Rayro's Account of Katz's Venture

Mel Katz fancied himself the best businessman on all of Manhattan Island. He spent long hours doing research before embarking upon his capitalist ventures. He was a familiar face in the Reading Room of The New York Public Library on 42nd Street. During his infrequent breaks he would eat his pastrami sandwich at the feet of one of the famous library lions for inspiration. Unlike another acquaintance of mine named Leopold, who took his breaks outside the library with the end of his necktie stuffed into his mouth, Mel was determined to get ahead in this world, to make his mark on America.

One day, Mel stumbled upon research that made excellent sense to him and inspired an extra helping of pastrami outside. One of its major premises that struck Mel was that “When children are old enough to have a general diet, allow them to have pickles.” One rarely meets such inspirational greatness, you must admit. You know that feeling you get when you feel that at last success lies within your very reach? That was what he felt. Most of this exciting research was centered around the work of a Doctor Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., MD.

Among other things this creative doctor suggested for a healthy diet were the following: a) “Use glandular or variety meats as one-third the necessary protein,” and b) “Use the following meats rare: steaks, lamb chops, leg of lamb, rib and sirloin tip roasts, fresh ground beef for patties.” Mel was in heaven, from a culinary standpoint.

What fascinated Mel the most was Pottenger’s experiments with cats, demonstrated to be at their healthiest when fed on “a diet of 2/3 raw meat, 1/3 raw milk and cod liver oil,” and the brilliant way in which this researcher was able to generalize his findings to human beings too. Truly, Pottenger’s cats held the key to Mel’s future, once he figured out how.

Well, why not open up a food market based upon all the new things Mel was learning daily? This would be no ordinary establishment like the nearby Essex Street Market, good as that place also was. He could feature not only the best pickles that money could buy, and the best pastrami, and the best meats, poultry, eggs, grains, and other foodstuffs that a busy man could bring home to his proud family after a day’s work, but also shelves of health literature like all of Pottenger’s studies to benefit his grateful customers. And even the right cooking utensils based on his same research.

And yet more. For example, Mel pored through every dictionary in every possible language at the New York Public Library to find out more about the meaning of the name Pottenger. This led him also to stock vessels of metal, earthenware, and wood for holding soups, broths, and other liquid or semi-liquid foods, including porridge. And because that name was also associated with being an apothecary, Mel set about looking for popular medications to stock in his market, maybe for indigestion, for example. Such a market as this was bound to be highly successful.

What was he going to call his new establishment on the face of the earth? Now the name came naturally to him: Katz’s Pottengers, in memory of Pottenger’s cats.

Concert In Memoriam: Odid McPherson

An Almost Forgotten Composer: Odid McPherson. January 13, 2007


Odid McPherson (1936-1989) composed voluminously during a short and relatively uneventful life. He grew up in a tenement on Vermilea Avenue in New York City during the war-ridden 1940s exhibiting but little musical talent in his youth. During his sophomore year at Columbia University, however, he reportedly heard steel drummers while en route to a class in electrical engineering, and his life’s path was thereupon set “as if by a miracle, or something like that.”

McPherson dropped his technological major forthwith and enrolled in a composition class taught by the esteemed professor Vladimir Ussachevsky combining Odid’s old interest in electronics with his new penchant for music. At the then revolutionary Moog Synthesizer, he set about trying to replicate “those wondrous sounds” of the steel drums playing Christmas favorites and “just about had the whole thing down” when it struck him that the instruments he was so expensively emulating could be purchased at but a fraction of what he had already spent. This initiated what we now consider the second crisis of McPherson’s career.

McPherson fortunately had little difficulty selling his hardly used electronic gear to an eager classmate. Using the fortune thus gained, he succeeded in purchasing an entire battery of steel drums, and indeed had plenty left for pursuit of his other major interest, that of consuming generous portions of Chinese food at George Goon’s Canton Restaurant on Mott Street in Chinatown. McPherson often claimed that he found the egg drop soup “quite conducive to composing on the spot.” The chromatic tunings made available by the finest steel drums that money could buy opened all manner of compositional vistas, though he reportedly often regretted being unable to bring them with him to the dinner table on Mott St. to further stimulate his composing.

Tonight’s composition presents our composer’s work at his highest level of maturity. We hope you will enjoy listening to this triple concerto titled "Star-Crossed Buns for Steel Drums, Aluminum Piccolo, Corrugated Iron Contrabassoon, and Plasterboard Orchestra," which is now posthumously receiving its world premiere. How proud would Odid McPherson feel to be present on this historic occasion and hearing his perhaps best work finally being performed tonight by such bright musicians!

Our guest speaker and reviewer Felix Carminum is a Professor Emeritus at Kinetic State College in New Hampshire, as chronicled in Harry Kirschner's study, "The Cult of Kashaknishra," published by Xlibris, 2000 (ISBN#0-7388-4213-3).

History Is Made!!!

Many heads were turned, and scholarly necks wrenched, when Prof. Dr. Ignaz Quasi Rosenstock discovered the above 18th-century manuscript underfoot after a sonic boom had shattered a valuable Grecian urn in the Museo della Spanakopita recently. He still proudly recounts how easily he picked up this treasure while other investigators were busily recovering all the shards dating back to the Fourth Millennium B.C. or indeed earlier. Speculations continue concerning how and why this manuscript, now designated Codex 1492, found its way into the aforementioned urn (itself a possible forgery of a Medieval casket), only to be so recently discovered by Prof. Dr. Rosenstock — who had simply entered the premises with the intent of using the nearest men's room. This, his latest musicological discovery, is causing a sensation impervious to any analgesics heretofore known to science. Regarding possible causes of the aforementioned sonic boom, Prof. Dr. Rosenstock remains modestly silent while continuing to celebrate his sudden fame under observation.