Nancy & Sandy
We met Nancy and Sandy Rosenblum at a gathering of Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Society’s open house for new members at the American Embassy in Tokyo. Bruce and I had decided to join and went along to sign up. We ended up sitting with them.
Nancy was from Detroit, an only child and a graduate of Wayne State University; Sandy was with the USIA at the American Embassy and studying Japanese. They had two small children Daniel and Jane and lived in a big old Japanese western-style house in Shinagawa district. They had a dachshund named Blue.
As time when on we did more and more plays. Nancy performed in many as did Bruce and once I did too. My function though was stage management and PR and advertising for our productions. We had the use of the Daichi Semei Hall in the old Daichi Semei Building on the Ginza – General MacArthur’s old headquarters. It was a full size stage and quite well equipped for the times – some forty years ago. As time went on I became closer and closer to Nancy. She was always high maintenance and theirs was perhaps the most rancorous marriage I have ever known. As she admits she stayed in twelve years longer than she should have.
Sandy Rosenblum looked and sounded like Woody Allen. He also had the same glib or dry sense of humor. But he whined and complained; he hated his job; his kids didn’t appreciate him and latterly he said that living with Nancy was akin to living with a Chinese cadre. It probably seemed that way because, like many women of the time, she fully embraced “women’s lib” and so some things became quite a shock for him: taking care of his own clothes, packing his own suitcase, perhaps preparing a meal.
Eventually, they left Japan and returned to Washington, D.C. Probably two years before I did in 1974. In late 1974 I moved to Rome, Italy. I lived there until problems with my partner at the time, Walter Kaplan, caused me to move to D.C. in February of 1976. Nancy invited me to come stay with them. She was preparing to finish her civil service training and would be posted to Ottawa. I was sure that it would not take me long to find a job and an apartment – which it did not. I found both fairly quickly but I noticed something strange with my left eye. I was working for Mt. Washington Bank as a temp and my boss recommended an opthamologist.
On the appointed day I went to see the eye doctor. He looked and looked and had his colleagues all come in and take a look and then he came in one more time and switched on the lights and asked me to take a seat. “I am afraid you have a lump in your eye.” Oh, I said and what does that mean?” “I fear” he said “that it is melanoma and it is growing on your optic nerve.” “How do you get rid of that?” I inquired. “Well we have to remove your eye.” I fainted dead away. There was no time to waste as it had metastacized and so I was thrown into top gear getting tested nine different ways for primary/secondary site. I took the train down to Philadelphia to Wills Eye Hospital. My surgeon was Dr. Jerry Shields. When I first entered his office I said sullenly “I have no desire to be here.” And he said just as sullenly “There’s the door.”
With all due haste we rushed to inject radio isotopes and readied me for surgery the next day. In the mean time, the American Red Cross found Walter in Africa somewhere and he proceeded to meet me a few days after surgery at Wills. He stayed with me through my convalescence and then he returned to Rome and I returned to Chevy Chase and Nancy’s house.
Things between her and Sandy were at an all time low. Both children were still living at home. Daniel was about to go to Oberlin and Jane was still in high school. Most of the best arguments were during meal times when Sandy would start pressuring Jane to talk to him; she would clam right up. One night Nancy entered the dining room with a big bowl of pasta and said to Sandy “There you go ruining dinner again. You want to ruin dinner, well, let me show you how!” And proceeded to dump the bowl of pasta on the dining room table.
Eventually, she stressed that it was time for me to make my own way. So I moved out to a residence. In the meantime Walter called and begged me to come back and Ben Brown called and offered me a job at Brown Daltas. From what seemed like a hopeless situation, opportunities were presenting themselves. My mother even wrote me a $400 check so I could pay for my airline ticket. So with my little collection of D.C. bits and pieces off I went on TWA back to Rome, Walter and Brown Daltas.
When I moved to Boston in 1985 I got back in touch with Nancy and Sandy who were now divorced and living separately, she in Chevy Chase and he in Dupont Circle. I went to stay with her in her just bought house on Fessenden Street. Then she was posted to Tijuana, Mexico. I went to visit her there. She was difficult then too. I went to the kids’ weddings, Nancy’s 70th birthday, Sandy’s funeral. High days and holidays as Daniel would say.
Then Nancy retired from the Embassy and moved to Montclair, New Jersey where Daniel and Tamima and their two girls, Beryl and Hanna lived. I visited her there too. Then she moved again back to Chevy Chase to a new house. After five plus years there she is now planning to move back to Montclair, having bought a condo there recently and on the brink of selling the Chevy Chase house on May 1. She will be 77 this August. I might note, just for the hell of it, in the twenty-five years I have lived here, she has visited me once when her daughter Jane was running in the Boston marathon.