Midland Beach, 1:33 P.M.

Daniel Avila/NYC Parks & Recreation Some of the 777 workers that the city parks department has hired to clean up storm damage worked on the beach today in Midland Beach on Staten Island.

Escaped Zebra Is Now in Relocation Program

Randy Leonard for The New York Times Razzi the zebra has left the city.

And what of Razzi the runaway zebra?

When we left him on Wednesday evening, Razzi, a 4-month-old foal who lives on Staten Island, had returned from his unauthorized tour of the neighborhood in the company of his friend and mentor Casper the pony and was resting quietly on the property of his owner, Giovanni Schirripa.

But the animals' brief escape attracted the attention of the authorities.

On Thursday, said Chanel Caraway, a spokeswoman for the city health department, “a health inspector visited the property, but did not find a zebra.”

That's because Razzi has moved to New Jersey, Mr. Schirripa said.

“The zebra's not here no more,” he said by phone, adding that he took him Wednesday night to a barn near Phillipsburg where he keeps some of his horses.

Mr. Schirripa said he thought inspectors might have been concerned about the conditions the zebra was living in. Possibly, he became mindful that the health department said Wednesday night that he did not have the required permit to keep a zebra on his property (no such permit is required to keep a pony for personal use, the health department said).

Mr. Schirripa said the inspectors told him there was nothing they could do if the zebra wasn't there.

Casper could not be reached for comment about the departure of his friend.

Low-Tech Thief Smashes Store Windows

How does a thief inconspicuously smash a plate-glass door of a clothing store in the middle of Manhattan?

N.Y.P.D. A burglar was captured on video breaking into the Lucky Brand store in the Flatiron district early Wednesday morning.

It helps, apparently, to do it at 3:30 a.m., as the star of the security video above (or here) did, according to the police, on Wednesday at the Lucky Brand store at 172 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron district.

T he thief helped himself to some clothing, the police said. The same man smashed the window of an AT&T store nearby, at 1099 Broadway, on Monday and made off with some property (see video below or here), and on Nov. 15 stole cigarettes and DVDs from a Duane Reade in the vicinity, the police said.

The police do not have a detailed description of the man. Anyone with information about him is asked to contact Crime Stoppers.

Gillibrand Chokes Up Describing Death of 2 Boys in Storm

It was the kind of moment not often seen in the stuffy hearing rooms of Capitol Hill.

At a hearing Thursday morning to assess the impact of Hurricane Sandy, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, began recounting for her colleagues the devastation caused by the storm, citing the loss of life and damages to homes and businesses.

Then, she turned to the story of Brandon and Connor Moore, two young brothers who were swept away from their mother, Glenda, as she and the children tried to escape surging, ten-foot flood waters on Staten Island during the storm's height.

“The most heartbreaking story was when I went to Staten Island and we,'' she said, before pausing for several seconds to hold back tears.

Composing herself briefly, Ms. Gillibrand, continued. “`We met with first responders whose job was to find two children,'' she said, her voice cracking and her eyes welling with tears.

“And what happened in this case was a mother was worried because she lost power and her husband told her to find a different place to stay with the children and urged her to go to Brooklyn to see her mother,'' the senator recounted.

“She took the children in the car,'' Ms. Gillibrand continued. “But what happened in Staten Island was the storm was so severe, a ten-foot wave came across the road. Her vehicle stalled. She took the children out of the car. She tried to get them to higher land.''

“And they were taken from her,'' she went on, her voice quavering. “These children were two-years-old and four-years-old. And the mother could do nothing about it because the storm was so strong.''

The hearing room, packed with senators, Congressional aides and journalists, became spellbound during Ms. Gillibrand's soberin g account to the Environment and Public Works committee.

Ms. Gillibrand, a mother of two boys ages 9 and 4, eventually went on with the rest of her prepared testimony. When she finished, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, the chairwoman of the committee, said she was touched and thanked Ms. Gillibrand for allowing her “emotions to come to the surface.''

For Ms. Gillibrand the story of the two boys was more than just an account she had read.

Two days after the storm ravaged Staten Island, Ms. Gillibrand traveled there for the first time and the first thing she saw was a New York Police Department scuba team searching for the boys.

Then, an officer took her to the Moore's battered and abandoned van.

Fairouz Opera Premiere Will Open the Prototype Festival

The world premiere of Mohammed Fairouz's “Sumeida's Song,” an opera based on the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq El-Hakim's “Song of Death,” will be directed by David Herskovits, and conducted by Steven Osgood, with a cast that includes Rachel Calloway, Dan Kempson, Edwin Vega and Amelia Watkins. The show is to open the first Protoype: Opera/Theater/Now festival, which runs Jan. 9-18 in New York.

The performances are at Here, a theater at 145 Sixth Ave. in TriBeCa that has fostered avant-garde and genre-mixing opera in recent seasons, as well as at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University and the 3LD Art and Technology Center. The festival is a co-production of the Here Arts Center and Beth Morrison Projects.

Mr. Fairouz's opera is about a young Egyptian who refuses to take part in a multigenerational feud and tries to pull his village into modernity, with tragic results. Though a recording of Mr. Fairouz's opera has just been released (on Bridge Records), it has not yet had a full staging.

David T. Little's “Soldier Songs,” a multimedia work based on interviews with veterans of five wars, will have its New York premiere in a production directed by Yuval Sharon, with the baritone Christopher Burchett as the Soldier, and Todd Reynolds conducting the Newspeak Ensemble at the Schimmel Center.

The Dutch ensemble 33 1/3 Collective will present the North American premiere of “Bluebeard,” a work based on the same story as Bartok's “Bluebeard's Castle,” with a recorded soundscape by Michael de Roo, vocal lines sung by Ilse van de Kasteelen and video by Douwe Dijkstra, Coen Huisman and Jules van Hulst, at the 3LD Arts and Technology Center.

The festival also includes a series of multimedia concerts by Timur and the Dime Museum, a Los Angeles ensemble that calls itself a “dark glam band” and produces a theatrical blend of pop, opera and vaudeville, as well as a workshop performance of “Aging Magician,” an opera with music by Paola Prestini and a text by Rinde Eckert. Mr. Eckert will perform the work with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

Levine\'s Comeback Concert to Include Work By Schubert and Beethoven

Schubert's Symphony No. 9, “The Great,” the prelude to Act I of Wagner's “Lohengrin” and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, with Evgeny Kissin as soloist, will make up the program for James Levine's comeback as a conductor on May 19. Mr. Levine will lead the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and it will be his first public performance in two years after a series of health problems. The program replaces the original version, which was announced when it was not clear whether Mr. Levine could conduct and no conductor was listed. The lineup then was Sibelius' Symphony No. 4, the Grieg piano concerto and Schumann's “Konzertstück” for four horns and orchestra.

In mid-October, Mr. Levine announced his return to conducting, including several opera productions next season at the Met, where he has remained music director despite a number of absences. The Met released the new Carnegie program on Thursday, a sign that Mr. Levine, 69, remains confident th at he can return to conducting after lengthy physical therapy following damage to his spine and back operations. Fabio Luisi, the Met's principal conductor, will lead the orchestra at Carnegie on Dec. 2.

Found Money Well Spent

Emily S. Rueb/The New York Times It's not Brewster's millions, but a $50 pile of fives, ready to be distributed on the city's streets.

What would you do if you found $100 on the ground?

Last week at a coffee shop near work, I found two crisp fifties staring up at me from the white stone floor. After making an honest attempt to find the owner, I decided the money was mine to spend as I wished. But how? A thoughtful discussion on City Room followed a prompt for your advice.

“I think it is O.K. that you just keep the money for your own use,” said Jason Shannon from Jersey City. “As my father used to say, ‘Don't lo ok a gift horse in the mouth.'”

But as a lapsed Catholic, I felt that keeping it all would be greedy.

“Why do you feel guilty?” asked RMC from New York. “Because you didn't earn it? Because someone else lost it?”

She continued, “If I found $100 and didn't need it to pay a bill, I'd take my husband out for dinner.”

Since there were two bills, I decided to keep $50 and take the advice of @NYTFridge:

@Rueby Can't imagine you can reliably identify the owner. Take a new friend to lunch downtown next week & tip generously.

- NYTFridge (@NYTFridge) 22 Nov 12

After treating a friend to a meal, I would give the rest away. Many readers suggested lofty causes, like Hurricane Sandy relief, The Times's Neediest Cases Fund or helping pay down the national debt. But I wanted to return the money to the streets from which it came.

Betty from Shrewsbury, N.J. suggested handing out five-dollar bills to homeless people or others in need. “Spread a little unexpected joy around,” she said.

“To be able to brighten the day of a handful of people, at no personal cost to you, seems a bit of a gift in and of itself!” said C.Gadd of Bethlehem, Pa., who had the same idea.

So on Wednesday, I walked the streets and subway platforms with a pocketful of bills, seeking a mix of people who seemed in need of a small boost. I met a man listening to soft rock on a portable radio as he collected bottles, a woman digging through trash cans in Times Square, an opera singer whose lovely voice floated above the din of subway commuters and a blonde crouched on a sidewalk near Grand Central who said she was pregnant and needed to get home to Maine.

Only one person, a woman sitting in a pedestrian plaza near Macy's, refused my offer.

But 10, included in a series of tweets below, received the small gesture with wide smil es, nods and even the jingle of a bell.

[View the story "$50 Well Spent" on Storify]

One of last week's commenters, bklynbar, worried that a homeless person might spend the money on “booze or drugs,” but if I'm using my share on empty calories, who am I to judge what others do with theirs?

In one afternoon, I put a little good karma out in the universe. But there were so many others out there â€" mostly men clutching small signs, lying on cardboard padding on subway grates and in doorways â€" who were in need, too. It was all I could do.

Giving is a matter of feeling, wrote Felicia from Dallas. “Whatever your heart moves you to do, you should do.”

Seeing Orientalist Art as an Aid to East-West Dialogue

Michel Lebrun “The Philosopher” by Ludwig Deutsch (1905) from the collection of Shafik Gabr. Enlarge.

One of the world's leading collectors of Orientalist art believes the genre can teach the diplomatic world much about East-West relations. Shafik Gabr, an Egyptian businessman and philanthropist, says the sort of immersion that Western painters had in the Middle East in the 19th century is the sort of personal interaction that can lead to better understanding between cultures.

So he's holding a symposium on diplomatic relations based on the concept of Orientalist painting on Monday to be followed by a big party at the Metropol itan Museum's Temple of Dendur.

The symposium at 583 Park Avenue, presented by Mr. Gabr's new foundation, includes a panel discussion on “Early Globalists: What Do the Orientalist Travelers Have to Teach Us Today?”

Others in the Middle East and elsewhere have disparaged Orientalist art, with its scenes of harems and fortune tellers, as patronizing.

But Mr. Gabr sees the genre's impact and origins differently.

“Their record of painting, their mission and what they accomplished,” he said in an interview this fall with the International Herald Tribune, “was a truly strong bridge-building experience very early in the 19th century.”

Short Plays From Edinburgh Fringe to Run Off Broadway

Theater Uncut, a scrappy, all-volunteer collective that drew standing room crowds at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer, will present a series of short plays Off Broadway at the Clurman Theater Jan. 29-Feb. 3, the company has announced.

Run by co-artistic directors Emma Callander and Hannah Price, Theater Uncut was launched in March 2011, when a number of British writers were asked to write short plays in response to the brutal cuts in public spending announced by the coalition government in 2010. The resulting scripts were made available for anyone in the world to download and present for free for one week, and about 75 groups took part in that inaugural effort.

In 2012, the company asked a global group of writers, both emerging and established (Neil LaBute was a participant), to respond to the current political climate in their home countries. About a dozen of the resulting scripts were presented at the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh last summer, and th e full collection of 2012 plays was then offered for free download once again. According to Ms. Callander, more than 200 people in 17 countries participated in the recent “international week of action,” held Nov. 12-18.

It is a selection of these latest works that Theater Uncut will present in New York, including Mr. LaBute's “In the Beginning,” about the Occupy movement.

The Theater Uncut series is being offered at the tail end of a previously announced run of “Midsummer [A Play with Songs],” a romantic comedy written and directed by the Scottish playwright David Greig, with songs by Gordon McIntyre. “Midsummer” will run at the Clurman Theater Jan. 9-26. Both shows are being produced by the Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation. “Midsummer,” loosely inspired by Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (with the city of Edinburgh replacing the Athenian forest as an enchanted locale) was presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2009, whe n it was well-received by critics. The original two-person cast, of Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon will appear in the New York production.

Kids Draw the News: Runaway Zebra

Violet, 8, Brooklyn N.Y.

New Assignment

You can see just about anything on the streets of New York City, but a zebra chasing a pony is something that no one had seen until this week, when Razzi the baby zebra and his friend, Casper the pony, escaped from their pen on Staten Island and went trotting down the street.

A man took a video of them running through a parking lot.

They were eventually caught and returned to their owner, who also keeps chickens and peacocks in his yard.

Here is an article about the runaway zebra foal and the pony. You may illustrate any aspect of the story you wish.

To submit drawings by children 12 years of age and under, follow the instructions here: Submit Artwork '

The Last Assignment

Thanks to all of you who illustrated Hurricane Sandy. Your pictures may be seen in the slide show that accompanies this post.

MoMA Adds Video Games to Its Collection

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Pac-Man was included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum earlier this year.

If you have been disparaging video games â€" or, perhaps, trying to wean yourself from an addiction to them â€" it's time to think again. Video games are now high culture, with the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art, which announced on Thursday that it has acquired the first 14 titles in a planned collection of about 40 games. These constitute a new category among the museum's collections, and will be on display in the Philip Johnson Galleries starting in March. (An exhibition devoted to video games will open in December at the Museum of the Moving Image, and another exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, closed in September.)

“Are video games art?” Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the museum's department of architecture and design, asked in a post on the museum's web page. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design - a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The games, Ms. Antonelli wrote, would be selected according to the same criteria the museum uses for other collections, including “historical and cultural relevance, aesthetic expression, functional and structural soundness, innovative approaches to technology and behavior, and a successful sy nthesis of materials and techniques.”

The first items in the museum's new collection are Pac-Man (1980), Tetris (1984), Another World (1991), Myst (1993), SimCity 2000 (1994), vib-ribbon (1999), The Sims (2000), Katamari Damacy (2004), EVE Online (2003), Dwarf Fortress (2006), Portal (2007), flOw (2006), Passage (2008) and Canabalt (2009).

The museum's wish list for future acquisitions runs from the early Spacewar! (1962), through Minecraft (2011). The initial 14 games are to be installed in an exhibition in the museum's Philip Johnson Galleries in March.

Watchlist: \'Last Chance Kitchen,\' the Rare Web Series to Challenge the TV Original

Every self-respecting television show has an online extension these days - webisodes, behind-the-scenes clips, comic Q&A's with the stars. But no one has integrated TV and Internet offerings as completely as the producers of Bravo's “Top Chef.” For the second season in a row they are offering the Web series “Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen” as an essential part of their menu - the starch to the TV show's protein.

“Last Chance Kitchen,” whose new season began Wednesday night on bravotv.com, is sort of like a repechage bracket in a judo competition or the national college baseball tournament. Chefs who have been eliminated on television meet in a stripped-down version of the main show for a chance to stay alive in the competition. On Wednesday night the four contestants cut so far in the current “Top Chef: Seattle” faced off in a single challenge, making a dish in two minutes using the same ingredients that had been their downfall on TV.

Unlike most athletic repechages, however, “Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen” - following the more sentimental dictates of reality TV - offers the losers the opportunity not just to come back, but to win the whole shebang. That chance is even stronger this season, when the winner of “Last Chance Kitchen” gets an automatic bye into the “Top Chef” finale. (Last year's “Last Chance” winner was re-inserted into the TV show three episodes from the end and didn't make it to the finale.)

Some viewers may find that they prefer the online show to its television parent. It's “Top Chef” distilled into one claustrophobic, jittery, 10-minute scene, with no shopping trip or backstage posturing - just cooking with an even greater edge of desperation. And instead of a panel of judges, there's just the stone-faced Tom Colicchio, doling out praise as if it were sips of Romanée-Co nti and grudgingly choosing one chef to move on.

The Web series could even challenge “Top Chef” on its own turf, the Emmys, where the TV show has won twice (for picture editing and, in 2010, for outstanding reality competition). The first season of “Last Chance Kitchen” was actually nominated for an Emmy in a category called Outstanding Special Class - Short-Format Nonfiction Program. Perhaps demonstrating the television academy's true feelings about the role of online content, however, the award went to the Directors Guild of America for a series of old-fashioned, hilariously self-congratulatory online shorts called “DGA Moments in Time.”

Neil Young Announces Hurricane Sandy Benefit Concert

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times Neil Young and Crazy Horse performing in Central Park in September.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse will do a benefit concert at a casino in Atlantic City to raise money for people displaced by Hurricane Sandy. The concert, “A Special Evening with Neil Young & Crazy Horse,” will be held at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa on Dec. 6, a publicist for Mr. Young announced on Thursday. Everest, an alternative rock band from Los Angeles, will open the show. Tickets, which go on sale Friday on the casino's Web site, will cost between $75 and $150. Mr. Young has pledged all the proceeds will go to the American Red Cross's relief fund for vi ctims of the storm.

Mr. Young is only one of several rock stars and pop musicians who are using their celebrity and talent to raise money for recovery efforts. Juanes and Juan Luis Guerra gave their profits from a concert in Brooklyn last week to the Red Cross. At Madison Square Garden on Dec. 12, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, the Who and other rock luminaries will perform at a benefit concert called “12-12-12.”

Other lesser-known artists have donated tracks to a charity album, waiving their royalties. TuneCore, an online distributor of music, has released a compilation album called “After the Storm” that features artists like Foxymoron, Gavin Mikhail and teh Infamous Stringdusters. All of the proceeds are being directed towards rebuilding efforts in New York City.

Psst, We\'re Showing a Film on This Guy\'s Wall, and, Oh, Don\'t Warn Him

Yana Paskova for The New York Times At a flash-mob screening of a short documentary about climate change and Occupy Sandy, the film was projected on a wall above an East Village gas station on Wednesday night.

At a Hollywood film premiere, sequined starlets drift across red carpets. At an Occupy Wall Street film premiere, people trespass on gas station parking lots.

So it went on Wednesday night when 200 people - academics, environmental activists, dudes on bikes - descended flash-mob style on a Mobil station at Houston Street and Avenue C for a guerrilla screening of a documentary film about climate change and Occupy Sandy,  the movement's ongoing effort to assist the victims of last month's storm.

In classic Occupy fashion, the 20-minute film, “Occupy Sandy: A Human Response to the New Realities of Climate Change,”  was projected onto a wall above the service station's gas pumps by a vehicle called the Illuminator, a mobile media center built this spring by a crew of Brooklyn artists and with the patronage of Ben Cohen, the ice cream tycoon.

The gala event - if one can speak that way of an occasion whose precise location was announced by text and Twitter message only 15 minutes before it began - was an attempt to place both Hurricane and Occupy Sandy into the context of climate change.

The filmmaker, Josh Fox, whose movie “Gasland” examined the oil- and natural gas-drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, spent 10 days documenting Occup y Sandy's efforts in the Rockaways section of Queens and in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, as well as at the group's headquarters, at a church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

“I'd heard so much about this thing, I had to figure it out,” said Mr. Fox, bespectacled and boyish. “I wandered over there” - to the church - “with a camera and was just blown away.”

His movie, put together on the fly, included interviews with residents affected by the storm and with Bill McKibben, the author and environmentalist. The film was streamed live during the screening at occupytheclimate.com, where it can still be seen.

The complex origins of the unpermitted, which is to say illegal, event suggest the natural interconnectedness of the Occupy idea machine. The idea began with a woman named Elana Bulman, an Occupy Sandy organizer, who got to talking with friends about ways to connect Occupy Wall Street's storm-relief efforts to the broader environmental movement. Ms. Bulman found her way to Justin Wedes, a creator of Occupy Wall Street's summer camp, who has been working for Occupy Sandy, often in Sheepshead Bay.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times About 200 people gathered in the glow of a Mobil sign to watch the film.

Mr. Wedes knew Mr. Fox; indeed, he was interviewed for the film. Mr. Fox, meanwhile, was an old friend of Mark Read, the designer of the Illuminator, having been arrested in Mr. Read's presence more than a decade ago while passing out anti-something-or-the-other leaflets at a Citibank branch.

Those wanting to know the location of the screening were asked to send a text to a certain phone numbe r on Wednesday morning or to follow the hashtag #climatecrime on Twitter. An initial communiqué was sent about 9 a.m. on Wednesday saying that the screening would be “somewhere in the East Village.”

At 4:13 p.m., a second dispatch narrowed the location to “the neighborhood south of 10th St btwn Aves A & D”; a third message sent at 5:53 p.m. (“Hello friends! Thanks for your adventurous spirit!”) narrowed it further to the area south of 7th Street between Avenues B and C.

Finally, about 6:15, the site at the Mobil station was announced.

Let's flash mob! Come to 2nd St + Ave C in E. Village now for the OCCUPY SANDY GUERRILLA MOVIE PREMIERE! #ClimateCrime

- Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) November 28, 2012

The organizers thoughtfully sent an ambassador to the poor service station owner, who seemed a bit nonplused at having a flash mob of Occupiers - not to mention a marching band - c onverging on his parking lot.

That said, everything went smoothly. A banner was unfurled and people driving by honked their horns. The band played well and loudly. “People are actually showing up; I'm amazed this is working,” Mr. Fox said. “There are folks here, and tubas.”

Then the film began. While the Illuminator's sound system performed fairly well, the image - bleached by the scouring lights of the parking lot - left a little to be desired. Not that it mattered to Joan Flynn and Steve Jambeck, a couple from the Rockaways who received help from Occupy Sandy in the early days after the storm.

“We were really lucky,” Ms. Flynn, 64, said. “They came in and pulled out the soaked rugs, the flooded carpets, the wet insulation.” Mr. Jambeck, also 64, added, “This whole thing is a reality check on the unintended consequences of 50 years of bad decisions over carbon use and corporate greed.”

When the movie ended, the audience, in the wa y of film premieres, was off to the after-party - this one, at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Mr. Read was packing up the Illuminator after another night's work.

“You know, I can't believe we did a whole film and no police,” he said.

Could that be disappointment in his voice?

He shrugged, made a face. “Maybe a little bit,” he said.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times The film was projected from a van known as the Illuminator.

In Performance: Aasif Mandvi of \'Disgraced\'

We're excited to introduce “In Performance,” a regular theater video series, that kicks off this week with Aasif Mandvi in a scene from Ayad Akhtar's “Disgraced,” now at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. “In Performance,” which features actors performing monologues and songs from their current shows, has only a few simple rules: Scenes are about two minutes long. The actors wear street clothes and no makeup. And, of course, they keep their language clean.

In “Disgraced,” Mr. Mandvi (of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart”) plays Amir Kapoor, a corporate lawyer who lives with his wife, Emily (Heidi Armbruster), on the Upper East Side of New York. Here Amir tells Emily about a not-so-subtle episode of racial profiling at the tony law firm where he's expecting to be made a partner.

Over the next few weeks watch for performances by Shuler Hen sley (“The Whale”), Michael Learned (“The Outgoing Tide”), Jackie Hoffman (“A Chanukah Carol”) and others.

Children\'s Book Coming From \'Hunger Games\' Author

Suzanne Collins, the author of the wildly successful “Hunger Games” trilogy, as well as the five-volume teen fantasy series “The Underland Chronicles,” has completed a a new book, “Year of the Jungle,” a 40-page children's book, which will be published next September by Scholastic.

The book, Collins's first since “Mockingjay,” the conclusion of the “Hunger Games” series, in 2010, is based on Collins's memories of her father's deployment in Vietnam in the late 1960s, when she was the first grade. It is for readers 4 and up, and was illustrated by James Proimos, The Associated Press reported.

“For several years I had this little wicker basket next to my writing chair with the postcards my dad had sent me from Vietnam and photos of that year,” Ms. Collins, 50, said in a statement. “But I could never quite find a way into the story. It has elements that can be scary for the audience and it would be easy for the art to reinforce those. It c ould be really beautiful art but still be off-putting to a kid, which would defeat the point of doing the book.

“Then one day I was having lunch with Jim and telling him about the idea and he said, ‘That sounds fantastic.' I looked at him and I had this flash of the story through his eyes, with his art. It was like being handed a key to a locked door. So, I just blurted out, ‘Do you want to do it?' Fortunately he said ‘Yes.'”

The book's protagonist will be a child named Suzy, whose father has gone off to war, and will touch upon her feelings as he misses family gatherings, her fears about whether he will return and the adjustments she must make when he returns, changed by the experience.

American Ballet Theater Dancer Daniil Simkin Promoted to Principal

Daniil Simkin, who joined American Ballet Theater as a soloist in 2008, has been promoted to principal dancer effective immediately, Kevin McKenzie, the company's artistic director, announced on Thursday.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Daniil Simkin and fellow members of American Ballet Theater performing in “Swan Lake.”

Mr. Simkin, 25, was born in Russia and raised in Germany, and made his first stage appearances when he was six, four years before he began his formal ballet training. His parents, Dmitrij Simkin and Olga Aleksandrova, are both dancers. Mr. Simkin began entering competitions when he was 12, and won first prizes at sever al, including international competitions in Vienna and Helsinki, as well as the USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Miss.

Mr. Simkin's repertory at the American Ballet Theater has included the Nutcracker-Prince in “The Nutcracker,” Benvolio in “Romeo and Juliet,” the Bronze Idol in “La Bayadère,” Franz in “Coppélia,” and Puck in “The Dream.” Reviewing Mr. Simkin's work in The New York Times, Alastair Macaulay has praised his penchant for “taking exciting risks” and his “bravado.”

Ecstatic Music Festival Unveils Genre-Crossing Line-Up

In its first two seasons, the Ecstatic Music Festival has helped transform Merkin Concert Hall from a relatively staid chamber music hall in the shadow of Lincoln Center into a lively home for the experimental, genre-crossing music of the indie classical world. The third installment of the festival includes 10 programs â€" most of them double or triple bills, with collaborations between the ensembles and soloists â€" and runs from Jan. 25 through March 21.

The festival is directed and programmed by the composer Judd Greenstein, who also assembled the first two festivals, as well as a spin-off series last summer at the World Financial Center. This year's festival opens with a collaboration between Shara Worden, the singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist best known for her work with My Brightest Diamond, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, for which Ms. Worden has written two new works. That performance will be at the Greene Space, the concert hall of WNYC and WQXR, and will be streamed live as a video webcast on WNYC's Q2 Web site. The rest of the festival will be at Merkin Concert Hall.

Also among the festival's highlights are programs featuring the composer and violinist Carla Kihlstedt and her band, Causing a Tiger; the new-music ensemble ICE and Face the Music; the Kaufman Center's teenage new-music orchestra, on Jan. 26; another appearance by Ms. Worden with the composer Sarah Kirkland Snider and the chamber-rock band Clogs, on Feb 6; the composer and visual artist Arnold Dreyblatt and the folk-jazz-ambient band Megafaun, on Feb. 27; the Bang on a Can All-Stars annual People's Commissioning Fund concert, on March 14;  the New York premiere of Steve Mackey's “String Theory,” by the JACK Quartet and Big Farm, a band that includes Mr. Mackey on guitar and Rinde Eckert,  the singer-accordionist, on March 20; and a folk-rock-classical crossover program with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, on March 21

A Life Dedicated to Pursuing Nazis, and Remembering Their Victims

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Serge Klarsfeld, a French lawyer who has dedicated his life to memorializing Holocaust victims and hunting Nazis, spoke on Monday at New York University.

As Serge Klarsfeld tells it, he had the “luck” to see his father and other French Jews in Nazi-occupied Nice carted off to Auschwitz by Germans. It spared him the pain of seeing them rounded up, as often happened, by their own French countrymen. Since Sept. 30, 1943, when he huddled behind a secret closet wall with his mother and sister while his father was seized by the SS for deportation a nd death, Mr. Klarsfeld, now a prominent French lawyer, has dedicated his life to memorializing victims of the Holocaust and bringing their killers to justice, most notably the notorious Gestapo chief in France, Klaus Barbie.

The quest, pursued alongside his German-born, non-Jewish wife, Beate, and their son, Arno, brought him and Arno Monday night to New York University in Greenwich Village with a monumental new work of documentation, a colossal volume of 12 inches by 19 inches weighing some 18 pounds, as intractable and chilling as the mass murders it chronicles.

“True emotion comes from precision,” Mr. Klarsfeld has said. “You have not to be guided by hand to the emotion.”

We'll get to the book, but first the man himself who drew 300 avid listeners to a talk co-sponsored by the N.Y.U. Center for French Civilization and Culture and the N.Y.U. School of Law. Whatever a Nazi-hunter (or “militant of memory,” as he prefers to call himself) is supposed to look like, he doesn't. At 76, he is portly with glasses, a balding dome and frizz of white hair. Oh, and the rosette of a commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur in the buttonhole of his blue pinstripe suit.

For Arno, 46, a high-ranking French judge who lived for a time with Carla Bruni, the model who is now Mrs. Nicolas Sarkozy, it was a kind of homecoming; he attended law school at N.Y.U.

In fluid English with a pronounced French accent, Mr. Klarsfeld, in conversation with Peter Hellman, a journalist and friend who profiled the Klarsfelds in The New York Times Sunday magazine in 1979, said his family's fate mirrored that of France's 350,000 prewar Jews. Almost a quarter were murdered. In his little family of four, three-quarters, too, survived.

Meeting his German wife-to-be, Beate Künzel, daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier, in the Paris metro in 1960 forged a powerful alliance. “We were weak individually,” he said . “Together, we had the strength of the Jewish people and Germany together.” One of their first exploits, he recounted, was infiltrating Mrs. Klarsfeld into the West German Bundestag in Bonn on Nov. 7, 1968, where she publicly confronted and slapped Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, whose history as an early Nazi Party member and radio propagandist had been largely ignored.

The shocking and symbolic act - a postwar generation's rebuke to its Nazi elders - was particularly risky amid the security mania that followed the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but it sealed Kiesinger's political demise. Mrs. Klarsfeld served four months of a year's sentence but won striking vindication this year as a protest candidate of a small leftist party for president of Germany.

I was a Times correspondent in Bonn in 1968-69 and vividly remember the uproar. I subsequently kept in touch with the Klarsfelds myself and consulted them when searching for the possible hide-out of the long-missing Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele, who later turned out to have drowned in Brazil in 1979. His secretly buried body was exhumed and conclusively identified in 1985.

With the same savvy agitprop that gained the civil rights movement its leverage to transform American society, the Klarsfelds kept shaming German and French authorities with their unexpiated wartime sins. Tracking down the former Gestapo chief Kurt Lischka, who was living peacefully in Cologne in 1973, Mr. Klarsfeld held a gun to his head, before laughing and walking away.

“We show you we can kill criminals but don't want to,” Mr. Klarsfeld explained at N.Y.U. “But if you don't judge them, it will happen.”

In what Mr. Hellman called “a scene out of the Marx brothers,” the Klarsfelds also sought to kidnap Lischka from a trolley stop. After the comical plot unraveled - the hulking ex-Nazi proved too tall to knock out with a billy club - Mrs. Klarsfeld presented herself to the police demanding to be arrested. Lischka was finally tried, convicted and sentenced to 10 years.

Mr. Klarsfeld said he was particularly honored to have forced France to come to terms with its collaborationist history. At this year's annual commemoration at the Vel d'Hiver, where French Jews were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz, President François Hollande declared, “The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France.”

But his proudest accomplishment, Mr. Klarsfeld said, lay on a reception table at the law school: an updated version of his masterwork, Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, a giant coffee-table volume that now for the first time lists all 76,000 deported Jews by family name and address, even if they were separated on different death trains. His previous books recorded the victims by convoy number and provided many of their photos, particularly the childre n.

“All the narratives of the Holocaust pale in comparison,” said Mr. Hellman.

Mr. Klarsfeld said because the book cost as much as $121 to mail from France he was able to provide copies only to the New York Public Library, and Jewish and academic institutions.

Ralph Preiss, 82, a retired computer engineer, traveled from Poughkeepsie to hear Mr. Klarsfeld and afterward hunched over the book searching for relatives. He found them grouped under Wohl - Erna, Erich, Frank and Ernst, at 4 Gabrielle D'Estrées in Paris. They had fled Berlin in 1934 to seek refuge in France. One day, Mr. Preiss said, “they disappeared from their apartment.”

\'Scandalous\' Producers Keep Faith in a Struggling Show

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Carolee Carmello as Aimee Semple McPherson.

No Broadway show is losing money faster than “Scandalous,” the $9 million musical about the turbulent life of early 20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Given its weak ticket sales and largely negative reviews, many veteran Broadway producers would have closed the show soon after it opened on Nov. 15. And yet “Scandalous” continues to run.

The reason? Its creator, the “Today” show host Kathie Lee Gifford, and two of the lead producers â€" Dick and Betsy DeVos, multimillionaires from their Amway family fortune â€" have been determined to keep “Scandalous” running in hopes th at the musical will somehow rebound at the box office. While Ms. Gifford has not put her own money into the show to keep it afloat, the DeVoses agreed this week to cover the show's financial losses for now, according to two executives involved with the show, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private business matters.

“Scandalous” has already burned through the financial reserve fund that all Broadway shows have to help weather periods of low ticket sales, the two executives said. Last week over the Thanksgiving holiday, usually a hearty time at the box office for many Broadway musicals, “Scandalous” grossed a bracingly low $194,511 â€" or only about 15.5 percent of the maximum possible amount. At some performances the cast â€" led by Carolee Carmello in a critically praised star turn â€" were playing to only a couple hundred people in the 1,450-seat Neil Simon Theater.

“Scandalous” has been a point of curiosi ty this fall because the show marks the Broadway debut for Ms. Gifford as a lyricist and book writer, and because its backers are a rare breed on Broadway. Most have never worked there before: the DeVoses are active in Republican politics in Michigan â€" Mr. DeVos ran for governor there â€" while another producer, the Foursquare Foundation, is a nonprofit group that provides financing to ministries affiliated with the Foursquare Church, which McPherson founded. Ms. Gifford has also drawn attention for conspicuously talking up “Scandalous” on “Today” show broadcasts, while the producers of the musical have sought to market the show to Christian theater-goers â€" an undertaking that has yielded mixed results among recent Broadway shows, including last season's major musical flop “Leap of Faith.”

While the two executives involved with “Scandalous” predicted that the show would announce a closing date next week unless there was a box office miracle, the exe cutives also held out the possibility that the DeVoses may end up covering losses out of their deep pockets in hopes of finding a bigger audience among Christmas-season tourists. A spokesman for the show said the producers had no comment; Ms. Gifford also declined to comment through a spokeswoman. The two executives said she was personally passionate about the show, which she spent years developing, but that the decision to continue running “Scandalous” was not hers.

\'Scandalous\' Producers Keep Faith in a Struggling Show

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Carolee Carmello as Aimee Semple McPherson.

No Broadway show is losing money faster than “Scandalous,” the $9 million musical about the turbulent life of early 20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Given its weak ticket sales and largely negative reviews, many veteran Broadway producers would have closed the show soon after it opened on Nov. 15. And yet “Scandalous” continues to run.

The reason? Its creator, the “Today” show host Kathie Lee Gifford, and two of the lead producers â€" Dick and Betsy DeVos, multimillionaires from their Amway family fortune â€" have been determined to keep “Scandalous” running in hopes th at the musical will somehow rebound at the box office. While Ms. Gifford has not put her own money into the show to keep it afloat, the DeVoses agreed this week to cover the show's financial losses for now, according to two executives involved with the show, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private business matters.

“Scandalous” has already burned through the financial reserve fund that all Broadway shows have to help weather periods of low ticket sales, the two executives said. Last week over the Thanksgiving holiday, usually a hearty time at the box office for many Broadway musicals, “Scandalous” grossed a bracingly low $194,511 â€" or only about 15.5 percent of the maximum possible amount. At some performances the cast â€" led by Carolee Carmello in a critically praised star turn â€" were playing to only a couple hundred people in the 1,450-seat Neil Simon Theater.

“Scandalous” has been a point of curiosi ty this fall because the show marks the Broadway debut for Ms. Gifford as a lyricist and book writer, and because its backers are a rare breed on Broadway. Most have never worked there before: the DeVoses are active in Republican politics in Michigan â€" Mr. DeVos ran for governor there â€" while another producer, the Foursquare Foundation, is a nonprofit group that provides financing to ministries affiliated with the Foursquare Church, which McPherson founded. Ms. Gifford has also drawn attention for conspicuously talking up “Scandalous” on “Today” show broadcasts, while the producers of the musical have sought to market the show to Christian theater-goers â€" an undertaking that has yielded mixed results among recent Broadway shows, including last season's major musical flop “Leap of Faith.”

While the two executives involved with “Scandalous” predicted that the show would announce a closing date next week unless there was a box office miracle, the exe cutives also held out the possibility that the DeVoses may end up covering losses out of their deep pockets in hopes of finding a bigger audience among Christmas-season tourists. A spokesman for the show said the producers had no comment; Ms. Gifford also declined to comment through a spokeswoman. The two executives said she was personally passionate about the show, which she spent years developing, but that the decision to continue running “Scandalous” was not hers.

After 460 Weeks of Protests, the Grannies Call It a Day

Sometimes the news is what didn't happen. It is worth noting, then, that Joan Wile and her cadre of graying activists did not stand curbside on Fifth Avenue late Wednesday afternoon in protest against America's wars.

In mid-November, after an almost-unbroken run of Wednesday vigils going back nearly nine years, this group, known as Grandmothers Against the War, decided to call it a day.

What had gotten them started, the war in Iraq, was over. While the other war, in Afghanistan, does go on, it draws ever scanter attention. That was the case even in the presidential campaign. (Headline in The Onion two weeks ago: “Nation Horrified to Learn About War in Afghanistan While Reading Up on Petraeus Sex Scandal.”) By now, Ms. Wile said, President Obama “doesn't need us to urge him” to speed up the withdrawal of American forces.

Besides, interests changed within her ranks. Some of her fellow grannies, as these women in their 70s, 80s and even 90s call themselves, turned to the Occupy movement. Others have focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And then there is that relentless tyrant called time.

If old age, as they say, is not for sissies, it is also not optimal for standing on the street for an hour - week after week, rain or shine, in numbing cold or pitiless heat, come hell or high water.

Actually, high water was one thing that stopped the grannies. On Oct. 31, the Wednesday after Hurricane Sandy hit, there was no way for many of them to make it to their usual protest site, the Fifth Avenue entrance to Rockefeller Center.

The only other time they could not take up their positions was in early December 2009. It wasn't for want of trying. But the police turned them away because the annual Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center was that evening.

Those interruptions aside, theirs was quite a display of nonstop determination - 460 Wednesdays, starting on Jan. 14, 2004, 10 months after the Bush administration went to war in Iraq, supposedly to prevent Saddam Hussein from ever using the arsenal of unconventional weapons he didn't have.

Still, nothing lasts forever (even if war seems to). Frankly, “it's a relief not to have to stand there for an hour any longer,” said Ms. Wile, a singer and songwriter who is 81. “Old bones do not take too well to such activity.”

“Do you know why I started it?” she said, meaning the weekly vigil. “I saw a picture in Time magazine of a young Baghdad boy, a 12-year-old boy named Ali who had lost his arms, was horribly burned all over his body and whose entire nuclear family was killed by our bombs. That's what motivated me. I just said, ‘I've got to do something.' I was tossing and turning right after that, and the idea hit me: Grandmothers Against the War.”

At times, dozens stood with her. Not all were grannies. Men took part, too, including vete rans of the Vietnam War. But “by the end,” Ms. Wile said, “we were down to seven to nine people - pretty small.”

The reaction to them could be icy, to put it mildly. At an early protest, in February 2004, a man walking by pointed a finger at the women and made a motion as if he were firing a gun. The demonstrators shrugged it off. “His aim was bad,” one of them, Judith Cartisano, said to me back then.

Ms. Wile recalled “a lot of heckling in the beginning.”

“The thing that they threw at us most often was, ‘You're a traitor,'” she said. “Another was ‘Remember 9/11.' They linked 9/11 with Iraq. It hurt to be called traitors, but what can you do?” Some of the taunting was truly in-your-face. The Army veterans in her group, she said, “almost came to blows with particularly nasty hecklers several times.”

But over the years, not coincidentally as the wars grew ever more unpopular, noxious comments faded. “Maybe one or tw o people would argue, but not with that nasty implication,” Ms. Wile said. “And people from other countries” - especially Europeans - “were always very supportive.”

With songs and speeches, the grannies held their final vigil on Nov. 14. Some of them gathered in Midtown one more time on Wednesday evening for a farewell dinner.

Mission accomplished, to use a discredited phrase? Not really, not with “all those people still fighting and dying in Afghanistan,” Ms. Wile said.

“But I think we helped jump start the anti-Iraq war movement here in the city,” she said. “We threw some seeds in the air, and maybe they landed somewhere and sprouted.”

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com

\'King Kong\' Producer Eyeing Spider-Man\'s Broadway Lair

Will King Kong be fighting Spider-Man for Broadway's Foxwoods Theater in the near future?

The producer of the big-budget Australian musical “King Kong,” which is scheduled to open in Melbourne in June, is eyeing the Foxwoods Theater â€" a cavernous venue that has the most seats of any Broadway house â€" as the ideal place to land the show in New York, perhaps as early as 2014, according to three theater producers familiar with discussions about a Broadway outing for “King Kong.”

Only a handful of Broadway theaters are big enough to accommodate the large-scale “King Kong,” which has a reported budget of more than $30 million, not to mention the one-ton, 20-foot tall silverback Kong. And the Foxwoods is regarded as the best equipped given its enormous backstage space and state-of-the-art technology now being used for its current tenant, the $75 million musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

“King Kong” would be the biggest spectacle †" and probably the biggest budget â€" on Broadway since “Spider-Man.” Yet the producers of “Spider-Man” said in an interview this week that they have no plans to vacate the Foxwoods anytime soon.

The crux of the matter is ticket sales for “Spider-Man.” The show opened in June 2011 to negative reviews but has since became a favorite show of many children and families, and set the record for the highest weekly gross ever on Broadway - $2.94 million â€" between last Christmas and New Year's. But the box office for “Spider-Man” has cooled a bit recently: Thanksgiving week was down 17 percent from the comparable week in 2011.

“Spider-Man” is still regularly among the top 5 on Broadway, grossing about $1.5 million a week on average, yet its profit margin is relatively modest because the weekly running costs of the elaborate production are so high, at more than $1 million a week.

The general manager of the Foxwoods Theater, Erich Jungwirth, said in an interview this week that he had been contacted by the “King Kong” producer, Carmen Pavlovic of the company Global Creatures, and discussed the show and the possibility of a booking in the Foxwoods. Mr. Jungwirth said that while he thought much of the “King Kong” designs and artistry were “beautiful,” and that its giant gorilla puppetry could be “a fascinating fit” in the Foxwoods, the theater was committed to “Spider-Man.” He added that he was not concerned about softening ticket sales for the show.

“I'm more bullish than some others about ‘Spider-Man' and think it could run on Broadway for more than just a couple of more years,” Mr. Jungwirth said. “If ‘King Kong' is a success in Australia in mid-2013, it's not crazy to think that it will show up on Broadway sometime in 2014, and I don't see the Foxwoods being available in 2014.”

Ms. Pavlovic, in response to questions sent by e-mail about the Foxwoods Theater and “King Kong,” declined to confirm that the Foxwoods (which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment) was her first choice for a Broadway house. She has also pitched “King Kong” to the Shubert Organization, which owns another of the largest theaters in New York, the Broadway.

“We are looking at a multitude of options following the launch of ‘King Kong' in Australia, including possible runs in New York, London and other major theater markets around the world,” she said by e-mail. “Of course New York City, being the home of King Kong, is really important to us! Right now, however, all our focus is on opening the production in Melbourne next year and we haven't set a time-line for anything beyond that. We are extremely flattered that so many traditional and non-traditional theatrical venues are interested in hosting the show.”

The two lead producers of “Spider-Man,” Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, said in an interview this week that they had no plans to give way to “King Kong” and expected to be playing in the Foxwoods for another four to five years at least. They said that ticket sales were on the upswing; Mr. Harris attributed the Thanksgiving drop-off to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (although some hit shows, like “Wicked,” set records), while Mr. Cohl said the ticket slide was simply due to the passage of time.

He declined to discuss how much of “Spider-Man's” $75 million capitalization had been paid back to the show's producers and investors, but estimated that, to recoup the entire $75 million and turn a profit, the show would need to run another five to seven years on Broadway at its current level of ticket sales.

“I would say I'm much more optimistic now about the future of ticket sales than I was in August and September,” Mr. Cohl said, referring to the traditional period when many Broadway shows experience a box office slump. “I think ‘Spider-Man' will be on Broadway at the Foxwoods for a good long while.”

Musings Amid the Wreckage

Dear Diary:
Sunday, Nov. 11. Belle Harbor, Queens.

It really has been beautiful weather here the last two days. We are in Belle Harbor for a 10 a.m. appointment with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We sit outside on the bench at the front door and look out at the calm blue ocean and exquisite view, unencumbered by walls and brick.

We sit there a long time.

How weird it is to sit and enjoy the beauty while at the same time, right in front of us, is the rubble of a house that is completely demolished. We are interrupted at times by hordes of gas inspectors, FEMA inspectors, Water Department inspectors, sanitation workers, sand removal equipment, volunteers offering us a survival kit of a blanket and a flashlight. Volunteers are everywhere, sweeping sand, cleaning out basements, whatever is needed.
All neighbors are on the street, working or congregating.

As for us, Thursday was Chubb; Sun day, FEMA; Tuesday, Traveler Flood.

Then concern for my mother's house. We met my brother and mother there today. The outdoor chair works on a battery and actually transported her up the stairs and onto the porch. We prayed the battery would last until the return trip down! And we walked fast into the house because the porch was leaning.

The aide and I packed up her clothes, some pictures, mail, the magic Shabbat flowers from two weeks ago that were still beautiful, her exercise weights and balls, and some games. (I found three sets of Bananagrams!)

She went to a meeting outdoors at synagogue and cried.

We eat dinners out. It seems I am reviewing every batch of French fries in Brooklyn and five towns. It has become my comfort food. I don't even hesitate to order it.

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