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Matching Minds With Sondheim
This is Daria Begley, long-time NYC correspondent for the Sondheim Society. This photo is from last May, at Below 54, preparing to listen to @melissa_errico_fairymom perform songs from her #Sondheim album.
Actually, this is a reflection of Daria in a phone.
The phone is an old Motorola Droid that she won at the American Museum of Natural History in 2011, at a fundraiser for Friends in Deed.
The cocktail party event (before dinner accompanied by Errico as well) was a treasure hunt designed by Stephen Sondheim: A Little Jurassic Treasure Hunt, which took place in the dinosaur Halls.
Daria`s team won the Hunt and, along with a number of other prizes, got to take home this phone, which no longer functions... but, OH, the stories it could tell!
#treasurehunt
In observance of the third anniversary of the passing of Stephen Sondheim, I am starting this video series (that will last about a year) to share some of the gifts he brought into the worlds... literally gifts he gave as Broadway Opening Night presents. (click in the bio for the full YouTube playlist, including a 27 minute playthrough with narration of this one).
From 1994 (Passion) through Company (2021), Stephen Sondheim looked to Stave, a Vermont-based jigsaw manufacturer, to produce personalized puzzles as his opening night gifts.
For each show, the poster was turned into a thick-pieced, deviously complex wooden jigsaw puzzle, each gift personalized with the initials of the recipient designed into the puzzle pieces as an additional challenge and delight.
I have been fortunate enough to have been provided access to one of the largest collections of these puzzles, through playwright @michaelmitnick, playwright, songwriter, and Sondheim aficionado.
In these videos I will share full-length videos of my building these jigsaws, explaining their brilliant designs, as well as speed-up videos like this one. To prevent spoilers I will avoid stating the name of the show and use, instead, its year of production. This one is from 2002.
These puzzles represent Sondheim`s life-long interest in using puzzles to create moments of awe and clarity. I hope some of that comes across in the viewing.
#sondheim @sondheimphotos @sondheimletters @stavepuzzles #jigsawpuzzle
This is it! The cover for Matching Minds with Sondheim has been finalized. Thank you all for your tremendous feedback that helped it to get to this point. I hope you love it as much as I do, and I love that we did it together. Let me know in the comments.
(And yes, that whole "Sept 2025" thing. My publisher was purchased this year and having growing pains. As a result, they are pushing back publication from May to Sept. But trust me, I think it`s still going to be worth the wait.)
As I shared last month, Andrew Parr (@lego_nerd_puzzles) wrote not one but TWO articles about the Sondheim auction, for Games WORLD OF PUZZLES magazine. The first second is out NOW.
This one also includes a number of my photos but this time focuses on what happened once I brought home Andrew’s winnings - hundreds upon hundreds of game and puzzle magazines - and shared the collection with him over Zoom to triage this remarkable collection.
(and yeah, that is a photo of me with Will Shortz delivering some gifts from Andrew’s collection…)
NOT TO BE MISSED. Check out an excerpt below:
It was decided that Barry, a thorough documentarian, would unpack the entire lot while I watched on a Zoom call. During the call, we would catalog every item from each box so I could decide what I wanted to keep, and which items could be gifted, sold, or donated to a museum.
The unboxing day arrived. We connected online and I eagerly watched from Barry’s phone, which was held on an angle tripod so I could see into the boxes. And the first hour we unpacked two boxes which contained the following…
#Sondheim #games #puzzles #auctions #theRightPlaceattheRightTime
If you subscribe to David Benkof’s Broadway Maven newsletter (and if you don’t, then you should) then today you saw that he worked with two crossword constructors to build a fun Broadway-themed puzzle (link in bio).
As he wrote: “Crossword puzzles have long been a popular pastime among musical theater people, and several prominent Broadwayniks are published cruciverbalists (puzzle constructors), including Hugh Wheeler, Richard Maltby, Jr. (who is a MARQUEE subscriber!) and The Master himself. Barry Joseph, author of the forthcoming Matching Minds with Sondheim, even told me that had Sondheim "not had any achievements in musical theater, his passing in 2021 would still have noted mention in The New York Times obituaries" for his role in promoting cryptic crosswords in America.”
And I stand by my comment!
sondheim crosswords
I had an amazing time today at the @museumofbroadway checking out all of the Sondheim goodness sprinkled throughout. The highlight of course was the Sondheim Anagram Puzzle, designed by @davidkwong, to taut Sondheim passion for word puzzles. I write about it in my book. (I greatly appreciated being reminded by the docent to not leave before finding the bonus puzzle.) #wordpuzzles #anagrams #museums
A lot in one photo! This is me right now with Richard Maltby, Jr. I had just given him from @lego_nerd_puzzles (Andrew Parr) one of Stephen Sondheim’s issues of Games magazines from 2021 (that Andrew acquired at auction last June, and includes Andrew’s interview with Sondheim). In the photo we are holding the CURRENT issue of Games, open to the page showing Andrew’s current article about that auction, featuring photos from me, including one of me with Richard, together at the auction last June… which just happens to be a half block from the auction house itself!
The near final draft of the cover just came in. Loving it! Thank you all for your fantastic feedback, pushing it along towards a state of awesome.
The dice are back, as is a new blackwing pencil (in tribute to Sondheim`s preferred implement) and a cover dissolving into jigsaw pieces.
This puzzle completed by Stephen Sondheim (from Games World of Puzzles, May of 2021, just a few months before he passed) is called Family Reunions, by Raymond Simon.
It is actually four puzzles, all following the same set of rules:
There are ten words in a set. Each word can have one letter removed and be remixed to make another word. Can you figure out the theme connecting those ten new words?
For example, you can see below how the first family’s words (GOJI, LAUGH, etc.) become dance-related words (JIG, HULA, etc.):
Goji: Remove “o” -> Jig (an energetic folk dance)
Laugh: Remove “g” -> Hula (a Hawaiian dance)
Balsam: Remove “l” -> Samba (a Brazilian dance)
Cosmid: Remove “m” -> Misco -> Disco (a popular dance style from the `70s)
Nougat: Remove “u” -> Tango (an Argentine dance)
Twosit: Remove “o” -> Twist (a popular dance from the `60s)
Vassal: Remove “v” -> Salsa (a Latin dance)
Energumen: Remove “n” -> Merengue (a Dominican dance)
Falconmen: Remove "n" -> Flamenco (a Spanish dance)
Chlorinates: Remove “o” -> Charleston (a dance popular in the 1920s)
Again, the trick here is to figure out how Sondheim’s mind worked by imagining his path through each puzzle.
As we can see across the four families of word-sets, Sondheim figured out the shared theme and penciled in that answer. However, what we do not see is him working through the remixing of each word. Most likely, with each set, he dropped letters, remixed the letters, and successfully sought out their common theme - all in his 91-year old mind!
As I have said before (and will continue to for this series of posts) these pencil markings are now precious artifacts of Sondheim’s mind at work. (As always, big thanks to Andrew Parr @lego_nerd_puzzles for supplying access to the issue. And thanks to ChatGPT for solving the first family of words for me.)
#Sondheim #gamesmagazine #wordpuzzle #wordpuzzles
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