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It’s been forty years since we first heard Suzanne Vega on record.  That haunting, lyrical sound is still there on her latest album “Flying With Angels.”  The songs are poignant and personal.  Suzanne’s songs have taken her around the world, including a friendship with the late Czech poet, activist and former President Vaclav Havel.  

Her musical journey started in New York and that’s where it continues.

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A little bit of a different Before The Cheering Started episode this weekend.  A mid August weekend always brings memories of Woodstock.  It was a pleasure and privilege to create and host this radio documentary for CBS News Radio in 2019, "Back To The Garden," with stories from the musicians, the festival goers, the organizers, the people who worked the festival and the locals.  Enjoy.

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Author Judy Batalion knows from Holocaust trauma, growing up with survivor grandparents in Montreal.  So when she chanced upon a book written in 1946 about a female resistance fighter in Poland, she was ready to start a journey that lasted more than a decade and resulted in the 2021 book “The Light Of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.”  It is the largely unknown story of Jewish women in Poland during World War II who showed incredible courage in arming and funding the resistance and saving lives.

“The Light of Days” tells an utterly compelling story, as is Judy Batalion’s.

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I always smile when I think of the apt title of Steve Forbert’s terrific debut album “Alive on Arrival.”  Because he was.  “Alive on Arrival” speaks to the excitement of coming to the big town and making it work.  For Steve Forbert, that meant plenty of hard work, indefatigable optimism and the inspiration of an uncle’s unorthodox career.  Steve has known every up and down of the music industry.  But there is still the joy of playing, writing and creating music that he first felt growing up in Meridian, Mississippi.

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Peter Asher has been part of the music that has elated and sustained me for some 60 years.  The songs of Peter and Gordon as part of the 1960’s British Invasion still sound fresh and wonderful six decades later.  And the musicians he produced and managed, especially James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, created the soundtrack of my life.  And Peter still has the touch, co-producing Barbra Streisand’s beautiful album of duets, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two.”

Getting an opportunity to interview him before a live audience at Magical Mystery Camp in upstate New York was a labor of love.

 I hope you enjoy the latest episode of “Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin.”

 If you like the episode, please rate and review it on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  And please share it on social media and by old fashioned word of mouth.

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Luis Miranda Jr.’s story is a great American story.  It’s a great New York story.  It’s a great Puerto Rican story.  Long before Hamilton became part of our vocabulary, Luis Miranda Jr. created a new life for himself in New York as a respected and influential advocate, organizer, politico and much more.  And then, thanks in part to the creativity of his son Lin-Manuel, he was able to take these skills and apply them on a bigger stage, more than he could have dreamed of growing up in a small town in Puerto Rico.

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Larry Charles’ comedy journey has taken him to some of the familiar places for a comedy writer, such as on set for Seinfeld, Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm.  At other times, it’s found him running for a waiting van to escape when a scene in the Borat and Bruno movies goes great but upsets the locals.  And then there have been moments in Iraq and Somalia, finding out that there is indeed standup comedy in some not so funny places for his series Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy.  It’s times like these when the art of talking your way out of situations, an art learned long ago on the streets of Brooklyn, comes in mighty handy.

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Willie Nile is a musical lifer, still going strong in his late 70’s with a new album “The Great Yellow Light.”  He’s been a New York singer songwriter who has traveled the country and the world with his guitar for decades.  But when it comes to the lessons learned that shaped his life and musical career, it always comes back to the Buffalo home where his parents raised him, providing Willie with a moral compass that served him well all those years ago.  And now.

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The story of the 1969 New York Mets, the Amazin’ Mets, has been told for more than five decades.  It will no doubt be told for decades to come.  Art Shamsky has experienced it as a player and an author, playing a key role as a left handed hitter and outfielder in 1969 and then hitting the keys to write several books about the Mets.  His latest is “Mets Stories I Only Tell My Friends.”  

Art Shamsky had a long career in baseball.  But his career and his life can be divided up into three categories: before 1969, 1969 and after 1969.

 Amazin’.

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David Gabriel is a young dancer on the rise as a soloist with New York City Ballet.  The love affair with dance began early.  Really early.  He started watching ballet videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov while growing up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  David was 2.  Not long after, the goal became “get to New York, “a dream he has realized.