Farewell for a Renfaire Flaneur*

For a taste of King Richard’s Faire, hear ye the opening lyric of a recent musical:

There is a land where all the people are grand
And all your dreams come true: Crowntown!

To the tune of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” the song remains perhaps. perchance, the closest expression yet that the annual fall festival down in Plymouth County’s cranberry bogs has to a keynote address–loaded with double entendres that charm the children and disarm the adults:

Crowntown! Monarchy works for us!
Crowntown! Democracy’s such a fuss!
Crowntown! King Richard’s ruling for you!

Every year’s musical combines such spoofs of popular tunes into a unified, if raucous, half-hour parody of anything from long before the Renaissance to Reality TV.

My favorites include Natural Born Kilters, a mash of MacBeth with Quentin Tarantino’s film, and The Odd-yssey with Homer’s sirens in day-glow wigs belting out, “Hey, Greek sailor! Spend a little time with me!”

In the orchestra pit from 1999 to 2008, Dennis Wrenn of Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough led the royal band on keyboard. He doubled as trumpeter who heralded and accented scenes throughout the realm during each day. A mawkish snippet of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” was his occasional sound-gag for the most pompous claims of king or jester.

More seriously, he could instruct me without a sheet when I caught an obsession for Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Popular in spooky films and cartoons–and recently in Harry Potter films–it’s an unusual and difficult combination of notes that took me two weekends to play fluidly.

On his trumpet, he found the sequence by ear, then played it a note at a time and pointed to where my fingers should land on a recorder. He could have been exasperated and amused at my penchant for adding B-flats and E-flats where they had no business being. Instead, he was patient–and amused.

Call us rennies of a scale: We joined the same year, 1999, at the same age, 48, both teachers, both with daughters in college at the time, both supporters of NPR, and both fans of all four Boston sports teams.

In late afternoons, I timed my break to return during the musical. My car radio would give me the score of any Red Sox and/or Patriot game in progress. Dennis would know when the games began, giving him an idea of the inning or period. From behind the back row of the audience, I’d catch his eye. A motion to swing a bat or throw a pass would tell him which game. One thumb up for a slight lead, two for a big one, and vice versa with a thumb or two down. A closed fist meant tie game. When done, I waved, and he always nodded at good news or shook his head at bad without missing a beat.**

On one occasion, he laughed when he saw me put a hand over my head with waving fingers pointed down. Though I was improvising a sign we hadn’t agreed on, he knew it meant rain delay.

We barely spent 15 minutes together each faire day, but at 18 days a year for a decade, it adds up, always between cast call and opening. Often we were joined by harper Michael Suss who crossed paths with Dennis making musical rounds in New England in the offseason. It was a treat to hear those two trade notes, fun intended, especially on the innovative but tight choreographies of their favorite marching bands. At times, I wondered if their health insurance was paid up as they re-enacted moves such as Ohio State’s tuba player scrambling while playing–winded in more ways than one–to dot the i in Ohio.

From there I would go behind the gate where I pipe a high-pitched fast tempo set of jigs and reels for the early arrivals. Dennis, in a monk’s robe that accentuated his barrel chest, lumbered up to the balcony where he joined the royal court facing the parking lot.

Our pre-opening scene on that balcony–or, scenario in the parlance of renfaires–began with his trumpet blast. It amused Dennis that the faire’s cue to begin was also my cue to cease and desist.

And it amused me back in 2001 when, telling a college freshman class about the faire, a young woman raised a hand and asked, “Do you know Dennis Wrenn?”

I laughed: “You put up with that joker in high school only to come here and get stuck with me?”

She laughed back; “You remind me of him!”

And I was reminded of him–out of touch for all of the ten-month offseason–when I wanted the lyrics for “Crowntown” a few weeks before our Labor Day weekend opening in 2009. Days later, wondering if he had changed his e-dress, I put his name into Google’s search engine.

Such news usually comes over a phone with a consoling voice, a friend or relative to answer questions. Instead of a handset to my ears, I pressed a hand over my mouth and read the answers, a list of headlines, most of them labelled with the word obituary.

Next day in my mailbox, as if on another double-cue, was the sheet for a tune titled, “Farewell to the Renfaire Flaneurs.” As I recall, I had told friend and composer Tom Febonio that my feet might force me to quit the faire. Knowing my habits, he conjured up a devilish piece laced with sound gags and heavy with flats, B and E.

A Farewell. And a double entendre: “Flaneur” derived from the French for “idler,” also meaning “man about town.”

Dennis was no idler, but to start every faire day, he was my fellow flaneur, a grand man all about Crowntown, and so I play it in tribute…

By his leave.

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In the upper left corner against the back of the gate, you can make out a shadow. Photo by Paul Shaughnessy taken between cast-call and opening.

*This is a slightly modified version of a column that appeared in the Newburyport Daily News, September 2009, about five months after Dennis Wrenn died in Athens, Greece. About a month before that, he took a fall that left him with cracked ribs, and a doctor told him to restrict his movements–that would and should have included cancelling the trip to Greece that Dennis had arranged for his high school jazz ensemble. Not wanting to let the kids down, he went. By all accounts, the trip was a success at every stop. At the Athens airport, while awaiting the flight home, something made Dennis cough. He never recovered.

**About a month after this appeared in print, the Boston Bruins paid tribute during an intermission by putting pictures of Dennis with his student musicians on their Jumbotron with a narration of how well-known he was to teachers of music and to musical organizations throughout New England. He was a season-ticket holder and had been asking me in the last two years to join him for a game. I told him it would have to be versus the St. Louis Blues, the only pro sports team with a musical logo–who are in Boston tonight, just hours after I post this. Wish I had settled for the Anaheim Ducks. Would be interesting to see if two wind-playing geezers could root against honkers less than half our age.

Taking Time the Only Way I Can

With the exception of two or three work days each week, I’ve been diligent about my otherwise daily strolls in and out of the Plum Island wildlife reserve.

As the weather has improved, I’ve been more consistently reaching the two benches that overlook the marsh a mile and a quarter in. On a day this mild, I sit so long that I don’t know if I can take credit for a two-and-a-half-mile walk or two mile-and-a-quarters. Friends say it’s just as well, and I don’t dare ask my doctor if that’s the case.

A few years ago I began noticing that anyone else walking in my direction would pass me. At the time it was a shocking realization for someone who did most everything at a brisk pace, as if there was always something to do next that should not be kept waiting. I was called a lot of bad words in my prime and middle age, but “slow” was never one of them.

Apparently, I’ve gone down yet another gear this year. In recent weeks, there hasn’t been one walk back without a car on the way out slowing down, a window sliding down, and a driver leaning over. The line is always the same:

“Need a ride?”

At first it took me by surprise. I’d say “Thanks, but I need the walk,” or, if I was within sight of the gate, “Thanks, but I live right there.”

Once, I was offered a ride when I had already passed the gate. I thought of the Three Stooges scene where Curly thumbs a ride on a wide, busy street and tells the driver to turn around. “It’s an emergency!” After the U-ee, he has the driver stop and drop him at the other side. A ride to cross a street. Tempting, but I said no thanks.

Now I pretty much expect it. And when I leave the bench to start back, some of those old muscles have retightened and both feet resume their complaints. So when I’m still on the other side of Parking Lot Two, about halfway home, temptation is hard to resist.

That’s about where a woman who knows me from the Screening Room, the wife of a friend, found me. Even at that, it took me longer to fasten the seat-belt–for which she waited–than for her to reach my place.

Today, another Screening Room acquaintance taking me an even shorter distance did not wait, and we exchanged pleasantries to the sonorous ding-dong of the seatbelt alarm.

I figured out that most, perhaps all, of these offers come from Screening Room patrons who frequent the reserve and, as they always say, “see you in here all the time.”

But they could have said that years ago. Why weren’t they stopping then? Why now?

The answer has to be my decreasing pace and lumbering gait. Not so much “taking time the only way I know” as the old song goes, as taking time the only way I can. Coming up behind me and seeing how slow I go, they assume that I need a ride. To them their question is rhetorical, asked only out of politeness.

With that in mind, I’m grateful that the offers come only on the walk back. If made while I’m walking in, then I will start away uneasy.

That would be telling me, in effect, that I appear too old and frail to be there at all. No matter that it is the very reason that I walk in there to begin with.

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Where I live is just before the gate (#1), to the left of it on this map. The two benches are just before Parking Lot Three (#3) at the Salt Pannes Observation Area.

From the air facing northeast, the full length of Plum Island, a good place to walk. Photo by Michael Boer: https://onewe.wordpress.com/

Following the Founders’ Money

We find it so easy to condemn America’s two-party system that we regard the condemnation itself as our only possible response to the dysfunctional government that hyper-partisanship has given us.

Easy and attractive.

Easy because it excuses us from having to think any further, if at all, about how the system actually works–and from having to pay attention to exactly who is doing exactly what.

Attractive because condemnation allows us to believe that we are above it all, and that we are too wise and too good to involve ourselves in arguments. Arguing is ugly. Since both sides are arguing, they both must be bad.

Come the election, one side claims that government can solve problems. They must be fools! Other side says government is the problem. How true! Let’s reward them!

This year, on November 8 to be exact, we’ll find out if the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the disappearance of reproductive rights in 20 or 30 states will be enough to force so many self-styled cynics among us to look at which side is doing what.

Or if we will cling to the ease of giving it no thought–and the attraction of believing that we are above it all.

Numerous historians have described the beginning of the two-party system in America, the riff between Jefferson and Hamilton while both served in the cabinet of Washington who feared and passionately warned against it.

We now have an account that examines it by following the money, The Founders’ Fortunes: How Money Shaped the Birth of America. In it, historian Willard Sterne Randall details how the Northern merchants stood to gain more with a stronger federal government while the Southern aristocracy fared better under state governments–which they, of course, controlled.

The Federalists, led by the inexhaustible Hamilton, pushed for more unity while the Democrat-Republicans, not so much led as instigated by a reticent Jefferson, insisted on 13 sovereign states confederated for the purpose of defense and defense alone.

Over in Europe, says Randall, trade ministers of every country looked at this and “saw 13 banana republics” rather than anything they would call “united.”

Luckily for the Union, a fellow named Madison was able to work with both antagonists long enough to smooth out a reconciliation that gave us the Bill of Rights–all while he and Hamilton railed against the rise of “factions” in their PR campaign that would come to be known as The Federalist Papers.

By “factions,” they meant parties, the very things into which they were falling at the time and which, in time, have fallen to us.

The Founders’ Fortunes shows us that these currents were influenced as much by personal interest as by ideology. Since the founders were most all of a class, and since voting was restricted to white male property owners–160,000 out of four million Americans at the time, or about 4%–no one saw conflict of interest. Only shared interest.

Washington and Franklin, both of the generation before the three characters named above, made considerable land speculations in the Ohio Valley years before independence knowing that westward expansion was inevitable. Randall reports that the founders carefully crafted policies for settlement on the other side of the Alleghanies except for one thing: speculation and the profit to be gained from it.*

During the French-Indian Wars (1754-1763), Gen. Washington in a British uniform made sure that his Virginian troops cleared wide roads on their way to the Ohio. He would regret it when he learned that the French had beat him to Fort Duquesne.

Hamilton held shares in Caribbean trade, and Jefferson stood to gain the closer we were allied with the French. Other signers of the Declaration of Independence had vast fortunes–billionaires in today’s dollars–that the English king wanted to tax for defense and development of the colonies: Trumbull of Connecticut, Hancock of Massachusetts, Livingston and Schyler of New York, Brown of Rhode Island, Carroll of Maryland, and the several plantation owners of the southern colonies-turned-states.

Richest of all was Robert Morris of Pennsylvania who, in effect, was our president with complete control of the purse strings that kept Washington in contention with the British and their Hessians for a few years between the Declaration in 1776 and the first inauguration in 1789.

Randall treats all of his subjects with balance. As much as Morris might have gained from independence, he invested much of his own wealth in it. Crossing the lines after the peace treaty by offering land he had already sold as collateral did earn him a short prison sentence which both Washington and Adams greatly regretted.

Such details make it possible to recommend The Founders’ Fortunes as a collection of biographical sketches. Every name I’ve mentioned and many others come to life. Especially appealing, perhaps because PBS is currently airing the Ken Burns biopic, is the portrait of Franklin and the French “playing with and on each other” as one critic put it.**

In all, the takeaway is that personal financial interests may have given us the two-party system, but they also gave us the revolution that gave us the country to start with.

Perhaps our problem is that we think the founders finished the job, and that there’s no need to change a document that was clearly of, by, and for the top four percent in 1787.

Or that it is heresy to change a document even though said document has already been amended 27 times–actually 25 considering that the 21st Amendment is there only to undo the 18th.

Those paying attention are well aware that one party, for all of its faulty financial connections, is calling for changes necessary to to serve the public, top to bottom.

Those not paying attention are content to condemn the two-party system for all the deadlock, stalemate, and acrimony reported on the nightly news. Cynicism is so easy. And so attractive to those who think that they are wise to what’s going on and are above the fray.

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617803/the-founders-fortunes-by-willard-sterne-randall/

*That should ring the bell of any fan of Kurt Vonnegut who wrote in his intro to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater that the founders made just one fatal mistake in an otherwise brilliant plan: They put no limit on any individual’s accumulation of wealth.

**This squares with the hilarity Sarah Vowell squeezes out of her sketch of Franklin in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015) and with Herman Melville’s surreal, fictionalized portrait in the middle chapters of Israel Potter (1855), “playing with and on” everyone in sight.

Make Racism Wrong Again

Open to the public, the Newburyport Youth Services’ event aimed mostly at parents and teachers of elementary and high-school students, offering guidance on “how to talk to young children about race and racism.”

A hot topic even in this liberal bastion in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. As soon as it was announced, an indignant letter to the City Council fretted over accusations of “White Supremacy” while invoking the phantom boogeyman, “Critical Race Theory.”

Days later, the executive director of the Greater Newburyport YWCA responded with calm reason to allay all fears–“no blame, no shame,” as the speaker herself would emphasize at the start of her talk.

What caught my attention was the invitation in the second letter to the writer of the first: “We would encourage you to come… [and] learn more about systemic racism and its impact on our young people and our social structures.”

Never a fan of what most folk call “fireworks,” I nevertheless skipped a Bruins game on the chance of seeing a local version of Smith vs. Rock.

There were barely 30 of us in attendance, all of us White, including the guest speaker. Skeptics might balk at the idea of a White person holding a seminar on race, but there are lately many Blacks urging us to do exactly that.

Locally, we heard historian Edward Carson of the Governor’s Academy conclude his William Lloyd Garrison Lecture a few months ago telling a largely White audience that we must do it ourselves. Nationally, Eddie Glaude, a frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN, made it a point of his most recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Lessons for Our Own.

Baldwin himself made the point sixty years ago in The Fire Next Time.

No surprise then that the talk would open with a first-person account of growing up in the rich, lily-white town of Winchester, Mass. Whites were all she knew–and all she saw even when she looked at TV or into magazines.

In books, she would read stories about Africa or about the American West before Manifest Destiny. In both places, the natives were “savages,” and there was nothing to counter the imposed stereotype. Indeed, it was God’s manifest will–symbolized by such inspirational images as an oversized angel clad in white flying over the wagon train–that Whites were destined to bring Christianity to all dark corners of the world.

Or by the five smiling faces on a poster for Father Knows Best in which father pointlessly holds a telephone–unless the point is to imply his control or exclusive connection to the business world. Even the phone and its spiral chord are gleaming white.

Most enlightening was Debby Irving’s analysis of the GI Bill. A feature of FDR’s New Deal, it has long been credited with creating the middle class, enabling returning vets to attend college, gain business loans, and buy homes.

We all knew that much. And we all knew that a real-estate practice called “red-lining” kept certain neighborhoods exclusively White. But new to me and most everyone present was that red-lining prevented Black GIs from the benefits of the GI Bill because they lived in places that had been red-lined. Banks weren’t about to send any money there.

Irving put the photo of lovely Winchester back on the screen and doubted that her parents ever knew that while they could live there, others were, by design, excluded.

Black businesses? Those, too, were red-lined unless you go back over a century to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a district known as Black Wall Street thrived for a few decades. But make sure you arrive before 1921 when it was wiped out by a mob of jealous Whites whipped into a frenzy by a false accusation against a Black youth by a White woman.

The two-day massacre killed an estimated 300 Blacks and destroyed 35 city blocks which included 191 businesses as well as hotels, schools, and residences. Police could not locate the perpetrators, not even the owners of the private planes used to drop explosive devices.

For all that, the most stunning line in Irving’s talk is when she pauses to say that she just learned of this a few years ago. If that’s true of someone who is actively looking for America’s true history, what does it say of the rest of us?

In this context, it’s easy to see why an obscure law-school term such as “critical race theory” has become an all purpose shield for those who want no talk of race or racism in our schools. None at all. None whatsoever.

And just as easy to see why talk of reparations gain no traction with people who were born into the advantages of the upper or middle classes whether their hereditary comfort owed to slavery, Jim Crow, red-lining, the GI Bill, or anything else that belies our belief in a “level playing field.”

When Irving mentioned the pervasive image of Rosa Parks as a poor laborer whose refusal to move to the back of the bus was due only to sore feet, I laughed at what I thought was a joke. Anyone who has read anything about the Montgomery Bus Boycott knows that she was an activist selected by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for that role.

Irving laughed back and said, but that’s what we were taught. My memory kicked in. Yes, that’s what we were led to believe back when it happened and for years later until we started reading about it. As if we couldn’t admit that Black people could plan and act with thought and purpose. No joke at all.

By the time it went to Q&A, you’d have thought that the need to teach the history of America’s race relations was a given, but a woman opened the remarks complaining about children being forced into guilt and shame. Don’t know if she was the author of the letter to the City Council, but her frequent repetition of the words “agenda,” “forced” and “imposed”–as well as the obligatory “critical race theory”–made me think so.

Another woman pointed out that this was all discussion about what options teachers and parents might have, that attendance was not mandatory, that there were no children present, and–most pointedly–that there was no force or imposition.

That was as close to fireworks as the presentation came, as all other attendees were receptive to Irving’s talk. Critics can it an “agenda” or “critical race theory” all they want, but what we heard were useful suggestions.

In the denouement, she showed a chart, three concentric circles. Innermost was labelled “comfort” while outermost was “danger.” We all prefer to live in comfort, and we always avoid the danger of losing a job, losing friends, ruining our reputation. If we want to counter racism, we need to speak up when we hear it, and act in the zone between comfort and danger.

That mid-circle was “risk.” When we left, it was clear that all present are ready and willing to take it. To the contrary of the skeptics, the fact that all of us were White did not detract from the event or from the message we took from it.

It’s the low number of us that’s depressing. Trying to increase it will be the first risk we take.

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Architecturally Yours

Anyone telling me that they are going to Chicago for the first time hears me rave about “architectural boat tours.”

Docents taking you along the Chicago River are devoted to details as fine as the tops of posts at the end of bridges that “echo” the designs of buildings as you float past–just as Boston’s Leonard Zakim Bridge echoes the nearby Bunker Hill Monument.

If they are travelling by car or Amtrak from this direction, I’ll also urge that they stop in Cleveland just to walk around downtown, if nothing else, and look at the buildings, the parks, the monuments. Of course, there is more than one something else, most appealingly the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, a glass pyramid shaped as a guitar on Lake Erie designed by I.M. Pei.

Though I never imagined myself an architect, I’ve always appreciated the art no matter what else was going on when I saw it. For all the adrenalin and chaos of the antiwar demonstrations in DC, my first visual association is the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial–itself an architectural tribute to the fellow who designed Monticello and the University of Virginia.

For all the joy of my daughter’s weekend-long wedding party in San Luis Obispo, right up there with the ceremony, toasts, and banquet, is the memory of walking over a small bridge before stopping to read a plaque telling me it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to match the medical center he designed on the other side of the creek:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/40992511@N05/5615422356

When my western friends visit New England, I like to show off our colonial houses, churches, covered bridges, grist-mills, inns, and taverns, as well as Federalist brick homes with columns that make Essex County an architectural feast.

To make them feel right at home, I take them to the many libraries, post offices, and train depots that came later in the 19th Century, very much in the Romanesque, Neo-Classical, and Gothic styles adopted in the American west in real time when first settled.

A bit further away are more recent gems that I include in day trips. Not far over the New Hampshire border is Exeter Academy’s Library designed by Louis Kahn:

Photo by Michael Boer. Other interior shots appear at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261

And there’s the home designed by Walther Gropius not far from the many sites in Lexington and Concord:

Also by Michael Boer with one more shot in: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261

Names such as Pei, Gropius, and Kahn are well known to us dilettantes, and Wright is a household name, so it was something of a jolt when I spotted the cover of a brand new book on which their names were nowhere to be found:

Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmstead, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces.

If we can consider American history as a household, Olmsted is as present as Wright, but his art was landscape. America’s first public parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, and Buffalo were all his design, and most urban parks soon to follow were modeled on them.

His home in Brookline, now a historic site, is also on my to-visit list when a friend arrives from the west, especially one with a camera:

The farmhouse was already there when Olmsted moved in and named it Fairsted. His genius was in landscapes that made buildings seem as if they had grown out of them. His pathways were always curved so that the view of a building would keep changing as you walked or rode along it. Photo by Michael Boer.

But it was the other name on the cover, Henry Hobson Richardson, that piqued my interest. How could I possibly never have heard of anyone that could be paired with Olmsted?

Hugh Howard answers that question in his acknowledgements. An author of numerous books on architecture and design, he set out to “right an injustice”:

Henry Hobson Richardson has been pincered by historical irony. Little known by most people, he is esteemed by many architectural historians as America’s most important architect. He dominated his era, inspired the next generation of designers, and exerted an influence on American building rivaled only by that of Frank Lloyd Wright (who quietly revered him) and Thomas Jefferson. Having written about both Wright and Jefferson, my desire was to help bring Richardson back into the mainstream conversation.

When his agent doubted that a book about a forgotten architect could sell, Howard noted that Richardson’s career began and was shaped by his collaborations with Olmsted. Presto! A dual biography was proposed.

The preface reads like a biography of an expanding nation. Howard offers us the advent of railroad when “the natural cycle of the day gave way to the mechanical” and “technology replaced geography as the chief determinant of whether a city prospered” as context for a fast paced tale of how cities grew.

The desire for parks began as a public health issue as cities grew dense, soon followed by the patriotic desire for Civil War memorials. Both included structures of some kind, and Richardson was Olmsted’s choice. In turn, Olmsted, sixteen years older, became Richardson’s mentor, schooling him (a word Howard uses several times) in how to make buildings look like part of a landscape.

Richardson made his own mark when commissioned to design the new Trinity Church in Boston. A review from the Boston Transcript at the time waxes Shakespearean:

The grand exterior dimensions of the church somewhat prepare one for the spaciousness within. But only seeing can realize the superb beauty of the decoration, rich yet not garish, elaborate and not “piled on,” magnificent in splendors, yet noble and dignified, artistic yet religious and fitting for the place. Its richness is beyond compare, because there is literally nothing like it this side of the ocean. Trinity is the first church in the country to be decorated by artists.

Photo by Paul Shaughnessy who catches himself in the act of shooting with this across-the-street reflection.

Those artists included Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi who, fifteen years later, created the Statue of Liberty. When Bartholdi asked for changes in the design, Richardson gladly accommodated him. Says Howard:

Along with his originality, this was a second important Richardson trait… [H]e found the company of other artists congenial, and his frequent embrace and encouragement of them to enhance his architecture would become a hallmark of his career.

Public libraries were a new concept after Civil War. What few existed before the war were rooms in larger buildings. Setting them in buildings of their own with surrounding landscapes, Richardson and Olmsted set the standard quite high, and many across the country were modeled on what they did in New England. With public buildings and grounds for other civic purposes in Buffalo, Albany, and Pittsburgh, they did the same.

The two were also the first to design train stations according to their practical use. Rather than just another two or three-story block of a building, Richardson designed elongated one-story buildings with roofs that overhung open-air platforms along the tracks, such as the one still in use in Framingham, Mass.

Richardson’s style was the rage for as long as he lived, and on his deathbed in 1886 he regretted he would not see the Allegheny County Courthouse & Prison in Pittsburg and Marshall Field’s in Chicago completed. He thought them his best.

After his death, Romanesque soon fell from favor, but most everything Richardson left behind is now a landmark maintained by municipalities, organizations, and others, including private owners of his innovative “open-plan” homes.

Most are still functioning, and in some, such as Trinity Church, you can view the works of various artists and sculptors. Architects of an American Landscape is loaded with sketches of a lively cast of them, including John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White, and the Hudson River School with an account of how Frederic Church enlisted Olmsted in the effort to halt the commercialization of Niagara Falls.

Sketches, too, of writers and politicians who promoted Richardson’s and Olmsted’s efforts, including Henry Adams, Clover Adams, John Jay, John Ruskin, Robert Treat Paine, and the Sargent family of Boston. Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, and Teddy Roosevelt all have cameos.

The most fascinating sketch was of Orlando Whitney Norcross, whose Boston firm billed itself as “Carpenters and Builders.” Richardson didn’t just hire him but consulted him so closely that Norcross used the “quasi-partnership… to pioneer a new business model.” And so “a new way of organizing a work site” was born, and those who did it had a new name: “Contractors.”

Howard quotes a consulting engineer to explain why the alliance to build Trinity was successful:

Norcross was, in his experience, “ingenious and resourceful and while desirous of making money… ready to subordinate the financial profit to the excellence of results.” For both men, the building mattered most.

That’s the kind of line that makes you nostalgic for a time long gone before you were born. It’s one of many that has me taking closer looks at buildings, bridges, and mills all over New England that I’ve driven past dozens of times.

Just noticed last week that the public library in Woburn, Mass., is so Gothic it seems to say “Enter only if you dare!” This book tells you to dare.

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https://duckduckgo.com/?q=winn+woburn+Library&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

*Post Script: Henry Adams, a leading historian in his lifetime (of the Jefferson/Madison years) wrote a biography of Aaron Burr. His publisher refused to touch it. Sympathy for the Devil. Unclear what happened next, and Howard says only the manuscript was either lost or destroyed, as if Adams had too much else going on to bother with it. Strange to think that in 1880 he published a novel anonymously. Why not the bio? Imagine finding that manuscript!!!

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hugh-howard/architects-of-an-american-landscape/

Always looking for a bench, always sitting on one end, always leaving room. Photo by M. Boer, who, along with me probably became one of the first two people to visit Fairsted and Fenway Park (speaking of architectural treats) on the same day.

Literally, a Smash Hit

Had Will Smith not slapped Chris Rock, what would have been the Oscars’ most memorable moment?

After reading so many commentaries that harp on the act with no mention of the provocation, the question feels like a 21st Century version of: “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

In this case, however, the show went on, and though we were left wondering what actually transpired–if there was a backstory, what was said when the audio was censored, was it staged?–our attention was taken elsewhere.

Which is, after all, what Hollywood is all about. And which is why I offer four speeches for most memorable moment. In no particular order:

Kevin Costner’s could-have-heard-pin-drop-on-a-pillow reminiscence of entering a theater on his own at age seven and watching a four-hour western that redirected his life. Who doesn’t have at least one transformative story set in a movie theater at an early age? In what was easily one of the two most moving speeches by an Oscar presenter that I’ve ever heard, Costner illuminated what we overlook: Every film’s every detail can trigger our imagination, and the best directors are always taking aim.

Jessica Chastain’s acceptance for Best Actress in a Leading Role in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Almost as a sequel to Costner’s remarks about imagination, Chastain spoke of a film’s possibilities as a call to action. Her scope was sweeping, from inadequate healthcare in the USA to war in Ukraine, but her intent was specific: We cannot be bystanders. Put the Reagan-era politics of Tammy Faye Baker aside, and Chastain was true to character.

Troy Kotsur’s signed acceptance for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in CODA. He gained the best laughs of the night while also offering an honest, welcome, and long-overdue entry into the world of deaf people. No need to put anything aside to know that Kotsur’s speech, which had the interpreter choking up, was true to the spirit of CODA.

Before I get to the fourth, let’s rewind to the Oscars of 2005 when that year’s host ridiculed actor Jude Law’s lack of a nomination for a role in a film that gained bad reviews:

You want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law? Wait. It’s not the same thing. Who is Jude Law?

Law may not have been present, but his friend Sean Penn was soon on stage to present an award. Before he did, he said this:

Forgive my lack of humor. Jude Law is one of our most talented actors…

Penn then mentioned his work with Law before ending with a defense of the craft regardless of what critics say and what nominations are made. The message was as moving as Costner’s last night. Unlike Costner, the look on Penn’s face and the timbre of his voice were of barely controlled rage. Rage directed at the evening’s host, one Chris Rock.

Which brings us to the last but not at all least candidate for most memorable speech last night. Admittedly, this one would never have been made if not for the hit:

Will Smith’s acceptance for Best Actor in a Leading Role for King Richard. We can only wonder what he had prepared to say if his name was called. Instead, we got a man repentant for what he had just done but still felt the justice in having done it. We got a man who reacted to public ridicule of his wife’s medical affliction made by a guttersnipe. We got a man who thanked Denzel Washington for his counsel after the fact and quoted it: “In your highest moments, be careful, that’s when the devil comes for you.” We got a man devoted to family, very much in the character of Richard Williams. And we got this description of how he views his work:

I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people. I know, to do what we do, we’ve gotta be able to take abuse. You’ve gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business, you’ve gotta be able to have people disrespecting you. You’ve gotta smile and pretend that that’s okay.

We even got a touch of comic relief: “Love makes you do crazy things,” as he began. “I hope the Academy will invite me back,” as he concluded.

His remarks gained endorsement from a presenter soon to follow, one Anthony Hopkins who drew another round of applause for Smith. No one cared that Smith apologized only to the Academy and to the viewers with no apology to, not even a mention of, the guttersnipe.

Last night, as an actor and as a man, Will Smith displayed the full range of human emotion. Chris Rock, as ever, was nothing more than a punch line.

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https://www.indiatimespost.com/devil-comes-for-you-denzel-washington-shared-advice-to-will-smith-after-chris-rock-slap/

Vigil from the Bridge

Love the idea of a bridge as the site of a vigil to express support for Ukraine, but eleven o’clock in the morning?

Many friends my age now prefer everything early, going to matinees rather than evening shows, griping when the Red Sox games on the west coast don’t start at seven. We meet at restaurants where they have lunch while I have breakfast. I’m a musician of Irish descent. I don’t know what morning is.

Somehow, in spite of my usual late night reverie on this keyboard, I awoke to see an even 10:00 on the clock. I resolved to let breakfast wait, and settled for a cup–okay, two–of coffee before throwing my clothes on to get out the door. Had I been just ten seconds quicker, I’d have joined the one-hour vigil at about 11:15.

Telephone. Many of my friends would chide me for this dilemma. See!, they would say, If you had a cellphone, you could have had that call while driving!

To me, that’s yet another compelling reason not to have a cell. Instead, I had a seat and enjoyed a chat with a dear friend calling to wish me a happy day-after birthday and talk about the possibility of a day-trip up the Maine coast. That led to my giving her news of my daughter’s move to the Massachusetts coast, which led to news of my grandkids, which led to my telling her how much they liked the children’s book she gave me to read to them over the holidays, which led to her idea of turning my restaurant blogs into some kind of tourist pamphlet, which led to…

Which led to my not getting off the phone until nearly 11:30.

But I already had my shoes on, so why not? At least I’ll see how it went. According to the notices, the vigil would line the Chain Bridge, so when I rounded the corner after the rotary, I was surprised to see no-one at all. However, the Chain Bridge goes only part way across the Merrimack to an island where another bridge connects Newburyport and Amesbury. You could call the island a bridge bridging bridges.

I kept driving and was soon waving to about thirty folks on the second bridge dressed mostly in blue and yellow, many with Ukraine’s flag, braving the raw mist of winter’s last day. At the end of the bridge was a spot to put my car, and so I walked back, a reinforcement for the final quarter-hour, replacing someone who had already left.

No telling how many were there when it began, but based on what I heard, I had joined about half of the original cast. Many of them I knew, if not by name, by sight from behind the counters of the Screening Room, including an elderly couple (i.e. my age) who drove down from Portsmouth. One fellow, a retired music teacher, joked that I might have been there to busk.

The response from drivers and passengers going by was all positive. Luckily, no one lives near the mid-river spot we occupied, or they’d have endured a full hour of horns almost non-stop. Rolled down windows for the sake of cheers and thumbs-up may have chilled the interior of the cars, but they offered at least an illusion of warmth to those of us in the outdoor chill.

Unlike recent local rallies in Market Square–such as those in reaction to Trump’s embrace of Putin in Helsinki and following the release of the Mueller Report‘s damning evidence of Russian assistance in Trump’s election–no one expressed opposition. This time, the intent matched that of America’s own returned-to-sanity leadership. Except for the Trump wing of the Republican Party and Putin’s cheerleaders at Fox Noise, America is united in support of Ukraine.

At least I was there to say goodbye to those who planned the vigil as they left, a few at a time. At noon, they broke into a round of applause to signify the vigil’s end, and before long we were walking off the bridge, half of us in each direction. As I started one way, I remembered something, turned around, and hurried the other way to get the attention of the music teacher:

“Say what you want about busking, but the only Eastern European song I know is ‘Moscow Nights’,” I told him. “That’s the real reason I came unarmed.”

He laughed, and responded instead to my earlier complaint regarding time: “I know jazz musicians who were surprised to learn that there were two eleven o’clocks in the same day.”

That’s when it dawned on me (a coincidental pun) that “vigil” means a observance conducted at a time ordinarily reserved for sleep. But it was too late to tell him, or anyone else, that, though late as I was, I was literally the only one there conducting a vigil.

By that time, I was quite alone in the middle of the bridge, on the movable span that allows boats with tall masts to navigate upriver. There, I stopped to read the memorial plaque, partly surprised that this bridge, about the length of a football field, had its own name: The Derek S. Hines Memorial Bridge, named for a local 25-year-old First Lieutenant in the US Army killed in Afghanistan in 2005.

Not to equate America’s invasion of that country with what Russia is doing now, but both were justified by false pretenses. If nothing else, it serves to remind us of the position that Russia’s soldiers are now in, and that their parents are much like those of Derek Hines who were the first to drive across the bridge when it was dedicated and opened in 2012. Soldiers all fighting in good faith, with families who believe in their cause.

Despite our near unanimity of support for Ukraine, our own freedom from false pretenses is tenuous at best as numerous states have restricted or are about to restrict voting rights, or simply grant their state legislatures the power to overturn elections.

Might be a good idea for us to take a walk on the Hines Bridge–or on any number of bridges across the country named for fallen soldiers in false-pretensed wars, including the Donald Wilkinson Bridge that links Plum Island to the mainland, named for one of America’s 58,220 casualties in Vietnam. We need to read the plaques, look at the likenesses, and imagine the lives that were put on the line in all good faith.

Vigils are good, but it’s vigilance that is necessary. We should all lose sleep until we get it right.

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https://www.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/newburyport-soldier-remembered-for-his-sacrifice/article_608af3fc-0b09-5120-ad3e-fa575ab1f49b.html
https://crazyasacoolfox.blogspot.com/2010/07/sepia-saturday-bridge-to-freedom.html

When I Come to It

BridgeSide Grille, Sunderland, Mass.

Don’t know (yet) what photographers plan or have in mind when they set out to shoot a bridge, but a writer could go crazy trying to pick from whatever they take. From the bridge or toward it? Vertical or horizontal? Showing what’s below or what’s across? And in which direction?

Any choice is yet more difficult when the bridge is not the subject, but the namesake for the newest lunch stop on the Marrakesh Express: BridgeSide Grille on the east side of the Sunderland Bridge over the Connecticut River in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley.

Never thought I’d add a blog for a place after just one stop, but the first forkful of BridgeSide’s St. Patrick’s Day special was the taste-bud equivalent of striking gold. Mouth-watering to the last bite. Yes, it was the day, and I had gotten out of bed determined to have corned beef and cabbage somewhere along the day’s route that would send me west on the Mass Pike until turning due north along the Connecticut before turning back toward home on The Deuce.

A drop short of Springfield caused me to find my way to Route 116, a much shorter alternative than the interstate to my next drop north in Deerfield, as well as a feast for the eyes. In addition to the fields and forests of a river valley, there’s an abundance of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture in the small college towns, most notably the campus of Mt. Holyoke.

I’d been on this road but a few times and had noticed BridgeSide’s attractive sign thinking it had to be good. But the timing was never right. Instead, I’d continue right across a most attractive bridge with side-rails painted in what I now call Ukraine-blue. If there’s any such thing as a real optical illusion, the aptly-named Sugar Loaf Mountain immediately at the other end makes the bridge appear considerably shorter than it is.

One good visual trick deserves another, so BridgeSide is about twice the size that it appears to be from the road. Moreover, there’s an outdoor patio where I’d have sat if not for the day’s rain. Indoor or outdoor don’t matter much when you dig in to an Irish plate this good. When the waitress came by and asked how it was, I blurted out something that I would never myself believe:

“Even the soda bread is delicious!”

She laughed, which I took as a sign that she knew, as I have always believed, that Irish soda bread is considered some kind of joke, maybe an admission that Celtic dishes will never be compared favorably to any Mediterranean or Asian or South-of-our-border cuisine.

Before leaving I asked how often they make it, hoping to hear her say “every Thursday.” That was not to be, but when she mentioned that there’s a ruben on the menu, it occurred to me to see what else is there. Keeping in mind how well they do with corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots, I could go crazy trying to pick from it.

A “Blue Maple Burger”? I’d order that just to say it.

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Rt. 116 and Mt. Sugar Loaf in the background.

Judging from the headlights on the approaching car, I’ll guess that this postcard is at least 75 years old.

Mass. Route 116, leaving Sunderland for Deerfield, crossing the Connecticut River.

New England’s longest and largest river. Further north it is the boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire.

Throwing Time in Reverse

Last thing I need is another birthday, but today was one, and so I thought I’d celebrate it–or counter it–by throwing time in reverse.

Before the pandemic, two part-time jobs suited me quite well. Long distance driving is just right for thinking long thoughts, and projecting films in a theater provides time to write them down.

Then there were eight weekends every fall playing in a Renaissance festival, and as weather allowed, busking weekends in the spring and early summer. For all of my four full decades busking, I never thought it would end. Whenever I was asked, my answer was pat:

Death may beckon, but retirement does not.

Enter Covid-19.

Deliveries? Done. Cinema? Shuttered. Faire? Closed. Busking? Hard to play wind instrument while wearing a mask. And so, while I never exactly retired, it was forced on me. Four times.

As the pandemic appeared to subside last summer, I played myself back into King Richard’s realm, and so I resumed my most physically demanding gig on Labor Day Weekend. Huge crowds. Many apparently eager to get out and, fortunately for strolling minstrels such as yours unruly, happy to tip. By far my best season in that regard. As one of the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers put it on the final day, “Fives are the new Ones.”

Two weeks later, to my everlasting amazement (and gratitude), the young new owners of the Screening Room asked if I’d like to return. A married couple with a young son, they craved at least one day when they could be in the same place at the same time and share a meal other than breakfast. Attendance has been coming back slowly. I only hope it’s now enough for them to afford an employee every Wednesday.

Two months after that, I dropped in at Winfrey’s Fudge & Chocolates, to offer myself as an extra driver for holiday deliveries. Never thought of that as coming out of retirement until they let me know that Thursday had turned into a day when too many orders were going in every direction. Since then, they’ve also dispatched me on Fridays, a shorter day when they tell me to sleep late. Never an argument there.

Within three months, then, I came out of three retirements. The sort of thing that you reflect on when you approach a birthday that approaches par at Pebble Beach and Augusta. And as weather kept improving, I thought, why not make it four?

Downtown Newburyport was surprisingly busy, and my spot under the tree was open, though it was still cool enough that I did not need its shade. Many kids in groups. Never occurred to me that this might be a week of school vacation, something on which I once kept a vigilant eye.

As always, they were loud, rambunctious, but that just gave me cover for working off a lot of rust. Not only that, but I gained their immediate favor, which made everything easy for me. One boy started doing some hideous mimicry of me, but a passerby, a woman of about 30 with a husband pushing a stroller, told him to stop. He did, and walked away. When I finished a tune, he returned to apologize. “Don’t worry, it’s okay.” He apologized again. I smiled and offered a fist-bump.

What new world is this?

As happened at King Richard’s on that first day last September, I was stumbling with many of my best songs but able to salvage them with an improvised tune until I could play it through. Whereas my usual busk is about half reading behind the stand, and half dancing away from it, today I was starting songs at the stand and skipping away to launch into other songs in the same key, or to improvise. Some tunes I never found at all, but there were at least a dozen that ripped, intact, as if waiting to be played and sent headlong in every direction–mostly those I play with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers, or Buccaneer Bay Buzzards when I join them.

A little over an hour later, it became overcast, the temperature dropped, and I was, frankly, winded. Got home and lied down for a minute that became an hour before I could move again. Yes, that’ll take some work, too. No retiring from that.

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First saw this about seven years ago. I do not know nor have I ever met Barbara Busenbark, nor am I concerned that her last name is an anagram for “busker ban.” According to this site, the original painting is still available for a tidy $950, almost as much as I made in tips in all 18 days of King Richard’s last year. Prints are now marked down from $22 to $18: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/newburyport-piper-barbara-busenbark.html

Auntie Allie’s Mann

Mann Orchard, Methuen, Mass.

Sitting at any of these tables while sipping morning coffee and planning the day’s itinerary on maps, I can see my mother moving among the rows of produce, the shelves of preserves and syrups, the tables of pies and pastry, the jugs of cider.

This is Methuen (muh-THEW-en), but if you go out the door, turn south, and walk maybe 15 minutes, you’ll be in my native Lawrence. With a few turns just over the town line, you’ll quickly find what I once called home. And if you did it over 25 years ago, my parents would still be there.

That’s how Mann Orchards became a favorite store for “Auntie Allie” as my many cousins called my mother, a name so musical I started using it myself. And that’s why I’ve enjoyed Mann’s apple and blueberry pies all my life. Yes, fruits and vegetables, too. Yawn…

Odd to think today that she and I were never here at the same time.

She passed away 22 years ago, and it was two years later that I joined the Marrakesh Express. Mann’s was already a regular customer, and I delivered here every Thursday for about twelve years in their former location about a Canadian football field away. While loading the van before my first stop here, the name on the manifest gave me a coincidental chuckle. And when I rolled in two stacks of boxes, I was all business until the invoice was signed. But then I looked up, I looked around, and time itself disappeared with the realization:

She didn’t come here just for groceries.

New England has dozens of these farmstands as large as modest supermarkets. What they all have in common is an authenticity that you feel as soon as you enter. They are as welcome a contrast to supermarkets as a country road to an interstate highway. Rather than enclosed in a series of aisles, you look over and across everything. In place of slick and smooth, you sense rustic and local; instead of fluorescent lights pressing down, sunlight pours through windows so that bulbs overhead go unnoticed. There’s nothing about these havens of nature that hurries you, and that suited Auntie Allie as much as it suits her son. I’ll bet she came here even when she didn’t need to. It would explain why there was never any lack of pies or cider on Buswell Street.

Too bad she didn’t live to see this new place with its very high roof propped up by posts and beams as inviting to the eye as the bins of apples below them.

Most farmstands include bakeries, many have butcheries, and a few, including Mann, sell beer and wine. Mann is among the largest, although it may not be half the size of Lyman deep in the heart of Connecticut which has an 18-hole golf course, a driving range, and a putting green across the road. (For my friends nearby, Mann is about the size of Cider Hill, two or three times the size of Tendercrop, though both of those, like Colby and Long Hill, are more densely packed.)

In this newer location, Mann joined the ranks of those with cafes, and for me became the first to double as a breakfast stop. The breakfast may be nothing more than an orange cappachino (or pistachio) muffin with coffee, but it’s as satisfying as mouth-watering, large enough to last through my connections of dots north into New Hampshire–as close as Buswell–or west to Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley. (That’s the Connecticut River to readers outside New England.)

For me, the location could not be placed to more strategic advantage. Starting in Rowley, barely 20 miles away, I make Mann my first stop in either direction, north or west. Post-pandemic, I am no longer dispatched south, and here on the coast, there is no east. Well, yes, there’s Cape Ann, but we call that local, as most of the Winfreys live on it while, up here on Plum Island, I keep an eye on them.

So breakfast is easy, delicious, and inexpensive. On short days I might stop for lunch, and it’s a nice spot for a rendezvous with what few friends I still have in Lawrence and Methuen. I’ll recommend all Mann’s soups, but I always return to the chicken-cranberry-walnut salad. Filling, but that doesn’t stop Mann from adding a slice of pie–all at a price you’d call cheap in a restaurant.

Pre-pandemic, I was here so often that a young lass named Gina behind the counter would fill a bag and tell me to take it, a reward for keeping their shelves flush with fudge and chocolate. In the bag would be two orange cappachinos. Another woman there one day noticed me looking longingly at a display of take-home corned-beef dinners, a St. Patrick’s Day special. She reached in front of me, opened the door, took one out, handed it to me, and said, “Yours! Enjoy!”

All my thanks could have been as much for the memories as for the muffins and the meal.

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