1963

You may not have seen Paul Binder lately, but chances are your kids have. Paul has been making regular appearances on "Sesame Street" doing the juggling act with which he has literally thrilled audiences on two continents. (By happy coincidence I happened to catch the act the other day with my son Tom, and Paul is very good and very funny. Tom was quite impressed when I told him the juggler was a classmate of mine, and the episode added a whole new dimension to the potential of the Dartmouth experience for him, I'm sure.)

Anyway, if you want to catch the show that Paul and some 120 students at the circus school he has started in New York are putting on this summer, stop by Bryant Park in Manhattan any time this summer (that's the park next to the public library on 42nd Street), and look for the big red-and-white tent of the Big Apple Circus.

The Big Apple Circus has come uptown from Battery Park where it was staged last summer, in its first season. This spring the show, which consists mainly of faculty and students from Paul's school, The New York School for Circus Arts, drew good crowds at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with performances over the Easter weekend. This summer's 14-week season is endorsed by city officials who hope that the circus, in the words of New York Times columnist Francis X. Clines, will replace "the narcoleptic zoo of louts and merchants of drugs and sex" who currently control that piece of urban turf. The school, which is housed in a large old building on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, will resume in the fall, probably with an expanded student body, which includes, according to Clines, "enthusiastic after-school arrivals from the local streets."

Paul has reportedly assigned himself the task of helping to create an American circus tradition. Right now, the show girls and clowns are just about the only American performers in Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey, for instance. The other acts come mainly from middle Europe.

Paul is styling his circus along the lines of the small, one-ring (he believes three rings is a wretched and unnecessary excess) circus that he himself worked with in France.

He clearly believes that circus-type entertainment is a touch of wholesome class that America badly needs right now. "The circus tent is the flimsiest excuse I know - a 16th of an inch thick - for shutting out the rest of the world," he told Clines. "But it is the place where people can be themselves and find the ugly outside world tolerable when they leave."

Paul himself was in Florida when I tried to reach him, but an administrative assistant was able to fill me in on the general course of his career, with much of the information coming from an interview done with him by The Trib, which was the new paper in New York.

After Dartmouth Paul had gone into a graduate theater program at Boston University, but dropped out of that. For a while he was the production manager for Julia Child's TV program, then went to Columbia, where he earned an M.B.A. After that came a stint as a talent coordinator for the "Merv Griffin Show," and a period in which he became increasingly concerned about the Vietnam War. In 1967, while in San Francisco, he saw the San Francisco Mime Troop, an anti-war theatrical aggregation. He auditioned for it, was accepted, and traveled with it for the next several years.

Later he went to London and juggled his way across Europe with partner Michael Christensen. They were literally "discovered" while performing on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris, and brought to the Casino de Paris to perform. That led to a television and a teaching job at the French national circus school, and he spent the next three years teaching, touring small towns, and "basking on the Riviera," he told The Trib.

But finally he decided he had to come back home, to America and New York. He presented his idea for a circus school to several (Corporations, and got the backing to get 'started. To see his current act - stop by Bryant Park this summer.

Paul isn't the only member of the Class who's been getting a lot of favorable ink in the New York press of late. Times restaurant reviewer Mimi Sheraton stopped by Woods the other day, which Blake Franklin and his partner Bill Gifford operate. (And I thank Bill for sending the review along in behalf of our apparently over-modest classmate.)

In short, Ms. Sheraton had a nice time. "It is easy to see that someone with imagination and a real sense of style has been at work developing Woods, the five-month old restaurant on Madison Avenue near 64th Street," she began in her report, which resulted in a two-star, or "very good" overall rating. In addition to the "glowing and felicitous decor" she congratulated the establishment on its "immaculately well cooked vegetables," the "exceptionally well prepared appetizers," and "a wonderful salad of smoked fish bound with what seems to be lightly salted whipped cream and a light and silky seviche of marinated raw scallops." Her principal cavil was that the seafood bisque was too thick, but she endorsed Woods' chocolate cake as "one of the best in the city." All major credit cards are accepted, and reservations are "preferred."

In other developments in the Big Apple, Harry Zlockower has joined Harshe-Rotman & Druck, an international public-relations firm, as an account supervisor. Harry had previously been publicity manager for Queensborough Community College, and had worked for two other public relations firms, and as a reporter for the Times.

A press account from Peabody, Mass., reveals that the Rev. David Goodwillie was the guest speaker at the First Church in Salem - Unitarian - on Valentine's Day. He spoke, appropriately enough, on "Learning Love - Life's Valentine." Dave, who had been minister of First Parish Church in Kennebunk, Maine, from 1973 to 1976, is at present a doctoral candidate at Andover-Newton Theological School near Boston.

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