Artists-Writers Is New and Improved
During a conversation at Poxabogue’s Fairway restaurant the other day with Leif Hope, the impresario of the Artists and Writers benefit softball game that is to be played here Saturday, this writer was asked if he could read what he was writing.
What a question. Of course he couldn’t, he replied. Would that then qualify him to play on the Artists’ team?
A query that evoked one of Hope’s fondest memories, the day in 1977 when the late Tom Twomey and he flew over professional fast-pitch softball battery mates C.B. Tomasiewicz and Kathy Neal from the Meriden (Conn.) Falcons, much to the Writers’ chagrin.
“The reason I did that,” Hope said, “was that the year before the Writers had on their roster two lawyers, and when I asked them what they’d written, they said, ‘Legal briefs.’ ”
The cradle of The Game, as it is known, is said to have been Wilfrid Zogbaum’s front yard in Springs where, beginning in 1948, antics ran rampant, and Philip Pavia, a heavy-hitting sculptor, smashed into smithereens a grapefruit painted to look like a softball. Though when it comes to verisimilitude, Hope has come to prefer a turnip.
Writers began filtering in in the early years, beginning with Barney Rosset, the publisher, and Harold Rosenberg, the art critic, and in the mid-1960s — now at Syd Solomon’s backyard in Georgica — the battle lines that continue unto this day were drawn.
Since 1967, the Artists and Writers Game has been played as a benefit, and while the Writers usually won in the early years, being more drawn to winning because of their tender egos, according to Hope, the Artists, despite his insistence that artists tend to be more fun-loving and insouciant, have fielded some pretty fearsome teams in recent years, so often, in fact, that it’s become a tossup each year as to which team will win.
You never know who will show up. Dick Cavett, Carl Bernstein, Paul Simon, Chevy Chase, Alec Baldwin, Gerry Cooney, Bill Clinton, John Irving, Jay McInerney, Kristin Davis, Rod Gilbert, Josh Charles, and Pele, among others, have in the past.
There will be new things this year, the 69th in which The Game has been played. First, the pre-Game party is to be held at the Schenck Fuels yard, behind Babette’s restaurant on Newtown Lane, tomorrow from 7 to 10 p.m.
The Game, which is to be played at East Hampton’s Herrick Park at 2, is to be preceded this year by a throw, bat, and run Future A&W Stars Skills Challenge for children ages 5 through 11 at 10:30 a.m., and at 11:30 by a home run derby whose pitcher-batter teams have been asked to donate $500 each. The odds-on favorite, should he come, as Hope said is rumored, would be the former Detroit Tiger and New York Yankee slugger Cecil Fielder.
Batting practice presumably will begin after the home run derby, and The Game, as aforesaid, is to begin at 2.
This being the 100th-year anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in this state, Hope has asked New York Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul to come, as well as Bridget Fleming, a Suffolk County legislator, and Minerva Perez, executive director of Organizacion Latino-Americana.