Author Archives: carlastockton

Lia and Izaak in New Amsterdam: A Writer’s Journey Begins

 Too Much of Nothing: Notes on Feminism, Identity, and Womanhood (Mountain Ash Press, October 2024) was not the book I expected my first solo book would be. I had spent two years compiling stories about my mother’s immigrant family, my father’s eccentric past. They comprised the MFA thesis that I planned to publish.  My readers disagreed.

“Make this your second book,” they said.  “What’s most interesting in this work is the story you tell with you as the central character.  Write about you first.  Then write them.”

I revamped, reassuring myself that my next book would be the tribute to my family I felt compelled to write.  Once I got past Book #1, I would return to the compendium of family stories, the histories of my displaced and troubled forebears, to honor their memory with my carefully chosen words.

Once Too Much of Nothing was launched,  I moved into the process of preparing the next book by focusing on my immigrant mother’s trauma and her family’s survival and planning for the research that would delve more deeply into Dad’s ancestry. I began preparing to depict the layered amalgam of culture and sorrow my parents’ union created.

The journey has been fascinating . . . .   Their background is rife with drama. The forces that drove mom’s clan out of Europe in 1939, coupled with the tales of my father’s Dutch family, provide a rich tapestry of escape, survival, and the power of love. Best of all for me as a true New Yorker, their stories converge in the Catskill mountains and coalesce into one truly American chronicle.

When I read Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America, I realized again how important the story I plan to tell really is. 

I’ve been a Shorto fan since, as a New York sightseeing guide, I read his Island in the Middle of the World, his history of New York City, which argued that everything we identify as American comes from the cultural stew that simmered in New Amsterdam/New York.  That stew, according to Shorto, contained generous portions of the Dutch, English, and Jewish traditions that bubbled in my identity. Shorto’s newer book re-examines the history even more sharply, and he plumbs the depths of tropes that any child who attended Junior High in New York State was fed as the history of our state. 

We all knew that the Dutch established a community here and called it New Netherland, that New Amsterdam, their city at the tip of the Manahatta Island, was its capital.  Then, in 1664, the English arrived on the banks of the Hudson River, seized New Netherland, and renamed it New York. Then, the Dutch slinked away to the corners of history. 

Not exactly the truth, Shorto proves.

According to documents that have only recently been translated, there is much more to the story that we did not know.  The Dutch West India Company, acting not as agents of the monarch but as agents of the world’s second international trade union (the first being the Dutch East India Company) stole New York – and what are now Delaware, New Jersey, much of western Massachusetts, and Rhode Island – from the natives and built a society that encouraged diversity.  They were not inherently more tolerant than the English or the Spanish, but they found that a multicultural world was conducive to profitable business. And business was what they were all about. They were willing to accept anyone and everyone from anywhere at all, so long as there was money to be made. What the Dutch West India Company did not do was to protect its people from the reprisals by the understandably angry natives, and they failed to create a workable government.

The British Civil War had just ended, reestablishing the English crown. King Charles II realized that his ravaged country needed to curry influence in the new world in order to replenish his coffers.  He put his brother James in charge of asserting their presence, and James sent emissary Richard Nichols to take possession of land that now constitutes most of the Northeastern United States seaboard.

After spending some time in the Massachusetts Bay Colony negotiating peace between royalists and Puritans, Nichols, well-educated and conversant with Dutch success, sailed down coast and up the Hudson River to negotiate with Peter Stuyvesant for a transfer of power.  No shots were fired; no animosity resulted. As soon as his signature was affixed to the document, Stuyvesant made a brief visit to his European homeland before returning to Manhattan and settling down on his large farm at the south end of the island. He died a very wealthy, satisfied New Yorker.  

Nichols knew that a system that worked needed no reworking, and the Dutch system worked.  He brought in military forces to protect the citizenry, to maintain loyalty to the King, and to uphold the law.  But the Dutch remained in positions of political and social prominence. The array of religions and nationalities that had thrived under the Dutch retained their status as well. 

In the story Shorto tells of my city, I see my mother and my father as central characters. My father’s paternal English roots English planted themselves in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire in the 1620s when they fled the Church of England,  around the same time as his maternal folks were landing in New Netherland. Members of the Dutch Reformed Church, Dad’s second and third great-grandparents likely originated as Walloons, Calvinists who wandered away from the perils of Catholic Belgium and France into New Amsterdam by way of Holland.

 Likewise, my mother’s people had spent generations seeking a safe homeland.  Out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, into Poland/Ukraine, to Zagreb by way of Vienna, and eventually to Kingston, NY, once a Dutch enclave called Wiltwyck.

I will write about my parents.  But I will write about them as fictional characters in a time when unions like theirs were the stuff that fueled the sensibility that built the United States.

My parents’ fictional personae will inhabit 17th-century New Netherlands.  He as the son of parents who arrived in 1624, for the purpose of establishing a future in nieuwe wereld. She as the child of a Lisbon-born Jew, whose family, dispersed by the Inquisition, had found refuge in Dutch Recife, Brazil, until the same Inquisition sent them scrambling to New Amsterdam.

My protagonists are Lia and Izaak.  Neither’s story is unique, but each has a singular voice and a profoundly individual presence.  Theirs is a timeless story shared by millions, but their details are theirs alone.

Carlafornia Failure

A good friend who lives and writes in Mumbai, posted a substack story about her misadventures in Bollywood. I shared some parallel experiences, and I am here to share my full reply. . . .

Yes, Sukriti, we have lived a kind of parallel existence.  I am here to recount this failure of mine because it gave me strength to move on, to find new paths. . . . Don’t get me wrong.  I wish I might have succeeded.  But, as with so many things in life, it is what it is, and I am where I am. . . .

And so the story.

Once upon a time . . . a loooong time ago . . . . My very young self thought I should be an actor.  I believed that if I worked hard, took whatever roles came my way, and learned the business well, I might evolve and become a director, or, better yet, an auteur. I could make it.  Big.

It did not take long for me to realize that I was not cut out for the profession I so desired.  I did not have the right look, the right attitude, the right anything. As an actor, I realized, I was a really good writer. 

So, no problem,  I thought.  I would work on becoming a Hollywood writer.

At the same time, I was married to a person who had been non-definitive about whether we should reunite.  We had shared the Broadway dream and settled in New York, but he moved home to his mother in San Francisco when Hepatitis made a mess of his liver . . . and his stamina.  I was unclear as to whether our relationship was finished, a fact that proves again and again to me how unplugged I was, but I had the notion that it was up to me to patch us back together.  Three days after I arrived in San Francisco, I was on a bus, bound for LA, too humiliated to go back to NY and admit my abject failure. What the heck, I figured.  There was theater in LA.  And, more importantly, there were movie producers waiting for scripts to be written.

Lucky for me, my first cousin was the Great American Director Peter Bogdanovich.  He had at that time made his first – and to my mind his most profound  –film Targets, and he was gearing up for The Last Picture Show.  Unlucky for me, we were not Coppolas; cousins in my family have not been good at leaning on or propping one another up.  When I arrived in LA and called him, Peter laughed and said I should be a paperback writer.  It was a good goal to have.  That message I got.  Loud and Clear.

Peter’s wife then was the extraordinarily talented, profoundly ambitious Polly Platt.  I did not meet her on that visit.  She was busy putting together the script for which she was uncredited and was carrying the lion’s share of producing tasks, for which she got insufficient recognition at best. 

I stayed in LA for a short time, but I hated it. In the few months I stayed, I managed to dodge a few casting couches that would have been unfruitful anyway, contracted scabies without any sexual contact, interviewed with several prospective employers with no interest in me whatsoever, found a job in a coffee shop, and was fired for feeding a homeless man.   Admitting total defeat was the only choice I had. So I headed back to NY, back to college, back to a more plausible life. 

But I still wanted to be a screenwriter. 

Some years later, having just turned 40 and contemplating what path my life should take, I returned to Hollywood, this time to meet with my esteemed (former)  cousin-in-law.  I liked her, and her invitation to meet gave me hope that perhaps she might be willing to mentor me. 

We had a lovely lunch.  She listened to me as I spoke of my dreams. She read some of my work and asserted that I did indeed have talent.  She did advise me. But she did not encourage me.

Instead, she did me a kinder favor.

“Stay back East,” she said. “Raise your kids.  Write for yourself.  You’re already too old for this place.”

Then she looked at me with a distinctly kind twinkle in her eye and said,  “Besides your age, you’re at least 40 pounds too heavy. No one will even talk to you.  Don’t waste your time.”

It was sound advice.  I was not thin.  I had three kids, a husband, and a satisfying job teaching and directing educational theater.  Without malice or regret, I did as she suggested. 

Eventually, I did collaborate on a very good screenplay, and through connections I managed to make for myself, I got an appointment with people at Paramount Pictures.  Once again, I flew to LA, bypassed any meetings with family, and went directly to Robert Evans’ office. There Evans’ accolytes, assistants, staff, who had theoretically read the script and invited me to meet with them, hosted me three days in a row. We talked about the way the script would go, the possibilities, the legs it had.  Finally, they said they loved it. They would option it, and they could not wait to get it up on the screen. 

“You’ll hear from us tomorrow,” Evans’ right-hand person said to me as I left for the last time.  “We’ll email you the contract agreement first thing in the morning.”

I smiled, thanked them, and was about to leave when the assistant quickly added, “This is a great script. Really.  We are very excited.  We’re gonna walk down the aisle, across the red carpet together. This one’s a prize winner.”

That was on a Friday afternoon in 2005.  I watched for that email through the weekend, through the next week.  Perhaps even through the next month.  But I understood.

I never heard another word from any of them.

Coming Soon to a Streamer Near You


Diana Penn’s Indie Reads Aloud

Episode #238  Too Much of NothingToo Much of Nothing: Notes on Feminism, Identity, and Womanhood, by Carla Stockton

Air Date: August 20, 2025 @ 9:00am EST

Website Program Index Page: https://www.dkpwriter.com/indiereadsaloudseasonfour

YouTube: https://youtu.be/0_XCnIKDFaM

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dVrhlfWNiwdEfTRnMA6pX?si=ObeNu6sTR_e3UPQIsUIp4Q

Come hear me. Then let me hear from YOU. I would love to know YOUR story, and perhaps we’ll write it together . . . .

Lightning Forever. . . .

In 2016, my friend B treated me to a Southwest adventure. We flew to Phoenix, visited family before we drove to Sedona and on to New Mexico.  After seeing friends and family in Albuquerque, we parked ourselves in Santa Fe, where we planned to stay before taking the High Road to Taos winding up with family in Los Alamos.  The trip was gorgeous in many ways, but a definite highlight was meeting Rock’n’Rolll legend Lou Christie.

Lou had been on our flight from NY to Albuquerque, and we had noticed him.  How could we not?  What an icon of pop culture he had been for most of both our lives. Lou Christie wrote and sang the musical score for almost every event of my adolescence.  We were impressed, but we didn’t bother him.  Until we saw him in Santa Fe.

He walked into the lobby of La Fonda Hotel as we roamed through looking for a public restroom.  I could not resist.  Neither could B.  I don’t remember exactly what we said to him or why he engaged with us, but when we left the hotel, I had his personal phone number and an invitation to call him about an interview for my “get Read” column in the Columbia School of the Arts publication Catch and Release.

Now that Lou is gone, I thought I would re-share that interview. . . .

—————————————————————

If I were a photographer, and the shutter had just closed, I would be confident that I had just grabbed the money shot.

“Lou,” I ask toward the end of our three-hour interview, “what have been the major forks in your life?  The professional ones, the places where you could have gone one way, but you chose to go another. . . ?”

 “Oh, wow,” he muses. I love that question!” 

We’ve been talking long enough for me to truly understand why he likes it so much, why he is so visibly moved. Lou Christie has been doing what he’s doing most of his life, and what he’s been doing is reinventing himself, reconfiguring the formulae that take him and his melodious voice onward and upward.

We were seated among colorful iconography on orange furniture in the cozy, New Mexico-inspired sitting room he has built atop what used to be the roof of a 1940s tenement building in Hell’s Kitchen, in midtown Manhattan, where he has lived since the early 1970s.  He bought his apartment when it went coop, and the landlord was selling dirt cheap; knowing exactly what he wanted and being ever in control of his destiny, he simultaneously bought the air rights so that he could add his a second story of his own design, connected to the first by a picturesque spiral staircase, lit by a skylight and a sliding glass door that leads to the patio with a view of lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. 

Despite the low price, the decision to purchase the place took some deliberation.  Hell’s Kitchen was among the least desirable neighborhoods at the time, a rough area dominated by the Westies, a deadly alliance between the Italian and Irish mobs,  and by Puerto Rican and Anglo youth gangs.  The ones immortalized in West Side Story.  But Lou Christie recognized an opportunity to get in on the first wave of gentrification, and by the 1980s, the Javitz Center was underway, the Westies were disempowered, and the kids were back in school.  He had bought himself a haven.  Now, he has transformed a perfect example of simple, utilitarian working-class architecture into a Southwestern style country dasha, a brilliant transformation.

And the perfect metaphor for the life and times of Lou Christie.  

When Lou moved into Hell’s Kitchen, his star had begun to rise in earnest.  Thanks to New York radio stations and American Bandstand, Christie’s had become the voice of its generation.  The insistent falsetto, half pleading, half scolding, all simply celebrating the fact that it could get that high, played on all the hit radio stations.  WABC’s hitmaker Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow,  was a fan, as was WNBC’s gravel-throated Robert Weston “Wolfman Jack” Smith.  “If those guys liked you, you were in.”   

“I was a fifteen-year-old farm boy from Glenwillard – yes, it’s a real place, less than twenty miles out into the boondocks in the environs of Pittsburgh, PA” –  when I realized I wanted to sing, just sing. I wasn’t Lou Christi in those days.”

Lou was born Lugee Giovanni Sacco,  a name reconfigured from the longer Sicilian Saccosso at Ellis Island, and he always loved to sing.  And to color outside the lines.

“My father, who had been schooled to become a priest or a doctor, was my first role model: he chose a path less traveled and became a steel mill worker. Then he came home every evening to farm our 100-acre property.  Both my parents were musicians, and instead of spending evenings watching television together, we usually got together over music-making.

Lou was the second of six children, having trailed his sister Amy into the world by 18 months; when Lou was nearly fourteen, his parents solved a marital crisis by having four more kids: Maree, Marcie, Shauna and Peter.   “We all had to chip in then,” he says, smiling slyly.

 “We never knew any different; we just took care of one another, helped mom take care of the house and dad take care of the farm. But we were always singing.  I don’t remember ever NOT singing.”  From the beginning, Lou was the family lead singer, and his sisters and brother naturally provided the backup. 

“See? Now, there’s the first fork.  I knew I wanted to be a singer.  But I had to make some choices.  Am I better off going into Classical?  My teacher thought I should do that.  Or should I find great standards to sing?  But wait, should I write my own stuff?  I had a great range – I sang the lowest bass in my school choir and the highest tenor with equal ease.”   

He also had a counter tenor range, the ability to sing the really high notes. 

“SI kept asking myself, what voice should I choose?”

His falsetto won and forged a path to classic rock ‘n’ roll.

 “I didn’t want to be a choir boy.  My father was a great bread winner, all day long he was a slave in the steel mill, and then he came home and farmed his land. I was a happy kid, but I didn’t want to be like him.  Not me.  I wanted the levis, the painted jeans, the purple shirts all the way.  I just knew this was it, and I knew instinctively how important it was to remain master of my own career.

“I was so focused.  You know.  I gave up a lot, like my teen years, but I got exactly what I wanted because I went after it.  You know that book The Secret? They must have been following my life . . . because that’s what I did.  I concentrated my efforts on getting what I wanted,  and I made it happen every time.”

Lou got wind that there signed up for lessons with “a guy in Pittsburgh, who recorded local artists.”  After a single session, the producer sent Lou home to make a demo tape.  “He told me my voice was already good enough.”

“What you really need,” the teacher said, “Is a backup group.”

Lou grins at the memory.

“’Oh,’ I said to him. ‘I got my group.’  We’ve got a sound you’ve probably never heard.  Kinda like three mice.  Because I sing high, and I have another guy, and he sings up here too, and a girl. . . so then he said, ‘ Okay.  Go put something together, make me a demo tape, and let me hear what you got.’ ”

When Lou brought the demo back to the studio, the producer was impressed enough to put Lou’s group on the vocal backgrounds for a song called Ronnie Come Back, by a girl called Marcy Jo, on the Robbie Records label.  Everyone loved the sound of the background, and the record was a big hit, climbing the national charts and reaching the top 20. Lou and his mice never got paid.

“Then we did a follow up with Marcy called When Gary Went in the Navy, and four more, and they were all hits though they never paid us.  Heck, I was still in school. I couldn’t even drive yet.” 

After a few more non-paying hits with Marcy Jo, Lou chose a new path and set his standards by creating Lugee and the Lions.  “I was Lugee, and my sisters and the same group of little kids that were always around me sang as the Lions.”  Lou’s dad drove the group all over Pittsburgh, where they sang for weddings, mall openings, parades and the like, and eventually the positive attention brought him Twyla Herbert.  And thus he reached yet another fork in his road.

“I could see right away. . . that woman was pure genius.  When she proposed working together, I still had to question myself. . . .

“There I was at another fork.  This woman was special. She was twenty years older than me, had a degree in classical music, was a classical pianist, didn’t know a doo-wop from a dust mop.  But she was brilliant.  Just brilliant.  And I could see we could be good together, really good!”

He chose to give collaboration a go, and together, Christie and Herbert wrote The Gypsy Cried, in the style of Valli’s Sherry – it took them all of fifteen minutes – and, he said the experience was surreal, something like what he imagined it would be like to be on an acid trip though he had no experience with drugs.  “There was something about our chord patterns.  They were more classical or more international, made the music more interesting instead of the standard 4 chord progressions, the usual wha wha wha. . . “   The song established a musical partnership spanned the next 47 years, until Twyla Herbert’s death in 2009. 

“I never wanted to make a record that sounded like anyone else. My voice had this falsetto, these octaves to work with, and I didn’t want to record anything that wasn’t uniquely mine.”

By 1966, when Lou and Twyla wrote Lightning Strikes, which shot almost immediately to #1 on the European and American billboard charts, Lou knew beyond doubting he had made the right choice both in going into the business of creating songs with Twyla Herbert and in sticking to his falsetto.  The only choice he didn’t like for a long time, until he got accustomed to it, was the recording company’s choice of his name. 

“I just wanted to be Lugee!”

But the bosses dubbed him Lou Christie.  And Lou Christie soared to fame and fortune.

He never took his good luck for granted. 

Still, the path was never smooth.

“Even good managers can be really dumb. I know because I had one. . . . Bob Marcucci tried to sway me from my path, and I had to fight tooth and nail to stay the course.” 

Marcucci told Lou that he would have to grow up, lose the falsetto, sing more standard arrangements of old songs.  But Lou tried it Marcucci’s way just once.

“I went to my gig in Framingham, outside Boston, and I sang all the standards, all the classics. ”  It was a disaster.  Fans hissed and booed, screaming for “Lightening Strikes.”

“It made sense to me. I mean, can you see  me doin’ Ol’ Man River? I’m boring myself just thinking about it.”

Lou left the songs in a dumpster and vowed to listen only to his own advice.  He toured extensively, singing the hits, getting his audience to its feet in adulation, singing along.  He knew what worked. His easy style on stage coupled with his obvious natural delight in being there sold him. 

Lou stops and thinks for a moment.  When he speaks, he is back in the present.

“Now I’m sayin’ to myself, I’m 72, and I’m sayin’ ‘See? It still works.  I’m still here.’” 

That was 2016.  Lou’s concerts were never less than packed.  His life was never perfect.  He had married, divorced, raised two children, lost one to a tragic accident, and he had persisted in touring and sharing the joy of his presence with family, friends, and, most of all with fans.

Like his myriad fans, I am left with the memory of a warm, witty man with a singular mission.

“Once upon a time,” Lous said to me just before we ended our interview, “I only wanted to share the good side, the fun side because I don’t believe you can make a career out of talking about all the bad things in life.  But maybe it’s time to start mentioning it.  Everyone thinks I’ve had a flawless life.  Part of the reason is I project that kind of forward thinking, and I’m a peaceful person. I have never wanted to get stuck in my anger or my bitterness. 

“But you know, I am still so naïve  There are a lot of people out there who live on bitter – more of an addiction than any wine or beer or shot or pill.  I don’t want to be one of them. 

“Maybe I will write that book.”