Bye bye Broadway
Goodbye for now, that is. Riley Costello, 15, of Belmont, played a singing and dancing teenager named Herman Henkel in the recent revival of “Bye Bye Birdie” on Broadway, which starred Gina Gershon and John Stamos.
The production closed last month, but according to his mom, Sheila Devore, “He’s auditioning like crazy” for his next role.
Devore says she has no idea how her son got the acting bug, but Riley has been doing theater since he was 7. Mom and dad, Brian Costello, are now bi-coastal so that Riley can attend the Professional Performing Arts High School in New York City, where he is a sophomore.
Riley was bar mitzvahed at Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City. When she’s not in the Big Apple with her son, Devore is project director for the Foster City–based North Peninsula Jewish Community Teen Foundation.
Man of honor
Scientist Mark Tischler, a Sunnyvale resident, was recently named a winner of the Army’s Presidential Rank Award in the Distinguished Senior Professional category for “sustained extraordinary accomplishment.”
Tischler’s work as an Army senior technologist at Moffett Field in Mountain View involves research and development of helicopters for military and nonmilitary applications. He’s also heavily involved in a 22-year U.S.-Israel collaboration on helicopter research, which takes him to Israel annually.
“I am fluent in Hebrew and a longtime teacher of Israeli folk dancing in the Bay Area,” he noted in an e-mail. “So my life and work are quite integrated with my Jewish identity.”
The awards ceremony will take place in Washington this spring, and there’s a chance that President Barack Obama will attend.
Bigotry 101
In front of a mostly non-Jewish audience at the Redford Center’s first Art of Activism program on Feb. 4 in Berkeley, actor Robert Redford told center director Rabbi Lee Bycel how an incident in fourth grade in Santa Monica was his first lesson in intolerance.
There was a “buzz rolling through” the classroom, Redford said, which, in retrospect, was the beginning of a “hurricane of anti-Semitism.” The whispers, he said, were other kids calling their fellow classmate Lois Levinson “a kike [and] a yid.” After a day or so, Lois stood in front of the room and stated, “My name is Lois Levinson. I’m a Jew and I’m proud of it.”
Redford thought she was very brave — the reason he has never forgotten her name. But at the time, he didn’t know what a Jew was, so he asked his dad. “You’re a Jew,” his dad responded.
After giving his son a few moments to digest how it felt to be among a group that was discriminated against — “I was scared,” Redford recalled — the elder Redford quickly explained what being Jewish meant, and that, in fact, the Redfords were not.
Short shorts …
Attorney Milton Sills of Hayward turned 100 on Feb. 4 and his family celebrated with him at restaurants around the Bay Area, writes niece Shelly Stiebel. Sills and his late brother Jerry practiced law together for many years and co-founded the Southern Alameda County Bar Association … Wine lovers alert: Rabbi David White, of the WineSpirit Institute for the Study of Wine and Spirituality, will chat about wine and Judaism, and longtime Jewish Community Relations Council member Herman Rosenbaum will be honored at the East Bay JCRC fundraiser March 14 at 1 p.m. in Walnut Creek. Contact [email protected] or (510) 318-6417.
This columnist can be reached at [email protected].