Staten Island Chuck: The Untold Story

The following note from Joyce Wadler, a former Times reporter, appeared mysteriously in our mailbox today. Attempts to confirm its truthiness were foiled when City Room’s fact-checking staff went out for crullers and never returned, so we are publishing it as is. Caveat lector.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times In addition to a love of sweet potatoes and indoor carpeting, Staten Island Chuck harbors a deep passion for the modernist theatrical canon.

I was kind of amused to see people taking the spring predictions of our local groundhog Staten Island Chuck so seriously this weekend, because the truth is I swiped the real Chuck a few years ago.

It happened when I stopped by, as feature writers are fated to do, to cover the carryings-on.

“Forty years of covering colorful and wacky goings-on for one newspaper after another,” I muttered. “A women who shelters two dozen grown tigers in the backyard; a composer who performs a sonata for piano and dog at Carnegie Hall. Will it never end”

That’s when I heard a voice I can only describe as furry pipe up at about the level of my knees.

“Tell me about it,” it said. “I myself long to perform Beckett on the boards. It needn’t be Broadway. A few logs in a clearing and a respectful audience is all I ask. Instead, I am reduced to mutely foretelling spring for these reportorial yahoos. No offense meant.”

I was, of course, amazed.

“You can talk” I said to t! he woodchuck. “How come nobody knew this”

“They didn’t ask,” said Chuck. “And, I admit, a few years in this heated cage, being fed all the sweet potatoes a woodchuck could ever want, I got lazy and stopped caring.”

“But you can really forecast stuff” I said. “That’s wild. What’s the stock market going to do”

“Please,” Chuck said. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be in a cage, I’d be in a penthouse in TriBeCa.”

“Gun regulation in America” I asked. “Will it happen”

“I don’t do politics,” Chuck said. “But from a strictly personal view, I never liked them.”

“O.K., O.K.,” I said. “Let’s make it simple. Am I better off taking the R train or the No. 5 from South Ferry”

“The No. 5,” Chuck replied. “I see a water main break coming on the R.”

I was skeptical, of course, but I took the R just to check it out, and just like Chuck predicted, there’s flooding and I get stuck at Wall Street. And so, a daylater, Chuck and I pull the old switcheroo. Chuck’s fat brother-in-law Stan, who’d hung around the enclosure begging for scraps, stepped in for Chuck. Chuck moved into my place, where he burrowed into a stack of old New Yorkers and read prodigiously, especially enjoying the film reviews of Anthony Lane. Well, don’t we all.

Now and then, between Chuck making the rounds of auditions, we’d have coffee and Chuck would tell the future. His predictions were consistently on the mark.

“This married guy I’ve been seeing, will he ever leave his wife”

“Nope.”

“Those lamb chops from Café Loup I had wrapped to go that have been sitting in the refrigerator for 10 days now. You think they’re O.K.”

“I wouldn’t feed them to a badger.”

“San Francisco 49ers or Baltimore Ravens”

“Ravens. And the guys at the Superdome should check the fuse box.”

More important, however, was the example Chuck set. Decent parts for middle-age groundhogs ! are not e! asy to come by, but the plucky little marmot stuck with his plan. He could have gotten a sweet deal forecasting traffic for WINS, but to Chuck that would have been selling out. For him, it was serious theater or nothing. I remember, in particular, a night when we were sitting around the apartment, listening to Springsteen. We’d both been hitting the Johnnie Walker pretty hard.

“Strictly between us, that line ‘I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk,’ has always spoken to me,” Chuck said, his voice now both slurry and furry. “I mean, it is me. I just got to find my audience, you know what I’m saying I have to take my shot. And if I get eaten by a coyote or a wolf along the way, at least I honored what’s in me.”

“This is Greenwich Village, Chuck,” I said. “We don’t have wolves.”

“Yeah, I know,” Chuck said. “I was speaking metaphorically.”

Then he passed out on a pile of The New York Review of Books.

But guess what After years of wor, he achieved his dream. Saturday, when the fake Chuck was hamming it up for reporters, the Chuck I’m proud to call my friend was co-starring in an Off Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot.” He was magnificent.

Voting In and Out Monopoly Game\'s Faux Riche

Courtesy of Hasbro The original version of Monopoly has eight game pieces. The game’s manufacturer plans to replace one of them.

Despite the onslaught of high-tech games played on smartphones, tablets and giant flat-screen televisions, some old-fashioned board games played at a more methodical pace endure. Of those, perhaps the most popular is Monopoly, which was born 78 years ago.

And even though there are any number of variations â€" a NASA edition, a New York Yankees edition, a Star Wars edition â€" the Monopoly of Park Place, Boardwalk and the Community Chest has remained largely unchanged.

Until now.

Hasbro, the company that manufactures Monopoly, has decided that the journey around the board for one of the eight classic tokens will end soon. And, in a modern twist, it has taken to social media to seek input from the public. So after Tuesday, when voting closes, the thimble, car, boot, Scottie dog, battleship, hat, iron or wheelbarrow will go to jail, forever, and a new token will take its place.

Of course, the company is not leaving it entirely up to the public to decide such an important part of a classic game. Hasbro came up with a list of potential replacements, conducted an internal vote and narrowed the field to five finalists: a robot, diamond ring, cat, helicopter and guitar. The classic token with the fewest number of votes will be replaced by the new token with the highest number. The winner is to be announced on Wednesday.

As of Monday afternoon, the boot and the iron had the fewest votes and were most in dange! r of being replaced. Hasbro would not say which of the new pieces had the most votes.

“The token is key to the game and key for all of our fans,’’ said Jonathan Berkowitz, the vice president for marketing at Hasbro Gaming, in a telephone interview from the company’s headquarters in Pawtucket, R.I. “You ask anyone what their favorite Monopoly token is and most people have an answer. There’s always a reason.”

The creation of Monopoly is widely attributed to Charles Darrow, an unemployed heating contractor from Philadelphia, though there were earlier versions of a similar game. Darrow’s 1933 version named the properties after places in Atlantic City, which experienced a boom in the 1920s, before the Depression.

“Because it was a game and because games are entertaining and they’re fun, Atlantic City seemed to be the perfect partner to use for the property names,” said Philip E Orbanes, the president of Winning Moves Games Inc., a game manufacturer. Mr. Orbanes has also written four books about Monopoly and has been a chief judge at the United States and world Monopoly championships.

In 1935, Parker Brothers negotiated and signed a contract in the Flatiron Building in Manhattan to acquire Monopoly from Darrow, Mr. Orbanes said. (Parker Brothers is now owned by Hasbro.)

“J.P. Morgan, the legendary financier, was the inspiration in 1936 for the styling of the little Monopoly man who today we call Mr. Monopoly,” he added.

Monopoly rose in popularity during the Depression. “Twenty-five percent of the work force was unemployed,” Mr. Orbanes said, “so playing Monopoly was an opportunity to vicariously feel rich.”

The game has remained essentially unchanged, which some say is part of its continued success. “When I played Monopoly as a kid,” Mr. Berkowitz, the Habro executive, said, “it’s exactly the same as when I play it now with my ki! ds, and t! he same is true of my parents and that’s very, very rare, and I think that’s one of the great things about the brand.”

Mr. Orbanes said, “The main appeal of the game is not necessarily the charming equipment, but rather it’s the dynamic that takes place when you and I and our friends sit around the table and we start negotiating, deal-making, bantering, making decisions, seeing the results of the decisions we make.’’

Poll Finds Slight Decline in Cuomo\'s Popularity After Gun Package

ALBANY - Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo saw only a modest decline in his popularity among New York State voters after winning passage of strict new gun laws last month, and voters approve of the new laws more than two to one, according to a Siena College poll released Monday.

The poll’s findings were considerably more positive for Mr. Cuomo than another survey released last week by Quinnipiac University, which found that the governor’s approval rating had declined by 15 percentage points in the wake of the gun measure’s passage.

In the Siena poll, conducted last week, 67 percent of voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Cuomo, down four percentage points from a poll conducted in mid-January. Fifty-eight percent rated is job performance as excellent or good, a decline of two percentage points.

But Mr. Cuomo did lose standing among Republicans: 63 percent said they opposed the new gun laws; 33 percent supported them. And for the first time since Mr. Cuomo took office more than two years ago, Siena found that more Republicans - 54 percent - had an unfavorable view of the governor than a favorable one.

“Clearly Governor Cuomo has spent political capital to get the gun law passed, but he still remains extraordinarily popular,” said Steven A. Greenberg, a Siena pollster. “His numbers did not move substantially at all with Democrats or independents. His numbers barely moved in New York City and the downstate suburbs.”

Differences in the wording and the order of questions can affect the outcome of a poll. In addition, Quinnipiac and Siena weight their polls differently.  For example, the Quinnipiac poll has slightly more voters from upstate New York than the Siena poll.

Because Siena adju! sts its results to match the ratio of voters who are enrolled as Republicans and Democrats, there are more Democrats and fewer independents included than in the Quinnipiac poll. Quinnipiac does not weight by party, and its conclusions of the opinions of Republicans and Democrats are based on which party voters identify themselves as, not how they are registered.

The Siena poll was conducted by telephone from Jan. 27 to 31. It included 1,154 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.

A $100,000 Prize for Yo-Yo Ma

Yo-Yo Ma, the popular and successful cellist who has already received several major cash awards, has won another: the $100,000 Vilcek Prize, given by the Vilcek Foundation. The foundation, which this year is recognizing achievements in contemporary music, also gave three $35,000 awards to three other musicians: the British-born songwriter James Abrahart, known as JHart; Samuel Bazawule, a Ghanaian producer and composer known as Blitz the Ambassador; and Tigran Hamasyan, an Armenian-born vocalist and pianist.

The foundation was set up to recognize contributions by immigrants in the United States to science and the arts. It was set up by Jan T. Vilcek, a scientist at New York University who made a fortune for research that led to the drug Remicade, an important anti-inflammatory. Mr. Ma has also received the Dan David Prize ($1 million), the Léonie Sonning Music Prize ($80,000), the Glenn Gould Prize ($34,000) and the Polar usic Prize ($166,000).

Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Sting to Perform Together at Grammys

From left, Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press; Jon Furniss/Invision, via Associated Press; Hussein Malla/Associated Press From left, Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Sting will perform together at the Grammy Awards on Sunday.

To the ever-growing list of artists already scheduled to perform at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, add this unlikely combination: Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Sting. The trio will perform together during the show, the Recording Academy announced Monday, as will Kelly Clarkson. All but Sting also are nominees for awards his year.

In another unusual pairing, the show will also have Sir Elton John and the 21-year-old British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran performing together in a live setting for the first time. The Black Keys, Fun., the Lumineers and Frank Ocean will also be making their debuts as Grammy performers on the Sunday night broadcast on CBS.

The ranks of Grammy presenters is also swelling, with Prince, Beyoncé, Jennifer Hudson and Jennifer Lopez now confirmed in that role. They join a list that also includes Carly Rae Jepsen and Katy Perry from the pop world; the country music stars Faith Hill, Tim McGraw and Keith Urban; and two stars of hit television series, Kaley Cuoco and Neil Patrick Harris.

A President and His Governor Catch Up

Spencer Platt/Getty Images Gov. Andrew Cuomo, left, and former President Bill Clinton spoke after the funeral service held for former New York Mayor Edward I. Koch at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El.

They spoke intently and uninterrupted, eyes fixed on each other for about five minutes despite the swirling crowd around them.

Outside of the funeral for former Mayor Edward I. Koch on Monday morning in Manhattan, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and former President Bill Clinton seemed like old friends, swapping a few casual observations and catching up on news.Much of what they said is unknown, since they spoke just beyond reporters’ earshot. But theirs is a friendship born during Mr.
Cuomo’s tenure as housing secretary in the Clinton administration, that may soon be tested.

Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary, the retired Secretary of State, is widely viewed as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2018. So is Mr. Cuomo. (Cue intrigue.)

As they prepared to depart, Mr. Cuomo raised his voice a bit. “Nice to see you, Bill,” he said, extending his hand. “Tell Hillary I said hello.”

Joseph Mitchell Back in The New Yorker

This week’s edition of The New Yorker’s annual anniversary issue includes a never-before-published piece by Joseph Mitchell, one of the magazine’s most celebrated contributors.

The piece, titled “Street Life,” was given to the magazine by Thomas Kunkel, who’s writing a biography of Mitchell, who died in 1996. (“Genius in Disguise,” Mr. Kunkel’s biography of The New Yorker’s founder, Harold Ross, was published in 1995.) Mr. Kunkel, provided access to Mitchell’s papers, found three excerpts of what appears to be an uncompleted memoir.

Mitchell grew up in North Carolina, and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1938 until his death, though he didn’t publish anything in the magazine after “Joe Gould’s Secret” in 1964. Mitchell’s profiles of the city’s characters are legendary, and much of “Street Lfe” is an ode to traveling around his adopted home: “I frequently spend an entire day riding on New York City buses, getting off at junction points and changing from one line to another as the notion strikes me and gradually criss-crossing whatever part of the city I happen to be in. I might ride in a dozen or fifteen or twenty different buses during the day.”

“What’s so poignant about [the excerpts] is the sadness of the incompletion but the brilliance of the voice,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an interview. “There’s an ambition in the voice; the voice is becoming more Joycean. He’s looking outward, but all of these pieces are very interior. He’s at the center of it.”

Mr. Remnick said the magazine plans to publish the remaining two excerpts, at a time yet to be determined.

Joseph Mitchell Back in The New Yorker

This week’s edition of The New Yorker’s annual anniversary issue includes a never-before-published piece by Joseph Mitchell, one of the magazine’s most celebrated contributors.

The piece, titled “Street Life,” was given to the magazine by Thomas Kunkel, who’s writing a biography of Mitchell, who died in 1996. (“Genius in Disguise,” Mr. Kunkel’s biography of The New Yorker’s founder, Harold Ross, was published in 1995.) Mr. Kunkel, provided access to Mitchell’s papers, found three excerpts of what appears to be an uncompleted memoir.

Mitchell grew up in North Carolina, and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1938 until his death, though he didn’t publish anything in the magazine after “Joe Gould’s Secret” in 1964. Mitchell’s profiles of the city’s characters are legendary, and much of “Street Lfe” is an ode to traveling around his adopted home: “I frequently spend an entire day riding on New York City buses, getting off at junction points and changing from one line to another as the notion strikes me and gradually criss-crossing whatever part of the city I happen to be in. I might ride in a dozen or fifteen or twenty different buses during the day.”

“What’s so poignant about [the excerpts] is the sadness of the incompletion but the brilliance of the voice,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an interview. “There’s an ambition in the voice; the voice is becoming more Joycean. He’s looking outward, but all of these pieces are very interior. He’s at the center of it.”

Mr. Remnick said the magazine plans to publish the remaining two excerpts, at a time yet to be determined.

Kitty Kelley Writing Book on Women in the Senate

Kitty Kelley, the author of unauthorized bestselling biographies of Oprah Winfrey and Nancy Reagan, will turn her gossipy form of reporting to the women of the United States Senate, her publisher said Monday. The book is tentatively set for publication this spring.

According to Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Ms. Kelley was attracted to the project because the current 113th Congress has the largest number of women ever, and she was interested in how they would influence power.

At the beginning of her career, Ms. Kelley worked as a receptionist and the press assistant for Senator Eugene McCarthy for four years. She said in a press release that she was approaching the project “with a positive bias.” She said she would also try to answer the question of whether “the presence of women can break the ugly gridlock now choking Congress”

In addition to Ms. Winfrey and Nancy Reagan, Ms. Kelley has written on the Bush family, the British Royal family, Frank Siatra and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Works Owned by Lucian Freud Head to British Museums

Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images “The Italian Woman, or Woman with a Yellow Sleeve” by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot at the National Gallery in London.

When the British painter Lucian Freud died in 2011, at the age of 88, his heirs faced a considerable inheritance tax. But his estate, taking advantage of a provision in British law that envisions “acceptance in lieu” of taxes, has now blunted that burden by donating works by two influential 19t-century French artists, Corot and Degas, to British arts institutions.

The Corot painting, which will go to the National Gallery in London, is a portrait called “The Italian Woman, or Woman with a Yellow Sleeve,” which, according to the BBC, “has not been seen in public for more than 60 years,” and, before Mr. Freud acquired it in 2001, once belonged to the Hollywood movie star Edward G. Robinson. In recent years, Mr. Freud had hung it on the top floor of his home.

The Freud estate is also donating three bronze sculptures by Degas to the Courtald Gallery, as specified by the painter in his will. Those works are “Horse Galloping on Right Foot,” “The Masseuse,” and “Portrait of a Woman: Head Resting on One Hand.”

Stephan Agostini/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Lucian Freud in 2010.

Under British law, authors, artists and collectors have been able to donate cultural artifacts in lieu of inheritance tax for more than a century. According to the British government, 51 items of “major cultural significance,” worth more than $60 million, were donated just between 2010 and 2012, including paintings by Reynolds, Turner and Rubens and manuscripts by Harold Pinter and J.G. Ballard.

In the case of Lucian Freud, widely considered to be Britain’s greatest painter at the time of his death, the donation is also being portrayed as his thank-you gift to the nation that sheltered him from Hitler. Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, was born in Berlin, but as a child came to the United Kingdom as a refugee, becoming a British citizen in 1939.

Next Stop: Ed Koch Station M.T.A. Suggests Otherwise

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Ed Koch, seen here riding the train in 1981, loved the subways. But an effort to rename a station for him was dismissed by the M.T.A. “We do not rename stations after people,” a spokesman said.

He has a bridge. He has a movie. But it seems that a subway station may be one honor too many for Edward I. Koch.

After receiving news thatRepresentative Carolyn B. Maloney was proposing to rename a subway station at 77th Street and Lexington Avenue for the former mayor, officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority quickly squashed the idea.

“We do not rename stations after people,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the authority, said on Monday morning. “The whole premise is that we want to keep stations with street names, in order to avoid confusing straphangers in terms of locations. Throughout the entire system, every station has a street name.”

Jacob Tugendrajch, a spokesman for Ms. Maloney, said that the proposal “got a little bit ahead of schedule” and that all the details had not been worked out. Placing a plaque at the station in Mr. Koch’s honor has also been discussed.

Ms. Maloney has scheduled a news conference for Monday afternoon outside of the station. Mr. Tugendrajch said the station was Mr. Koch’s “favorite stop,” which he often visited on Election! Days.

In a statement issued after his death last Friday, Ms. Maloney referred to the stop as “his ‘lucky’ East 77th Street subway entrance,” where he often asked his signature question â€" “How’m I doing” â€" as he greeted riders.

Mr. Tugendrajch acknowledged that Ms. Maloney did “not necessarily” have the authority to spur a name change, but said that she “thinks it’s a good idea, and she’s going to try her best to make it happen.”

In 2011, the City Council voted to affix Mr. Koch’s name to the Queensboro Bridge. Ceremonial renamings are not a hallmark of the subway system, though some stations, like the recently renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center stop, include information that extends beyond grid geography.

Frank Ocean Suggests He Will Not Press Charges Against Chris Brown

Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters Chris Brown

Frank Ocean has published an online message suggesting he will not press charges against Chris Brown in connection with a brawl the two singers had in a parking lot last week. In a paragrah on his Web site that did not mention Mr. Brown or the incident, Mr. Ocean wrote: “I’ll choose sanity. No criminal charges. No civil lawsuit. Forgiveness, alibeit difficult, is wisdom.”

On Jan. 27, Mr. Brown and Mr. Ocean, who are both nominated for the best urban contemporary album Grammy, were involved in a fight over a parking space outside a West Hollywood studio. The police say there are witnesses who saw Mr. Brown punch Mr. Ocean during a melee involving other men from their entourages.

Neither man has made a full public statement. Mr. Ocean sent a Twitter message alleging he had been “Jumped by Chris and a couple guys.” Mr. Brown, who is on probation for another assault, has said nothing but published a picture on his Instagram account of Jesus being crucified, and wrote, “Painting the way I feel today.”

Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, told The Associated Press th! at the incident was still under investigation because Mr. Ocean had not yet informed deputies he intended to drop charges.

Italian Government Blocks Premiere of Film on Berlusconi

A documentary film that offers a scathing portrait of Silvio Berlusconi’s tenure as Italy’s prime minister has had its premiere in Italy postponed at the request of the government there. “Girlfriend in a Coma” was to be shown in Rome on Feb. 13, but is now scheduled to be exhibited only after Feb. 24, the date of a national election in which Mr. Berlusconi is a candidate.

Despite its title, drawn from a song by The Smiths,” “Girlfriend in a Coma” examines Italy’s economic and political decline over the past two decades. Mr. Berlusconi, whose party recent polls show running a close second in the coming election, was in power most of the second half of that period, and is blamed in the film for many of the country’s ills.

“Girlfriend in a Coma” was directed and co-written by the Italian journalist Annalisa Piras, with Bill Emmott, a former editor at The Economist and athor of the book “Good Italy, Bad Italy,” credited as her co-writer. The film has already been shown in the United States and Britain, and had been booked by Rome’s prestigious MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art for a special initial screening for an invited audience of politicians, diplomats, journalists and business leaders â€" until the Ministry of Culture intervened.

“I find myself asking: would this have happened in any other western democracy” Mr. Emmott said in a statement on the film’s Web site. “The reasoning provided by MAXXI is that as a private foundation running a museum under the control of the Ministry of Culture, they are not allowed to host events that could be considered to be ‘political,’ given the imminence of the general elections.” But, he added, “the oddest point is that no one at MAXXI has actually watched our film, nor even asked to see it.”

\'Bombshell\' Doesn\'t Exist, but Its Songs Are Real Hits

Richard Perry/The New York Times At the Monster, a bar in Greenwich Village, Phil Kadet played the piano and Paul Hagen, in checked shirt, sang along with other customers.

On any given night at Marie’s Crisis, a cozy singalong piano bar in Greenwich Village, the pianist can be reliably counted on to deliver a fistful of standards. Songs made famous by Broadway royalty â€" Barbra, Liza, Patti â€" come out to play.

But lately, a more unlikely set of ballads has crept into the mix at Marie’s Crisis and countless other piano bars and karaoke lounges. Unlikely, because the inspiration is an apocryphal musical that has nevr been performed on Broadway.

The songs are from “Bombshell,” a musical based on Marilyn Monroe’s life, but one that exists only in NBC’s “Smash,” a drama about putting together a musical.

On a recent night, Rebecca Rosen, 24, a waitress from Alphabet City, chose a song from the show’s 12th episode performed by Megan Hilty: “Second-Hand White Baby Grand.”

When Ms. Rosen sang the lines “for many years the music had to roam, until we found a way to find a home,” she winked at the pianist, who smiled back. Tender and lilting, her voice filled the small space as fellow patrons contentedly rested their chins in their palms and soaked it in. Nobody else knew the words, but there were murmurs of recognition.

“They actually bring the sheet music,” Adam Tilford, 32, a piano player at Marie’s Crisis, said of the “Smash” devotees. “It’s great. The songs really stand out.”

Mr. Tilford’s favorite regular “Bombs! hell” performer at the bar is Knox Bundy, 46, a network engineer from Herald Square. Fond of “Let Me Be Your Star,” the show’s anthem from its pilot episode and itself a Grammy nominee, Mr. Bundy belts it out in a sonorous baritone.

That particular song has also entered the rotation at “Musical Mondays” at Splash, a gay bar in Chelsea; John Bantay, a video jockey at the bar, characterized “Let Me Be Your Star” as “an ‘I want’ song.”

“Everyone loves those,” he said, comparing it to Broadway standards like “Defying Gravity,” from “Wicked”; “Maybe This Time,” from “Cabaret”; and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” from “Funny Girl.”

Mr. Bantay said “Smash” is “‘Glee’ for grown-ups,” in reference to the Fox show about a high school a cappella group. But whereas “Glee” repackages familiar pop songs with canny cross-promotional wiles, “Bombshell”’s popularity has grown more organically. There isn’t even an official cast album et (although a 22-track “Bombshell” album is due Feb. 12, a week after the show’s sophomore season makes its debut Tuesday night).

“Stuff like this just never happens,” exclaimed Anthony Ellis, 33, a Marie’s Crisis regular and Fort Greene lawyer who majored in musical theater in college. “The last time was probably ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding,’” he said, referring to the 1997 film that starred Julia Roberts. For emphasis, Mr. Ellis then sang a few lines of Dionne Warwick’s “I Say a Little Prayer,” which was featured in the film.

“Smash” â€" and by extension, “Bombshell” â€" were created by theater heavyweights: the Tony-winning songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”), and the Tony-winning director Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”).

Upon hearing about his songs’ surprise stealth popularity, Mr. Wittman said, “Ooh, it’s gay Inception.”

Mr. Wittman and Mr. Shaiman, now married to each other, first met at Marieâ€! ™s Crisis! in the 1970s. They had heard rumors that Tina Fey liked to belt “Smash” songs at “30 Rock” cast parties, but Mr. Wittman said that having their songs performed at Marie’s Crisis topped even that.

“I couldn’t imagine a better compliment,” Mr. Shaiman said.

William Wesbrooks, the director of vocal performance in New York University’s musical theater program, said he hoped the “Smash” songs would stay precious. He recounted a single morning when he endured five different student renditions of “On My Own,” a ballad from “Les Misérables” that is having its own revival thanks to the new film version.

“What’s great about these ‘Smash’ songs is that they’re not ‘What I Did for Love,’” said Mr. Wesbrooks. “It allows for a new ‘What I Did for Love.’”

He said what draws singers to such songs is that they aren’t specific to any particular characters or plots, “and you can have, as a singer, a full moment, not just a piece of a larger stry.”

On a recent Thursday night, Paul Hagen, 32, a magazine editor from Greenpoint, set his martini on the piano at Monster, a Greenwich Village piano bar, and requested “Don’t Forget Me,” the grand finale in “Bombshell.”

The pianist, Phil Kadet, seemed practiced at the new tune. Mr. Hagen performed with brio, occasionally employing jazz hands or brushing aside nonexistent feathered tresses. With the last line â€" “Please let me be the star” â€" he held the final note as he raised his arms with the seriousness of “Evita”’s Eva Perón. His hands began to tremble as they rose, as if boiling until, having held the note for 11 seconds, they crashed against his temples. He whispered the word again: “Star!”

The agog audience, having begun applause mid-song, was stunned into silence until a jokester piped up: “Do you know ‘Whatta Man’ by Salt-n-Pepa”

Schneiderman\'s Chief of Staff Is Leaving

ALBANY â€" Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s chief of staff, Neal Kwatra, is departing to set up his own political consultancy.

Mr. Kwatra, 39, has been the most prominent political adviser in Mr. Schneiderman’s orbit, with the exception of Mr. Schneiderman’s former wife, Jennifer Cunningham.

Mr. Kwatra, a Queens native, will continue to provide strategic advice for Mr. Schneiderman. He is also expected to advise one of the Democratic candidates in the New York City mayoral race. Mr. Kwatra maintains a close relationship with the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, which represents about 30,000 hotel workers â€" he was previously the union’s director of political and strategic affairs â€" and is likely to side with whoever the union endorses.

“Neal has been one of my closest and most trusted advisers,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a note he was to send to his staff Monday morning. He also called Mr. Kwatra “a truly outstanding partner,” adding, “I look forward tocontinuing to count on his advice and counsel for many years to come.”

Mr. Kwatra will be replaced, on an acting basis, by Melissa DeRosa, 30, who has been serving as deputy chief of staff. Ms. DeRosa has deep Albany ties; she previously served as director of communications and legislation for Cordo & Company, a prominent lobbying firm. Her father, Giorgio DeRosa, is the chief Albany lobbyist at Bolton-St. Johns.

Challenging the Laws of Physics in the Subway

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

As we stand on the station
a train announces itself
with a welcome rumble
seconds before its headlights
illuminate the tiled walls,
thus proving that, at least
in the subway,
sound may sometimes travel
faster than light.

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