Today is John Lennon’s 66th birthday.

Friend and Park Slope neighbor, Jill Eisenstadt, writes acclaimed novels, hilarious articles for the New York Times’ City section and other magazines, and has three children and a novel writing husband (Michael Drinkard).

She’s also a filmmaker. With her sister, she wrote a film called, THE LIMBO ROOM, and it’s making its way to a film festival near you.  I am SOOOO IMPRESSED.

THE WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL:
OCTOBER 13th – Fri. 10pm UPSTATE FILMS – RHINEBECK NEW YORK-
OCTOBER 14th-  Sat. 9:45pm – WOODSTOCK TOWN HALL-

VISION FEST NYC- CLOSING NIGHT FILM:
TRIBECA CINEMAS
(Laight & Varick)
Sunday, Oct. 29th @ 8pm

THE MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE
THE QUEENS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
November – times tba

THE LIMBO ROOM written by jill eisenstadt & debra eisenstadt, directed by debra eisenstadt, produced by alessandra gatien, brett morgen, debra eisenstadt, dir. of photography- jay silver editing- debra eisenstadt, jen lilly with- andrea powell, melissa leo, jonathan marc sherman, zack griffiths, roger raines, richard vetere, cathy curtain, peter dinklage, & many more….

for info. and reviews about the limbo room
go to www.withoutabox.com then go to THE LIMBO ROOM’s audience page

On Monday we finally opened the e-mail sent by the cat owners. Somehow it slipped my notice. In the email, the cat owners included names, pictures, and some personality details about the cats.

The cats even have names: Jethro and Phoebe.

We did everything right even though we never saw the formal instructions artfully drafted by the cat owners.

"Pet and talk to them. Jethro was a feral cat and still is skittish. He may not let you pet him but don’t take it personally. He meows more than any cat we’ve ever known and sometimes it sounds like he’s saying "batman" or "mama." Phoebe loves to be petted."

A friend asked if Teen Spirit would like to make some money feeding cats over the weekend, while she and her family went on vacation over the Columbus Day Holiday.

I told her that I wasn’t sure about Teen Spirit’s plans but I knew OSFO would LOVE to do some cat sitting.

She loves taking care of pets. And this would not be the first time that she’s been enlisted to take care of cats, guinea pigs, birds, and turtles.

Of course, as OSFO is only nine, I knew I’d be going along, too. So these pet sitting jobs are kind of a mother/daughter affair. And they’re always a bit of an adventure for both of us.

Saturday morning; We have to go feed the cats. We have to feed the cats. OSFO loves using keys to open doors so that was big fun, too. Once in, we had to figure out how to unlock the gate on the second floor landing ("DO NOT LET THE CATS GO DOWNSTAIRS, THEY’LL WREAK HAVOC," my friend warned).

Putting food in the bowl was a cinch as was refilling the water bowl. Dealing with the poop in the litter box was a bit more, shall we say, complicated. But OSFO was game and made sure to wash her hands thoroughly afterward.

OSFO asked if my friend was an artist and I said yes. "I thought so because there are so many paintings." Indeed, it is a very artistic house with interesting mid-century furniture, Japanese lamps, perfectly placed paintings, cool vintage objects, a unique color palette, interesting books. Okay I checked out their CD collection, too and it was an eclectic blend heavy on the Bob Dylan and the Glenn Gould: but that was just a quick look).

The house looks completely effortless and simple. Not showy, not "designed." It’s just a very comfortable, aesthetic place to be.

We did however have trouble finding the cats. I believe there are two of them but we only found one sitting on top of an unmade bed on the third floor. OSFO pet the cat a bit but she seems like a very private cat, a majestic cat, a cat that VANTS TO BE A ALONE.

She couldn’t be bothered with a couple of cat sitters.

The other cat — we never saw. Maybe we’ll find the other one tomorrow.

OSFO and I were walking down Seventh Avenue puttting up signs about Teen Spirit’s benefit concert next week (October 14th at 6 p.m. at the Old Stone House) when my friend, Barbara Ensor, author of Cinderella (As If You Didn’t Already Know the Story) called and asked if we were busy.

She needed help with her shadow puppet show.

Why not, I thought. We were planning on being at the reading anyway. And I knew it would be fun to help Barbara carry out her ultra-creative vision of a children’s book reading and puppet show.

In the cozy and whimsically decorated children’s section Community Books, Barbara set up her homemade shadow puppet theater — a grocery box with a shower curtain screen and a halogen lamp from Ikea. She handed me a paperback copy of the book with numbered cues and showed me all of the flat black puppets. It took a little practice but after the while I got the hang of it.

After a quick rehearsal, Barbara asked OSFO to do some directing. "Tell your mom how the puppets look. Tell her how to make them look better," she said.

For the show, OSFO was enlisted to sit alongside Barbara and pretend to read an oversized copy of the book while Barbara read excerpts outloud to the audience.

The reading was originally organized because Barbara got a fan letter from an 8-year-old girl named Ali who lives in Santa Diego.

Ali and family were shocked when Barbara actually wrote them back!!

Turned out that Ali’s family was planning a trip east for a baby naming ceremony at the Old Stone House. What a coincidence, they were making a trip to Park Slope of all places. So Barbara thought it would be fun to have a reading in Ali’s honor.

Sure enough, Ali and family arrived at the bookstore at 3:30 sharp. A small crowd packed the  back room of Community Bookstore and the short show went without a hitch. We did it twice when others wandered in who missed the show the first time around.

At the second show, OSFO got to be the puppeteer—and she did a great job. She even played the red spinet piano at the beginning and end of the show.

The book is great and is gathering up some great reviews, including one in the New York Times Book Review. There will certainly be more readings and workshops and OTBKB will keep you posted. In the meantime, pick up the bright orange chapter book (with the groovy black and white illustrations) at a bookstore and see what all the fuss is about.

It’s a really, really fun read. For excerpts from the book and examples of the illustrations, check out Barbara’s really cool website: barbaraensor.com

Tracy Connor, a Daily News reporter, has a great story in Sunday’s Daily News. She happens to be the daughter of Park Slope hero, Jackie Connor, who died last Spring and now has a street named after her on Seventh Avenue and Carroll.

Now, she’s armed and dangerous (i.e.: she’s breastfeeding). I noticed that she was pregnant at Jackie’s memorial. She had a tiny baby at the dedication of Jackie’s corner in September. Now Tracy weighs in on the great breastfeeding debate. With baby on her breast, she went out to public spaces in New York City to find out how people really feel about it.

The Daily News put the issue to a test by dispatching reporter Tracy
Connor and her 3-month-old daughter, Charlie, to nurse at humble and
posh locations around town. Here’s her account of who is hip to NIP
and, perhaps surprisingly, who is not.

There’s even a picture of Tracy  discreetly nursing her daughter on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. The story was in Sunday’s Daily News. Here’s her story.

When a Brooklyn mom claimed she was harassed for breast-feeding her baby at the Toys "R" Us store in Times Square, her story brought forth complaints from other mothers with similar tales of woe.

A state law, enacted in 2002, says that any mother can breast-feed a child in any place, public or privately owned, where she is otherwise authorized to be.

But to hear some mothers tell it, there are still stores and restaurants hostile to women who nurse in public – or NIP, the shorthand used on breast-feeding Web sites.

The Daily News put the issue to a test by dispatching reporter Tracy Connor and her 3-month-old daughter, Charlie, to nurse at humble and posh locations around town. Here’s her account of who is hip to NIP and, perhaps surprisingly, who is not.

The Apple Store – Inside the gleaming white Mac mecca on Fifth Ave. and 59th St., where workers in identical T-shirts rush to straighten iPods knocked askew, I’m certain my baby and I will be a spectacle.

On a low circular concrete bench facing a busy bank of computers, I pick a spot between two guys – a businessman and a hipster glued to their laptops – and in full view of a dozen sales associates.

Out comes the nursing pillow, down goes the baby, up comes the shirt and I toss a coverup over my shoulder. Twenty minutes, we’re done – and no one has said a peep. My benchmates never look up.

All in all, I would have created more of a stir if I’d announced my home computer is a Dell.

"I don’t know if we have a policy that you can or can’t do it, but breast-feeding is natural," one employee tells me. "Now, we do have people who come in and log onto certain sites on the Internet and take out certain body parts – that we don’t allow."

Crosstown bus: We board a M79 at midday, taking a seat opposite the driver. At the next stop, the bus starts to fill up and we get down to business.

The baby wriggles around, exposing a few inches of skin – and all around me, riders develop the kind of glazed-eye look usually reserved for panhandlers and the mentally ill.

Finally, one passenger pipes up, "Can you do that someplace else?" But she’s not talking to me – she’s barking at a man talking loudly on his cell phone.

When we get to the end of the line, the driver tells me I’m his first breast-feeder passenger. He’s not sure what the Transit Authority’s policy on nursing is, but he has his own. "I don’t see no objections to it," he says.

Babies "R" Us: After Toys "R" Us was the target of a high-profile "nurse-in" protest and warned by the New York Civil Liberties Union, I expect that employees at its corporate partner will politely ignore my breast-feeding. In the back of an aisle at the chain’s Bay Parkway, Brooklyn, store, I feed my child quietly for five minutes – until a worker spots me.

"Excuse me, ma’am," she bellows. "We have a room where you can do that."

I explain that I had checked out the "mother’s room" and found the sofa dirty, but she’s undeterred.

"It’s not good in the open like this…for the other people who can see," she presses.

When I remind her that I can legally breast-feed wherever I want, she changes her tune. "I just think you would be more comfortable," she says. "If you’re comfortable here, that’s fine."

Moments later, another clerk sees us and says, "Oh Lord!" She scurries off, perhaps to speak to a manager, and I brace for a new confrontation. But when she returns it’s with the offer of a chair to use in the aisle and when I refuse it, she leaves us in peace.

Corporate spokeswoman Kathleen Waugh said the first worker broke store policy. An internal review is under way, and the chain may revamp its training.

"Any mother may breast-feed her child in the place of her choice in any of our stores," Waugh says.

Metropolitan Museum of Art – The airy wing that houses the Temple of Dendur looks like it would make an artful lactation lounge, so we settle on a stone wall right across from the ancient Nubian monument.

Throngs of tourists, mostly foreign, pay us no mind. A security guard issues stern warnings to every visitor using a video camera or cell phone, yet somehow misses the baby at my bosom.

But later he says that if he had seen us, he would have thrown us out. Why? "There’s no eating or drinking in the galleries," he explains.

When I raise an eyebrow, he tells me to check with the information desk, where a woman consults a supervisor and confirms the guard was incorrect: "This is New York City, and a mother may feed her baby wherever she feels comfortable."

Le Cirque – A slightly chilly reception at the restaurant’s front desk – an admonition about crying babies – makes me think nursing in the lap of luxury will turn some stomachs. But it’s quite the opposite.

There is a little buzz among the wait staff and a few older diners as Charlie noisily tries to latch on several times from an awkward position on the banquette next to the kitchen.

But then everyone acts as though the suckling is as natural as a $100 lunch tab. Servers smile as they deliver bread, and one acknowledges the breast-feeding when I pull the baby off as my appetizer arrives.

"She’s saying, ‘Mommy, I want some more,’" the server says.

General manager Benito Sevarin tells me I’m hardly the first woman to breast-feed over four-star cuisine.

"In fact, a few days ago we had a woman – a very famous woman, I won’t tell you her name – nursing her baby," he says. "There’s nothing wrong with it."

Sean Lennon’s CD is the one new album I’m curious about this week. This is from NPR.

The latest release from singer and songwriter Sean Lennon tells a very personal story of love, friendship and betrayal.

Friendly Fire, the second album from the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, is accompanied by a DVD of short films, one for each song.

The
largely autobiographical project is dedicated to Lennon’s lifelong
friend, Max LeRoy, who died last year in a motorcycle accident.

Lennon
explains how he, LeRoy and Lennon’s then-girlfriend, Bijou Phillips,
were involved in a love triangle. LeRoy died before the two men were
able to reconcile. Lennon says that Friendly Fire explores the profound effect LeRoy’s death has had on him.

Despite
growing up in the spotlight, Lennon says it’s very natural for him to
express such personal feelings in his art and music.

What
strikes him as unnatural, Lennon says, is when people think of him as a
"cardboard figure" onto which they project their ideas of what John
Lennon’s son should be like.

Annie Lebovitz’s show at the Brooklyn Museum is coming on October 20th. This from the New York Times:

IN the days after the death of Susan Sontag in December 2004, Annie Leibovitz began searching for photographs for a small book to be given out at the memorial service. She started with other people’s photographs of Ms. Sontag, then turned to her own, taken during the 15 years they spent together. That exercise turned into what she has described as an archeological dig: an unearthing and sifting of a decade and a half of work, love, family life, illness, deaths and births, adding up to “my most important work,” she said in an interview this week. “It’s the most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”

The photographs, published earlier this week by Random House in a book titled “A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005,” will be shown at the Brooklyn Museum in an exhibition opening Oct. 20. The collection interweaves the professional and the personal, the public and private, in startling ways. It includes many of the bold, often carefully composed portraits of celebrities, musicians, artists and presidents for which Ms. Leibovitz became famous at Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. There is Sarajevo in 1993, ground zero in September 2001. And there is previously unseen “personal reportage” on her big and exuberant family, her parents, her life with Ms. Sontag, the births of her three daughters, Ms. Sontag’s illnesses and death, and the death of Ms. Leibovitz’s father six weeks later.

Last year at this time, Teen Spirit’s band, Cool and Unusual Punishment, organized a  benefit for the victims of Hurricane Katrina at the Old Stone House called "Teens for New Orleans."

That show turned out great. More than 200 kids and adults showed up and it was a blast for a great cause.

This year the band is planning another benefit. This time, it’s "Teens for the Philippines" and they’re reaching out to street children in Manila. This benefit will support a home that is being built for these kids.

The show is on October 14th from 6-9 p.m. Here’s the line-up: Zach Fine on sitar, RAPR, Tetsuwan Fireball, Somewhere There’s a Fix, and Cool and Unusual Punishment.

TICKETS ARE $10 dollars for adults and $5 dollars for kids.

There will be food for sale as well as information about St. Martin de Pores, which is a home for kids and teens rescued from the
streets of Manila. Though many of them are not technically orphans,
they effectively are as living on the streets is often safer than
living at home. Many are abused by their parents, who more often than
not are crippled by their own addictions to drugs and inability to deal
with the pressures of extreme poverty. So at very young ages, children
head out to the streets to beg, collect plastic garbage to sell, shine
shoes, and scrape out a very meager living. They sleep wherever they
can and eat by scavenging through the garbage at outdoor markets and
picking through the dump. Not surprisingly many end up falling in with
gangs, resort to petty thievery and prostitution, and sadly many don’t
survive past their teens.

To help these kids, a priest born in the Philippines, Father Boyet,
has founded a home for them outside Manila, which my foundation, the
John D.V. Salvador Foundation, is raising money to expand. Not only did
he create a safe loving place for them to live, he and the house
parents and volunteers transport them to a local school, where they are
all learning and acquiring skills that will allow them to break free of
the cycle of homelessness and poverty. The proceeds from Teens for the
Philippines would go toward the construction of a dormitory for the
home’s teen boys, who have been sleeping in a former Manila city bus
that’s been outfitted with bunk beds. The dormitory is nearly completed
and construction set to begin in the spring on the girls’ dorm.

To buy tickets or donate even if you can’t make it go here:

http://www.nycharities.org/event/event.asp?CE_ID=736 

Steve of Steve’s Key Lime Pies, Steve’s INCREDIBLE Key Lime pies, knows the chef who is opening North of New Orleans, the new Cajun food outpost on Seventh Avenue. Here’s what Steve wrote to OTBKB:

I know Greg (the chef) from his years at Delta Grill in Manhattan, great to see him headed out on his own. From what I recall speaking with Greg (Delta has been buying my pies for many, many years, and we’ve been doing the 9th Ave. Food Fest together as well), he worked for and trained under Paul Prudhomme. I’m looking forward to their opening, pie sales aside.

You can become immersed in someone else’s apartment – dirty dishes, laundry, clutter and all.

The Brooklyn Apartment is a digitization of Brooklyn. It is an expanding virtual tour of mine and my friends apartment. All environmental details are included, including dirty sink, weird 100-year old bathtub, the toilet, and views of brooklyn streets as well.

The whole point of this is to allow anyone to be immersed in the same environment as the one me and my friends inhabit. Recently, we have also been using the virtual tour as a platform for our art work and the second apartment in the tour(the one you take the city bus to) is primarily an art gallery.

Updates to this project are planned to occur once a month. Each month the territory will expand to include more of this area. Future updates will include digitizations of the East River waterfront, the basement, the subway and more.

If you link to us, we thank you, but please include a link to our the main site which houses all of our projects: Poland-Korea Relations by EmilHiri (http://www.polandkorearelations.com/)