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“News” is one of my favorite four-letter words. Since I was a kid and watched the newsreels that preceded the feature films at movie theaters, before television, I have been engaged by the events that unfold around us on a daily basis. When they installed the public address system in my elementary school, instruction would stop for a half hour every Friday morning as “Let’s Look at the News,” a New York City-sponsored program, was transmitted to all the classrooms. The format involved student panelists each week, and I listened with great interest. I was even on the panel at the radio station when I was in fifth grade, which necessitated my reading the daily newspapers throughout the week. So in hindsight, I guess it is not so surprising that I wound up being a newspaper publisher, despite my teenage plans for a different direction. Hearing the news and interpreting its implications are as much a habit for me as breathing.

So you can understand my distress at the current tsunami of fake news that has overtaken us. News, by definition and tradition, must be factual. If not, it is either a parody in the guise of news; or it is opinion or partisan, clearly presented as such; or it is propaganda, to be thus evaluated by the viewer. Now, those in the business of offering the news can certainly make mistakes, sometimes colossal ones, as in telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction rather than emphasizing the fog and controversy surrounding that conclusion. Respected journalists told us that as fact, and though they believed what they were sharing, they were wrong.

That is different, however, from the plethora of so-called news stories that are deliberately fabricated and shared every day with millions thanks to access to social media. Everyone with a digital device can now become a publisher and disseminate half-truths, conspiracy theories and flagrant falsehoods as news, without any form of vetting. The more gullible or, perhaps, less informed, or those enjoying the partisan slant, like tabloid readers, are rapt viewers. Sometimes they respond, as did the North Carolina guy we heard about who shot up a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. because he heard that there was a child-abuse ring operating there. While extreme, it is not any more false than the news that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump before our recent election. Regardless of one’s political orientation, that sort of phony and hyperpartisan stuff is alarming — or should be. Further troubling is how to deal with the question of vetting versus censorship.

Worst, as a result of the proliferation of so much fake news, is the confusion it sows about all news. What’s true, what’s a lie? Whom and what to believe? The marvel of the internet and mobile phones to bring inside news about brutality of dictatorships or other previously secret horror stories to the world’s attention and thereby reduce their occurrence has now been inverted. All sorts of false horror stories can now be broadcast as truths. The impact on the real news is to diminish the effect and value of good reporting.

As Thomas Jefferson preached, without an informed public, democracy is not possible.

Ironically, speaking of Jefferson, he or his supporters placed deceitful and, in today’s view, libelous stories in early newspapers when he ran against John Adams for president, and Adams’ followers did the same. So this fake news epidemic is not something new; only having so many decentralized outlets for transmitting the lies is. Somehow we will sort this out, just as they did two centuries ago.

Meanwhile, read the hometown newspaper. We never lie and while we are not always accurate, publishing corrections for our inadvertent mistakes in the following issue, we hold fact to be sacred.

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This is a big THANK YOU to the Village of Port Jefferson and all those who worked hard to transform the village into the Charles Dickens Festival. For the 21st year in a row, the seaside village came to life in the time of Dickens, with decorations, lights, greenery and especially costumed characters roaming the streets and welcoming visitors. This year, a second THANK YOU for naming us, Times Beacon Record News Media, the honoree for the event.

The entire weekend was a thrill, for us and for the thousands of people who chatted with the characters, shopped in the many varied stores, ate in the wide selection of restaurants, rode in the horse-drawn carriage, enjoyed the festival of trees and took in the harbor views. How do I know? I asked the festivalgoers, because I was there every day from Thursday to Sunday, and they told me how they decided to come into the village. Some came from Connecticut, enthusiastic about the magical event because they had visited before and knew of the many fun activities. It also helped that Port Jefferson ferry general manager, Fred Hall, offered a two-for-one price special during the weekend. The 10:30 a.m. boat on Saturday morning had 300 walk-ons alone, and they came without cars so no parking problems, and they had money in their pockets to spend for a good time. And people came from towns to the east and west, responding to the publicity and reputation surrounding the annual fantasy on the Long Island Sound.

Everyone might take the festival for granted after all these years, but I know how it came about because I was also there at the beginning. It was the brainchild of Jeanne Garant, the mayor at the time and mother of the present mayor, Margot Garant. Jeanne, a woman of vision, wanted the many organizations and groups to come together and work as a whole on a project to strengthen the sense of community and to celebrate the village. And she figured it wouldn’t hurt if the project helped the local businesses. So the first weekend in December was designated as the ideal time to capture some of the holiday shopping, and the theme was to be the Dickens stories and characters, who would come alive during those couple of days. And so it happened.

This was no small project to get the organizers’ arms around. Among those invited to offer their talents and to hold special events was the Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council, which would become the managing body alongside Port Jefferson Village, the historical society, the school district, the churches, various cultural paeans like Theatre Three (“A Christmas Carol”) and Harbor Ballet Theatre (“The Nutcracker”), the chamber of commerce and the civics, the constables, the ferry company, music groups, the harbormaster, the individual businesses and the residents just for starters. Events were designed for all age groups.

Eventually the Currier & Ives-like ice skating rink — another Jeanne Garant idea — joined the enchanting picture. And a special THANK YOU to nationally famed and charming confection artist, Pat Darling, for once again creating the whimsical Santa’s Workshop in the historic Drowned Meadow Cottage on West Broadway.

There are new offerings each year, and this past weekend Mrs. Cratchit’s Colorful Christmas Crafts was one such in the Village Center, along with an expanded Festival of Trees that each sponsor creatively decorated.

Port Jefferson Village was rich with events running through Saturday and Sunday. Indeed, it required more than two full pages in our Official Festival Guide just to list them in their many different locations hosted by the various community groups. So the original vision of a unified village has once again been realized. And the businesses were delighted with the results. “Never had an empty table all weekend,” one restaurateur said. “Shoppers buying all afternoon,” a jewelry store owner said.

Dickensian pleasure will go on throughout December this year, with the decorations and specials. And I would like to end on a personal note. I have watched countless parades in my lifetime as a child, a mother and a grandmother, but until this weekend, I had never been on a parade float. As the honoree of the Dickens weekend, I got to ride atop the ferry float and to wave at the thousands of people and shower them with (artificial) snow as they waved back, calling out greetings. What fun! We are deeply honored to have been appreciated in this way.

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There were two extra place settings during our Thanksgiving weekend. They were for a couple we met when my husband and her husband were serving at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, some 50 years ago — a golden anniversary of sorts. The idea that we met half-a-century ago and have maintained our connection is astonishing and lovely because we were quite fond of them then and are happy to still be friends now. When they left the service, about a year before we did, they returned to their home state of North Carolina, and we, of course, returned to New York. Over the years, we have kept up sporadically through Christmas cards stuffed with letters about our lives.

Our family wound up at Sheppard because we made the right decision for the wrong reasons — as so often happens in life.

Just after my husband began his internship at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, he came home one evening somewhat puzzled. “Look,” he showed me paperwork, “if I agree to enter this lottery called the Berry Plan, I will be allowed to finish my residency in the specialty I choose, but then I will have to go into the military for two years. The benefit is that I will not be drafted out of my training before I finish, but I will delay starting my practice two years while I am serving Uncle Sam. What should I do?”

“Do it, do it!” I urged. “They will send us to Germany or Japan and we will get to see the world.” I yearned to travel and we had not had the chance or the means. The year was 1963, and aside from a few military advisers in Vietnam, there was no war involving the United States. There was a draft but we were at peace.

“OK,” my husband said, still seeming dubious. “But only about 5 percent of those who apply are selected.” He went off the next morning with the completed paperwork and the two of us promptly forgot about the whole matter. That is, until the next spring when he came home and announced, still unsure what he had gotten us into, that he had been selected. I was happy at the prospect of travel in our future.

With the benefit of hindsight, you know that by 1965, we were in a hot war and I will tell you that many physicians were drafted out of their specialty training and sent to Vietnam as general medical officers. Some of them never returned.

We, meanwhile, now had one child and a second on the way when we were sent to Texas. It was not Germany or Japan, it wasn’t even California or New Jersey, as we had requested when asked by the Air Force, but it was — just by dumb luck — stateside, which meant we could be together. In fact, we had a house to live in, our first, with a washer and dryer, and each child had his own room. Wichita Falls is not a particularly beautiful place, as far as scenery goes. There were no real trees, little grass, no bodies of water and only an occasional bit of mesquite shrub blowing across the brown dirt. But it was heaven for us, and we were thankful to be there for the duration of the two years. We learned to eat chicken fried steak and barbecued beef on a bun, and before too long our third child was on the way.

It was on the base that we met our friends, who were serving under similar circumstances. He was a pediatrician who worked alongside my husband at the hospital, and with his wife they also eventually had three children, went home and started their professional lives together. But we stayed in touch, as I have explained, and they have rejoined my family with lots of conversation and laughter.

Old friends are treasures because they are irreplaceable. We are older now, quite a bit older, and we might not have recognized each other immediately on the street. But the basic persons that we were are intact.

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Thanksgiving is arriving at the right time. With so much to be thankful for, it should be hard to remember one’s passions about the outcome of the recent presidential election. Yet there is talk about families who are calling off their Thanksgiving reunions around grandma’s richly laden table because they don’t want to talk politics with relatives who were on the “other” side. What a travesty, as if anything were more important or enduring than the safety net of family.

People have a right to think differently, even if they are related. There is, after all, no accounting for the distribution of genes, and anyway that’s not important in the scheme of things. What is important is the love family members feel for each other and the security that they have each other’s backs. If that is not the relationship one has with one’s family, I guess differing political opinions are a good enough reason to break off what was a meaningless business of just going through the kinship motions to begin with.

Even though the present situation is not nearly as dire, I am reminded of the Civil War or the War Between the States, which pitted brother against brother on the battlefield. That was a tragedy of deepest proportions. Right now, we are merely dealing with the outcome of an election whose consequences are perhaps feared or cheered but have not been actualized. If matters do get worse in our nation, we are going to need each other all the more to manage. And if they get better, then we can all cheer together.

Let’s wait and see — and break bread together, treasuring the love that binds us rather than the rhetoric that divides us.

As we go forward, we should remain vigilant about what is happening in our country and speak truth to those in power. The end of the election, at long last, is but the beginning of the next chapter. We have the right, as Americans, to speak our minds and expect those who represent us to hear us. Indeed, we have the obligation to remain active in our society, letting our lawmakers know how we feel even as we set an example of staying informed and engaged for our children and grandchildren.

What we should take great care to do, however, is work to separate fact from fiction. Communication in today’s world is infinitely more complicated than when our founding patriots read newspapers to learn what was happening. And even then, they had to be sure whose words they were reading and whether the writers could be trusted. By comparison today, there are so many different vehicles claiming to give the “facts.” Newspapers, radio and TV networks have been joined by cable, the Internet and dangerously, social media, where anyone can say anything without the benefit of fact-checking and their words can be transmitted to literally millions of people.

This is how jihadists woo recruits. This is also how politicians’ supporters win voters. So how can one tell if what one is reading is fact? The answer is obvious but hard. We must use that same Internet to check out what we have read on social media, not just assume that what we are told is correct because it comes from a good friend or loved one. Facts must be corroborated by multiple news sources, not just by opinions. Indeed, the more dramatic an assertion, the more likely it will be published in many places, not just on Facebook or Twitter.

Also, we need to talk with more than each other, by which I mean those with similar views. We need to talk to people on the “other” side of issues and ideology. At the least, we may learn how they come to the conclusions they do. And maybe we can hear something we might agree with, creating a bridge and not a wall. Some of those we talk with might even be our relatives. But that brings me back to grandma’s dining room table: Wait until everyone has finished and enjoyed dinner first before discussions commence.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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When I was a child, my parents would sometimes take me out of the city and to the Catskill Mountains where my father was raised. There, in rustic accommodation, we would spend some weeks during the summer, happy to be out of the heat and humidity. But for a child used to the protective shield of tall urban buildings, I would be fearful when a summer storm, with high gusts, thunder and lightning would rage across the country horizon and pelt the windows and roof of our cabin.

Seeing my fright, my mother would leap into action. “Oh good,” she would say. “It’s a perfect day for pancakes.” As I would watch, she would whip eggs and milk from the antiquated refrigerator, then heat some cooking oil in a pan. She would ask me to beat the eggs while she measured out the flour and in short order the divine smell of frying pancakes would fill the kitchen. The storm outside now merely made the feast inside more cozy and safe, and by the time my mother, sister and I finished eating and looked up from the table, the summer squall would be gone.

Security, thy name was silver dollar pancakes.

In these unsettled times of postpresidential election, how I wish I could cook up some pancakes to help calm the people around me. My neighbors, my friends, our readers, many of them seem anxious, even afraid. Whether they voted for Clinton or Trump, they don’t like what they are hearing about bullying, demonstrations that can turn violent and slurs that seem to have been unleashed by the election. With each possible pick for the new administration, from chief strategist to possible EPA chief to a trial balloon for secretary of state, a shudder goes through the minds of many. Our outgoing president urges us to give some space to the incoming one, and then leaves the country for his last overseas trip. He has already visited Greece with Germany and Peru to follow, undoubtedly to try and calm those unsettled by the election in distant capitals. Anxiety, it seems, is global, but not entirely.

The stock markets are celebrating. The prospect of government spending on infrastructure and tax cuts that will stimulate the economy has sent the markets around the world on a tear as they hit all-time highs. Monetary policy is out — fiscal stimulus is in. At least that is the presumption at this first blush of transition to a new administration.

Meanwhile we have a country that is equally divided. What could be better proof than to have the razor-thin popular vote go one way and the Electoral College go the other way. How do we deal with that?

Despite the closeness of the election, the fact remains that the GOP won and won across the board: senators, representatives and governors. At least the next two years of political party leadership have been determined, and there is no further contest for now. But we also, as a democracy, are obligated to protect the rights of the minority — all minorities. That’s the part of the definition that some majorities don’t get. If we could all acknowledge and teach that point, those who feel threatened because they are in the minority could stop being afraid.

Further, the GOP is not a monolithic bloc — there is not just one shade of red. Nor are the Dems just one color blue. There is enough potential for bipartisanship as long as neither side digs in and vows to prevent cooperation between the parties. We Americans want our elected leaders to work actively on our behalf, not just to abdicate and coast in office. It will take the best of both sides to steer our nation through these challenging times. And by the way, the times have always been challenging.

We, on Long Island, have set a pretty good example with our state, county and town legislators often working together for the regional good, regardless of party. So there is hope. That’s my impression — and I’m not just serving up pancakes.

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One fact that we can all agree on at the tail end of this clamorous and divisive election season is how happy we are that it is almost over. In a presidential campaign that has been part entertainment, part embarrassment, only slightly about the grave issues of the day, but wholly history making, the people are exhausted. Bombarded relentlessly with political messages, robocalls, knocks at the door, endless campaign literature and ugly ads, citizens are yearning for an end. May it all truly be over next Tuesday night.

For all the talk, though, about how insufferable the electioneering has been, the candidates have gotten the attention, albeit negatively, of the electorate. At business lunches, during hair-stylist appointments, at cocktail parties and the daily exchanges at the bus stops, the latest election tomfoolery is the topic of the day. Conversations about the weather, that perennial conversation fodder, are finally being overtaken by the latest political revelations. For a nation that has long been declared apolitical, we breathlessly keep up with who has hurled what insult at whom and what new leaks the media are revealing. It seems to matter little if the leaks are corroborated or not, and social media, the preferred vehicle for dissemination, does not automatically offer any fact checking. Anyone can get away with saying anything, and the more outrageous and indecent, the greater number of viewers. The gloves of decency and civility are off.

In our presidential election, we are exploring the twists and turns of sexual accusations — out in the open for everyone to see. London’s backbenchers in Parliament pale with their insults compared to us. At least theirs are often witty. Except for Saturday Night Live, there has been little in these last two years of intense campaigning to earn a good laugh.

Has our country demonstrated less bigotry by naming a woman as standard-bearer for one of the two major parties? Or has our obvious double standard become only more painfully obvious, with so many men declaring publicly their unwillingness to ever vote for a woman as leader? The same question, about race rather than gender, was posed eight years ago when we elected the first black president. With painful irony, amidst our self-congratulatory open-mindedness, it seems more racial incidents have played out since that election than when George Wallace stood in the doorway and refused entry to black school children. Will the same ironies ensue in the event of a Clinton victory?

Perhaps it is cleansing to have our faults out in the open — acknowledgement as the first step toward healing. At least there has been no talk about ageism the way there was during the Reagan campaign in 1980. Both candidates today are within a couple of years of each other and of the biblical endpoint of three score and ten. At least that is something to be grateful for.

In this election season, as with every other during which we have been publishing, we have tried hard to remain as neutral as possible and present you, our readers, with the news in a balanced fashion. There are a number of local races, all critically important for their ultimate effects on our daily lives. As we have always done, we have spent hundreds of hours throughout the month of October interviewing candidates for each local office, two-by-two, and we have asked them questions and passed the answers along to you in our election section this week. We have also distilled this information during many more hours of discussion among our editorial board members and offered endorsements on our editorial pages. In no way do we intend this to dictate how you should vote. Rather we are telling you how we will vote after the journalistic privilege of personally questioning the candidates and covering the incumbents throughout their terms.

We owe you, our readers, no less.

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This past weekend, I spent some delightful time with my grandson and was introduced to electronic music. He plays and composes this type of music, so I wanted to know more about it, and I was dazzled. In a corner of his bedroom, with relatively few, modest-sized electronic instruments, he can construct and deconstruct and reconstruct sounds as they graphically appear on a screen in front of him. He can reproduce the sound of any musical instrument, then combine that sound with any other, such as an industrial sound, and create a unique sound with the help of a synthesizer. There is often a strong beat associated with the musical line, but not always. Traditional musical instruments can be combined with unique sounds. And pauses can be built in for a vocalist.

I’ll try to explain how this was made possible. Advances in technology, from the development of tape recorders last century to the laptop computer of today played a part. According to some research I did on the Internet, the earliest electronic devices for performing music were developed at the end of the 19th century. Italian Futurists explored sounds not precisely considered musical. Then in the 1920s and ’30s, electronic instruments were introduced and used to play the first compositions.

The big breakthrough came with magnetic audiotape, sort of analogous to the development of film for movies. Audiotape enabled musicians to tape sounds and then modify them, by changing speed or splicing out mistakes and inserting better parts of takes. It was a boon to recording commercial music, be it classical or popular.

Germany was first on this scene, actually during World War II, and that work was brought to the United States at the end of the war. Musique concrète was created in Paris, France, in 1948, wherein fragments of natural and industrial sounds were recorded and edited together to produce music from electronic generators. Japan and the United States joined in this development in the 1950s and ’60s.

Computers were now available, and they could be made to compose music according to predetermined mathematical algorithms. In 1957, the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer became the first that could be programmed by its user, making possible the fusion of electronic and folk music, for example. Its user now had the ability to pinpoint and control elements of sound precisely.

By the 1970s, the synthesizer helped make electronic music a significant influence on popular music. Electronic drums and drum machines entered disco and new wave music. Toward the end of the last century, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface or MIDI enabled everything from experimental art music to popular electronic dance music. Pop electronic music became connected to mainstream culture.

In the last decade, many software-based virtual studio environments have emerged, allowing viable and cost-effective alternatives to typical hardware-based production studios, many of which have gone out of business. Microprocessor technology can help make high quality music using little more than a laptop.

When my grandson, who just turned 18, sits in his bedroom and composes full-orchestral music from bits and pieces of sounds he has recorded — aided by his drum machine and bass synthesizer, that he then plays over the Internet — we are seeing the democratization of music creation. He doesn’t even need those bits and pieces, although he sometimes likes to add them.

Synthesized music can be created entirely from electronically produced signals. My grandson is, in fact, marching along the same path as Paul Hindemith and the Beatles. Only today he has more technology to help him than they did.

Will all this eventually replace large orchestras? He says, “Yes.”

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A friend of mine, who is about my age and grew up on Long Island, was somewhat timid about going into the Big Apple on her own because she didn’t feel she knew how to get around, but she now is empowered by her car service. She is a member of the customer base of Uber or Lyft or Via — one of those and others that she can summon with her cellphone to take her on her errands around the city. The service comes within two or three minutes, and she gets in and gets out, sometimes sharing the ride with another passenger, without having to so much as reach for her wallet. The fee and tip are automatically charged to her credit card and the price is significantly cheaper than an ordinary taxi. It is as if she had a chauffeured limo at her beck and call. As a result she uses the service more often.

When a store charges prices that are generally considered too high by shoppers, the store invites competition to come into the neighborhood. The same rule of economics applies to manufacturers and to industries. Sometimes that competition takes the more profound form of disruption by competitors who are aided by advances in technology, like the cellphone. In the instance of my friend and many like her, the car services have severely disrupted the taxi industry, dropping the NYC medallion price considerably.

Another vulnerable industry is higher education. As the cost of a college education has gone up over the last 50 years by about twice the rate of inflation, the ability to secure a bachelor’s degree has moved beyond the reach of the average household. The result has been an untenable explosion of student — and parent — educational debt. This trend has also exacerbated the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. Those without a four-year degree earn less over the course of their lives.

While there are good public universities and community colleges, like Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College, that are more reasonably priced and often allow the student to live at home and avoid room and board fees, there is another, growing option for students. Some colleges, including those with more well-known names, are offering bachelor’s degrees online. Although this may have struck many as snake oil in the past, today an online degree has become a viable option thanks to enormous technological gains — with more to come.

Professors can stand in front of a class of students numbering from a handful to several hundred on campus. But thanks to webinars and other advances on the web, their student listeners may number in the thousands. Ah, you say, but they miss the live interaction of a classroom setting. Wrong. The students can now hear each other, as well as the professor, speak to each other and even see each other. There is more interaction over the Internet, in fact, than there is typically in large lecture classes. Shortly the speed of the Internet will reach unimaginable numbers to accommodate the instant transmission of incredible amounts of information. Professors attest to the high quality of response from the online students handing in assignments. There is even technology for locking down computers during tests to prevent cheating.

Online education has already disrupted traditional education, and not just for special one-off events that are typically used by businesses and special-interest groups but for long-term degrees. Just Google “online degree programs USA,” and you will find 10 pages of names for starters. These include 2016 Top Online Colleges & Degrees, The 50 Best Online Colleges for 2016, List of Accredited Online Colleges & Universities, U.S. News & World Report 2016 Best Online Programs, Boston University online programs and so forth.

Habits change more quickly today than at any other time in history. Just ask me how people get the top of the news each day: It’s not so much from newspapers or radio, or from network television or even cable TV — we get up in the morning and eyeball our mobile phones. Pay attention, college administrators and trustees, serious disruption is near.

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A baroness and former leader of the British House of Lords, Margaret Jay, came to Stony Brook University to speak to us about “The new populism in America and Britain: What has happened to our politics?” The talk, which was open to the public and well attended, drew parallels between Trumpism and the Brexit movement in Britain and served as one way to understand our preelection frenzy.

Populism, as a political ideology, views virtuous citizens as mistreated by small circles of elites to be overthrown. In Britain, where jobs are drying up and wages have been stagnant for those 31-59 years of age for decades, migrants have been pouring into the country — some 330,000 in the last year, looking for jobs and a good life. Citizens are angry. The landscape has changed and a common cry is, “I don’t recognize the town I grew up in,” as a result of the changes. As a member of the European Union, Britain had open borders for laborers throughout the 28-member countries even as British workers could in turn move anywhere within the EU from Britain.

Baroness Jay of Paddington, daughter of former Prime Minister James Callaghan, told us that there are four times as many Brits collecting unemployment insurance in Germany as there are Germans collecting unemployment in Britain. Nonetheless, the “elites” and the politicians are seen by the British middle class as being unresponsive and only self-serving, and there is a deep sense of insecurity in the country. In such an environment, the message, “Support Brexit to take back control,” resonates and sounds not dissimilar to “Make America great again.” These slogans would seem to pit the common people against the top 1 percent.

Leaders of populist movements have certain characteristics in common, as the baroness pointed out. They tend to be blunt to the point of crude. The media loves them for their irresistible sound bites and the attention they draw from the public, and offers them a platform. Interestingly in this comparison of Britain and the United States, those who would speak “for the people” are not actually “of the people.” They feel none of the economic insecurities but seek to identify with the millions of citizens. That is certainly the case with “billionaire” Trump and also the leaders of the Brexit campaign, who are from the upper classes.

Populism is spreading in Europe. Will it spread here? That is the question Margaret Jay poses for us.

For the United Kingdom, there are other serious issues. Will the four parts of the country stay together? Scotland and Northern Ireland resoundingly voted to stay in the EU, while Wales and England voted to leave. Also there is what the baroness described as an “unpleasant divide” between foreign workers, who are increasingly viewed as taking away jobs, benefits and even lifestyle, and the citizens. The Brexit vote seems to have given legitimacy to the antagonisms. Then there are the matters of making separate trade agreements with 27 other countries, and the pound sterling exchange rate.

Meanwhile what has Brexit done to the rest of the EU? Other countries, with similar movements, are stirring. There is even the thought that the Brexit vote may have caused matters to improve elsewhere, as politicians heed the message sent by the voters.

The solution, proposed by Baroness Jay, lies in rebuilding the center. We must not become fortresses of isolation, she warns, either in trade or of xenophobia. Pluralism and diversity are the way of the future, and in the U.S. these ideas are baked into our democracy. To rebuild the center involves a role for education. Tellingly some 75 percent of the more educated in Britain voted to stay in the EU, while about the same number, 75 percent of the less educated, voted to leave. The latter are those for whom the present system is not working. And while this picture of current politics, is specific to Britain at the moment, the dark and unpleasant nature of this past Sunday’s presidential debate here would urge us to pay further attention to the people whose needs are not being met.

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If you have had enough of politics and pundits this week, come with me for a nostalgic trip through the golden age of Broadway musicals. I was carried back to those heady days of the 1950s by a recent New York Times article about the lost art of sneaking in for the second act, impossible today due to post-9/11 security. Now I don’t know if you have ever indulged in this type of larcenous activity, so I will explain how it worked — at least for me and my merry little band.

I attended junior high and high school at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. The subway was right at the corner of our Gothic-style building. This is important information for you to know in order to follow our exploits. The other bit of vital info is that our school day officially ended each afternoon at 2 p.m., rather than the usual 3 p.m. for the rest of the schools under the New York City Board of Education’s auspices.

Shortly after I started in seventh grade, I fell in with a happy group of kids who lived across town, on the Upper West Side. While that was decades away from what we know today as the highly cultured and worldly UWS, nonetheless these kids were a lot more culturally savvy than I was. Every Wednesday, which is of course matinee day, they would slip out of our last class some 15 minutes early, slither quietly through the side door of the school and make a beeline for the subway stairs 20 feet away.

Somehow I came to be included in this precocious group. We would ride the local to 59th Street, descend to the lowest level of the station, which in those days housed the BMT line, ride it through Midtown to 49th Street and Broadway and arrive at the predetermined show of our choice just as intermission was ending and the smokers were returning to their seats for the second act.

No one ever checked the tickets for the second act in those days. And there were always empty seats sprinkled throughout the theater that we claimed for our own. If the real seat owner arrived, most often the usher would help us find another seat since it was fairly common practice for young people to move closer to the stage in those days if there was opportunity. I doubt the ushers realized they were helping scofflaws.

In this way, I saw some of the most famous plays with their original casts during what turned out to be the most memorable period of American musical theater. Of course I didn’t know that then, I just knew I was having a fine old time and we didn’t even have to pay the subway fare because we had student passes.

Of course I never told my parents what we were doing every Wednesday afternoon, and somehow we never got caught leaving school early. Perhaps the faculty understood where we were going and thought it more important than the last 15 minutes of classes.

But my parents may have wondered from time to time because I seemed too knowledgeable about the current musicals, their actors and composers. There were the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics: “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “The King and I,” “South Pacific” and “The Sound of Music” (the latter two with Mary Martin); Frank Loesser and his “Guys and Dolls,” “The Music Man,” “West Side Story” and Chita Rivera; Ethel Merman, Gertrude Lawrence, Yul Brynner, Gene Kelly and Gwen Verdon; Irving Berlin and Cole Porter — they were all in my world.

And then there was the best of the best, its eloquence, melody, intelligence and heart standing at the head of those magnificent musicals, Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady.” I can still hear the music, with its clever lyrics, playing in my head. Led by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, it was the longest running show on Broadway for years thereafter. And we saw them all — at least by half.

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