Breakfast with Butruccio

On the day before shutdown, I didn’t appreciate how long it would have to be. Maybe I thought that libraries would simply cancel their events and otherwise stay open for those of us who live on books as much as bread and water.

Went home with just two.

On the day of shutdown, which few noticed was the Ides of March, I had already finished one before hearing the reports and seeing the not-at-all-flattened charts that made even the Quack-in-Chief cancel his Duck Dynasty carnivals and stop calling it a hoax.

Two? Should have taken twenty, but a stay of literary execution appeared in my mailbox on the Italian feast day honoring St. Joseph just hours after I finished the second:

Dinner with DiMaggio: Memories of an American Hero.

Intended as a birthday present, it was one day late, but as an Irish-Italian-American, I’ve always observed a three-day holiday, so she who sent it could hardly have missed.

My immediate reaction was delight. Needing a change of pace from my usual here’s-how-to-save-the-world or here’s-why-the-world-cannot-be-saved fare, I crave biographies because they always deliver history. This one offers added consolation to a lifelong fan of the game about to endure a spring without baseball.

But more: A biography of Joe DiMaggio would serve as a sequel to The Big Fella, a richly surprising 2018 bio of Babe Ruth I read a year ago. DiMaggio’s career began about when Ruth’s ended, and ended, purposefully, when Mickey Mantle, pointedly, replaced him.

And yet more: The gift is from a full-blood first generation Italian-American I’ve known since college, fully aware that I’m a half-blood who would crave a memoir about an Italian, by an Italian, and, if that’s not enough, with a foreword by Francis Ford Coppola.

Written by Dr. Rock Positano, the doctor who, in 1990, finally relieved DiMaggio of the bone-spur pain that ended his career in 1951, Dinner describes their close friendship. In effect, the doctor became DiMaggio’s New York guardian and fixer for the decade up to his death in 1999.

You have to to endure a lot of hero-worship and outright hagiography—in the opening chapters the word icon appears on every other page—but it’s a fascinating look a life for Italians from the 30s into the 60s. What I experienced was minuscule, the very end, muffled for me by my Irish name. This book lets me know it was still going strong.

Positano is eight years younger than I, 39 younger than DiMaggio. He grew up a brawler in Brooklyn and told stories that mirrored those of DiMaggio in San Francisco four decades earlier. While Positano offers many reasons for the odd-couple friendship—from curing the foot to keeping intruders at a distance to arranging for restaurant rendezvous with those the Yankee Clipper wanted to meet—he is either too modest or innocent to claim what his narratives make most clear: DiMaggio saw him as a younger version of himself.

DiMaggio impressed Positano as a man who taught without trying to teach, as when he chided a star-struck furniture mover at the doctor’s office for being late by quoting Martin Luther King’s 30-year-old exhortation always to do the best job you could not matter what it was—complete with King’s choice example of sweeping streets.

Most of Dinner’s stories are told at restaurants all over NYC, all of them Italian, with names from every place and background: Isaac Stern, Henry Kissinger, Michael Bolton, Elle MacPherson, Woody Allen, Tom Hanks, and on and on with occasional reminiscences of Charlie Chaplin, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart.

Not to mention Joltin’ Joe’s thoughts on Mohammed Ali, Lou Gehrig, Fidel Castro, Joe Lewis, Ted Williams, George W. Bush, Pete Rose. Or his crossing paths with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, James Earl Jones, Sonia Sotomayor. Or, most delicious of all, his regard for the tributes paid him in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.”

Most revealing are topics DiMaggio refused to discuss publicly, which created his aloof reputation before he left the game: Marilyn Monroe, his wife of nine months; Frank Sinatra, a close friend turned “pimp”; the Kennedys, “low class shanty bastards.” In time, Positano heard them, and in part Positano shares them with this in mind:

“(DiMaggio) was painfully aware of his place not just as an icon, but also as part of history. He had spent much of his life playing to a future generation of journalists, historians, and fans… I wrote this memoir… to define Joe’s place in history and in the setting of the town that made him legendary… He was a complex man, both a demon and a hero… So many have portrayed him as one or the other, which oversimplifies the man he was…”

All of which makes Dinner with DiMaggio a feast, with sumptuous dishes—history, baseball, arts & entertainment, politics, and foot and ankle medicine thanks to advances Positano made in the field thanks to his unwell-heeled patient—all so very Italian.

All of which makes me want to serve it in my mother’s family name.

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https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Dinner-with-DiMaggio/Rock-Positano/9781501156854

Drinking the Turpentine

A year ago in the middle of a magazine article about a subject I cannot recall appeared a striking piece of writing advice I cannot forget.

Reminded me of that story most all of us heard back in high school. The one where Leonardo da Vinci asks a friend to take a look at The Last Supper before he unveils it for public view. Supposedly the friend leans into the middle of the canvas and exclaims, “Che bel calice!”

Da Vinci, the story goes, picks up a cloth soaked in olio di trementina and wipes the golden chalice right off the middle of the table, no doubt ironing out some of the wrinkles in Jesus’ robe which he later restored, and asks his stunned friend, “Cosa pensi adesso?”

Now what do you think?

The literary version of turpentine, often but erroneously attributed to William Faulkner who gave us Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and other Mississippi masterpieces, calls for writers to examine their drafts for quirky comparisons, nimble turns of phrase, and other flourishes that they most like, and then cut them.

That wouldn’t be so memorable if not for the phrase used by Arthur Quiller-Couch, the legendary Oxford don of a century ago, to impress upon students the need to avoid distracting from the subject at hand by inadvertently calling attention to themselves:

Murder Your Darlings.

Now it’s the title of the sixth book about writing by Roy Peter Clark, best known for Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, a favorite of writers and writing teachers since its publication in 1998. Just in time to make me aware of Clark’s considerable influence on the teaching of writing before I left the profession.

For nearly 20 years I have had no interest in books on writing, having spent much of the previous 25 with them, and it would never occur to me to pick one up in a library much less review it. But to see that three-word command as a book title after a year of turning it into a joke at every possible opportunity, and I could no sooner leave it than I could a picture of anyone from Benjamin Franklin to George Washington lying lost on a vacant sidewalk.

Yes, it is delivered as a textbook with a “toolbox” to forecast each chapter, all of which are followed by “lessons” to list and summarize what today are called “takeaways,” but if you can ignore or forgive that–as a lapsed writing teacher of 20 years, I view it as literary wallpaper–Murder Your Darlings is an entertaining and enlightening survey of the history of writing.

And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser, as the book’s subtitle, only begins to describe the length of Clark’s table. At it, we hear from Strunk & White, Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Gay Talese, Horace, Don Hall, Don Murray, Anne Lamott, Thomas Wolfe (NYC, not NC), Orwell & Huxley, and at least a dozen more.

Some surprising biographical details here. Did you know that a young Eric Blair, before he became George Orwell, attended Oxford where he was a student of Aldous Huxley? And if you’re a Newburyporter, did you know that Edward Bliss, who wrote guest columns for the Daily News in his retirement, was a close friend and colleague of Edward R. Murrow and the editor of In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, 1938-1961?

I’ll leave the writing advice for all you authors, bloggers, journalists, and writing teachers. For anyone else with any interest in history and current events, Murder Your Darlings sheds much light on how language shapes thought and action.

For most books, a reviewer will select a quotable passage to deliver a taste of the writing and content much the way a coming attraction does for a film.

For this book, such passages come in Clark’s introductions to books written well in the past, in this case S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action 70 years ago:

Not only do people disagree on policies, but they can’t seem to agree on what a fact is… Terms like “truthiness” and “alternative facts” have surfaced in political culture. Voters seem to care more about ideology than practical truth and reliable evidence. Propagandists and conspiracy theorists have used social media to magnify the untrue narratives they like and to attack people they hate. Antagonists across the globe seek to undermine American institutions, even messing with our election process.

Such is the intro to Hayakawa’s prescient post-WWII pronouncement:

Hitler is gone, but if the majority of our fellow citizens are more susceptible to the slogans of fear and race hatred than to those of peaceful accommodation and mutual respect… our political liberties remain at the mercy of any eloquent and unscrupulous demagogue.

To unravel that, to understand it, and to undo it, Murder Your Darlings is a useful toolbox offering valuable lessons.

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https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/murder-your-darlings-roy-peter-clark/1131500235

Putting US Together Again

On the day of shutdown, I stocked up at the supermarket like everyone else, but instead of too many rolls of toilet paper, I stopped at the public library for too few books.

As is my habit, I went directly to the New Release display in the lobby where two titles caught my eye. Wham, bam, thank you librarian! I was in and out in less than a minute.

Should have stayed two, as two books proved too few. Five days later I finished both, and the library like all else is closed until further notice. Oh, why didn’t I take that 400-page tome on documentary film-makers with all those glossy color photos?

Yes, I’ve gained a reprieve with the arrival of Harper’s, a monthly mag, in my mailbox, but when I saw the cover story, “Arm the Left,” advocating that liberals start buying guns and forming our own NRA—LRA?—I almost left it there hoping the mail-carrier would replace it the next day with Bon Appetit.

But why complain? The fact that I finished both books within five days is an endorsement all by itself, and rather than getting back on that bed where I have spent way too much time since the most fateful Ides of March since Caesar turned his back on a 2,000-year preview of Knives Out, I should tell you of one.

Not a review, but a relay of a message as useful as it is urgent:

American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves by Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR’s On the Media, may be as close as anyone has come to updating Orwell or Huxley in this funhouse-mirror age of social media memes and Reality TV.

As an extended metaphor throughout the slim volume—I read it in two sittings—Garfield uses the children’s rhyme of Humpty Dumpty, not that there will be any chance of putting “Trumpty” together again, but that “all the king’s men had better get (expletive deleted) busy.”

Yes, it’s a raucous, profane book, all of which is especially electrifying coming from a voice so sonorous and restrained on NPR. Don’t be eating or drinking anything when you get to his expose of how blurbs on movie posters can be extracted from even the most damning reviews.

Written before our current crisis, Garfield’s attention to the anti-vax movement is most timely. Prompted by a single university study in 1998 soon exposed as a fraud, paranoiacs 22 years later still insist it’s true.

This is one of many examples he uses to put responsibility on that third entry in his subtitle: Ourselves.

To counter his own charge, Garfield offers a variety of olive branches, at times martinis, with suggestions for how enough of us can overcome the gullibility exploited by and blind rage perpetrated by Fox News.

Of those who believed on Feb. 27 that the virus was “going to disappear… like a miracle,” later cheering the same speaker’s ridicule of “another Democrat hoax”—but then on March 17 believed the same man claiming, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. While Garfield’s portrayal of bottom-line journalism attacks the influence of advertisers regarding what airs and what does not, there’s no question who is primarily to blame:

In the marketplace of ideas, legislative redistricting and offshore shell companies can’t begin to compete with live partisan shouting matches, much less Kim Kardashian’s (excess deleted).

Which is why a boycott of sponsors seems the most plausible of his manifesto’s calls, reminding us that it was a boycott that ended apartheid in South Africa just three decades ago.

References to films such as Network, Bob Roberts, and Ghostbusters—with an eye-popping comparison of Trump to Bill Murray’s Dr. Venkman—make American Manifesto a cultural treat, but Garfield’s frequent invocation of E Pluribus Unum impresses us with the practical challenge of telling fact from fiction.

A challenge that the current pandemic may yet put on the scale of the Great Depression and World War II.

Now that we all have so much time to examine it, why not meet it?

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https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bob-garfield/american-manifesto/

Quarantine on the Cob

For an islander, social distancing is far easier than socializing, and at my age, it’s preferable. Call it de facto quarantine.

Save one trip to Market Basket, this is my tenth day not setting foot on the mainland, not even setting you-know-what in the driver’s seat of my car.

Tomorrow will be eleven, and after one more trip to pick from whatever’s left on those all-too-clean shelves, I could go another ten.

Resolved to take advantage of this by cooking dishes for which I never have time. For my annual two-day holiday—that Irish indulgence followed by my birthday, a.k.a. Hangover Day—I wanted to simmer corned beef, cabbage, et al, but briskets were long gone.

Hence, Plan B, my first ever attempt at paella for a dias de San Patricio fiesta. Sounds far-fetched, but my uncle used to insist that our dark complexion and black hair owed to at least one of many sailors from the doomed Spanish Armada who washed up on Irish shores in 1588.

The lighter hair, fairer skin, and freckles of many grade school classmates seemed to bear him out, and he was far too funny to risk disproving after the fact with Ancestry.com.

Unfortunately, in the supermarket I had nothing written down, and I’m too stubbornly neo-Luddite to have a smartphone-to-serve-in-place-of-a-brain to call it up, so I taxed my memory.

Wanted to leave out any seafood and just go with plenty of chicken. I live alone after all, so I must simplify. Incredibly, I forgot chorizo and saffron, probably the two most characteristic ingredients—like pineapple and macadamia nuts in Hawaiian pancakes.

Embarrassing to admit this now, but I actually had a small jar of saffron in my hand only to think that I had some inherited from my mother stashed away these 20 years and to hell with any expiration date. The $13.99 tag may have influenced my delusion.

Did you know that saffron is, per weight, the most expensive natural resource—animal, vegetable, or mineral—on the planet? And vanilla is second. Beyond gold, beyond uranium.

But I digest. I did remember sweet corn, a can because all frozen veggies were sold out, only to forget to add it when home. And this was when I was still just 68, mind you.

So I improvised, thinking that more paprika might offset the lack of saffron, only to realize that I had confused the amount with that of crushed red pepper, and, anyway, I was already on my third bottle of Greenhead IPA by the time I poured in the last generous dose of chicken broth, lowered the heat, covered, and waited until a scent of tinged brown rice reach my nostrils.

Delicious! As savory as Grog burritos, Park Lunch’s fried-clams, Brown’s chowder, Lexie’s “Blue Angel,” Flatbread’s “Punctuated Equilibrium.”

But a five-alarm fire that demanded the rest of the six-pack to enjoy. Went to bed as tipsy as I was satisfied, remembering that I already had something to take the edge off the leftovers: A can of corn.

Next day I added it to my pseudo-paella with some lemon juice I had also overlooked, then a half cup of broth to cover and simmer.

No one will ever mistake me for whoever is behind the swinging doors at Angie’s or Port Tavern, but that second round was downright mouth-watering—and barely a two-alarm fire that allowed me to enjoy more ale as dessert. My birthday, after all!

So, yes, to those who sent birthday wishes, I’m holding up well, lucky that the weather tolerates long walks into the Plum Island Reserve to flatten the curve caused by this anomalous paella and anagrammatic pale ale.

And allows me to sit comfortably on those benches near Parking Lot Three, looking at the mainland all the time, grateful for not needing to go there for the time being, content to put time out of mind.

Keeping busy? No writer is ever at a loss for things to do, just time to do them. As Melville exclaimed, “Oh, Time, Cash, Strength, and Patience!”

Notice which comes first.

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Cover image is Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, the Apothecaries painting, sometimes attributed to Nicholas Hilliard. According to Wikipedia, “A stylised depiction of key elements of the Armada story: the alarm beacons, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, and the sea battle at Gravelines.”

Also, more evidence to bear out my uncle’s claim, a map showing almost all of the wreckage off Ireland’s Atlantic coast. How else could there be Irish named Kinsella and Costello? How else did Ireland have a president from 1959 to 1973 named Eamon de Valera?

Put the Load Right on Me

If you’ve seen or plan to see Once Were Brothers, the new documentary about The Band, you may want to see a 2013 film titled Ain’t in It for My Health, a documentary about The Band’s drummer, Levon Helm.

Much of Ain’t in It is devoted to Helm’s post-Band years performing at folk festivals, singing and playing mandolin, and winning a Grammy in 2007 for his album, Dirt Farmer. And it unavoidably covers his embittered estrangement from Band frontman and songwriter Robbie Robertson.

Audiences are giving Brothers ovations as the credits roll, and a few I’ve spoken with agree that the closing ten-or-so minutes are especially powerful. If you see the Levon Helm film before or after it, you’ll know the other side of the story of The Band’s breakup, making that concert scene, with Helm singing lead on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” a reconciliatory response to Ain’t in It.

In that context, the finale is as moving a tribute as anything you will ever see on film or hear in a soundtrack.

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Brothers plays through Thursday, March 6, at the Newburyport Screening Room. Ain’t in It is available on DVD, more than one of which can be checked out of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium system, so I’m told.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10334456/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1362518/

Cities as Museums, People as Art

Somewhere between Travel and Memoir, or between Lifestyle and Home Finance, your local bookstore may have Unpack Your Travel Budget, a slim volume by Newburyport author Marianne Curcio, a contributor to The Boston Globe Magazine.

The title itself is daring in a time when journalists use the word “unpack” as a visual synonym for “analyze.” Curcio proudly reclaims the word as an action aimed at lightening a load with the intent of finding things.

Or, as the subtitle puts it, Change Your Lifestyle and See the World.

Most of us believe we have already made the choices posited in Unpack for the sake of an occasional overseas or cross-country trip: A new SUV or (to use Curcio’s word) a clunker? Cable TV or the local library’s DVDs? Many will want to reconsider their choices after taking the trip of this book in the cheerful company of its author.

If there’s a single scene that best captures both the content and spirit of Unpack, it’s the advice in one of the book’s sections called “Tips,” ironically titled “Museum Pass.” In it, Curcio invokes the odd push-and-pull obligation we feel to visit and spend hours with indoor exhibits:

“It has taken me several years to come to the following conclusion: Skip the museums. Even when I have had the opportunity to visit a museum child-free, it seldom seems worth it… The city is the museum. Every café, side street, book shop, group of college kids playing music and drinking on the steps of a cathedral—this is the museum. The architecture is the history; the people are the art.”

Fans of Herman Melville will hear in that the echo of “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” and Unpack’s frequent and whimsical debunking of so much conventional wisdom regarding travel—as well as the employment that makes it possible—might make them think that Curcio is Ishmael’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter.

She describes much of that employment—demanding, on-her-feet, long hours waiting tables. But always with her eyes and mind on the prize, which kept her in good spirits both noted and rewarded by people out on the town, many of them tourists themselves.

As one who depended on tips for her livelihood, Curcio pays it forward in another punfully tendered “Tip” called “Tips for English.” Reminding us that people in restaurants, in hotels, and driving cabs in most foreign countries have made efforts to learn and speak our language, at least enough to serve us, she makes a surprising and surprisingly fresh case past the formula of 15 to 20 percent.

This tipped-turned-tipper, waiter-turned-traveler may say, in her playful way, that she lives or works or travels “about halfway between anxietyville and stubborntown,” but Unpack Your Travel Budget is something you can take anywhere you go—or keep right at home.

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A disclosure: I’ve met Curcio two or three times over the years in the Screening Room lobby where her mother, Ellen, is a frequent ticket-taker, sometimes assisted by Marianne’s daughter, Violet, to whom the book is dedicated, as well as by Maria and/or Vivian, Marianne’s nieces and Ellen’s other granddaughters. Call it a perk of employment at the Screening Room, a place wherein women wander everywhere.

And a personal note: As one who has depended on tips to supplement my own livelihood for most of my life, and as an author of two books, both of which have sections headlined, “When the Tipped Turns Tipper,” it was fascinating to find so much thoughtful attention paid to the act of tipping on both the receiving and giving ends. My take on the subject was, of course, as a busker on downtown streets and at Renaissance faires, so I was gratified to find that the psychology of the act is much as it is for those who wait tables, tend bars, carry bags, deliver packages, drive cabs–anyone of which occupations outnumbers mine by a long shot.

One of my two takes appeared as a newspaper column in 2014:

https://newburyport.wickedlocal.com/article/20140803/NEWS/140809168

And for more about the author and her work:

http://www.mariannecurcio.com

Do the Geo-Math

Still wondering how upwards of 80% of the American public wanted more witnesses, but the Senate voted no?

Are Judge Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings still fresh in your hippocampus?

Likely you are among the 85% of Americans, including members of the NRA, who favor stricter background checks, waiting periods, and keeping military-grade weapons off our streets.

Such bills have passed the House only to be gunned down by the Republican Senate Majority leader—along with equally popular bills regarding prescription drugs, veterans’ benefits, the environment, education, and on and on.

Since no video of a piece of paper buried under others in a desk will ever go viral, many Americans fall for the overstated claim of “a do-nothing congress.”

Republicans then add this to anti-government campaign rhetoric most appealing in sparsely populated, “rugged individual” states that send nearly as many senators as representatives to Washington DC—in five cases, more.

To answer my opening questions: The House represents people. The Senate represents land.

Symmetry makes the numbers memorable: 18% of Americans inhabit 26 states giving them 52 senators, while 52% of us fill nine states with just 18.

With few exceptions, Texas and Florida, the states with two Republican senators are among the least populated, largely rural—including vast rangelands, forests, and deserts—with as little economic as cultural diversity.

To illustrate, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is the largest city in five contiguous states stretching from the Mississippi’s northern basin all the way to the Rockies’ western slopes, about 20% of the lower 48’s land mass.

Not bad for a city barely the size of Worcester. And not bad for a combined population 2/3rds that of New York City to have 10 US senators.

Meanwhile, again with few exceptions, states with two Democratic senators are highly populated with large cities as well as a fair share of farmland, as much manufacturing as high tech, agriculture as aquaculture, as many tacos as tuna casseroles, chowders as cheesesteaks, linguicas as lasagnas, falafel wraps as fish fries, spinach pies as apple pies, chicken curry as crab Rangoon.

Not bad for a melting pot that House Republicans in the impeachment hearings contemptuously dismissed several times as “urban, coastal liberals.”

Allowing for the exceptions, as well as splitting in half the states that have one senator from each party, the current 53 Republican senators represent about 48% of Americans.

When we consider that just half of qualified voters actually vote in any election, that drops to 24%.

Yes, that also cuts Democrats from 52 to 26%, but in primaries the percentages narrow much more for Republicans because they, in this Age of King Donald, fear hard-right primary challengers—as well as federal agencies now used for political purposes.

They’ll “have their head on a pike,” as CBS reported, a medieval image which an indignant Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski seemed to mistake for an insult to one of her state’s prized fish. Three weeks later, the Port of Alaska gained a $20m grant from Transportation Sec. Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. McConnell.

While the Democrats are split between progressives and centrists, most all pledge support to the eventual nominee. Considering that one leading contender for the presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020 is not even a Democrat but an Independent, everyone, as Sen. Amy Klobuchar likes to say, “has a home” with them.

Ask Sen. Mitt Romney how that compares with his party, and it’s easy to see why Republicans cater to, at most, a cynical, paranoid, gullible 15% of the American population.

All while Democrats bend themselves into pretzels trying to “reach out” to independents and traditional Republicans, boasting of their ability and willingness to “work across the aisle.”

In the few red states where traditional Republicans still have some clout, Republican senators publicly raised some “concern” before hiding behind the technicalities of the rare and complicated impeachment process.

Since they’ve already turned the phrase “thoughts and prayers” into a wink and nod, why not turn “concern” into a verbal snooze button?

Only way to end such deceit and raise all percentages of representation is for more Americans to pay attention and vote.

Until then, the Senate—like the Electoral College and gerrymandering—will be a tool for minority rule.

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Driving in Dynamic Witticism

Get in the Car may be the title, but it’s also a command. The ride, often raucous and as often meditative, takes us from city streets to rail trails, from interstate highways to shores on both coasts, and the range of expression is more than worth the fare.

Mostly memoir, the collection is as varied as the scenery along the cross-country drives W.B. Cushman describes. Which is why the book’s title track offers one of many memorable ah-ha moments when one of his friends keeps insisting that he—or we, or the world—“Get in the car!”

The entry has an equally memorable sequel and powerful reinforcement later in the book under the title, “Please Give the Keys to Florence.”

Yes, there’s a larger application, and in other entries Cushman draws equally provocative messages from deceptively simple questions. As titles of entries, they are easy to find: “What If?” And “Now What?”

Perhaps the most compelling of all is a fictional entry, “From ‘Bennie’s Berkeley’,” which keeps asking, “What’s the goal?” Labeled “Chapter Two,” it’s a tantalizing tease–or what Cushman calls a “dynamic witticism”–for a book to come in a year or two, but by itself it makes one wonder what life would be like if we kept putting that question to each other, to those who hold public office, to those who own businesses, to teachers, to students, to planners of anything urban or rural.

What if? Now what?

The questions themselves may seem simple, as will Cushman’s riffs on giving up alcohol, couch surfing, and Edvard Munch’s Scream, but for all of the above he has answers that not only satisfy, but leave us thinking.

Agreement has nothing to do with it. From start to finish, and from memoir to fiction, these are subjects usually and easily overlooked. Get in the Car gives them the attention they need.

As he says near the end in “Rant,” the collection’s shortest entry, Cushman does “care about the attention I bring to the day.”

And that is what makes his title a command I’m glad I took.

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Full Disclosure: Buddy Cushman is a friend of half-a-century with whom I walked one day from the end of the Blue Line in Revere, Mass., to Salem State College (now University) taking turns wearing a sign with one very large word: “Impeach.”

There was a third marcher, Bill MacDonald of Dorchester, who is the subject of a tribute in this collection. Long after we left Salem and went separate ways–Bud to the Left Coast, Bill to Costa Rica, and me to Dakota Territory before my Prodigal Son act–Bill would sometimes re-appear here in Massachusetts where I would introduce him as SSC’s first graduate with a major in agriculture.

My friends in Dakota would not have noticed, and for good reason, but here north of Boston it was laughable. When the laughter subsided, I’d add, “and minor in Pharmacy.” Buddy and I were the beneficiaries of Bill’s academic pursuits, and the three of us shared an apartment in Salem on a street named for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, just around the corner from Salem’s Polish-American Club. Many streets and squares and even a town in Mississippi are named for him. Sometimes the “Z” is omitted.

Cushman spells it with a “qui” which may (or may not) be his deliberate attempt to capture Bill’s pronunciation. The entry is a nice tribute to the youngest of us who passed away before we had the chance to reprise that sign and walk again, and I have to say that the spelling of our street’s name is the high, like really high point of it. I can hear him.

And, no, the irony of reviewing a book titled Get in the Car by a frequent passenger in my car, my Red Rascal, is not lost on me.

Congress Shall Make Nothing

Pompeo’s meltdown had to be calculated, and explanations range from waving red meat to the base to outright restriction on the First Amendment. The first is a given, yet another distraction, but the second may seem far-fetched until we consider the context:

1) This administration treats the press with contempt.

2) DT himself demonizes the press at his rallies, inciting his crowds to jeer at them.

3) He has excluded the American press from meetings with heads of state in which press from those countries, most notably Russia, have been present.

4) Pompeo chose to do it to an NPR reporter.

5) The Trump administration and base want NPR and PBS shut down.

6) With a senate about to quash an impeachment inquiry without calling witnesses or considering documents, public broadcasting should prove to be an easy target.

7) Without NPR’s and PBS’s “deep dives” into issues–ranging from Flint’s water to Giuliani’s travels–commercial outlets will be likely to stay on the surface of issues, accepting more press releases from agencies they cover, calling it “cost cutting measures.”

8) Lastly, and most ominously, if enough of the public was willing to accept AG Barr’s two-page whitewash of the Mueller Report as “complete exoneration,” then Pompeo’s claim that a veteran journalist couldn’t tell Ukraine from Bangladesh on a blank map may as well be written in stone.

Or perhaps with a Sharpie on a weather map bulging toward Alabama. Trump’s 30% base and their senate majority has already swallowed that one.

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Less than a year old, the map above and its legend can be found at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press

A comparison to a map published in early 2017 before America began breaking ties with longstanding democratic allies and aligning with authoritarian regimes can be made by looking here:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2017

Cartoon at the bottom of it says it all, although by now the wolves would include Brazil, India, and, yes, the US of A:

Confessions of Jack the Ripper

What is it about ticket takers at cinemas that makes people think we can tell how old they are just by looking at them?

At the counter where moviegoers proffer $20 bills as I rip tickets off a roll and in half, the senior discount begins at 60—so says a sign facing them right to my left.

Perhaps because it’s a small arts cinema, most of our patrons are about my own age, not yet November but well past August—barely senior or “golden oldie” or whatever other euphemisms they find amusing.

No matter how old “old fart” is, I laugh with them every time because I appreciate their letting me know.

Those who say nothing, however, tax my patience. Guess low, you risk overcharging them. Guess high, you risk overaging them.

To cheat, or to insult? That is the no-win rub.

As bad as the first may be, the second can be traumatically worse. One lesson long ago was all I needed to always overcharge, no matter how gray, and let them correct me.

Fortunately, most seniors take the overcharge as a compliment, and I am often thanked for it. Feigning surprise, I make a show of wiping my eyes, squinting, and exclaiming, “You’re kidding!”

This is a variation on a schtick well-worn at Renaissance faires. In the cinema I can give it quite a workout before films such as the recent biopics of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harriet Tubman.

A mother-daughter combo walks up, and you welcome the younger one before turning to the other: “And welcome to your big sister!”

If dad is with them: “And you, too, grandpa!”

It’s like flipping pancakes. Men just laugh, and women pour endearments like Vermont dark amber, which is exactly why I ham it up.

Always played it to the max at the faire, knowing that patrons pay for us to be goofy, but at a cinema some may be in the mood of 1917 even if they’re about to see Little Women.

And since it’s an exchange of change, you cannot risk distraction while counting back bills—an act that surprises younger folks already reaching to grab bills out of my hand, while those my age and older offer astonished thanks for a memory of the Eisenhower years.

Some think that a ticket counter is no more—or maybe no less—than an ATM machine, and that we should read them as automatically as a computer reads their punched-in numbers.

At least that’s the look they give when they ask, “Don’t we get a senior discount?”

For a while I would apologize: “Oh, sorry! I forgot to activate the app which allows me to tell how old you are just by looking at you! So sorry!”

Sadly, I soon learned, as did Congressman Adam Schiff, that satire can fall flat in real-time. So, I started explaining that I’m “severely visually impaired” even though I look right at them, clear-eyed and without glasses.

That got mixed reviews until I realized that our regular patrons—many of whom I’ve seen twice a month since the end of the previous century—know that Jack the Ripper is also Jack in the Booth.

Seriously, what would it do to a theater’s reputation if, out of any joking context, word got out that the projectionist couldn’t focus on a face right in front of him, never mind a screen 55 feet away?

That’s why, when we do reopen, I’ll be trying something I saw in a magazine feature about a small arts cinema somewhere in New Jersey.

In a photo of its ticket counter, there above the ripper, hung a simple sign: “Senior Discounts Available on Request.”

If I can mutilate Shakespeare for years at renfaires, why not plagiarize a measly sign?

Seems left to my right to just take it—especially at a distance of 300 miles.

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The photo is courtesy of the Newburyport Daily News, taken by long-time staff photographer Bryan Eaton. The note on the door says: “Sorry, we are shuttered for the duration of the plague.” The last word may lead you to believe that a denizen of centuries past–i.e. Yours Unruly–wrote it. Not so. It was penned (or typed and printed out) by owner Andrew Mungo, a man who believes in calling things by their true name.

And, no, I am not going to make any comment whatsoever on the implications of the ominous title of the next film we were about to open when we had to shut down: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Not a word. No way. Didn’t happen.