Salvatore Salamone (Non-Theatrical) ♣ Sponsors: JoMarie Triolo, David Star
Sardi’s Restaurant has long been a place for Broadway insiders to visit. One who knows this well is Salvatore Salamone.“Between around 2000 to 2015, if you went to Sardi’s on any day after work, there’s a good chance you’d see me,” he said. Over the years, Sal met the Shepherd of The Lambs, Marc Baron, Lamb Father John R. Sheehan, SJ. and the late Lambs member Frank Torren there. How did Sal hear of The Lambs? “They were always leaving Sardi’s on Friday to go to Low Jinx.”
Sal has enjoyed the company of regulars at Sardi’s. “It’s such a local bar in many ways,” he said, adding, “Many people whom I’ve met there will be my friends forever.”
At Sardis, he also met one of his Lambs’ club sponsors, David Star, who was a vice president of the cosmetic company, Revlon. Sal recalls the camaraderie around the bar, which centered around the popular bartender, José Esteves, who retired recently. “He knew so many people,” Sal said. When the mayor of Boston, Ray Flynn, would come in occasionally, José made sure that Sal, who was a fellow Bostoner, got a photo with him. Whenever someone else arrived at Sardi’s from Massachusetts, José would introduce him to Sal, saying. “Here’s another Red Sox fan,” Esteves (a staunch Yankees fan) would say, even though Sal was not particularly a baseball fan at all.
Sal grew up in East Boston next to Logan Airport. People have asked him how can he stand the noise of New York. “I’ve lived at the end of a runway, for crying out loud,” he would tell them. He has done marketing and social media to help promote theater and cabaret. He has helped plays such as David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre that featured actors Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight. Any advice for an online marketing campaign? He said, “Don’t ask people all the time to come see the show. Give them a reason that they would want to see it.” He adds, “Try interviews, news, an offer, quiz, or synopses.’” He said to avoid getting the reaction, “They just want to sell me something.” He now works for QuinStreet, a marketing company covering the insurance and education fields and that diversified into the world of computers. One of their web sites, CIOINSIGHT.com, looks at major trends that chief information officers of companies ought to be aware.
At QuinStreet, Sal has switched roles: he used to work for publishing companies that needed assistance with marketing, He now works for a marketing company that publishes editorial content. Sal has honed his writing skills at science and computer trade publications over the years. At such trade magazines, he has run campaigns for IBM, Dell, and other companies. He grew SmarterTech’s Twitter account over five years from 2,500 followers to more than 36,000. Sal’s knowledge of science and technology goes back to his college days. He earned a degree in atmospheric physics from Boston College followed by graduate study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He entered the field of editing accidentally. Sal was working at the Haystack Observatory, run by MIT in Westford, MA. Someone from a highly technical magazine in Boston dealing with new radar technology needed a writer and called over to the M.I.T. lab. The caller reached Sal’s advisor, asking if one of his students would be interested. “I did the assignment and had a blast, so the editor sent me more.” The editor offered Sal a job in 1986 and Sal has never left the editing field since.” In the late 1980s Sal went on to work for Plastics Today. “I was the chemical additives editor! I knew everything there was to know about extruders in making plastic,” he said with a grin. Sal moved on to become associate editor at Lightwave, a magazine that covered fiber optics.
Then he got his first computer industry job working for Network World, in the early days of personal computers. He went on to work at McGraw-Hill and became news editor at Byte magazine.
Sal went on to write three books. One was titled “The LAN Times Guide to Managing Remote Conductivity,” which has also been published in Spanish and Chinese. He turned his books into lectures and toured the country where readers of the publication would come to a hotel for a conference. Another of his books was called “InternetWeek Guide to Virtual Private Networks.” When the dot-com bubble burst, Sal moved from the computer field to the life sciences. The human genome was in the news at the time for being sequenced. “All this digital information needed to be stored and analyzed,” said Sal, who went to work for a magazine title called Bio IT World. He was also a six-time judge of Microsoft Life Sciences’ Innovations Awards.
He currently works partially at home in King of Prussia, Pa., and commutes regularly to New York.
Sal has begun to perform magic locally in Pennsylvania. He started with tricks that involve giving out his business card, and has developed his prestidigitation into a business through word of mouth by performing at restaurants and holiday parties under the stage name “Sal.” He customizes his shows for the audience or situation. This past flag week, for example, he had four or five tricks relating to the holiday, including making a deck with white background change its colors from red to blue.
There is the love of theater in Sal’s family. Sal’s brother, Louis, worked for Off-Broadway and Off-off Broadway shows. His father, Liborio Salamone, was a federal governmental employee in Massachusetts who had worked as a clerk at the Watertown Arsenal and at the Charlestown Naval Shipyard. Sal’s mother was often sick, so his father would sometimes drop off Sal and his brother on the docked ship Old Ironsides for the day, which was at the very same shipyard as his father worked, treating it as a kind of daycare. “We were bored out of our minds,” Sal said. Sal’s father directed hundreds of small community plays in Boston and its environs, mostly during the 1960s and 1970s. They included You Can’t Take It with You and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. His father would type up and mimeograph a kind of local “Playbill” publication and sell ads to local stores. It would raise about $2,000 or $3,000, and the sum would go each year to South Tewksbury Methodist Church for projects such as paving the dirt parking lot or adding a wheelchair lift. “This was my father’s hobby and his passion.” “That’s how my brother and I got experience with plays,” said Sal. “I got my first taste of what theater was and could be.”
At the piano bar Mimi’s on East 52nd Street at Second Avenue, Sal met his future Lambs sponsor JoMarie Triolo, who is a writer, producer, photographer and art director. It turns out that she
and David Star, who is Sal’s other sponsor, already knew each other. One day Sal would like to perform magic at Low Jinx. He has been to it about six times. “I love Low Jinx. I wish I could be there every week.” He enjoyed hearing Matthew Broderick at the Shepherd’s luncheon, organized by Shepherd Marc Baron in October 2016. “Broderick told great stories,” said Sal.
This year he attended the Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall. He stayed overnight in one of the guest rooms at 3 West 51 Street, which is across the street from Radio City. “I walked out the door and I was immediately in line for the show.”
- written by Gary Shapiro