Sounds of Silencing

My selection of subjects may give the impression that I’ll write about anything.

That’s hard to deny after a day that began with my post about quirky signs on restroom doors–such as “Cylinders” and “Ovals” at an imaginary center for math nerds called Geonasium. Only to end with a draft regarding the glaring prospect of American fascism should either current resident of Florida win the White House next year.

Some subjects I never touch for reasons that have nothing to do with the side I might favor or the proposal I prefer. Nor does it mean that I think them unimportant. Gender-identity rights, for example, are far more important than signs on bathroom doors–which may be the very reason those who oppose gender rights harp on public restrooms as a way to deny them.

You might say, Ah ha! You just wrote about it! Well yes, but only as an example of what needs to be said about language and logic. In other words–if in very few words–I will call attention to a detail that is overlooked.

The subjects I avoid are those widely debated by many others far more involved with or caught up in them. What could I, a lapsed-Catholic-turned-agnostic of European descent who spent his Prodigal Son years in the Dakotas, ever add to debates regarding Israel and Palestine?

Back in the late-80s when he was at the height of his popularity, Woody Allen offered an op-ed in the New York Times that made the distinction between the Israeli government and the Jewish people. The force of a slapstick Jewish comic making a serious, life-or-death point without a single wise-crack was impossible to miss. His case for the Israeli government to end its violence was undeniable.

It was also ignored. In 1992, an El Al flight skidded off an Amsterdam runway into a very large apartment building. Many residents were hospitalized with respiratory ailments and severe burns for weeks while the Dutch government denied that there were any dangerous chemicals released or burned. Dutch doctors, knowing that was false and desperate to know what they faced, put the question directly to the Israeli government which refused to tell them what was on the plane. In 1999, a tape surfaced that forced the admission that the Israelis had pressured Dutch officials to keep their secret:

The plane was loaded with explosives, ammunition, and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), a chemical used in the manufacture of sarin poison gas and banned by many international treaties which Israel had signed.

With that in mind, who can doubt claims of Human Rights Watch that the Israeli Defense Forces used white phosphorus in the bombs dropped on Gaza City in response to the attack by Hamas this October? Termed a “war crime” in international treaties, the use of WP causes severe burns “down to the bone,” organ failure, and a lifetime of suffering. Israel’s response to the charge is the same as it was to Dutch doctors in 1992: Silence.

But that’s not the Jewish population. That’s a government. The divide is not defined by a border, but by political opportunists on each side of it. That’s why I join those who say: I support Israel’s right to exist, but I condemn the Israeli government. Immediately preceded or followed by: I support a Palestinian state, but I condemn Hamas.

Can the United Nations find a way for both populations to rein in their respective governments?I’ll never presume to have that answer, but there are numerous voices that are aiming in that direction. Among the most incisive and convincing is that of British journalist, Mehdi Hasan, best known in the USA as host of a weekend show on MSNBC.

Until now.

Reports this weekend are that NBC is cancelling the show as well as his show on Peacock. Timing makes it impossible to believe that it’s for any reason other than his voice against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. As most everyone else, Hasan condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but he went further with something few others are willing to say aloud:

Hostage-taking of civilians is a war crime. What we’re witnessing in the Middle East right now are multiple war crimes. Some of us condemn war crimes there, regardless of whether the perpetrators are Israeli or Palestinian. Some only condemn war crimes by Palestinians.
https://www.mediaite.com/

Hasan has long been a bit inconvenient for NBC, but as a Brit of Indian descent, he gave them cred. Pro-Netanyahu critics slam him every time he so much as talks to American progressives of Arab descent, such as US Reps Ro Khanna or Rhashida Tlaib, but say nothing when he dissects Hamas, most notably when he shared a CNN report that took cameras into an Israeli morgue to show the extent of Hamas’ atrocities.

Four years ago he was calling for the west to cut ties with Saudi Arabia. Seems like the obvious thing to do morally, but if anything, America and Europe have strengthened them. Has nothing to do with Arab vs. Jew, but all to do with appeasing those who have billions of dollars to invest or advertise–or numerous tankers full of gallons of oil to supply those who advertise.

Religion is a ruse for geology. Nations became facades for oil fields after World War II when new boundaries were drawn–by Europeans and Americans–all over the Middle East. Ever since, leaders both Arab and Jewish have been guilty of crimes against humanity. All while the Arab and Jewish populations they victimize are overwhelmingly for peace.

That should sound familiar in America where a gun lobby can stop all attempts at regulation despite polls that keep showing over 80% of its own members in favor. We’ve become a nation that sees everything in black and white, either-or, right or wrong, day or night, empty or full and nothing “half” about it. Mention anything in the least critical of Israel, and you might as well wear a swastika.

The Israel-Hamas conflict is a subject of which I know little. But I do know details when I hear them, as mundane as signs on restroom doors and as menacing as presidential candidates who believe they should have their own police forces to do what a legislature or a court might block. Details, not ideology, are the reason I tune into MSNBC more often than all other news stations combined.

That’s why the cancellation of Mehdi Hasan’s show is the network’s betrayal of an audience. As an analyst and as an interviewer, he’s among the best in details. Most important of all, he understands that details, much like innocence, are found on all sides.

To curb that will be to let us find less, to just keep reflecting what we already know and reinforcing what we already think. There’s already a station doing that. It’s called Fox.

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Published this year: https://www.harvard.com/book/win_every_argument/

All the Charm of Preparation H

Biggest laugh in Thursday night’s odd showdown was the Florida governor’s straight-faced claim that, in California, “You have the right to defecate in the street.”

Well, it was billed as a “The Great Red State vs. Blue State Debate,” so it might as well sound like talking smack at a college football game. The California governor did not keep a straight face. In fact, he appeared to be laughing at his potty-brained counterpart most of the night.

If it happened before June, 2015, it would have dominated the news for days and reverberated for weeks. Not the crappy exchange, but the very idea of the whole contrived show. Call it the political equivalent of a bowel movement.

Can’t speak for anything that happened before I turned nine, but I am the son of a political junkie, and have followed presidential elections with intense interest since 1960–from Dixville Notch in early February to late-night network calls in November. So, I can report with certainty that Thursday night’s debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom was without any remote hint of precedent.

Proxies go head-to-head all the time, but this was a proxy (Newsom representing Biden) vs. an active candidate. Candidates in primaries always attack an incumbent of the opposing party while debating each other. That’s looking ahead. However, debating a Democrat as if you’ve already won the Republican primary? That’s being blind to where you are.

It happened because Ron DeSantis doesn’t like where he is. Failing to gain any ground on Donald Trump, and rapidly losing it to Nikki Haley, he jumped at the chance to be the lone MAGA voice heaping scorn upon a “coastal, urban liberal” on national television in prime time.

It also happened because Fox Noise gets more audience mileage–and therefore advertising dollars–out of airing a scowling fearmonger like DeSantis than it would a smiling sugarcoater like Haley or a pious waffler like Tim Scott.

As Marshall McLuhan told us sixty years ago, “The medium is the message.” What was said hardly mattered. Nothing but talking points already accepted or rejected according to which side you’re on. We all know what a MAGA-Republican is going to say and what most Democrats are going to say. We may have been amused–or bemused–by the word “moderator” applied to Sean Hannity, but we all knew how he would frame questions, and how Faux News analysts will spin the answers.

All that’s left is performance. And DeSantis was, well, himself. Bitter, snarky, cynical, paranoid, and with all the charisma of a doorknob, he aimed to present himself as the second coming of Donald Trump only to further reinforce his reputation as a Mussolini wannabe.

Performative? Here’s a line from an email sent by the head of DeSantis’ PAC to his chief of staff as soon as he took office as governor:

It is the governor’s desire to fundraise and maintain a high political profile at all times–inside and outside of Florida.
Harper’s, Feb. 2023

And that was just the eye-opening first paragraph of several pages documenting that Florida has become the stage for what is called “performative politics.” The governor’s office has been a prop for a presidential run since he first crossed its threshhold in 2019.

Thursday night, therefore, taught us nothing about DeSantis. Newsom, however, proved a revelation. Again, not for what he said, but for how he performed.

Another claim I can make with certainty starting with 1960: In presidential elections, crosstalk was unheard of until 1992. And that was in the vice-presidential debate, when Dan Quayle kept talking over Al Gore no matter what the moderator said. In 2016, Trump played the tactic to the hilt in both primary and general debates. This year, we are hearing Republicans doing it to each other.

On Thursday night, Newsom became the first Democrat to beat a Republican with the Republicans’ own Neanderthal club. And he won several times when both DeSantis and Hannity gave up trying to stop him and yielded the floor.

If you missed it, you may be wondering why I’m so approving of a Democrat employing crosstalk as a strategy. Those who saw it, however, know that Newsom was responding the lopsided statistics that took no account of California being a much larger and younger state than Florida. He then demanded answers to even the playing field.

For instance, Hannity’s chart for a “crime” rate made no distinctions between petty theft and aggravated assault. The California governor responded by citing Florida’s high rates of murder and gun violence, and repeatedly asked DeSantis to explain them while DeSantis and Hannity both tried in vain to steer him back to the loaded, misleading question.

Throughout, Newsom appeared calm and sincere while talking, but grinning with amusement at DeSantis’ absurd claims and at Hannity’s warped questions. Except for occasional forced laughter, Florida’s governor looked like a man in deadly combat with constipation.

No wonder DeSantis started talking about defecation. It’s all he knows.

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https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-11-28/newsom-desantis-debate-california-florida-cheat-sheet-guide

Where to Go When You Gotta Go

The answer to the most frequently asked question over the years regarding the Screening Room is a number:

Ninety-nine.

Question most frequently asked in the Screening Room: “Restroom?”

I point the way, “Yes, we have two. Use either one.”

If we had just one more seat, we would be required by Massachusetts law to add a third restroom. And if we still made distinctions, the addition would be for women.

As an arts cinema, our offerings of independent, foreign, and documentary films have always drawn far more women than men. We always laughed at the term “chick flicks.” The Screening Room founders were never offended by it because they felt that films full of car chases and explosions were for the birds–and they knew that women were not chicks.

But their clever, wordless placement of photos–one of Humphrey Bogart, the other of Lauren Bacall–on the two doors with but one toilet each behind them in the discreet corner to the side of the screen failed to anticipate a problem on busy days and nights: When the credits rolled, there would be a line of five or six women waiting to use one restroom while the other remained idle.

When I mentioned this years ago, I was reminded that there were no signs saying “men” or “women,” just the pictures. That’s when I started telling audiences to use either one, adding: “All we ask is that you leave the seat at 45 degrees.”

Now we have new signs. Mass-produced, artless white lettering on charcoal gray, as uniform and sterile as anything you’d find in an industrial supply store, they show stick figures for men, women, and bi or trans people. Hurts to look at them, but they’ve been placed underneath Humphrey and Lauren who remain at eye-level. So I keep my head up.

Maybe I’m looking for the past when I compare the Screening Room’s restroom photos to clever designations found elsewhere. Right here on Plum Island, the Beachcoma’s two doors say “Inboard” and “Outboard.” At the legendary Rein’s Delicatessen which boasts a New York menu in the middle of Connecticut, the doors say “Manhattan” and “Queens” at the end of a corridor you enter under a sign that says “Flushing.” And I can’t count the number of seafood restaurants with doors saying “Gulls” and “Buoys.”

Sometimes I wonder if casinos–places in which I will never set foot–might have rooms labeled “Levers” and “Slots,” and I’m braced for the day I walk into a coffee shop that caters to the hi-tech crowd and see “Plugs” and “Sockets.”

Today, I stopped at the Sturbridge Coffee House for the first time in over a year. Just one restroom there, as they have way less than 49 seats, but that might change considering the size of the room they are adding. I didn’t walk in to take any measurements, settling instead for the sign posted outside the door:

Please excuse our appearance while we try to figure out what we’re doing.

Went into the restroom without noticing the sign on the open door, but a sign on the underside of the toilet’s cover sure caught my eye. Have I ever before seen a sign so positioned? Have you?

It has one of those red circles with the slash through it, forbidding what? Move closer. Under the slash, you’ll see the illustration of a man diving: “Do Not Dive!” The finer print warns of shallow water and serious injury, but if you do dive, it’s at your own risk.

This place serves sandwiches as delicious as its humor–with potato chips they make themselves that make Cape Cod and Utz seem like imposters. I was seated within sight of the restroom door on which was one of those dull charcoal rectangles that has me rolling my eyes in Newburyport. Instead of three, this has four figures, and the fourth is not stick, but the curvy shape of Casper the friendly ghost, except with the face of a space alien and the expression of Edvard Munch’s Scream.

Nice visual, but it was the text that made my day:

Whatever, just wash your hands.

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No idea where this is, but it’s from a collection that’s good for a few laughs:
https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/2087/13-Funny-And-Bizarre-Bathroom-Signs-Seen-Around-The-World

Save Which Date?

At the Screening Room, first thing I do when I open up is take care of the mail and any flyers from community groups put through the transit for us to post in our window for public display.

Today I picked up one that began, “On Christmas Night,” by far the largest line on the 8.5 x 11 sheet. Next line, half that size, says, “Immerse yourself in seasonal favorites.” Wonderful! We can tell that it’s a concert. So far, so good.

Next line begins, “Friday, December 8…”

Cut! I read these three lines more times than I care to admit, wiping my glasses once and wiping my eyes twice or thrice. I even turned it over and looked closely at the back side. The rest of the flyer was clear enough. It was also inviting enough to make me consider buying a ticket—for what, I will not say because I do not want to embarrass these good people.

Nothing like this has ever happened before. Only two items that come to mind are barely related:

Years ago, one local arts organization prepared an elegant flyer, luscious in color, dynamic in design. The dark blue print was gorgeous against the coffee-colored background, and delightful to read when I put it on the counter. In the window, it might as well have been a wet brown paper bag.

Then there was the woman who showed up an hour late because she forgot to set her clock forward for Daylight Saving. Sounds like a minor oversight, but the fact that it happened on a Wednesday made her the woman of my dreams. Unfortunately, that didn’t occur to me until I had laughed long enough for her to turn around, walk down the street, and disappear around the corner.

Today, while making popcorn and getting the projector ready, I spent the next 15 minutes wracking the muscle-memory of my Yankee ingenuity for a way to alter the Christmas Day, Dec. 8 flyer with a sharpie and/or a pair of scissors without making a mess, but thought better to just let pedestrians on State Street figure it out as they walk by.

I suppose that changing “On” to “Before” would not have been too ugly, but I was reluctant to mess with anyone’s preferred prepositions. Then it occurred to me to write a little ditty I could post on social media and that would eventually gain their attention–as well as the attention of anyone who looks at posts on walls of numerous Newburyport businesses.

Of course, on November 29 as I write, it’s too late for them to change the present poster, but in the future, they might make the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. As we often hear:

Better 441 years late than never!

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Can’t recall who took this pic, but it was taken in 2020 because that note on the door reads: “Shuttered for the duration of the plague.” The last window next to the barber shop was where we put community notices, but now they go on the two windows in the recessed doorway.

Know When to Walk Away

Sometimes, to escape concerns and worries over politics, I turn to the ever-engaging, always exciting entertainment of sports.

With a glut of pro and college football games on the tube throughout the long Thanksgiving weekend, I was, well, frankly thankful to have picked up a bug that kept me indoors downing high-pulp orange juice, hot cocoa, hot toddies with apple cider vinegar in lieu of alcohol, and a litre of Kahlua to atone for that lieu.

None of which goes well with trying to convince, as I often try, the American public that, no, it is not all politicians that are bad, but some; not all of Congress or Washington that is indifferent to basic needs, but half.

What a futile waste of time! Worse, I’m asking others to waste their time paying attention to who does what. Worst, I’m contradicting the easy, simple answers of third parties and term limits that allow people to think they are being discerning and responsible while remaining inattentive to exactly who does exactly what in DC.

As a battle-cry, “Get rid of them all!” has far more velocity and force than “Attention must be paid.”

What better place for me to retreat, then, than the world of sports where velocity and force are often the point–often the deciding factor between the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat?

This weekend I enjoyed nine of ten games, most of them going down right to or near the wire. Iowa State vs. Kansas State had the added attraction of being played in a steady snowfall with ten touchdowns, three of them running plays over 70 yards.

That was an annual contest dubbed “Farmageddon” that followed the intense in-state rivalry of Washington State vs. the University of Washington, or “U-Dub” as my source in Seattle tells me. That annual matchup is known as “The Apple Cup.”

Hurts to acknowledge that Washington, mostly on the eastern side of the Cascades, grows more apples than all other 49 states combined. Hurts even more for this once-upon-a-few-harvests-a-lifetime-ago New Hampshire apple-picker to think that you could throw in two more New Englands and maybe a New York and still not equal the output in the Columbia River Valley.

Coincidentally, the only reject in the lot of tight, well-played games this weekend was the New England Patriots vs. the New York Giants. If that one had a name, it might well be “The Toilet Bowl.”

Here in New England, we sports fans are freaking out at how our not-long-ago invincible Patriots have plummeted from perennial contenders and six-time champions to the doormat of the National Football League.

Doormat? More like laughing stock to the sadists who take their pleasure at seeing the mighty brought low.

Both monikers were widely applied to the NY Giants from the beginning of the season, so both should accompany a loss suffered by a hopeless team at their hands. Use whatever metaphor you want to describe the NE Patsies–including that of a deflated football if you happen to be an Indianapolis Colts fan–but I’m already wondering if the team itself is the metaphor I’ve been looking for all along.

Many fans I’m hearing and overhearing want to get rid of the entire team and start anew. If you see only the 2-9 record and a few blowout scores, that might make sense.

But if you look closer, you see a team that scores less than 14 points per game and allows 22.5. If you adjust that for the points scored by or set up by a team’s defense intercepting passes and recovering fumbles, and for points scored by opponents’ defenses off of a hapless quarterback’s handouts and air-mailed gifts, both numbers do down.

In other words, the offense is even worse that the numbers show, but the defense looks quite good. The scores of the last two losses against bottom-feeder teams, the Colts and the Giants, are more indicative: 6-10 and 7-10. Didn’t keep track of it, but I know that at least one of the other teams’ two touchdowns was a pass interception.

Fortunately, most New England fans recognize this. We are good fans who pay attention to detail, know the game, know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.

If only we were citizens as we are fans.

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Abu Sama III ran through the snow for 276 yards and three touchdowns for the Iowa State Cyclones vs. the Kansas State Wildcats in “Farmageddon.”
https://www.postregister.com/sports/pro/iowa-state-relies-on-big-plays-fourth-down-stop-for-snowy-42-35-win-over/article_0070bcd6-e16e-53a7-ab85-2800c5c6b043.html

Going with the Furniture

All those years rolling my eyes and making fun of holiday newsletters that sum up a family’s year and are tucked into Christmas cards, and I’m about to write a blog doing exactly that.

Before you remind me that December has yet to begin, let me remind you that we’ll soon be too busy reading these things to be writing them.

I’d say “holiday cards,” but I don’t want to imply that people who celebrate Hanukkah and Kwanzaa do anything so ridiculous. Maybe they do, but I’ll stay in my lane. And in my own defense, I’m not stuffing this into any envelope.

Then again, I wrote such things back in the 80s long before I ever got on-line and wrote emails, let alone blogs. And I did stick them into Christmas cards. Like this blog, they had headlines that offered the highlight of the year.

For better: “The Year of E-flat” described what musicians call developing a “chop.” In this case, a knack for improvising in minor keys with rapid fire movement for notes that previously threatened carpal tunnel syndrome. By far my best year on the streets.

Or worse: “Wear Sunscreen” focused on a visit to a dermatologist who insisted I return to his office at the end of the day, refusing to take no for an answer. First sample came back positive, but he took a second cut which showed he got it all the first time. I’d say that having someone save your slap-happy life is worth a narration.

Whether or not a diagnosis of melanoma belonged in a Christmas greeting is another matter, and so is 2023, which I will ever remember as the year of:

Going with the Furniture

A very unusual year, due mostly to the sale of the house aside me, and therefore of mine which, per the local zoning board, was part of the deal.

Luckily I went with the furniture without any anticipated raise in rent. Not only that, but the new people, a 40-ish couple, decided to absorb the electric bill, so expenses went down. This may have been due to the gutting and rebuilding of a re-imagined house next door. Price was that I was living next door to a construction site from mid-spring into the fall. Very little company, but I sure spent a lot of time on the beach.

This happened hard on the heels of the sale of the Screening Room to another 40-ish couple. After scraping by through the limitations of Covid, they decided they needed a night off once a week. I got the call. To this day, faithful patrons are still showing up for the first time since the Ides of March, 2020, and they express surprise when they see me.

That’s when I started saying, “I went with the furniture.”

Not sure the expression applies to my other employer, but the founders of the fudge company just it turned over to their children, a 40-ish trio. For them, the furniture I go with one day a week is behind the wheel of a Ford Transit.

Meanwhile, my mid-fortyish daughter and her pushing-fifty husband relocated from California to Massachusetts’ South Shore where I now go for the holidays. My two grandkids may well think I’m part of the furniture. With Generation X now in control of every part of this Boomer’s life, Lachlan and Briana may be right.

Back in the spring and early summer, I had a few rendezvous with a friend who lives in Portland. She’s a member of the Appalachian Mountain Trail Club, Maine chapter, where she found a book titled, Beer Hiking in New England, linking trails with nearby brewpubs. How’s that for delight at the end of the trouble?

Well, there’s a few of them on the southern Lobster Coast and a few more in southeast New Hampshire. Must admit that she’s alternately annoyed and amused by my wanting to stop and sit on every bench along those trails, but I don’t go anywhere without furniture.

Strange to think that in my last busking years before the Covid shutdown, I was adamant about never taking a seat while busking. When I complained about sore feet in the last few years, a friend or relative would suggest I bring a folding chair. I knew they didn’t mean it as such, but I took it as an insult: “I will retire before I sit down!”

Must have been quite a shock to people who also heard me declare, “Death may beckon, but retirement does not.” Do vertical graves exist?

Covid, of course, made all that a moot point, though I’m lately considering coming out of retirement next spring. That’s due to the response I gained in Salem this fall playing in the street as a warm-up for a witch-trial re-enactment. If I could do that in uncomfortable period-shoes, imagine what I can do in high-cut Pumas.

As well as at the Renaissance faire, although I did play much more this season with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers, and when sitting in with them, I sit down with them. Much better for the musical conversation between wind and string instruments to have each players’ ears on the same level. As for the visuals when I join, the name does change to Buccaneer Bay Buzzards.

Not sure if a wooden plank with no backing qualifies as furniture, but it has prolonged my life at that faire. If so, I am yet again going with the furniture, already signed in for 1524.

At first I resisted the phrase. To me it sounds like, and therefore almost implies, “going with the flow.” That’s a phrase, a concept, an attitude that I have always detested. Ditto “Let it slide.” I lose respect for people who say it. Let things control you. Make no effort. An admission of apathy at best, cowardice at worst, laziness at length. But that’s my Sixties’ schooling, an attitude that anticipates injustice 24/7/365.

As Dylan furnished it, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. What on this burning planet would make me think that the choice to sit or stand has anything to do with the courage to change the things I can? Or that returning to a job–or cancelling a move from Plum Island which I never wanted to make–is anything unwise to accept?

Finally, I’m young enough to know the difference, and there’s such serenity in sitting down.

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A musical conversation with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers at King Richard’s Faire: Bob Littera, Irish bouzouki; Kelly Reed-Hathaway, autoharp; some other guy, sopranino recorder. Photo by Triple-G Photography.

A monoblog. (A blogolo?) Photo by Paul Shaughnessy.

Old Dog, New Trick

Two months ago, egged on by a mid-life crisis–or in my case, about a four-fifths-life crisis–I joined a theater troupe in Salem.

Called “immersive theater,” Cry Innocent begins outdoors when a town crier delivers the news–from the old world, from nearby villages, from the frontier, from the docks–and is interrupted by a breathless constable who delivers a warrant for the arrest of an accused witch. She’s milling around among the gathered crowd, and is soon arrested.

From the mid-90s into the mid-teens, I watched that scene from my busking spot on the Essex Street Mall, pausing for a 15-minute break before the actors took the play–and an audience–into Salem’s Old Town Hall.

Sounds like a case of couldn’t beat them so I joined them, but I stopped busking Salem a few years before the pandemic. What brought me back was a grapevine notice–via the Renaissance faire–that they were short of male actors needed to burn the witch (or so I read into what I read). Musicians were also mentioned, so perhaps I might get away with a line or two when not piping up a storm.

There’s a reason I’m a wind musician.

My hope for a small role might have been raised when the script offered a few, but it was soon dashed when I learned of “doubling.” In this case it was tripling, as three roles I might have easily delivered were “tracked” into one. Another track had four, and so two actors each had a coat-rack backstage, in view of the audience, with coats, cloaks, aprons, scarves, and hats to give the appearance of different characters from scene to scene.

I was to open as a timid, nervous-wreck of a servant and close as a bold, plain-speaking farmer–with a blase, above-it-all Puritan minister in between.

But there were plenty of actors–real actors and drama students from Salem State and other nearby schools–to cover the roles, and I couldn’t help but notice that they needed to schedule two others to handle all the other necessities, such as the “sweep” (talking up an audience on Essex Street), the box office, and sitting at the rear of the hall to lead people to restrooms and escort parents with fussy babies to a “Quiet Room.”

My plan from the start was to play full-tilt on Essex Street–directly across from my old busking spot–for at least 45 minutes before each show, and then position myself where the town crier would appear at least ten minutes before he rang the bell. In effect, I opened the show. In fact, on several occasions, I was able to spot the crier’s approach, jump an octave to hit a final note, doff my cap, take a bow, and say aloud:

“Ladies and gentleman, it is my great honor–and much to my great relief–that I give you (pause, flourish of the arm) the Town Crier!”

My ulterior motive, of course, was to convince them that I was of more value as a musician than I would be on stage. It worked. To my greatest relief, I remained an understudy to the end of the run, although, to be fair to myself, I did learn all of three characters’ lines. By the end of it, my fear was more of the transitions. How quickly could I go from a minister’s robes into a farmer’s apron?

Mind you, this all happened two or three days a week while I was spending weekends piping up storms at King Richard’s Faire. Both gigs are athletic events, and, not to play the role of Captain Obvious here, but my nimble and quick are long gone. There’s a reason I haven’t played Salem in recent years. I barely play Newburyport anymore.

Be that as it may, the two months were withering, and November couldn’t come soon enough. What I didn’t know was that Cry Innocent ran a full week after Halloween, partly for school field trips. So, when the last show ended, I breathed a huge sigh of relief–only to have a funny thing happen while saying farewell on my way out the door:

“Hey Jack, wanna play Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol?”

Added to that was the mention that the director “needs Fezziwigs.” Perhaps I should have taken more note of the plural, but all I thought was that it’s a small role and I know the story quite well. Also, I could crave January just as I did November, with a few mostly idle months to follow.

In the week before the first audition, I would learn that, like Cry Innocent, this production is also immersive–so immersive that Scrooge and Marley take the audience on a trolley ride from the Gallows Hill Museum & Theater to a cemetary a few blocks away for the Christmas Future scene. That much made me smile.

Then I realized that, also like Cry Innocent, characters are tracked, and that, after playing Fezziwig in the Christmas Past scene, I’d be changing outfits, getting into a car, and arriving at the cemetary while the audience watched Christmas Present and shed tears for Tiny Tim before boarding the trolley to watch me as Joe, the owner of a pawn shop, purchase bits an’ pieces that Missy and Mrs. Dilbert–or Belle and Ghost Past who rode with me–hawked from Scrooge’s rooms after the old cheapskate croaks. The thought of doing it was as breathless as that sentence to describe it.

Watched all this in the rehearsals, and it’s great stuff. Bad news for you is that all 102 scheduled performances are already sold-out–pretty much sold out as soon as they went on sale in September.

By all means, keep it in mind for next year, but let me qualify my enthusiastic review: Great stuff when the other actors at the rehearsals play Fezziwig/Joe. No I’m not being modest, just realistic:

The rehearsals drew more actors than I think the producers anticipated. By the second night I counted five others for the Fezziwig track. All of them are experienced with far better instincts and more of a knack for acting than I–I who last performed in a play in 1973. Some are theater students committed to the art. For all of them, it’s some meaningful part of their livelihood. For me, it’s a lark.

Lest I sound impossibly selfless, there’s the practical consideration: Driving into Salem late weekday afternoons, whether through Beverly or Danvers, takes 90 minutes to go 25 miles. And even more practical than that is that this Jack no longer jumps over candlesticks.

At the end of the second night, I told the producer that I didn’t mind sitting out. In fact, I suggested that she not schedule me at all, but should call me in an emergency, as I do know the lines. I also mentioned that I’d be glad to hear of any musical role they might add, as they did enjoy my riffs on “Deck the Halls” and “The Holly & the Ivy.”

But local theaters run on shoe-string budgets, and while 102 sell-outs might raise your eyebrows, the 35-seat capacity of a Salem trolley–not to mention the ambitious overhead–should lower them again.

Did I waste two nights by getting roped into this? Not at all. Salem’s theater scene is flush with great people, young and old, a few–very few–almost as old as I. I’m fortunate to have gotten to know them and will have my eye on listings for future productions that might–possibly, hopefully–include an aging piper.

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On any given day, you might find four entirely different actors ready to perform *Cry Innocent*, but surrounding me on this day, clockwise from top left: Colin LaMusta with the crier’s bell, Caleb Palmer with the arrest warrant, Melinda Kalanzis with testimony, and Mikayla Bishop with an attitude. Photo by Artistic Driector Kristina Stevnik.

A Force of Friendship

As First Lady from 1977 to 1981, Rosalynn Carter organized “The Friendship Force.”

Based on her own idea that she was able to launch in Georgia when her husband was governor, it was an exchange program for American cities with cities around the world.

Chartered planes took residents from one city where they would stay, not in hotels, but with host families. Hosts and their guests were matched according to what they had in common, usually their occupation, and guests would go to their hosts’ places of employment, schools, recreation centers. That other city would send the same number of people to the first, with all of the same arrangements.

In 1979, I was a resident of Bismarck, North Dakota, where about 200 of us signed up for ten days in Hamburg, Germany, home of namesake Otto Von Bismarck. I stayed with an editor of Der Spiegel, which may be the largest circulating magazine auf Deutsch.

Highlight of our stay was a day-trip that required about a half-hour train ride out to the Bismarck estate. All of us North Dakotans and all of our German hosts were there to pick from the platters of endless trays of shot-glasses filled with schnapps. Ever since, I’ve shaken my head at the stereotype of Germans as uptight, joyless people—which I would come to realize was the point of Rosalynn Carter’s Friendship Force.

Back in North Dakota, all of us had high praise for the experience, urged friends and family in other cities to see about starting one, and, as you can see here, still reminisce about it while wishing it might be re-created. Today, I’m sure that all of us will recall with gratitude the woman who made it all possible.

May she rest in peace. No one worked harder or longer or in more imaginative ways for it.

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A Laugh on the Dark Side

Years ago, a woman walked into the lobby of the Screening Room while I was bouncing up and down the four steps to the projector’s booth trying to determine the right level of sound for a film opening that evening.

Since the steps are visible right behind the ticket counter, she faced me there when, once satisfied, I took my position as ticket-taker.

“Hop-Frog!” she laughed.

“Huh?” I asked.

“The character in the Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘Hop-Frog’! You remind me of Hop-Frog!”

“I’ll have to read it,” I smiled.

As way leads onto way, I never did read “Hop-Frog,” and some 25 years passed before I trekked a short distance up the Maine coast to see Poe: Tales of Fear & Suspense.

Much like Robert Frost: Fire & Ice, which I caught in 2021,* this is dinner-theater a few miles inland from Ogunquit at the Clay Hill Farm where a chef prepares green beans as if they might be the main course. I’ll leave the taste of seared salmon to your buds’ imagination.

Also a one-man show, Poe, like Frost, is resurrected by Kirk Simpson–who is also my liege, King Richard at the Renaissance faire so named. For all the similarites, the performances take divergent roads: While Frost offers poems that reveal much of his life, Poe selects stories that dramatize characters and conflicts of a dark imagination. Frost is autobiography; Poe is selected works.

But the performance is not at all free from Poe’s own demons. Simpson, in character, begins with a brief description of Poe’s wife, Virginia, a first-cousin half his age, just 13 when they married–and 24 when she died of tuberculosis. Simpson’s re-creation of grief leads seamlessly into “Annabelle Lee,” Poe’s lamentation haunted by “a high fever and jealous angels” and punctuated by quiet coughs into a napkin.

With that as an appetizer, a menu of seven stories is atop each table, along with those for food and drink, offering three “audience choices.” For the first, Simpson took a spin-wheel among the tables, chose a woman to spin it, and then annouced the result:

“Hop-Frog”!

What makes Poe so vivid, so memorable, is Simpson’s theatricality. As much as facial expressions and inflections of voice, he takes care of–and I’d say advantage of–every move. For Hop-Frog, a jester who outwits (and then some!) a king and a court who ridicule his misshapen leg, that’s an exaggerated, lunging gait. That woman at the Screening Room wasn’t far off.

Apart from her comparison, “Hop-Frog” strikes me as the evil-twin of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” published 12 years earlier. Hans Christian Andersen offered something family-friendly, and Poe, very much in character, flipped it to the dark side.

Simpson also has a way of enunciating “ourang-outang,” the oft-used joke-of-a-word in the story’s subtitle, that should remind Poe fans of his fascination with–and disdain for–P.T. Barnum. Couldn’t help but hear the story as a source of influence for magazine pieces years later by Herman Melville and Mark Twain who both shared that fascination and disdain.

After “Hop-Frog” reached its fiery conclusion, Simpson brought his spin-wheel to me. Hoped for “The Masque of the Red Death” for its relevance to the Covid outbreak, but Simpson announced the result aloud: “The Pit & the Pendulum”!

True to my namesake’s occupation, I added, equally aloud: “I apologize!”

Never would have thought that “Pit” or the following “Tell-Tale Heart” could be cause for laughter. Neither features a court jester. But Simpson plays the role of maniacal narrator as well as he plays jovial king and rueful poet, and we often laugh against our better judgement. All while retaining a sense of terror. Exit Andersen and Twain, enter Hitchcock and Serling.

We may have missed the other four stories on the menu, but during intermission, Simpson, as if a demon sent by Poe, circulates among the diners wearing a masque of death–such as we see at the renfaire–scraping a brick with a trowel, the unlikely tool to cover up murder in “Cask of Amontillado.” He also bantered somewhat about “The Black Cat,” so only “House of Usher” was left entirely unpainted.

The show ends with “The Raven,” so iconic it’s the only literary work to have a professional sports team named for it. Yes. we’ve all heard it, but never so vividly as from an actor who can induce sound effects–tapping, gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door–and a chorus of “Nevermore” from some 30 listeners. Simpson puts us in that chamber.

To enter and take a seat, keep your eye on Clay Hill Farm’s 2024 schedule (caption below) for what it bills as its “autumnal tradition.”

Meanwhile, my eye will be on the Screening Room door to tell one patron what I think of her comparison. We had another exchange over that same counter, around that same time, when she laughingly told me that she found my Daily News columns “sardonic.”

Apparently, I reminded her of Hop-Frog in more ways than one.

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Before it appears again next fall, you might consider Simpson’s one-man performances of Dickens’ *Christmas Carol*, *Frost: Fire & Ice*, and similar presentations of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain:
https://www.clayhillfarm.com

*My blog-review of Robert Frost: Fire & Ice:

Barding Around

Deliver Us from Inattention

As with so many other bits and pieces of American history, we all hear of the Salem witch trials but very little of the details.

Took me fifty years after my college graduation–from Salem State, of all places–to learn that accused witches were at times put to “The Lord’s Prayer Test.” And this was only because I joined a Salem theater troupe which performs a re-enactment of a trial every fall.

In the words of Rev. John Hale, based on an actual transcript from 1692:

It is believed that a witch may not be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer without some deprivation or amputation to the text, as it may be that the Lord will not suffer a witch to blaspheme in this manner.

Despite the passive It is believed and the mincing may not be and may be, the claim appears simple and straightforward.

The accused Bridget Bishop insists she can say it, but indeed deprives the text of the very phrase most directly opposed to the devil: Deliver us from evil.

When we opened, I was surprised to see a schedule that went a week past Halloween, ending on weekdays. Turned out that those were to accommodate school field trips. It was during one of those shows that Goodwife Bishop finished with Amen and, before Rev. Hale could note the amputation, the audience burst into cheering applause.

The actor was convincing, and they thought she nailed it.

Who today doubts that we live in a country that has been delivered into evil?

Yes, that is in the passive voice, but it is a rhetorical question that really asks: Who’s to blame? Or, in the context of the Lord’s Prayer: Who led us into temptation?

Convincing actors? Those who exploit a public that sees only headlines without the details of cause and effect?

On the day following the end of Cry Innocent‘s run, with the applause for an amputated text still nagging me, a friend may have updated the question to 2023:

I swear, all people can see is the rise in the prices of food and gas, things over which Biden has no control. Meanwhile, employment is the highest it’s been in decades and wages have risen 37% since Covid restrictions were over.

As appalling as the reality is, his claim is appealing because he does not cast blame at some other side. Instead, his emphasis is on “people.” He names the culprit twice.

Regarding one side of the American divide, it’s too easy to attribute the appeal of “Make America Great Again” and “I alone can do it”–or the appeal of candidates who keep speaking in superlatives and using words such as “tough” and “strong”–to the gullibility that results from our lack of attention.

Ditto the idea of a wall on our border or an end to any and all regulations that may limit what we can own or do–with the glaring exceptions of women’s reproductive rights and minorities’ rights to vote.

Meanwhile, the other side–my side–is blind to it. Too many of my liberal friends are tempted by calls for term limits: We already have a way to remove office holders. It’s called the next election. Why forfeit our ability to keep those whose work is beneficial?

And by third parties: Until ranked choice voting is in place, or unless we are willing to take the time for run-offs, any third party bid will divide voters who consider themselves “independent” and “discerning” while delivering an election to the extremists who have turned a political party into a cult of personality–no matter how many indictments he has or guilty verdicts he may have.

Like it or not, an American presidential election is a numbers game. The extremists will remain united with a formidable number enhanced by the Electoral College. A Democratic coalition offers a number that can beat it. A coalition that splinters–No Labels, Green, Progressive–cannot.

Like so many conservatives, many liberals and a whole lot of in-betweens see and hear only the surface, nothing below it. Simple answers, nothing complex. Sensation, no dull details or explanations of cause/effect relationships.

Superficial, simple, sensational. All of these make for the plot and dialogue of an ongoing national drama in which the actors are convincing, and too many of us are willing to believe they nail it.

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