Joan Halperin

Biography

Joan was a special education teacher who worked with troubled prechool children for 25 years. She wrote and got her works published and then became a poet in the schools, a poet in pub,ic service and a poet in the Westchester Council of Arts. 

"At that time, the late 70s and early 80s, there was a lot of public money for the arts. It was a very exciting time for poets and writers and artists in the schools. We were more or less making our own curriculum.

I collaborated with the teachers in the classroom. The whole idea was to get the teachers excited about poetry and then the teachers could carry on the work on their own. And then I taught a private workshop for teachers, which started off as a three week grant, but they all wanted to stay, and we continued for 14 years as a private workshop in my home. They enjoyed it – I’m fun to be with."

Video

Transcript

Disclaimer: Unedited AI Transcript

Joan (00:00):

First of all, I'm gonna give you a little background on why my grandmother and I were secretly going to the fortune teller. My mother married four times, my father, three. My mother was very high, ma required very high maintenance. She was very beautiful. She was very bright and very charming. She loved good clothes, good food, traveling, dining out with, with people who were celebrities. She required a lot of attention. So when I was seven years old, she and my father, who was a very shy, reclusive kind of person, divorced, the marriage, just couldn't hold despite the, the efforts of both the Holland and the Rubinoff families. My mother was the Rubinoff side. Then when my mother got divorced, we moved, she and I moved into New York from New Jersey, and we moved in with my grandmother and grandfather and a brownstone on 61st Street on the east side.

Joan (01:21):

My mother was on the fourth floor, and my grandparents were on the second floor. And I was very, very attached to my grandmother. She was very loving, she was very caring. She was always there. Her main concern in life at the time that we moved was to find my mo mother, another husband, this one, one who was more successful, one who was very rich, one who would satisfy all my mother's multifarious needs. So on Sunday mornings, my grandmother would whisper to me, we're going downtown, we're going to get bagels and locks and salami and hilta, fish and food for the family. And also she whispered in the other ear, we're going to the fortune teller. I was thrilled. I was absolutely thrilled to go to the fortune teller with my grandmother. We would, we would say goodbye to my grandfather. My grandmother would put her finger to her lip to remind me not to say where we were really going first. And we would tiptoe down the stairs as if we were two spies going out on some kind of mission. Then we would walk to Fifth Avenue. We would mount the Fifth Avenue bus, go up to the

Speaker 2 (02:58):

Top. Now, in those days, the tops of the Fifth Avenue buses were uncovered. So it was quite an adventure for me and my grandmother to go down out in the open air. And we would get off at 42nd Street and fifth Avenue and walk west. Walk in West. We came to several brownstone buildings. And in those brownstone buildings, usually on the fifth or fourth floor, were a series of many fortune tellers. My grandmother had her favorite one. We would get off, we would go the three flights of stairs, we would go in. There were beads separating the booths where customers were having their fortunes told. I would go in with grandma and she would have her palm red grandmother would ask three questions. She would ask, when is my mother gonna marry again? Is she gonna marry a rich man? And is the rich man gonna be a nice man?

Speaker 2 (04:06):

The fortune teller has always told her, yes. They said, yes, she's gonna marry. I see an A in his name. This was enough to really excite my grandmother, who was, by the way, not in other parts of her life, a superstitious person at all. She was very practical and very down to earth. And then I would have my tea leaves read. Usually I would be told that I was going to have meet new friends, have a good time get good grades in school. And I believed every single word that was said. So I came out very happy. Then we would go down the four flights of stairs and we would go to the lower East side, and we would stop in at the bagel shop. We'd stop in to get deli. Sometimes we often, we stayed for lunch. And then my grandmother being in a very good mood, we would walk along singing as we went along the sidewalk, walking to where we could again, catch the Fifth Avenue bus and go back home.

Speaker 2 (05:20):

Where grandmother again warned me not to tell anybody where we had been. And we would continue our lives as we usually did till the next, till the next Sunday. My years after my grandmother and grandfather died, and my mother had had multiple marriages. She was widowed four times and outlived every single husband. I think it was dangerous to marry her. And and I went to see my uncle Herbert, my mother's older brother, who was the practical one in the family, c certainly compared to my mother. And always did the right thing and had married once and had come upon hard times and was now living in a very rundown building in New Jersey. And I went out to see him at least once a month just to check in on him. I to buy bedspreads for his bed to bring him flowers.

Speaker 2 (06:36):

And we went. We would go to the IHOP House of Pancakes for lunch. I went with Uncle Herbert and I said, you know, uncle Herbert, now that grandma's dead and Grandpa's died and, and mother's not here anymore. I'm gonna tell you a secret. And he said, what? And I told him about the trips to the fortune teller, and he said, Joni, he said, we knew about it all the time. He said, we kept it a secret from you that and your grandmother that we knew, because we knew it gave you such pleasure, the both of you to go downtown and get those, have your fortunes told. And that's the story of my grandmother and the fortune tellers.