By Reid Spagna

Born in Pittsburgh, Peter Ackerman received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Yale and attended The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco to study acting. Among other works he is the co-author of Ice Age and Ice Age 3.

The writer met his wife when she starred in his play, Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight. The couple settled down on West End Avenue and has two sons.

Most recently, he is the author of The Lonely Phone Booth, his newly released children’s book.

Peter Ackerman

The story portrays one of four remaining phone booths in Manhattan, located on the northwest corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street. An analog victim in a digital world, the booth loses its grasp on the neighborhood as “shiny silver objects” capture the ears of passing pedestrians.

Currently working on an animated feature for Universal Pictures, Ackerman recently took time to discuss The Lonely Phone Booth, his writing career and the changing culture of New York City.

Our Town: Why did you choose the 100th Street phone booth to be the subject of your book?

Peter Ackerman: The story came about a couple of years ago when my younger son was three. We were walking by the booth, and he said, “Why is that phone in a box?” I realized that he had no idea; it seemed very funny to me.

What implicit messages did you aim to express with The Lonely Phone Booth?

Everything has value. Even though things are changing, it doesn’t mean that something we used to use is valueless. The phone booth is a metaphor for a human being. An older person can’t do everything that he or she used to do, but it doesn’t mean that they are valueless.

What is your most memorable phone booth experience?

In college, my girlfriend spent the semester in France. I would go to a particular phone booth and she would call me collect and I’d accept the charges. We got away with this a few times, but one time, the operator broke in and said, “I know what you’re doing!” I was very panicked, and hung up the phone. It was a very dramatic moment.

What is the cultural significance of old phone booths?

There is a neighborhood feel to it. I’ve seen people in phone booths laughing, crying and yelling. You don’t exactly hear what they are saying, as they are enclosed in the booth, but in a weird way, you imagine all sorts of things about them.

You co-wrote Ice Age and Ice Age 3. How do you find a balance between entertaining children and adults, in both your book and the Ice Age films?

If you know that kids and adults are going to see something, you need to have themes that are simple and clear. I tend to write about things that are interesting to me, but I don’t try to talk down to kids.

Do your sons have any input in your children’s works?

When the book was still in gallery form, I read the book to my son’s class at P.S. 87 and made some changes to it based on certain words they couldn’t understand and the jokes that they thought were and weren’t funny.

What has writing The Lonely Phone Booth taught you? Does it make you notice new things about the city?

I feel alert to everything that is around me in the neighborhood. The truth is, I must have passed that phone booth a billion times with my kids, and I hadn’t thought about it. Then my son noticed how unusual it was, so I take more notice of things, great and small.

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Since opening Sfoglia on a barren stretch of Lexington Avenue in 2006, husband-and-wife owners Ron Suhanosky and Colleen Marnell-Suhanosky have been inundated with hungry Upper East Siders who were thrilled to have a sought-after pasta joint in the neighborhood. The couple made their first foray into cookbooks last September with Pasta Sfoglia (Wiley and Sons, Inc., $29.95), which won a 2010 James Beard Award in the single subject category and was included on several fall best cookbook lists.

Ron Suhanosky says he will reveal plans for another restaurant in the coming weeks—but it won’t be in New York.

Ron, who deals with the savory side of the menu while Colleen handles bread and pastries, sat down on a recent rainy afternoon to talk about how best to get a reservation at Sfoglia, customer pet peeves and when his wife once poisoned the family. We’ll have to wait to get Colleen’s side of the story, as she was due to return from Italy the following day, where she’d been living with their kids for a year so they could learn Italian.

Q: How does one go around writing a cookbook?
A: Well, you hire somebody to help you.

Q: To do the writing?
A: Not necessarily. I think that the great success to a cookbook is if you translate a recipe from a commercial kitchen to a home kitchen. That’s really the difficulty in creating a cookbook. I didn’t have too much trouble doing that. I had help from my co-writer, Susan Simon, and she’s written cookbooks before so she was able to help translate a recipe to the home kitchen.

Q: What is the biggest misconception about cooking pasta at home? People think it’s an easy, simple meal.
A: Great pasta dishes are all about the marriage of the sauce and the pasta and the pasta water—which is one of the recipes that I fought really hard to have in that book, because it’s such a major part of each recipe. My editor was like, “There is a recipe for pasta water?” And there is: You have plain water and you’re putting pasta in it and there is salt and you’re using that as part of an ingredient to the finished dish. That really helps the marriage of the two. The misconception about that in America is that you put the sauce over the pasta, and really the whole idea is that you are supposed to marry the two together and create this unbelievable bowl of pasta.

Q: Have you ever used jarred sauce at home?
A: No, never done that. It’s funny that you bring this up because I’ve been approached recently to create my own tomato sauce. And I won’t do it because it defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to get across and what I believe in—that you really can make a quick tomato sauce. There’s nothing difficult about it. In the time that you cook pasta, which is in 7-8 minutes, you could have a pasta sauce.

Q: What goes in it?
A: Garlic, olive oil, tomato and basil. You let it cook and then you add the pasta to the sauce.

Q: Between you and your wife, who’s a better cook? Although I guess that’s not the best question because you’re savory, she’s sweet.
A: Colleen is a good cook, although there have been times that she has actually poisoned us. When we’re living in Nantucket it was all over the news. She is a forager and she once picked what she thought was wild asparagus but it was blue indigo so we had to get our stomachs pumped.

Q: What is blue indigo?
A: It’s like a hallucinate drug. I was drinking that charcoal shake [in the hospital] and it was awful.

Q: So she’s not allowed to forage anymore?
A: Not for me. She can forage for herself.

Q: Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to food? Like Kraft macaroni and cheese, Twinkies?
A: I love peanut M&Ms—that is what I call my piato uniquo in Italian. It’s a one-plate meal. Every now and then I binge on a bag of potato chips like any American would.

Q: So no Olive Garden?
A: No, no, I rather starve than eat that kind of stuff.

Q: Would you ever consider opening another restaurant in New York City?
A: Yes, actually I’m considering it right now.

Q: Can you tell us where, or is it a secret?
A: I can’t.

Q: When will we know?
A: Maybe in a month. But it’s not in New York City, or New York State, for that matter.

Q: You’ve been a guest on the Martha Stewart show before. You liked doing it?
A: I wouldn’t say that I liked it. I would say more that I was told that I was good on television so that’s how I am going to pursue it.

Q: Are you nervous on television?
A: No, I just don’t want to go about it with an ego. My approach about everything really has been with my ego just below the radar. I think it is better received that way. It’s more important that I get across what I’m trying to teach people or express to people. Not so much about me being the chef.

Q: Like Rachael Ray?
A: Well, that’s entertainment. Mine is more practical.

Q: This place is always jam-packed. Do you have any tips for people who want to dine here at a normal hour?
A: Getting through to us on the phone is a difficult process because we can only answer the phone when the phone calls come in, and we really do have two phone lines and we only have one person working the phones. What I tell people is to email their requests. We have a great website that people can go on and look at the menu and preview what the restaurant’s about.

Q: Any pet peeves that diners do?
A: Last night, actually, I had this incident that was kind of funny. I took a walk-in party of two. Seemed like a young hip couple. She was looking at the menu and she looked like she was perplexed about what to order and before I could even get into any detail about the menu she asked me if I had chicken piccata or veal milanese. And I was so close to letting out of my mouth, “I think you’re in the wrong part of this town. Maybe you should be downtown in Little Italy because that is where they carry that stuff.” I literally went on Facebook and posted it on my Facebook page—all these question marks: chicken picatta? Wrong part of town! I talked her into getting the pappardelle Bolognese. We brought out the pasta and literally she started picking off the pieces of parsley that we sprinkled on top. I just thought, those are the people—I wish I had some sort of doorbell at the front so they’d let me know that they were coming in and [I] could say, “No that’s OK—take a right turn down the street, there’s a place that serves that kind of stuff.”

Q: If somebody does send back food, chefs don’t do anything bad to it. Not here, of course, but in general.
A: No, no. You mean like if it has fallen on the floor, do we put it back on the plate?

Q: Or if they are allergic to something, do you just pick it off?
A: We just make fun of them in the back.

—
Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide to Soccer and Geopolitics
World Cup fever hits June 11. If you’re going to pretend like you know what you’re talking about for the only month every four years that Americans care about soccer, you better do your research. Join Stephen and Harrison Stark as they discuss their book World Cup 2010, which lays out the premise that soccer is the window to a nation’s soul.
June 9, The Strand, 828 Broadway (at E. 12th St.), 212-473-1452; 7, Free.

The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee comes to Bryant Park.

Word for Word Series
With an event nearly every other day this summer, the Word for Word series in Bryant Park has something for everyone. Highlights include funny woman Samantha Bee (June 9), mean girl publicist Kelly Cutrone (June 16), sex master Dr. Ruth (June 30) and bad-ass war journalist and screenwriter Sebastian Junger (July 14). It’s the perfect storm of speakers.
Wednesdays, Bryant Park, enter park at W. 41st St. and 6th Ave., 212-768-4242; 12:30, Free.

Madison Square Reads
Throughout the summer, well-known writers will give free outdoor readings in Madison Square Park—right next to Shake Shack! You could read the entire book while on line! July 15, Craig Nelson (not the dude from Coach) reads from Rocket Men: The Epic Story of The First Men on The Moon. There’s also a number of food writers, then the stage hosts David Gates, Tracy Daugherty, Emily Barton and Stacey D’Erasmo July 22, to honor short fiction writer Donald Barthelme.
Thursday evenings, Madison Square Park’s Farragut Monument, enter park at E. 23rd St. and Madison Ave., www.madisonsquarepark.org; 6:30, Free.

McNally Jackson Fiction Book Club
Trend-shattering successful independent bookstore McNally Jackson is never short on interesting writers attempting to educate the fashionable illiterates of Nolita. The store also hosts plenty of readings and the summer kicks off with a bang—or just a dude with bangs—when Simon Rich visits June 2. Check back on the website for future updates.
One Monday per month, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. (betw. Lafayette & Mulberry Sts.), 212-274-1160, www.mcnallyjackson.com; 7, Free.

Housing Works Bookstore Café
The non-profit has its once a year Open Air Street Fair June 5, where it opens up the secret basement vault and unloads thousands of books for a dollar each on Crosby Street. Award-winning Netherland author Joseph O’Neill stops by June 10. For those of you whose psychiatric needs aren’t being met (i.e. all of you), there will be a July 27 event that’s described as “speed-dating but with shrinks” to celebrate the paperback release of our pal Sue Shapiro’s Speed Shrinking.
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby St. (betw. E. Houston & Prince Sts.), 212-334-3324, www.housingworks.org; Free.

Bloomsday on Broadway
For the past 28 years, Symphony Space co-founder Isaiah Sheffer has hosted a marathon staging of scenes from James Joyce’s Ulysses, enlisting a lot of big-name celebrities to bring the story of a day in the life of Dublin anti-hero Leopold Bloom to life. Performances have been known to go on for seven hours, so be prepared for a lot of Joyce. Whatever the length, $25 is a good price for what has become a New York institution.
June 16, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway (betw. W. 95th & W. 96th Sts.), 212-864-5400; 7 $25.

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“It was percolating in a way I didn’t necessarily confront, and every time I considered exploring it, it got so personal that there was no way to separate approaching it as a journalist and as a twin,” said Pogrebin, an Upper West Side native and former 60 Minutes producer. “I finally decided to not be frightened by the fact that it would be personal.”

Of course, since the book covers her life as a twin, including a visit to Twinsburg, Ohio, which hosts an annual twins convention, her family is included, especially her twin sister.

Abigail Pogrebin’s new book reflects on her life as a twin and profiles the unusual experiences of other twins. Photo by Lorin Klaris

“To write this was to decide that [Robin’s] life would be peeled back too,” she said. “It wasn’t an easy decision, and I needed to do it with Robin’s blessing. The biggest act of love was that she let me go ahead and write it—that took a lot of trust, since there are things she wasn’t comfortable with.”

Although her interviews with fertility clinic doctors and other experts are included, the portraits of different twins are the heart of the book.

“The people who really come to life are the twins profiled in each section,” Pogrebin said.

She talks to NFL players Tiki and Ronde Barber (there are not as many celebrity twins as one might think, she points out) and, in one of the most emotional sections, Gregory Hoffman, whose twin brother Stephen died on Sept. 11.

“I was struck by how unraveled he was,” Pogrebin said. “His was a different kind of loss [than others’ on that day], not unique, but its own distinctive pain. I couldn’t help putting myself into his shoes and thinking about how close Robin and I are. There was an urgency to his saying not to take [our relationship] lightly.”

Writing One and the Same opened Pogrebin’s eyes to a world she couldn’t have imagined growing up a twin in the ’60s and ’70s.

“There are so many more twins now, obviously, so it’s a different landscape than when I was being raised,” she said. “And online, there are twin blogs and twin sites everywhere.”

On Sept. 30, Pogrebin also begins an interview series about her hometown, “What Everyone’s Talking About: Governing the Ungovernable City,” at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

“We want to hit the chord of what people are debating, writing about, talking about and worried about,” she said, “since we’re not around water coolers any more.”

The first topic is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s run for an unprecedented third term, with guests Joyce Purnick of the New York Times, whose new Bloomberg biography is coming out, and former Mayor Ed Koch.

“There are so many interesting questions built in to his run for another term, and Joyce knows the mayor well and Ed has his own take on what that office requires in this crazy city of ours,” she said.

Pogrebin seems to have an organic view on what other topics her series will cover.

“What’s planned ahead are the dates and me, but we won’t know what the world will bring. And we’ll be in front of a smart audience, a West Side audience, who are not passive participants but active listeners.”

–
One and the Same
($26.95) is being released by Doubleday on Oct. 20.

“What Everyone’s Talking About” premieres at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 30 at the JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave.; $10 members and $15 non-members; jccmanhattan.org.

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Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
By Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters, Out Sept. 15
In the follow up to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s Dashwood sisters search for love on an island after their father is killed by a shark.
To Sound in the Know: Winters didn’t write P&P&Z. That was by Seth Graeme Smith, who apparently is too busy working on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to pen another Austen.  

Velvet Underground: A Walk on the Wild Side
By Jim DeRogatis, Out Sept.15
An illustrated history of the band founded by Lou Reed and John Cale, guided by Andy Warhol and worshipped by generations of musicians and fans.
To Sound in the Know: DeRogatis’ previous work includes a biography of famed music critic Lester Bangs.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
By Jon Krakauer, Out Sept.15
Like in his best-seller Into the Wild, Krakauer follows a young man on an improbable (and ill-fated) journey, this time that of NFL-star-turned Afghanistan-bound Army Ranger Pat Tillman.
To Sound in the Know: The original publication date for the book was Oct. ’08, but Krakauer withdrew it to rewrite the manuscript.

Our Noise
By John Cook with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, Out Sept. 15
Even at 20 years old, Merge Records is still putting out important indie rock, releasing albums from bands like Wye Oak, Conor Oberst and Spoon. In this fact-packed book, the label’s history is thoroughly explored alongside delicious extras like old photos, postcards and an awesome compilation CD.
To Sound in the Know: Both McCaughan and Ballance play in Superchunk, one of Merge’s best-known bands.

Bicycle Diaries
By David Byrne, out Sept. 17
Musings and reflections on urban life all across the world as witnessed by the musician whose main mode of transportation is his bike.
To Sound in the Know: Byrne takes a fold-up bicycle on tour with him so he can ride wherever he goes.

Generosity: An Enhancement
By Richard Powers, Out Sept. 29
In this novel, a young Algerian woman who seems unnaturally happy is fought over by a dour writing teacher and a genetic enhancement specialist who wants to create a genome for human happiness.
To Sound in the Know: Powers’ last book, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award.

Drunk
Edited by Michael Ogilvie, Sean Russell and Michael Todoran. Out late Sept.
A collection of 25 graphic artists contributed to this collection, which features 128 pages of funny, disturbing, alcohol-inspired art. Whether it’s the comic-book-style work of Ivera Pennant or Sean Russell’s “True Stories of the VFW,” your own tales of one too many won’t hold a candle to these.
To Sound in the Know: A Boy’s Guide to Arson author Jarret Keene, who wrote the book’s foreword, has edited both Las Vegas Noir and The Underground Guide to Las Vegas; dude knows his drunken debauchery.

The Wild Things
By Dave Eggers, Out Oct. 1
This novel, loosely based on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, centers around a boy in a wolf suit who escapes his family and sails to the island of the Wild Things where Denise Richards and Neve Campbell tempt him (or something like that).
To Sound in the Know: Eggers, along with Spike Jonze, recently wrote the screenplay adaptation of Sendak’s classic children’s book.

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1. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. There’s a reason 20 million copies are in print. Jong’s hilarious 1973 therapy, sex and feminist tour-de-force about hot, unhappily married 29-year-old poet Isadora Wing fantasizing her way through Freud’s Vienna will make you want to see a shrink, be a shrink, screw a shrink and screw over a shrink before you can say “zipless.”

2. Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth. Told as a monologue from patient Portnoy to Dr. Spielvogel, Roth’s 1969 laugh riot is his most popular book—except with his own tribe, who called him a self-hating Jew. It’ll remind you that your family’s ethnic insanity is actually normal. And you’ll never again say, “What am I, chopped liver?” without laughing (or puking, depending on your gross-out level). Book is way better than the film starring Richard Benjamin.

3. August by Judith Rossner. For a more serious chronicle of psychoanalysis, this 1983 bestseller could be subtitled “Looking for Dr. Goodbar.” Luckily 20-year-old New England client Dawn Henly finds her in a 40-year-old Manhattanite, Dr. Lulu Shinefield; their five years together make compelling reading. Okay, the names Dawn, Lulu and Shinefield are Dickensian, and I wouldn’t recommend the realistic, dialogue-heavy soft cover for the beach. Still, Rossner’s story is the real deal, and you’ll be thankful your background is nowhere near as insane as Dawn’s.

4. The Treatment by Daniel Menaker. Thirty-two-year-old Upper West Side wimpy teacher Jake Singer has a crazy Cuban Catholic head doctor, proving you don’t have to be a Jewish shrink to be meshuganah in this serio-comic Manhattan shrinkfest. Fascinatingly, Dr. Morales turns out to be dead-on about his patient’s need to grow balls. Bonus: rent the recent fun movie starring Ian Holm as the last foul-mouthed Freudian.

5. Therapy by David Lodge. One wouldn’t think a British satirist could do justice to psychoanalysis. But this 1995 satire charmingly chronicles the misadventures of 50ish sitcom writer Tubby Passmore, a successful, rich married dad in England addicted to everything from psycho- to aroma-therapy.

6. Genius by Jesse Kellerman. I don’t even like mysteries, but I couldn’t put down this tale by a shrink (married to a shrink!) depicting real crimes and not just imagined ones. In this quick, clever 2008 Queens-and-Chelsea-located whodunit about 33-year-old East Coast art dealer Ethan Muller, bodies get unburied faster than you can say unconscious wishes.

7. The Schopenhaur Cure by Irvin Yalom. Prolific psychiatrist-novelist Yalom nails his 2005 portrait of 65-year-old ailing West Coast psychiatrist Julius Hertzefeld, incorporating sex addiction, mentor/protégé connections and philosophy into this tale of two men’s search for meaning. Almost as good as his nonfiction best-seller Love’s Executioner.

8. Envy by Kathleen Harrison. The ick factor concerning creepy 47-year-old married male Park Slope psychoanalyst William Moreland in this 2005 beautifully written novel will make you happy you can’t afford therapy anyway.
–
Susan Shapiro (susanshapiro.net), a Manhattan writing teacher, is author of the novel Speed Shrinking.

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Back when you were growing up with dyslexia and ADD, these conditions weren’t readily diagnosed or treated like they are now. How were you diagnosed?

I grew up on the Upper East Side. My dyslexia wasn’t detected until I was in the 1st grade at the Trinity School (this was around 1973). I was put in the worst reading group, and when I started slowing that group down, they told my parents I should be evaluated. The school psychologist thought that I might have this thing called dyslexia but not to worry because Albert Einstein had dyslexia. My mom, excited about the prospect that I might be a genius, had my IQ tested. But I wound up testing slightly below average. I was ultimately diagnosed with dyslexia by my eye doctor, the transsexual Renée Richards. I don’t think I was diagnosed with ADD until I was an adult.

Nowadays, people argue that Ritalin and other drugs used to treat these conditions are overprescribed and sometimes abused. What are your thoughts on this?

Parents are tormented about whether to put their kids on Ritalin. There’s a play out now with Cynthia Nixon called Distracted that illustrates how difficult this decision is. It’s a phenomenal drug, but it has huge side effects, including transformation of personality. I always think of it this way: Oscar Madison, one of the characters in The Odd Couple, was a huge slob, which is sometimes a symptom of ADD. If Oscar Madison were on Ritalin, he wouldn’t be a slob anymore. Ritalin makes you clean, focused and very aware of the order of things. The problem is that Oscar Madison wouldn’t have been Oscar Madison anymore; he would probably just want to get his hands on more Ritalin.

It seems that you sometimes used drugs and alcohol to help you compensate for your learning disabilities—to fit in socially or make you more confident.

Life is generally a pain in the ass. It’s all paperwork. I have a chapter on all of the mundane. The basic stuff that comes at people: the bills, the paperwork, the applications. People with learning disabilities struggle with that stuff. Other people probably do, too, but when you have a learning disability, it makes it that much harder. Drinking and drugs give you solace from that kind of stuff. I have been dry for 20 years now. Your problems just get bigger when you use drugs and alcohol as an escape.

So was writing the book therapeutic for you?

I thought it was a good story to make a memoir out of. Believe me, it was not initially embraced by the literary community. I chased around Frank McCourt for a blurb for five years. Finally he said, “Enough, I’ll give you an f’ing blurb, but in the name of god stop dropping off manuscripts AT MY HOUSE!” He read it and told me I should pursue fishing.A friend of mine is the one who said that I should call it “My Life as An Idoit,” and then that got added to the title. But by the time the movie was made, I had kinda given up. But then, [my agent] made a bidding war for it between HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. The book sold in a day and a half. So it’s not really a happy ending, but you know…

So you feel successful, right? You feel vindicated from the way you were treated as a child growing up with learning disabilities?

I do. But you know what’s great about this, is that the guys I went to school with were all a bunch of rich kids that ended up working at hedge funds. I was really popular and funny, but I was never going to end up as, you know, the head of Texaco. If you had told me that when I graduated college I was going to be walking dogs, I would have shot myself. But you’re dealt a hand of cards. It’s become a good thing. Actually, with everything going on in the economy now, I’m kinda proud to say I’m a dog walker.

–
Trainwreck: My Life as an Idoit
By Jeff Nichols (Touchstone)

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