrak begins closing the existing tunnels for repairs. Christie had better hope that, with the resulting delays, he doesn’t have a job that calls for him to cross the Hudson—or to pass irate fellow commuters with long memories along the way.)

*defending a New Jersey Transit system that failed to take into account the impact of climate change—and watching as 300 railcars, one quarter of its fleet, were damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

But we now know, due to the media that Christie and Donald Trump have scorned as much as they have courted, that these failures were part of a larger, system-wide breakdown facilitated by the outgoing governor and his spineless minions:

*Using funds for a purpose unintended by legislation. Christie leaned hard on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to shift money intended for the ARC Tunnel project to rehabilitate the Pulaski Skyway and two other state roads, all so that he would not enrage GOP Presidential primary voters by raising the state gas tax or state voters by raiding the transportation trust fund. The reasoning behind it was a bald-faced lie: that these roads provided direct “access” to the Lincoln Tunnel. (Take out a map and see if you agree.) The Securities and Exchange Commission saw through the ruse, and last month, after a lengthy investigation, fined the Port Authority $400,000 for the fiscal diversion. 

*Allowing nationwide models of efficiency to deteriorate. Some of my readers are, like me, old enough to recall when New Jersey Transit had an admirable record of on-time performance. Not anymore. According to a March 2017 Bloomberg News report, the agency’s railroad has the most accidents and safety fines among its peers. 

*Stocking an agency with unqualified cronies. Christie’s aspirations for higher office—not just President, but also Attorney-General, chief of staff and even transition head for Trump—unraveled because of the machinations of one such patronage dump, David Wildstein, a high-level Christie appointee to the Port Authority who concocted the insanely vindictive Bridgegate scheme. But the Port Authority, we now know, was not the only institution that he used to install allies and undermine its mission. Two weeks before Christie was due to leave office, the Bergen Record reported that NJ Transit hired or promoted 10 of the governor’s staffers at a time when it couldn’t retain veteran employees necessary to operate the system safely and reliably. The draining of the latter talent pool gave other states an edge in creating advanced transportation systems that will serve the long-term interests of citizens—even while New Jerseyans must struggle right now with delays and cancellations so severe in the New Jersey Transit system that some frustrated commuters are even floating the idea of refunds. In the early postwar period, GOP anti-labor advocates helped popularize the term featherbedding as a term of opprobrium for union "make-work" sinecures. But, by appropriating the idea for his own purposes, the outgoing Republican governor of the Garden State deserves a similar neologism in his honor: Christie-bedding.

 

*Putting lipstick on the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) pig. True, long lines at DMV locations were a constant under the direction of prior New Jersey governors of both parties. Christie’s solution? A name change for the institution, to the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC), and a vow to use computers to streamline operations. Those who sensed something amiss were right: the new name was a public-relations move leading to no upgrade in efficiency, a state of affairs that quickly became apparent when that new-fangled technology…failed to work. In the meantime, several state inspection and license/registration offices had closed, forcing motorists to travel miles away to locations with lines even longer than what existed before. By August 2016, Christie was calling these continuing failures “unacceptable” and vowing immediate action—a statement pretty rich, because he already had done so much by himself to worsen their condition.

In an odd way, this perhaps least-noticed aspect of Christie’s mismanagement of the state’s transportation needs ties back to his most famous one. Lost amid the round of accusations cascading around Bridgegate was another by Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage that the Christie administration took an ax to an MVC location in his city—the fourth largest in the state—in 2010 as retribution for opposing such administration initiatives as an annual cap on budget and property tax hikes.

The Christie administration denied the charge four years ago. But the modus operandi of Bridgegate—i.e, using an element of the transportation system as a tool for political vengeance—may have gotten its first tentative, small-scale tryout here.

Untruth and Consequences

Already serious, the consequences of Christie’s malign neglect of state commuters will likely become dire in the not-so-distant future. That Gateway project agreement he trumpeted as a better deal for the state? It’s already unraveling. Christie was too busy jumping on planes carrying him to Iowa and New Hampshire voters to explain to his own constituents how the $13 billion Gateway tunnel would have been a better financial deal than the $8.7 billion one already in place for ARC. 

(Oh, and those potential cost overruns he cited as a reason for killing ARC? He never bothered to say how Gateway--to be started, at best, several years later--would not avoid incurring the same unanticipated add-on costs.)

But now, the Federal Transit Administration has thrown cold water on a recent funding proposal by New York and New Jersey for the first phase of the project that would have the federal government take on half of that portion of the bill. 

Tell me, Faithful Reader: Will the self-proclaimed “Builder President” aid his--ahem, biggest--early supporter by defying a red-state base on Capitol Hill with no interest at all in helping along anything related to the Eastern Seaboard—particularly anything within a paragraph of the words “mass transit” and “taxes”?

For a governor who throughout his two terms rated himself highly for management efficiency, a pro-business attitude and concern for the middle class, Christie failed spectacularly in overseeing the state’s transportation needs because he and his top appointees—who, once can be sure, do not take public transportation from out of state to their jobs-- could not understand the centrality of transportation to business site selection decisions. To start with, millennials are more comfortable in using public transportation than other age groups, and attracting and retaining young talent is a priority for businesses. 

But even for other age cohorts, every half hour that a worker loses in stalled traffic means higher stress that finds its cost in heightened medical expenses and family fractures. That same half hour in traffic for businesses spells lost productivity.

It is debatable whether, as Barack Obama contended, "elections have consequences." But the Christie Administration went a long way toward proving that all forms of untruth do.

The biggest lie was that Christie was a responsible guardian of the public's money. For a while, he got away with pursuing a selfish short-lived run for the Presidency that sacrificed the long-term public interest, and with parking his own loyaltists at the public trough. 

But it all caught up with him in the end, and now it's Christie who can see no future in either Trenton or Washington. Cold comfort on this night to the citizens he misled and abused for two terms.

Quote of the Day (Nathaniel Hawthorne, on ‘Autumnal Sunshine’)

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house."—American novelist/short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Oct. 10, 1842 notebook entry, The American Notebooks (1875)

(I took the photo accompanying this post nine years ago in the Ramapo Mountain State Forest in northern New Jersey.