Bernie Sweeney owner of the Casino in the Park and Shore Casino in Atlantic Highlands has been hosting and donating the Snyder High party for the past 11 plus years.  As an alumni of the school and  also an inductee into Snyder High School’s Hall of Honor since 1998 the party is Sweeney’s way of giving back to his old alma mater. 

In those 11  plus years of hosting the Snyder party which equals to around 5000 dinners,  Sweeney’s message to the young people at Snyder has always been study, work hard,  and pay it forward to others.

The event is an exciting time for Sweeney, his wife Kathleen his sons  and staff as told by  Sweeney’s  son Jay, ” For us at the Casino in the Park it is a joy to see these young people having a great time, they’re all great kids with good grades and all we ask is they go out and help others in their lives.”  He Said. “Our one message through the years go out and do something wonderful for someone else.” 

Casino in the Park 

The post CASINO IN THE PARK JC ANNUAL DINNER FOR SNYDER HIGH STUDENTS first appeared on River View Observer.

New Play at LaMama in New York based on The Carmelettes, the 1950s All-Girl Doo-Wop Group from Jersey City

 

“When I was 15, I started writing my own material,” Murphy says, “and somehow I knew I was going to come to this story at some point in my life.”

Murphy’s full-length play about her mother’s experience as a doo-whop singer began 20 years ago, she says, when she was invited to perform a 10-minute monologue on her story of choice and she chose to talk about her mother’s singing career. Ten years later, she started thinking of that monologue and the play began to take shape.

“I always had my mother’s records and they were always fascinating to me,” Murphy says. “It was family history and even more, it was my voice that I heard on those records. When I would research songs for the kind of music that I perform, I always came back around to my mother’s music and that’s when I decided that I needed to tell this story. And the more I worked on this play, the more I began to think about all the other uncelebrated people in this world. We live in an ‘American Idol’ society and there are people sitting behind desks, teaching school, who have amazing gifts and you just don’t know about them. That’s become very interesting to me.”

Growing up, Murphy wanted to be a rock star, she says. And because of her experience as an undergrad in the experimental theater division of NYU’S Tisch School of the Arts, Murphy’s career path turned into a search for belonging that included singing in New York’s cabaret rooms like the Eighty Eights and doing theater and music gigs that didn’t fit one particular genre.

“I was never a cabaret performer, per se,” Murphy says. “I would sing in cabarets and end up doing a U2 song. Then I would sing Standards in rock clubs. My tastes were eclectic.”

During all that time, Murphy says, the stories of her mother’s life as a doo-whop singer would always come back to her. Even though the play is called “Girl/Group…” her mother’s trio, The Carmelettes was really a pre-girl group. pre-Supremes, pre-Shirelles and pre-Shangri-Las.

In the mid-1950s, The Carmelettes received their name from their parish priest at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel church where they sang in the choir. They signed with Alpine, a subsidiary of Epic Records and recorded their first songs. That’s when Neil Sedaka chose them to sing back up for his song “Oh Carol,” a tune he wrote about singer/songwriter Carole King.  Although not much is written about The Carmelettes, according to Angela LaPrete Murphy, “We sang backup on ‘Oh Carol’ and then were asked to duplicate the sound on ‘Oh, Neil.’ At that time, Virginia had already left the group. Vicky and I did a great deal of backup with Carole King for other artists.”

Beatrice Verdi, Virginia Verga’s sister wrote songs for them, arranged the vocals, and went on to become a successful songwriter, Susan Murphy says: “She was unbelievable. She was writing four-chord doo-wop stuff, the harmonies were insane and these little girls did them. One of their records is now up on eBay for 50 bucks.”

The Carmelettes continued to do back up and record their own songs. When they recorded “Promise Me a Rose” at Columbia Studios in New York, singer Anita Bryant recorded the same song and the DJ pulled The Carmelettes version off the air. Similar to most girl groups like the Shangri-Las, The Carmelettes/Kittens disbanded and moved on with their lives.

“It’s because of The Carmelettes that I discovered a personal love for all types of music,” Murphy says, “and a deep respect for the path my mother paved all those years ago so that other girl groups could follow.”

And although her career as a doo-whop singer became a treasure trove of memories in a box of 45s, Angela LaPrete Murphy made sure the music never stopped playing in the Murphy household.

“I always knew doo-wop because it was always playing in our house,” Murphy says. “And my mother always sang. In fact, everybody always sang in my house. Even though we weren’t music professionals – except for my mom – we would bust out in songs.”

Girl/Group: A Daughter’s Tale

June 17-26,

Fri & Sat 10 pm; Sun 5:30 pm

Tickets $18

LaMama’s The Club

74A East 4^th Street

(Btw Bowery & 2^nd Ave)

New York City

212-475-7710

Tickets can be purchased online at www.lamama.org/theclub

 

To view a short video about the show on YouTube, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJfqW2Toh9A

 

 

 

 

           

 

The post Golden Girls of Doo-Wop- The Carmelettes inspire new play first appeared on River View Observer.

By Sally Deering

 International street artists like “Big Foot,” “Kid Zoom,” Jason Maloney and Ron English travel the globe creating art on the urban landscape. The artists – all world renown – paint murals on big concrete canvases like bridges, embankment walls and building facades that draw tourists, bring ka-ching to a city’s coffers and transform dilapidated structures into works of art. And because they’re painted on concrete walls, the artists’ works can’t be bought or sold or compete with the gallery sales of their paintings, so they do it all for free.

 

The Jersey City Street Art Initiative is like many public art happenings taking place in cities around the world. English, a Jersey City resident, worked with several street artists on a “Separation Wall” in Palestine and just returned from Miami, Florida where he was invited by real estate mogul Tony Goldwyn to create murals in a neighborhood of broken-down buildings to help transform it into a hip and happening hub of homes and restaurants. (Back in the day, Goldwyn initiated the transformation of Soho in New York City from a neighborhood of abandoned warehouses into a hip and thriving upscale arts district.)

 

“In Miami, that whole neighborhood is being filled with murals by most of the famous street artists on the planet and now they have all these galleries there and really nice restaurants,” English says. “We did murals on a Separation Wall in Palestine and people flew in from Tokyo and Switzerland to see the murals we worked on. Then I go back to Jersey City and wonder why we can’t get something going on here. If we had a big mural project we could attract tons of tourists and catch a boon to the economy.”

 

English took his idea to Greg Brickey, art curator at the Jersey City Office of Cultural Affairs (and also an artist) and Bob Antonicello, Executive Director of the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency who embraced the opportunity to transform some of Jersey City’s blight spots into works of art. Since the Initiative began more than a year ago, several murals have already gone up. On the brick façade of the Hudson County Art Supply building on Newark Avenue and Coles Street, English, Big Foot and Jason Maloney created a whimsical mural depicting a wide-eyed child in shorts and T-shirt emblazoned with an upside-down peace sign. Several artists including

Christian Santiago and Megan Gulick of Jersey City are painting a block-long concrete wall between Oakland and Baldwin facing the General pencil factory. And Big Foot, who English describes as “Rembrandt with a spray can,” has been working on a section of an embankment wall on Baldwin Avenue near Journal Square. Plans are also in the works for a temporary wall gallery in the east plaza of the Powerhouse station in downtown Jersey City.

 “There’s an explosion of street art here,” Brickey says. “Every two weeks another piece goes up. We’re not focusing on one area. We’re looking for spots where the work will fit into the environment and become part of the environment rather than disrupt what’s happening. The plan is really to let it happen in the most organic way possible.”

 On a walk in the Heights section of Jersey City, you’ll come across a mural of bright colored fish, ducks and bunnies on the side of Daisy’s Cleaners, a 20-foot-by-25-foot brick wall on the corner of South Street and Central Avenue. The mural is by Megan Gulick, a local artist who is also one of the artists painting the block-long mural on Baldwin.

 “I like painting big and I thought it would be fun,” Gulick says. “I’m more of an illustrative painter and most of my work has been indoors and I want my stuff to be bigger and I don’t care if they sell. I also want to give back to my community.”

 Gulick says she enjoyed painting the mural on Central Avenue because it got her in touch with the people in the Heights neighborhood.

 “I met a lot of great people in the Heights, some special little kids,” Gulick says. “One little girl gave me a bracelet and I gave her a little fish painting. There’s definitely a community there and I’ve gotten some honest responses to the mural. It’s a very colorful, bright happy piece and a tribute to the Heights.”

 As Executive Director of Jersey City’s Redevelopment Agency, Antonicello sees the Jersey City Art Initiative following in the footsteps of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Project, where street artists paint murals featuring the likenesses of real people who live and work in Philly’s neighborhoods. The mural painted at the Hub, an intersection on Martin Luther King Drive in the Greenville section of Jersey City was a neighborhood-based project painted by street artists, local children and teachers from Snyder High School.

“We call these types of projects soft redevelopment,” Antonicello says. “It’s not bricks and mortar, but just as important because it sends a positive message to the people who work and live in that neighborhood.”

 Jersey City stands right across the Hudson River from New York City, the art capital of the world where internationally-acclaimed artists display their works in museums and galleries and outside in parks and on the city’s streets. According to Antonicello, approximately 30,000 artists (in the visual and performing arts) claim art or art-related work as a large source of their personal income. They make Jersey City their home, in part, because of its proximity to New York. At least that’s how it starts. Then, as the artists settle in they begin to fall in love with the place, make friends with their neighbors, raise families and get involved in their community.

 “We’re lucky in Jersey City to have this community of artists here,” Antonicello says. “They are the invisible hand bringing art to the people. Not everyone can go to a gallery or museum, but if you’re walking down Central Avenue to the Brennan Court House, take a moment when you’re on Baldwin Avenue and look up at the wall. You’re going to be somewhat stunned, 140-yards of top-notch street art in what was a pretty ugly spot.”

 The Jersey City Street Art Initiative is not city funded or federally funded, but accepts private donations that Antonicello says are easily offered by members of the community. When Antonicello approaches local real estate developers for donations, he never gets ‘no’ for an answer, he says, and so far the Initiative has raised $18,000, much of it used for summer job salaries for the kids involved in the Hub mural and stipends for the artists along with paint supplies. Other donations roll in too, like 20-gallons of primer they just received.

The mission of the Jersey City Street Art Initiative is to bring art into local neighborhoods in locations that will have the most impact on the community.

Public art has always been a part of human history,” Antonicello says. “In Jersey City, we don’t have commissioned outdoor art, so how do we fill that need?  We choose good walls, good canvases in highly visible locations where a statement can be made, where people can be uplifted and with the help of artists like Ron English, we’re presenting a high-level of art to the people. We’re not rendering any opinion that people will like everything they see, that’s the nature of art. Leondardo Da Vinci was an artist and so is Kid Zoom and so are the kids who painted the mural at the Hub, in their own right. For the folks going into the Hub, all those kids were Leonardo Da Vincis.”

 For more information, go to www.thejcra.org

Here are some more  photos of Wall Art captured by our photographer Newsboi around Hudson County. These photo’s may not represent wall art affliated with the Jersey City Arts Intiative.

The post WALL ART-INTERNATIONAL STREET ARTISTS TURN JERSEY CITY BLIGHT INTO PRICELESS ART first appeared on River View Observer.