Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin

Send us Fan Mail There are a lot of different people on a movie set.  It usually helps when all of them are rowing in the same direction.  Erika Burke Rossa got an early lesson in interacting with all sorts of different people, growing up in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then coming to New York to be a dancer, an actor, a social worker and now a first-time feature film director.

Send us Fan Mail FRANK FILIPETTI Creating Behind The Console   If you’re a music buff like me, you could listen to seven time Grammy Award winning engineer and producer Frank Filipetti talk all day long.  There are stories of joy and inspiration and an improbable journey, working with James Taylor and Carly Simon, Broadway musical casts and recording the traditional sounds of the Bush men and wome...

Send us Fan Mail KEN BELSON “Every Day Is Sunday”   The Super Bowl has long been America’s unofficial national holiday.  Ken Belson covers the business of the NFL and other sports, bringing a business journalism background to his work rather than a sports journalism background.  He learned the lessons of how to deal with influential corporate executives as a business reporter in a land not associa...

Send us Fan Mail We are going deep into the archives for this episode of "Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin." I’ve been blessed to have a long career in broadcast journalism and meet so many intriguing people along the way.  During my years covering sports, when I spent more than a few days and nights at Yankee Stadium, there was nothing better than spending some time with th...

Send us Fan Mail Arturo O’Farrill says his piano looks at him every day and asks “want to dance?” Let the playing begin. Arturo O’Farrill’s love affair with music spans generations.  It started with his father Chico and continues with Arturo’s sons Adam and Zack.  He’s shared the love with thousands of students through the years in classrooms and on performance stages.  After almost two decades of...

Send us Fan Mail Perhaps we should have known all along that David Silverman would pursue a life in animation and would make us laugh.  When his father, a professor of chemical engineering, read to him at night, it wasn’t “Goodnight Moon” or “Oh, The Places You’ll Go.”  It was Walt Kelly and the classic comic strip “Pogo.”  At the movies, it was Charlie Chaplin and “Modern Times” and “The Gold Rus...

Send us Fan Mail Every once in a while, I turn my attention to stories from my broadcast journalism career, memories that remain vivid years later.  That is certainly the case for December 19, 1995, a night at Madison Square Garden 30 years ago that was easily one of the most dramatic in the building’s history.  I still think of this night three decades later.  And I smile.

Send us Fan Mail For decades, Harvey Araton has used the prism of sports to write about people.  He did so for many years as a columnist for The New York Times.  And then as an author of books like “When The Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks,” “Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship” and his most recent book, a middle grade novel abo...

Send us Fan Mail New York has long played an important role in sweeping works of fiction and non-fiction, as if the city were a character itself.  That’s certainly the case in the work of Jonathan Mahler, first in his 2005 book “Ladies and Gentleman, The Bronx is Burning,” subtitled “1977, Baseball, Politics And The Battle For The Soul Of A City.”  Now comes a sequel of sorts: “The Gods Of New Yor...

Send us Fan Mail Suzzy Roche has known both sides of the coin in a long musical and acting career.  She’s known the struggle of wondering when the next job is going to come.  But she has also known the joy of writing and performing music and seeing the effects of that music on her many fans through the decades.  When The Roches, sisters Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche, first hit in the late 70s, the...

Send us Fan Mail Warren Zanes knows the joy of speeding down the ski slopes and cycling miles of bike lane.  He knows the rush of getting on stage and performing.  And he certainly knows the fulfillment of sitting in front of a blank computer screen and then finding the words to touch music lovers everywhere.  Author.  Musician.  Academic.  And yes, serious skier and cyclist. Dusty Springfield.  J...

Send us Fan Mail We witnessed some historic days in the Middle East this week.  What lies ahead is uncertain at best.  What is certain is that David Broza will be singing, bringing joy, optimism and a hope for peace, as he has all over the world for 50 years.   He co-wrote one of his most famous songs, “Yihiye Tov (There Will Be Good), as a peace anthem when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is truly a labor of love. Steve Albert and I have been friends for almost forty years.  For all of those years, he has made me laugh.  I thought I knew all of the stories.  I wasn’t even close.  His new book “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Broadcast Booth” has tons of funny stories, such as honing his broadcasting skills by doing play by play of family dinne...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s episode of “Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin” is a bit different. It’s a conversation that is part of a new series that I am hosting, a series of conversations with public artists whose work is found all across America.  These conversations will be found in the Otocast platform, an immersive, innovative, location-based mobile audio guide.  More information...

Send us Fan Mail Public art is everywhere, in towns big and small across the country.  The reaction to public art can be subtle.  It can be emotional.  The impact can be economic.  And the reaction is almost always positive. I’m hosting a new series of conversations with public artists found in the Otocast platform, an immersive, innovative, location-based mobile audio guide.  More information at...

Send us Fan Mail   AMY ARBUS Seeing Life Through The Lens   You might think that a life in photography was always a given for Amy Arbus since her mother Diane Arbus was a photography icon and her father Alan Arbus was also in the field.  It was not a given.  But after her mother died in 1971 and her father focused on acting, Amy felt a pull towards photography.  She eventually landed a position at...

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

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

Send us Fan Mail Author Judy Batalion knows from Holocaust trauma, growing up with survivor grandparents in Montreal.  So when she chanced upon a book written in 1946 about a female resistance fighter in Poland, she was ready to start a journey that lasted more than a decade and resulted in the 2021 book “The Light Of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.”  It is...

Send us Fan Mail I always smile when I think of the apt title of Steve Forbert’s terrific debut album “Alive on Arrival.”  Because he was.  “Alive on Arrival” speaks to the excitement of coming to the big town and making it work.  For Steve Forbert, that meant plenty of hard work, indefatigable optimism and the inspiration of an uncle’s unorthodox career.  Steve has known every up and down of the...

Send us Fan Mail Peter Asher has been part of the music that has elated and sustained me for some 60 years.  The songs of Peter and Gordon as part of the 1960’s British Invasion still sound fresh and wonderful six decades later.  And the musicians he produced and managed, especially James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, created the soundtrack of my life.  And Peter still has the touch, co-producing Bar...

Send us Fan Mail Luis Miranda Jr.’s story is a great American story.  It’s a great New York story.  It’s a great Puerto Rican story.  Long before Hamilton became part of our vocabulary, Luis Miranda Jr. created a new life for himself in New York as a respected and influential advocate, organizer, politico and much more.  And then, thanks in part to the creativity of his son Lin-Manuel, he was able...

Send us Fan Mail Larry Charles’ comedy journey has taken him to some of the familiar places for a comedy writer, such as on set for Seinfeld, Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm.  At other times, it’s found him running for a waiting van to escape when a scene in the Borat and Bruno movies goes great but upsets the locals.  And then there have been moments in Iraq and Somalia, finding out that t...

Send us Fan Mail Willie Nile is a musical lifer, still going strong in his late 70’s with a new album “The Great Yellow Light.”  He’s been a New York singer songwriter who has traveled the country and the world with his guitar for decades.  But when it comes to the lessons learned that shaped his life and musical career, it always comes back to the Buffalo home where his parents raised him, provid...

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