About Us

Article from Ye Olde Tri-Valley Townsman, Volume 13 Number 18, published 2017.

The studio isn't so mysterious. RJ was a film editor and editing supervisor and a stage manager at Akiva Studio in Dumbo. He bought the BKS building 13 years ago, and converted what was originally Fried's Feed store, built circa 1890, into a modern boutique production facility. I was not familiar with the Catskills, and balked when he convinced me to come up from NYC for a look at his future dream. His caretaker had hung and gutted a deer inside the garage, and I had the luck of being first one to find it. It was a Jamie Lee Curtis moment for me. I did return a year and a half later.

Cab Frank's is a bit more of a surprise, at least for RJ. I'm a career bartender and cabaret performer. After the marriage, we went to Canada to celebrate, and I was not allowed to re-enter the United states—our marriage was legal in NY state, but not federally. I could not join RJ for nearly three years, after the case of Edie Windsor ended the ban on same sex marriage. We had a re-wedding so all our family and friends could celebrate our re-union. BKS could easily accommodate 100 folks for our ceremony, with the Pyramids of Giza projected on a giant screen behind us for good luck. RJ hatched a plan for the reception/dinner—he would bid on the former Big Willie's restaurant, right next door to the studio, and we would have a caterer serve our international posse, coming from Peru and the far corners of Canada and the states. But what if Big Willies fell through. Not to worry, RJ told me had a back-up plan. (He did not. Production people make plan A and go for it. A Plan B takes time away from executing Plan A, he later explained.)

We closed on Big Willie's two days before the wedding. We had so little time to re-habilitate the restaurant, closed but never cleaned after the last service 9 years before. They pulled the last greasy plate out of my hands and pushed me to the rehearsal dinner at the fabulous Rolling River Cafe, and the next night, every inch of Big Willie's scrubbed and sparkling, served an incredible wedding feast.

RJ intended Big Willie's to be an annex film shoot studio for BKS, but I convinced him that we might as well run it as a Music Hall, since hospitality and music-booking run in my blood. How I convinced him is the biggest mystery. After a full day's book-keeping and then expediting in the Frank's kitchen all night, he'd sometimes look at me and say "how the hell did you talk me into this?" But still we persist, and have brought great music and pleasure to a barren corner of an almost-ghost-town, to the delight of (almost) everyone. Come by and say hi!