Fred Astaire – Puttin’ on the Ritz (1930) Taco – Puttin’ on the Ritz (1982) Puttin’ on the Ritz (annotations) by Irving Berlin Have you seen the well-to-do Upon Lennox Avenue On that famous thoroughfare With their noses in the air High hats and narrow collars White spats and fifteen dollars Spending every dime For [...]

Pennies get no respect. Their mineral composition fluctuates — they’re mostly zinc now, though they’ll return to bronze in 2009. People treat them like trash, often tossing them on the ground rather than keeping them. But some people know that pennies are treasures. Sure you can make spiders out of dollar bills, but you can [...]

Clarence Day wrote for the The New Yorker in the 1920s and 1930s. His most famous work is Life With Father, which was adapted successfully into a stage play, a film, and a television series. It’s a bittersweet look at childhood in New York City during the 1890s. One of the joys of Day’s stories [...]

My cousin Nick remembers: My dad was so cheap that he once drilled a hole in a nickel so that he wouldn’t have to pay eight cents for a washer. My first memory of gas prices is driving home from my grandparents. We drove into a gas station, and pulled up to the pump. The [...]