Works by
Helene Stapinski
(Writer)

• Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music (2004)
  Helene Stapinski took guitar lessons when she was a girl, but it was her brother’s drums that really held her interest. She used to sneak in and play them when he was away; when he realized what she was doing, he dismantled them each time he finished playing. But Helene figured out how to put them back together. She learned the classic drum solos and followed the careers of famous drummers.
  
  As an adult, Helene put the drums aside and became a journalist. When she was thirty she interviewed Julie, the leader of a rock band, for a story. The band needed a drummer, and Helene’s long-forgotten ambitions came flooding back. She joined, and then she brought her husband aboard on bass.
  
  Just as they started playing out at clubs, though, Helene’s husband quit the group. And as Helene’s involvement with her bandmates deepened, her relationship with her husband became distant and strained—and very nearly shattered.
  
  Baby Plays Around reads like a novel but will ring true to anyone who has ever been in a band or just dreamed of it. Set amid the bars, clubs, and rehearsal studios of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, it’s an incisive exploration of the romance of rock and roll, and of the realization and relinquishing of youthful dreams—about ambition, freedom, and infidelity, about love lost and found again. Written with the same wit and insight that distinguished Stapinski’s uproarious memoir Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History — and a sense of humor as sharp as the crack of a snare drum — Baby Plays Around is a unique and deeply personal story of music and passion.

• Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History  (2001)
  On a summer night when she was five years old, Helene Stapinski watched out her kitchen window as her Grandpa Beansie was carted off to jail for the last time. Beansie (so nicknamed because he had stolen a crate of beans as a child) had spent the better part of that day in the Majestic Tavern, a dive bar on the ground floor of the Stapinskisí apartment building. As the afternoon wore on, Beansie's usual ranting turned mean. He flashed a loaded gun; a silver .22 glowing in the light from the Yankee game on the tavern TV, and bragged to his drinking buddies that he had a bullet for each of his relatives living above the Majestic. But news traveled fast in the neighborhood, and before Beansie, a convicted murderer and armed robber, could stumble upstairs, the cops had him in handcuffs. The headline in the local newspaper the next day read "Man Seized On Way To Kill 5 Children". As Stapinski writes, Jersey City was a tough place to grow up, except I didn't know any better.
  
  In this unforgettable memoir, Stapinski tells the heartbreaking yet often hilarious story of growing up among swindlers, bookies, and crooks. With deadpan humor and obvious affection, she comes clean with the outrageous tales that have swirled around her relatives for decades, and recounts the epic drama and comedy of living in a household in which petty crime was a way of life. The dinner Helene's mother put on the table (often prime rib, lobster tail, and fancy cakes) was usually swiped from the cold-storage company where Helene's father worked. The soap and toothpaste in the bathroom were lifted from the local Colgate factory. The books on the family's shelves were smuggled out of a book-binding company in Aunt Mary Ann's oversize girdle (or taken by Grandpa Beansie from the Free Public Library). Uncle Henry did a booming business as the neighborhood bookie, cousins did jail time, and Great-Aunt Katie, who liked to take a shot of whiskey each morning to clear her lungs, was a ward leader in the notorious Jersey City political machine.
  
  No backdrop could be more appropriate for the Stapinskis than Jersey City; a place known for its ties to the Mafia, industrial blight, and corrupt local officials, and the author ingeniously weaves the checkered history of her hometown throughout the book. Navigating a childhood of toxic waste and tough love, Stapinski tells an extraordinary tale that, unlike the swag of her childhood, is her very own.

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