Jersey Celebrities Archives | New Jersey Monthly: Recent Episodes
Jersey Celebrities Archives | New Jersey Monthly
Actress Kelly Bishop was at a gas station in northern New Jersey one morning when the title for her new memoir, at the time just a few chapters underway, suddenly materialized.Best known for her supporting role as Emily Gilmore, the blue-blooded, demanding and deliciously sardonic matriarch on the quirky TV comedy-drama Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Bishop was dressed down in sweats, sunglasses and a baseball cap when a teenage boy gently approached her. (Fans “come out of the strangest places,” she muses.)He’d recognized what Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino refers to in the memoir’s foreword as Bishop’s unmistakable “whiskey voice,” and relayed that he’d been binge-watching the show on Netflix. Emily was his favorite character, and would always be, he assured her, “the third Gilmore Girl.” (The show stars two: Emily’s daughter, Lorelai, played by Lauren Graham, and granddaughter, Rory, played by Alexis Bledel.)It wasn’t the first time she’d heard a fan invoke that phrase, but amid her current absorption in building a book, it seized her. The Third Gilmore Girl, out now (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), traces Bishop’s life up to and beyond her career-defining role on the beloved series—from her ballet roots out West, to her Tony-winning role in Broadway’s original production of A Chorus Line, to her unexpected gig in Dirty Dancing, to her decades-long marriage to TV personality Lee Leonard.[caption id="attachment_344264" align="alignnone" width="778"] Bishop (top right) in Gilmore Girls with Edward Herrmann (top left) and, from bottom left, Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel and David Sutcliffe. Photo: Courtesy of Gallery Books/Photofest/WB/Ron Batzdorff[/caption]The quotidian scene of Bishop, who has lived in South Orange for nearly 30 years, stopping to fuel her car in loungewear and happily chat with a stranger is a far cry from the “severe, uncompromising” character of Emily Gilmore, as Bishop describes her—who sports Chanel suits and discards maids like Kleenex, turns up her nose at her granddaughter’s high-school commute (“I hate that she takes the bus. Drug dealers take the bus.”) and, in one episode, refuses a breathalyzer after a police officer pulls her over (“Young man, I don’t know where that’s been,” she drawls, eyeing him with arctic disdain, “but I can say with absolute certainty, it won’t be going anywhere near my mouth.”)Although inherently elegant, self-assured and occasionally, as she recounts in her memoir, coolly confrontational when warranted, Bishop, 80, unlike her most popular on-screen persona, has maintained a lifelong aversion to snobbery.“I think there is so much pretense with people when they're striving for not only social acceptance, but some sort of elite place or group of people,” she tells New Jersey Monthly. “A lot of covering; a lot of wearing the right outfit and having the right diamond ring—all that stuff that frankly doesn't interest me too much.”Bishop has been “strong-willed about what worked for me and what didn’t for as long as I can remember,” she writes in her memoir. Born Carole Jane in Colorado Springs, she grew up in Denver with an older brother, Tony. Not dissimilar to the dynamic between her future TV daughter and granddaughter on Gilmore Girls, Bishop’s mother, Jane, was her “best friend.” Her father, Lawrence, on the other hand, was a “detached, mean, alcoholic bully,” whose family lived in frequent fear of his rage and abuse. Life was “peaceful” when he was away, which he often was, working various airline jobs and philandering.As a child, Bishop loved sitting on a stool beside her mother as she pressed her husband’s shirts at the ironing board. “She was a lonely woman…and when I kept insisting that I couldn't go to sleep, which I couldn't, then we’d get into these talks,” Bishop recalls to us. “She's the one who opened up so many thoughts for me and told me so many stories that may have even been inappropriate for a child my age. But she made me very sophisticated as a result.”Since her first day of kindergarten, Bishop detested school, where she seldom spoke or socialized. When she was eight, her mother, a ballet enthusiast, began giving her lessons on their basement linoleum, hoping to invigorate her. Instantly, Bishop was hooked. It “lit a fire in me that ended up defining my future,” she writes. Her father refused to pay for ballet classes, so her mother started playing piano at Denver’s American Ballet Theatre in exchange for Bishop’s tuition.At 18, itching to make a living as a dancer, Bishop moved to New York City, staying with family friends from Denver in the Bronx upon her arrival. She was crushed not to be accepted into the American Ballet Theatre’s company, but soon joined Radio City Music Hall’s corps de ballet—the “far lesser-known dance troupe” with “a separate stage door from the Rockettes,” she writes.After her considerable quietude as a schoolgirl, and as a young ballet dancer—“you don’t talk at all; you don’t even make facial expressions, really, or you can get into trouble,” she says—living on her own on the mean streets of Manhattan saw her begin to speak up more freely.“I’d spent so many years in a nonverbal place that once my mouth opened up, my heavens—I couldn’t believe what was coming out of it sometimes,” Bishop chuckles. “And then it felt good to be able to express myself, so I continued to do so the rest of my life.”Someplace along the way, she also discovered she was funny. “And I loved being funny—so that [kept] me talking,” she adds.In the 1960s, Bishop worked as a Las Vegas showgirl—briefly leaning on “pep pills” (amphetamine) amid her grueling schedule—and danced in two Broadway shows: Golden Rainbow (starring Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé) and Promises, Promises (created by Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon). In the latter, she met her first husband, Peter Miller, who turned out to be a compulsive gambler. He “pretty much cleaned me out, emotionally and financially,” she writes. Their five-year marriage ended in a messy, two-year-long divorce.In 1975 came Bishop’s big break: a principal role as Sheila Bryant in Broadway’s A Chorus Line. The musical sold out on opening night, became a major tourist attraction, and was credited with saving Broadway from a years-long decline. It “changed my life,” she writes. Composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban even based one of the songs, “At the Ballet,” on real-life childhood reminiscences Bishop had shared in the show’s early brainstorming sessions.She won a Tony for her performance—best featured actress in a musical—and took a photo that night with Edward Herrmann, who’d won best featured actor in a play. Unbeknownst to both of them, they’d reunite a few decades later on Gilmore Girls as TV husband and wife. (Herrmann died in 2014 after a battle with brain cancer, not long before a 2015 reunion of the series' cast members at the ATX TV Festival in Texas; an empty chair graced the stage in his honor.)A decade after A Chorus Line—and following stints like her first TV acting job in an episode of Hawaii Five-O (1976); her first small movie role in An Unmarried Woman (1978); guest spots in soap operas; and a stock job on a traveling tour of Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey (1983)—Dirty Dancing came calling.Bishop was originally cast in the small role of Vivian, a Kellerman’s resort guest interested in seducing Patrick Swayze’s character, Johnny. She writes that it had taken her “a minute and a half” to learn her lines—so when the producer requested a two-week rehearsal, she was bewildered. She concluded that she’d be asked to shoot some dancing scenes with Swayze, which suited her just fine.When she arrived on set in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, she was instead offered the role of Marjorie Houseman, mother of Jennifer Grey’s character, Baby. “Frankly, the role…hadn’t really leaped off the page at me,” she admits in the memoir. But, thrilled by the prospect of working on a film from start to finish, in such a beautiful location to boot, she accepted.[caption id="attachment_344173" align="aligncenter" width="677"] Kelly Bishop's memoir is out now from Gallery Books.[/caption]There was “such comfort between the crew and the cast” who were “stuck together on those mountains,” she says fondly, recalling such “mischievous” fun as being slipped alcoholic beverages toward the end of filming the final dance number, which took four or five days. “None of us thought [the movie] was gonna be any good,” she says. “I mean, we didn’t think it was gonna be a hit”—until they heard the “delightful” soundtrack. She still gets chills when she hears the closing song, “(I've Had) The Time of My Life.”In 2000, on the heels of The Sopranos’ debut and ensuing craze the previous year, Bishop’s agent sent her a pilot script. “Refreshingly, the title didn’t sound Italian at all,” she writes. Upon reading, it was “love at first sight….The dialogue was smart, razor-sharp, and unpredictable. The humor was a delight, and utterly unique.” Bishop phoned her agent immediately with an “emphatic ‘Yes, please.’”Gilmore Girls originally aired on the WB (now CW) and is currently streaming on Netflix (along with its 2016 revival miniseries, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.) It follows free-spirited single mother Lorelai Gilmore as she raises her bookish 16-year-old daughter, Rory, in the fictional small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. The show is revered for its unabating stream of witty banter; its sweeping, and sometimes irreverent, cultural and historical references; and its revolving door of eccentric characters (“I’m fascinated by oddballs,” Bishop says).[caption id="attachment_344202" align="alignnone" width="778"] Kelly Bishop, Alexis Bledel and Lauren Graham at the 2016 premiere of Netflix's Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life.[/caption]The chance to inhabit high-society matriarch Emily Gilmore was exciting for a number of reasons. “For so long, I was kind of pigeonholed into this sexy girlfriend type,” Bishop says. “And that was fine—but to suddenly be this very classy, wealthy woman, it put me into another category.”Not to mention, she writes, playing a “cold, condescending, emotionally distant” mother is “infinitely more fun than playing a nice one.”Some of the show’s storylines also posed an opportunity to explore her own family dynamics. She actually modeled Emily after her own grandmother, Louise, who—like Emily’s daughter, Lorelai—became pregnant at 16. She felt “a lot of sympathy” for Louise, despite the fact that she was “awful” to Bishop’s mother. “Just a tough, tough woman,” she recalls. “Very classy—without the money—but certainly a taste and dignity, and a good front.”Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino writes in the memoir’s foreword that she knew she’d found Emily “three words” into Bishop’s audition, noting her “perfect comic timing.” Indeed, Bishop volleyed lines from the famously dense scripts to her fellow fast-talking cast members with balletic ease and precision.Both women—Sherman-Palladino in her writing, Bishop in her acting—also let Emily’s insecurities and vulnerabilities seep through cracks in her upper-crust veneer, deftly offsetting some of her more villainous qualities.Bishop reunited with Sherman-Palladino to star alongside Sutton Foster on the one-season ABC Family series Bunheads (2012-2013), and, most recently, for three guest appearances on Amazon Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which ended last year.Bishop moved to South Orange in 1995 with her dear husband of nearly 40 years, Lee Leonard, who hosted programs on ESPN (its first-ever), CNN and News 12 New Jersey. He died in 2018 following years of difficult illnesses.Though Bishop says she’s had to “just accept the fact that I’m gonna miss him every day for the rest of my life,” she feels “blessed” to have experienced such a loving partnership: “There are a lot of people who have successful marriages who didn’t have that kind of comfort and communication and fun.”Bishop lives a “rather quiet life” in the Garden State these days, keeping to a “very small radius” in South Orange, Maplewood, Millburn, Livingston and West Orange. She does Pilates in Millburn, and lives “an eight-minute drive” from Paper Mill Playhouse, where she sits on the advisory board. (Her commute decades earlier, while dancing in a production at the theater? Hitching a ride from Manhattan on the back of a fellow dancer’s bike. “We’d hop on his motorcycle [and onto] the Turnpike,” she recalls.)She’s comfortable around so many New York transplants and commuters—“the same level of sophistication that you find in the city; the same intelligence”—and has always appreciated her community's multiculturalism.Whenever “racial issues arise” in the country, she says, “I want to bring people on tours of my neighborhood,” where residents of all races and nationalities “get along so well.” Passing strangers look each other in the eye and exchange pleasantries. “There's a real civility about living here.”Often she sits out on her deck, reveling in the trees and green and silence.“I am now,” she declares, “a Jersey girl.”
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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Monmouth County writer and director Kevin Smith turned his place of work into a makeshift film set, bringing together a cast and crew of trusted confidants to create a semi-autobiographical independent sensation.That’s the story of Clerks, Smith’s 1994 debut film, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year—and it’s also the case for Smith’s 16th and latest feature, The 4:30 Movie, set for a theatrical release on September 13 via Saban Films.“I’ve got a type, as they say,” says Smith, 54.Clerks was a vision of ’90s snark and ennui, a day-in-the-life saga of convenience- and video-store employees that was famously filmed where Smith worked at the time, the Quick Stop in the Leonardo section of Middletown. The 4:30 Movie, on the other hand, is a summer-of-’86-set comedy about a group of teens hanging out at their local movie theater.Smith shot his new film at Smodcastle Cinemas, the five-screen Atlantic Highlands movie house he has co-owned since 2022. It’s the theater Smith frequented—and loved—as a kid.Smith sat down for a conversation with New Jersey Monthly on the afternoon The 4:30 Movie had its first prerelease screening, held for a handful of superfans at Smodcastle, where his love of film was cultivated in his youth. After the screening, one fan in the lobby could be heard remarking, “This is a new Kevin Smith, and I like what I saw.”“I know the movie feels good, man,” says the Red Bank-born, Highlands-raised Smith. “It just makes people feel warm inside. If you grew up in the ’80s, it’s really going to hit you someplace, but it just has all the lack of and overwhelming urgency of being a 16-year-old kid.”[caption id="attachment_342890" align="alignnone" width="778"] Smith directed The 4:30 Movie following his stay in an Arizona treatment center after a mental health episode. "It was the only movie I could make at that time," he says. Photo: Courtesy of Ralph Bavaro[/caption]It’s a film Smith describes in adjectives the general public doesn’t normally associate with the off-color work of the man behind Dogma, the Clerks trilogy and Tusk.“It is a very nostalgic, sentimental trifle, but they’re all trifles, really, at the end of the day,” Smith says. “But there’s something really sweet about it, there’s something really warm and wonderful about it. And it was the only movie I could make at that time.”The time he’s referring to is the aftermath of a mental health episode in 2022 that led to his stay in a treatment center in Arizona. There, he dealt with trauma stemming from past sexual abuse and body shaming that had, in turn, fueled the people-pleasing, marijuana-smoking public persona he had become known for.“When I got out of the joint, I was like, I’m not going to smoke weed anymore, because I had stopped for the whole time I was in there,” Smith says. “And so, I was in this weird place of not knowing who I was to be going forward. Because I knew who my identity was: I’m the guy that made Clerks, and I smoke a lot of weed and stuff like that. And then, suddenly, that aspect of it was kind of removed. So when I was going into this [new movie], it was more like, Well, how about before all of that?”Before all of that—the speaking engagements, convention appearances, and work on comic books, TV shows, films and podcasts—there were a childhood spent at the old movie theater on First Avenue in Atlantic Highlands and friendships with the likes of Ernie O’Donnell, now Smith’s business partner as the co-owner and operator of Smodcastle Cinemas.“There are moments for me where [The 4:30 Movie] is tough to watch, from an emotional standpoint, because that’s us growing up,” O’Donnell says. “But it’s so charming....It’s a great coming-of-age [story].”For Smith, the film is highly personal. “I don’t want to be like, ‘This is the most personal movie I’ve ever made,’ but my God, it’s a secret origin story,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s, ‘Hey, how’d you ever become a filmmaker after all?’ and it tells that story.”Growing up in Highlands, Smith was one of three children of Grace and the late Donald Smith. There, he attended Our Lady of Perpetual Help parochial school and then Henry Hudson High School, acting in school plays and creating comedy skits with friends, including O’Donnell. At the time, Smith “was a long way from realizing that I could be a filmmaker,” as he wrote in his 2021 book, Kevin Smith’s Secret Stash: The Definitive Visual History, but, “I was always drawn to being the center of attention to some degree.”Now, looking back on his Monmouth County youth, Smith says, “I think it’s fair to say, having seen how other people grew up and having raised a kid of my own, I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood.“I couldn’t have asked for a better place to grow up,” he continues. “New Jersey made the difference. It puts a chip on your shoulder to some degree because you live in the shadow of New York, which is always the center of attention, and because of that, it tends to make you try harder.”Smith has certainly followed that credo. In addition to a legendary film career and his ownership of Smodcastle Cinemas, he’s the longtime proprietor of Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, a popular comic book shop in Red Bank named for two of his most famous characters.Over the last two years, the theater has become a go-to destination for movie fans, hosting festivals, new releases, revival screenings, live events, and celebrity appearances from the likes of Bayonne native and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and actor/collaborators Jason Lee, Joey Lauren Adams and Justin Long.Rumson writer and actress Siobhan Fallon Hogan, known for comedic roles in movies like Baby Mama and Men in Black, is among the artists who has benefited from Smith’s work; Fallon’s 2022 film, Shelter in Solitude, which she wrote and starred in, held its world premiere at Smith’s theater as part of the inaugural Smodcastle Film Festival.“Kevin personifies New Jersey,” Hogan says, “because he is hilarious, hardworking and loyal.”Fallon says Smith’s theater gives “filmmakers of all ages a chance to experience film festivals, readings, movies and moviemaking. Kevin is all about sharing his talent and giving back.” The third Smodcastle Film Festival is set to take place October 24-27.Smith is outspoken about his love of New Jersey, and now the state is showing him some love right back. The director is being inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame this fall alongside other Garden State luminaries, including Oscar winner Meryl Streep and Giants quarterback Phil Simms. The ceremony is set to air on Fox 5, My9 and social media starting November 13.“Being a New Jersey business owner is a huge point of pride with me,” Smith says. “I’ve traveled and I’ve lived elsewhere and whatnot, but this state made me who I am, and I feel like I probably love it more than it loves me—I definitely love my hometown more than it loves me, that’s for damn sure. New Jersey’s always been kind of nice to me and stuff, but it made all the difference. I wouldn’t have been on this journey had it not been for being from here.”[RELATED: For Zach Braff, Making Movies in New Jersey Is Deeply Personal]
Alex Biese, senior editor of CURE magazine, has been honored by NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists and has been published in USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times, Press of Atlantic City and more.
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Broadway star Laura Bell Bundy opens a wooden gate and steps inside a muddy pen to pet a group of donkeys. She’s dressed in a wrinkled, loose-fitting linen shirt, brown cargo pants, and beige boots with red laces—an outfit to ward off ticks. Her signature long, blond locks are tied back in a low ponytail. Getting dirty isn’t of concern as she enthusiastically walks the grounds of her farm, one of two in New Jersey that she owns with her husband, Thom Hinkle, to show off the cows next.It’s a stark contrast to the image audiences probably have of one of Broadway’s most endearing—and funny—leading ladies, who has been charming theater lovers since her breakout role as Amber Von Tussle in the 2002 musical Hairspray. Bundy, who went on to originate the role of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde: The Musical in 2007, has taken the literal meaning of her iconic character’s name all the way to the actual woodlands of Hunterdon County.[caption id="attachment_342280" align="alignnone" width="778"] Laura Bell Bundy and Thom Hinkle are raising their son, Huck, on their Tewksbury farm. Photo: Chris Buck[/caption]During the pandemic, Bundy, who grew up on a lake in Lexington, Kentucky, and Hinkle, an executive producer for television who was raised in Union County’s Roselle Park, decided to leave California, where they’d been living for the past seven years.After briefly considering farms in Kentucky near Bundy’s family, they decided to head back to the East Coast. Bundy missed working on Broadway, and Hinkle wanted to experience four seasons again.First, they looked at properties in Connecticut and New York, then expanded the search to New Jersey, where they are now raising their 5-year-old-son, Huck, on a farm in Tewksbury. In the midst of huge renovations, they bottle maple syrup, plan to open a boutique membership winery in a few years, and even expect to host farm classes and events.“I’ve fallen in love with New Jersey—I can’t believe how much it looks like Kentucky,” says Bundy.[caption id="attachment_342282" align="alignnone" width="778"] The farm's goats were rescued when they were 10 days old. Bundy bottle-fed them for three months. Photo: Chris Buck[/caption]The Hunterdon County farm they settled on in 2021 is about an hour’s drive from midtown Manhattan. “I’m not interested in living in suburbia. If I’m going to be outside of the city, I might as well be outside the city,” Bundy says, explaining why they picked a home so far west on Route 78, when their jobs are mostly in New York City.Right now, she’s filming the movie Miracle on 74th Street there. When I meet her for a farm tour, she holds up her long nails, which are part of her look as an “Eastern European lady,” she says in the character’s accent before stepping away to take a call related to the project—also starring Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Dan Hedaya as her husband. Last fall, during her run of The Cottage on Broadway, Bundy would drive into the city, leaving home between 4:30 and 5:30 pm to make it in time for a 7 pm curtain. “The only traffic we have here is you could get behind a tractor,” she says.“Or a cow,” adds Hinkle. “I never thought we’d move back. The farms we saw here were nicer than the ones we saw in Kentucky.”The welcoming community has made them feel right at home. There’s a neighborhood Facebook page, a town Christmas tree lighting, and Fourth of July festivities with potato-sack and relay races.“People wave to you,” Hinkle points out.“It’s the most neighborhoody feeling I’ve ever had in my life, even though the properties are fairly spread out,” Bundy adds.[caption id="attachment_342294" align="alignnone" width="778"] Buy our September 2024 issue here. Photo: Chris Buck; Hair & makeup: Dylan Silver[/caption]The only downsides? It takes three days to mow the lawn, and it’s an almost 20-minute drive to the nearest ShopRite, where Bundy does her own grocery shopping. “But now, with Whole Foods Amazon delivery, my life is much easier,” she adds. “I also buy from local farms, and we have a few small general stores.”Their property boasts a barn, pond, creek, sheep, goats (which were rescued at 10 days old, and Bundy bottle-fed them for three months) and maple trees. Hinkle collected sap from 80 trees over two months and boiled it down to 60 8-ounce bottles of delicious syrup, which he’s been gifting to friends.[caption id="attachment_342283" align="alignnone" width="778"] Hinkle makes maple syrup from trees on the farm and bottles it for friends. Photo: Chris Buck[/caption]There’s no cell phone reception, which Bundy feels is a blessing. Not being plugged in to the internet all the time helps clear her mind and allows for more creativity. “I would much prefer to be on a bicycle all day and jump in a creek—that’s my happy place,” she says, offering carrots to feed the goats.Perhaps it worked. It was their bike rides that inspired the couple’s next great adventure. In September 2022, they purchased another farm that they always passed on their excursions. It cost $1.2 million, and nearly every building was in disrepair. The best part about the deal was that the state offered them money to preserve it as part of its efforts to maintain open space, support local agriculture and protect the environment. “We felt it was win-win,” says Bundy. “We preserved 58 acres through the State Agriculture Development Committee, who were a joy to deal with. Although selling off lots could have been more financially lucrative, we decided to preserve the land to benefit Tewksbury, the town we deeply love, and to respect our neighbors and the community.”[RELATED: Exploring the Future of Farming in New Jersey]
Now, the couple secures their helmets and hops on electric bikes to show me just how close in proximity the two properties are. It’s an impressive two-mile ride weaving through the woods. I follow in my car. “Having a project like this farm appeals to us,” Bundy explains, who is leading on the design concept. “We are idea people. We like birthing a concept and seeing the concept through.”“She just vomits creativity. She’s a producer’s dream, the amount of ideas that she comes up with—I love it,” says Hinkle, who does a lot of the manual labor, along with hiring contractors. There are several tractors on site, too, some of which have seen better days, with Hinkle at the wheel. He works on the farm from 9:30 am until about 12:30 pm, and then goes back home to work on his TV projects on L.A. time.[caption id="attachment_342311" align="alignnone" width="778"] "We’ve really become New Jersey loyalists and want to continue to spread the message that Jersey really is a beautiful place,” says Hinkle of his and Bundy's attitudes about the Garden State. Photo: Chris Buck[/caption]The 300-year-old farm boasts five outbuildings, one of which will ultimately become a wine-tasting room and is one of the first things you see as you drive up the gravel road. “We’re uncovering things probably built in the 1700s-1800s and bringing back to life, things that have been hidden on this farm,” Bundy says as the couple points to the newly repointed stone walls that were covered up by the previous owner’s garbage. They are the fourth family to hold the deed to the property.“This could be France. This could be Spain. This could be Italy, and it’s right down the road from us,” Bundy says, imagining the possibilities as they map out their plans. Bundy outlines with her arms where custom glass doors will go to store the wine. The heralded Ironbound Farm and Ciderhouse in Asbury was a sort of inspiration to them in terms of operating a farm-to-table business.[RELATED: Forget Napa Valley! NJ Wines Are Better Than You Think]
A short walk uphill leads to the main barn on site. They envision live music, educational classes and dining events—all related to farming, due to local ordinances associated with the sale. Once covered floor to ceiling with hay, it will be the primary focus of restoration next year.Across the way, Bundy shows off her future “she shed,” a tin barn. She wants to add a dance floor.Bundy gets into the back of a Polaris ATV as Hinkle steps into the driver’s seat to show off the rest of the property. I take the front passenger seat. They point out three homes: one they plan on moving into this fall after selling their current house; a second one they updated, where Hinkle’s parents now live; and a third cottage, a Dutch Colonial built in the 1700s, stripped to its bones, the architectural plans still in the works. Bundy walks through it with ease, noting the irony that she was renovating a cottage while performing in The Cottage on Broadway. Once it’s ready, she’ll hang up a photo of her from the show as part of its decor.The cottage overlooks an acre of white pinot grigio and grüner veltliner grapes, which were planted this summer and will take roughly three to five years before they can be bottled. Until then, they’re allowed to import grapes and bottle the wine under their name—which they haven’t decided on yet. The goal is to have the tasting room—though probably not wine—ready for a soft opening for Memorial Day weekend of 2025.Hinkle aptly named the 73-acre farm the Hardscrabble, after the first home Ulysses S. Grant built with his hands, and “because Hardscrabble was already taken,” Hinkle explains of his affinity for the 18th president who summered in Elberon. Hardscrabble is also a term that means hard work, and they feel it couldn’t relate more to them. “That’s us,” Hinkle says. “It’s like we do a lot of hard work, but we’re also kind of a mess.”Along the ATV tour, we take a look at five apple trees that were once part of an apple-processing facility on-site, according to records the couple researched. One of the historic apple barns was damaged by the earthquake earlier this year, since the farm is three blocks from the epicenter.Inside, an elevated platform stage has performance-space potential that Bundy can’t help but demonstrate with a little shim-sham. “We’re going to sing ‘Little Lamb!’” she kids, referencing Gypsy, a show she did at the Paper Mill Playhouse back in 1998—staying true to her musical theater roots along the tour.Some might wonder how entertainment professionals know how to revive a farm. “Thom is one of those people that figures out how to do everything quickly,” Bundy says.“We’re kind of doing it as we go—flying the plane as we learn how to fly,” Hinkle says jokingly, adding that the state offers grants, loans and calls with experts to help them. “There’s this network where we dial in once a month and ask a question to all these experts that have been doing it forever. They give you free advice. It is like the most supportive environment we’ve ever been in.”On top of renovations, Bundy and Hinkle are filming their own mostly unscripted reality show about bringing the farm back to life. They plan to release the 22-episode show themselves as soon as they can—Hinkle’s experience as an executive producer will certainly come in handy. “We are about to approach brands to see if someone wants to sponsor the show,” Bundy adds.They’ll also show their family life. Audiences can expect to see the family’s late bulldog, Polly, being exhumed from their current home address and reburied at the Hardscrabble. “We buried her at our current farm. About a month later, we decided we’re moving here,” says Hinkle. “And so what do you do? Do you leave the dog buried with strangers, or do you take her with us?”“Partly why we’re doing this show is to familiarize people with this area and try to get more young people out here. We’ve really become New Jersey loyalists and want to continue to spread the message that Jersey really is a beautiful place,” Hinkle says of their mission, before handing me a bottle of his homemade maple syrup to take home. “We want a place where people can come together.”Leigh Scheps, who grew up in Holmdel obsessing over Broadway, is a full-time senior reporter for Inside Edition Digital and freelance writer with bylines in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and more.
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He wants to get better, better, better!Jack Antonoff announced this week that he has rerecorded his debut Bleachers album, Strange Desire, amid its 10th anniversary.First released in July 2014, the album—best known for its lead single, "I Wanna Get Better," the Jersey-born band's first No. 1 hit—arose during a “rough time with the full armor of sonic chaos. Voices fluttering around me, hotel room walls echoing in the vocal takes,” Antonoff wrote on Instagram. "[...] It was the sound that I called Bleachers. That feeling of being there but in no way at the center. Watching and dreaming. Shouting from a corner. In the shadow. I wrote from that misunderstood place and I still do."[caption id="attachment_339784" align="aligncenter" width="632"] Bleachers' debut album, Strange Desire, came out a decade ago this July.[/caption]The Bergen County-raised producer and musician, 40, who often waxes poetic about his native New Jersey sitting in the "shadow" of neighboring Manhattan, explained that the album will feature "all eleven tracks reimagined without the armor I needed" a decade ago."Anytime you put out an album, you’re trying to give more context to people; give them as much of who you are in that moment," Antonoff told NJM earlier this year.The project's slightly altered title—A Stranger Desired—is a nod to the audience his band has built in the years since: "It wasn't only a strange desire to write these songs," Antonoff reflected in the post. "There was something unknown to me happening. I was looking for you: my people."[caption id="attachment_339783" align="aligncenter" width="632"] Bleachers' A Stranger Desired is out September 6.[/caption]Those strangers have showed up in droves to Bleachers' 2024 international tour, which kicked off days after the band released a self-titled fourth album in March. It played Antonoff's sold-out Shadow of the City festival at the Stone Pony Summer Stage last month, and is currently slated to conclude at Madison Square Garden in October.The announcement comes after Antonoff's work on several rerecorded albums with his longtime collaborator and close friend Taylor Swift.The first song on A Stranger Desired will be released August 2. The full album is out September 6.[RELATED: Stone Pony Celebrating 50 Years in Asbury Park]
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The New Jersey Hall of Fame has announced its class of inductees for 2024—and the group includes some of the biggest names in Hollywood.Meryl Streep, who grew up in Bernardsville, Paul Rudd, who was born in Passaic, and Kevin Smith, a Red Bank native, are on this year's list, which features 18 New Jerseyans who have achieved greatness in categories including performing arts & entertainment, sports, and education & science.“The 2024 class of inductees of the New Jersey Hall of Fame illustrate the New Jersey ethic of hard work, determination and grit,” Jon F. Hanson, Chairman of the New Jersey Hall of Fame, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to celebrate the contributions of 18 new Inductees so future generations can learn about their journeys.”Streep, one of our country's most celebrated actors and a three-time Oscar winner, got her start in a fifth-grade play, then starred in musicals at Bernards High School. Things came full circle for the Jersey native in the late '90s, when her movie One True Thing filmed for several months in nearby Morristown.Rudd, of Clueless and Ant-Man fame, spent his early life in Passaic but moved to Kansas City as a kid and attended the University of Kansas—but we're happy to claim him as our own.Clerks director Smith has supported New Jersey throughout his career, filming and setting his movies in his home state, including his newest, The 4:30 Movie, which comes out in September. He's also the owner of the popular comic book store Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in downtown Red Bank. In recent year he bought his childhood movie theater in Atlantic Highlands and renamed it Smodcastle Cinemas. "It’s a dream come true for a fat kid from New Jersey who spent his childhood at the movies," he told us in 2022. "I can just go down in my bathrobe and watch the latest releases on my screens.”The pre-taped induction ceremony is set to air November 13 on Fox 5 My9 and social media.A full list of inductees is below.Performing Arts & Entertainment* Lesley Gore,Tenafly, singer-songwriter of "You Don't Own Me" and “It’s My Party" * Warren Littlefield, Montclair, former NBC Entertainment president * Paul Rudd, Passaic, actor * Kevin Smith, Red Bank, director, producer, writer * Meryl Streep, Bernardsville, actress
Arts & Letters* Gay Talese, Ocean City, journalist
Sports* Dick Button, Englewood, two-time Olympic gold medalist in figure skating * Tim Howard, New Brunswick, soccer player * Ron Johnson, Madison, football player * Phil Simms, Franklin Lakes, former New York Giants quarterback
Enterprise* George Cooney, Bogota, chairman emeritus of EUE/Screen Gems Ltd * Peter Cancro, Point Pleasant, founder of Jersey Mike’s * Donald Katz, Newark, founder of Audible, Inc.
Education & Science* Elizabeth Coleman White, Whitesbog, botanist * John Forbes Nash, Princeton, genius mathematician * Avi Wigderson, Princeton, computer scientist, mathematician
Public Service* Father Edwin D. Leahy, Newark, Benedictine monk and Catholic priest, headmaster of St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark * Geraldine Thompson, Lincroft, founder of VNA Health Group
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Musician and actor Stevie Van Zandt and his half-brother, playwright and producer Billy Van Zandt, now have another honor to add to the list. This spring, the street where they grew up, Wilson Avenue in Middletown Township, was ceremonially renamed Van Zandt Way.
The renaming, sponsored by the New Jersey Hall of Fame and Middletown Township, was attended by Mayor Tony Perry, former NBC news anchor and Middletown native Brian Williams, and officials from the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
“We have both been awarded for our work, but being honored by our hometown is obviously very special,” said the brothers. “We will try our best to keep our street proud!”
Stevie Van Zandt, musician, songwriter, and actor, is best known as a founding member and guitarist Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, but also has a solo band called Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. He gained acclaim for his portrayal of Silvio Dante in the Emmy award-winning HBO series The Sopranos, which earned him multiple Screen Actors Guild Awards and an Emmy nomination. He is an inductee of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
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Billy Van Zandt is a celebrated playwright, actor, director and producer. He is the writer of the best-selling memoir Get in the Car, Jane (Adventures in the TV Wasteland) and was nominated for an Emmy Award for his television special I Love Lucy: The Very First Show. Other credits include You’ve Got Hate Mail, Love, Sex, and the I.R.S., and Silent Laughter. He’s also a stage and screen actor, with notable performances in The Godfather Part III and Jaws 2.
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Unless you’re a bonafide Swiftie, you may not know that the Pennsylvania-born megastar is also a New Jerseyan: For 12 summers, her family owned a home on the bay in Stone Harbor, which she has called a “magical place to grow up.”This summer, at the Stone Harbor Museum, you can get a peek into Swift’s formative years in the idyllic Shore town. Swift, 34, vacationed there from 1992 until 2004, when her family moved to Nashville to help her break into the music industry.The exhibit includes photos of Swift as a child in Stone Harbor, provided by her family. Other items include four vinyls of her Midnights album that form a clock display, a “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” concert film poster, a Taylor Swift-inspired Peter Max poster, and a Midnights-themed guitar signed by Swift.“We are thrilled to have these items,” Teri Fischer, president of the board of trustees for the museum, said in a news release. “Taylor Swift is definitely part of the Stone Harbor story, and I know that she does delight and inspire so many of us.”[caption id="attachment_338133" align="aligncenter" width="681"] "When I would run out of material, I'd just start making up songs on the spot," Swift once said of playing in cafes in Stone Harbor. Photo: Shutterstock[/caption]The Swifts were woven into the fabric of Stone Harbor. Scott Swift, the singer’s father, was an EMT with the Stone Harbor Volunteer Fire Company No. 1, while the budding star herself could often be found playing her music in local coffee shops and cafes.“I used to sing karaoke at Henry's [on Third Avenue] and play acoustic shows for hours on end at Coffee Talk, a little cafe on 98th Street,” Swift said in a 2009 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I used to drag my parents into those places all the time, and all of their friends would show up and put dollars in my tip jar. When I was younger, I used to play for hours and hours in cafes like that. When I would run out of material, I'd just start making up songs on the spot.”Henry’s has since shuttered, along with the Italian Garden restaurant, another favorite of Swift’s. But for those who want to walk in the shoes of the pop icon, the Coffee Talk cafe is still open, along with Springer’s Homemade Ice Cream (which is also one of New Jersey Monthly's favorite ice cream shops). For an authentic reenactment, order the cookies ‘n’ cream, which Swift says was her favorite."When I was little, I used to walk in there and just stare up at all the flavors and toppings, completely frozen and unable to make a final decision,” she told the Inquirer. “I was always so overwhelmed.”The Swift memorabilia will be on display at the museum through the end of September.Swift was back at the Shore last summer, when her close pal and collaborator Jack Antonoff married the actress Margaret Qualley on Long Beach Island—causing a frenzy among Swifties and paparazzi. Antonoff, who grew up in Bergenfield, has a home on LBI with Qualley.
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People may like to poke fun at New Jersey, but our stories are undeniably American. From newspapers to broadcast to viral moments, these Garden State stories went national in a big way.The Jersey Devil Is Born in the Pinelands1735As legend has it, the mysterious creature said to roam the Pinelands was born as the devil-esque 13th child of a woman named Mother Leeds. Today, the Jersey Devil is reportedly the only state demon in the country. Our NHL team is also named for it.Nearly Whole Dinosaur Fossil Found in Haddonfield1858William Parker Foulke discovered the world’s first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton in a marl pit in Camden County. That discovery, the Hadrosaurus foulkii, a plant-eater with a duck-shaped bill, is now the official state dinosaur. Read about a Haddonfield home redesign inspired by the 19th-century discovery here.Thomas Edison Invents the Light Bulb in Menlo ParkJanuary 1880Thomas Edison, who had labs in Menlo Park and West Orange, created some of the most important inventions of all time, among them the movie camera, the phonograph, the automatic telegraph and, most famously, the light bulb, for which Edison received the patent in January 1880. Today, Edison-focused tours are available in both towns.
President James A. Garfield Dies in Long BranchSeptember 19, 1881Garfield was the only president to die in New Jersey. He was shot and wounded in Washington by Charles J. Guiteau, and later died of an infection while staying at Francklyn Cottage, a Shore escape from the country’s capital. Garfield had been president for just four months before the shooting. Guiteau was executed in 1882.Roselle Is First U.S. Town With ElectricityJanuary 19, 1883It’s fitting that a Jersey town was the first one lighted by electricity from one generating station.Paterson Silk Strike Changes HistoryFebruary 25, 1913About 25,000 workers went on strike, shutting down the important silk industry in Paterson for five months. The workers, mostly immigrants, sought improved conditions in the mills. Although the workers didn’t get everything they desired, the strike played an important part in the country’s movement to improve workplace conditions.Cliffhanger Joins Movie Lexicon From Fort Lee1914The film term cliffhanger originates from the silent serial The Perils of Pauline. It starred the actress Pearl White, who literally hung over the cliffs of the Palisades of Fort Lee and left audiences on the edge of their seats with anticipation as they wondered what would happen next. Fort Lee is known as the birthplace of film, with many early studios and projects.Prohibition Fuels Atlantic City DebaucheryJanuary 17, 1920The start of Prohibition sparked an era of Mob activity, bootlegging and political corruption in Atlantic City. Today’s New Jerseyans saw a slice of that time when the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire ran from 2010 to 2014. The series starred Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson (based on real-life political boss Nucky Johnson) and West Orange’s Michael Pitt.Lindbergh Baby KidnappedMarch 1, 1932In one of the most infamous crimes in American history, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was kidnapped from the family’s home and found dead two months later, just a few miles from their residence. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the murder of baby Charles A. Lindbergh in 1936. In 2023, a judge shut down a possible re-examination of the case.M&Ms Created in Newark1941The first batch of the iconic candies was made at 285 Badger Avenue. The Mars Wrigley factory is now in Hackettstown. (Read more about iconic candy brands born and bred in Jersey here.)Self-Service Gas Ban Begins1949Today, New Jersey is the only state left in the country that doesn’t allow people to pump their own gas at service stations. The practice stems from the state Legislature passing the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act, citing driver safety and convenience. Government players have attempted to get the self-service ban reversed over the years, but so far, it has never happened.Three Planes Crash in Elizabeth1951-52In one of the most shocking and tragic stories in New Jersey history, three planes crashed in Elizabeth in a 58-day period from December 1951 through February 1952. All either took off from Newark Airport or were en route to land there. Judy Blume, an Elizabeth native, used the events as the setting for her 2015 novel, The Unlikely Event.Newark Riots Tear the City ApartJuly 12-17, 1967The five-day uprising left Newark devastated for decades. An incident of police brutality sparked the riots in the midst of frustrations about housing discrimination, unemployment, and the failure of leadership to reflect the mostly African American community. The governor sent in the National Guard. Twenty-six people died and many were injured.Grateful Dead Concert in Englishtown is Biggest Ever in U.S.September 3, 1977More than 107,000 fans rocked out, making it the biggest ticketed concert in U.S. history.Physicists Win Nobel Following Discovery in Holmdel's Bell Labs1978Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered cosmic background radiation, proving the Big Bang Theory.Baby M Case Stuns the Nation1987-88New Jersey was at the center of the nation’s first surrogacy controversy when Mary Beth Whitehead decided she wanted to keep the baby she’d birthed as a surrogate for the Sterns of Tenafly. Whitehead used her own egg. The Sterns won custody. The case ignited a debate on the morality and legality of surrogacy and helped gain protections for parents. These days, hopeful parents are increasingly choosing surrogacy in the Garden State.‘Crazy Eddie’ Gets Prison Time1996[caption id="attachment_328696" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Courtesy of Paul Hayes[/caption]Crazy Eddie, the electronics store chain that rose to prominence in New Jersey for its cut-rate prices and notoriously frenetic TV commercials, later become notorious for its dramatic fall from grace amid a colossal fraud scheme. Founder Eddie Antar ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of racketeering conspiracy. He served time and died in 2006.JFK Jr.'s Fatal Flight Leaves From FairfieldJuly 16, 1999John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren took off from Fairfield’s Essex County Airport at 8:38 pm with Kennedy piloting his new Piper Saratoga, headed to Martha’s Vineyard. At 9:41, the plane hit the water, killing all three. The accident was caused by Kennedy’s spatial disorientation descending over water at night; hazy weather reduced visibility.9/11 Claims 750 New Jerseyans’ LivesSeptember 11, 2001An estimated 750 New Jerseyans were among the nearly 3,000 lives lost on September 11, 2001. We had the second highest death toll of any state, following New York. Ten years after the attacks, New Jersey dedicated its official 9/11 memorial, called Empty Sky. Located in Liberty State Park, the powerful memorial faces the World Trade Center site. Twenty years after the attacks, New Jerseyans shared personal stories with NJM about 9/11's impact on their lives.Jim McGreevey Comes Out as 'Gay American'August 13, 2004Then governor Jim McGreevey shocked the world by resigning, admitting to an affair with a man, and declaring, “I am a gay American.” Nearly 20 years later, in 2023, McGreevey announced a run for mayor of Jersey City. In recent years, he’s been working with formerly incarcerated people through his New Jersey Reentry Corporation.Charles Kushner Weaves a Sordid Web of Scandal2005Real estate mogul Charles Kushner was embroiled in scandal long before son Jared married Ivanka Trump. In pleading guilty to various charges, he admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband, and paying someone $25,000 to film the tryst. The reason? Kushner's sister was a cooperating witness against him. Kushner got two years in prison.Sopranos Series Finale AirsJune 10, 2007When The Sopranos ended its six-season run, the series finale sparked an intense debate that never died. The final scene was filmed at Holsten’s in Bloomfield, making the eatery a household name far beyond the Garden State. For years a plaque hung in the booth where the Soprano family sat that read, “This Booth Reserved For the Soprano Family.” In late February, the restaurant announced that it was auctioning off the booth on eBay amid desperately needed renovations.Bob Dylan Detained in Long BranchJune 2009When cops got a call about an “eccentric-looking old man” walking around Long Branch, it turned out to be music legend Bob Dylan. The 24-year-old police officer who responded to the call didn’t recognize Dylan, nor did she initially believe him when he told her who he was and that he was in town on tour. It was a a shock when she used his passport to verify his identity.Hurricane Sandy Wreaks Havoc on Jersey ShoreOctober 29, 2012[caption id="attachment_328725" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Courtesy of Anthony Quintano[/caption]Hurricane Sandy left destruction and years of rebuilding in its wake. It devastated our Shore and caused billions in damages. Read about what's next for the Jersey Shore a decade later here.Bridgegate Scandal in Fort Lee Shocks EveryoneSeptember 9, 2013Staff members of then governor Chris Christie apparently schemed to shut down the busy lanes into the GW Bridge during rush hour in retribution for the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee’s refusal to back Christie’s bid for re-election—even though Christie is a Republican. The misadventure resulted in massive headaches for drivers and a nine-count indictment.Super Bowl Held at MetLife February 2, 2014The game between the Broncos and the winning Seahawks was the first Super Bowl played outdoors in a cold-weather city.Tracy Morgan Nearly Dies in Cranbury Car CrashJune 7, 2014[caption id="attachment_329278" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Alex Millauer/Shutterstock[/caption]Comedian Tracy Morgan was in a wheelchair for five months, broke every bone in his face, and says he considered suicide after a Walmart truck crashed into his limo on the Turnpike. Morgan’s friend James “Jimmy Mack” McNair, died in the crash. The truck driver pleaded guilty to second-degree vehicular homicide and four counts of third-degree aggravated assault.'The Situation' Sentenced to PrisonOctober 5, 2018[caption id="attachment_328723" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Courtesy of Mike Sorrentino[/caption]Jersey Shore star Mike Sorrentino spent eight months behind bars for tax evasion. He spoke candidly with New Jersey Monthly last year about his road to redemption following prison and drug addiction.Ivana Trump Buried in BedminsterJuly 2022Even though she'd been divorced from Donald Trump for three decades when she died, Ivana Trump was buried at his Trump National Golf Club. Her gravesite is reportedly located in a quiet spot, away from the hubbub of golfers passing through. The former president has said in the past that he wants to be buried at the golf course.Senator Robert Menendez IndictedSeptember 22, 2023Did anyone say gold bars? That’s what was found in the home that Senator Robert Menendez shares with his wife when it was searched by federal agents, along with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash—all central to the stunning charges against the pair. He has been accused of acting as a foreign agent to Egypt and helping to advance the interests of Qatar in a bribery scheme.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’How Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken's Favorite SonJon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Aren’t Jersey Natives, But They’re Local IconsMartha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans GuessingShaquille O’Neal Has Never Forgotten His Newark RootsAlpine Is the Beverly Hills of New Jersey: Why Celebs Are Drawn to Bergen County HamletWhy Jersey Is the Perfect Home for the Latest Era of Satirical Tabloid Weekly World News*
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Chatting with Richard Lewis, as I fondly look back on it, was less an interview than a ride on a wild and crazy comedy roller coaster. You’d hang on for dear life and let out shrieks—of laughter—at his fantastical ad-libs.This only encouraged Lewis, who’d spin ever crazier stream-of-consciousness riffs on his fears and neuroses and supposedly traumatic memories of growing up in Englewood.He used to joke that he made so many trips to his school nurse that a plaque to him was erected in the Dwight Morrow High School nurse's office.Did he really work as a paper carrier for The Record, his hometown paper, for just one dreadful day?“I only delivered the papers to therapists’ houses,” Lewis claimed the first time I spoke with him, when he was starring in the ABC sitcom Anything But Love, in 1989. “You can’t throw the papers up against the door, because they might be having sessions, so I would tiptoe...“I got so nervous, because I was so frightened of dogs. In one house, it wasn’t a dog; I think it was one of these huge box turtles. It was a horror. I blame The Record for most of my fear of animals, because of that one day on the route.”Lewis, who died on Tuesday of a heart attack at age 76 in Los Angeles, is credited with coining the phrase “(Blank) from hell," (as in day and date and dream from hell). He was born June 27, 1947 in Brooklyn, but grew up in Englewood. His father, Bill, a co-owner of Ambassador Caterers in Teaneck, died in 1971. His mom, Blanche, was an actress in community theater.Their son came of age as a comic in the late 1970s and early '80s, just as cable television was about to make stars out of standups. Lewis’s HBO comedy specials had names like I’m in Pain, I’m Exhausted and I’m Doomed. That last one was nearly identical to a show I saw at BergenPAC in April 1990. Dressed in trademark black, with slightly stooped shoulders, and hands touching his forehead, he’d pace the stage like a nervous panther, periodically stopping to consult a topics list, six feet long, placed atop a prop grand piano.Lewis made 48 appearances on Late Night With David Letterman and had a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall. But he never stopped performing in his home state—from Englewood to Atlantic City—and never missed a chance to talk to his hometown newspaper.When Lewis said he’d grown up in “the house that guilt built” (aka “the Suffer Dome),” one sensed that there was real pain behind many of these references. He confronted his struggles with alcoholism and substance abuse in his standup routine and his memoir, The Other Great Depression. Sober since August 1994, Lewis is survived by his wife Joyce Lapinsky, whom he married in 2005. And despite having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years ago, Lewis told his fans, via a video he posted on social media last April, that he was doing well and was happy.Lewis became known to a younger generation of fans thanks to HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, for which Larry David tapped his longtime friend to play a version of himself. As David said in a statement on Wednesday, the two were born in the same Brooklyn hospital, three days apart. But they did not meet up until their pre-teens—at an upstate New York State sports camp. Their on-screen chemistry was incomparable.While going through my old Lewis clips, I found one from 2010, to promote a comedy show he was doing with Susie Essman at Montclair’s Wellmont Theater. Lewis started off by explaining why he’d mistakenly called me the day before, when I was at a meeting. He blamed the mishap on a nightmare from hell.“Five minutes before I call you, eight Hasidic dinosaurs were chasing me, saying, “You’re not religious enough,” he said, adding, “ You should see the size of the skullcaps they had on.”There was only one Richard Lewis.Virginia Rohan is the former longtime TV critic for The Record newspaper.
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The list of residents and one-time residents of this Bergen County town reads like an awards-show nominations bill. Alpine is replete with well-known residents like comedians Chris Rock and Tracy Morgan, as well as political pundit Kellyanne Conway. One-time residents include musicians (Britney Spears, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and O’Kelly Isley of the Isley Brothers, who is now buried in Paramus), athletes (Patrick Ewing), entrepreneurs (Norman Sas, inventor of electric football, and John Ringling of Ringling Brothers Circus)—and others.With a median house price of $5.8 million, what is it about this tiny enclave of fewer than 2,000 residents that attracts celebs? Yes, it sits on a cliff that overlooks the Hudson and is close to New York City, but that can be said of other nearby towns. “There are three reasons celebrities flock to Alpine: proximity to New York, lower taxes and privacy,” says Realtor Joshua Baris of NJLux.com (Coldwell Banker). Baris, who sold Diddy’s seven-bedroom, nine-bath house in 2016, has been selling million-dollar properties in Alpine and other tony towns since 2002. He has had his share of celebrity clientele and, he says, understands what they are looking for. “Even though it is a wealthy town, it has a close-knit feel,” Baris says. “I wouldn’t say everyone knows everyone, but everyone knows who is there.”[caption id="attachment_329412" align="alignnone" width="778"] “I had to make miracles happen to get that house,” Chris Rock said of his Alpine pad in his 2009 special, Kill the Messenger. “I had to host the Oscars to get that house. To this day I don’t even believe it’s my house; that’s why I keep a bag packed right at the door.”* Photo: Shutterstock/Featureflash Photo Agency[/caption]At 9.22 square miles, this low-profile town has no downtown, no postal delivery, no supermarket and a single restaurant. In other words, if privacy is paramount, this is a place not to be fan mobbed. “Everyone has a P.O. box,” says Baris. “Without postal delivery, one less person comes to your front door.”In grammar school, Alpine kids enjoy a 1-to-6 teacher ratio. There is no high school in town; students attend Tenafly’s secondary school. Other neighboring towns, including Cresskill and Closter, provide services like shopping, coffee shops, drugstores and restaurants minutes away.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’How Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken's Favorite SonJon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Aren’t Jersey Natives, But They’re Local IconsMartha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans GuessingShaquille O’Neal Has Never Forgotten His Newark RootsWhy Jersey Is the Perfect Home for the Latest Era of Satirical Tabloid Weekly World News*
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[caption id="attachment_328719" align="alignnone" width="778"] Illustration: Raul Arias[/caption]Long before Shaquille O’Neal became an NBA superstar, the Big Aristotle was born in Newark. While the 7-foot-1 center lived in Germany and Texas before attending Louisiana State University, he has credited Newark’s Boys & Girls Clubs of America for giving him a safe place to hone his skills on the court.The first overall pick in the 1992 NBA Draft, O’Neal went on to enjoy a 19-year career with the Magic, Lakers, Heat, Suns, Cavaliers and Celtics. A Hall of Famer, MVP and four-time champ, he and the late Kobe Bryant formed one of the game’s great dynamic duos in Los Angeles, though they clashed at times.With an unmistakable frame, O’Neal has found as much success off the court as on it. He’s been a spokesperson for brands like Wheaties and Icy Hot, appeared in numerous films, and released multiple rap albums, cementing him status as a pop-culture icon.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’6 Social Media Influencers From New Jersey Who Are Driving the ConversationHow Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken's Favorite SonJon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Aren’t Jersey Natives, But They’re Local IconsMartha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans GuessingWhy Jersey Is the Perfect Home for the Latest Era of Satirical Tabloid Weekly World News*
O’Neal now works as an analyst for TNT’s NBA programming, often providing comical commentary on the sport he once dominated.He also hasn’t forgotten where he came from. He has tried his hand at real estate—among other business ventures—developing multiple projects in New Jersey, including ones in Newark. In 2022, he DJed on the streets of Jersey City before Flo Rida put on a Fourth of July concert.O’Neal was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.
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[caption id="attachment_328717" align="alignnone" width="778"] Illustration: Raul Arias[/caption]Queen Latifah has a long list of accolades on her résumé, from her role in the ’90s sitcom Living Single to hit albums, Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated performances in Chicago and Bessie, and last year, a Kennedy Center honor. She even had her own talk show for a while. But the 54-year-old got her start as Dana Elaine Owen in East Orange’s nascent hip-hop scene.“Growing up in New Jersey prepares you for whatever you might encounter outside in the world,” the Newark native once told New Jersey Monthly. “We’re not afraid to go places and try things.”That sentiment couldn’t ring truer for this star. In 1989, she released the album All Hail the Queen on Tommy Boy Records. The smart, flowing and edgy track “Ladies First” didn’t just hit number 6 on Billboard’s rap chart, but also proved to be a pioneering record for female MCs, previously absent in hip-hop culture, adding a layer of feminism to a movement of consciousness. She also set up Flavor Unit Records and Management in Jersey City. Among the stable of artists she signed was Naughty By Nature, also from East Orange.Her 1993 record Black Reign went gold, thanks in part to the single “U.N.I.T.Y.,” a rap classic that confronted misogyny in urban communities.Later work saw her put her angelic voice to jazz and pop and delve into decades of TV, film and social justice. She has been working on an affordable-housing development in Newark for the last several years.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’6 Social Media Influencers From New Jersey Who Are Driving the ConversationHow Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken's Favorite SonJon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Aren’t Jersey Natives, But They’re Local Icons*Martha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans Guessing
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[caption id="attachment_328695" align="alignnone" width="778"] Illustration: Raul Arias[/caption]Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert weren’t born in New Jersey, but the comedic icons have been tickling people’s funny bones from home bases in the Garden State for years.The two friends skyrocketed to fame on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, which Stewart hosted from 1999 to 2015, taking a humorous and often blunt look at current events; Colbert was a correspondent on the program before getting his own show, The Colbert Report (2005 to 2014). There, he portrayed an over-the-top conservative pundit, typically mocking real-life right-wingers in the process. Colbert, in character, even announced a not-so-serious presidential campaign in 2007.In 2015, Colbert gave up his alter ego to host The Late Show on CBS. Stewart, meanwhile, hosted The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+ from 2021 to 2023. In early 2024, Stewart delighted fans when it was revealed that he would return to his old stomping grounds on The Daily Show as a part-time host through the 2024 election. The stars have each won multiple Emmys, Grammys and Peabody Awards.Stewart, who has an animal sanctuary in Colts Neck, has used his platform to advocate for 9/11 first responders and veterans. Colbert, who lives in Montclair, helped start the Montclair Film Festival and is a familiar face around town.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffHow Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken's Favorite Son*Martha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans Guessing
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[caption id="attachment_328722" align="alignnone" width="778"] Illustration: Raul Arias[/caption]Frank Sinatra was 15 when he quit school and began singing at church-basement dances and social clubs in his native Hoboken. He hooked up with a trio called the Three Flashes, and together they passed an audition for Major Edward Bowes’ Amateur Hour radio program—the American Idol of its day. Bowes made Sinatra part of the group and renamed it the Hoboken Four. That episode was short-lived, and Sinatra went back to singing locally.In spring 1938, when he was 22, Sinatra took a job as a singing waiter at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse on a desolate stretch of Route 9W in Englewood Cliffs. That’s where the popular bandleader Harry James discovered Sinatra and signed him to sing for $75 a week. Next, Sinatra joined Tommy Dorsey’s band and sang his way to national stardom.Splitting from Dorsey, Sinatra made his solo debut at Newark’s Mosque Theater. That led to his historic sold-out performance on December 30, 1942, at New York’s Paramount Theater. By that time, Sinatra was living in Hasbrouck Heights with his first wife, Nancy.As Sinatra’s career took off, he abandoned New Jersey for Hollywood. Still, he often slipped back into Hoboken to visit his parents at the grand home he had purchased for them at 909 Hudson Street or to buy trays of chocolate-covered apricots at Lepore’s on Fourth Street.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’*Martha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans Guessing
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[caption id="attachment_329007" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Illustration: Andrew Ogilvie[/caption]Long before he was a world-famous talk show host, Stephen Colbert was just another denizen of my suburban New Jersey town. He and his wife, Evie, raised their three kids in Montclair and prided themselves not on their impressive resumes, but on being good neighbors and community members. They joined nonprofits and helped launch the Montclair Film Festival. Stephen hosted events at his kids’ schools and taught Sunday school at Immaculate Conception Church.Like most people who’ve been in town awhile, I have a few stories about crossing paths with Colbert around town. I’ve seen him give hilarious surprise performances at fundraisers, jumping onstage and singing with the band dressed in a suit as David Byrne or in gray wig and beard as Dr. John. Once, I was walking toward the Wellmont Theater for his interview with singer Mavis Staples when my friend spied him taking selfies with fans. She grabbed my arm and, like groupies, we took off. As I approached him, fumbling with my phone, he took it, flipped it expertly, and shot. In the photo, he’s making a silly face; I’m smiling ear to ear.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’How Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken's Favorite Son*Martha Stewart Is a New Jersey Icon Who Always Keeps Fans Guessing
One Halloween, he made a surprise appearance at his own door. My eldest daughter and a friend, bored teenagers at a neighborhood party, had decided it would be more fun to go trick-or-treating at the Colberts’. When they asked me for a ride, everyone laughed. “Yeah, Stephen Colbert is going to come to the door,” they teased.His neighborhood was quiet; no other trick-or-treaters were in sight as we approached his house, despite the inviting pumpkin lights lining the path. Nervously, my daughter’s friend rang the bell. The door swung open and there stood Montclair’s most famous resident holding a bowl of candy, his younger son on one side and a fluffy, well-behaved dog on the other. We gaped for a minute before the girls remembered why they had come—ostensibly, anyway.“Trick or treat!” they said, stepping forward for their take, thanking him and complimenting him on the decorations. Sounding like any run-of-the-mill dad, he said, “Thanks! We worked hard on it.”Being the funnyman he is, though, he couldn’t resist a joke. Noticing me gawking out of view (or so I thought), he peered into the darkness. “How about you? Candy?” he asked, grinning.That was more than a decade ago, and things have changed in Montclair and the world. As host of the top-rated Late Show, Colbert is more security conscious. He’s still involved with the film festival, but doesn’t mill around with fans before events. His kids grown, he’s no longer a presence at their schools or handing out Halloween treats. But at his core, he’s still a regular guy.A few years ago, as I walked down the steps of my house with my dog, he happened to be striding up the street toward me. Without thinking, I blurted out, “Hi, Stephen!” He stopped, smiled, stuck out his hand and said, “Have we met?”
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[caption id="attachment_328708" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Illustration: Raul Arias[/caption]Domestic goddess. Influencer. Swimsuit model. Is there anything she can’t do?When New Jersey Monthly ran a profile of Martha Stewart just a little over a decade ago, she had long been considered a home and media icon—a status that didn’t budge even during her 2004 prison stint for fraud. But nobody could have predicted that the domestic goddess from Nutley would add titles like social media star and even Sports Illustrated swimsuit model to her resume—all in her 70s and 80s.MORE FROM OUR POP CULTURE ISSUE*:The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New JerseyGet to Know NJM Cover Star Jack AntonoffWhy New Jersey’s Live Music Scene Will ‘Always Be Booming’How Frank Sinatra Became Hoboken’s Favorite Son*
Yes, posing is in Stewart’s roots—growing up in the 1950s, she earned cash working as a model after school at the now defunct department store Bonwit Teller. But that certainly didn’t mean that she would land the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue last year at the age of 81, a coveted gig typically taken by much younger stars. Nor did anyone expect that she’d strike up a friendship and business relationship with the wild, weed-loving rapper Snoop Dogg.But that’s the thing about Stewart. She’s always surprising us, keeping her relevant and interesting to an audience that seems to be expanding by the day.On Instagram, Stewart has 2 million followers, who drink up her occasional thirst traps and other fun snippets from her life in Bedford, New York, and the Hamptons (she moved out of New Jersey years ago).Her Instagram bio recently described her as “Entrepreneur. Author. Cook. Gardener. TV Host. Podcast host. Eternally curious. Teacher. Student. Mother. Grandmother. Friend.” That sounds about right, but what about “Jersey native?”
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When a guitar-wielding Jack Antonoff ambled onto the stage at MetLife Stadium last May—about 25 minutes from the Bergen County suburbs of his childhood—he fiddled for a moment with the lapels of his leather jacket, brushing them aside to bare the bold yellow lettering splashed across his signature T-shirt: “Welcome to New Jersey. Now, go home.” Delighted cheers rippled through the already roaring crowd of 82,000 fans.Antonoff’s longtime collaborator and close friend Taylor Swift had just called him onstage as her first surprise guest for night one of three sold-out New Jersey shows on her Eras Tour, the omnipresent musical phenomenon of 2023.The pair performed a playful acoustic rendition of “Getaway Car”—a song they cowrote for Swift’s 2017 Reputation album and whose studio inception was partially captured on film. As later shown in the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, Swift and Antonoff composed aloud four finished lines in a fevered span of less than 30 seconds. (The since-viral scene has been memed and even Halloween costumed by fans far and wide.)“A few miles away [from MetLife], that song was made in this tiny little space,” Antonoff recalls to New Jersey Monthly, referring to his cozy, 200-square-foot Brooklyn home-recording studio, wallpapered with the same colorful tiger design from his boyhood bedroom. Over the course of the past decade, this studio has become the fabled, fertile ground for many of his prolific music-making endeavors, including writing and producing partnerships with some of the world’s most renowned pop stars: Lana Del Rey, Lorde, St. Vincent, Clairo and, of course, Taylor Swift. “It’s crazy,” he continues. “The coolest part, though, is also to play to that many people, acoustic, and have it feel massive and explosive.”Antonoff has always worn duality well. The Bleachers frontman and former fun. guitarist, who turns 40 on March 31, took home his 10th Grammy earlier this month, including his third consecutive producer of the year award. (Swift declared him a “once-in-a-generation producer” while accepting the Grammy for album of the year, Midnights, which Antonoff coproduced.) But among many artists and fans, he’s known as much for his high-powered musical prowess as he is for his empathic and largely egoless studio presence. For all his fame and commercial success, he seems sustained by one solemn pursuit: making good songs. “Age, or success, or lack of success, or accolades…all these external things, they just sort of get left at the door when I go into work,” he says.[caption id="attachment_328824" align="alignnone" width="1222"] Buy our March 2024 issue here. Cover photo: Alex Lockett[/caption]While Antonoff’s comfort zone is most closely affiliated with 20- to 40-something women, he also weaves gracefully among genders, genres and generations. He’s worked with Harry Styles, the 1975, Diana Ross and the “brilliant” Patti Scialfa, whose “ornate…sad and grimy…beautiful” forthcoming album he calls “some of my favorite music ever.”In his own indie rock band, Bleachers, whose new self-titled album is out March 8, Antonoff’s work is simultaneously aching and anthemic, sorrowful yet hope suffused. “When two people are looking at a painting and one person sees a dead body, the other person sees a flower, right?” Antonoff muses. “You hear a song and it’s the saddest thing you’ve ever heard; your friend hears it and they want to, like, bump it in their car and party.”Antonoff grew up idolizing New York City from the North Jersey suburbs, only to move there and realize just how much mystery and majesty his home state holds. These days, Antonoff and his wife, the actress Margaret Qualley, relish the quietude of Long Beach Island—where they own a home equipped with a small studio, just three blocks from the house where Antonoff vacationed as a child. “It’s the best place, and we’re living there year-round now...basically anytime I don’t have to be in the city, we’re in LBI. And I actually prefer it in the winter. It’s really sweet, and just a really nice, small town.” He adds, “I don’t get wrapped up in dumb shit when I can look out at the ocean. It’s real perspective-shifting to see a large body of water—it kind of makes you just want to focus on the things that really matter.” Antonoff and Qualley even tied the knot on LBI this past August at Parker’s Garage, in front of celebrity friends including Swift, who caused quite the commotion when she arrived in town.[RELATED: The 50 Biggest Pop Culture Moments in New Jersey]
For years, Antonoff has been gripped by not just an unabashed pride for the Garden State, but also a frenetic obsession with its mythology, especially as it relates to New York City. He philosophizes: “The amount of literal energy that’s shooting off of…Manhattan, in proximity to where I grew up—what does that do when it hits New Jersey and sort of dissipates? I think it creates such a funny place that lives in…the shadow of all that energy.”Childhood drives meant constant confrontation with the skyline. Being so close to a “totally different life,” he says, is a “powerful, very medieval concept.” Jersey music, he once told Seth Meyers, elicits feelings of “a torch worth carrying.”Bleachers songs—synth-heavy, horn-haunted—are steeped in such meditations. Antonoff often sets mournful lyrics to deceptively boisterous sounds—a sensibility he gleaned in part from his local predecessors and contemporaries. New York music, he explains, “can be more pulled back…and relaxed…because people are going to pay attention either way.” But Jersey has to make more noise. “From Sinatra to Southside Johnny to E Street to Gaslight Anthem to My Chemical Romance—all this music, it just flies out at you, daring you to listen and dig into what is being said there,” he says. “I think a big part of the New Jersey sound is having to deliver a lot of sadness with a lot of fireworks—because otherwise, we might get looked over again.”[caption id="attachment_328802" align="alignnone" width="778"] “I used to go to a diner on Christmas," says Antonoff, pictured here at Legends Diner in Secaucus. "I'm Jewish, and I used to go when I didn't have a partner or anything, and I'd just be home and Christmas didn't really mean much to me. And I would go to the diner on Christmas—maybe like noon on Christmas Day. And it was a really interesting array of people. There was a lot of sadness in the room.” Photo: Alex Lockett[/caption][RELATED: Jack Antonoff Loves a Good Jersey Diner]
Born in Bergenfield, Antonoff was raised in a Jewish family in New Milford and Woodcliff Lake, where his parents, Rick and Shira, got him hooked early on classic rock. He attended the Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County in New Milford, then commuted to high school at Manhattan's Professional Children’s School. In the tenth grade he formed a punk band, Outline, with friends, borrowing his parents’ minivan to travel to shows they'd booked down South.When Antonoff was 18, his 13-year-old sister, Sarah, died after a long battle with brain cancer. At a time when most of his peers were absorbed in college plans, “There was such a do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want energy in the house,” he recalls—an ethos of, “Life is short, and it’s precious, and do whatever the hell you want.” It was an attitude that helped Antonoff avoid "cookie-cutter" suburban expectations as he pursued music over higher education. “In that kind of middle-class Jersey upbringing I had...college was king—SATs and college and all this crazy stress," he says. "…Not going to college was pretty bold. …[Those New Jersey towns] can be really heavy in terms of expectation, and there’s not a lot of space...for people who have a different concept of what they want their life to be. I was really lucky because I didn’t give a shit what anyone else thought, because my family was cool with what I was doing.” He remains immensely close to his parents and older sister, the fashion designer Rachel Antonoff, who are often spotted at his shows and have made cameos in his videos.[caption id="attachment_328803" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Alex Lockett[/caption]Antonoff was playing in another band, Steel Train, when, in 2008, he joined the New York-based band fun. He cowrote the group’s massive 2012 hit single, “We Are Young,” which reached number 1 on the Billboard chart and won the Grammy for song of the year. In 2013, Antonoff and Swift wrote and produced their first song together; he has since credited her for cementing his status in the industry as a bonafide producer. They’ve subsequently collaborated on 10 albums, including those in Swift’s mammoth rerecording project.Antonoff released Bleachers’ debut album, Strange Desire, in July 2014. The next summer, he launched Shadow of the City, a music festival held at Asbury Park’s Stone Pony Summer Stage (June 15 this year). “I always wanted to have a place where [our audience] could be like, ‘OK, I’ll meet you there’…our place where we can all [reunite],” he says.Bleachers projects are often accompanied by what can only be described as ultra-earnest spectacles, carried out in gloriously laborious fashion. Amid the release of Gone Now (2017), Antonoff hired a company to remove his childhood bedroom from his family’s Woodcliff Lake home, where he’d lived until age 27, and load it onto a trailer. He brought the wheeled relic on tour so fans could listen to his album inside the same world that birthed it: music and collectibles cluttering every inch; drawers still teeming with clothes; a disheveled twin bed. “Touch whatever you want,” he wrote to fans in a long, reverential statement, explaining that the exhibit was also a metaphor for how intensely he was struggling to let go of a cumbersome past. “Anytime you put out an album,” he says, “you’re trying to give more context to people; give them as much of who you are in that moment. The album itself is like the Bible—but then everything around it is...a way to bring people further and further in.” (The bedroom is parked outside his parents’ house; he plans to bring it to this summer’s Shadow of the City.)Antonoff widely described Bleachers’ third album, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night (2021), as fixated on a specific journey—the drive from New York City back home to Jersey, to build a future with someone you love. The song “Chinatown” features vocals from Antonoff’s idol turned dear friend, Bruce Springsteen; its video sees him driving the Boss around their native state in a Cadillac convertible (never mind that he didn’t have a license at the time).“I’ve spent a lot of time in a car with Bruce, just driving around, listening to music,” Antonoff says. “...[Driving is] where I do my best thinking, and my best listening—whether it’s [to] other people's music or my own. I just hear things very clearly...I know what I gotta change; I know what I'm feeling, what I'm not...Anytime I've cruised around with [Bruce], we're usually listening to some new mixes of either my music or his, and kind of testing it out in the car.”Antonoff has also recorded inside the (Jersey-bound) Holland Tunnel, shot a music video at the Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights; and partnered with Razza in Jersey City to put out a limited-edition tomato sauce. He released a podcast series, God and New Jersey, in which he dissected, with fellow NJ-bred artists, why we’re “a punch line for some people, Zion to others,” he wrote on social media. He played a live-streamed Bleachers concert inside a bus that barreled over the George Washington Bridge, cruised down the Parkway, then rolled up to the Stone Pony.This month’s Bleachers release coincides with an international tour that kicks off March 19 in London, stops at Coachella and returns to Jersey for June’s sold-out Shadow of the City. The album, Antonoff says, arose uncommonly quickly. “Not really since my first album did I feel like there was just this rush of life that had to be documented right now,” he says.“We all have these stories: ‘Oh, I’m not good at relationships...I'm too focused on my work.’ …I think about it like armor,” he says. “For anything not going well in your life, you need armor to wear because it's a little too painful to just say, ‘Well, this just isn't going well.’ (Laughs.) And maybe that's just because it's just not time yet, you know? ...And so for my whole life, when it came to relationships, I had all these one-liners and these concepts that I would live by—and that all kind of crumbled when I met my wife. …It's often when something good happens and we feel comfortable that we then can look back and say, ‘What was that? [Who] was that person who had to be so hard on themselves and had to be so tough and have all these answers for why they weren't in relationships that were working?’...I found myself writing a lot about [a] laying down of this past self and making peace with [it].”Writing one of the album’s future singles, “Alma Mater,” Antonoff imagined himself driving, mostly around LBI, “kind of having my life and culture just whip by me,” he says. “Frankly,” he deadpans, “I was thinking about, like, Wawa more than any person.” The video for the album’s third single, “Tiny Moves,” stars his wife, Qualley, who choreographed and co-directed, dancing late at night in a Jersey parking lot, the New York City skyline behind her, until sunrise.Is Bleachers a wiser older sibling to his last album? “In a weird way, I think it’s, like, a freer younger sibling—but maybe that’s kind of the same thing, said in different ways,” he grins.“I wrote some really young-sounding songs later in life,” Antonoff says. “And I’ve written...songs when I was really young [but] sort of accessing this older, wise person. Right now, I feel pretty grounded in my actual moment on Earth.”
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[caption id="attachment_328716" align="alignnone" width="778"] Illustration: Emily Krill[/caption]Sure, we’re known for Sinatra, Springsteen and The Sopranos, but New Jersey has added so much more to the cultural landscape. Here are the 50 biggest pop culture moments in New Jersey's history. 1. The Sopranos Premieres[caption id="attachment_328778" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: RGR Collection/Alamy[/caption]When The Sopranos debuted on HBO on January 10, 1999, nobody could have predicted that a little show about a New Jersey mobster/suburban family man would become one of the most iconic pieces of television ever made. It was especially personal for New Jerseyans. It filmed in our homes, our stores, even our strip clubs. It inspired other productions to flock to the Garden State, a trend that grew as the years went by. Sure, there were critics—mostly Italian American groups who said the show reinforced stereotypes—but even they would be hard-pressed to deny its impact on our state and pop culture. The 2007 series finale is debated to this day, and fans still flock to Holsten’s to sit in Tony’s booth. The show had a revival during the pandemic, and we can’t imagine its popularity ever dying. —Julie Gordon2. Bruce Springsteen’s Debut Album ReleasedBruce Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., came out in January 1973 to average sales but critical raves and launched Springsteen on a path toward superstardom. Singles included “Blinded by the Light,” “Spirit in the Night” and “Growin’ Up.” The cover features a 1970s souvenir postcard proclaiming Springsteen’s Jersey roots, despite a push by the record company to promote him as a New York City artist, and despite the crime and civil unrest Asbury Park was experiencing at the time. In 2013, Rolling Stone deemed Greetings “one of the 100 greatest debut albums of all time.” *—Julia Martin[RELATED: Read Our Cover Story With Producer of the Year and Proud New Jerseyan Jack Antonoff]*
3. ‘What Exit’ Joke Originates on SNL“What exit?” It’s the biggest Jersey joke of all time—quite the accolade, considering the number of Jersey jokes out there. But what’s the origin? It was Valentine’s Day 1981 when Joe Piscopo (a Passaic native), in the SNL sketch “Paulie at the Card Store,” said, “You’re from New Jersey? What exit?” Piscopo went on to use the zinger throughout his career. For New Jerseyans, the joke makes perfect sense, since the Turnpike and Parkway crisscross the state from Bergen County to Cape May County. —Connor Carlin4. Bet on Atlantic City, Monopoly, and Miss AmericaAtlantic City boasts a slew of historical accolades that resonate beyond the state’s borders. This resort town has a permanent place on a globally known board game (yes, Monopoly, we know where St. James Place is); it boasts the first sand-evading, wood-planked, raised walkway—the country’s first boardwalk, built in 1870, rebuilt in the 1890s, and still standing. Then there’s the phenomenon of the Miss America pageant, which began in AC in 1921. And, of course, in 1978, East Coast casino gambling began with the opening of Resorts International in AC. —Deborah P. Carter5. On the Waterfront Shows Hoboken GritHoboken may have lost its grit, but in 1954, its shabby bars and dockside shanties provided the perfect locations for the classic Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront. Rooftop scenes were shot along Hudson Street, and two historic churches—Our Lady of Grace (for exteriors) and the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul (interiors)—figured prominently. —Ken Schlager 6. Mall Culture Is BornWhen it opened its doors on October 11, 1961, the Cherry Hill Mall became the first enclosed shopping center on the East Coast, birthing mall culture as we know it. It led the region by creating an air-conditioned, 1.3 million-square-foot, dual-winged megaplex. The mall offered an experience beyond retail that included fountains, a pond, tropical plants, and an aviary with exotic birds. Today, many malls are shuttering as patrons return to downtown shopping areas or go online, but the Cherry Hill Mall continues to thrive, with 130 stores and plenty of eateries—but no more birds. —DPC7. Campbell’s Soup Gets More Than 15 Minutes of FameCan you name a more iconic soup than Campbell’s? The “mmm mmm good” brand’s Camden factory made the world’s first jar of ready-to-eat soup, beefsteak tomato, in 1895; two years later, the process of condensing came along, allowing for the small cans we know today. Fast-forward to 1962, and the Jersey soup became a pop-culture icon thanks to Andy Warhol. His Pop Art piece Campbell’s Soup Cans features 32 cans of the soup, which the artist ate daily for 20 years. The Camden factory is still in operation. —Emily Melvin8. Broadway’s Hamilton Name-Checks New JerseyAlexander Hamilton was a Jersey boy. He lived and studied in Elizabeth, fought at Trenton, Princeton and Freehold, spent two brutal winters in Morristown as General Washington’s aide-de-camp, helped turn Paterson into an industrial city, and died in a duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, the very spot where his 18-year-old son had been killed dueling two years earlier. So it’s not surprising that Lin Manuel-Miranda tossed a few Jersey jokes into his Broadway musical Hamilton when it opened in 2015. One laugh line is, “Everything is legal in New Jersey,” from “Blow Us All Away,” a reference to the Garden State’s reputation for overlooking illegal activities such as gambling and, fatefully in Hamilton’s case, dueling. —J. Martin9. New Jersey Earns Place as the Diner Capital of the WorldLet’s face it: New Jerseyans are hungry to claim diner supremacy. Although we weren’t technically home to the first diners—those cropped up in Rhode Island and Massachusetts before the turn of the 20th century—we can thank Bayonne’s Jerry O’Mahony for giving us serious greasy-spoon credibility. The key moment came in 1912, when O’Mahony, who owned horse-pulled lunch wagons in Hudson County, pivoted to building such wagons himself. He sold his first to a restaurant entrepreneur who operated it in what is today Union City. “The transaction helped set in motion New Jersey’s golden age of diner manufacturing, which in turn made the Garden State the diner capital of the world,” local diner expert Michael Gabriele explained in New Jersey Monthly’s 2018 diner-themed issue. —Jennifer Finn10. Whitney Houston Remembered in Starry Home-Going Ceremony When Whitney Houston died suddenly in February 2012, her star-studded home-going ceremony was held at her childhood church, New Hope Baptist in Newark. Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys and Houston’s cousin (and fellow New Jersey native) Dionne Warwick performed. Kevin Costner and Clive Davis delivered eulogies, and Oprah Winfrey and Mariah Carey were among the mourners in the nearly four-hour-long ceremony. The 48-year-old’s casket was carried to Fairview Cemetery in a golden hearse, a fitting farewell for music royalty. —Dionne Ford11. Chris Christie Becomes a Beach MemeIt was Fourth of July weekend in 2017, the day after Governor Chris Christie had shut down the state’s parks and beaches because of a budget standoff, when a photographer caught him lounging near the state-owned governor’s beach house at Island Beach State Park. Christie denied being there until a photo surfaced of him in shorts, baseball cap and flip-flops. It triggered widespread outrage and countless memes of him in his beach chair in preposterous and hilarious locations. —J. Martin12. Jersey Shore Invades the Jersey ShoreLove it or loathe it, Jersey Shore became a phenomenon when a group of 20-something party animals with nicknames like “Snooki” and “The Situation” invaded our TVs—and beaches—as the show hit MTV on December 3, 2009. Seaside Heights, where the cast lived, quickly gained national name recognition and became a tourist spot. In the years since, it’s tried to shed the party-town image portrayed on screen. As the cast grew older, the show spun off into Jersey Shore: Family Vacation to includes the stars’ partners and kids. Season 7 premiered in February. —JG13. Aaron Rodgers and Tommy DeVito Dominate Football HeadlinesFor Jersey football teams, 2023 was a rollercoaster year. Future Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers moved from Green Bay to the Jets, bringing high hopes that he’d lead the team to their first Super Bowl win since 1969. That dream was quickly quashed when he was injured in the fourth play of his debut, sidelining him for the season. The Jets would end up with yet another losing season. The Giants also failed to make the playoffs, struggling after losing their starting quarterback to injury. But fans were able to turn lemons into limoncello when Cedar Grove local and third-stringer Tommy "Cutlets" DeVito became the feel-good story of the year as the Giants’ starting quarterback—fully embracing his Jersey and Italian American roots along the way. —JG14. Jersey Brings Us ‘Rapper’s Delight’[caption id="attachment_328724" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy[/caption]Although it is named after a neighborhood in Harlem, Sugar Hill Records, which introduced hip-hop to the mainstream with the 1979 Sugarhill Gang classic “Rapper’s Delight,” was formed and based in Englewood. Legendary producer Sylvia Robinson brought together Englewood’s Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank and Master Gee at her Bergen County studio and changed the face of modern music forever. —CC15. Jaws Reportedly Inspired by New Jersey Shark Attacks Many believe Jaws was inspired by the first recorded fatal shark attacks in American history, which occurred off the coast of Jersey in 1916. Jaws novelist and screenwriter Peter Benchley insisted that wasn’t true—even though his story of a man-eating shark terrorizing a fictional New York summer resort is very similar to what happened here. Either way, Benchley wrote the novel while living in Pennington, and Steven Spielberg (who lived in Haddonfield as a kid) made it into cinematic history in 1975. —Ed Condran16. Bon Jovi Changes the Face of RockPerth Amboy native Jon Bon Jovi formed his eponymous rock band in Sayreville in 1983. Their first hit may have been “Runaway,” but Bon Jovi has stayed close to the Garden State over the years, particularly through his philanthropic JBJ Soul Kitchen Community restaurants. —JF
17. Philip Roth Puts Newark in the Spotlight Author Philip Roth grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, which inspired much of his writing. Roth set his 1959 novella, Goodbye, Columbus, in tonier Short Hills, but his best-known novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), put Weequahic High School on the literary map. —KS18. NJ's First Drive-In Movie Theater OpensOn June 6, 1933, a culture of Friday night hangs, first dates and seeing a film from the comfort of your car was born. The first drive-in movie theater in America, Camden Drive-In, was located in Pennsauken, initiating a boom that would sweep the country. Now, there is only one drive-in left in Jersey: Vineland’s Delsea Drive-In. —EM19. Stone Pony in Asbury Park Becomes an IconThe iconic music venue in Asbury Park that launched the careers of Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny and Jon Bon Jovi is still a vibrant music hub. Repeatedly threatened by development, the Pony was saved by the musical community and renovated in 2000, with a summer stage facing the ocean. A visit there is a pilgrimage to rock fans around the world. —J. Martin20. Gotham City Is in New Jersey Since its introduction in Batman #4 in 1940, Gotham City has served as the Dark Knight’s stomping grounds. Though the location of Gotham has varied in different Batman incarnations, the most consistent is somewhere in southern New Jersey. DC writer Mark Gruenwald referred to “Gotham City, New Jersey” in Amazing World of DC #14 (1977), and artist Dick Dillin gave a detailed map showing Gotham near Egg Island in The World’s Greatest Superheroes (1978). —CC[RELATED: How New Jersey Shaped Stan Lee Into a Marvel Legend]
21. Surviving Action Park Is a Rite of Passage Surviving Vernon’s Action Park, nicknamed Traction Park and Class Action Park due to its dangerous rides, was a rite of passage for Jersey youth in the early ’80s. One of the country’s first waterparks, it attracted about 1 million thrill-seeking visitors a year and later spawned movies, TV shows and books. It closed in 1996 after six fatal injuries and legions of broken bones, reopening, with safer rides, as Mountain Creek Water Park in 1998. —J. Martin22. Teresa Giudice Flips Table on The Real Housewives of New JerseyIt was the table flip heard round the world. In 2009, when an outraged Teresa Giudice flipped a restaurant dinner table over during the Season 1 finale of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, she cemented the show’s place in pop-culture history and set the stage for dramatic reality-TV moments to come. That includes RHONJ’s current 14th season. —JG23. Michelle Obama's Official Portrait Painted by NJ Artist[caption id="attachment_329066" align="alignnone" width="778"] Michelle Obama portrait photo: Randy Duchaine/Alamy; artist Amy Sherald photo: Kyle Knodell[/caption]Art lovers already knew Amy Sherald for her sober-faced, matter-of-fact portraits of African Americans when, in 2018, she painted the official likeness of Michelle Obama to hang in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, skyrocketing her reputation. The colorful, softly hued painting became an iconic image of one of the nation’s most popular first ladies. In 2020, Sherald’s posthumous portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair also gained national attention. Today, the artist continues her work from her Jersey City studio. —DPC24. Four Seasons Rise to Fame Jersey’s famed doo-wop/rock quartet, the Four Seasons, led by Newark native Frankie Valli, officially formed in 1960 after a failed audition (as the Four Lovers) at a Union County bowling alley called—you guessed it—the Four Seasons. Hits like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like a Man” followed. Jersey Boys, the Tony-winning musical about the group, charmed Broadway from 2005 to 2017, and a Clint Eastwood film hit theaters in 2014. A streaming adaptation stars Wyckoff-raised Nick Jonas as Valli. —JF25. New Jersey Monthly DebutsFormer Princeton roommates Hendrix Niemann and Christopher Leach founded this very magazine in the 1970s, and it’s still going strong today. “We felt the coverage, both broadcast and print, of New Jersey tended to be overly negative and stereotypical,” Niemann told NJM in 2016 about their reason for starting it. The first issue came out in November 1976. The magazine has always covered serious issues plus the fun side of life. In 1982, Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. of the Morristown Daily Record bought NJM and moved it from Princeton to Morristown, where it remains today under the leadership of his daughter, Kate S. Tomlinson, the publisher/editor in chief. —JG and KS26. Kevin Smith Films ClerksWhen Kevin Smith caught Slackers in 1990, the Red Bank native was inspired. He maxed out his credit cards and made the now iconic movie Clerks for less than $30,000. The 1994 film, which was shot at a Leonardo Quick Stop, became a critical and commercial success and was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry. Smith made two sequels. He remains a force in Jersey arts as the owner of the Red Bank comic book shop Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. In 2022, he purchased Atlantic Moviehouse, where he used to go as a kid. —EC27. Yogi Berra Leaves His Mark Legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra lived in Montclair for more than 50 years, so it was fitting that in 1998, the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center opened at Montclair State University. Along with exhibits honoring the achievements of Berra and others, it provides educational programs and camps emphasizing respect and sportsmanship. Two months after opening, Berra and his former manager, George Steinbrenner, with whom he hadn’t spoken in 14 years, reconciled there. Berra died in 2015 at age 90. —J. Martin28. Zach Braff Releases Garden StateA lot of filmmakers shoot in New Jersey, especially since Governor Phil Murphy reinstated tax incentives in 2018. But fewer set their plots here. An exception is Zach Braff. The actor/director, who grew up in Maplewood and South Orange, filmed and set his acclaimed 2004 directorial debut here, even titling it Garden State. A decade later, his 2023 movie, A Good Person, filmed at his high school, Columbia. “I love my hometown, and I want to tell stories about my hometown,” he told New Jersey Monthly last year. —JG29. The Fugees Score Big-Time In 1996, South Orange-based hip-hop trio the Fugees had a huge hit with their second album, The Score. The New York Times said the album placed the band at the “forefront of pop music.” The Fugees’ version of the Roberta Flack song “Killing Me Softly With His Song” reached number 1 in more than 20 countries. Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean both went on to have huge solo careers. In 2023, Hill gave a nod to her hometown when she invited members of the marching band her high school, Columbia, to perform with her at the Prudential Center. —Jacqueline Mroz30. @NJgov Rocks Social MediaWith its viral “your mom” tweet in December 2019, @NJgov proved official government accounts don’t have to be boring. Melding Jersey attitude and pride, the X (formerly Twitter) account posts important updates along with memes praising full-serve gas. The edgy account battles @nycgov about bagels and more. Cocreator Megan Coyne now posts from the account @WhiteHouse, but Jersey’s account is still going strong. —Sharon Waters31. Carole King Sings About Suburbia In the early 1960s, Carole King, who would become one of the most successful female songwriters of all time, was living near Pleasant Valley Way in West Orange with husband and collaborator Gerry Goffin when they wrote their hit song “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” It went on to become one of the Monkees’ most successful singles, peaking at number 3 on the charts. Goffin apparently wanted to write the song because he disliked their suburban life; it was a commentary on the boredom and conformity of it. —J. Mroz32. War of the Worlds, With Alien Invasion Set in NJ, Sparks PanicThe infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast ignited panic when listeners thought aliens were invading Earth—with their entry point in New Jersey. Orson Welles’s fictional radio drama, based on H.G. Wells’s sci-fi novel of the same name, said that Martians had invaded the small community of Grovers Mill in West Windsor. Since the 1980s, a bronze monument to the broadcast has stood there. —JG33. Cake Boss PremieresTLC’s reality show Cake Boss skyrocketed a family-owned Hoboken bakery to national stardom when it premiered in April 2009, bringing its lively owner, Buddy Valastro, along for the ride. The original Carlo’s Bakery set up shop in 1910. Now, there are nine Carlo’s locations and 28 vending machines across the county. Cake Boss went off the air in 2020, but Valastro debuted two new shows on A&E in 2023. —EM34. Sea Hear Now Festival Rocks Asbury Park Sea Hear Now has brought superstar musicians to Asbury Park’s shores since its inaugural festival in 2018. The likes of Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters and more mega-acts have made this a top-notch jamboree for music fans of all ages each September. The festival also includes surfing and art. —Gary Phillips35. WBGO Becomes NJ’s 1st Public RadioNewark is to thank for introducing the state to public radio. In 1979, WBGO 88.3FM aired for the first time, playing jazz music from Newark. It soon became a 24-hour station affiliated with NPR. WBGO remains active today. —EM36. Les Paul Changes Music in NJ Music legend Les Paul created the first solid-body electric guitar design. Though he was born in Wisconsin, Paul spent much of his life in Mahwah, and his most influential discoveries were made in the Bergen County town. In September 2011, the Mahwah Museum honored Paul by unveiling a permanent exhibition titled “Les Paul in Mahwah.” He died in 2009 at age 94. —EM37. Rachel Zegler Gets Her Big Break[caption id="attachment_328734" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: Courtesy of Ramona Rosales/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp[/caption]After a nationwide search that drew 30,000 aspiring actresses, Clifton’s own Rachel Zegler was picked to play Maria in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 adaptation of West Side Story, which filmed in Newark and Paterson. The now 22-year-old has since been in box office biggies like Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and her star is only poised to rise. —CC38. Judy ‘Blume’s’ in New JerseyJudy Blume, the beloved author of books for children, young adults and adults, grew up in Elizabeth. She began writing in 1959; her books include bestsellers Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. In 2015, Blume published In the Unlikely Event, based on a bizarre series of plane crashes that took place in her hometown in the early 1950s. Blume has sold more than 82 million copies of her books. —J. Mroz39. The Watcher Creeps Us OutHow would you feel if you moved into your dream home and discovered that someone was watching your house and your family’s every move? That’s the story behind The Watcher, a real-life drama that took place on a suburban street in Westfield and was turned into a popular Netflix show in 2022 starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. In both reality and fiction, the family was plagued by ominous letters and sinister threats. The real Watcher was never found. —J. Mroz40. VMAs Choose Newark In 2019, the MTV Video Music Awards eschewed cities like New York and LA for Newark’s Prudential Center, marking the first time the awards show was held in New Jersey. The show featured Jersey tributes including performances by Wyckoff’s Jonas Brothers. The VMAs returned to the Rock in 2022 and 2023. —Leigh Scheps41. New Jersey Mourns Anthony BourdainThere are few people who blended a love of food, travel and Jersey pride quite like Anthony Bourdain. The late chef and host of numerous travel shows grew up in Leonia and considered himself a Jersey boy, regardless of where life took him. In his words, “to know Jersey is to love her.” After his passing in 2018, legions of local fans mourned him, and the state created the Anthony Bourdain Food Trail, featuring 10 local restaurants profiled on his show Parts Unknown. A map can be found at visitnj.org. —CC42. Cheaper by the Dozen Based on Real FamilyPublished in 1948, the novel Cheaper by the Dozen was based on the real-life stories of a Montclair couple (authors Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey) and their 12 children. A bestseller, the book inspired several film and stage productions. The actual Gilbreth house, on Eagle Rock Way, last sold in 2015 for $2.75 million. —KS43. Count Basie Comes BackRed Bank native Count Basie kicked off his jazz career playing Jersey Shore nightspots. He became a giant of the Swing Era after relocating to Kansas City, but on February 3, 1938, he triumphantly returned to his hometown for a show at the River Street School, about a mile from the theater that now bears his name. —KS44. Addams Family Has New Jersey Roots [caption id="attachment_328690" align="alignnone" width="778"] Charles Addams in 1952 Photo: Courtesy of Library of Congress/Bob Sandberg[/caption]Charles Addams, the cartoonist who in 1938 created the macabre Addams Family for the New Yorker that spawned the legendary TV show, grew up in Westfield, playing in the Presbyterian Cemetery and drawing cartoons for the Westfield High School yearbook. Two houses there, on Elm Street and Dudley Avenue, inspired the ghoulish family’s mansion. The TV show, which ran on ABC from 1964 to 1966, has inspired movies, other series, songs and, some think, goth subculture. —J. Martin45. Friday the 13th Scares America Fans still flock to Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Hardwick to see where Friday the 13th was filmed in 1979. The special tours showcase the Boy Scouts camp that served as Camp Crystal Lake, where the movie’s murders happened. The slasher film that spawned a franchise was also shot at locations in Hope and Blairstown, where Roy’s Hall shows the cult classic every Friday the 13th. —SW46. Author Harlan Coben Comes Full Circle Blockbuster mystery author Harlan Coben, who grew up in Livingston and now lives in Ridgewood, is the author of more than 35 bestselling novels, with many set in Jersey and adapted into Netflix series. All things Garden State aligned when the TV version of his thriller Shelter, which aired last year, was filmed at his alma mater, Livingston High School, and 20 local towns. —J. Mroz47. Paper Mill Gets Saved and Nabs a Tony Millburn’s Paper Mill Playhouse, opened in 1938, suffered a financial crisis in 2007. A save-the-theater campaign raised more than $1 million in four weeks to finish the season. In 2016, the Paper Mill was awarded the Regional Theatre Tony Award, elevating its status as two shows, A Bronx Tale and Bandstand, transferred to Broadway. —LS48. Jersey Fans Go Wild For Taylor SwiftNobody had a bigger 2023 than Taylor Swift, so it’s only fitting that she caused a commotion not once but twice in New Jersey last year, first with a trio of massive, sold-out MetLife Stadium shows in May and then when she traveled to Long Beach Island for the wedding of her close pal and collaborator Jack Antonoff to the actress Margaret Qualley. Swift literally stopped traffic upon her arrival in Beach Haven, attracting hordes of fans and, unsurprisingly, causing a bit of uproar among locals for all the fanfare. Fun fact: Swift, who grew up in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, spent her childhood summers at the Jersey Shore. —JG49. SZA Defends Maplewood Hometown[caption id="attachment_328726" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photo: UPI/Alamy[/caption]Maplewood singer SZA stood up for her dad’s favorite family-owned café, Village Coffee Shop, in 2017 when a Starbucks set up shop nearby. The Grammy winner shared frustration with changes in her hometown, urging city slickers flocking to the ’burbs to “shop local and be polite,” writing on social media that people who move to small towns need to “learn how to be a part of a community.” —Falyn Stempler50. Pinegrove Shuffle Goes Viral In 2016, the band Pinegrove, formed by Montclair natives Evan Stephens Hall and Zack Levine, broke out in the indie-rock world. Their album Cardinal was recognized by Spin magazine, and they regularly toured North America and Europe. The band went on hiatus in 2022, so it was a surprise a year later when social media began buzzing with new Pinegrove-inspired videos. Not only was the group not forgotten, but their lyrics and beats had become the backdrop for an arm-flowing, one-step dance dubbed the Pinegrove Shuffle. After a TikTok video went viral, countless new versions popped up and led to a huge increase in Pinegrove plays on streaming platforms. —DPC
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New Jersey experienced losses in 2023.We pay tribute to the stars who died this year who were born in New Jersey, made their home here, or represented our state in another, memorable way. Although they are gone, the legacies of these celebrities live on in their work and in our memories.Andre Braugher1962-December 11, 2023 [caption id="attachment_325352" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Photo: Shutterstock[/caption]The star of TV shows including "Homicide: Life on the Street" and, more recently, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was born in Chicago but lived in South Orange for more than two decades with his wife, the actress Ami Brabson. The Essex County town was where the couple raised their three sons, Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley. “After living in Harlem and Park Slope and Baltimore, we realized we liked this whole backyard thing,” he told New Jersey Monthly in 2019. He also said the Garden State "can be shockingly beautiful.” A graduate of Juilliard, Braugher died of lung cancer. He was 61.Suzanne Shepherd1934-November 17, 2023The actress had roles in two famed Mob projects: Goodfellas, where she played the mother of Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco), and The Sopranos, the iconic New Jersey show where she played the mother of Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco). Shepherd, who was born in Elizabeth, died peacefully at home in New York City at the age of 89, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "Suzanne Shepherd was a powerful actress and a force to act with…may she rest in peace," Bracco, who starred in both Goodfellas and The Sopranos, wrote on Instagram when Shepherd died, sharing a photo of herself and Shepherd with Falco.George 'Funky' Brown 1949-November 17, 2023The drummer, songwriter and founding member of the Jersey City band Kool & the Gang died of lung cancer at the age of 74. He co-wrote the group's 1980 hit “Celebration” and other iconic tunes. Brown and six other classmates formed the band (originally dubbed the Jazziacs before getting a new name) as teenagers in the 1960s in Jersey City. "In loving memory of our dear brother, cofounder and the funkiest drummer the world has ever seen," Kool & the Gang wrote on social media at the time of Brown's death. "His beautiful soul is now at rest. We love you George. Thank you for giving us the sound of happiness."Ron Cephas Jones1957-August 19, 2023The Emmy-winning star of "This Is Us" grew up in Paterson and, in 1978, graduated from Ramapo College, where he acted in productions including Cinderella Ever After. The actor spoke at the commencement of the Class of 2017 via video instead of in person because of his ongoing battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to the school, a disease that would claim his life in August of 2023. He said to the graduating class, "Never stop learning…And never stop loving. It’s the thing that we need most in this life, is to love." Cephas Jones moved to New York after graduation but an addiction to heroin halted his career in the arts, as he described to the New York Times in 2021. He got clean in 1986.Tony BennettAugust 3, 1926-July 21, 2023[caption id="attachment_325353" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Photo: Shutterstock[/caption]Bennett was born in Queens and is usually thought of as a New York singer, but he lived in the Garden State, Englewood specifically, from 1957-1971. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2011, an honor presented to him by Nancy Sinatra, the daughter of Frank Sinatra, a Hoboken native. Bennett spoke highly of the Garden State at the time, saying in a speech at his induction: "I moved to Englewood, New Jersey, and I had the most wonderful time. I loved it so much, and I had so much optimism in those days. I still do." He also spoke of his son Daegal's life and recording studio in Englewood. Bennett died at the age of 96 after a battle with Alzheimer's disease.[RELATED: NJ Celebrities Who Died in 2022]
Carol Higgins ClarkJuly 28, 1956-June 12, 2023The mystery writer, who penned the popular Regan Reilly mysteries, died of appendix cancer at the age of 66. She was the daughter of famed novelist Mary Higgins Clark. Carol Higgins Clark grew up in Washington Township and graduated from Immaculate Heart Academy in Bergen County. She was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2016, and was introduced by her mother, a fellow Hall of Famer. At the induction event, Carol said she'd been told it helps to be Irish to be a good storyteller, but countered that thought by noting: "I say it helps to be from New Jersey" (via NJ.com).Wayne ShorterAugust 25, 1933-March 2, 2023[caption id="attachment_325354" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Photo: Shutterstock[/caption]The jazz icon and multiple Grammy winner from Newark graduated from Newark Arts High School in 1952. In 2017, the saxophonist and composer described Newark to WBGO as as a “a place that conjured up a lot of imagination.” He said of his childhood in the Ironbound section, “When we got our bicycles, we would go down to the marshes, where Newark Airport is now, and ride the bikes a little bit into the soft earth, and in those tall weeds. We’d go as far as we can—like, dare each other: 'How far can you go?'” He died at the age of 89.
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Kevin Jonas scored some major dad points this week.The eldest Jonas Brother brought his daughters, Alena and Valentina, to the New Jersey Devils game on Thursday night. Although the team lost 6-3 to the Edmonton Oilers, the trio appeared to be having a blast together in a photo snapped at the game."Great night out with my girls at the @njdevils game!" he captioned the snap on Instagram.The hockey-game appearance comes two months before the Jonas Brothers—made up of New Jersey natives Kevin, 36, Joe Jonas, 34, and Nick Jonas, 31—perform at the NHL Stadium Series on February 17 at MetLife Stadium, when the Devils take on the Philadelphia Flyers. Although all three Jonas Brothers grew up in Wyckoff, Bergen County, Kevin is the only sibling to still reside in the Garden State. He and wife Danielle Jonas, who wed in 2009, are raising their two girls in Denville, the town where Danielle grew up.The family lives just a few blocks from Danielle's parents and close to many of her childhood friends, which makes things easier when Kevin is on the road with the band. “It’s been a blessing—really nice for us to have a safe place here and a community around us,” Kevin told New Jersey Monthly in 2022.When Kevin is not out on tour, he, Danielle and the kids love spending time outdoors together; in the summer, they head down the Shore. "It's our own version of the Hamptons," he said. "It really is incredible."Although Joe and Nick no longer live in their home state, Kevin and Danielle make sure they get their fill of Jersey foods when they're back visiting. “We still bring the Taylor ham to them,” Danielle, 37, told us. “Or the meatballs.”As Kevin described the family, “We are true Jersey, through and through.”The Jonas Brothers, who formed in 2005, broke up in 2013, and reunited in 2019 to huge fanfare, performed earlier this month on their home turf during tour stops at the Prudential Center in Newark.
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On Tuesday, Giants quarterback Tommy DeVito pulled a surprise play and delighted his fans. But this time the skillful move was in Morristown, not East Rutherford, and involved pizza, not a pigskin.The appearance of the undrafted rookie sensation at Coniglio’s Old Fashioned came after a scheduled appearance at the pizzeria had been canceled because of a reported dispute about DeVito's fee. On Sunday, the pizzeria posted on social media that they would no longer be hosting DeVito on Tuesday, claiming they “received word from his agent that his appearance fee would be doubling," from $10,000 to $20,000, following the Giants’ win over the Green Bay Packers last Monday.But the hometown hero made it right, walking through the doors of the South Street pizzeria Tuesday with his marketing agent Sean Salci. Sean Stellato, the flashy, fedora-wearing NFL agent who had been negotiating with the pizzeria and accompanied DeVito on an earlier appearance that day at Bubbakoo’s Burritos in Livingston, was conspicuously absent. [caption id="attachment_324923" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Coniglio and DeVito plan to host a charity event together in January at the pizzeria. Photo: Courtesy of Coniglio's Old Fashioned pizzeria[/caption]It was later reported that Stellato had been replaced as DeVito's marketing representative by Maxx Lepselter, but remains DeVito’s contract agent in football matters.“It was really important to me,” DeVito, who lives in Cedar Grove, told the New York Post of appearing at Coniglio's. “As soon as I was made aware of it...that’s when I was like, ‘We need to go in there, meet him face to face, set things right, eat the awesome pizza and have fun.”During his visit, DeVito, 25, posed for photos with Coniglio and his wife, Shealyn, and held Penny, the couple’s 11-month old baby. Over egg creams from an antique machine and chicken cutlet sandwiches, DeVito’s favorite, the two agreed to a charity appearance there in January. At the event, which doesn't yet have a date, DeVito, of Cedar Grove, will sign 100 autographs and Coniglio will sell 100 chicken cutlet sandwiches with proceeds going to Knights of Columbus charities. [caption id="attachment_324924" align="aligncenter" width="778"] DeVito held baby Penny when he popped into Coniglio's on Tuesday night. Photo: Courtesy of Coniglio's Old Fashioned pizzeria[/caption]Coniglio had decided to cancel the event when the quarterback's appearance fee had reportedly doubled following the team’s third win in a row. “We are a small family-run business & decided $20,000 was a bit steep for 2 hours,” read his message on Instagram.Stellato said it was a misunderstanding; he thought negotiations still were ongoing since no contract had been signed. But Coniglio was not having it, and made it clear Stellato was not welcome at the pizzeria. In an Instagram post in which he apologized for the cancellation, he said, “We’re Italian too & don’t like when someone says one thing & does another.”
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[caption id="attachment_324814" align="alignnone" width="778"] Skating in the 2026 Olympics is the primary focus for 16-year-old Isabeau Levito, one of the top figure skaters in the U.S. Photo: Ronald Gray; makeup: Andrea Hunter[/caption]Many parents have endured the frustration of convincing a cranky toddler to eat dinner. They plead. They beg. Bargain. Cajole.
“If you finish your vegetables, you can watch TV.” “Clean your plate, and you can have dessert.”
It is often a futile effort.
After Chiara Garberi Levito watched her daughter, Isabeau Levito, pantomime Johnny Weir’s free-skate routine during the 2010 Olympics, she had the ultimate weapon in their dinner wars. Isabeau was transfixed by Weir’s performance, and Chiara decided to enroll her daughter in a weekend skating class.
“She loved it,” Chiara says of the class. “That’s how I would make her finish her meal. I would say to her, ‘If you finish your meal, we can go to the rink Saturday.’”
Isabeau ate. And she skated. She skated so well that, last January, she became the U.S. women’s champion. Two months later, she finished fourth at the World Championships. The 16-year-old is chasing more success this year and is aiming for a spot on the 2026 U.S. Winter Olympics team that will compete in Milan, her mother’s birthplace.
[caption id="attachment_324627" align="alignnone" width="778"] Levito practices at her home rink, the Igloo at Mount Laurel. Photo: Ronald Gray; makeup: Andrea Hunter[/caption]Levito lives in Mount Holly and trains in Mount Laurel. She thrives on the eight-hour days she spends at the Igloo, her home rink, where a team of coaches, led by Yulia Kuznetsova, prepares her for competition. Though she must sacrifice many ordinary teenage hobbies, Levito is happy. She is homeschooled, but has plenty of friends at the rink. “She can relate to 3-year-olds and 21-year-olds,” Chiara says. She loves to read, crochet and knit. “My hobbies are grandma-esque,” Isabeau admits, laughing.Some may think Levito has surrendered her youth to pursue gold medals and world championships. But women’s figure skating, at its highest levels, is a young person’s sport. Twenty-one of the 30 female Olympic winners have been 20 years old or younger. If Levito is going to reach the pinnacle, she must devote the next several years to her skating, even if that means postponing things like college. Not that she is leading a cloistered existence. “I do have a social life,” she says, laughing.
[RELATED: Behind the Scenes of NJM’s Cover Shoot with Figure Skater Isabeau Levito]
[caption id="attachment_324619" align="alignright" width="350"] Buy our January 2024 issue here. Cover photo: Ronald Gray[/caption]Levito also has a maturity that allows her to handle the pressure of competing against the best in the world. While other 16-year-olds are fretting about getting their driver’s licenses, Levito is completing polished routines before large crowds and exacting judges. She says skating’s precise nature and the techniques needed to land jumps are “really satisfying for my perfectionism.”
Levito has an emotional strength that allows her to relax when competing and an intensity that helps her grind through workouts. “She wants to give all of herself to the sport and the fans,” Kuznetsova says. “Sometimes, I have to calm her down and tell her that it’s okay to make mistakes and that she can learn from them.”
When Levito steps onto the ice to compete, she gains confidence from her extensive training and becomes calm. She thinks only of succeeding.
Her mother may fret—“I squeeze my purse and have sweat in my hands,” she says—but Levito is composed.
“In competition, the majority of it is based on [the] mental, because physically, if you’ve been training right, you can do it,” she says. “The only thing that’s keeping you from doing it is handling the nerves. It’s so important, especially when you’re out there on your own and everything’s on you, to be able to handle that and not let that just drown you.”
[caption id="attachment_324621" align="alignnone" width="778"] Levito spends eight-hour days training at the Igloo at Mt. Laurel. Photo: Ronald Gray; makeup: Andrea Hunter[/caption]Chiara named her daughter after Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in the 1985 movie Ladyhawke, Isabeau of Anjou, who sometimes takes the form of a red-tailed hawk. Chiara loved Pfeiffer and the name. “It’s different,” she says. Chiara had always liked skating, but she worried because Isabeau’s first few sessions weren’t too smooth.
“She kept falling every two minutes,” Chiara says. But Isabeau kept getting up, and it was easy to see she had talent. Perhaps more importantly, she had a strong drive.
“She’s very intense,” Kuznetsova says. “She will say, ‘I need to do it. I want to do it. I will do it.’”
Kuznetsova skated in her native Russia, but never reached the Olympics. She believes Levito can get there “to realize her dream and my dream” and lists “consistency and confidence in herself” as Levito’s primary strengths.
Polina Edmunds, a two-time U.S. national silver medalist and the host of Iron Butterfly podcast about figure skating, describes Levito as “an elegant, dainty skater.” She considers the structured, Russian-style training Levito receives crucial to her success. The Russian approach blends artistry—Levito has taken ballet classes— with athleticism and demands extreme mental toughness from an early age.
“The fire to compete is very much present in [Levito] because of the years of childhood hard work,” Edmunds says. “She has such a grit. She comes to win.”
By the time Levito was eight, she was mastering sophisticated techniques and difficult jumps. She trained with a different level of commitment than other young skaters, and Kuznetsova saw tremendous potential. When Isabeau was nine, Chiara removed her from school so that she could devote more time to training.
In 2018, Levito won the U.S. juvenile championship. The next year, she was a silver medalist in the intermediate division. In 2021, Levito became the U.S. junior champion. A year later, at the World Junior Championships in Estonia, Levito became the first U.S. world junior champion in 14 years.
MORE WINTER FUN*:Join NJ's Curling Craze*Quirky Places to Go Ice-Skating*Yes, There’s Dog Sledding in NJ: ‘It’s a Lifestyle’*Where to Cross-Country Ski in NJPolar Plunges at the ShoreBeat the Cold with Indoor Activities Last January, in San Jose, California, she won the U.S. title. After posting the top total in the short program, Levito unfurled a clean free skate that resulted in the best score of her career. NBC commentator Tara Lipinski, a U.S. national champion and Olympic gold medalist, described Levito’s performance as “perfection, precision.” She said Levito was like a “heart surgeon” and that she floated across the ice “like a ballerina.”
“[Winning the title] means the world to me,” Levito says. “It was a milestone in my skating career. It was so important to me.”
Two months later, at the World Championships in Japan, Levito entered the free skate in fourth place. However, she fell during her first jump, a triple lutz-triple loop combination. That error kept her in fourth.
“It was tragic,” she says. “I went in more confident than I had been all season. I was so ready for that first jump, but it didn’t happen.”
But Levito does not worry about what happened in Japan. “I don’t want to psych myself out,” she says.
That forward-thinking approach was obvious during the first event of the 2023-24 International Skating Union Grand Prix of Figure Skating, when Levito finished second at the Humana Skate America competition in October in Allen, Texas, behind only Belgium’s Loena Hendrickx. In November, she won her first gold at an ISU Grand Prix.
In December, Levito overcame a disappointing short program to finish fifth at the Grand Prix finals in Beijing. Levito had the third-best free-skate score, which was boosted by a triple Lutz-Euler-triple salchow combination.
“With her mentality and how she can compete, she’s really strong,” Edmunds says. “She doesn’t fall apart in competition. She comes out and hits it. She definitely has a bright future, barring injury.”
As Levito works toward the keynotes of this season, the 2024 U.S. Championships in Columbus, Ohio, January 22-28, and the World Championship in Montreal, March 18-24, she remains committed to her training. At times, she is stressed about her schoolwork—“My teachers wouldn’t say I’m balancing school and skating so well,” she says with a laugh—and she is always looking for the next book to read. (Taylor Jenkins Reid is a favorite author.)
When Levito is on the road competing, she brings as many as five books with her. Sometimes, she reads them all. At other times, she only reads 30 pages. “I might be just hanging out with people or actually doing schoolwork,” Levito says.
Skating in the 2026 Olympics remains Levito’s primary focus. And it would be a family reunion of sorts. Not only did her mother grow up in Milan, but Levito’s grandmother still lives there.
“It’s a crazy coincidence,” she says. “Some would say it’s fate.”
Or just the inevitable by-product of plenty of hard work.
Michael Bradley is a writer based in suburban Philadelphia and an assistant instructor at Villanova.
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[caption id="attachment_323298" align="aligncenter" width="778"] "Jersey Shore" star Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino gets candid about everything from his drug abuse to stint in prison to wild sex parties. Photo: Courtesy of Anthony Serrantonio[/caption]When most people hear the name Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, they likely think about his famously chiseled abs or those infamous nights at sweaty Shore nightclubs alongside pals Snooki, Pauly D and JWoww. Or fans might find themselves repeating the crew’s ever-present catchphrase, “Gym. Tan. Laundry.”Those glory days of MTV’s Jersey Shore, which premiered in 2009 and skyrocketed Sorrentino to immediate international stardom, seemed like a 20-something party boy’s dream come true—and it was for Sorrentino, who had been trying to break into showbiz for years. But behind that shiny exterior of newfound fame was a drug addict desperately battling to hold onto his life.In recent years, Sorrentino, now 41, has gone public about his struggles with substance abuse and his rocky road to sobriety. But not until now, in his new memoir, Reality Check, has he delved so deeply into the dark ride on which fame took him, marked by years of debilitating prescription drug abuse, wild sex parties with strangers, mounds of financial debt, and an eight-month stint in federal prison for tax evasion.“At a certain point, when I was down to the rock bottom of rock bottoms, I would sometimes think to myself, What’s worse? Never going for your dreams, or achieving them?” Sorrentino tells New Jersey Monthly. “Obviously, in the earlier years, it was like gasoline to fire, you know? All the excess money, the excess fame, no one ever saying no to me for anything. Everybody wanted a piece of me. But then there was an obvious cost to that.”*
The reality star, now eight years sober and a married father of two with a third on the way, has called New Jersey home since the age of six, when he moved from Staten Island to Manalapan in Monmouth County. Growing up in a big Italian family, Sorrentino was surrounded by people—his mother, a homemaker; his father, an electrical engineer; two older brothers, Frank and Marc; and a younger sister, Melissa—and a lot of delicious home-cooked meals, as anyone who watched Jersey Shore will remember.The family planted their roots in the Garden State, Sorrentino writes, because of “the Mafia lifestyle” in their old Staten Island neighborhood, even though that very lifestyle “was romanticized in my household,” with movies like Goodfellas on repeat.“That’s partially why we ended up leaving Staten Island—to get away from that life,” Sorrentino writes. “My dad knew all the made guys from the neighborhood, and lots of the kids he had grown up with ended up in that line of work.”[caption id="attachment_323300" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Sorrentino and his wife, Lauren, live with their two children, 2-year-old son Romeo and nearly 1-year-old daughter Mia, in Holmdel. They are expecting a third. Photo: Courtesy of Munoz Photography[/caption]As a teen, Sorrentino was a popular class-clown type and troublemaker, but he never crossed the line to bully, he writes in the book. His antics, as he describes them, “meant no harm”—like the time he drove across the front lawn of Manalapan High School instead of waiting for traffic to clear up, or the time he thought it would be funny to cartwheel across the stage at graduation but ended up kicking the school’s principal in the face.Between the pranks, the parties and, yes, some schoolwork, substances were starting to creep into Sorrentino’s life. The first time he drank alcohol, at Hawkins Park in Marlboro, he got arrested.Writing of his attitude back then, Sorrentino remembers, “If you told me not to smoke weed, I was going to sell coke. If you told me to drive carefully, I would do donuts in the parking lot. In fact, right after I got my license, I smoked angel dust on the way to homecoming in [my brother’s] hand-me-down Pontiac Sunfire that our father gave me…and wrecked it after hitting a sewer grate and bottoming out.”*
Nineteen was a pivotal age for Sorrentino, but not in a positive way. That’s when what he calls his “love affair” with “the devil,” prescription opiates, began, starting a downward spiral that would only intensify as his public persona grew.By the time Jersey Shore came into his life a couple of years later, through an open casting call held at an Atlantic City nightclub, Sorrentino had all but given up on his dreams of fame. He’d worked as a server at Main Street Bistro in Freehold, a stripper at Club Abyss in South Amboy, an underwear model, and, yes, a drug dealer. He’d failed out of Kean University, yet earned his associate’s degree in business management from Brookdale Community College, where he also met his future wife, Lauren, in a math class.[caption id="attachment_323303" align="alignright" width="350"] "Reality Check" is out December 19 and available now for preorder at mikethesituationbook.com.[/caption]In his memoir (out December 19 from Ballast Books), Sorrentino could have easily glossed over the difficulties he’s experienced and the mistakes he’s made, as many celebrities do, hiring crisis-management teams and avoiding the truth at all costs. For a long time, Sorrentino did attempt to hide his drug problem from his employer, MTV, as well as his castmates and the world. But now, after putting years of failed attempts at getting clean behind him and looking forward to a life of sobriety ahead of him, he has no reason to hold back any longer.In the book, he candidly describes the lengths to which he went to score drugs while MTV’s cameras were following him around. He gets frank about the seemingly endless string of orgies he’d have with strangers while out on the road for public-appearance tours.He reveals that his accountants, while working on his financials in his tax-evasion case, estimated that he’d spent a staggering $500,000 on drugs during the height of his addiction.Andy Symonds, his cowriter on the book and the president and publisher of Ballast Books, says Sorrentino could not fully remember some of the details and stories he wanted to include in the memoir because he had been high, so the star used old photos and new conversations with friends to help recreate the accounts for publication.“The darkest years were probably from 2013 to 2015, before I went to rehab, the years I was experimenting with Adderall,” says Sorrentino. “I was, you know, hearing voices and seeing things that weren’t there. I’m sure if I would’ve went to a doctor, they would’ve diagnosed me with schizophrenia or some sort of mental disorder because of the self-medicating and all the mixing of substances I had put myself through.”Eight years ago, after a terrifying wake-up call stemming from a drug score in New Jersey, Sorrentino got clean for good. He details his intense recovery process in the book.[RELATED: The Sorrentinos Reflect on NJ Wedding 5 Years Later]
Then came another setback: prison. In 2019, Sorrentino served eight months for tax evasion at Otisville Correctional Facility’s minimum-security prison camp (which has been called one of the best federal prisons to do time) in upstate New York.But, clearly a changed man, Sorrentino seemed to almost thrive in prison. Newly married, he was popular among the inmates, making friends with guys with nicknames like Andy Cucumbers and Tony Meatballs; he even became buddies with Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s disgraced former lawyer, on the inside.As a sober person with strong faith, Sorrentino maintained the strict routines in prison that he had created during his recovery. He exercised, read a lot, ate well. He also tried to be supportive of inmates who seemed to be in a worse mental state than he was.“I was definitely helping a lot of guys in prison,” Sorrentino says. “Mental health is something that’s not necessarily talked about, and the guys in there—a lot of guys weren’t doing good.”Sorrentino recalls seeing some fellow prisoners sitting in their bunks, alone and depressed, staring at the wall, not eating. “You could just see the life just draining from them,” he remembers. “And then the opposite was, you know, people like myself, who were constantly exercising and reading books and trying to better themselves and trying to help others, and having conversations and trying to make the best of a negative situation. A lot of guys really appreciated that mindset.”*
These days, Sorrentino’s life is about as different as it could be from the one he had 15 years ago. He lives with Lauren and their two children, 2-year-old son Romeo and nearly 1-year-old daughter Mia, in a beautiful home in Holmdel, Lauren’s hometown. They are due to welcome their third child in March.“All I’ve ever wanted my whole life is to have a big Italian family, and now I have it, and I worked hard to have it and keep it, and for us to thrive and grow together,” he says.Sorrentino loves New Jersey and chose to raise his family in the Garden State, but as anyone who lives here knows, New Jersey hasn’t always loved Sorrentino back.Jersey Shore became a phenomenon as soon as it hit the airwaves in December 2009, when eight strangers moved into a house in Seaside Heights for a summer of partying, hooking up and having fun. Over the years, critics have panned the show for its portrayal of Italian Americans as nothing more than party-hopping “guidos” and “guidettes,” for the antics its cast brought to Seaside Heights and the surrounding towns where they filmed, and for creating yet another Jersey punchline for the rest of America to laugh at.But Sorrentino dismisses the backlash. “You know, once you get on such a mass scale of entertainment, where everybody knows you and you’re a household name, you’re not going to get a hundred percent approval,” he says.During the heyday of Jersey Shore, the show did contribute to a boost in tourism in Seaside Heights, officials said at the time. Sorrentino also notes that, these days, he and his costars have “matured.” Many have families and run their own businesses.Most of them, like Sorrentino, live in the state that made them household names.For Sorrentino, part of evolving and getting sober was focusing on honesty and communication. That’s one reason why he wanted his wife to read his memoir as he wrote it, despite the emotional toll of learning about many of the more shocking moments from her husband’s past. “I’m so proud of him,” she says.In the two decades she’s known him, Lauren has stood by the reality star through some truly difficult periods. They did break up at points, but when she was with him, she was his rock.She says, “There was a point in time where all I had besides Mike and, of course my family, was my faith. So that’s really what I leaned into. At the end of the day, when you’re facing some really hard things, that’s the really best way to achieve it.”In addition to being a father, a reality star and, now, an author, Sorrentino is an active member of the recovery community. He speaks to high schools and other groups in New Jersey and around the country. He sees his memoir as an extension of that outreach.“Jesus Christ is my savior and he saved me. I believe that I was spared,” Sorrentino says. “[There were] many times I could’ve not been here. I was spared to share my story and to help others.”
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We don't need a celebrity magazine to tell us that Jersey guys are sexy, but the accolade sure doesn't hurt.Five gents from New Jersey made People magazine's brand-new "Sexiest Man Alive" list, ranging from a 36-year-old pop star (Kevin Jonas) to a 68-year-old TV legend (Kelsey Grammer).Although all three Jonas Brothers—Kevin, Joe and Nick—grew up in Wyckoff, Kevin is the only member of the band who still lives in the Garden State because of a promise he made to his wife, Danielle, also a New Jersey native. “I got a year not in New Jersey,” Kevin told New Jersey Monthly with a laugh last year. “Most of my work was elsewhere.”The couple are raising their two daughters in Denville, just a few blocks from Danielle's parents' house and many of her childhood friends. Although Kevin joked about moving back to Jersey, he also proudly said: “We are true Jersey, through and through.”Filmmaker and actor Zach Braff, also on the list, grew up in South Orange and Maplewood, attending Columbia High School. New Jersey means so much to him that he not only films projects here, but also sets many of his projects in New Jersey.“I love my hometown and I want to tell stories about my hometown,” the 48-year-old told New Jersey Monthly earlier this year.Braff's directorial debut, in 2004, was even called Garden State; he wrote, directed and starred in the highly lauded film alongside Natalie Portman. His newest feature, A Good Person, which came out in March, filmed in Braff's hometowns as well as locations in Clifton, Elizabeth, Morristown and other local towns.As part of its "Sexiest Man Alive" cover story, People each year puts together a list called "Sexy at Every Age," which features one man at every age (from 20 to 70 years old). Two sixty-something Jerseyans made that list: Jersey City native Nathan Lane, who is 67 years old, and Kelsey Grammer, who spent part of his childhood in Woodbridge and Atlantic Highlands and is 68 years old.In the category of "Sexiest Morning Host," a Jersey guy, Nate Burleson, is a runner up. The CBS Mornings host and former NFL wide receiver lives in Franklin Lakes with his wife and kids. (Mark Consuelos won that category; he's not from Jersey himself but is married to his Live cohost Kelly Ripa, a proud New Jersey native.)Grey's Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey, a Maine native with no Jersey ties, covers the issue as this year's "Sexiest Man Alive."
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[caption id="attachment_321761" align="alignnone" width="778"] Beverly Lee (far left) and the Shirelles were Passaic classmates. Photo: Pictorial Press Limited/Alamy Stock Photo[/caption]In many ways, the girl groups that ruled the airwaves six decades ago—from the Shirelles and the Angels to the Ronettes and the Crystals—remain “in everyone’s minds and around them all the time,” says Laura Flam, coauthor with Emily Sieu Liebowitz of But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?, a recently released oral history of several ’60s girl groups (Hachette Books). They serenade us “in movies...and in the background: in a taxi, in the grocery store—everywhere,” Flam says. And yet, Sieu Liebowitz laments, most of the women behind these songs are not household names.
[caption id="attachment_321770" align="alignright" width="350"] An oral-history format lets the women of the girl groups “speak for themselves,” coauthor Laura Flam says.[/caption]In part a response to this injustice, the duo’s book is a treasure trove of illuminating accounts directly from the girl-group members themselves, who were trailblazers not only in their recordings—reminiscent of summer nights, teenage-tinged yearning, and transistor radios tucked into pockets or under pillows—but also in their songwriting, performing, touring and, in the case of the many Black girl groups, “desegregating [of] pop music and culture,” the authors write. Even as they endured rampant sexism, racism and mistreatment, “these girls created a space for being women in public,” Sieu Liebowitz says. We spoke to two of these artists with deep Jersey roots.
Beverly Lee • The ShirellesLee was born and raised in Passaic, where she met the other founding members of the Shirelles—Shirley Owens, Doris Coley and Addie “Micki” Harris—by junior high. In 1961, their hit single “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” became the first number 1 song by a Black girl group. Regarded as rock ’n’ roll’s first female supergroup, the Shirelles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. The city of Passaic renamed a portion of Paulison Avenue, near Passaic High School, Shirelles Boulevard in 2008. Lee, 82, currently lives in Passaic, where she enjoys walks in the park, still sometimes takes the bus, and serves as an usher/deaconess at St. Paul Baptist Church “any Sunday I’m home.”
What do you recall about Jersey’s music scene in the late ’50s and early ’60s?Well, it was male dominated, and you heard mainly male groups. After [the Shirelles] were introduced to show business, we broke that cycle. We were [later] universally credited as the creator of the girl-group sound.
You and the other founding members of the Shirelles were teenagers when you wrote what would later become your first single, “I Met Him on a Sunday,” on the fly at your Passaic apartment in 1957. How did you come to record it?We were fooling around in gym at Passaic High, and the teacher said, “There’s gonna be a show. Do the show or fail gym.” Quite naturally, we opted to do the show. We brought “I Met Him on a Sunday,” [about having] your first date, your first kiss and the whole nine yards, and you don’t know what you’re doing, and everybody’s nervous. The kids went berserk. One of my classmates said, “They stomped so hard that the ceiling was cracked.”
As a result of that show, we discovered that we had a classmate, Mary Jane Greenberg, whose mother, Florence Greenberg, owned a record company, which we had no knowledge of. Mary Jane asked us to let her mother hear the song, and she pursued us constantly. We got tired of her chasing us, and we finally said, “Okay, we’ll let your mother hear the song.”We went and sang the song in Florence’s living room, and she fell in love with it and wanted to record it. We were teenagers and knew nothing about show business, but we were excited. And we all told a white lie—telling our parents, “You’re the only one who won’t sign [the contract].”
The first time we heard the song was in Passaic High, on the intercom. Florence had arranged for the principal to [play it]. We were in the classroom, and...it was quite an experience.
In August 1963, the Shirelles performed at the first integrated fundraising show held in Birmingham, Alabama. In the book, you recall that you were “a part of the civil rights movement and didn’t know it.” What is it like to realize, in hindsight, the kinds of barriers you broke?Well, at the time, we were young, and we were having fun, and we didn’t know the dangers of what we might encounter. I’d never been [down] South before; [I’d only been] as far as Washington, D.C. We went on a chartered plane. When the plane landed, we heard that the Ku Klux Klan had marched before we got there. [The National Guard] had to guard our plane. Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.], we were told, led the caravan of cars to the hotel, like the leader he was. [At the hotel,] we could not leave. Everything was guarded. It was frightening, but we had praying parents, and we knew that God was on our side and we would be all right. We still didn’t know at the time that we were making history. When I saw Dr. King sitting to my left, I said, “Oh, dear God.” Words couldn’t describe it.
When “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was initially introduced to the Shirelles, you actually didn’t want to sing it; you thought it was too country-esque. It ended up becoming your biggest hit, and the new book describes it as “an anthem for a generation and for a nation coming into its own adulthood.” How do you feel about the song now?It’s true that we didn’t like the song when we [first] heard it, because Carole [King, who wrote the music,] did the demo, and it was very, very twangy. It sounded like a country-and-western song. [But producer] Luther Dixon said, “You’re gonna do this song.” [Then] when we went to the studio, we heard a lush arrangement with strings and violas. As a matter of fact, I believe Carole played the kettledrums [on the record] ’cause she didn’t like the way [the other] guy was playing [them]. That’s girl power. We had girl power in that song. Because we had the right—a female has every right—to ask that question: Will you still love me tomorrow?
Peggy Santiglia Ricker • The Delicates, the Angels[caption id="attachment_321759" align="alignnone" width="778"] The Angels’ Peggy Santiglia Ricker (far right) hails from Belleville. Photo: Pictorial Press Limited/Alamy Stock Photo[/caption]Santiglia Ricker grew up in Belleville, across the street from Branch Brook Park. She formed her first girl group, the Delicates, with two elementary-school classmates. (In 2013, part of Belleville’s Union Avenue was renamed The Delicates Drive.) In high school, she joined the Angels and sang lead on their 1963 number 1 hit single “My Boyfriend’s Back.” The Angels were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2005. Santiglia Ricker, 79, now resides in Maryland but returns to New Jersey often to visit family. “It’s a special place,” she says.What was your musical upbringing like in Belleville?My sister sang opera. My dad played clarinet, saxophone, mandolin...and guitar. And I started singing and recording as early as elementary school, actually. I met my two original partners [in the Delicates], Denise Ferri and Arleen Lanzotti, in second and third grade. By seventh grade, we were recording. We wrote theme songs for an extremely popular New York DJ at the time, Murray the K. And that’s how we started as the Delicates, not because we were—well, we were innocent—but because Denise’s parents owned a delicatessen on Union Avenue.
It was rare for girls, especially of such a young age, to be writing their own material back then. What do you recall about those early songwriting days?Well, at that time, we wrote about our two favorite subjects: boys and cars. In that order. And then probably boys again. It’s funny—we didn’t even think of it as writing; we thought of it as making up songs. About friends and [such]. So some, of course, were [written] at the deli, or in back of the deli, where [Denise’s family] lived; some were [written] in my house; sometimes at school, when we would have a break, and an idea would come to us. ...Now, maybe at the time, we were just trying to impress our friends. We certainly weren’t thinking about making money. We did love to perform. But that is how it started—with friends that had natural musical ability.
You were a senior at Belleville High when sisters and Orange natives Barbara “Bibs” and Phyllis “Jiggs” Allbut asked you to join the Angels. You sang lead on “My Boyfriend’s Back.” Fast-forward to the summer of 1963: You were at the Jersey Shore with your family when Bibs and Jiggs called and said, “Peggy, come home! We have a hit record!”“It’s climbing the charts!” It was a very exciting time. Of course, at that time, we didn’t have Sirius radio, or even FM [stations in cars]. I can remember riding around in a convertible...with Jiggs and Bibs. Every major station that you turned to, we would hear “My Boyfriend’s Back.”
And in the late ’60s, under a pseudonym, Peggy Farina, you wrote, with Bob Gaudio, the lyrics to “Beggin’,” which became a Four Seasons hit.Yes...and at the time...it did get on the charts, number [16] in the country, which I was very happy about. Then, a number of years later, “Beggin’” was also in the [2005] Broadway show version of Jersey Boys, which I’m very thankful for; that was just fabulous. Then, [in 2007,] a group called Madcon did [the first modern cover of it]. And then when Måneskin recorded [another cover in 2022], I didn’t even know about it until I was with a few of my step-grandchildren, who were quite young at the time. And we’re in the car, and they had their phones, and they’re playing Måneskin’s version. And they said, “Oh, this is a big hit.” And I’m listening, and I’m saying, Could it be possible? ...Oh, my God, what is going on here? But it became a huge global hit all over the world, which I am so grateful for. And I kind of joked: If people only knew that someone who wrote those lyrics could be their grandmother!
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Jon Bon Jovi is not just a famous rocker from New Jersey.He’s also a philanthropist who has been helping feed the hungry in the Garden State for years now with his JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurants, where diners pay what they can.This Saturday, October 7, the eighth annual JBJ Soul Kitchen Chili Cookoff will be held at nonprofit's Toms River restaurant. First responders from all over will compete in the fundraiser by cooking up their favorite chili recipes.Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea, usually serve as unannounced judges at the event—so if you’re a fan, it’s potentially a chance to catch a sighting.[caption id="attachment_317320" align="alignnone" width="778"] Jon Bon Jovi greets members of the Toms River Fire Department, Company #1, as he tastes their chili. Photo: Courtesy of Chris Brittain/@Brittain Studios[/caption]To date, JBJ Soul Kitchen has provided 173,870 meals to the hungry. The organization's community restaurants, run by the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, serve both paying and in-need customers. Individuals and families can enjoy a delicious farm-to-table meal with dignity, in a warm, welcoming setting. Reservations are not necessary.The restaurants are operated on a “pay it forward” model, where those who are unable to pay are encouraged to join the Soul Kitchen community to learn about resources and volunteer opportunities.For those who can pay, they are asked to pay a suggested donation for their meal ($20 for lunch/$30 for dinner in Red Bank and $20 for lunch/dinner in Toms River), and “pay it forward” $20 to cover someone’s meal who is unable to afford it.The restaurants are located in Toms River and Red Bank, at Rutgers University-Newark, and at New Jersey City University in Jersey City."Our Chili Cookoff is my favorite event of the year," says Joanne Gwin, community coordinator of JBJ Soul Kitchen in Toms River. "It is a wonderful opportunity to bring the community together. Attendees have the chance to support and thank our first responders for their service, along with supporting JBJ Soul Kitchen."Fire, EMS and police departments, as well as first-aid squads, compete for first-, second- and third-place honors in the annual event. Last year’s winner was Union Beach PBA Local 291.[caption id="attachment_317321" align="alignnone" width="778"] Guests enjoy last year's Chili Cookoff at JBJ Soul Kitchen in Toms River. Photo: Courtesy of Chris Brittain/@Brittain Studios[/caption]Presale admission is $20; tickets purchased at the door are $30. Children 12 and younger can enter free of charge.This year, JBJ Soul Kitchen will also be selling beautiful ceramic bowls, crafted by students throughout New Jersey, for $20. Funds will support people who are battling food insecurity.In addition, local food bank People’s Pantry will be collecting nonperishable food items.The fundraiser will take place at 1769 Hooper Avenue in Toms River on October 7, from 1 to 4 pm.For more info, go to jbjsoulkitchen.org/chili-cook-off-2023.
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Bestselling Ridgewood author Harlan Coben’s new TV series, Shelter, has some extra thrills for New Jerseyans: It was filmed in several Garden State towns. Viewers can see the action begin in the halls and athletic fields of Livingston High School—which is Coben's alma mater—and unfold at several iconic spots such as the Jersey Shore, the Water’s Soul sculpture on the Jersey City waterfront, the Hoboken train station and the Great Falls of Paterson. The show, set in the fictional New Jersey town of Kasselton, is about a teenager forced to move from Los Angeles to New Jersey after his father dies in a car crash. When his new girlfriend disappears, he and two friends go on a quest to find her, encountering stories of heartbreak and abuse as well as history and romance.Even less-recognizable spots were filmed in Jersey—a tony Alpine mansion, Anthony David’s restaurant in Hoboken, Montclair’s First Congregational Church, CareWell Health Medical Center in East Orange and the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg. The exterior of the Oakeside Bloomfield Cultural Center serves as the haunted home of the series’ character "Bat Lady."More filming took place in Bayonne, Hanover, Kinnelon, Little Falls, Middletown, Millburn, Morris Township, Morristown, Sea Bright, Totowa and Wayne.[caption id="attachment_316096" align="alignnone" width="778"] Author Harlan Coben was born in Newark, raised in Livingston and now lives in Ridgewood. Photo: Shutterstock/betto rodrigues[/caption]The Shelter series, now streaming on Prime Video, is based on Coben’s 2011 Young Adult mystery thriller of the same name—the first in his Mickey Bolitar trilogy. It's a departure from his other books-turned-TV-shows, like Safe, The Five and Hold Tight, which were all filmed in Europe.Steven Gorelick, executive director for the New Jersey Motion Picture and TV Commission, had a lot to do with Shelter's Garden State spotlight: He set up a meeting with Coben and convinced him to shoot his next production not in Europe but in New Jersey, NJM reported last year.Shelter is also the first book that Coben—who was born in Newark, grew up in Livingston and now lives in Ridgewood—adapted for the screen himself, alongside his daughter Charlotte Coben.[RELATED: A Q&A with Author Harlan Coben]
Filming in Garden State locations has been booming since 2018, when Governor Phil Murphy reinstated generous tax incentives for local productions. According to the commission, Shelter spent about $50 million that qualifies for state tax credits.Shelter's season finale is available to stream starting Thursday, September 21, at 8 pm EST.
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[caption id="attachment_315866" align="alignnone" width="778"] Nicki Minaj is slated to emcee and perform at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards. Photo: Paramount[/caption]When Tyler Bates joined the Prudential Center in Newark as director of programming in February 2020, his plan was to take the venue to another level.Since then, Bates, who lives in Jersey City, has curated one of the most diverse arena lineups in the country, with an emphasis on Latinx recording artists.The arena, commonly known as "The Rock," is set to host the MTV Video Music Awards for the second consecutive year on Tuesday, September 12 at 8 pm ET/PT. Stars including Nicki Minaj, Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat, Kelsea Ballerini, Lil Wayne are slated to perform, with Minaj also emceeing the evening's festivities.Bates chats about booking top shows and hosting hometown superstars.[caption id="attachment_315864" align="alignright" width="350"] Tyler Bates is the director of programming for Newark's Prudential Center. Photo: Courtesy of the Prudential Center[/caption]How does the Prudential Center book massive events, such as the VMAs and the K-Pop band BTS, over venues like Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center?We are in a great spot here in Newark. We're very close to public transportation, and we're just 15 minutes from Newark Liberty International Airport. And that's huge, since fans can fly in and easily travel to our venue. It's very easy to get here from New York, and it's the easiest venue for those in New Jersey to travel to for an event.What was it like when Taylor Swift appeared at the Prudential Center for last year's VMAs?It was so out of the blue when Taylor Swift showed up. Having that kind of star power electrified the room. The entire crowd went nuts. The next day, all people talked about was Taylor Swift appearing at the VMAs at the Prudential Center.Maplewood native SZA is performing at the Prudential Center in October, and the Wyckoff-raised Jonas Brothers are coming in December. How cool is it to host shows from hometown superstars?It's special. We had the Misfits in recently, and Gaslight Anthem [from New Brunswick] opened and just loved playing a big show in their home state. It's a big deal to play in front of your family and friends.[RELATED: Kevin Jonas Is Rocking Dad Life in New Jersey]
The Prudential Center recently scored the NCAA Men's Basketball Eastern Regional over 3,000 applicants.That's pretty massive. An event like that really catalyzes the entire state, in a similar manner to the VMAs or the big shows that come through here and only play a handful of venues. The big events give us the opportunity to showcase the arena, Newark and the state of New Jersey to audiences that have never been here. Our goal here is to have more of these types of events so people can see what the Prudential Center is capable of hosting.
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[caption id="attachment_315781" align="alignnone" width="778"] Tony winner Laura Benanti grew up in Kinnelon and recently moved back to the Garden State with her family. Photo: Courtesy of Tina Turnbow[/caption]When an actor plays a famous person on the big, small, or very small screen, the goal is to faithfully embody that person and to entertain an audience. No actor hopes to inspire hate. But that was the response when the actress Laura Benanti put on an accent and a lot of makeup in 2016 to play Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a role she’s been reprising regularly since then. Upon her first appearance as the first lady, Benanti, who grew up in Kinnelon and currently lives in Montclair with her family, received threats on social media—and the hate continued each time she played the part.For an actress, to go viral is a thrill. But the death threats tempered the excitement. “I had to move in the middle of the night because people threatened to kill me and my family,” she says of quickly and quietly moving from one New York City apartment to another. Despite hateful rhetoric and threats, Benanti has continued to do her Melania Trump act. She appeared on Colbert’s show in April and performed a skit and a medley of songs as the former first lady onstage at the Out Montclair Pride festival in June. She is committed to the bit because she doesn’t avoid controversy when she believes in something.“I don’t understand how anyone can not be political,” she says. “I’m so tired of being told to, like, shut up.”In certain circles, Benanti is a household name. She has been nominated for five Tony Awards, winning in 2008 for her portrayal of Louise in Gypsy on Broadway. She is a regular on stage, has recorded albums, and appeared in films and on television (Younger, Nashville, Tick, Tick…Boom!). Next up, she appears in season 2 of the HBO hit The Gilded Age, which debuts on September 11; a tight-lipped Benanti would only say her character has a “secret“ and “scandalous” relationship with one of the show’s main characters.These days, Benanti is perhaps as well known for speaking out about politics and her personal life and supporting community causes. On a sunny afternoon in May, over an iced latte for me and green juice for her, Benanti described what life as a successful, working performer and parent was like. She was about to start an Off Broadway run of the play Love Letters, starring opposite Matthew Broderick. A new film alongside Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings, would be coming out in theaters shortly. But politics and people were what really got her riled up. In 90 minutes, we covered the climate crisis, juggling career and parenthood, bodily autonomy, media literacy, local politics, national politics and former President Donald Trump. When the fact that many women supported him in both elections came up, she sighed, saying: “It is so sad. And infuriating.”Benanti is also well known for speaking out about issues that many deem too private for public airing. In April, she wrote an Instagram post about having a miscarriage in the middle of a concert performance on a cruise ship. The post went viral, with pretty much every entertainment and news outlet in the country writing about it. She says she went public with her experience because it’s the sort of thing that should get talked about, but doesn’t.“There is so much shame around women’s bodies and women’s issues. I was literally singing for 2,000 people [when it happened]. I was devastated,” she says. “But in a weird way, it was like I was singing this little being home.”The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to have an abortion, was a moment that activated Benanti. She has been very vocal about her own difficulties getting pregnant—including having multiple miscarriages, going through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and using a surrogate to carry her second child—and she says she felt a need to help women at that moment in time. “I feel like, in this case, it is doing a service to women to talk about these issues,” she says. “And in particular right now, women are being punished.”Benanti is a Jersey girl through and through. She grew up in Kinnelon and, during the pandemic, moved from New York City back to the Garden State, citing her family’s well-being. “I had told myself we would never live in New Jersey ever again,” she says, laughing. “I’ve grown to love it.”She and her husband, Patrick Brown, have two daughters: Ella, 6, and Louisa, 1. Benanti says there’s no doubt her Jersey background has given her confidence. “This is how I’ve been my whole life. I’ve always had a strong sense of what I feel is right or wrong. People don’t have to agree with me, but I have always had a strong sense of justice,” she says. “That was very encouraged in my home and in my school.”But Benanti, while proud of her outspoken nature and devotion to doing what she sees as the right thing, also muses that it may have had an effect on her professionally. “I feel like, in many ways, I have shot myself in the foot career-wise,” she says. “I am not good at schmoozing. I am not good at being a good soldier and toeing the line. I am not interested in, you know, showing only glamorous, Photoshopped pictures of myself. I think I could have had a more visible career if I had just been pretty and quiet.”One of Benanti’s fiercest champions is her Gypsy co-star, stage and screen legend Patti LuPone. They met in 2008, both won Tonys, and they have been friends ever since. LuPone, who calls Benanti a “unique woman,” says that she is proud of her for her outspoken nature. “More people should be outspoken the way she is,” LuPone says. But she also says she can relate to the challenges it might present: “Women who are outspoken get a terrible reputation.”But being quiet is not exactly what people from Jersey are known for. As Benanti describes it, “Jersey people don’t all agree on the same thing, but there is a passion with which we pursue whatever we think is right.” Benanti says she never saw herself leaving New York City, but the return to her home state has been natural and a positive move for her family. She has met a community of like-minded people, and even other musicians and performers that have inspired her. “[Montclair] is a community in a very different way than I experienced in New York,” Benanti says. “It’s a small-town feel, and I didn’t know how much I needed it.”Benanti is active in her community. Peter Yacobellis, Montclair Township council member, mayoral candidate and director of Out Montclair, says the star’s presence in town can be felt in many ways, from attending council meetings to performing at Montclair’s Pride festival for the past two years to attending a fundraiser “where she was managing this bouncy house where adults had to climb in, and she had a Whac-A-Mole thing where whoever got the most Wiffle balls wins a prize.” Adds Yacobellis, “She’s the real deal.” Two days after the Pride festival, Benanti had a cold. And no wonder—she had just wrapped the play in New York with Broderick and also performed at the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence fundraiser—not to mention her daily mom duties. But still, she talked with enthusiasm about what’s to come. She is planning to do a musical-theater workshop with fellow local mom and musical-theater writer Miranda Ferriss Jones. She’s writing an audio comedy and music special for Audible that’s in the early stages of production, and she will appear in the upcoming film Goodrich alongside Michael Keaton, out this December. Of course, she will continue to do all she can for the sake of her daughters.“They are entirely my dedication to changing whatever I can, even if it’s in my one-mile radius,” says Benanti.Georgia Kral is a professor of journalism and communications at Saint Peter’s University and a regular contributor to New Jersey Monthly.
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[caption id="attachment_315715" align="alignnone" width="778"] Photographer Danny Clinch co-founded Asbury Park's Sea Hear Now festival. Photo: Justin Borucki[/caption]Just a few feet from the beach in Asbury Park—an area rich with rock history—the Transparent Clinch Gallery celebrates music icons.The space displays countless photographs by Danny Clinch, a renowned music photographer who started shooting for SPIN in 1991. It helps that the Toms River native can add a personal touch when customers are browsing images of legends like Eddie Vedder, Tupac Shakur, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Neil Young.“Every photo there has a story,” Clinch says. “It’s the photograph, but then it’s like, ‘How did that photograph happen? What were the things surrounding it that were of that moment?’”For example, Clinch shot the cover art for Bruce Springsteen’s 2020 album Letter to You. The two were walking in Central Park when it started to snow, and Clinch immediately broke out his camera, as he often has throughout his career.[caption id="attachment_315695" align="alignnone" width="778"] Danny Clinch photographed the album cover for Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You during a snowy walk in Central Park.[/caption]He did the same in 1992 when high school friend Tim Donnelly invited him to meet Eddie Vedder at Lollapalooza. Donnelly had an interview scheduled with Vedder for the environmental group Surfrider Foundation.Years later, the three remain friends. In 2021, Vedder’s band Pearl Jam even played at Sea Hear Now—a massive, annual, Asbury-based surf and music festival that Clinch and Donnelly cofounded. Clinch himself joined the band on stage.Clinch and his Transparent staff have been preparing for this year's Sea Hear Now Festival, which takes place September 16-17. They’re installing a Sea Hear Now section at his gallery, and curating art for a Transparent pop-up tent.The tent sells art that festival musicians volunteered to make, and proceeds go to local charities. “That’s always really fun,” Clinch says, “because you discover people that you didn’t realize made art.”[RELATED: 24 Hours in Asbury Park]
For a building dedicated to still images, Transparent Clinch Gallery features plenty of sound. With a small stage and instruments tucked into a corner, Transparent often hosts small concerts highlighting local bands. Since Clinch is so cozy with musicians at every level of fame, it’s not unusual for big-name bands to play pop-up shows at the gallery. The Head and the Heart and the Revivalists did that over the summer before a July 9 show at the Stone Pony. The likes of Nathaniel Rateliff, Gary Clark Jr., Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and the E Street Band’s Max Weinberg have also performed at Transparent. “I forget that we’re basically there to sell my photography,” Clinch says while recalling how, after that July 9 show, members of the Head and the Heart and the Revivalists returned to the gallery for an impromptu jam session that went past 2 am.This year’s See Hear Now festival is fronted by the acts including the Killers, Foo Fighters, Weezer, Sheryl Crow and the Beach Boys. It remains to be seen who Clinch will play with this year, but he’s already thankful for a lifetime’s worth of unforgettable memories.
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Engaged New Jersey couples looking for laid-back coastal vibes can take a cue from celebrity couple Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley, who tied the knot on Long Beach Island on Saturday.
The Bleachers frontman, who grew up in Bergenfield and spent his summers on LBI as a kid, exchanged vows with the Maid actress at Parker’s Garage, a restaurant and events venue that boasts stunning views of the water, according to multiple reports.
The venue, which fits up to 180 guests and is part of the Shore-based Tide Table Group, aims to bring back “a golden age of Long Beach Island,” according to the hot spot’s website. From an oyster saloon to boat slips, Parker’s Garage keeps the nautical history of Beach Haven alive while boasting customized menus, strings of soft lights and a laid-back beach style.
Shore-based photographer Ann Coen, of Ann Coen Photography, has shot several weddings at Parker’s Garage and calls it “one of my favorite venues on LBI.” The reason? “Perfect sunset views, excellent food, a cozy coastal vibe and also two blocks from the beach—it pretty much has it all,” she tells New Jersey Bride. She notes that Parker’s Garage does not offer an outdoor ceremony space, so many people opt for the beach or a local church for their ceremony location.
In recent years, New Jersey Monthly named Parker’s Garage one of the Jersey Shore’s best raw bars, so the menu for Antonoff and Qualley’s wedding likely featured great fresh seafood.
As for the vibe that Parker’s Garage couples exude, Coen says they’re “usually laid-back but appreciate great food and atmosphere.”
[caption id="attachment_314833" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Margaret Qualley has been romantically linked to Antonoff since 2021. Photo: Shutterstock[/caption]
The back part of the venue overlooks the bay, “so you are always guaranteed a sunset,” says Coen. “They have the boat slips out back, they kept the wood floor and walls, and all of the decor is real antiques and photos from local baymen of the last 100 years.”
Couples searching for a Shore wedding venue may want to consider touring Parker’s Garage.
Click here to continue reading this story on New Jersey Bride.
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[caption id="attachment_314644" align="alignnone" width="778"] "I'm always training," says race-car driver Frankie Montecalvo. Photo: Courtesy of Rick Dole[/caption]
A dozen times a year, Frankie Montecalvo races cars on the AIM Vasser Sullivan team, competing in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. The 32-year-old Highlands native is a 2015 Pirelli World Challenge Champion, and is currently chief of field operations at Bayshore Recycling, his family's business. Montecalvo recently chatted with New Jersey Monthly.
How do you explain a SportsCar Championship?It’s a series of races with different levels of cars that are either prototypes or similar to a street car that comes off the showroom floor. It’s the highest level of sports car racing in the world.
What do you drive?A Lexus RC F GT3 is my car. It looks similar to a Lexus RC F at the dealer—headlights, taillights, shape of the car—but we have a massive aero wing, a rear diffuser under the car, and splitters.
How fast do you go?The tracks with the longest straightaways are the fastest, like the Daytona International Speedway. There, we’re right under 190 mph for 24 hours. At Daytona, we have four drivers on the same car, and I probably drive three or four times for a total of six hours. For the shorter races (such as Battle on the Bricks in Indianapolis, September 15-17), it’s two drivers per car, splitting driving time roughly in half.
Is there an ideal body type for the sport?The lighter the driver, the lighter the car. I’m 5’8”, which is a great size for a race car driver. My co-driver and I are identical in size. We fit in the same seat.
How do you prepare for a race?I’m always training—cardio, running, weights, kayaking. We have a great area here (Hartshorne Woods in Highlands) for mountain biking. Cars get extremely hot. You have fire suits on, everything is closed up in the cockpit. Airflow’s not great. It’s always hot; it’s always hard.
And for a race weekend?Racing is very mental. Get the track fresh in your mind. Luckily, my team has a simulator in Charlotte, North Carolina.
What advice would you give aspiring race car drivers?Get an engineering degree. Every driver can drive. If you can talk to the engineer in terms he can understand, it gives you a leg up on the competition.
What’s the most frequent question you’re asked by people who aren’t racing car fans?When I say I’m doing a 24-hour race, they ask, ‘How do you go to the bathroom in the car?’ The answer is that you’re sweating so much, you don’t have to.
How young were you when you started working in the family business, Bayshore Recycling?I feel like you’re born into that. I’ve been there since my dad could hold me in his arms on a bulldozer. I have a lot of respect working for my parents because they grew the business to what it is today.
When did you decide to concentrate more on your work at Bayshore Recycling instead of race car driving?When I started getting a little older, I made a decision to take it more seriously. I really needed to be there, to be more involved and to help grow our company to be more successful. It’s a family business. If I didn’t have a family business, I’d still live here in New Jersey. I love it here.
What’s your favorite Jersey drive?I always love going to Sandy Hook in the offseason. You can drive along the water on a motorcycle or in a car with no one there and the sun setting. It’s beautiful.
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The post Frankie Montecalvo Talks Racing, Training and His Favorite Jersey Drive appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
[caption id="attachment_313979" align="alignnone" width="778"] Stephanie Ruhle calls summers on LBI the “greatest escape” for her family. Photo: Courtesy of Eric Hance[/caption]
Stephanie Ruhle, anchor of political news broadcast The 11th Hour on MSNBC, seems to have a charmed life: a happy family, a fantastic job and two lovely homes—one in Manhattan and the other, a cherished Jersey Shore homestead on Long Beach Island. She would be the first to say her life is not a matter of luck, but a result of hard work.
“I have New Jersey hustle,” she says, grinning, while sitting in her corner office at 30 Rockefeller Center. In contrast to her polished image under the studio lights, Ruhle is wearing jeans, sneakers and a casual khaki jacket. But the high-spirited demeanor she’s known for and the quick smile that dazzles the camera are just as evident in person as on TV.
The more she discusses her early life and career, the more surprising her professional trajectory seems. “My mom used to tell me, ‘You’re not the smartest, you’re not the tallest, you’re not the fastest, you’re not the most beautiful, but nobody can outwork you. You can do anything you set your mind to,’” says Ruhle. “That’s just the most Jersey approach ever, right? Nobody’s gonna outwork you!” She grew up in a middle-class family in the small town of Park Ridge in Bergen County, attending public schools; she only had 70 kids in her graduating class. “I had great parents, a great family,” she notes. “I don’t have a sad story to tell.”
It seems that the things that stood out about her then (and still stand out now) were her spirit, her confidence and her driving desire to be part of the great, big, exciting world.
“New York was always sort of a dream for me, a love story,” she says thoughtfully. “One of my earliest memories was taking my dad to the train station with my mom in the morning, seeing him get on the train and saying, ‘That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to get back in this car, I don’t want to go to school. I want to live that life.’”
While in college at Lehigh University, Ruhle decided she wanted to explore a career in the banking industry. Not knowing how to get started, she wrote to alumni, seeking advice and contacts, and was offered an internship at Merrill Lynch.
Ruhle was only an intern, but she immediately set about climbing the ladder. “At the first desk I rotated on, there were a bunch of 45-year-old guys who had to go out and entertain clients every night,” she recalls. “So I made friends with every single nightclub doorman, every maître d’ at every hot restaurant, and booked dinner tables for all these guys. I told them, ‘You can’t go unless I’m at the table. It’s my reservation.’ I was 21 years old, and I went straight Jersey. I ended up meeting all the biggest clients. If I hadn’t done that, I would’ve just been the girl answering the phone.”
Upon graduation, Ruhle secured a job at Credit Suisse. But the boys’-club environment was tough on her. “Banking is the sharpest of the sharp elbows,” she says, thinking back. “There weren’t a lot of people who looked like me. I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I didn’t go to a fancy prep school, I didn’t have a background in business. In banking, I definitely suffered from impostor syndrome. I was always competing. It was exhausting.”
Even as she worked hard in the financial sector, she dreamed of a career in television. It didn’t seem possible, especially because she was rising in the ranks at Credit Suisse. After nearly six years, she was promoted to a vice president position. Even then, she says, “TV was always in the back of my mind.”
Eventually, she accepted a lucrative job from Deutsche Bank in 2003. Right before her job was about to begin, however, she spontaneously attended an open-call audition to guest host Live! With Regis and Kelly while Kelly Ripa was out on maternity leave. “My husband thought I was insane,” she recalls, laughing. “We had to get up at three o’clock in the morning and wait in line at ABC Studios for, like, seven hours.”
[caption id="attachment_314134" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Ruhle is seen on NBC's "Today" show in June 2023. Photo: Courtesy of Nathan Congleton/NBC[/caption]
Ultimately, Ruhle wasn’t chosen for the gig, although she did make it to the finals. So she reported to work at Deutsche Bank and, after several years, was promoted to managing director in global markets senior relationship mangagement. By then, she was doing a lot of public speaking, trying to help professional women rise in the industry as she had. She felt strongly that the world of finance offered excellent opportunities for women, but was disappointed that there were few women in it. “I didn’t have any homegirls in finance,” she says, still a bit exasperated. “Nobody. I thought, This has to change.”
Advocating for women’s financial empowerment has been Ruhle’s passion for years, and it continues to be. She is the founder of the Corporate Investment Bank Women’s Network and has cochaired the Women on Wall Street steering committee. She is also a member of the board of trustees for Girls Inc. New York, and has been involved with numerous other groups as well. “It doesn’t make sense for women not to have financial autonomy,” she says. “Sharing a bed with somebody, building life with somebody, parenting with them, is really hard. And if that other person also controls all the finances in your life, that makes life extra hard.”
One day, in 2011, the White House Project hosted a presentation and Ruhle was a guest speaker. Having worked at Deutsche Bank for about eight years by then, she was asked what she wanted to do in her next chapter. It was a pivotal moment in her life.
“I realized that I was afraid,” she says. “You know, it’s embarrassing to say out loud, ‘I want to take a leap; I want to do something totally different.’ You run the risk of people laughing at you. But that day, I said it out loud: ‘I’ve always wanted to work in TV. Especially business TV.’”
That experience made her realize that television was the next critical step in her career. She told the audience that day, “Our banking system finances the American dream. We’re a country of entrepreneurship. There are amazing stories to tell. And that’s what I want to do.”
A panelist from Bloomberg News was so moved by her speech that she offered to introduce Ruhle to the then head of Bloomberg TV, Andy Lack (who went on to become chairman of NBC News before stepping down in 2020 amid controversy). Never one to squander an opportunity, Ruhle knew exactly what to say when she met him.
“I told him, ‘Pay me the lowest amount of money of anybody in your organization, but give me a real shot. Give me a show to anchor. Teach me how to be on TV. If I fail, it won’t cost you that much.’” To her surprise he said, “It’s a deal.”
Ruhle went on to co-anchor a series of shows on Bloomberg TV. She discovered that the businesses of money acquisition and news gathering weren’t so different. “Let me tell you, a trading floor and a newsroom look almost identical,” she explains. “People screaming, open floor plan, very, very intense. Everyone looks like they’re fighting, but they’re actually not. They have a common goal.” After so many years in finance, Ruhle felt right at home.
Ruhle worked at Bloomberg for nearly five years. She interviewed some of the world’s most powerful people: business tycoons, Wall Street traders, CEOs, celebrities. But she was beginning to feel a tug to her roots. The issues of real, everyday people sometimes felt more important than the concerns of her niche industry. When Lack announced he was leaving Bloomberg to accept a job at NBC, she decided to follow him.
The move gave her just what she was looking for. At NBC, in addition to finance, she reported on trends, pop culture and politics. It was a steep learning curve, especially because 2016 was a challenging time to cover America’s rapidly changing political landscape. However, it was exhilarating. Ruhle says she felt like she was in the right place at the right time.
Ruhle co-anchored a smart-money MSNBC program with her friend and colleague Ali Velshi. During that time, Brian Williams (also from New Jersey) hosted the popular nighttime show The 11th Hour, a position he slid into after losing his anchor job on NBC Nightly News when it came out that he’d exaggerated some of his reporting experiences in the field. In 2022, Williams left The 11th Hour, and the baton got passed to Ruhle.
Nowadays, The 11th Hour With Stephanie Ruhle covers a mix of political news, hard news and a bit of economic policy. Ruhle can often be seen in daytime programming, too. She’s a frequent contributor across NBC’s multiple platforms and series, including its iconic morning program, the Today show. Because the national discussion so often focuses on money matters like inflation, the debt ceiling, estate planning, Covid recovery and small business issues, Ruhle is a sought-after guest on many of her colleagues’ programs.
On May 5, 2023, Ruhle had the opportunity to interview President Joe Biden at the White House. Calling it “the honor of a lifetime,” she believes Biden granted her the interview because of her focus on economic policy and her show’s wide, national, multi-demographic audience. “I think the President sat down with me because I covered in depth a number of bills he passed in his first two years in office,” she says. “I work really hard to not just cover noise. I try to make my audience better and smarter. I can only hope that’s maybe what the White House saw.”
Fealty to truth, says Ruhle, is a critical component of every show she broadcasts.
“Look, we have a complicated country,” she says. “We have a lot of angry people. Viewers who have never watched you may assume you have an ideology or you’re pushing an agenda. Um, no. There’s no right or left with me. You know what there is? The truth. Every night we cover the truth. And that, to me, is a very Jersey thing.”
She adds, smiling, “New Jersey is a no-BS state. And I’ve tried to create a no-BS show.”
Ruhle's life on LBI [caption id="attachment_313980" align="alignnone" width="778"] Ruhle and husband Andy Hubbard with their kids, Drew, Harrison and Reese, and their cavapoo, Skipper Dipper. Photo: Courtesy of Eric Hance[/caption]
Her New Jersey ethos inspired Stephanie Ruhle to work hard (“People in New Jersey are just like scrappy builders,” she says), but her parents provided the bedrock of love a child needs to face the world with confidence. Nowadays, her parents give that same support to Ruhle’s kids. “My children will all tell you that my mother is their best friend,” she says.
Which is why, media career notwithstanding, Ruhle says the best parts of her life are long, lazy summer days spent with family on Long Beach Island. Her sister’s summer home is four houses down from hers, and her parents travel from Park Ridge every weekend to join them.
It’s an idyllic life. Ruhle’s husband, Andy Hubbard, takes their three kids swimming and sailing. Reese, 14, is in a lifeguard training program, while Harrison, 17, is among the best young competitive sailors in the state. Ten-year-old Drew performs at local venues like the Surflight Theater and Show Place ice cream parlor.
“LBI has given all of us the greatest escape from our busy, scheduled New York City life,” Ruhle says. “We can literally shout out the window and our neighbors will come over for s’mores after dinner. Having that community, that safe haven, with neighbors, cousins, grandparents—it’s truly a blessing.
“A Jersey way to think is to be on a team. That’s how I grew up.”
Linda Federico-ÓMurchú is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in outlets including NBC News, CNBC, the Today show and TheStreet.com. A Montclair resident, she is currently working on three books.
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The post MSNBC Anchor Stephanie Ruhle Has ‘Jersey Hustle’ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Aaron Rodgers is officially a Jersey boy.
The Jets quarterback has been revealed as the mystery buyer of a multimillion-dollar contemporary mansion on the Montclair-Cedar Grove border, according to reports.
Sources told the Daily Mail that Rodgers bought the eight-bedroom, 9-bathroom home for $9.5 million.
[caption id="attachment_310403" align="aligncenter" width="778"] The ultra-modern home spans 10,000 square feet. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company[/caption]
As New Jersey Monthly first reported in June, rumors had been swirling that Rodgers could be the mystery buyer of the new-construction, modern glass pad, which has incredible views of New York City and is located near the Mills Reserve, a wooded county park that sits on top of the First Watchung Mountain.
Super Bowl stud Rodgers, 39, was traded to the New York Jets in April from the Green Bay Packers. The team’s practice facility is located in nearby Florham Park.
As for the new pad, it spans a whopping 10,0000 square feet. The sleek design includes walls of windows, an open floor plan that seamlessly blends indoor and outdoor living spaces, and a gourmet kitchen with high-end appliances, custom cabinetry and a large center island with bar seating. Impressively, the back of the house is almost entirely made of glass.
[caption id="attachment_310406" align="aligncenter" width="800"] The house features an open-concept floor plan. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company[/caption]
The home was listed and sold by Stanton Company Realtors in Montclair. Rich Stanton, the broker and owner of the agency, previously told us that he didn't know the identity of the buyer, as the home was purchased through an LLC.
He described it to us as “a very unique, modern home." And Carol Apprendi, a realtor with Brown Harris Stevens real estate office in Montclair who toured the home, previously told us it was "beautiful" and “very unusual for the area because it’s so modern. It’s a great home for entertaining and the views of the city are breathtaking.”
The mansion sits on 2.39 acres of land atop the mountain, making it very private but giving Rodgers easy access to all the nearby goings-on in Montclair, including the town's top-notch restaurant scene.
Other features of the house include a gym, media room, wine cellar and three-car garage.
New Jersey Monthly has reached out to the Jets for comment on the home purchase.
The post Aaron Rodgers Revealed as Mystery Buyer of NJ Mansion appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Dolores Catania and Paul Connell’s Bergen County residence was newly built. Still, Catania, a cast member on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and Connell, president and CEO of Manhattan-based Eco Electrical Services LLC, wanted to infuse it with their own aesthetic.
“They’re very particular,” designer Vanessa Deleon says. “They wanted to refresh the spaces and tailor them to their liking.”
Deleon, a television staple herself on programs such as American Dream Builders and Restaurant Impossible, as well as a brand ambassador with Overstock.com, is principal designer at New York City-based Vanessa Deleon Associates. She describes her clients’ design preferences: “They wanted classic elements to reflect their traditional tastes. However, this is a modern town house. We didn’t want to stray from that aesthetic too much.”
The designer merged the two styles to create an elevated urban aesthetic that both celebrates the owners’ preferences and honors the contemporary bones of the home. “We made a cohesive synergy happen with the finishes and the architecture,” says Deleon, an allied member of the American Society of Interior Designers.
In the living room, the finishes and architecture meet in a wall treatment that reaches from the fireplace mantel to the 16-foot-high ceiling. “We considered marble or stone cladding, but everything felt too hard,” the designer says. Instead, they opted for the faux-leather installation. “We hit the nail on the head,” she says of the tall expanse of quilted squares rising in uniform rows above the fireplace. The ceiling features its own geometrics in the form of L-shaped insets that are lit from within for added drama.
The effect is repeated in the primary bedroom, this time with upholstered wall panels behind the bed. “The clients wanted more than a headboard,” Deleon explains. “They wanted it to speak to the room, to be very prominent.”
The deep-gray treatment is, indeed, a focal point. The tone is reinforced throughout the space with the inclusion of tactile textiles in shades of white and gray—from the quilted bedding to the faux-fur throw to the hand-tufted rug over the chevron-patterned hardwood floors.
Click here to continue reading this story on Design NJ.
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After acting in an astounding 54 movies, Montclair's Patrick Wilson decided it was time to try his hand at directing his own film.
He chose Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth and final chapter in the popular supernatural horror franchise, for his directorial debut—and it did not disappoint.
The film, which opens Friday, July 7, held a private screening this week at the Village at SOPAC cinema in South Orange, a theater Wilson jointly owns with his other partners in the company Cinema Lab. Wilson, who lives in Montclair with his wife, actor Dagmara Dominczyk, spoke about what it meant for him to show his film there:
“I always thought about what it would be like to screen a movie that I made here. I kept thinking about this moment. This is a huge bonus for me,” Wilson, 50, said to applause.
The film stars Wilson and Rose Byrne as Josh and Renai Lambert, a couple that has divorced after their family experiences a series of terrifying incidents.
[caption id="attachment_312113" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Patrick Wilson, Andrew Astor, Juliana Davies, Rose Byrne and Ty Simpkins in "Insidious: The Red Door" Photo courtesy of Sony[/caption]
“In this film, I wanted to deal with trauma, and what it does to your memory,” says Wilson, who has also starred in Aquaman and The Conjuring films; Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is set to be released in December.
Parts of Insidious: The Red Door were filmed in New Jersey, including Morristown, Chatham and Florham Park. Drew University in Madison was the filming locale for scenes involving the couple's son, Dalton, at college. Ty Simpkins, who stars as Dalton, also acted as a kid in Little Children, a film that starred Wilson and was based on the book by novelist Tom Perrotta, a Garwood native.
At an audience Q&A after the screening this week, Insidious actor Peter Dager called Wilson “an actor’s actor. So it was a dream to work with you.”
The film closes with another first for Wilson: He sings the song Stay, which plays during the credits. The song is a cover of the Shakespears Sisters track and is an original collaboration between him and the Swedish rock band Ghost.
“Not too many directors sing on their own soundtrack,” said Wilson with a laugh.
Of course, not too many directors have also been nominated for two Tony Awards for acting in musicals.
The post Patrick Wilson’s Directorial Debut Is Scaring People in His Own Backyard appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
A luxurious $11 million contemporary mansion in Cedar Grove that is under contract by a buyer has the area buzzing with speculation that the new owner could be a celebrity like New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers or someone in the music industry.
The new construction, modern glass house has stunning views of New York City and is located on the Montclair-Cedar Grove border near the Mills Reserve, a wooded county park that sits on top of the First Watchung Mountain, and the Upper Montclair downtown area.
[caption id="attachment_310403" align="aligncenter" width="778"] The ultra-modern home spans 10,000 square feet. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company[/caption]
This very private, 10,000-square-foot architectural home has a sleek design, with walls of windows that let in plenty of sunlight, an open floor plan that seamlessly blends indoor and outdoor living spaces, and a gourmet kitchen with high-end appliances, custom cabinetry and a large center island with bar seating. The rear of the home is almost entirely made up of glass.
The home was listed and sold by Stanton Company Realtors in Montclair. Rich Stanton, the broker and owner of the agency, says he doesn’t know who the buyer is as the home was purchased through an LLC.
“It’s a very unique, modern home,” he says.
[caption id="attachment_310405" align="aligncenter" width="800"] The house sits atop a mountain. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company Realtors.[/caption]
Local gossip started mounting about the identity of the buyer once area residents found out the glamorous home was under contract. The rumor mill has speculated that 39-year-old Rodgers, a recent East Coast transplant who was traded to the Jets in April from the Green Bay Packers, could be the buyer. The team’s practice facility is in nearby Florham Park.
The house was previously owned by Matsumi Kaneda, who owned the popular Japanese restaurant Daikichi in Montclair, along with her husband Aki Kaneda. Their son, Benji Kaneda, recently took over the establishment, which has been open since 1988.
[caption id="attachment_310406" align="aligncenter" width="800"] The house features an open-concept floor plan. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company Realtors[/caption]
The 8-bedroom, 9-bathroom home was built in 2022 and also has a luxurious primary suite with an open-plan, spa-like en-suite bathroom (the large glass shower stall has two entrances) and a walk-in dressing room, as well as a home office, media room, gym, in-law suite, wine cellar, a whole house generator and a 3-car garage.
Additional bedrooms are generously sized and have en suite bathrooms and custom closets. The house sits on 2.39 acres of land atop the mountain.
[caption id="attachment_310408" align="aligncenter" width="800"] The primary suite features an open-plan, spa-like en-suite bathroom; notice the tub on the right of this photo. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company[/caption]
Carol Apprendi, a realtor with Brown Harris Stevens real estate office in Montclair, toured the home.
“The house is beautiful, and very unusual for the area because it’s so modern. It’s a great home for entertaining and the views of the city are breathtaking,” she says.
[caption id="attachment_310411" align="aligncenter" width="800"] The views of New York City are stunning. Photo courtesy of Stanton Company[/caption]
The closing is scheduled for the end of the month.
The post Jaw-Dropping $11 Million Cedar Grove Mansion Finds Buyer appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
He might be a global superstar now, but Charlie Puth hasn’t forgotten his Jersey roots.The Rumson native, 31, is heading home on June 3 for a show at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel—made even more special because that's where he saw his first concert, James Taylor."It’s going to be a full circle, special moment,” says Puth.Although it'll be a brief trip (he has a show in Virginia the next day), the "See You Again" singer plans to squeeze in time with loved ones and indulge in his favorite pizza—a must for any true Jersey boy.“[I’m looking forward to] having Sea Bright pizza backstage after the show, an entire grandma pie to myself," he says. "But not before because then I won't be able to sing.”Puth—who has performed at arenas all over the world, released multiple platinum-selling albums and earned millions of social media followers—says his upbringing in the Garden State heavily influenced his pursuit of a music career, growing up surrounded by local acts and bands who gained small but loyal followings. He says the state has a unique way of making anyone into somewhat of a celebrity.“Everyone’s a mini celebrity in New Jersey. Whether it's a suit maker in town making suits for everyone [or] a pizza guy, everyone is a personality," he says. "New Jersey is the state with the most personalities. Growing up around that made me want to have that and then some.”Puth has come a long way from those humble Rumson beginnings. He’s gone from idolizing Jersey heroes like Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi to speaking with them occasionally over the phone. He made a name for himself with his first two albums, Nine Track Mind and Voicenotes, and is now touring the continent in promotion of his latest release, the self-titled Charlie, released last October.This album is his most personal yet, delving heavily into past relationships. Puth says it was a challenge writing and recording the first few songs, but once he got through those, he was able to create the rest of the album in its entirety with more ease.“The only way to make music that feels real is to tell the truth," he says. "The most important thing is for people to relate to it and make their own memories and experiences toward the album. If people can relate to it, it's my pleasure.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7GITgqwDVgPuth has previously worked with some of the biggest names in the industry, including James Taylor, Selena Gomez, Elton John and Boyz II Men. But this project features his first collaboration with a K-pop artist, Jungkook of the popular boy band BTS on the track “Left and Right.”“It was one of the most positive experiences I ever had working with a different artist," Puth says of Jungkook. "When I met him, he didn't really carry himself like he was a big presence. He was very humble, respectful of my team as we were of theirs. It was such a regimented, easy process filming the music video and getting the vocals done.”Puth is working on his next album, which he expects to finish by the end of the tour. He says the project will be entirely R&B, a genre he’s worked on before but never put together in a full album.As for the future, Puth dreams of headlining a show at the Prudential Center in Newark one day, having previously performed there as an opener for Shawn Mendes in 2017. But in the meantime, he’s grateful to perform this weekend at what will be his biggest Jersey concert to date—and to pick up a scooped sesame bagel with butter from Bagel Masters in Shrewsbury (no eggs because he’s allergic).The post How Charlie Puth’s New Jersey Roots Shaped His Music Career appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
[caption id="attachment_308719" align="alignnone" width="778"] Teresa Giudice walks down the aisle at the Park Chatêau Estate & Gardens in East Brunswick. Photo: Jenna Russo (@silentcapturephoto)[/caption] Related posts fromNew Jersey Bride: * Inside Teresa Giudice and Louie Ruelas’ Wedding * Top Wedding Venues in NJ * Get Inspired by Real NJ Weddings Fifteen-hundred bobby pins, three pounds of hair, three-and-a-half hours of styling and one bejeweled crown all add up to Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice’s $10,000 wedding-day hairstyle.Lucia Casazza, Teresa’s stylist of 14 years and co-owner of the Great Cazoo Boutique & Beauty Bar in Wayne, says she wanted Teresa to “look and feel like a princess on her wedding day” last August at the glamorous Park Chateâu Estate & Gardens in East Brunswick.Because of Teresa’s large headpiece, Lucia says the TV star’s hair—which she loves to wear long—needed some height. And she certainly got it!“I refused to give her those Hollywood waves like every other bride,” Lucia tells New Jersey Bride. “That’s been trending now for long enough in New Jersey. I said, ‘I refuse to give you the same hair as everyone else.’”Although Teresa and now-husband Louie Ruelas didn't walk down the aisle until dusk, the day started at 7 am. Lucia and her team set Teresa’s hair in rollers, curled and pinned it, and executed an elaborate full installation of human-hair extensions (from the stylist’s own Lucia hair extensions line).[caption id="attachment_308645" align="alignnone" width="778"] Pre-order your copy of New Jersey Bride here to see even more photos of Teresa Giudice and Louie Ruelas' wedding. Photo: Jenna Russo (@silentcapturephoto)[/caption]Lucia says her bridal services run $2,500 and up, but that other stylists at her salon charge a range of prices.“My best advice is that a bride should do whatever she feels beautiful in on her wedding day,” Lucia says. “It’s her dream day, it’s her dream look.”Click here to continue reading this story on New Jersey Bride*.
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[caption id="attachment_308692" align="alignnone" width="778"] Teresa Giudice and Louie Ruelas tied the knot at the Park Chatêau Estate & Gardens in East Brunswick. Photo: Jenna Russo (@silentcapturephoto)[/caption] Related posts fromNew Jersey Bride: * Teresa Giudice’s $10,000 Wedding Hair * Top Wedding Venues in NJ * Get Inspired by Real NJ Weddings Anyone who knows Teresa Giudice—either personally or from her longtime stint on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New Jersey—knows that the reality star throws one fabulous party.So it’s only fitting that her wedding to entrepreneur Louie Ruelas, held last August at the luxurious Park Château Estate & Gardens in East Brunswick, was the ultimate party—filled with jaw-dropping entertainment, decor and flowers that truly dazzled the couple’s 225 guests.“I wanted everybody to walk in and be wowed, like, ‘Oh my God, this is spectacular,’” Teresa tells New Jersey Bride. “And that’s what they did when they walked in. They were wowed.”The venue, one of the most high-end wedding locales in the state, is impressive enough on its own, with its elegant mansion set on 15 acres of stunning grounds. Pair that with Teresa and Louie’s flair for all things fun and their unique personal touches, and the day was unforgettable. Fans can get an up-close look at the wedding by tuning into the special Teresa Gets Married, which airs on Tuesday, May 23 at 8 pm on Bravo and starts streaming on Peacock the next day.[caption id="attachment_308645" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Pre-order your copy of New Jersey Bride here. Photo: Jenna Russo (@silentcapturephoto)[/caption]During the reception, guests boogied to music from a 16-piece band provided by Jordan Kahn Music Company and a DJ from Geo Events later in the evening. Jordan Kahn also put together an extravagant display of live, immersive entertainment. Sultry burlesque dancers stripped down to nearly nothing, aerialists showed off their impressive moves, a sword swallower provided some dangerous fun, and stilt walkers in metallic suits strutted across the dance floor.The couple also enlisted drummer Tito Puente Jr., a childhood friend of Louie’s and the son of famed musician Tito Puente, and saxophonist Art Crichlow to play more terrific tunes.The performers were glitzy, glamorous and sexy—just like Teresa envisioned. “I wanted the dancers to have as little clothes as possible,” says Teresa with a laugh, adding: “Yes, I’m all about sexiness, I wanted that sexy vibe.”Overall, Teresa and Louie hoped for—and achieved—a day that was “elegant, magical, timeless and classic.” Teresa adds, “I wanted a lot of entertainment because I’m all about having a good time.”It worked. The dance floor was packed all night with family and friends—like bridesmaids and fellow RHONJ cast members Jennifer Aydin and Dolores Catania, plus plenty of other television stars, including Loni Love and Bob Harper, Real Housewives of New York City alumni Jill Zarin and Dorinda Medley, and Real Housewives of Atlanta personalities Kenya Moore and Cynthia Bailey.“You know when you go to a wedding and it’s, like, nobody’s dancing? And it’s, like, everybody sitting down and eating—the dance floor is empty?” says Teresa. “I swear, I don’t remember that at all at my wedding. It was never empty.” “Luckily,” she adds, “the cocktail hour had a ton—a ton—of food,” so guests could have fun during the reception and not worry if they missed part of the dinner. “It was insane. And I’m Italian, so growing up, food was the most important thing to us.”Click here to continue reading this story on New Jersey Bride.***
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[caption id="attachment_308396" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Martha Stewart covers the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, on newsstands May 18. Photo: Ruven Afanador/Sports Illustrated[/caption]This Jersey girl knows how to work it!At 81 years old, New Jersey native Martha Stewart covers the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in a plunging white one-piece bathing suit—and she rocks it."Usually I'm motivated by pay, but this time I was motivated by showing people that a woman my age can still look good, feel good, be good, blah blah blah," the home-design guru says in a behind-the-scenes video for the publication.Svelte Stewart grew up in Nutley in the 1950s, where she earned extra cash by working as a model after school at the now-defunct department store Bonwit Teller. As a teen, she was also very focused on her schoolwork and served on student council, as she told New Jersey Monthly in a past interview. “It was very important to me to be an all-around student,” she said in 2011 of her time at Nutley High School. “I was pretty centered on being smart and well read and had a lot of hobbies, and I was the art director of [the school's literary magazine] The Gauntlet.”Back then, her name was Martha Kostyra. “I lived for every day, and I tried to get all my work done, and I was a good child, basically,” she said. She went skating, attended high school football games and bonfires, and caught tadpoles.Today, she lives in Bedford, New York and has a home in East Hampton.Anyone who's followed Stewart recently won't be too surprised by her turn as a cover model. Her Instagram account has featured sultry swimsuit shots. The sexy white suit on her SI cover is by Monday Swimwear, while her vibrant cover-up comes from Torso Creations and her ring was designed by Jacob & Co.[caption id="attachment_308373" align="aligncenter" width="778"] Martha Stewart reveals her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover on Monday's episode of the "Today" show. Photo: NBC News/Today[/caption]Still, she said that posing for the SI cover was not easy. "To be on the cover at my age was a challenge, and I think I met that challenge," she said while revealing the cover on Monday's episode of the Today show.She got a call from the magazine in November and had to be ready to shoot by January. So how did she prepare?"I didn't starve myself, but I didn't eat any bread or pasta for a couple of months," said Stewart, noting she always lives a "clean life." "I went to Pilates every other day, and that was great.... I'm still going to Pilates every other day."Her past modeling experience, which helped her pay for college at Barnard, also helped.
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Midway through the film One True Thing, Meryl Streep surveys her surroundings and laments, “I wish I had redone this kitchen years ago when I had the mind to do it.”
Alas, in the film, Streep’s character, Kate Gulden, is dying of cancer. And the kitchen? That’s actually the domain of Michael Aaron Rockland and Patricia Ard, whose vintage Morristown home was the setting for the 1998 film.
Rockland and Ard purchased the ornate, Queen Anne-style Victorian in 1987. Located in Morristown’s historic district, the 1886 home is just one block from Macculloch Hall Historical Museum and the Thomas Nast Home, a National Historic Landmark where the late-19th-century political cartoonist resided for the last 30 years of his life.
Rockland and Ard have lived in their 1886 Morristown home since 1987. Photo by Laura Moss
It is only fitting that Rockland should live in an historic home. Now retired, he taught American history at Rutgers for 50 years. He is also the author of 15 books and a longtime contributor to this magazine. Ard, also retired, taught English literature at Ramapo College.
Upon moving into their six-bedroom home, Rockland and Ard began making improvements, expanding the front porch, combining two parlors into one large living room and creating a dramatic entrance to the living room, with a wide archway. They flanked the archway with two sets of twin columns, salvaged by their carpenter from someone else’s rotting porch.
Those fluted columns were destined to play a central role in One True Thing. Director Carl Franklin used them to frame several scenes; at one point early in the film, Streep ducks behind one of the columns as she awaits the arrival of her husband (played by William Hurt) at his surprise party.
The living room columns played a key role in the film. Photo by Laura Moss
The couple were taken by surprise when the art director for One True Thing and his staff came knocking. “There were seven or eight of them,” Ard recalls. They explored, measured and videotaped every part of the house. After some bumpy negotiations, a deal was struck. The homeowners were given a temporary home to inhabit during the shoot, which took more than six months. The production paid them $75,000.
“We were told later that we were totally ripped off,” says Rockland. “They bowled us over with Meryl.”
[RELATED: How Scores of New Jerseyans Get Their Homes in Movies and TV Shows]
The contract signed, a crew of 12 moved every stick of furniture from the house. Every room was painted or papered—often in flowery patterns to reflect the fictional Kate Gulden’s fussy taste. Despite the home’s high ceilings, large rooms and oversize doorways, several walls were moved to accommodate certain shots.
Rockland and Ard were allowed to visit the set as they liked, and both of their children, Kate and Josh, appeared as paid extras in some of the outdoor crowd scenes, which were shot in Maplewood. (Rockland has three other children from a previous marriage.)
The couple keeps a photo of Meryl Streep on display, which she signed while filming the movie.Photo by Laura Moss
Interactions with Streep during the shoot were limited. When she wasn’t on camera, she typically retreated to Rockland’s third-floor study where a bed had been installed for her naps. But Streep, who grew up in nearby Basking Ridge and Bernardsville, went out of her way to tell the couple how much she loved their home. “She was as nice as she is talented,” says Rockland.
His experience with Hurt was not as painless. “I called him Bill one time,” says Rockland. “He went nuts.” Hurt insisted on being called William. “I thought, What’s the matter with this guy?” On the other hand, Rockland did discover Hurt reading one of his novels (A Bliss Case, published in 1989) during a break from shooting. That compensated for the actor’s rudeness.
Production paid the couple $75,000 to film in their home for six months. Photo by Laura Moss
There were bigger difficulties with the producers. Rockland had noticed members of the crew stomping out cigarettes on the home’s precious heart-of-pine floors—despite a stipulation in the contract that there be no smoking in or around the house. Rockland stormed into the production office and declared, “If I see one more cigarette here, I’m going to stop the movie.”
Rockland was reminded that all of the floors were going to be sanded and refinished, but that didn’t stop him from repeating his threat. That’s when things got heavy. One particularly tough member of the team got up in Rockland’s face. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he snarled. For Rockland, it was like a scene out of The Godfather. Needless to say, he backed off.
Crew installed a tin ceiling in the kitchen, which the homeowners kept. Photo by Laura Moss
Finally, the shoot was over and the crew restored Rockland and Ard’s home to its original state. Well, almost.
The kitchen plumbing leaked, paint spotted the floors in some places, and an improperly replaced second-floor bathroom window tumbled from its framing one night with an alarming crash.
Renee Zellweger and Meryl Streep in “One True Thing.” Photo: Photofest/Universal Pictures
Which brings us back to the kitchen. While Rockland was happy to say farewell to the fruit-print tiles and red Formica counters installed for the movie, he coveted the retro-looking tin ceiling the crew had installed. Unprompted, one of the producers asked Rockland if he’d mind if they left the ceiling in place. Bingo!
“That was a tremendous triumph,” says Rockland. “We got the ceiling for free.” What’s more, they used a significant portion of the fee they had received to remodel the kitchen yet again. Kate Gulden, no doubt, would have been pleased.
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We’re a sucker for free shows.
The Jersey-bred Jonas Brothers are set to kick off the Today show’s free Citi Concert Series on May 12, the same day their hotly anticipated sixth record, The Album, is released. The outdoor series takes place at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan.
“You don’t want to miss it,” Joe Jonas said on Thursday’s episode of the NBC morning show, announcing the concert while sitting alongside his brother-bandmates Kevin and Nick Jonas.
News of the show comes as Kevin, 35, Joe, 33, and Nick, 30, are wrapping up a five-night Broadway residency at the Marquis Theatre. Each night featured a different album from the Grammy-nominated group’s discography—and tickets were tough to score. The residency concludes Saturday with a debut performance of The Album.
Though the guys—who formed the band in 2005, broke up in 2013 and reunited in 2019—grew up in Wyckoff, Kevin is the only brother who still lives in New Jersey. He and his wife, Danielle Jonas, are raising their two daughters in Denville, near Danielle’s parents and some of her childhood friends.
“We are true Jersey, through and through,” Kevin told New Jersey Monthly in an interview last year.
Kevin is grateful New Jersey can serve as a home base for Danielle and the kids while the band tours, telling us: “It’s been a blessing—really nice for us to have a safe place here and a community around us.”
Although Nick and Joe now live on the West Coast, they do get a taste of Jersey when they’re back visiting their home state—if Kevin and Danielle have anything to do with it. “We still bring the Taylor ham to them,” Danielle told us of the guys’ visits. “Or the meatballs.”
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Zach Braff wrote his new movie, “A Good Person,” during one of the most difficult periods in his life. Photo: Jeong Park/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
During a pivotal moment in Zach Braff’s new movie, A Good Person, lead actress Florence Pugh stands on the platform at the South Orange train station waiting for her ride into Manhattan. It’s the same place where Braff, who grew up in South Orange and Maplewood, waited countless times as a teen on his way to auditions in New York, yearning to make his showbiz dreams come true.
Braff, who wrote and directed A Good Person, could have filmed that scene—and the entire movie—in any town in the United States. He could have set the story—which revolves around a woman (Pugh) dealing with tragedy, addiction and an unlikely and complicated friendship with her ex-fiancé’s father (played by Morgan Freeman)—anywhere. But for Braff, it’s always been about New Jersey.
“I love my hometown and I want to tell stories about my hometown,” he says.
In recent years, a growing number of productions have opted to shoot in New Jersey, after Governor Phil Murphy reinstated tax incentives for film and television projects in 2018. But what sets Braff apart from many of his colleagues is that, to him, New Jersey isn’t just a backdrop. He not only works here, but builds storylines around the place he grew up because his home state means something to him. “We love him for that,” says Steven Gorelick, executive director of the NJ Motion Picture and TV Commission.
Braff filmed much of “A Good Person” in his hometowns of South Orange and Maplewood, including at his high school, Columbia. Photo: Jeong Park/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
Braff’s Jersey pride could not have been spelled out any more clearly than with the title of his directorial debut, the highly lauded 2004 film Garden State, which he wrote, directed and starred in alongside Natalie Portman. Referring to A Good Person (which his theaters on March 24), he says, “Of course I could have told the story anywhere, but I wouldn’t have related to it.”
Braff spent his formative years in New Jersey; it was where he experienced the joys of being a class clown, the pain of his parents’ divorce, the wonders of catching the acting bug. Five years ago, New Jersey was where he saw his father, Harold Braff, who imbued in him a love of theater and of New Jersey, lose his battle with cancer. “I don’t know what the equivalent of patriotic for your state is, but he was that; he just loved Jersey,” Braff recalls of his father. “And I think he instilled that in me.”
Braff describes himself as a “bit melancholic” during his childhood. After his parents divorced, they shared joint custody of Braff and his siblings. “I think I had OCD and I was dealing with anxiety. I was a bit lost,” Braff says.
Braff had “zero interest in sports” (today he uses exercise, specifically riding on his stationary Peloton bike, as a stress reliever), which was “tough,” as team sports are often an important part of making friends. Instead, Braff made movies with his pals and tried to make other kids laugh.
He remembers a seminal moment in fifth grade, when he was assigned an essay. “I wrote mine using other kids in the class as the characters in this funny essay, and I got up in front of the room and read it,” he says. “I remember the kids cracking up and belly laughing, and I remember seeing the teacher in the back of the room belly laughing. And I was like, This is the greatest feeling ever. I wrote this, and they’re all giving me this affirmation. It was kind of at that moment that I was like, So is this a job that you can do?”
Braff, seen on the set of “A Good Person,” says his father imbued in him a love of theater—and New Jersey. Photo: Jeong Park/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
Braff got his first taste of acting thanks to his dad, an attorney and law professor at Rutgers, who acted in local community theater performances on the side. Starting around age 10, Braff would tag along to his dad’s rehearsals with the Livingston Community Players and Florham Park Players and help out behind the scenes. “I was kind of like their mascot,” Braff says. Despite his age, the stage crew soon started taking him seriously because “they saw what a hard worker I was.”
He truly fell in love with acting while attending Stagedoor Manor, a prestigious theater camp in upstate New York. He soon began auditioning for professional gigs and landed his first at 14, a pilot for CBS produced by the famed Bruce Paltrow, called High. It was a gritty high school drama set and filmed in New Jersey. Interestingly, High was also the first role for Bruce’s daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, who was cast as the “pretty high school senior, and I was sort of the nerdy high school freshman,” Braff says.
Fast-forward thirty years, and Braff was back at his old high school, Columbia, to shoot A Good Person in the fall of 2021. Locals will appreciate the location-spotting opportunities in the movie. Braff features places that are meaningful to him, including Columbia, from which he graduated in 1993; the South Orange Duck Pond, where as a kid he loved to steer an electric boat and feed the ducks with his mother; and the South Orange train station, which, to a teenage Braff, represented the possibility of pursuing what he loved most.
“One of the special things about being in South Orange and Maplewood was that direct line to Penn Station,” he says. “When other kids would go off to soccer or lacrosse practice, I was going into the city to audition.”
Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman star in “A Good Person.” Braff does not have an on-screen role in the movie. Photo: Jeong Park/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
During one scene in the movie filmed at a soccer game at Columbia, you can even see an apartment building where Braff’s father lived following his divorce from Braff’s mom.
The movie was filmed mostly in South Orange and Maplewood, but also includes scenes shot in Clifton (Colonial Pharmacy), Elizabeth (the now-shuttered Pastime Tavern), Morristown (Loyola Jesuit Center) and other area towns. Braff wanted to shoot at the Livingston Mall, where he hung out as a teen at the arcade (which has long been closed), but the film’s budget wouldn’t allow for an additional location.
The movie’s subject matter is also very personal for Braff. He wrote it during one of the most difficult periods of his life. In a four-year span that included a portion of the pandemic, he lost his father to cancer, his sister to an aneurysm, his manager Chris Huvane to suicide, and his best friend, the Broadway actor Nick Cordero, to Covid-19. Braff says he “needed to write” in order to deal with the grief and to “find some purpose.” “It just felt completely inauthentic to write about anything other than tragedy and the human desire to stand back up after tragedy,” he says.
However, Braff says he wanted to stay true to himself and not make the movie maudlin. As any fan of Braff’s hilarious work in the long-running TV series Scrubs can confirm, Braff has serious comic chops. A Good Person has funny moments, particularly some with Freeman and with Saturday Night Live legend Molly Shannon, who plays the mother of Allison (Pugh).
“It’s how me and my family deal with loss—we find humor and we find ways to laugh and have a release,” Braff says.
As the title suggests, Braff’s directorial debut, “Garden State,” took place in New Jersey.
Braff does not appear in this movie, something unexpected for him; he starred in both Garden State and his 2014 film, Wish I Was Here (which he wrote with his brother Adam Braff). “I wanted to tell, for the first time, a story that was what I was feeling in my heart, but not necessarily about me.”
He wrote the movie for its star, Pugh, whom he was dating at the time. “We were dating, and she is just a phenomenon to me,” he says. The two are no longer together, but speak fondly of each other.
Pugh says that having “someone who knows me so well write a character for my voice only has to be one of the most unique and bonding feelings.” She also says living and filming in New Jersey was “the highlight for me. Especially with Zach’s personal history and ties there, it felt so special to be bringing this story to life there.”
These days, Braff no longer lives in New Jersey. He studied film at Northwestern University in Illinois and has homes in Los Angeles and New York. But he comes to New Jersey to visit family, and, of course, to make movies.
His impact on the state is important. Gorelick, of the film and TV commission, says A Good Person spent $11 million in New Jersey (In comparison, some TV series spend $80 million-$100 million on one season, he says). In addition to economic growth for the state, Gorelick says that a movie like A Good Person gives New Jersey publicity that no amount of advertising can provide.
For Braff, his home state is so much more than a location: “New Jersey’s a character in the movie.”
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It’s the simple things, like a Taylor ham, egg and cheese on an everything bagel, that Rachel Zegler missed most about New Jersey while she was away for nearly all of 2022 filming two movies. Oh, and the diners. Can’t forget the diners.
“Anywhere else in the world, if the menu is longer than three pages, you shouldn’t go there,” the 21-year-old Clifton native jokes.
After celebrating the holidays with her family in her childhood home, Zegler is slowly settling into Eastern Standard Time in her new apartment in New York City. This March, her second film, DC Comics’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods, premieres. In her superhero movie debut, Zegler plays Anthea, sister of Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu’s characters. The auditions were entirely over Zoom. Zegler didn’t even know what role she had read for until the director, David Sandberg, called to tell her she landed it.
“I fell in love with the idea [that]… you don’t really know if she’s good or bad,” Zegler says of the character. “Everybody already assumed she’s a villain. But you don’t know, and that’s what’s really fun about playing Anthea.”
[RELATED: How New Jersey Shaped Stan Lee Into a Marvel Legend]
Zegler was filming the Shazam! sequel in Atlanta right before her big-screen debut, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, came out in December 2021. That was just the beginning for Zegler, as she won a Golden Globe for her star turn as María in West Side Story. Then 2022 called for six months in London filming Disney’s live-action Snow White—in which she plays the title character—and a few more months in Poland for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, in which Zegler plays Lucy Gray Baird. In between takes, she learned to play guitar for the part.
There have also been high-profile appearances at the Oscars and Grammys.
Zegler’s rise to stardom began in her home state. Just 16 years old at the time, she tried out for the iconic character of María in West Side Story through an open casting call. It took a year of callbacks before she landed the breakout role, which had her film scenes in Paterson.
Zegler played María in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios
When Spielberg rang, Zegler was a senior at Immaculate Conception High School in Lodi and about to play Fiona in the school’s musical production of Shrek. She had never had a professional performing job before.
When the casting news broke, tickets sold out quickly for the musical. Fans clamored for Zegler’s autograph, and the school added extra security due to heightened interest in its leading lady.
“The whole world knew what was happening. It really changed everything to suddenly have the world watching you in this tiny little school,” says Gregory Liosi, the school’s theater director and the artistic director of the Hackensack Performing Arts Center. He directed Zegler in Shrek and three other leading roles in high school musicals.
During those four years, people close to Zegler assumed she was Broadway bound. No one imagined Hollywood would come first. “We were all aware that she obviously had a future. After high school, she’d audition, get something on Broadway, and that would be her path,” Liosi says.
Even from an early age, Zegler had it, explains Kathleen Kellaigh, Zegler’s former director and the artistic director of ACT Studios in Clifton. “She naturally has that presence,” Kellaigh says. “She gets it innately. She’s born to that greatness. When you are in her presence, there is this energy that is palpable.”
Zegler was 12 years old when Kellaigh met her at an audition for the Theater League of Clifton’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. Zegler’s mom, Gina, had seen an ad for auditions in the Clifton Journal and “thought it would be good for me because I had just started to sing out,” Zegler recalls. “I just started to use my voice in a powerful way, and my mom was really instrumental in making sure that I explored that aspect of my life.”
Zegler was influenced by stage and screen legends Audra McDonald, Chita Rivera and Sutton Foster. Photo courtesy of Nathan Johnson
The production marked Zegler’s first foray into musical theater.
For the next few months during rehearsals, if anyone in the cast was missing, Zegler could step in, Kellaigh says. “She was not only holding her own against the adults, but leading the adults. Not deliberately; it wasn’t like she would take over. It was just by being who she was and taking the chances that she was willing to take.”
Growing up, Zegler was influenced by stage and screen legends Audra McDonald, Chita Rivera and Sutton Foster. It’s not lost on Zegler that she played two roles Foster originated: Fiona in Shrek and Millie in Thoroughly Modern Millie. She even got an Instagram message from Foster raving about her West Side Story performance. “It was life changing to read that from somebody that you admire so much,” Zegler says. “My soul left my body.”
Singin’ in the Rain was Zegler’s favorite movie as a kid, and she loved 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, starring Oscar Isaac. But watching movie after movie was all for fun at the time—or so Zegler thought. “It wasn’t until after I started working in film that I realized how influenced I was,” she says.
Zegler’s favorite New Jersey celebrity is none other than Bruce Springsteen, who came to visit the set of West Side Story. When asked what her dream New Jersey performance venue would be, she immediately recites a Boss-centric family tale. “My dad stumbled in on Bruce Springsteen performing at the Columns down at Avon-by-the-Sea,” Zegler recalls. “Everybody’s just eating their Thursday prime rib special. I would do that. I think that’s fun.”
When college was approaching, some of Zegler’s theater directors felt she didn’t need to go. Kellaigh remembers telling Zegler’s mom, “Don’t worry about the college thing. This is something you need to understand about her. Her time is now.” Zegler was accepted into Montclair State University’s musical theater program for the fall of 2019. She deferred to shoot West Side Story.
Zegler felt filming Shazam! was like freshman year of college. “Being on your own is such an interesting thing when you’re coming out of a pandemic,” she says. “It was like my real college experience…because I was living in the same space as so many people that I was working with and seeing at work every day.”
Zegler doesn’t feel college will ever be off the table, but she is adamant that she will pick a different major if she ever attends. “Probably something that would service the world rather than myself,” she says.
Zegler’s passion for other people helps her stand out as much as her acting chops.
One year, for the school musical Beauty and the Beast, Zegler posed for pictures as part of a fundraiser. “The way she interacted with the children who came up to take a picture, without any training whatsoever, was spot on,” Liosi remembers. “She was so good at it, effervescent, and so kind to every single person that took a picture. I used to jokingly say that Disney made her in a lab because she was so perfect in that sort of Disney persona when she was Belle [in Beauty and the Beast] and [Ariel] in The Little Mermaid. Next year, she’s going to be on the big screen in Snow White. So I guess I was right. My joke came true.”
After filming four consecutive movies and an upcoming animated musical, Zegler is ready to check off her biggest dream: Broadway.
It’s “closer than everyone thinks,” she teased. “I’m bursting at the seams about it. So very soon.”
Leigh Scheps is an entertainment reporter from the Jersey Shore who has never met Bruce Springsteen.
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Zain Asher is the anchor and host of CNN International’s One World with Zain Asher. She recently moved to Montclair with her husband and two children, and last year released Where the Children Take Us, a memoir centered on her mother’s profound influence throughout her often challenging London childhood. Asher’s brother is the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave.
Asher recently spoke with NJM about what inspired her story—and what she hopes readers take away from it.
What made you want to write your new book, Where the Children Take Us?I had just turned 36, which is how old my mother was when she got that phone call about a car crash in which my father died [in Nigeria]. The second reason was becoming a mother myself—that’s when I fully understood the gravity of what my mother went through and the extent of the sacrifices that she made. I believed that if I collated all of these lessons that I learned into a book, someone out there could benefit from it. It’s not meant to be prescriptive, but to inspire.
“It’s not meant to be prescriptive, but to inspire,” Asher says of her memoir.
How did your father’s death change you, your mom and your family?Initially, it was an emotional earthquake. It was the greatest shock to our system that you could imagine. My mother was pregnant and wasn’t able to function and be a parent. It was difficult for my older brother, too. The turning point was when he got kicked out of school. That’s when my mother rolled up her sleeves and began to fight for us.
Your mother saved your family from falling apart. Where do you think she found that strength?I’ve been deeply inspired and strengthened by how much our mother fought for us. She tried to be both a mother and a father to us. I can’t even imagine where she got the energy to do that—especially as a single mom with a newborn baby. Every time my willpower is running on low, I remember my mom and I’m filled with gratitude for her.
Can you talk about the ways that your mother inspired you to succeed, such as encouraging you to attend Oxford University?Sometimes in our society, there can be a tendency to not appreciate and not welcome ambition in women. My mother was the total opposite of that because of what she experienced as a young woman [during the Nigerian Civil War]; she ate termites and crickets to survive. For her, ambition was all about survival. We lived in a neighborhood with poverty and crime. She had to fight for her children no matter what.
My mother would say: ‘You’re just as smart as the people who [attend Oxford].’ She tore down those walls in my mind.
How did your family and your upbringing lead you to become an anchor at CNN?My mother was good at finding the work-around for anything. When my teachers said I wasn’t good enough to attend Oxford, she said, ‘What can I do to change that?’ Her solution was, if it’s about hard work, then I can make it easier [for my daughter to succeed] by eliminating distractions. I didn’t get into Oxford because I was the smartest person in the room; my mother created an environment where I had nothing to do but study. She took away our TV and our phone.
What would you like people to take away from your book?The book is a memoir, but there’s so much more to it than that. I wanted to showcase the beauty of my culture and my country. It’s not meant to make anyone pro-immigration, but I do feel like I can showcase through my family that immigrants have a lot to offer. Our culture is vibrant and rich. I was given a gift by being born in the UK and what I was given. I haven’t taken it for granted. You can’t put a price tag on being a British or U.S. citizen.
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A rock ‘n’ roll icon selling natural, holistic remedies?
It may sound implausible, but when you talk to Stevie Van Zandt—Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and a founding member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—about why he wanted to create a line of healthy products, it starts to make sense.
“For me, the message from the pandemic was that we all need to strengthen our immune systems,” says Van Zandt, who grew up in Middletown. “My wife (actress Maureen Van Zandt) is a vegan, so I’ve been conscious of developing good habits for years.”
Little Steven’s Underground Apothecary line of natural, holistic remedies was created to help improve physical and mental health while boosting the immune system.
Little Steven’s Apothecary includes coffees (seen here), teas and more holistic products. Photo courtesy of Astrida Valigorsky
Van Zandt, who starred as Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, as well as in the TV show Lilyhammer, says he noticed a big difference in his health when he cut out sugar. “You’re fighting a war all the time. I’m always taking ginger and blue pepper onstage—I find it really helps my voice,” says Van Zandt, 72.
That’ll come in handy when the E Street Band heads out this year on tour, which includes a special “homecoming” show on April 14 at the Prudential Center in Newark.
The products are now sold in select stores and online at wickedcoolwellness.com and littlesteven.com. They include boutique teas, coffees and lollipops, and use products such as Wakaya’s ginger, turmeric, kava, maca and Manuka honey.
Ten percent of the profits are being donated to Teach Rock, Van Zandt’s music-education initiative.
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The post Steven Van Zandt Ditched Sugar and Feels Great appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
New Jersey lost many bright stars in 2022.
We remember the famous faces who were born here, made their home here, or represented the Garden State in another, memorable way. Although they are gone, their legacies live on.
Ron GalellaJanuary 10, 1931-April 30, 2022
Ron Galella, a legendary celebrity photographer considered to be the “Godfather of U.S. paparazzi,” died of congestive heart failure in his Montville home on April 30. He was 91 years old. Galella made waves as trailblazer capturing candid shots of celebrities, who had previously maintained highly-curated public images. Galella was dubbed a creep, a stalker and worse when he was making a name for himself in the 1960s. Marlon Brando even once punched him in the face, breaking Galella’s jaw. His hunt for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s pictures led her to sue him, and a judge barred him from photographing her anymore. Luckily for Galella, this happened after he captured his most famous photograph of her, wandering the New York City streets in 1971, where she is seen with a half-smile and her hair blown across her face from the wind. He told New Jersey Monthly that he considers it “his Mona Lisa.” The walls of the photographer’s Montville home were covered with his iconic work, when we visited about a decade ago. There was even a room dedicated to and inspired by the legendary Andy Warhol, who was rumored to be a Galella fan.
Ray LiottaDecember 18, 1954-May 26, 2022
Ray Liotta is seen on NBC’s “Shades of Blue” in 2016. Photo: NBC/Photofest
Ray Liotta, whose unforgettable role as Henry Hill in the 1990 mob classic Goodfellas made him a household name, died on May 26 at the age of 67. The star, who grew up in Union after being adopted as a baby, passed away in his sleep in the Dominican Republic, where he’d been shooting the film Dangerous Waters. Liotta, an alum of Union High School, was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2016 and said on stage of his home state, “To me, New Jersey is about family. And Taylor ham,” which garnered laughs from the crowd. “Which you can’t find anywhere but here.” He also recalled that in Union, there was a saying that “Union has loads of good kids.” “But what I have to say is, New Jersey has loads of great people,” he added. In 2021, he gave another nod to his Jersey roots with a role in the Sopranos prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, as “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti.
Tony Sirico1942-July 8, 2022
Tony Sirico is seen on “The Sopranos.” Photo: HBO/Photofest
Tony Sirico—a Brooklyn native who played one of the most memorable New Jersey television characters of all time, mobster “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri on The Sopranos—died on July 8 at 79 years old. “Tony was like no one else: he was as tough, as loyal and as big hearted as anyone i’ve ever known. I was at his side through so much: through good times and bad. But mostly good,” actor Michael Imperioli wrote on Instagram upon announcing Sirico’s passing (He played Christopher Moltisanti and shared many a scene with Sirico). “And we had a lot of laughs. We found a groove as Christopher and Paulie and I am proud to say I did a lot of my best and most fun work with my dear pal Tony.” Sirico died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Taurean Blacque1940-July 21, 2022
Taurean Blacque starred on “Hill Street Blues” in the ’80s. Photo: NBC/Photofest
Taurean Blacque, an actor best known for his role as Detective Neal Washington on NBC’s acclaimed drama “Hill Street Blues,” died on July 16 at the age of 82. He passed away in Atlanta following a brief illness, according to Deadline. Blacque was born in Newark and graduated from its Arts High School; however, he did not pursue acting until he was almost 30. He takes credit for making Neal Washington a quiet character, aiming to move away from the “hip, jive Black man” stereotype, he once told TV Guide (via the New York Times). His name at birth was Herbert Middleton Jr., but he took on the stage name Taurean Blacque to capture casting directors’ attention. The name is an homage to his astrological sign, Taurus, which is a Venus-ruled Earth sign represented by the Bull. As the Times reports, he had two biological sons and 11 adopted children. This led him to become an adoption advocate, serving as a spokesperson for Los Angeles County adoption services and later becoming the national spokesman for adoption under the Bush Administration in 1989.
Paul Sorvino1939-July 25, 2022
Paul Sorvino is seen in 2017 in “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders.” Photo: CBS/Photofest
Paul Sorvino—best known for roles like “Big Paulie” Cicero in the 1990 mob classic Goodfellas and Sergeant Phil Cerreta on Law & Order, but also a gifted opera singer, sculptor and chef—died on July 25 at the age of 83. The New York-born, former Tenafly resident, whose Oscar-winning daughter, Mira Sorvino, spent much of her childhood in the Bergen County suburb, is also survived by his children Amanda Sorvino and Michael Sorvino and his beloved wife of nearly eight years, Dee Dee Sorvino. Although he left the Garden State years ago, he once told New Jersey Monthly, “I still have a lot of fondness for New Jersey. If there was a New Jersey song, I’d sing it.”
Anne HecheMay 25, 1969-August 12, 2022
Anne Heche is seen circa 2007/2008 promoting “Men in Trees.” Photo: ABC/Photofest
Actress Anne Heche died on August 12 following a horrific car crash in Los Angeles, which was ruled an accident. A Hollywood star, Heche spent some of her difficult youth at the Jersey Shore, including Atlantic City and Ocean City. “That’s where I first became an actress,” she told Suburban Life magazine in 2017 (via nj.com). “I literally started singing for my supper, right on the Boardwalk. I would flip burgers and sing show tunes to get people to come to our stand.” Her first job was at a local dinner theater in Swainton, which she said helped support her family. “So, you could definitely say that New Jersey changed my life,” Heche said. “I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Jersey.”
Frank Vallelonga Jr.Green Book actor and former Bergen County pizzeria owner Frank Vallelonga Jr. died on November 28 at 60 years old. He formerly served up pies as the owner of Tony Lip’s Italian Restaurant & Pizza in Franklin Lakes, which was a nod to his father, who was nicknamed Tony Lip (and was known for playing crime boss Carmine Lupertazzi on The Sopranos). Vallelonga’s body was found dumped in the Bronx, according to the New York Times, and Bronx man Steven Smith, 35, was charged with concealing the corpse. Smith has claimed Vallelonga was “dead already,” per the Times.
Bob McGrath1932-December 4, 2022
Bob McGrath (bottom right) appears with the cast of “Sesame Street” in 2004. Photo: PBS/Photofeset
Bob McGrath, who for decades put smiles on the faces of children and parents alike as Bob Johnson on Sesame Street, died at his Norwood home on December 4. He was 90 years old. McGrath, an original cast member who worked on the children’s program until 2016, was born in Illinois but lived in New Jersey for the last 60 years, the bulk in Teaneck. He was as beloved off-screen as he was on TV, according to northjersey.com. “He was a person we’d see in our neighborhood,” former Teaneck Mayor Jackie Kates told the website, referencing a famed Sesame Street tune. “But he was also part of our family. The loss feels very personal.”
Helen Slayton-Hughes1930-December 7, 2022
Photo: ABC/Photofest
Helen Slayton-Hughes, best known for her role as Ethel Beavers on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, died on December 7 at the age of 92. She was born in Glen Ridge. In addition to Parks and Rec, she made appearances on numerous other popular shows over the years, including The West Wing, The Middle, Arrested Development and Pretty Little Liars. She reportedly had four children and six grandchildren, and was related to another Jersey celeb, Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage (who grew up in Mendham), her first cousin once removed, according to nj.com.
Dino Danelli1944-December 15, 2022
Dino Danelli, the Jersey City-born, original drummer of the rock group the Rascals (first known as the Young Rascals), died on December 15 at age 78. He had been in declining health for years, Joe Russo, the group’s historian and a close friend, told the New York Times. The band, formed in Garfield in 1965, is considered among the first American bands to form following the British Invasion the year prior. The band made their debut at the Choo Choo Club in Garfield. The group dissolved in the early 1970s, but Danelli’s music career carried on. In 1980, he collaborated with fellow Jersey boy Steven Van Zandt, guitarist of the E Street Band, on a side project called the Disciples of Soul. Van Zandt, a longtime Rascals fan, delivered the group’s 1997 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, where he called Danelli “the greatest rock drummer of all time,” according to the Times.
The post New Jersey Celebrities Who Died in 2022 appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Stan Lee is known for his unique Marvel career, but he also sometimes contributed to competitor DC Comics, most notably in his Just Imagine… series from 2001–2002. The series puts Lee’s spin on DC characters, and in the first issue, Just Imagine: Stan Lee’s Batman, Batman is Wayne Williams, an African American man who takes revenge on those who framed him for robbery.
The issue featured Lee’s writing and the art of another comics legend, Joe Kubert. Kubert is best known for work on DC characters Sgt. Rock and Hawkman, as well as for founding the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, New Jersey’s own accredited cartooning college. Emma Kubert, Joe Kubert’s granddaughter, a graduate of and teacher at the school, recalls Lee as “being a really big fan of my grandpa’s.”
Lee makes a cameo in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, something he did in most Marvel films prior to his 2018 death. Photo: Columbia Pictures/Photofest
Just Imagine: Stan Lee’s Batman features the work of comic book artist Joe Kubert in addition to Marvel legend Stan Lee’s writing.
The Kubert School currently teaches 90 undergraduates across three years in a semester system. It is a hybrid experience post Covid. Joe, who lived in Dover for over 40 years, founded the school in 1976 because he wanted it “close to home,” says Emma.
It was first run by Kubert with his wife, Muriel; after his death in 2012, sons and school graduates Adam and Andy, Emma’s father, took over. Anthony Marques bought the school in 2019; Emma says he “runs the school like Joe did.”
Kubert’s influence remains in some key policies. Student classes are a year long with the same peers and teacher, and drawing for up to 10 hours a day is required. “The school is run [the way] a freelance artist would live everyday life,” says Emma. What her grandparents didn’t foresee, she says, is the community that that experience creates, which “really is kind of the staple of the school.”
Kubert School teachers are required to be working industry professionals, and the curriculum is designed to support job placement. On top of drawing fundamentals, which Emma teaches, students learn topics from storyboarding to digital production to graphic design, as well as how to use computer programs like Illustrator.
Of the school’s impact, Emma says that “usually for an artist, it takes 10-plus years to develop their skills, but by having the kind of curriculum that we have at the school, you can really fast-track that [kind of] learning.”
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Illustration by Yiran Jia
Long before he was the center of the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU), Stan Lee was just another 19-year-old at Fort Monmouth for basic training—as Lee quipped, “Guarding New Jersey from an impending enemy invasion”—shortly after enlisting in November 1942.
Lee was initially “put on sentinel duty overlooking the Atlantic,” according to Abraham Riesman’s 2021 book, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, “freezing his tuchus off in what he assumed was a kind of official hazing ritual.”
But this soon became an important moment in Lee’s early career. “This was an eye-opening experience,” another Lee biographer, Bob Batchelor, tells New Jersey Monthly. “His time at Fort Monmouth exposed [Lee] to recruits and draftees from all over the country….It broadened his ideas about storytelling.”
At the time, of course, there was “no way Stan could have known his military service would have any direct impact on his writing,” Riesman notes in True Believer.
Ultimately, though, Lee (who died in 2018) learned valuable lessons during his time at the Jersey Shore, on his way to creating icons such as Spider-Man, Iron Man and Black Panther, who have since come to dominate American popular culture—thanks in no small part to another show business titan with Garden State ties.
Kevin Feige—a graduate of Westfield High School—has served as a top producer on three dozen MCU blockbusters in the last two decades, including the latest entry, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which hit theaters in November.
Ultimately, by one estimate, the collective labor of Stan Lee, Kevin Feige, and MCU’s army of musclebound heroes and evil villains has generated worldwide revenues of nearly $30 billion, “making it the biggest movie franchise ever,” according to Business Insider.
Stan Lee entered the U.S. Army in early 1942 and served as a member of the Signal Corps after basic training in Fort Monmouth.
MCU fans have even glimpsed the Garden State in several recent blockbusters. A fictional Jersey military base plays a pivotal role in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger as well as Avengers: Endgame, the 2019 flick that is now the highest-grossing film of all time. Meanwhile, the Disney+ TV show WandaVision is set in the (real) North Jersey town of Westview.
Marvel also returned to Jersey this past summer with a new take on Ms. Marvel—Kamala Khan, a character first introduced in the 1960s as an Air Force officer and female counterpart to (then male) Captain Marvel.
In 2013, the Ms. Marvel comics character was reimagined by a creative team including Jersey natives Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson as a Muslim American teen, who now stars in her own Disney + TV series.
“Ms. Marvel is a new kind of superhero,” head writer and executive producer Bisha K. Ali says. “I never saw a young teenager of color—specifically a Pakistani—in a comic book. Are you kidding?”
As Kamala Khan herself put it in one episode: “It’s not usually the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world.”
Marvel’s setting was a homecoming, of sorts, for Stan Lee, who would have turned 100 years old this December. He was born Stanley Martin Lieber, a short stroll from the New York-New Jersey waterfront, in December 1922.
His parents, Jack and Celia, were working-class Jewish immigrants who raised Lee, as well as his younger brother, Larry, on Manhattan’s West End Avenue, and later, in the Bronx.
Though he would eventually earn fame and fortune in the visual world of comic book art, Lee was actually more of a word nerd growing up—a “nut for reading,” as Riesman writes. Young Stan devoured everything from Shakespeare and Mark Twain to Leo Edwards’s once-popular Poppy Ott children’s series.
Lee had an uncle on his mother’s side who worked in the up-and-coming comic book industry. After graduating high school at the age of 16, Lee took his facility with narrative structure to the offices of what was then known as Timely Comics (later morphing into Marvel Comics).
By the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler was rattling sabers across Europe. This was reflected in a new Timely character—Captain America—introduced in March 1941.
“Lee had already been heavily influenced by working on the early Captain America comics. Many had Nazis on the cover as villains,” notes Batchelor, whose updated Lee biography, Stan Lee: A Life, was rereleased in October.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, Lee did not wait to be drafted.
“I felt I had to go in the army,” Lee wrote in his 2002 autobiography, Excelsior. “I used to go to penny arcades…and shoot those little guns and win prizes all the time—I figured I was a shoo-in to handle real guns.”
But frostbite, not firearms, was a bigger concern once Lee was posted in Jersey.
“My first assignment at Fort Monmouth was to stand guard duty at night, there in sight of the Atlantic Ocean,” Lee recalled. “Once the sun went down and the frigid wind came up, I turned into one human ice cube of a sentry.”
When he was finally able to leave his icy post, Lee raced back to the barracks “so fast I almost caused a sonic boom.”
Lee was eventually selected to serve in the Army’s communications wing—the Signal Corps. And while he was only at Fort Monmouth long enough to endure the rigors of basic training, the experience left a deep impression on Lee, according to biographers.
“Fort Monmouth was a big, austere base, and well-known as a research facility,” says Batchelor. “Think about it—radar, the most innovative communications equipment—all from this base in New Jersey!”
Lee’s subsequent military postings would keep him far from the front lines. But his storytelling instincts were stirred up nonetheless.
Lee was, as Excelsior puts it, “fired up with excitement, anticipating the adventure of climbing telephone polls and splicing wire under fire.”
Lee was starting to “see things in comic book form,” he wrote.
Army higher-ups later tapped Lee as “one of only nine men assigned to the [Signal Corps’] so called playwright division,” charged with educating soldiers about everything from equipment to morale.
“When he wrote training manuals or used cartoon images to educate users on a piece of delicate equipment,” Batchelor notes, “Lee thought about all those different men and how he could best reach them.”
Also part of Lee’s job was building morale—propaganda.
“Stan Lee was a hype man!” says Riesman with a laugh. “His job was about salesmanship. Salesmanship. Mission purpose. Camaraderie.”
[RELATED: Stan Lee Was ‘A Big Fan’ of DC Comics Competitor Joe Kubert]
This instinct for hype—mixed in with heaping doses of creativity, exaggeration and occasional outright lies—served Lee well after the war as he rose through the comic book industry, cultivating a madcap persona, at once eccentric and approachable.
And prolific.
Lee makes a cameo in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, something he did in most Marvel films prior to his 2018 death. Photo: Columbia Pictures/Photofest
In the early 1960s, Lee and frequent collaborator Jack Kirby unveiled the Fantastic Four, followed by the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Daredevil, Iron Man and more. Thus began a thrilling run of creativity—and financial success—that was interrupted at times by shifts in cultural taste, but has dominated the 21st century.
Alongside all of the acclaim, however, were never-ending emotional and legal disputes about who actually deserved most of the credit—and cash—for these comic creations. Right up until Lee’s 2018 death, having earned and also lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Lee was entangled in legal and financial disputes, amid charges that a onetime business associate was essentially imprisoning the 95-year-old Lee in an elaborate effort to steal his money.
Such sensational heights of fame seemed unlikely right after Stan Lee left Fort Monmouth and joined artists such as Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington director Frank Capra in the Signal Corps. Another Signal Corps member was a talented illustrator from Westfield, New Jersey, named Charles Addams, whose ghoulish cartoons for the New Yorker evolved into a television and movie franchise still with us today.
In a movie landscape decimated by Covid-19, 2021’s Addams Family 2 raked in $125 million. Not bad at all. But not in the same (if you will) universe as the Marvel/Stan Lee flick SpiderMan: No Way Home, which has thus far earned nearly $2 billion across the globe.
Lee popped up as Willie Lumpkin in the 2005 flick Fantastic Four. Photo: 20th Century Fox/Photofest
In the not-too-distant future, when you watch an Addams Family reboot or a new superhero streaming series, it might have its own Fort Monmouth connection.
Stan Lee’s onetime basic training site was shut down in 2011. Since then, local officials have tried to sell developers on potential uses for the 300-acre site. Earlier this year, Governor Phil Murphy pronounced himself “thrilled” that Netflix was planning to turn the old Army base into a state-of-the-art film-production facility.
[RELATED: Inside New Jersey’s Thriving Film and TV Industries]
Which could be seen as yet another homecoming, of sorts, for Stan Lee. Whatever his actual role in the big bang that created the Marvel Universe, it was substantial and important. Another bookish kid with deep connections to Jersey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz, once wrote: “If Western popular culture has a common idiom, a force that binds us all, the stories contained in Marvel Comics are probably it. In a few short decades…[they have] rewired how millions, perhaps even billions, of people imagine what is possible, what is heroic, what is good.”
All of which suggests that Stan Lee used a lot more than his tuchus during his chilly stint at the Jersey Shore.
Tom Deignan is a Woodbridge resident and regular contributor to New Jersey Monthly. He has written for the Washington Post and New York Times and is researching a book about Ellis Island.
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The post How New Jersey Shaped Stan Lee Into a Marvel Legend appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Zach Braff’s newest film features a pair of Hollywood heavyweights—and two New Jersey towns.
A Good Person, written and directed by Braff, filmed in South Orange and Maplewood in 2021. Braff, 47, grew up in South Orange, and his movie’s new trailer spotlights locales such as the South Orange train station and Columbia High School, the Scrubs star’s alma mater.
The trailer, released by MGM, highlights performances from Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. Pugh, Braff’s real-life former girlfriend, plays Allison, whose life veers off-course when a fatal accident claims her soon-to-be sister-in-law. Freeman plays Daniel, a model train enthusiast and Allison’s would-be father-in-law. The two develop an unlikely and healing connection in the aftermath of their shared tragedy.
[RELATED: Inside New Jersey’s Thriving Film and TV Industries]
Pugh, 26, produced the movie with Braff. Freeman, 85, previously starred in Braff’s 2017 remake of Going in Style.
“This is the first time I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of watching how the art is made from the very beginning to the very end,” Pugh wrote in an Instagram post accompanied by the trailer. “I am so proud of this creation, I’m so grateful to all those who jumped on board this crazy journey with us.”
A Good Person also stars Molly Shannon, Celeste O’Connor, Chinaza Uche and Zoe Lister-Jones.
Zach Braff (left) and Morgan Freeman on the set of Braff’s 2017 film Going in Style. Photo: Warner Bros./Photofest
Braff first made a name for himself as an actor by playing J.D. on Scrubs, the medical comedy TV series that debuted in 2001.
A Good Person is not Braff’s first movie to include his home turf. His directorial debut, Garden State, took place, naturally, in New Jersey. The 2004 flick earned a Grammy for best soundtrack.
“I love New Jersey and I’ll keep setting my films in New Jersey as long as they let me,” Braff told New Jersey Monthly in an interview a few years back.
A Good Person, which will be rated R, hits theaters March 24.
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The post Zach Braff’s New Film Stars Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman and New Jersey appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
David Krumholtz played Bernard the Elf in the Santa Clause film franchise and now stars in Tom Stoppard’s Broadway play Leopoldstadt. Photo by Chris Buck
Bergen County’s David Krumholtz returned to his well-loved role as Bernard the Elf in the Santa Clause movie franchise this holiday season. But lately a weightier, wisecrack-free character is landing him in the spotlight: Krumholtz plays Hermann, the patriarch of a well-to-do Jewish family, in Tony Award winner Tom Stoppard’s latest Broadway hit, Leopoldstadt.
It’s the turn of the 20th century in Vienna, and Hermann converts to Christianity to better his chances at social and professional mobility. But he’s derailed by what Krumholtz describes as “an unwelcome comeuppance.”
“Ultimately, he cannot escape his destiny,” says Krumholtz, 44, who moved to Wyckoff with his wife, Vanessa, and their young son and daughter from Los Angeles five years ago. “It’s a deeply devastating play with some very hard truths to tell.”
For Krumholtz, those truths often feel personal. His father grew up in Manhanttan, surrounded by Holocaust survivors. In 2017, he died of multiple system atrophy, a rare neurological disorder.
“I’m doing the play in tribute to him,” he says. “It’s been a chance for me to reconnect with my own Judaism, which would have been my father’s dream come true.”
David Krumholtz on stage in Leopoldstadt with actress Faye Castelow, who plays Gretl to his Hermann. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus
Making the leap to live theater after a 30-year career on screens—Krumholtz starred in the CBS series NUMB3RS and in movies including Harold & Kumar—hasn’t been easy.
“I’ve been spoiled by film and television, where you shoot one scene on one day, and then it’s over, and where it’s rare to work every single day,” he says. But living in New Jersey, where he has fallen in love with what he calls “the keenness and smartness of New Jerseyans,” and has become part of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, has been a balm. Every day, he drives to the Longacre Theater in Midtown Manhattan.
On the way, “I’ll call a friend to tell them how intimidated I am by the play, how frightened I am,” he says. “It settles me down.”
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The Boss is promoting his new covers album, “Only The Strong Survive,” for four nights on Jimmy Fallon's show.
The post Bruce Springsteen Slated for Soulful ‘Tonight Show’ Takeover appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The Four Seasons frontman is returning to his native Newark this November for a concert at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
The post Frankie Valli on Jazz, His Go-To Jersey Restaurant and What He Sings in the Shower appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
New Jersey native J.R. Smith used to be an NBA sharpshooter. Now he spends his time golfing—and in the classroom—at North Carolina A&T.
The post Different Strokes: Former Knick J.R. Smith Talks Transition to College, Golf appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
For a writer whose late mother adored the barrier-breaking Queen of Salsa, the Forked River service area serves as a poignant link to the past.
The post Parkway Rest Stop, Renamed for Celia Cruz, Prompts a Ride Down Memory Lane appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
After a years-long hiatus, the New Brunswick band announced a reunion in March. Now they're gearing up for a Jersey concert—and a brand-new album.
The post The Gaslight Anthem’s Reunion Comes With Great Expectations appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
New Jersey resident Nate Burleson spent 11 years in the NFL. Now he’s enjoying a meteoric broadcasting career that’s transcended sports.
The post At CBS, Nate Burleson Fulfills a Dream That’s Bigger Than Football appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The Red Bank native proves the Garden State is not just a quick stop. He's back to launch a film house and reboot his cult-classic film.
The post ‘Clerks’ Director Kevin Smith Returns to a Jersey Shore State of Mind appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
A two-time Super Bowl winner with the Giants, Eli Manning joins a high-profile group of Gotham FC minority stakeholders.
The post Eli Manning Joins NJ/NY Gotham FC Ownership Group appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Bruce Springsteen joined fellow Jersey native and Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff for a surprise performance at Radio City on Tuesday.
The post Bleachers, Bruce Springsteen Bring Jersey Flair to Radio City appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
With 8 Jersey eateries among his 15 worldwide, the Hazlet native makes room for whimsy (Think: whisks dipped in cake batter and pizzas topped with actual crickets!).
The post David Burke, NJ’s Rockstar Chef, Serves Flavor, Fun and Surprise appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
"Remember Them" celebrates local icons like Frank Sinatra, James Gandolfini and Whitney Houston, who changed the face of the Garden State.
The post New TV Series Spotlights Late NJ Legends appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Fabian Nicieza's "The Self-Made Widow" just came out this month.
The post Deadpool Co-Creator Tackles Suburban Life in New NJ Mystery appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Judy Blume, who was born and raised in Elizabeth, is one of America’s most beloved authors.
The post Judy Blume Documentary to Shed Light on Author’s Youth in NJ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The home, which Whitney Houston used as a guest house and a recording studio, sits on just over 5 acres of property in Mendham.
The post Whitney Houston’s Former NJ Home Sells for Nearly $1.6M appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The Jersey Shore legend on historic music moments, quirky pandemic-era performances, and "Live In Cleveland ’77," out now on CD.
The post Southside Johnny Chats New Jukes Album, Stone Pony Show appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
"At this time, the Township of Union is exploring various options on how best to honor/remember Ray Liotta," Mayor Manuel Figueiredo said.
The post Ray Liotta’s Union Hometown to Honor Him After Death appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
"We are bursting with love and joy and Mac is officially the best big brother ever."
The post WNBC’s Raphael Miranda and Husband Welcome Baby Girl appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The "Goodfellas" star was born in Newark and grew up in Union.
The post Ray Liotta, ‘Goodfellas’ Star and Newark Native, Dead at 67 appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
With June's Pride Month approaching, Miranda says much has changed for the LGBTQ+ community and for him personally following his public coming-out more than a decade ago.
The post WNBC’s Raphael Miranda Reflects on Public Coming-Out, Prepares For Baby No. 2 appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The Bravo couple may spend most of their time in the Hamptons and NYC, but Batula has Jersey in her blood.
The post Amanda Batula, Kyle Cooke of ‘Summer House’ Take Fans to Her Native NJ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Chris Rock's tour kicks off in Atlantic City just days after Will Smith slapped him at the Oscars.
The post Chris Rock Ticket Prices Soar Post–Oscars Slap as Star Readies for NJ Shows appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The Jonas Brothers star and wife Danielle Jonas, both NJ natives, have a children's book out inspired by their family.
The post Kevin Jonas Is Rocking Dad Life in New Jersey appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
As the executive director of the Devils Youth Foundation, Whitman Annis works to ensure hockey is accessible to every NJ kid who wants to play.
The post Kate Whitman Annis on Hockey, Resiliency & the Devils Game That Changed Her Life appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Muhammad Ali—who would have turned 80 years old on January 17, 2022—is Cherry Hill’s most recognizable homeowner ever.
The post A Look Back at Muhammad Ali’s Life in Cherry Hill appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Bobbi Brown left her billion-dollar global brand in 2016. Her second act, Jones Road Beauty, has received a warm welcome in her longtime NJ hometown.
The post Makeup Mogul Bobbi Brown on Starting Over and the Magic of Montclair appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
First Lady Jill Biden returned to her birth state of New Jersey on Thursday for a visit to Bergen Community College in Paramus.
The post Jill Biden Visits Her Native NJ, Says She Feels at ‘Home’ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
"Jeopardy!" contestants had no problem answering other New Jersey questions, but one about Governor Murphy left the group puzzled.
The post Who is Phil Murphy? ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestants Can’t Name NJ Governor appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Laurie Hernandez, 21, grew up in Old Bridge and says there's nowhere in the world quite like the Garden State.
The post Olympic Gymnast Laurie Hernandez Says It’s Impossible to ‘Recreate’ New Jersey appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The Family Band guitarist talks philanthropy, education and life in Livingston.
The post How Musician Robert Randolph is Steering Kids Toward High-Paying Jobs appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The NBC News meteorologist, Manalapan native and new mom to baby Russell recalls her childhood in the Garden State.
The post ‘Today’ Co-Host Dylan Dreyer Calls Growing Up in NJ ‘the Reason I am Who I am’ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Anger at the current political landscape inspires the actress/comedian’s latest episode as author and activist.
The post Chelsea Handler Has a New Outlook on Life appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
In a candid interview, the Sopranos star came clean about nervous moments, favorite co-stars and that time he threw up in an airport.
The post When James Gandolfini Let Down His Guard appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Weary plays Deran Cody on the hit TNT drama Animal Kingdom, whose fourth season premieres May 28 at 9 pm.
The post Actor Jake Weary: ‘I’m a Jersey Boy at Heart’ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Andre Braugher, the distinguished actor best known for playing buttoned-up, hyper-competent characters on television stars in a world-premiere at SOPAC.
The post Andre Braugher Stars in “Tell Them I’m Still Young” at SOPAC appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Oh maron! Can you believe "The Sopranos" premiered on HBO twenty years ago? Here's an update on the most memorable characters and locations.
The post 20th Anniversary of “The Sopranos” appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
The beard is real—and so is Ron Williams’s joy at playing Santa.
The post Seasonal Greeter: A Day in the Life of Mall Santa appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
From 1986: With three hit singles, a chart-topping debut album, a Grammy, and her family behind her, 22-year-old Whitney Houston is destined to become the next great pop singer from New Jersey.
The post NJM Archives: Whitney Houston Profile ‘This Voice Can’t Miss’ appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
While his brother achieves film and TV fame, Jonathan Dinklage thrives under the stage as lead violinist of Broadway’s Hamilton.
The post Jonathan Dinklage, Lead Violinist for ‘Hamilton,’ is Not Throwing Away His Shot appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Southside Johnny stays close to his roots—musically, spiritually and geographically.
The post Southside Johnny is Still Having a Party appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Former Glee star Lea Michele talks about her Tenafly roots, her current tour with Darren Criss, her love of Barbra Streisand and her favorite Jersey restaurant.
The post A Conversation with Lea Michele appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Bruce wows NJ Hall of Fame crowd with Miami Steve induction, performance.
The post Springsteen’s Surprise Asbury Park Appearance appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
Little Steven Van Zandt talks with NJM about his induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, his Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, and whether he'll make an appearance in the Sopranos sequel.
The post A Conversation with Steven Van Zandt appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.