A Draft of Going Daft

Settling in here at Plum Island Coffee in Market Square, Newburyport, with a black Brazilian roast in a cup the size of a sink to work on one of two draft, and somewhat daft memoirs–“Autopsy of a Joke” and “Sight Unseen”–when I hear the proprietor ask:

“Is that your wallet?”

I assume he’s asking a customer at the counter, but as a joke, I’m about to call over my shoulder, “No, Bruce, not mine!” As if it’s part of the act, I reflexively tap my back pocket, and am immediately alarmed and on my feet. Three steps later, I recognize the item right where I had pointlessly left it.

“Oh, thank you, thank you!”

“Thank him,” Bruce points to a customer, “He noticed it.”

I turn, look up into the face of a tall millenial, and repeat a few more thank yous. He smiles and nods. Only later do I realize that he did not use the interminable auto-response, “No problem,” for which I am even more grateful. Certainly would have been a huge problem for me had he been an opportunist and stealthfully pocketed it. Of course, that’s precisely why I would not have noticed had he said it.

Maybe he noticed that I was already turning back toward Bruce, a fellow who moves in some of the same local circles as I. Putting an index finger over my lips: “This didn’t happen, Bruce. You saw nothing.”

Always easy to gain agreement when the person you’re counting on owes you the identical favor: “No idea what you’re talking about, Jack. All is good.”

Sitting back down, I have no mind for daft drafts, but am starting to feel a draft of going daft. I walked in here with a front pocket stuffed with a roll of one-dollar bills gained in tips while piping endless variations of “Greensleeves” and “Hole in the Wall” at a Renaissance festival to buy a single, if enormous, cup of coffee. Why would I reach for my wallet?

Out of habit? Fair enough, but then why did I not put it back when I recalled and paid with the wad of ones?

Blame it on the wad of ones! My weekends this time of year are always at the renfaire, and when I awake on Sunday morning in a friend’s condo in Halifax, I just jump in my clothes, then my car and drive straight to the caffeine served by Kiskadee Coffee in Plymouth center.

Often I’m there when no one else is, as early as 7:30 to catch up on any correspondence sent me in the last 24 hours when I’ve been off the grid. No WiFi at the condo, and no way I’m bringing any device into Monponsett Inn where I wolf down a post-faire feast on Saturday nights while enjoying playoff baseball and college football on the TV monitors. The tab and tip are covered entirely in ones.

Cellphone? Ha! You don’t know me, but if you’re paying attention, you do know that I park my car in front of Kiskadee when no one else is is sight. Nor are any cars, so I go right to the last spot before the intersection where I’m guaranteed to be clear for takeoff.

NPR is airing what it calls a “driveway moment.” Despite my inability to recall the report now, it’s worth the 40-or-so foot walk back to Kiskadee. I keep the engine going but put the car in neutral because the brake is easier to press than the clutch.

Automatic transmission? Ha! You really don”t know me, but by now you can guess that when I kill the engine, pull the key, and leave the car, I neglect to either put it back in gear or apply the emergency brake. Only now does it occur to me that I should think of it as auto manufacturers and DOTs want us to think it: a parking brake.

In my own defense, I might say that this section of Court St. in Plymouth appears to be level. And it must be very close because, luckily for me, the trunk of my Versa takes at least a half hour to appear outside Kiskadee’s door, its rear bumper resting harmlessly against the front bumper of a car parked here not long after my arrival.

As the saying goes, no harm no foul, so I simply drive off. But I can report that my parking brake has gained more use these past six weeks that it has in the six years I’ve owned the car, possibly in the 40-plus years I’ve owned stick-shifts.

As we often hear, short-term memory is often a stranger to advancing age. Can’t keep one and continue the other, and the other will be my choice as long as I have a choice.

Better move on to “Autopsy of a Joke” (but not the joker) or “Sight Unseen” (but sight nonetheless), except that I can’t recall what I was ready to say about either of them.

Worse yet, the Brazilian is gone.

-30-

An A-sharp on a sopranino recorder outside the front gate of King Richard’s Faire, 2023. Photo by Paul Shaughnessy.

When Am I This Time?

We often hear people ask or wonder where they are, both literally and metaphorically. If they refer to a personal crisis, we might say they need to figure out who they are.

Not me. My challenge is to figure out when I am.

Tis the month of October when, all through each week, I spend weekends in 1510, Mondays and Tuesdays in 1692, then Wednesdays at a cinema projecting films that, this lunar cycle, are set in 1967 and 1983. As if that’s getting too close to the present, yesterday, a Thursday, I registered at the first possible moment to be part of the annual marathon reading of a novel written in 1851.

I’m not just “living in the past,” as the saying goes, I’m bouncing around in it.

In his 1968 counter-culture classic, Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut coined the expression, “unstuck in time.” Reaching old age in the 1960s, mild-mannered protagonist Billy Pilgrim (a name that itself darts back three centuries) alternately returns to Dresden during WWII and launches into an interplanetary future.*

But Pilgrim had no control of when he’d leave the present or in which direction he would go. For me, the schedule is set, and the result more resembles a story Vonnegut wrote eight years earlier.

Set on Cape Cod, it’s about a community theater troupe joined by an impossibly shy man and a young travelling rep of a computer company spending the summer in the small town. She’s cautiously open to something to occupy her evenings. May have been the most popular reading assignment I ever gave my college classes–along with others in Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House collection. But for now let’s just say that, however reluctantly at first, they eventually soar to life as soon as a character name answers the question they ask. It’s the story’s title:

“Who Am I This Time?”

This month, I might ask that myself, as my name keeps changing depending on when I am. At the Renaissance faire, I am Hamm Lynn, a nod to my ancestor in the colorful coat who kidnapped an estimated 130 children in an Alpine town in 1284. For the reenactment of a Salem Witch trial, I may be villager John Louder, farmer John Bly, or Rev. John Hale. (At least I can’t screw up my first name.) Considering what I do at the Screening Room, I am both Jack in the Booth and Jack the Ripper. And if I am once again selected for the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s annual reading of Moby-Dick in January, call me Ishmael–even if I may be quoting Ahab, interpreting Queequeg, or drinking Starbuck’s.

Still, as you likely noted, who I am on any given day depends on when I am. You may also have noticed that two weekdays are unaccounted for and should serve as 48 hours when I can figure it out.

Cut! As a projectionist, I’m necessarily on a schedule requiring that films begin their runs on Fridays, always ending them on Thursdays. At a small arts cinema such as the Screening Room, it’s often a single week run and rarely ever goes three. As a result, Thursday for me feels like Friday, while Friday, since it is mostly free, feels like a weekend. The confusion is compounded whenever I hear someone say, “Thank God it’s Friday,” because what they describe sounds to me like Thursday.

So even when I know I’m back–forward?– in 2023, I have trouble keeping days straight. But I am unconcerned about days. Once we get past Halloween, I’ll be back to a two-day work week, neither of which will require a change of name, a change of garb, or any attempts at Merry Olde English or Colonial speech.

By that time, I’ll be like everyone else wondering where I am, at times who I am, and if things really go south, why I am.

Roll camera!

-30-

*Two years ago, Unstuck in Time was the title of a documentary on Vonnegut that played at the Screening Room:

Stepping Backwards

Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon as Harry and Helene rehearsing Stanley and Stella in *A Streetcar Named Desire,* a scene in a 1982 one-hour television adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Who Am I Today?”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083325/

As Hamm Lynn in 1510. Photo by Yvette Yvettes.

To Quench Our Thirst

In a city that prides itself on support for the arts, especially for local artists, many might jump at the chance to attend a world premiere play penned by a local guitarist long-known for his flamenco, Spanish, and classical performances in downtown Newburyport.

Fuente Grande, based on the persecution of Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca and steeped in the music played around town all these years by John Tavano, plays just twice at the Firehouse this weekend: Saturday at 8:00 pm, Sunday at 3:00 pm.

The title translates into English as “big fountain,” a reference to Lorca’s prominence as a poet who “awakened a nation.” As the Firehouse also tells us:

The feel is 1936 Granada, Spain, on the brink of civil war. It was a time of great social upheaval and people were being intimidated and, in Lorca’s case, murdered.

Produced by The Actors Studio, this is dual effort that is local on both sides. The director has staged all kinds of plays for young and old at Newburyport venues as diverse as the Firehouse and Maudsley Park for some forty years and counting. If that’s not enough, Rhina Espaillat and Alfred Nicol, two local poets who seem to share the mantle of Newburyport laureate, will be there to add their voices.

Guitarist-now-playwright Tavano took his first dramatic effort to Actors Studio director Marc Clopton as soon as he thought it ready to be fashioned by someone who actually knew what he was doing. Turns out Tavano was closer than he thought, as Clopton’s changes were minimal.

Or so I hear. In the interest of full disclosure, I count myself a good friend of Tavano, the only wind-musician in his weekly coffee-klatch of guitarists who tolerate me while I pretend to know what they are talking about. But I do know the dramatic process Tavano described, having been through it more than once, and I suspect that Clopton, like a any good director–or editor, teacher, parent, executive of any stripe–made Tavano think that all the new ideas were his (Tavano’s).

All I know for certain is that Fuente Grande tells a compelling and timely story in a day when debates over what is taught in schools are based on the “comfort zones” of students and parents rather than the truths of history and science.

With the participation of no less than four of Newburyport’s foremost and long-term artists, Fuente Grande can’t help but be both entertaining and satisfying.

Drama. Poetry. Music. For those of us who take pride in our support for local arts, what better chance could we have to distribute it?

Mucha suerte!

-30-

L2R: John Tavano, Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol. Photo: Newburyport *Daily News.*

https://firehouse.org/event/fuente-grande/2023-10-07/

Throwing Darts

Back in the 90s I always busked Portsmouth, N.H., on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.

As far as I can recall, these were the only busking days I ever piped up before noon, taking advantage of a gathering morning crowd in Market Square, many people seated at the dozen-or-more tables on the wide-as-I’d-ever-dare-ask-for sidewalk outside the late and still-lamented Cafe Brioche.

Everyone was awaiting the annual parade, and I offered myself as a warm up act, doing quite well, thank you, as buskers generally do among crowds in good spirits. That had been an early lesson in Denver, Colorado, where my busking career began during the fall of 1977, the very first year that the Denver Broncos went to the Superbowl. In the historic district of Larimer Square just across Cherry Creek from Mile High Stadium, I learned quickly to save myself for late Sunday afternoons when I could see spirited waves of orange jerseys and jackets approaching the trendy pubs and night spots all around me.

Denver was less challenging than Portsmouth, not just because it was later in the day, or because the event had already happened, but because alcohol was involved. Yes, I use the words spirits and spirited in both senses of the word, and as luscious as Cafe Brioche’s dark roasts always were, they could never induce the, um, uh, generosity that results from a pint or three of a favorite ale or lager.

So I worked for it in Portsmouth and was done at a time when I was usually just getting started. Ah, but I had more than one ulterior motive: Barely a block from where I played was the Portsmouth Brewery, New Hampshire’s original brewpub.

Today, this is no big deal, but in the 90s, brewpubs were new in America. Or at least in New England. In the late 70s, one Billy Carter prevailed upon his brother, who happened to be president of the USA at the time, to undo the stranglehold that a few mega-brewing companies had on the industry. Before long, craft beers and ales were appearing from coast to coast. Most all were successful, a few eventually bought out by Miller, Anheuser-Busch, and Coors. Only failure I recall, ironically, was an eyeball-crossing insult to the taste buds called “Billy Beer,” named for the very guy who started it all.

Brewpubs took longer, but not in Colorado. Could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure my friends in the college town of Fort Collins took me to three before Boston had one, possibly before New England had one. So Portsmouth was a BFD for a hops connosieur in the 90s, and I was often there after teaching evening classes at New Hampshire College–now the U of Southern NH, a name that defies geographic clarity considering that the much longer-established and more renowned UNH is itself on the same latitude in the southern half of the state.

For at least a decade, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend was my one afternoon in the Portsmouth Brewery, and I could always count on the Red Sox to be on the screens over the bar, third or fourth inning, when I settled in. It was in 1995 that I ordered a plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and started sipping a pale ale before looking up at the screen and seeing something I couldn’t quite believe, let alone understand:

A pitcher who looked like he was throwing darts. The ball moved so slowly that batters seemed impatient waiting for it, and each pitch went into its own herky-jerky motion just before reaching the plate–like an airplane persisting through turbulence. Batters hit nothing but infield dribblers. Many struck out and walked back to the dugout staring back at him with wide eyes and dropped jaws.

The pitcher himself made less motion than the ball, almost as if standing still and simply flicking his wrist. No doubt my memory is exaggerating his stillness, but compared to most any other pitcher we ever see, he seemed like something that might have been carried out of a wax museum.

Strangest of all, he was wearing a Red Sox uniform.

I didn’t follow the team closely in those years, and so maybe I missed news of a trade wherein the Sox acquired a young pitcher from the Pittsburgh Pirates who caused a sensation two years earlier when he nearly led his team to the World Series by beating the heavily favored Atlanta Braves twice in the National League championship series. Took me awhile to figure out he was throwing a knuckleball, a pitch that was celebrated back in the 50s and 60s but was fading from memory long before he showed up–likely because it is extremely difficult for a pitcher to control as well as a nightmare for the catcher trying to corral it.

As happens in bars, the sound was off, so I wouldn’t learn his name until I heard it on the radio driving home from Portsmouth. But the dart thrower and what he might do were not at all on my busking mind when I pulled into Newburyport and set up for an evening busk dowtown. The second ulterior motive for those of you keeping count. Yes! Still in my forties, I played doubleheaders.

All I was thinking was what it would be like to play as if each note was a knuckleball.

Wouldn’t be the first time I took a musical influence from a pro athlete. When I first picked up recorders–old style, wooden flutes–I was one of many baseball fans fascinated by Cincinnati Reds’ perennial all-star secondbaseman Joe Morgan’s twitching left elbow when he was at bat. In jam sessions in October of ’75 when the Reds met the Red Sox in the World Series, I imitated it with my right elbow while playing my long tenor recorder off to the side–a joke to amuse my guitarist friends who, like me, were watching every game. By the time Carlton Fisk did his Body English Pogo Dance down Fenway’s firstbase line, I realized that Morgan’s twitch was what pro athletes call a “timing mechanism” and that it also worked for musicians, at least this one.*

Goes without saying that what the public wants from a street-performer is high energy, so the idea of piping a wind instrument as if throwing darts was going against the grain. But I wasn’t about to try it on every song, or even most of them, and if it fell flat, I could leave it behind.

It did not fall flat. At times the staccato effect provided such such a welcome contrast to the racing jigs and reels that I had to remind myself not to be mesmerized by it. And before long, I started eyeing people sitting on the benches as if they were dart boards, aiming particular notes when making eye-contact. By the time I joined a Renaissance faire in 1999, you could say that this became my stock-in-trade. But you might not recognize it, as I’ve figured out how to throw darts during the jigs and reels as well.

By the end of 1995, all Sox fans would hear the name Tim Wakefield often, as we would while he pitched for the team all the way to 2011, a stint that includes two World Series championships. And we are all hearing it this week as the tributes mount following his passing at the age of 57.

To those tributes, I add my long overdue thanks for what he taught me to do just by standing pretty much still and throwing darts.

-30-

* A more recent example of a timing mechanism that younger Red Sox fans likely noticed was Dustin Pedroia’s hop at his position just as every pitch was thrown. Kevin Youkilis also did it, but he was off screen at third base while Pedroia was at the top of the screen at second.

The pitch is named not because knuckles are on the ball, but because they are flexed and more visible. Written in January, 2021, this says nothing about the cause of death, which Wakefield kept secret. Instead, it is a fair and concise assessment of his career in baseball and his considerable community service after he retired from baseball:
https://www.thecoldwire.com/what-happened-to-tim-wakefield/

Our Lady of Good Voyage

Ask and I did receive.

A few days ago I posted a review of the Hopper exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Mass., in which I described a painting by his wife, Jo N. Hopper, while admitting regret that I could not find it on-line.

Kind thanks to my friend, Tom Febonio of Rockport, a quaint fishing village right there at the tip of Cape Ann with Gloucester, who found it in a review of the exhibit by the Washington Post:

What fascinates here is the bend of the telephone pole toward the cross, as if drawn by a magnet, and the readiness of the Madonna’s outstretched hand to hold it up.

From a modern perspective, there may not be much more to say of it, but one century ago, Jo Hopper was looking at a brand new technology with an infrastructure that literally towered over the towers that congregations–that people–built to worship their God. When Europeans first settled in North America, most every village had a rule that nothing could be built anywhere nearly as high as a church steeple. Did Jo Hopper see an offer of collaboration or an imminent revolution? Was the hand raised in acceptance or resistance? And what of the identical T shape?

Since this is a much closer look at the church than was the painting I posted with the review, it’s worth noting the Spanish Revivalist architecture that we associate with the American Southwest and which, in this case, jolts many an unsuspecting New Englander visiting Gloucester for the first time.

Originally built in 1892 to serve a large Portuguese population that came to work in the local fisheries, it burned down in 1914, but was rebuilt by the 1920s when the Hoppers began spending summer vacations on Cape Ann.

The new church is nearly a replica of the Santa Maria Madalena church on one of the Azores islands from which most of the immigrants came. Our Lady of Good Voyage was added to the list of National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

-30-

Postscript: In addition to the fishing industry, many Azorean natives joined both the whaling and shipping industries, as Herman Melville tells us in a magazine piece from the 1850s titled “The ‘Gees” (with a hard G). Following descriptions that are mostly laudatory–including an unsurpassable work-ethic–and at other times reflective of the prejudices of Melville’s day, the summary line is more characteristic of Ishmael, his open-to-all and dismissive-of-none narrator of that novel he penned at about the same time:

’Gees are occasionally to be encountered in our seaports, but more particularly in Nantucket and New Bedford. But these ’Gees are not the ’Gees of Fogo. That is, they are no longer green ’Gees. They are sophisticated ’Gees, and hence liable to be taken for naturalized citizens badly sunburnt.

Painting by Alpini Gionatan of the volcano on one of the Azores, the main cause of emmigration.
https://www.inkroci.com/culture_movie/the-stories/classics/herman-melville.html

To Go On When There Is No Cure

If you ever wondered how Kathy Bates would sound–or look–singing the Chiffon’s 1963 number one hit “He’s So Fine” with Maggie Smith on backup vocals, The Miracle Club is for you.

Young enough to be Smith’s great-grandaughter, Irish actor Agnes O’Casey do-lang-do-langs alongside her, a sight-gag with matching dresses. Before the last Oh, yeah, Laura Linney will join them–not behind the microphones but on a long bus ride from Dublin to Our Lady of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees.

As a quartet, they represent four generations, and with Dolly’s (O’Casey’s) young boy taken along for a cure, we could say five. This accounts for a tension barely noticeable at the start of Miracle Club that hits hard when Chrissie (Linney) returns from Boston after 40 years of silent absence to the row-house hood for her mother’s funeral.

As a film of re-generation, the mood and the pace of Miracle Club is comparable to other recent Irish and British films such as The Quiet Girl, The Duke, and Living.

Gradually we’ll learn that much is not what it seems, and that what links these women to each other is well in the past, present only in pictures on walls–or is it the future of the young boy looking into the snow globe he brought back to Dublin at the film’s end?

Rather than spoil it–or issue an alert–I’ll leave all that unexplained and say simply that, more than anything, Miracle Club is a film about reconciliation. For a capsule review, I cannot top Allan Hunter of Screendaily:

As the women set out on a journey each of them hopes will change their lives, along the way, old wounds are reopened, and the travelers are forced to confront their pasts. A quietly feminist film that honors the invisible labor of women, the complexities of motherhood, and the belief that change is possible.

In that, the “quietly” in front of “feminist” partly refers to the portrayal of three husbands left behind. There is one ugly moment and a few insults that in 1967, when this takes place, didn’t draw the offense they would now. The return to Dublin from Lourdes is another round of reconciliation, served as dessert after a full meal. Other than that, these scenes are played for comedy, especially the leak in the plumbing staged by Lily (Smith) for her getaway.

Call it comic relief from the traumatic revelations, accusations, and confessions we hear from the women in Lourdes. As the priest consoles a demoralized Eileen (Bates) when they leave, it’s not the cure that you look for, but the strength to go on when there is no cure.

In Lourdes, forced or not, the women relive their pasts. While miracles fail to occur, reconciliation beckons–or “peace” to use Chrissie’s word. That’s the Miracle in The Miracle Club.

-30-

Playing at the Screening Room in Newburyport now through Thursday, October 5 @ 4:30 each day:

https://www.newburyportmovies.com/the-miracle-club

Hoppers on Cape Ann

When New Englanders say The Cape, it’s always understood to mean that imposing arm of a sandbar that flexes its bicep in the Atlantic and shakes a clenched fist at the Old World.

Those of us who live north of Boston are fine with that, as we play host to enough tourists who know of the beaches, the promontories, the lighthouses, the docks, the harbors, the woodlands, the trails, the fishing villages, the clam shacks, the orchards, the farmland, the castles, the theater troupes, the dance companies, the music ensembles of Massachusetts’ Other Cape that reaches from the coast like a hand open to all.

While many artists have captured the beauty of Cape Cod on canvas, it’s hard to imagine that any have so thoroughly and repeatedly brought it to life as Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has done with Cape Ann.

May be hard to think of the creator of Nighthawks as a landscape (or seascape) painter, but the proof is on exhibit now through Oct.16 at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, a thriving fishing port that Hopper and his wife, fellow painter, frequent model, and life-long muse, Jo Nivison Hopper, frequently visited in the Roaring 20s.

Any scape is equally misleading for an exhibit with so many paintings of buildings, featuring architecture as diverse as the dual towers of the Portuguese church and the mansard roof of the home of a wealthy merchant.

But the overall impression is not so much of wood and bricks, boats and railroad cars, streets and water, or even trees and rock, harbor and surf.

All those subjects are on canvas, making the exhibit well worth the view. But Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape is most memorable for the lighting in which we see the buildings and boats. Hopper was the artist, but Cape Ann is the star of the show.

*House by ‘Squam River, Gloucester,* Edward Hopper

Tempting to say the show was stolen by Jo N. Hopper as she signed her name to the ten or so canvases the filled a middle area surrounded by her husband’s work. A telephone pole curving toward the church steeple strikes me as an essay I dare not write, although a few draughts of Fisherman’s Ale at Blackburn’s Tavern may change my mind.

Her husband’s portrait of her is memorable for the ingenious angle at which he took it, and her self-portrait well past middle-age fascinates us with an inevitable comparison to another of her as a teenager. Called The Art Student, this was by Robert Henri who taught at the art school where Josephine Nivison and Edward Hopper met. According to the paragraph on the wall, she appears as “a little human question mark.”

But there’s no question over how either painter regarded Cape Ann. Every canvas is a statement, an offer made by an open hand.

-30-

https://www.niceartgallery.com/Robert-Henri/The-Art-Student-Aka-Miss-Josephine-Nivison.html

No photos allowed at the Cape Ann Museum, and Jo N’s painting of Our Lady of Good Voyage with the telephone pole leaning toward it is nowhere to be found on-line. (If you can, please let me know,) Here’s one she did of the Portuguese church from another angle.

Prior to Cape Ann Museum, the only Hopper I had seen up close was *Nighthawks* at the Institute of Art in Chicago in 2008. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/people/onewe/

A painting by British painter Phil Lockwood (born 1941) in which every window is Edward Hopper’s painting, even the bar-cafeteria is a Hopper.

A Rye Toast to Salem 1691

Yes, I’ve joined the cast of Salem’s Cry Innocent, but I’m tempted to plead Rye Guilty.

As kids, every American hears of Salem’s witch trials, and every October reminds us of them in living black and orange. An official holiday or not, Halloween is Salem’s night to moonshine.

Missing here is why. We know what: An estimated 150 people were imprisoned for witchcraft. At least 19 adults, most of them women, were executed—though we rarely hear of the two dogs also put down.

In lieu of any scientific reasons, all of the hallucinations, the convulsions, “St. Anthony’s Dance,” the skin lesions, the screaming and erratic behavior are attributed to the devil.

I’d say all of the mischief as well, but one theory holds that a Rev. Parris pushed some accusations to acquire vacated land. Another emphasizes the panic caused by a smallpox epidemic. Both, however, may be called pretexts for exploiting or misinterpreting teenage girls acting, looking, and sounding abnormal, often with menace.

For nearly three centuries, no scientific reason was offered until 1976 when a doctoral student at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute noticed that similar outbreaks occurred earlier in various parts of Europe, all of them with identical symptoms suffered mostly by young girls. What these regions had in common were crops of rye, a grain then far more common to diets, and exceedingly wet seasons prior to the outbreak.

That sent Linnda Caporael, who would complete her doctorate at RPI, into the diaries of Salem villager Samuel Sewall who noted a wet, warm spring of 1691 followed by a hot, stormy summer.

Though it went unnoticed through most of the 18th Century, the excess moisture caused the growth of ergots—small, purple bulbs—on rye grain. Farmers likely thought nothing of it, may not have even noticed it, as they harvested and later milled the crop. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s website:

Since medical knowledge was sparse, the presence of darker shoots on rye was probably thought to be the product of overexposure to the sun.

Not only is it toxic, but hallucinogenic. The young girls, with their not-yet-fully-developed immune systems, started acting out late in 1691, and the hysteria was in full swing by year’s end. Almost all of these cases, Caporael found, were on the west side of Salem Village, where there was considerable marsh compared to the rocky east side. Whereas rye was a “common crop,” harvested by and for the immediate community rather than individuals, this fit her theory. Most of the hearings and trials were held in 1692, coming to an abrupt end, Britannica tells us, “quite simply because Salem ran out of ergot-contaminated grain.”

Caporael’s finding has been rejected by some historians who point out that, even in the 17th century, midwives knew how to harness ergot for inducing labor. Says one:

(T)he visions seem to come and go with the afflicted in ways that are more controlled than a hallucination would cause… [E]rgotism leads to gangrene and there is no documentation of the accusers having gangrenous limbs–even while other symptoms (admittedly similar…) are written about with detail.

Since ergotism was unknown at the time, Cry Innocent has nothing to do with it. So I’m well offstage and away from the cast when I ask: Does an outbreak in one place have to duplicate every symptom in another to be considered the same, or even related? As Britannica tells us:

With the exception of a few events likely triggered by groupthink and the power of suggestion, behavior exhibited in 1692 fits the bill of rye-induced ergotism…

Perhaps it was ergotism that triggered the groupthink and manipulation. Perhaps an American strain lighter than that which produced gangrene in Europe. As always, when you mix history and science you get theory, never to be 100% pinned down and always ripe for debate.

No doubt due to the immediate opposition in 1976, Caporael’s report was not widely circulated. There may have been public resistance as well. After all, as any child will tell you—and as any actor or director will quickly agree—villains are the highlight of any story. Satan versus ergot bulbs on rye grain? No contest!

Be that as may, count me as among those who espouse the theory. To a child of the Sixties, the hallucinatory properties seem close enough, and it is more than glaring that no explanation other than Satan has ever been offered.

The tide turned in October of 2012 when Discover Magazine published an essay comparing Salem’s trials to the Vardo trials in northern Norway throughout the 17th Century:

Hundreds of women were accused, and 92 burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft. Ergot poisoning has also been suspected in several “dancing mania” events in Europe, in which masses of people danced randomly in the street for hours.

Two months later, Live Science offered an irresistible parallel to account for Santa’s annual trips around the world: Hallucinogenic mushrooms in northern Finland, a place with very few people, but many of them shepherds. About as close to the North Pole as you can get, this is where the reindeer, if not the antelope, play. After bites of mushrooms, shephards saw them fly.

Another character we think of as myth, is actually based on a historical figure. According to one of a handful of theories, he used laced bread to entice children to leave a Saxon village in 1284. If true, then for the Pied Piper—my ancestor so to speak—the music was more analogous to taking loaves from the oven than to the baking of the hallucinogenic bread he fed those kids. His flute served as an aural oven mitt.

Medical News Today could have had him in mind when it reported that LSD “is not the same as ergot fungus but contains some similar compounds.” The magazine did include the Salem trials in an extended diagnosis last year, offsetting the poison with a report of extracts with medicinal value for migraines and childbirth–as well as current research for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Even Bon Appetit served up Salem’s contaminated rye, though it should have changed its name to Mal Appetit. One wonders if they were using the story to steer us toward French baguettes.

As for me, my sandwiches between performances will still be on dark rye. After the summer we’ve had, it may be all I need to stay in character.

-30-

Note: Nearly two years after writing this, I chanced upon a 1991 book titled Poisons of the Past by Mary Kilbourne Matossian who explains that ergotism has two strains: gangrenous and convulsive. That Salem’s young girls had no gangrene, therefore, does not rule out that they were afflicted by the latter strain. See: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300051216/poisons-of-the-past/

Detail of TRIAL OF TWO WITCHES by Howard Pyle (1853-1911).
http://www.granger.com.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/story/how-rye-bread-may-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/this-hallucinogenic-fungus-might-be-behind-the-salem-witch-trials

https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/article/how-a-bad-rye-crop-might-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ergot-poisoning#history

https://www.livescience.com/25731-magic-mushrooms-santa-claus.html

Pay the Piper! A Street-Performer’s Public Life in America’s Privatized Times (2014), page 17.

Don’t It Always Seem to Go

Possibly the most quoted song of all the Sixties classics, it is the target of ridicule in a supermarket where I make my rounds today. Joni booms from the ceiling speakers as I walk in:

They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot! Ooooooooooh, ya, ya, ya…

One young deli clerk’s smirking laugh nearly makes his wisecrack redundant: “So, if we don’t pave paradise, where are we supposed to park our cars? Up in trees?”

He appears to be answering someone in a back room, and I do not catch the remark that prompts or follows his car-wrecktorical questions. Indeed, I have no idea If I’m hearing one side of a debate or one half of unanimous condemnation.

Before I can learn which, the clerk is summoned away, leaving me no chance to put my quarter–or my credit card as today’s well-paved world now has it–into any meter of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Just as well. The comment is so unprecedented, at least to me, that I’m at a loss for words. There’s a reason that it’s been among most quoted musical lines for over fifty years and counting. Just last month, I headlined a blog, “Of Paradise & Parking Lots,” and last week it appeared in my Newburyport Daily News column, “Best-Sellers R Us,” as a metaphor for the recent, indiscriminate, hi-tech-driven practice of “weeding” in public libraries.

At the deli counter today I feel as if I’m hearing JFK’s “Ask what you can do” singed in the cynicism of “what’s in it for me?” There’s no question that the Zeitgeist of the Sixties–from Joni to JFK, or from Kerouac to MLK–seems quaint to those in the thrall of America’s Algorithms-Über-Alles 21st Century, but Joni’s “birds and bees”? Please!

Half a century later, our modern day technocrats keep putting up parking lots without gloating over the loss of paradise, or claiming that those of us wanting to preserve it are a bunch of losers. Rather, they merely insist, no matter the evidence to the contrary, that the more parking lots, the better.

By now, they may be right. When Mitchell wrote that song, shopping malls were a new concept. Up until then, most shopping for clothes, hardware, and household items was done downtown in city or town centers. Groceries were purchased at corner stores in most neighborhoods where you also found barber shops, pizza shops, and fish markets. Most all businesses were owned and run by families who lived in the town; what they spent, they spent in the town. In effect, all of us spent what we spent on each other on each other.

That was the America in which Mitchell, a Canadian, arrived only to see us chain ourselves–in both senses of the word–to shopping malls. They were promoted as convenient under the banner of “one-stop shopping,” and it was easy for the corporate owners in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, or anywhere else with skyscrapers to undersell the mom-and-pops downtown and around the corner.

In the winter, there was the added advantage of remaining indoors as you went from store to store. To make it even more inviting, mall designers placed a few chairs in the corridors, and, as my slightly older cousin enthused at the time, “had music coming out of the ceilings” while she and her girlfriends strolled those corridors in a time-honored ritual now facilitated by a controlled environment.

Because so many stores expected so many customers, and because they were all being built on outskirts of towns and cities, massive parking lots were required. No more walking to get a haircut or a pizza or fish-n-chips. No more bus rides downtown.

Often, these were open fields where kids played games, woods with trails where kids went exploring, parks where people of all ages walked, sat, picnicked, romanced, meditated, dreamt, thought long thoughts, asked what they might do for…

This is what Joni Mitchell saw paved.

Not sure if it’s even possible to communicate that to a teenaged deli clerk today. I doubt that such variables would fit any app on his cellphone, nor do I think he’d ever give up the option of one-stop-shopping for a return to mom-and-pop businesses any more than would his parents or his parents’ generation. And, so, yes, he–they, we–must have ample parking.

“Big Yellow Taxi” was a huge, instant hit playing all over the radio, AM and FM, when I was a teenage clerk in a downtown delicatessen. I loved it as much as anyone, especially the line more than one female friend at Salem State liked to sing from time to time:

You don’t know what you got till it’s gone…

Chances are they had in mind the loss of doomed relationships rather than the loss of Mother Nature to concrete and asphalt, but I was so vain, I never thought they sang about me.

That may be why I shouldn’t fault the deli clerk I heard today for laughing at it. The last laugh, after all, is his. Delicatessens such as where I worked were pretty much erased by the supermarkets such as where he works. All made possible by a few football fields’ worth of pavement.

Ridicule?

That’s the fate of all prophets.

-30-

Joni Mitchell performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans, Lousiana on May 6, 1995. Photo Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns
https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/joni-mitchell-book-morning-glory-on-the-vine-8502109/

High on the Rocks of Time

I’m the only person I know who was once hired because the guy choosing from the applications noticed that my birthday, March 18, matched his.

Turned out that the place of employment and the job itself were just as loose, to put it in the parlance of the 1970s. My job was to place large colorful numerals on enormous pieces of just as colorful nylon that, when stitched together, would form spinnakers, or racing sails.

Not the triangular sails that you commonly see on all sailboats, but those huge, billowy, and perfectly symmetrical sails on boats that compete for world cups. Fifty years ago, Ted Hood of Marblehead, Mass., was an annual contender for and at times winner of those cups. Among his advantages was his own sail making company that made them to exact specifications.

Spinnakers are so large that we worked on a floor kept cleaner than the tables of our own college dorms and apartments back in Salem. Knee pads made it easy, as did a rock-and-roll station that played non-stop. Then came the breaks every two hours during which the guy with my birthday would lead his team, all eight of us, out of the building and onto a smooth rock overlooking the ocean to enjoy the sea-breeze and a bit of spray if the surf was up.

Once we were seated and sipping our coffee or soda, he’d reach into his pockets, find a joint, already rolled, strike a match, get it going, and then pass it along. By the time the third person had it, he find another, light it, and pass it on. No one was obliged to partake, though I think we all did. I certainly don’t recall checking a yes or no for marijuana use on the application, but he may have assumed it of a fellow Pisces.

You’re not going to believe this, and even though pot is now legal, it’s probably very bad manners or grossly politically incorrect to say it, but here goes: Our work was easier once we were high. This may be due to so many bright colors being combined, a heightened sense that these were works of art that we weren’t just making, but making possible.

Back in that day of altered consciousness, we’d experienced what we called a “rush,” that might be described as a moment of ecstacy or enlightenment. At Hood Sail this happened whenever the radio station reached back six or so years and played the unmistakable strumming of an autoharp to open a Lovin’ Spoonful song.

Everyone stopped. The women at the machines, the people at the tables, the supervisors in their tracks all looked up as if the band was there attached to the wall in place of the speakers. They all smiled, nodded to each other, and returned to work. I doubt that any of those folk were getting high. First time we, the summer crew noticed this palpable adoration, we must have looked confused. My birthday boss (and drug supplier) noticed:

“He worked here!”

“Who worked here?”

“John Sebastian! The guy singing that song, a song he wrote. He had your job!”

Guess I missed him by at least ten years. I was still in high school when I attended two Spoonful concerts. At one, at my high school–a Catholic high school!–I met and was hopelessly smitten by Donna, an attractive lass who claimed to be drummer Joe Butler’s cousin. But she arrived on a bus from Winnacunnet High, some 30 miles distant, and these were my learner’s permit days before I could drive in the night when, as Sebastian sang, “it’s a different world.”

The Spoonful’s reputation as a folk-rock band was misleading. Sure, Sebastian looked angelic in his granny glasses and picking his autoharp, but they often launched into instrumental riffs led by guitarist Zal Yanovsky that were as kick-ass as what the Beatles and Rolling Stones were putting on albums. To describe it with other common 70s’ expressions, they cooked, they sizzled.

“Do You Believe in Magic?” and “Did You Ever Have to Make up Your Mind?” were my favorites back then, although “Summer in the City” and “Rain on the Roof” have more appeal now. Whichever you pick, “Bald Headed Lena” included, it is one of the crying shames of rock music history that John Sebastian is today remembered more for a televison sitcom’s theme song than for all those great Spoonful hits.* What a day for a…

…Daydream

You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice

Nashville Cats

Darlin’ Be Home Soon

Bald Headed Lena…

…has anybody seen her? Cute as she can be/ She don’t wear no wig ’cause her head’s too big/ But she’s alright with me…

Well, who am I to complain? I recall him more for the best summer job with the most unlikely fringe benefit I’ve ever had. All because my supervisor’s birthday is the day after his.

About twenty years after all that, or thirty years ago, my daughter, then about 15, and I were travelling through Ontario when we put in for the night at a bed and breakfast in Kingston, a very attractive, elegant small city at the east end of Lake Ontario where you can take tours on boats that zig and zag from the lake into the beginning of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

On a table in the lobby were about a dozen menus of downtown restaurants, all within walking distance. I asked Rachel to pick one while I moved luggage into the room. She handed me one for a place she clearly chose for it’s name, Chez Piggy, but I was immediately struck by the name of one of the two proprietors in the top righthand corner:

Zal Yanovsky.

So in character! The restaurant’s goofy name and equally goofy logo of a smiling oinker… It had to be the guy who gave Sebastian a rest by singing lead on “Bald Headed Lena.” Off we went on that mild summer evening to a gorgeous, quaint place with outdoor seating. As soon as we were seated and I ordered a pint of ale, I asked the waiter.

“Oh, yes! And if you arrived just ten minutes ago, you could have shaken his hand.”

In time, I’d learn he was a native of Toronto where he busked Yonge Street with Dennis Doherty before they struck out for fame–Doherty to LA where he joined the Mamas and the Papas, Yanovsky to NYC where he met Sebastian. A fellow busker! The meal, by the way, was delicious, as was the Sleeman Ale.

Occurs to me, as it might to you, that my last blog was about missing Jimmy Buffett when I moved into a South Dakota trailer court about five years after he left. That, as you might guess, was what reminded me of missing John Sebastian by ten years and missing Zal Yanovsky by ten minutes.

Is it merely coincidence or cosmic consolation that the settings for both–a summer job, a restaurant far from home–were as good as it gets?

-30-

Spinnakers made by Hood Sail.
https://www.windcheckmagazine.com/races-and-regattas/4th-annual-storm-trysail-club-ted-hood-regatta-is-on-august-21-23/

L2R: Steve Boone, bass; Zal Yanovsky, lead guitar; Joe Bultler, drums; John Sebastian, autoharp, who also played acoustic guitar as much of the time as well as occasional harmonica. Photo taken in London, 1966: https://forestdweller18285.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-lovin-spoonful.html

*For more about the Lovin’ Spoonful–how they came together, stayed together, and came (abruptly) apart, see bassist Steve Boone’s 2014 memoir, Hotter than a Matchhead, a title taken from the hit song, “Summer in the City.” Some wild surprises, such as their employment as the Beatles’ roadies for the gig at Shea Stadium and driving around Manhattan in an old, beat up station wagon belonging to Bob Dylan who insisted on driving while lighting and passing around joints: