Gimme Some Of That Old Time Religion

We’ll visit Benefit Street in Providence Rhode Island, dear reader. But first, a diversion.

Sunday is for wandering. My wife pleads for me not to work all seven days of the week, and not-working-but-staying-home is no day off for her. Let’s go for a walk, and point the camera at things, shall we?

I’ve been going to Providence Rhode Island regularly for over thirty years. I’ve done most everything there is to do there — thrice over. What are considered hoary old establishments now by the locals are places I go by and recall their predecessors of Jimmy Carter vintage. Hell, Gerry Ford vintage. Damn! Nixon vintage.

I know exactly what my family looks like to the denizens of the part of town known as college hill. Both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design are right there, and the place has had alternated between a bohemian and a faux-bohemian vibe since I’ve trod the earth.

We have no tattoos. No skinny glasses. No moonboot athletic shoes. No swoosh stripes. We dress ourselves and our children unstylishly, really; to be stylish nowadays, and casual, is to be deliberately poorly dressed. And it’s expensive to dress badly; the affectation of poverty costs big, generally. We are neatly turned out, and all our clothes match- that’s it. There are no slogans of any kind on anything we wear. My wife has the beauty of a real woman, and her clothes just wrap it. Women wish they were her; I doubt many wished they were dressed like her.

Our children unselfconciously clutched balloons from the burger restaurant, and wore the paper hats given them. They were not being wry- and genuine need not a apply on college hill.

A disreputable street person approached me, and tried to press a pamphlet in my hand, and whisperered that the Marxist something Worker’s something Revolutionary something something would set me free.

I know how this works. He is a bum. He is being paid to hand out these pamphlets. That is why he mumbles a slogan that is designed to be delivered like Mussolini from a balcony. He’s not getting his dough for drugs or booze or a flop if he doesn’t unload the pamphlets, but he couldn’t care less what’s on it. And I know that if ridding himself of the documents was all he had to do, they’d be in the nearby 7/11 dumpster by now. So I know he’s being watched. My conjecture is not disappointed.

We cross the street to promenade further, and head back the direction we came. And there they are: his handlers. They have a card table, and a banner, and folding chairs, and big stacks of said pamphlets, and they see us coming.

It’s striking to walk down that street, after over thirty years of walking down that street, and seeing them there. Because they are squatting right adjacent to the location of my own brother’s old place of business. They called it an “alternative” bookstore back then, but let’s not pussyfoot around; it was a communist bookstore.

Communism is that sweetest of ideals — we’re all pals and should share everything. My brother is smarter than me; he’s a better father to his children than me; he’s more talented at everything he’s ever tried than me; and he devoted a goodly portion of his time to the ideals on those pamphlets I was looking at now, thirty years later, flapping a bit in the breeze outside his old haunt. The Soviet Union was still very much a going concern, back then.

The two fellows eyed me a bit. They scanned my familial situation. I could see intellectual calculations going on behind their severe skinny glasses.

I was doing some mental calculations too. Mine were wobbling between the sort of polite demurrals you have at the ready for the panoply of geeks, freaks, and entreaters of all sorts that come at you in any city, and the unwise urge to tell them how stupid they looked to me.

There are certain things you know without having to be told. And I knew for a certainty that those two fauntleroys have never, and will never, really work a day in their lives. They were each wearing north of five hundred dollars worth of clothing and accessories, minutely calculated to make them look disheveled. My wife, who you perhaps have gathered is a female, would be unable to afford having her hair cut by the salon where these two had their hair artfully arranged to look like they had just rolled out of bed. They are attending schools using money unearned by them, and are out politicking for a lark. The Workers are a lovely abstraction to them. They are going to save them.

I read once that college educated persons rarely have friends that are not. If you press them on that, they always claim their menial laborers as their friends, like a country club swell hugging the landscaper for unbigoted effect. I attended a conclave of writers once, and a nice fellow made a remark about the great unwashed, which took the form of the great uneducated in his vernacular. He asked me directly where I was degreed. I said I was not. He almost fell over me trying to apologize while saying “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” He was pleasant and didn’t understand why what he said was interesting. The idea that anyone present would have a different background never occurred to him; he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, and really, I didn’t care.

Well the card table bohemian Marxists loomed large now on the radar screen. I saw them watching the bum they had hired directly across the street, and eying me. And here I was, right in front of them; I was the person they were touting on all those flyers. I was the worker who they would emancipate. I’ve been a body shop mechanic, and a janitor, and a housepainter, and a welder, and a factory hand, and a starving artist, and a laborer, and every other damn thing. If I sneeze at the wrong time I could still lose a finger or two at work. And I didn’t play at working hard for a few months between semesters, and then think I know what it’s like to see the horizon, fifty or sixty years off, with nothing but your wits and your back to get you there.

I actually became interested. What could you possibly have to say to me, I wonder?

They sized me up, and pulled their hands back in, and let me pass by without saying anything. They waited a short moment for the next trust fund bohemian to come along, and pressed the pamphlet into their hands with a rousing: Help us emancipate the working man.

The communist bookstore is a Sovereign Bank now.

Happy Sunday

When you examine it, it’s just the same dumb thing over and over. Just like life.

Playing a hammer-on note while counting the audience is exactly the kind of droll thing I’d do. It just doesn’t take me as long as Billy Gibbons, is all.

More Than Sticks And Bricks

Well, I found a postcard featuring the Millicent Library in Fairhaven, Massachusetts to annoy you with today. The town’s benefactor, H.H. Rogers, built it to commemorate the memory of his beloved teenaged daughter, after her untimely death. Here it is, as envisioned by its builders:

It still looks more or less like this, but there are a lot more mature trees and foundation plantings now, and it’s difficult to get in position to capture the whole joint without greenery intruding into the frame. The picture is from a lovely small archive of postcards of venerable things called: Vintage Views.

Of course you can peruse our earlier ramblings about the old place here, and here. Oh yes; and here.


Or just walk up those stairs with me. The pictures always list to the port side these days, as the left hand is being tugged by a certain three year old library devotee.

Ladies and gentlemen, I can assure you that when you see my pictures straighten out, there will be a tear in my eye also.

It is difficult to consider Mr. Rogers’ eye.

Not Bahstun; Bawstin!


Well, we laid Jack Warden to rest yesterday. And it got me to thinking. One of the movies I mentioned, The Verdict, is a very “Boston” sort of a movie. There aren’t that many of those.

You know the places that end up in movies. Los Angeles and New York and Chicago and Miami and did I mention New York and Los Angeles? Hell, nowadays it’s Toronto more often than not because it’s cheaper to film there. The Farrelly Brothers have a sort of Providence, Rhode Island franchise going now, but that’s just a cool icy rock orbiting around Boston.

Let’s have a list, shall we? VERY BOSTON MOVIES.

The rules:

“Rules? In a knife fight?”

Sorry, wrong area, wrong movie. The only rules are that the movie encapsulate the local vibe here, with bonus points for local sights and extra special bonus points for successfully attempting a local patois; or more likely to be efficacious: avoiding attempting a local patois without drawing attention to yourself. John Ratzenburger need not apply.

Let’s make it an even ten:
10. The Thomas Crown Affair– It’s a lousy movie, really. But it absolutely looks like Boston and environs in the sixties. It’s mostly of places the vast majority of working class people in Boston never dreamed they’d be allowed to sweep, never mind mingle at, but what the hell. Faye Dunaway eventually married local favorite and J Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf. Steve McQueen wisely avoided attempting a cultivated Boston accent. His face would have broken.
9. The Boston Strangler – When I’m done with you, you’re going to figure Boston is the most depressing place in the world. Let’s get the mass murderers out of the way, right away. Albert DeSalvo sums up the crime in Boston forty years ago: There’s plenty of it, and we have no idea what to do about it. My friends and I always do imitations of Tony Curtis in Spartacus and The Vikings, talking like, well, Tony Curtis the whole time. Yondah is da cassool ov my faddah. He makes a surprisingly believable weirdo murderer, which might tell you something. All kind of Boston area in there.
8. Tie
7. Tie
Paper Chase
Love Story –
You know, before Al Gore invented the internet for me to make fun of him on, he went to Harvard where the Socratic Method is used and had the greatest love story ever told about Ryan O’Neal based on Al’s life. Some persons who are of a more skeptical bent than I doubt the likelihood of these happenings. I don’t. Al Gore is just as big a self-absorbed and shallow jerk as the people portrayed in these movies. Enjoy.
6. Jaws- Boston’s no where near Martha’s Vineyard, where they filmed this thing, but who cares? Everyone in Boston goes down Route 3 every Friday in the summah and goes to the crummy cold beaches on Cape Cod. Who cares? They don’t go anywhere near Martha’s Vineyard, which is just a pile of rocks and t-shirt stores out in the Atlantic. Who cares? No one has a Massachusetts accent of any kind in this movie. Who cares? They caught that tiger shark, the one they hang up on the dock and do an impromptu autopsy on, off Montauk — and that’s Long Island! Who cares? It’s a good movie. The only part that strains credulity is where they get all those people in the water at the beach. On Memorial Day. Try it. There’ll be some shrinkage.
5. The Last Hurrah –Not much Boston to look at in it, and they changed everybody’s name, of course; but you’re never going to understand Boston until you understand James Michael Curley. Curley the mayor used to get kickbacks from contractors for public works projects. Once, a highway overpass collapsed, and his “partners” were in trouble. Asked about the calamity, hizzoner calmly remarked that it appeared to be “an injudicious mixture of sand and cement.” Anyone surprised that the Big Dig tunnel fell in on some poor woman and crushed her to death a few weeks ago must be new around here.
4. Charly – Made that street in South Boston famous. It didn’t help. The trajectory of every poor Boston schlub: Born dumb, get a little education, lift your eyes up from the mud to gaze for a moment at the bright horizon, and then land face-first back in the mud again. They blame it on mental retardation in the movie, but I think it’s the Guinness, myself. Triple points for the scenes in the Kasanof’s bakery.
3. Good Will Hunting -There is manifest affection for the whole of Boston and Cambridge in this movie. It’s silly, but who cares? They understand the local zeitgeist. Around here every airhead thinks they’re a genius, so why not run with it? I punched my fists right through the drop ceiling in my basement room when Fisk hit that home run. A sterling moment in an ultimately losing effort (The Reds beat us the next day to finish it.) — yeah, that’s Boston. Lose proud. I’ve heard rumors that Robin Williams is a skilled mimic. Where did he find a mentally challenged Vermonter to imitate for this one? One of life’s great mysteries. Gives Cliff Clavin a run for his money for crash and burn attempts at Bawstin Tawk. And Will is always on the wrong train. No wonder he doesn’t show up on time for work very often.
2. The Verdict –Sidney Lumet made this movie, and you could see he hates Boston. He even drags the characters to New York City for no discernible purpose; maybe he wants to get decent deli or something, which is impossible in Boston. David Mamet’s screenplay has people saying very Boston things. The seedy bar where Newman hangs out across from the common is perfect. Pre-Cheers Boston was just like that, trust me. Newman doesn’t even attempt an accent, thank god, but Milo O’Shea, the judge, is the ne plus ultra of the successful rogueish Irish twang. The whole mess of a proud city gone to seed is in there; the scene of trying to pull a grip and grin at a funeral is very Boston — it’s usually a politician, though, not a lawyer. They even got the dry cleaning bag hanging behind Newman while he slurs his words into his apartment phone right.
1. The Friends of Eddie Coyle –Everything about Boston is small-time, except our egos. Small time crooks with small-time concerns and small-time dreams drift around a bunch of small-time Boston area haunts. Robert Mitchum tries a mild local accent, and doesn’t sound like he’s from Nebraska. The bowladrome’s still there; the Garden’s gone.

Honorable Mentions:
Moby Dick – We’re all that crazy in New Bedford.
Malcolm X – I was born in Dorchester, but I’m keeping my last name, thank you.
The Last Detail – They’re all drunk in Boston, for a while.
The Brinks Job – Looks like old Boston, sounds like old Peter Falk.
State and Main – Supposed to be New Hampshire, I think; screams Manchester-By-The-Sea to me.
Outside Providence – That’s where Massachusetts kids go to meet girls with big hair, when Saugus is too far to drive.

Heaven Can’t Wait After All

Jack Warden died. He wasn’t young. He got the mention you’d expect for an old hand in movies and TV; chaste, short, each item mentioning the little corner of his life that overlapped the reporter’s life. We’ll remember his name for a while, and then just his face, always referring to him as “Oh, that guy,” and then he’ll become the trivia question, and then end up in a sort of famous oblivion. He’ll never go away, really, there’s just too much evidence of him.

It’s telling, about either Jack or me, that all the mentions of his work in the five-paragraph-dead-notices I found here and there mention all kinds of things he worked in I haven’t seen, and wouldn’t find time to watch if I was confined to an iron lung, in prison. Come to think of it, I bet if I looked through his bio hard enough, I bet I could find a role he played of a guy in an iron lung in prison. He played every other damn thing.

I always liked actors like him. Out of the WW II army with a bum leg, he took a shot at acting, and from there on in he worked all the time. I’m sure he became that reliable name in everybody’s rolodex: ready, steady, go. And after a while, you noticed that whenever they gave Jack Warden interesting lines to deliver, he’d deliver them as well as anybody. I did anyway.

He seems to be remembered mostly as being Warren Beatty’s go-to guy. He was terrific in Shampoo, where they gave him something to say. It’s Warren Beatty who’s a stiff that won’t lay down now, not Jack. Warren Beatty played a callow lothario in Shampoo to a tee, and Warden played the dissolute businessman foil for him perfectly; no one seems to have figured out that Beatty was good in his role because that’s exactly what he was — a tongue tied dope with too few shirt buttons. Jack Warden was a good actor. Big difference.

Jack has 153 projects listed in imdb, and some have mutiple entries because they’re TV roles. Anyone can go in there and find something they liked Jack Warden in. Film critic or Home Shopping Club devotee — doesn’t matter– there’s something for everyone.

There’s three things he did that came to mind right away for me when I heard he was dead.

Shampoo
Being There
The Verdict

Those three movies encapsulated, some unintentionally, the clapped out shambles the seventies still represents to me. Jack Warden is marvelous in all three, and steals the show each time.

Watch those three movies. Send Jack home thinking: Man, he was good.

Spring Is A Distant Memory


The end of July is Summer in New England. There’s no bones about it. The air is heavy with moisture, the heat more like a sauna than an open oven door. The plants get crazy, pushing and shoving in the beds, reaching out to grab at you when you go by. At night, the bugs on the screens blot out the moon.

The ocean is at the foot of the street, mere miles away, and when the breeze tacks, you can catch a whiff of the salt in it. No siren can compose a more alluring sales pitch. It’s delightful to be on the water in July, and there’s always the breeze you need to banish the motor. The sun is like a velvet hammer.

I’m a late summer man. I’m not old, but I’m not young. There’s as much wake behind the boat as horizon in front of it. I don’t mind really. Consider my house.

That’s it there, in the picture, this spring. When I was younger, I dreamed of this house, and having the family in it. I had no idea how to get it. I wandered the earth, and had many adventures. And eventually, I figured things out, and did an end around, and made the thing happen. I am happy here.

According to the cult of the adolescent, to which we are all expected to pay obeisance unto death, it’s the wanting phase of my life I’m supposed to prolong as long as I can manage it. I’m supposed to pretend there is no finish line, and simply ask the starter to fire the pistol over and over again, so I can know the thrill of beginning over and over again. I demur.

Life is a career, and then it is over. I do not wish to be an entry level employee until the day I am fired, as it were.

That picture is supposed to encapsulate all that I am supposed to abhor about owning a home. It is no longer new. It requires attention, and effort, to keep it standing and presentable. I’m supposed to want a new one by now, or have covered it with plastic to avoid paying any attention to it. But why would I not want to pay attention to it? It holds everything I’ve ever really wanted. I run my hands over it like a lover, because that’s what I am.

It needs painting. I don’t mind, because I don’t want to go back to the starting line just to hear the pistol.

You Got Mixed Use In My Sprawl

(Editor’s note: This was written before breakfast this morning, but Blogger absolutely refused to accept the picture upload until this evening. Blogger is owned by Google. Forget Microsoft; Google is evil.)
(Author’s note: There is no editor.)


What are we looking at here? The short answer is: what I drive by about a mile from my house, if I head away from the water.

There are a lot of defunct farms in New England. Subsistence farming was the occupation of the vast majority of citizens until quite recently. I remember seeing a statistic that at the outbreak of WW II, the majority of US citizens didn’t have indoor plumbing. That seemed odd, until you considered how many people still lived on farms.

It’s very difficult to grow food in New England. And over time, as transportation improved, the production of food became remoter to its consumers. We routinely eat food that is flown to its destination now. Amazing.

So the farms got bigger, and more efficient, and moved to where the ground didn’t “throw up a fresh crop of rocks every year,” as they used to say in New England. What are we going to do with the land?

For the most part, it’s become forest again, or houses. The houses we notice. The forest part gets overlooked. There’s a lot more forest in New England than 100 years ago. And when you walk through it, you occasionally come across the rubble foundations of the houses where flinty people whacked at the flinty soil generations ago. Their descendants are playing Playstation in a 3500 square foot ranch in a subdivision, and don’t even know where the food comes from. The supermarket, right?

It’s restful to drive past the hayfield. They tried to raise sheep there a few years back, but either the shepherd or the sheep got tired of it, apparently. That’s feed hay in the rolls there; I often see bales elsewhere for construction silt fencing too. There aren’t that many animals to feed, but there is plenty of construction and wetlands around.

The land has become valuable. The farmer who cleared it 250 years ago would have to visit his outhouse when he found out what the city slickers would pay to whack his farm up into houselots. He’d laugh in there, and then straighten his face and come out and get his millions.

I can guarantee you that there will be very heated discussions at town committee meetings and petitions circulated and laws passed and invective hurled when this property is offered for sale for houses to be built on it. The word “development” will be spat out like a curse, and the words “sprawl,” and “pristine,” and “save” and others will be bandied about. Because nobody knows what they are looking at.

That lot is as developed as any houselot. Trees were cleared, the granite boulders, worn smooth and round by glaciation, were stacked along the perimeter, and the farmer had a go. The land is already developed; just not to its full money potential, what they call in real estate “best use.”

What you’re really looking at there, and what I like, is a form of “mixed use.” And every single person screaming at the meetings about developing the land into houses wouldn’t allow mixed use anything, anywhere, in their town, ever — and so are kinda crazy. They just see a house as other people, and don’t care to see any other people, I guess. But more than any more houses, they refuse to see anything that isn’t houses anywhere near their house.

The loveliest places around here are mixed use places. You can walk down the streets, there’s a mixture of commercial, residential,retail, restaurant, government services, parks, and so forth. I take pictures of them all the time and folks write me and say: That’s lovely; “I wish I lived there instead of this nasty subdivision I’m in.” And planners are always trying to invent places like that, but they always turn out like Potemkin Villages. Not real. Because the thing they are trying to achieve isn’t allowed, and you can’t plan that which must arise spontaneously.

My neighbor builds dock platforms in a barn and in his yard. I hear him banging away over there occasionally, or the sizzle of a welder. At night, I hear the coyotes ranging through the woods; but I also hear the pumps in the not-too-distant cranberry bogs. My neighbor grows herbs for sale to restaurants and a small local clientele. We’re too spread out to comprise any sort of village, but the mixed use part is there, if imperfectly.

Someday, somemone will complain about all that stuff, and zoning laws will be enforced, and the NIMBYs will triumph; and this place, where people say 24/7 they don’t want sprawl, will have nothing but.

Because they won’t allow anything else to happen.

Money Changes Everything

It is gratifying to see effort rewarded.

My good friend Steve is an excellent father to his two boys. His older son, Flapdoodle, is twenty years old, and wishes to follow in the old man’s wake a bit and play music with his friends. My avid readers will recall that Flapdoodle is Mr. Pom Pom’s brother, whose brush with death and musical greatness we recounted here before.

Now, I’ve known Flapdoodle since he was a wee bairn. He’s always been a nice kid, and afflicted with a kind of adult poise from a tender age. He was “born old,” as we say. And every spare minute, he’s been plunking on his guitar to learn how to do it. And he’s got college age friends now, who are similarly thoughtful and fun and dedicated to making music for the amusement of others.

“Making music for the amusement of others” is more than just learning how to play Stairway to Heaven, halfway through, in your basement. Everybody wants to be a rock star. But the local bar don’t need no rockstar. It needs you to learn how to play your instruments properly, gather the proper equipment, figure out what the audience would want to hear, and show up on time and work hard. And I can assure you, all that’s rarer than hen’s teeth.

Father Steve is both mildly demanding and helpful. Flapdoodle goes to college now, and spends his summer working at a beachside restaurant/nightclub, working hard in the kitchen. Steve used to play in that same nightclub twenty years ago. When Flappy’s done, he comes home to the apartment over Steve’s garage that he and his musical compatriots rent from Steve.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think Steve is getting wealthy off the rent.

Steve cleared out half the basement in his house, painted the floor, and they cobbled together the equipment needed to simply go down there, pick up instruments, and bang out a four chord song. It’s much more marvelous for not being lavish.

Steve tells me the band works down there every spare moment, and he’s gratified to hear them really applying themselves and trying to get better in an organized and intelligent way. They don’t make the mistake most aspiring musicians make –to just plunk away indefinitely at the same old thing, never really learning it, never giving much attention to the wants or desires of any prospective audience. Rock music suffers from festering self-absorption enough without adding any of your own on there. It’s not rocket science. But it ain’t that easy to be entertaining, either. Steve helps them when he can, and mostly helps them by not intruding much. He always seems to be around when they can’t remember the end of “Light My Fire,” though, and the door opens up a crack while they argue over it mildly, and Steve says F C D and they’re back at it again.

They were going to get their chance last weekend, until nature intervened. Steve’s old band was dragged back from semi-retirement to perform at an annual outdoor party, on the water’s edge, at a fine little community called Far Echo Harbor. It’s along the shores of the gigantic Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire. Steve’s got a summer home there, and helps put on this entertainment as a gesture of neighborliness and goodwill. It’s become something of a tradition. And Scrambled Porn, as Flapdoodle’s band calls themselves, was going to play for an hour in the middle of the old man’s performance.

That’s perfect. Big, ready made audience. Instruments already set up. Familiar friendly faces in the audience. The only pressure was the internal kind, the desire to do well and entertain. There’s a lot more pressure when you’re professional. Money changes everything.

There was a problem. It rained like the first ten pages of the Bible for twelve straight hours. There was no venue large enough to hold the audience and the bands indoors, and it had to be cancelled. Long faces.

But sometimes, marvelous things happen, and minor disappointments only make the story flow better. They had the tent set up for the caterer, and he served that food anyway, and as a hundred or two of us huddled under the tent in the rain and watched the kids splash in the puddles just outside it, something coalesced amongst the disappointment.

The caterer ran a roadhouse restaurant right down the street called the Bad Moose. It’s a great place, haunted by locals and tourists alike, serving food in the afternoon and bluesy music and beer at night. That man had hired a band to play on Saturday night. And they didn’t show up.

So here’s your chance Flapdoodle and friends. First you have to convince Old Steve to let you. He’s wise, your father; he didn’t say yes right away. He went there first to take one look at the crowd and see if things would be thrown at you if you faltered. Because you were about to be among strangers. And entertaining strangers is … different.

The Bad Moose crowd at night is prone to motorcycles and tattoos. There are very few drinks with umbrellas in them in evidence. There is a contingent of very large males prone to high-fives and bottled beer, and some women who might have danced around a pole previously. The bartender works alone,whirling like a dervish, is dressed like a vampire, has some metal in the face and tattoos on the skin, and could probably clear the room in 15 seconds flat. And she’s a girl.

There is a lot of commotion and confusion as Steve and I tried to set up the instruments and PA system for unfamiliar idiosyncracies in a crowded bar. The crowd was restless. The manager of the bar looked at the childish faces of the band, old enough to work in a bar, but not old enough to drink in one, and I saw a moment of doubt flash over his face. And after we sorted out all the cables and applied all the necessary duct tape, those young fellows let it rip.

Steve and I crouched by the door, winced a little, and prayed or something. I went to Catholic School for seven years, but I couldn’t remember for the life of me the name of any Saint that would be the Patron Saint of Bar Fights, so the the prayers may have been of doubtful utility.

And…

They were great. Not polished, but not so’s you’d notice. And after about five minutes, you could feel it — the audience wanted to like them. And when they faltered, the audience picked them up and carried them to the next passage where they knew the way better. There was lots of wild abandon on the dance floor, which is just the same scoured pine planks the band’s standing on. And the audience whooped and hollered and beat their spilled beer to sea foam in front of the manchildren drinking water and smiling like they’d just won the world series — when they got the nerve to look up from their strings. And when they ran out of things to play, the audience made them play it all over again.

The next morning, an emisssary came from the Bad Moose. The boys were asleep still, crashed out on every couch and bunkbed in the little summer home like some invading army. Steve was awake, and the fellow pressed two damp and wrinkled fifty dollar bills in his hand. Give that to the boys and tell them they can play there anytime.

Money changes everything.

Traveling

It’s been a long time since a day went by without a Sippican Cottage blog entry. I’m traveling without a computer, to where there are no computers. This does not compute.

Here’s some more pictures of Bristol, Rhode Island, to tide you over until Monday:

Let’s Put On A Show!

There was a hackneyed theme in movie entertainment sixty or seventy years ago. Mickey Rooney or some other homunculus would turn to Judy Garland or some other soon-to-be-drinking-right-from-the-bottle starlet, and exclaim: “Let’s put on a show!”

Of course they’d get up a stage made from packing crate lumber and bedsheets, and sing and dance, and have some good old-timey fun; and they’d save the orphanage from the evil bankers who wanted to foreclose on the mortgage and turn it into a Dickensian factory. With the orphans chained to the machines, no doubt.

The only problem with the theme was that it wasn’t real. The essence of entertainment is to make the difficult seem easy, or better –effortless. When you see Gene Kelly splashing in the puddles, he’s always got that huge beaming smile on his face. Four minutes and fifty seconds in to the routine, he’s still got that smile pasted on there, even though I imagine his lungs are on fire and his knees are groaning and his lower back is barking at him and his stamina is tested like a marathoner 1000 yards from the finish line.

You’re not supposed to see the effort he put into it before the cameras were turned on, or the pie plate with stubbed out cigarette butts atop the battered piano in the third floor walk-up in Brooklyn where the song was written. You don’t want to hear about the splinters suffered by the crewman making that packing crate stage to hold Fatty Arbuckle.

But all the apparatus that makes self expression possible is getting easier to get your hands on all the time. And there are still a lot of kids in straitened circumstances with a lot of time on their hands, and they still decide to put on a show. And the internet and the digital world it represents makes room for the amateur — he who does it for love– to compete ably for your attention with the mighty professional.

Hail to you, whoever the hell you are, because you were down in your mother’s basement, and said to yourself: Let’s put on a show!:

Month: July 2006

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