Deja Vu All Over Again

This past Saturday was the annual Kent State Folk Festival day of workshops
at the Student Union. Actually, there are no students present at these workshops because they are all holed up in their dorms Twittering with their friends in the next room, or glued to their computers. Another reason is that most students these days have to work in order to pay for the outrageous costs of higher education. The folk festival was started 40 years ago by students, and although they are no longer a part of it, it still goes on, supported by old folkies and the Kent community.

I remember going to the very first one, which was held in a classroom building. I took my guitar with me, hoping to learn a few new licks. At the time, I was mostly playing tunes from the Burl Ives and the Weaver's Songbooks and mournful ballads like "Lord Randall." I felt very old (I was 41) and all the participants were, like, 20 or so. Kent was a hot spot for folk music, along with a magnet for rock groups in the bars downtown. Some of the kids I met at that first folk festival kept returning over the years until they were way older than I had been at the beginning of it. Unfortunately, if their kids came to the university, they did not carry on their parents' love of folk music.

Its glory days are over, since everything is scaled down and the top performers now come in for one night only, playing at the theater downtown over a week of concerts. There are no more Andean pipers, or Appalachian balladeers, or old Alabama shape note singers doing the workshops. The Saturday workshops now feature area musicians, all of whom are worth hearing and watching, but they are people you've seen a lot of times already. There was a fine Irish group, but my favorite was a group playing choro music from Brazil, beautiful dance music, European with an African beat.

Along with its being good day for music, it's an even better day for people watching, since these folks come out of the woods or wherever they live during the rest of the year. I'm not sure where they find the clothes they wear, but they are always interesting. The couple pictured were there last year, and I looked for them this year, but they might have been in disguised as suburbanites and I just could have missed them. Fedoras, worn with long hair, were big this year among the younger men. Ugg boots were also prominently displayed, even though the weather was quite mild.

This used to be held in February, which was a perfect month for it in terms of fighting cabin fever, but it was also a bad time for traveling, so they moved it to the fall - and then ran out of money to bring in acts who would have had to travel, thus creating a perfect Catch 22.

Time to Stop

I think it's time to lay off the Obama cult. Last week's New Yorker cover is the kind of thing I am talking about: a picture of the Lincoln Memorial, and the "O" in the title is hovering over it in silver. The new Newsweek has a picture of Lincoln looming over Obama. Editorial headlines proclaim the hope that Obama will save the country. Editorial writers I admire have joined in the Obama worship, as if he is the second coming.

I realize that we have just been through an 8 year "dark night of the soul", if I may paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, but this is too much to put on the shoulders of one man. Along with everyone I have great admiration and high hopes for this new president. However, it seems to me that we are setting him up for failure if we have such unrealistic expectations of what he can achieve. I think everyone just needs to calm down and get real. He is not the Messiah. He is not Lincoln. He is an intelligent, responsible, good man whom we all need to support in any way we can, but this adulation is getting ridiculous.

Obscure Connections to Fame

A number of years ago, my daughter Polly developed an idea about obscure connections to fame, spurred by the fact that the uncle of a man she was dating had invented the UPC, those little stripey things that are scanned whenever you make a purchase. This idea caught on with my family, and extended to anyone careless enough to have experienced such a connection. The obscurity can pertain to both an obscufre person who has done something noteworthy, or to whatever object or activity may be connected to a famous person. For instance, there's the wonan who had been thrown up on by Paul Lynde at a drunken football game at Northwestern. Another person was offered a joint by Jack Nicholson, a stranger to her, on a ski lift in Colorado. My son's girlfriend's sister's boyfriend, who is a leather worker in Kentucky, made the harnesses used in the movie "Seabiscuit." It can't be something as prosaic as "I met George Cloonery", but rather that you bought a second hand jacket in a Good Will store that George Clooney's' father had worn on a local TV program in Cincinnati in 1965. I don't know anyone to whom that has happened, but only offer it to demonstrate the limits.

As I have shared this phenomnon with people, I have gathered some really fine connections and it has even grown into the Burnell Museum of Obscure Connections to Fame, nade up of objects sent to me by enthusiasts. I have a dried up apple from the orchard of the writer and critic Edmond Wilson, who was at one time married to Mary McCarthy ("The Group"). I have toilet paper from the home of the late Norman Mailer. These came through the originator of Obscure Connections, Polly, who lives in Provincetown. I have a paper napkin used by Hal Holbrook, when he was appearing in "King Lear" in Cleveland, snagged from his table in a restaurant by daughter Emily. A Playbill from a performance of "Chicago" in New York that was taken from the seat occupied by Rex Reed was sent by friend and Obscure fan Chris Jehle. Chris also sent me the picture of Rip Taylor. What makes that a worthy entrant is that Chris and his partner were walking on a beach in Hawaii, encountered Taylor, asked for his autograph (for my museum) and Taylor already had on him a pack of autographed pictures. On a beach in Hawaii!

The prize of the collection is a cigarette butt, dug out of an ashtray by our friend David C. Barnett, who interviewed Joe Esterhaz on the Cleveland NPR station when Esterhaz was in Cleveland for the opening of his movie "Telling Lies in America." He refused to put out his cigarette for the interview, telling David, "no cigarette, no interview." This butt is a trifecta of sorts. A few years later, Esterhaz developed throat cancer and was interviewed by Terry Gross to talk about the dangers of cigarettes and his battle with cancer. Then, recently he was on some NPR show talking about how his bout with cancer and his recovery had led him to become - A BORN AGAIIN CHRISTIAN! So, this butt has a lot going for it in the obscure connection story. David is also responsible for the piece of video tape, which he clipped from a videocassette of "Freebie and the Bean," which came from the estate of Sammty Davis, Jr. "Freebie and the Bean!"

I met a woman who had dated the son of the woman who does the "Find the hidden object" pictures for Highlights magazine. But the very best of all the encounters related to me came from my brother Mike. Several years ago, he was walking through the hospital where he gave people new hips and knees, and met a colleague who had just returned from Poland. This doctor was a proctologist. He held up his forefinger and said to Mike, "Touch my finger." Well, one hesitates to touch the forefinger of a proctologist, doesn't one? So Mike hesitated. "Go ahead," the man repeated. "Touch my finger." Reluctantly, Mike did. "You have jut rouched the finger of a man who traveled to Poland specifically to give a rectal exam to the Pope's confessor!" he proudly exclaimed. So that is one of the best of all obscrue connections. Not the Pope (the late John Paul II), but his confessor. There may be other Obscure Connections to Fame out there. but this is the absolute best.

My Country 'Tis of Thee

Well, I didn't go to a movie. I didn't turn on the TV, but I had left the radio on after "All Things Considered" and let it play. I started fooling around on the computer when they started talking about the map you could follow as the state returns started coming in. So I sort of followed along with side trips to YouTube and FaceBook. As some of the states turned blue, I kept myself from jumping to conclusions. A little after ten o'clock, when Ohio turned blue, my phone rang. It was Emily in Germany, where it was 4 a.m.

"Can you believe it?" she cried. "I am so thrilled!. We have a bottle of expensive Champagne chilling in the refrigerator which we're about to open. We're going to stay up for the acceptance speech, too. This is just great." The girls had already gone to bed, but were really interested in the ourcome.

It wasn't long before it had truly happened. Barack Obama is the new president of this country which is my country once again. I am so proud of us. I am so proud that people began to actually think about what this country needs and did not let racism interfere with their vote for the right man.

I went to bed, but not to sleep, because the phone rang again around 11. It was my friend Susan in Dayton.

"Can you believe it?" she shouted. "Obama made it. I am so relieved. I didn't think it could happen." I could almost see her jumping up and down. We exchanged mutual happy shock.

I drifted off watching my little black and white TV, and saw a bit of the acceptance speech. I watchd more of it this monring. It was so moving and even though Mr. Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King are from a different era, there were echoes of that wonderful speech from 1963, which I can never hear without tearing up, in the words of the new young president-elect. Everyone I have talked to today has had the same sense, and everyone I have talked to has been moved to tears. Emily called again today and she said that she and Chris were both crying as they watched the speech. Emily said that she saw on TV a German waving an American flag. They are wild about Mr. Obama over there. The Europeans had written us off after the incompetence and arrogance of the Bush years.

There are those who say that race should not be an issue here, but it cannot help but be. It's a landmark, a promise kept after centuries of limits imposed on Americans because of color. It's just plain wonderful for all of us. I hope that the Democrats keep a cool head and do not act like Republicans in Congress. We've been given a gift, which many people worked very hard for, and I hope we use it well.

Moving to Canada?

Tomorrow is the big day for all of us here in the United States of America (which all of the candidates keep calling the country we live in, with emphasis on the last two letters, like KAH!) I am leery, having been down this road so many times in the last 40 years. I was thinking today of all the times I swore I would move to Canada in the various election years: Both times that Nixon was elected, both times that Reagan was elected and both times that Bush II got into the office of President (of the United States of AmeriKAH.)

The media, the current villain of all of us in AmeriKAH, is giving the election to Obama, which I find worrying. There are people, among the undecided (Who are those people and where have they been for the last year and a half - or for the last seven years?) who might figure that they might as well not vote at all, or vote for McCain, figuring they want to make him feel good. I don't trust undecided people to make good judgements at this point in time.

I worry that all that early voting will somehow screw things up. Since I live in a small precinct, I have no problem voting on election day, because it is rarely crowded, so I can understand those who live in big cities who may have to wait in line forever on official election day. However, there have been waits of up to an hour in the early voting areas, so I don't know what the point is. In our county they are not using paper ballots, so that isn't an issue here.

What the current administration has done to this country in the last seven years has created the most dangerous time in which I have ever lived. It is hard for me to believe that anyone can think that we need more of the same.

As for McCain's choice of a vice presidential candidate, I agree with Colin Powell that it does call into question his judgement. I am astounded that people think she is capable because she is "just like us." I don't know if the people who say this think themselves capable of dealing on a global level with other world leaders and the many problems of planet earth, or if they are just too dumb to understand that we are not considering a race for the student council president's office.

Tonight (Monday) I'll be watching NBC's Saturday Night Live Presidential Bash for comic relief. Tomorrow morning I shall vote for Barack Obama and every Democrat on the ballot. Tomorrow night I shall go to a movie and not turn on the TV or radio until Wednesday morning. No matter what, I'll probably not move to Canada once again.

Telling Stories

Last night, on the official Halloween, was the second annual ghost walk in Kent. Last year this was quite a success, so this year there will be two nights. I am one of the storytellers stationed at the various places purported to be "haunted." I lucked out last year by being at the great old Kent mansion on the hill. It was the home of the person for whom the town was named. It's a wonderful, magnificent house, which has belonged to the Masons for over 80 years. It's beautiful inside, with walnut woodwork, vast rooms with high ceilings and exquisite workmanship throughout. The Masons have, over the years, taken loving care of it.

Back in the 1880s, one of the Kent women was burned to death while trying to light a heating stove in the ballroom. There have been sightings of the figure of a young woman, dressed in white, wandering around in the billiard room, or floating down the graceful winding staircase. Her grieving husband had sat on the great porch in his rocking chair, and after his death some 15 years later, the empty chair was seen rocking all by itself.

Well, I don't believe in ghosts, but I think these are fine stories for the telling, and last year I had such a good time. I sat in the massive doorway with a lantern at my feet. We had over 200 people from all over during the 3 hours. I had never had to tell the same story 10 times, and by the third hour I felt as if I was babbling a bit.

This year I was not so lucky. Stories had been solicited from the public and I was given a story which in itself was a good one, except that there was no background that would explain why this particular place might be haunted. I was finally able to work it into a narrative of sorts. I had assume that I would be able to stand or sit on the porch of the "haunted" house, but no one had bothered to tell the present occupants, and I was relegated to standing across the street and pointing to it as I wove my tale.

Unfortunately, right behind me was a storefront church which was sponsoring a Halloween party for teenagers, complete with a really loud rock band, heavy on the drums and bass (MBOWMBOWMBOW) and that sort of guttural screaming stuff, like "OWOWOWOW "- Rockin' with Jesus, I guess. The kids were very nice, not rowdy, polite, but VERY NOISY. The "music" was coming from inside the building, but many of the kids were congregating in front of their "church." They politely moved out of the way when the tour groups came along. I couldn't move too far away from the noise because my ghost-ridden house could best be seen from that vantage point, avoiding the trees screening it. I couldn't cross the street because there was a lot of traffic and the large groups in the tour might have gotten stranded waiting to cross and it would have slowed things down, with tour groups piling up on each other. Or worse, turned into group road kill. Which would maybe create a whole new ghost story for next year.

In a way, it worked, because once in a while the moaning electric bass came in at the point where the ghost showed up in my story. I had parked my car right there, so between groups I could sit in the car and listen to NPR and try to drown out the booming music. I was there from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and the weather was mild and not too cold. Tonight someone else will be at that spot and will not have to compete with the Christian teenyboppers.

I don't think I shall do it next year, but I have certainly enjoyed it up to this point. I'm learning that a lot of people actually believe in ghosts. I have decided that these are Sarah Palin people, bless their hearts. And my ears are still recovering.

Twick or Tweat

Beggar's Night is no more. It is now on the Sunday afternoon before actual Halloween. Since we live on a dead-end street, only one and a half blocks long, this is a very popular spot for hoards of costumed urchins, dropped off by parents in pick-up trucks from all over the county. I don't mind this particularly, because there are not so many children living on this street as in the past. When my children were that age there were over 60 children just on this block. There were, of course, many Catholic families here (along with a few fertile and careless Protestants), since it is close to both the church and the school. We were the greatest generation indeed. Or the greatest generators.

The costumes are always interesting and indicative of current pop culture. A tubby little girl wearing a long, blond, curly wig appeared on the doorstep, accompanied by another little girl with a head set on. 'Oh, are you Cinderella, or Goldilocks?" I asked, innocently. Blondie, looking puzzled, replied, "I'm not either of those people." "She's (some name) from 'High School Musical', and her sister here is Miley Cyrus," piped up their mother proudly. Fortunately, they were followed by two Dorothys from "The Wizard of Oz," which was nice to see. And there were a number of princesses, probably with names from Disney movies, but I didn't want to know that. I could at least pretend that maybe their parents read to them once in awhile.

My main complaint is that people bring their infants in arms along and hold out a bag to fill with candy for them. I wanted to do a W.C. Fields on them: "Do you honestly intend for that toothless spawn of your loins to ingest this sugary, choking hazard treat? Have you no sense of decency? Are you totally clueless about what is proper for that helpless costumed lump dressed as an alligator which you are holding in your arms?" I almost did when this guy holding an infant whose mouth was plugged with a pacifier held out a bag. I asked,"Does this baby eat this kind of stuff?" "Of course," he said, smiling broadly. Right.

Who are these people? I expect they are the same people who bring their toddlers to slasher movies. Or a screaming two year old to the restaurant where you are trying to have a quiet meal and a glass of wine. Or take their six year olds to rock concerts. There's a whole generation of clueless parents out there who themselves are devotees of instant gratification and push their children into activities they're not ready to really enjoy.

Good grief, I sound like one of those old ladies who inhabit every neighborhood I've ever lived in -the ones who threaten to call the police if a child so much as puts one foot into their yard. Old Mrs. Cole here on Edgewood Dr. threatened to do that, so every time the kids walked by her house, they would put one foot into her yard just to see what would happen. Well, I don't care if kids run through my yard or play outside and make noise. There are so few kids here now that it's a joy just to hear them once in a while. That's why I enjoy even the watered down Beggars' Night Sunday Afternoon once a year. It's their former kid parents that I want to call the police on when they set foot in my yard begging for treats for babies.

Back to the Opera

The first live HD transmission of the Met Opera was a performance of Richard Strauss' "Salome", starring Karita Mattila, a very sexy, blonde, Finnish soprano. Her performance of this role a couple of y ears ago had been reviewed with great praise for her "Dance of the Seven Veils" - daring, sensual, completely erotic, a bit shocking, etc.  I mean, raves. I had seen her last year in "Manon Lescaut" and she was great.

The broadcast started with her being interviewed backstage by Debra Voigt, who told us that she herself had played this role in the past and that  it was a very strenuous part. (Ms. Voigt used to be a very, very large woman. Several years ago she was denied a role  at Covent Garden on the grounds that she was too big to fit into the costume even though she has one of the most glorious voices in the field of international opera. She has since lost a very, very lot of weight, but still it was hard to imagine her in the past doing any kind of dance, much less peeling off a bunch of veils.) So, anyway, she asked Ms. Mattila how she prepared just before going on stage. Ms. Mettila replied, "It's time to kick some ass!" and hurried off to the stage. Ms. Voigt looked a bit startled, as the camera followed the star onstage, where she proceeded to do a lot of rather gymnastic warming up exercising. She was wearing a very clingy sort of slip dress with a halter top, which she kept fiddling with, as if to tear it off right then and there. (I looked around to see if there were any creepy old men in raincoats in the audience.)

The opera was set vaguely in the present time and the set was quite grand and modern, with lots of metal contraptions and glass floors and platforms and an enormous staircase guarded by ominous winged human gargoyles. You just knew that really, really bad things were going to happen.In fact, one of the pages keeps telling one of the guards that if he doesn't stop staring at Salome, something terrible will happen. Who doesn't know that story? John the Baptist is called Jochanaan and he spends most of the time in a well under the stage so that all  you hear is his voice. Which is a good thing, it turns out, when you finally see him. 

Well, the first bit of hilarity is when Salome insists that he be brought to the surface so she can get a good look at him. (Every time his voice is heard, Ms. Mattila sort of gyrates seductively, as in hot to trot.) When he is brought up, she just about goes crazy. The singer who plays him is a man of very large girth. She looks him over and sings, "How wasted he looks!" Now this guy is lying on the stage looking like a beached whale and I don't know if the audience at the Met laughed, but there were quite a few guffaws at the theater here in Ohio. Then she goes on, "His skin is like ivory!" More guffaws in Ohio. The makeup artist must not have read the script: the guy is so filthy you can't tell what color he is. "His hair is like black grapes!" More guffaws as the matted dull wig the guy is wearing looks like something coming out of one of those discarded couches you see on the side of the road. "His eyes are so lustrous, like gems!" Huh-uh, more little piggish. Of course the audience at the Met has the advantage of distance, but we are right on top of the performers. Suspension of disbelief is simp,ly not possible. But surely they can see his bulbous form as it rises from the floor. 

Anyway, we settled down in expectation for the Dance of the Seven Veils, the much heralded highlight of Ms. Mattila's "Salome." And so far, the singing is great, even from the whale. After being cajoled by Herod, her lecherous stepfather, to dance for him, Salome disappears and soon returns, wearing a  top hat and a set of gray tails, a la Eleanor Powell from those 30s musicals, and I wonder if she is going tap dance the Seven Veils number. But, no, she is going to do "Dancing With the Stars", accompanied by a couple of courtiers in tuxes. They whirl  her around to Strauss' beautiful, sensuous music, doing leg lifts, spins - all the stuff you've seen on DWTs. (I'm giving her a 7 so far.) Then she throws off the hat, the jacket and the two guys help her off with the trousers and the long fishnet hose and she's down to a black bustier. She turns her back to the audience and flips off the bustier, turns back to the audience with her arms across her chest and that's about as daring as it gets. 

As Salome's reward for the dance, Jochanaan gets his head chopped off (off stage) and then Salome (now wearing a bathrobe) does her necrophiliac final, endless aria with the head, getting blood all over her face, and the curtain comes down as Herod orders the executioner to kill Salome. We don't get to see that part. (The ominous human winged gargoyles do nothing but stand on these tall perches for the entire hour and a half of the opera. I wonder about them. How would you describe a job like that? It's not even as noteworthy as being a spear carrier in "Aida", for Pete's sake. What do they tell their kids?) 

The next live HD performance is John Adams' "Dr. Atomic", about Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb.  The composer also did "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer". I probably won't go.