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JULY 2021 FREE
Piano men
Star gazers Astronomy group back in action after long COVID-19 layoff
Jacobs Music makes a well-timed move to the Windsor Green shopping center
BY NICOLE VIVIANO
BY RICHARD D. SMITH
If you’ve ever wondered about the vastness of the night sky, the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton might have just the thing for you. After being forced to pause meetings more than a year ago due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the club is finally back and looking at the stars. Founded over 50 years ago, AAAP looks to share the fascination of the night sky with members and the public through their events and informational meetings. The club owns the Simpson Observatory in Titusville, within the New Jersey half of Washington Crossing State Park, and they were recently allowed to operate the facility under near normal conditions. There is no occupancy limit on the observatory grounds, and up to 12 people are allowed inside the building for visual observing. The observatory is home to multiple permanent large telescopes that are open to the public for free during the AAAP’s public Friday nights that run from April through October. The club resumed its public nights last month, and people of all interest levels are encourSee AAAP, Page 11
Gloom and doom were the tunes for piano manufacturers and their sales/service outlets. The piano industry had to face the music, so played the reports. “Hitting a low note: Pianos becoming extinct in US homes,” declared the seacoastonline.com news service in July, 2018. And only this past May 12, the research department of the online statistics portal Statista illustrated a report on the number of acoustic pianos sold in the United States with a bar graph looking like a mangled piano keyboard whose black keys had been chopped progressively smaller. In just five years, from 2005 through 2009, annual sales plunged from 95,518 to 33,060. After a slight stabilization, sales played a discordant descending scale from 31,073 in 2019 to 20,870 in 2020 — a loss of nearly a third. And now, in 2021? “The demand far exceeds the supply,” says Robert Rinaldi, vice president, education, for Jacobs Music and co-principal of the company with his brother Chris, president and CEO. See PIANOS, Page 4
West Windsor resident Fabian Nicieza, the co-creator of the comic book character Deadpool, is pictured above at the FanX Salt Lake convention with a young fan. He released his first book, “Suburban Dicks,” last month.
A WW-P murder mystery Legendary comic book writer’s first book set in his longtime home town BY BILL SANSERVINO
Comic book writer Fabian Nicieza first moved to the Plainsboro/West Windsor area in the mid-1990s. Nicieza, 59, is probably most famous for being the co-creator of the character Deadpool, but he has also written almost
every major character in the Marvel and DC universes. But it was a contentious issue in town (more on that later), which occurred shortly after moving to West Windsor that helped spark the idea for what would become his first novel. More than 25 years later, Nicieza has finally written his book, titled Suburban Dicks, which released on June 22. Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Suburban Dicks is set in West Windsor and Plainsboro townships and tells the story
of former FBI profiler Andrea Stern and disgraced journalist Kenny Lee. The two join together to investigate a murder that occurs at the Valero gas station on Route 571 and wind up stumbling across a decades-old conspiracy. Suburban Dicks debuted to rave reviews and Nicieza has already been contracted to write a sequel. The book has also been optioned for a television show. Although the novel is set in the WW-P community, the See NICIEZA, Page 6
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