tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-260504212024-03-26T23:37:12.311-07:00The Word SanctuaryW. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.comBlogger1036125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-65144133510206656472021-09-13T14:41:00.009-07:002024-03-17T02:57:12.137-07:00Jordan Scannella, Bassist for HAMILTON: Exclusive Interview on Two Wheels<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzQiS_Zwscks80K3h8GrVlTkUw8YPgn-yfofNwwIsFlvK7NVbHjBCeelMuxHp_sImgQw5iPObJ94i-t083DfahxC4iVjkxjg4M_PH_hUy7e7nP-08k67nNXipl_-Xuz3yl9w/s2048/scanella+publicity+shot.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzQiS_Zwscks80K3h8GrVlTkUw8YPgn-yfofNwwIsFlvK7NVbHjBCeelMuxHp_sImgQw5iPObJ94i-t083DfahxC4iVjkxjg4M_PH_hUy7e7nP-08k67nNXipl_-Xuz3yl9w/s400/scanella+publicity+shot.jpg"/></a></div><P>Today I interviewed the bass player Jordan Scannella, now touring with <I>Hamilton</I>. We were both on bikes on the Silver Comet Trail north of Atlanta. He was ahead, then I passed him, and he stayed close. When we both passed a softball-sized turtle, he asked if turtles were a common sight around here, as he was passing me. I figured he was from out of town and started up a conversation -- once I'd caught up to him. Riding with him was very helpful for my average speed.
<P>In truth, being a friendly guy, he was the one who asked most of the questions. From him, I learned something about the life of a musician traveling with a show. He's staying in a bed-and-breakfast close to the theatre and riding several times a week. When he goes to different places on the tour, he often hooks up with a cycling group to get to know the territory. Not all places are so hospitable as our Silver Comet; he told of unpenned, unleashed dogs. One time he outraced them, but another time they attacked on an uphill climb. In that situation, he got off the bike and put it between him and the dogs. His airhorn confused them. "They forgot what they were doing, and went away."
<P>He was amazed by octagenarian jazz stars whom he saw at Piedmont Park last weekend during the Atlanta Jazz Festival. He theorized that musicians live longer than ordinary people because they keep playing -- "When you stop playing, your life is over," he said. I shared how playing piano in the pit orchestra for <I>Sweeney Todd</I> was the most intense living I've ever done -- and how I wished I'd discovered band when I was doing drama in high school.
<P>About <I>Hamilton</I>, we said little. I told him how I'd known the music and went to find out what the visuals added. (See my article <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/09/hamilton-on-mute.html">Hamilton on Mute</a>.)
<P>He does some teaching on Zoom these days, and misses in-person interaction, but he acknowledges some advantages in the remote learning.
<P>While we did talk some about music and Broadway, I did not learn until I went online that he has recorded with groups including <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jorscan">Jorscan</a> and <a href="http://www.peopleschamps.com/">People's Champs</a>. When conversation shifted to a new topic, I kept to myself a comment about a wonderful bike trail in Cincinnati, missing an opportunity for another connection, since that's his hometown and very dear to me (see <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/cycling-america-virtually.html#Cincinnati">Cincinnati on my virtual bike tour</a>).
<P>After I'd gone a bit over an hour, it was time for me to turn back while he explored land west. I told him I'd consider my <I>Hamilton</I> program to be virtually autographed, now.
<P>In an
<a href="https://bassmusicianmagazine.com/2018/03/interview-with-bassist-jordan-scannella/">Interview on Bassmusicmagazine.com</a> from 2018, he discusses his background, how he hustles to make a living as a musician in New York, and how he got involved with <I>Hamilton</I>. He's very enthusiastic about the show. Near the end of the interview, he explains how he actually plays several different basses to get the sounds required.... and how he has literally two seconds to switch from one instrument to another. He's grateful for the consistency of his <I>Hamilton</I> schedule, giving him time to compose. And -- it goes without saying -- to ride his bike.
<a href="https://bassmusicianmagazine.com/2018/03/interview-with-bassist-jordan-scannella/"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu5sT_rfOLmaYsmPIlfi_GmGUtJwK4jnpI7TJ9Rb2dQO-yu651q3cavjCzi2w6j0uPGR4oXj4oByYOKw-0qYchYQ1B4k2u2rP9RLsYfuZGQpHJsDKd8AyUe2_tgiyXQzSoEw/s839/Scanella+interview+2.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="477" data-original-width="839" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu5sT_rfOLmaYsmPIlfi_GmGUtJwK4jnpI7TJ9Rb2dQO-yu651q3cavjCzi2w6j0uPGR4oXj4oByYOKw-0qYchYQ1B4k2u2rP9RLsYfuZGQpHJsDKd8AyUe2_tgiyXQzSoEw/s400/Scanella+interview+2.jpg"/></a></div></a>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-3002693761166206342012-07-04T18:31:00.003-07:002024-02-18T04:19:57.891-08:00Carole, Joni, and Carly in Context<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin3weqB7wbWTUDAnLDnuDQKJe_eYxBXmeSVAoobuYdMMvisJQ8u73dRralOhMTY5w21v7n95H39Ux2xuiluBrDtRT3rLCaUkZVu-VMt06rRybvtWMVjEhsZ4J97C7gdwd1SQ/s1600/Carly_Carole.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" sca="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin3weqB7wbWTUDAnLDnuDQKJe_eYxBXmeSVAoobuYdMMvisJQ8u73dRralOhMTY5w21v7n95H39Ux2xuiluBrDtRT3rLCaUkZVu-VMt06rRybvtWMVjEhsZ4J97C7gdwd1SQ/s320/Carly_Carole.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(Reflections on GIRLS LIKE US: CAROLE KING, JONI MITCHELL, CARLY SIMON, AND THE JOURNEY OF A GENERATION by Sheila Weller, paperback published by Washington Square Press, 2008.)</span><br />
<br />
Discussing the cover of Carly Simon's 1972 album <i>No Secrets</i>, Sheila Weller notes that the photo portrays the singer-songwriter as "the epitome of the 1970s educated woman," shown "in errand-doing, lunch-date-going motion in velour jeans, tote bag swinging." In eighth grade, I picked up on all that subliminally. More significantly, I took for granted in 1972 that women would have lives and careers of their own, unmarried. Weller does also note a couple of details that did grab my conscious attention back then, "discreetly visible" under Simon's "tight jersey."<br />
<br />
Weller in GIRLS LIKE US presents parallel biographies of Carly Simon, Carole King and Joni Mitchell. It's about three parts relationships, one part songwriting, and one part social history. <br />
<br />
About social history, Weller is so right matching her subjects' albums to the <i>zeitgeist </i>of that era that I take her word for the parts of the story that I was too young to understand. She fits their work into a bigger picture of immense cultural change, and she does so without idealizing that era. For example, she writes that Carole King, a teenager unmarried and pregnant in 1959 had therefore married and boarded "the elevator" (of adulthood) "when young adult life had meant responsibility and sober idealism. Now [in 1967] it meant playfulness, politics, and sensuality" (189). <br />
<br />
Weller observes that Sixties social movements seemed to happen overnight, but she describes how they had been a long time in preparation. We can see some of this in the family backgrounds of these three women: Carole King's working-class parents and their divorce; Joni Mitchell's escape to Bohemian life, immediately marred by pregnancy and the anguished choice between giving up either the career or the baby (haunted for decades after by her choice to give up the baby); Carly Simon's wealthy, educated parents' cocktail parties with New York cultural figures and their "no secrets" lives with live-in employees who were also their lovers. The sexual revolution didn't begin in 1967, it just went public. Weller doesn't idealize any of this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In hindsight, the last three years of the 1960s were like some self-wrought mini-Messianic Age plunked in the middle of the twentieth century. Hubristic prophets spouted melodramatic rhetoric...; believers found revelations in holy texts (Weather Underground manifestoes, acid visions, Dylan or Beatles lyrics); [and Students for Democratic Action espoused] "fraternity and honesty." But they devolved into tableaux both satirically grandiose and improbable... (256)</span></blockquote>
Citing Wolfe, she describes Black Panthers sharing cocktails with Leonard Bernstein. What she calls "the triumphalist chaos of late 60s rock, the radicals' political opera, the psychedelic madness" all "seemed to have backfired" by 1971: assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin King, massacre at My Lai, and shootings of protesters at Kent State, not to mention high-profile drug-related deaths of counter-culture icons Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, all seemed to be signalling that 1971 was the time to try living out Bobby Kennedy's statement, "We're here to make gentle the life of this world" (321). We were ready for songs that asked, <i>Ain't it good to know, you've got a friend?</i><br />
<br />
About artistry, Weller confirms what I've divined since my days of squinting at LP inner liners' lyrics and composition credits: Carly and Carole have the AABA form from Broadway in their blood, and all three women respect craft to an extent that bothered some of their peers and critics, for whom anything unspontaneous smacks of inauthenticity. King's lyricist-husband Gerry Goffin had wanted to write his own <i>West Side Story</i> with Carole, and their song "Up on the Roof," with strings added, was a nod in that direction. Joni had jazz chords and the sounds of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in mind long before she got the guitar and the folk label, longer still before her jazz albums of the 70s bombed. <br />
<br />
For this poisonous ideal of "authenticity," Weller credits the faux-vagabond Bob Dylan with spreading the notion that craft reeked of dishonesty. In his encounters with these women and with the Beatles, his example and charisma gave them license to indulge in allusions to personal experiences that no one could divine. Weller calls it "deep" songwriting that does more than find ways to say "I love you." At one point in the mid-sixties, Joni Mitchell realizes, "Oh! You can write about <i>anything!"</i><br />
<br />
All of that is very interesting, but the stuff about who did what in bed (or the bathroom!) with James Taylor (or Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, or <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2019/08/cass-elliotts-voice.html">Mama Cass Elliot</a>'s brother-in-law Russ Kunkel), about marriages brutal and sad, and about flings with Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, and others -- just didn't interest me much. Weller quotes many more women friends than I could keep track of dishing about the artists' relationships. <br />
<br />
All three women had long spells of self-doubt and critical indifference in the 80s and 90s, and all have come through with some acceptance that their audience will remain those of us whose notions of relationship were shaped by "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," "You've Got a Friend," and "Both Sides Now."<br />
<br />
[Read my re-discovery of Joni Mitchell <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2012/07/just-songs-discovering-joni-mitchell-40.html">here</a>. In another blogpost, I pay tribute to the singer of that same generation whose voice I hear in my head every day of my life, <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2019/08/cass-elliotts-voice.html">Cass Elliot</a>.]W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-36647369439290506712020-06-17T10:32:00.101-07:002024-02-15T13:34:43.885-08:00"Forge": Friendship and Fire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Ten minutes into Laurie Halse Anderson's YA novel <i>Forge</i>, I'd laughed out loud four times, gasped and cried. Those reactions mix in about that same proportion throughout the novel, along with "awwws" and some outrage. Comparing this to <i>Chains</i>, its predecessor in Anderson's trilogy <i>Seeds of America</i>, I find the same skillful manipulation of her story to fit with events of the War for Independence, with more playfulness and a whole lot more fart jokes.
<P>
<blockquote style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">
[Image: Laurie Halse Anderson. <i>Forge</i>. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2010.]</blockquote>
The jokes are a guy thing, natural to Anderson's narrator Curzon. In <i>Chains</i>, the intense story of Isabel, a girl enslaved, Curzon was comic relief, with his ridiculous floppy red hat, an earring, military garb too big, and a mouth on him. Even at the end of that story, sick and starving in a military prison, he's making jokes. Now he's "almost 16," meaning 11 months short of his birthday, enrolled in the Continental Army, longing to reunite with Isabel.<P>
<br />
Friendship leavens Curzon's suffering from the elements, privations, and hostility from a few of the other teenaged boys in his company. Foremost among his allies is Ebenezer "Eben" Woodruff, the young soldier that Curzon saves early in the novel. Eben's gratitude is as boundless as his chatter, expressed often with arm-numbing punches to Curzon's shoulder. <P>
<br />
A gulf opens between the two friends in a passage that anticipates how the "seeds of America" in 1777 will grow through Civil War to Civil Rights to those today who pit "law and order" against "systemic racism." When Eben argues that runaway slaves break the law, Curzon counters, "Bad laws deserve to be broken," just as the King's decrees are being rebuffed by the colonies. Eben asserts that "running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England." Curzon falls silent a moment.<P>
<br />
<blockquote>
I almost told him then; told him that I and my parents and my grandparents had all been born into bondage, that my great-grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery while his great-grandparents decided which crops to plant and what to name their new cow. (66) </blockquote><P>
If they'd had the phrase "white privilege," Eben still wouldn't understand. When Eben counters that bondage is "God's will," Curzon walks away: "You're not my friend." The ugly and painful chapters that follow make the friendship, when it returns, all the more deep and sweet. <P>
<br />
To fit the arc of Curzon's story to a day-by-day account of events in 1777-1778, Anderson paces her chapters to make the personal coincide with the historical so that jaw-dropping surprises don't feel random. Instead, for example, we think, "It makes sense <i>they</i> would be there!" Anderson shows off in a playful way, meting out highpoints to fall on significant dates. There's peace-making and good will on Christmas, very bad luck on Friday the 13th, something having to do with the heart -- no spoilers, here -- on February 14th, and, for May 1st, more than one reason to think that our narrator has Maypoles on his mind. The way Anderson plays with her material to hit these marks adds another pleasure to the novel.<P>
<br />
Anderson plays with the title, too. When my seventh graders read <i>Chains</i>, there's always a bubbling up of energy as the kids realize how many ways the title appears in the text, relating to story and themes. That game continues, as <i>Chains</i> are made at a <i>Forge</i>. Much of the novel takes place at Valley Forge. Curzon, who once worked for a blacksmith, makes himself a black "Smith" when he enlists with an alias. The hardships of military life are a "forge," says a fellow soldier, to be "a test of our mettle" (121). Lead antagonist James Bellingham has forged a metal collar for his slave. By training during the spring, ragtag soldiers are "forged" into an army. Then, forged notes are part of Curzon's escape plans. <P>
<br />
Of course, there are no forges, no chains, without fire, and a singular passage about fire and chains confirms the strength of the fire that burns in Curzon. He tells of hearing a story from Benny, the runt of the company whom Curzon admires for courage. It's little Benny who shames a bully to tears for shirking (140). Curzon bites his tongue to keep from laughing when Benny, trying to fit in with the big boys, cusses "like a granny," <i>Oh, foul, poxy Devil!</i> (95). Curzon, who cannot read, listens intently when Benny tells stories to his mates. <br />
The story of the Titan Prometheus, chained to a rock for sharing fire with the needy, comes to Curzon's mind at a moment of intense hopelessness. Bellingham has outmaneuvered him: since Curzon is inured to pain, Bellingham threatens to punish Isabel for any misstep by Curzon. Moments later, Curzon stares into a fireplace and recalls the story, though not the name, of a "fellow ... chained to a rock where an eagle ate out his liver, which grew back every night, and so on through eternity." Curzon reflects,<br />
<blockquote>
When Benny finished his story... I did not know what I would have done if somebody shackled me to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat my insides, day after day after day.</blockquote><P>
<blockquote>
<div>
Now I knew. I would fight the eagle and the chains and that mountain as long as I had breath. (199)</div>
</blockquote><P>
<div>
This inner fire is important to Laurie Halse Anderson's trilogy. In education forums and in public discussion of novels and movies, people this year have questioned whether white authors should be writing about the experiences of people of color. Anderson, a white woman, gives us in her epigraphs samples from primary sources to show us how close she comes to real lives and real voices of the time, black and white. She has given her black, male, teenage protagonist an appealing voice and strong agency in his own salvation; there is no White Savior, here.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anderson's other works include memoirs of her own experience with abuse. When she writes about Curzon's despair and anger under someone else's absolute power over his body, she writes with authority. In <i>Chains</i>, both Isabel and her nemesis Madam Lockton suffer arbitrary decrees and physical beatings. In <i>Forge</i>, it's different. As Isabel fills Curzon in on a particularly violent slave trader, she stops talking. Curzon is mystified:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote>
<div>
I was overcome by an unsettling sensation, as if some giant had picked up the whole of the earth and tilted it. She'd been hurt, scarred on the inside of her spirit, and I did not know how to help her. (189)</div>
</blockquote>
<div>
Curzon lacks our culture's generic phrase <i>sexual abuse </i>for what Isabel experienced. But Curzon knows it when he sees Isabel forced to lather Bellingham's face while the odious man soaks in a tub. Giving orders, the man casually pets Isabel. Curzon barely contains himself, thinking</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote>
<div>
<i>Take your hand off her, you foul whoreson.</i><br />
"Of course, sir," I said. (207)</div>
</blockquote>
<div>
Though victimized, Isabel is no victim. When she and Curzon make risky plans, Curzon says, "We should wait... for our luck to turn" (270). He observes, with admiration, that others, female and male, would have "blubbered" and "backed out": </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote>
<div>
Not Isabel. The reverse side of her pigheaded stubbornness was unshakable courage that was worthy of a general.<br />
"If our luck does not turn for the good on its own," she said, "we'll make it turn." (270)</div>
</blockquote>
<div>
</div>
<div>
For the finale, Anderson whips up action, humor, surprises, poetic justice, and a perfect conversion of her major themes, forge, freedom, and guys. As the story ends, Curzon is once again laughing, "walking out of Valley Forge the way I walked into it, with friends."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">
[See my response to <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=26050421" id="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2020/06/ashes-seeds-of-america-trilogy-concludes.html" name="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2020/06/ashes-seeds-of-america-trilogy-concludes.html"><i>Ashes</i>, concluding book of the trilogy, 06/2020</a>]</div>
W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-15040253823517110452023-02-08T10:32:00.013-08:002024-02-15T11:30:02.022-08:00Living a Life that Matters: Rabbi Kushner on Jacob<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrYixRxwGfC71PD63Ufwh4Ek1Gbc2rZ6MCB0UUPx02Lc5sctanE7Piu33XsYp_V8u1hhQyg3nrJPIj3m54oaJjyZk1cv4z8Q8TfiJkyQlP6yiNyDKPYCjuD0XKUW8lnEN4IQ9UfjartOXwcti5gjE8RnCc5yHKlSDNwGPre-Q5L97H7Es/s297/harold-kushner.jpg" style="clear: right; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="252" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrYixRxwGfC71PD63Ufwh4Ek1Gbc2rZ6MCB0UUPx02Lc5sctanE7Piu33XsYp_V8u1hhQyg3nrJPIj3m54oaJjyZk1cv4z8Q8TfiJkyQlP6yiNyDKPYCjuD0XKUW8lnEN4IQ9UfjartOXwcti5gjE8RnCc5yHKlSDNwGPre-Q5L97H7Es/s320/harold-kushner.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Harold S. Kushner</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>Some days ago, I uncovered two unread books in my basement, <i>Listening to Midlife</i> and <i>Living a Life that Matters</i>. Too late for those, I guess. I wasn't yet 50 when I bought them at a long-gone local bookstore almost 15 years ago.
<p>Yet <i>Living a Life that Matters</i> by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner still resonates. I'm especially drawn to what Kushner sees in the story of Jacob in Genesis.
</p><p>Kushner compares Jacob's story to a play in three acts: boy, suitor, and patriarch. The arc of the play is implied by the character's name change. <i>Jacob</i>, his name in youth, relates to Hebrew <i>akav</i> "crookedness," while the name he later earns, <i>Israel</i> ("he wrestles with God") relates to <i>yashar</i> "straight."
</p><p>In the story, Jacob masquerades as his brother Esau to trick their father into passing his legacy on to him instead of Esau, his firstborn son. Kushner speculates that it's deeper than that: Jacob wants the strength and boldness of Esau; he feels incomplete. (22)
</p><p>Kushner observes that, lacking curtains or chapter headings, the ancient text marks transitions from one act to the next with dream-like epiphanies in the night, a ladder to heaven and an all-night wrestling match with an unnamed being. The first of these happens at the end of the day when Jacob fled his home where Esau has sworn to kill him. Ashamed and afraid, Jacob envisions a bridge between earth and heaven. Kushner says this image gives Jacob hope that he can reach higher (21). That night Jacob bargains with God: for divine help, he will give God a tithe of his earnings.
</p><p>In the second act, he is the first (the only?) character in the Bible who falls in love. Others take wives, are given wives, coming to appreciate them later, but for Jacob and Rebekah, it's love at first sight. Rebekah's father tricks Jacob as badly as Jacob tricked Isaac, fooling Jacob into marrying the less lively older sister Leah. We're told that Jacob hated Leah. Kushner speculates that she was always a living reminder of Jacob's own malfeasance. Jacob has to wait 14 years to consummate his love for Rebekah. He builds a family and wealth, and readies himself for a return to Esau.
</p><p>[<i>My poem <a href="https://smootfirstverse.blogspot.com/2022/07/angels-never-know.html">Angels Never Know</a> grows from Jacob's story.</i>]
</p><p>In the second transition between acts, Jacob has sent his family ahead. We're told that Jacob was alone. But then he's wrestling with someone who doesn't give a name. Who is it? I've heard it's God, it's an angel, it's a devil, it's a spirit of the place. Kushner thinks it's Jacob's own self, equally strong, equally adept. Jacob's fighting his own fear; Kushner says he's fighting his own impulse to use some underhanded way to avoid meeting Esau face to face. Jacob's injured, but survives, a lesson to take away, that he doesn't have to be afraid. Again, Jacob prays, but this time he does not bargain with God but requests strength to do the right thing (31).
</p><p>Across the three acts, Kushner sees Jacob moving from amorality and selfish ambition, shame being the only sin, to a morality of integrity, in which the primary sin is to fail to live up to your ideals (21). Kushner tells us the scripture calls him "<i>shalem</i>, whole, united within himself" (107). He lives the rest of his life raising the brothers who will constitute the nation of Israel, and he carries his love for Rebekah to the end.
</p><p>What does Jacob's story have to do with Kushner's readers leading lives that matter? Kushner's chapter following his analysis of the Jacob story is titled "Family and Friends: We are Who We Love." Essentially, it's what I've known for years, said simply in a lyric by Comden and Green, <i>Make someone happy / make just one someone happy / and you will be happy, too</i> (see <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2006/11/make-someone-happy-remembering-betty.html">blogpost of 11/2006</a>). Kushner tugs at my heart when he refers to adolescents, himself included, who were "redeemed from self-doubt" by a parent or teacher who let them know what Jacob's first dream told him: you are someone who will matter. Kushner steps out from behind his screen of authority to tell of his son killed in middle school by a rare genetic disorder, whose classmates years later cited him again and again as their inspiration and a shaping influence on their lives.
</p><p>Kushner's message resonates with what I believe as a Christian: We cannot bring the Messiah down to solve the world's problems, but we can bring the Messiah down for someone else.
</p><p>[Harold S. Kushner. <i>Living a Life that Matters</i>. (New York: Knopf, 2001.)]
</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-89952984925888709592021-09-28T10:13:00.011-07:002024-02-13T12:49:53.418-08:00Lapine, Sondheim, and "Sunday": So Much Love in their Words<i>"So much love in his words...forever with his colors...how George looks...he
can look forever..."</i><br />
(lines written by James Lapine, spoken during the reprise of Stephen Sondheim's song
"Sunday" at the end of their musical play <i>Sunday in the Park with George</i>)
<p>
The distinguished Broadway musical <i>Sunday in the Park with George</i>
wraps a love story in a lively conversation about art -- how we make it, why it matters. </p><p>So does James Lapine's memoir of that musical's creation,
<i>Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created </i>Sunday in the
Park with George (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). The starting
place for both love stories is George Seurat's pointillist painting
<i>A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte - 1884</i>.
</p>
<blockquote>
<i>Clockwise from top: Act One finale, 1984; Sondheim and Lapine on set, 1984;
Sondheim studies <i>La Grande Jatte</i>, photo by Lapine.</i>
</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Enro5VMR7UuqoqqeRsV6aaTeMJSz7lcckG-c02XVtAUm32TDxfDS7iY0XZRPAh2MZonj-pm4vUxFN0vaIpn9rfKnUwJGbW7WmFbdhf0gGeSkYGj6UKqYJ3emCgHq3rudVQ/s2048/Sunday_collage.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1531" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Enro5VMR7UuqoqqeRsV6aaTeMJSz7lcckG-c02XVtAUm32TDxfDS7iY0XZRPAh2MZonj-pm4vUxFN0vaIpn9rfKnUwJGbW7WmFbdhf0gGeSkYGj6UKqYJ3emCgHq3rudVQ/s400/Sunday_collage.jpg" width="400" /></a>
</div>
<p>
</p><center>The Musical</center>
The love story in the musical arcs through two acts and 100 years. In the
opening seconds of the show, as artist George Seurat sketches "Dot," the woman in
the forefront of the painting, she pleads with him to notice
"there's someone <i>in</i> this dress." She is determined to "get through" to
the artist. But during Act One, she comes to recognize that she cannot have his full attention. He sings why in a reflection about himself,
<p></p>
<blockquote>
<i>... however you live,</i><br />
<i>There's a part of you always standing by,</i><br />
<i>Mapping out a sky,</i><br />
<i>Finishing a hat...</i><br />
-(Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat")
</blockquote>
Dot, carrying George's child, finds another man "simple and kind" who "makes a
connection." With him, she immigrates to America, leaving Seurat with these
words:
<blockquote>
<i>You have a mission,</i><br />
<i>A mission to see.</i><br />
<i>Now I have one, too, George.</i><br />
<i>And we should have belonged together.</i>
<p><i>I have to move on.</i><br />("We Do Not Belong Together")</p>
</blockquote><p>
In Act Two, another artist named George, descendant of Seurat and Dot, revisits
the island of La Grand Jatte. He had planned to bring along his grandmother
Marie, the baby in the painting, to celebrate the painting's centennial with a
new art installation. But Marie has died, the island is encrusted with buildings
and pavement, and he's having doubts about his own work. </p><p>As he reads the notes
that Dot wrote in her English primer, she appears to him in person. As if he were his ancestor Seurat, she thanks
him for what he taught her about being "in the moment," not
to worry over past or future -- a lesson that the modern George needs to hear.
For his part, George sees in her "Things I hadn't looked at / Till now," her
smile, "the way you catch the light," the "care / and the feeling." Now George
and Dot sing in unison, "We have always belonged together." Dot inspires him to
"stop worrying if your vision is new" and "move on."
</p><p>
</p><center>The Collaboration</center>
James Lapine reflects in his book that the two years spent creating
<i>Sunday in the Park with George</i> "changed my life, and I would venture to
say it changed Sondheim's as well." No doubt about that: Sondheim's memoir,
part I, ends at a lowpoint in his career, but he adds, "Then I met James
Lapine."
<p></p>
<p>
The two men were unsuited to each other like characters who "meet cute" in a
rom-com.
</p>
<p>
Lapine, barely in his 30s, straight, with "commitment issues," was an
out-of-work teacher of fashion design with a couple of writing-directing
credits at an off-Broadway workshop for experimental drama. Sondheim, 52 and
gay, was a multi-Tony-winner and "Broadway's Music Man" (<i>Newsweek</i>) but
suffering the end of his fruitful collaboration with director Hal Prince after
their show <i>Merrily We Roll Along</i> flopped in 1981.
</p>
<p>
When a common friend arranged for a meeting, Lapine didn't know any of
Sondheim's work except for the 1979 masterpiece <i>Sweeney Todd</i>. Blocked by a nuclear protest, Lapine barged through the crowds to arrive at Sondheim's
town home just on time. Sondheim put him at ease by offering a joint.
</p>
<p>
"I loved that you did that," Lapine says to Sondheim in the book. The
transcripts of Lapine's reminiscences with Sondheim glow with many moments
when the two collaborators express feelings they'd kept private at the time.
</p>
<p>
For example, Sondheim reveals that it was Lapine's play
<i>Twelve Dreams</i> that kept him from quitting theatre altogether. Sickened by
the glee that greeted the failure of <i>Merrily</i> in "so-called Broadway
circles" (17), he wanted nothing more than to create video games. But Lapine's play inspired him. "Really? I
didn't know that," says Lapine in his interview.
</p>
<p>
Then Sondheim describes the moment that began their long working relationship. Over
several meetings, they'd not found a subject of sufficient interest to both of
them. Then Lapine laid down a postcard printed with Seurat's
<i>Sunday on La Grande Jatte</i>, and the two found possibilities. It looked
to them like a stage set; all the characters seem to avoid looking at each
other. Then Lapine observed that "the main character is missing" -- the
artist. Sondheim says, "Boing! All the lights went on" (23).
</p>
<p>
As in any good romantic comedy, there were doubts, more than either man knew
at the time. Reading Lapine's first drafts, Sondheim felt superfluous. "This
will make you blush," Sondheim tells Lapine, "but you are -- a poet" and
Sondheim feared that any song by him would be "intrusive" (35). At the same
time, Lapine felt that Sondheim always had "one foot out the door." Sondheim says,
</p>
<blockquote>
I never detected any of that. ...Not only did I enjoy your company, but also I
thought everything you were showing me was fun and good and stimulating. (35)
</blockquote>
Sondheim's procrastination made it a pretty one-sided collaboration until the
day when Sondheim seated Lapine beside him on the piano bench to turn pages
while he sang the opening number. Lapine admits, "This is going to sound odd...
Suddenly, we were shoulder to shoulder... It was a kind of an emotional moment
for me." Sondheim was so nervous that he "attacked" the keys and oversang. He
had to do it twice before Lapine "got it," and even then, Lapine apologizes now,
"I'm not effusive" (44).
<p>
Their trust grew through re-writes, rehearsals, and preview performances when
the audience sometimes responded badly. "Out of the blue," Lapine recalls,
Sondheim said to him, "I want to write my next show with you." Lapine writes,
"I had never felt that kind of trust coming at me." He reflects that his
"commitment issues" vanished forever (121).
</p>
<p>
In an
<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/08/james-lapine-on-friendship-with-stephen.html">interview about this book</a>, Terri Gross asked Lapine why he never wrote another show with Sondheim
after <i>Sunday,</i> <i>Into the Woods</i> and <i>Passion</i>. "Are you still
friends?" she asked. "Yes!" Lapine said, though they never found another topic
that interested both of them. Lapine worked with Sondheim on a successful
revision of
<i><a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2013/10/rhymes-with-integrity.html">Merrily</a></i>, a stage revue
<i><a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2015/07/sondheim-anthologies-you-have-to-think.html">Sondheim on Sondheim</a></i>, and a movie mixing archival footage and new performances,
<i><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2014/07/stephen-sondheim-movie-star.html">Six by Sondheim</a></i>. Now, he told Gross, writing this book has been another way to keep Sondheim
in his life.
</p>
<p>
</p><center>The Art of Making Art</center>
The love stories in both musical and book are buttressed by dozens of
thumbnail portraits of characters whose lives go into the making of the
artworks.
<p></p>
<p>
In the musical, Seurat sketches the other figures of the painting between his
encounters with Dot. Lapine's pithy bits of dialogue bring out their salient
characteristics. In musical numbers called "Gossip" and "The Day Off,"
Sondheim distills Lapine's characters in brief songs. Though a couple of critics say there's "no life" in Seurat's art, Sondheim has Seurat sing along with portions of each portrait, showing how the artist enters into
the characters' lives. Seurat even channels two dogs in a virtuoso duet for
solo voice. In act two, Lapine and Sondheim interlace dialogue and lyrics to
portray a slate of new characters from the contemporary art world who surround
the 1984 George.
</p>
<p>
Likewise in Lapine's book, we get to know actors, producers, and designers. We learn how much
the actors helped -- and prodded -- Lapine and Sondheim to flesh out their
characters. In the roles of servants, Nancy Opel and Brent Spiner
(subsequently "Data" on <i>Star Trek</i>) introduced German accents that gave
Lapine and Sondheim ideas for character development (97). Lapine borrowed
personality traits for his 1984 George from the technical designer Bran Ferren
who created the laser-based sculpture called "Chromolume #7" (169).
</p>
<p>
Lapine also got a lot of pushback and resentment, especially during weeks of
previews for audiences that grew restless and hostile. He learned about leadership from
their pushback. Actor Melanie Vaughan remembers how she, Spiner, and Opel stonewalled Lapine, staring at him blankly while he gave them notes. They were
thinking, <i>just tell us what you want</i> (98). Lapine reflects that, as
both writer and director, he was still figuring out what he wanted (98). Actor
Charles Kimbrough asks Lapine in the book if the memory of all that is
painful. "I'm actually somewhat in awe of my younger self. At the time, I was
just trying to keep my head above water. But when I look back now, I think:
Boy, I had some chutzpah!" (242)
</p>
<p>
Sondheim felt mounting pressure to fill in gaps in the dialogue where he and
Lapine intended the characters to sing. Bernadette Peters complained that
"Dot" "kind of disappears" in the first act, pushing Sondheim to write
"Everybody Loves Louis," about leaving Seurat for the baker, a peppy song with an undercurrent of sorrow: "We lose things / and then we choose things
/...George has George, / and I need someone." Mandy Patinkin, already
high-strung (the backstage crew wanted to kill him (218)) was on the verge of
quitting. He pleaded for a song that would explain his
character. Sondheim finally delivered "Finishing the Hat." Rehearsing it,
Patinkin "lit up like a flare," remembers orchestrator Michael Starobin. The
song explained "why [Seurat]'s so hard on his partner and also why he's so
hard on himself. The piece didn't make sense until that song came in" (120).
</p>
<p>
Everyone felt even more urgency for Sondheim to produce songs for the second
act. For the book, Lapine presses Sondheim for an answer to what took so long. After all, he and Sondheim had discussed the characters, the moments, the themes;
Sondheim had written page after page of notes; yet the audience and actors,
too, were left to wonder why they should care about the second-act George or
why "Dot" suddenly appears in 1984. What was the delay?
</p>
<p>
Sondheim finally admits that he has no answer, but it's clear that he
benefitted from seeing the actors in their roles. Performing the role of
"Marie," Peters spoke to Marie's grandson "George" with a South Carolina lilt
that put Sondheim in mind of his favorite composer, southerner Harold Arlen,
whose blues-inflected songs were "seductive...warm...yearning" (233). Sondheim wrote those qualities into a new song "Children and Art" in which Marie gently encourages her
grandson to produce "the only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you
depart this world: children and art" (368). </p><p>That still left a big hole in Act Two where the modern George expresses himself. Sondheim tells Lapine that he knew
the contents of the missing number, but not the form,
until he saw the little red book in George's hand, the primer that Dot used to learn English in the first act, a gift to modern George from his grandmother. Alone in the park, George reads from the book: "Charles has a book... Charles shows them his crayons... Marie has the ball of Charles...." George keeps the primer's simple grammar
going as he muses about the lost park and his uncertain future:
</p>
<blockquote>
<i>George is afraid</i><br /><i>George sees the park</i><br /><i>George sees it dying.</i><br /><i>George too may fade,</i><br /><i>Leaving no mark,</i><br />.<i>Just passing through.</i><br />
("Lesson #8")
</blockquote>
Lapine tells Sondheim, "So when we finally got those last two songs in the show,
Mandy said it best, it was like a magic trick" (240). Sondheim responds, "That's
the miracle. ...When music is used correctly, then everything coalesces." Actor
Charles Kimbrough gives the cast's perspective. They'd watched from the wings
each night as the last scene fell flat.
<blockquote>
But the addition of these songs laid that carpet of feeling under the moment.
When Dot entered to the music of "Lesson #8," it was clear that this George
had summoned her. It was pure gold. And then they sang "Move On" and that just
killed. And then when the "Sunday" reprise came around, <i>bam!</i> (241)
</blockquote>
Lapine and Sondheim stuck to their vision while producers and actors advised
them to just extend act one with some audience-pleasing number and jettison the
difficult second act. Lapine writes, "[We] had to stay true to our initial
impulses and write the show we had intended, not the show these people [who
walked out on the second act] had wanted to see" (127). Actors Mandy Patinkin
and William Parry both remember Lapine, a very "controlled" and "internal" man,
opening up and choking back tears after the last rehearsal, pleading with the
cast to "trust" the show. "Believe in what we have made." And they produced
something "remarkable."
<p>
</p><center>Art, Love, and Death</center>
Lapine and Sondheim both have discovered new things in what they themselves
wrote. They have heard their own words come back to them in times of
discouragement:
<p></p>
<blockquote>
<i>Anything you do</i><br />
<i>Let it come from you</i><br /><i>Then it will be new.</i><br /><i>Give us more to see.</i><br />("Move On")
</blockquote>
Lapine says it's a letter to them from their younger selves (127).
<p>
Those words from "Move On" speak to me as an artist, too, but the moment that
has always spoken to me as a man emerges from another arc in the story.
There's a through-line of statements about art that tell us all why we should
care about artists doing their work.
</p>
<p>This other arc has to do with the death of what you love.</p>
<p>
At the start of the show, Dot says, "If you want instead / When you're dead /
Some more public / And more permanent / Expression / Of affection," then you
want a painter or sculptor whose work will endure "forever." Near the end of
the show, 1984 George fears that his life will have been "just passing
through." In between, we've heard the admonition to "leave behind" either
children or art, and we've heard the anthem "Sunday" that celebrates how
Seurat's painting preserves a moment "forever."
</p>
<p>
But the song "Beautiful" reaches an emotional peak that affected me deeply,
from the first time I heard it to the present moment nearly 40 years later.
</p>
<p>
This quiet song follows Dot's tumultuous aria "We Do Not Belong Together."
While Seurat sketches his mother, the "Old Lady" played originally by Barbara
Bryne, speaks of memories that are fading. Sondheim's music for her seems
to be built on sighing, while an ostinato suggests the river nearby. She sings
of regret that the Eiffel Tower is being constructed "where there were trees,"
and she mourns
</p>
<blockquote>
<i>Sundays</i><br /><i>Disappearing</i><br /><i>All the time,</i><br /><i>When things were beautiful.</i><br />
</blockquote>
The accompaniment changes to cascades of notes when George tells her "All things
are beautiful." In the earlier song "Finishing the Hat," he had expressed the
joy of seeing this world through art "like a window...the only way to see." Now
he demonstrates for his mother how the tower is "a perfect tree." He promises,
"You watch / While I revise the world." Suddenly, she gets it, and her song
becomes urgent, as everything is
<blockquote>
<i>Changing,</i><br />
<i>As we sit here--</i><br />
<i>Quick, draw it all,</i><br />
<i>Georgie!</i><br />("Beautiful")
</blockquote>
"You make it beautiful," she says, eyes closed. As this quiet song subsides, the
other characters enter, their confrontations with each other at the boiling
point. Seurat freezes the chaotic action to compose all the players into the
tableau we all know, Seurat's "perfect park" that continues "forever."
<p>
The song isn't mentioned in Lapine's book, but the 1986 edition of Craig
Zadan's <i>Sondheim and Company</i> includes Mandy Patinkin's story of a
two-hour conversation with Sondheim about "people that you love, things you'd
like to say to them, ideal states of when you can communicate and when that
communication can never take place again....And four days later, he came in
with this conversation turned into a poem called 'Beautiful,' set to this
simple, gorgeous music" (Zadan 305).
</p>
<p>
When the Old Lady says, "Quick, draw it all!" she speaks for all of us when
we're suddenly reminded that people and places that we love will not last.
<i>Sunday</i> gives us the reason to care about the making of art: it's an
expression of love that distills, elevates, and preserves the object of
appreciation.
</p>
<p>As Lapine has done for that life-changing collaboration in this book.</p>
<p></p>
<blockquote>
<center>Of Related Interest</center>
<ul>
<li>
In
<a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2015/11/sunday-art-and-forever.html"><i>Sunday</i>, Art, and "Forever"</a>
I speculate why many people cry for the song "Sunday."
</li>
<li>
The show is key to what I see as
<a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2017/11/sondheims-religious-vision.html">Sondheim's Religious Vision</a>, with George and Dot as saints.
</li>
<li>
With my fellow arts teachers' thoughtful <i>Sunday</i>-themed retirement
gift, the show spoke to me in a new way:
<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/05/children-and-art-sunday-in-retirement.html">Children and Art: Sunday in Retirement with George</a>.
</li>
<li>
See a curated list of many, many more articles on
<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html">my Sondheim page</a>
</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-91594732636394085832023-10-16T13:55:00.006-07:002024-02-13T04:17:19.617-08:00From Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party to A Haunting in Venice <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYL8LfPoB37xqeTzenobedtpFJxmBciOQ9K11aM85IIAvM6TSSX3QDf09as_SHdLcir9c4ZXVBodDG67p6z-oIKqrCgMjhVMcsQZiERXQzhTXCnTeXl_LQDslnYLZnKlD2p35y33EjpV-hyZVIGsLWWox3vbA3oL4_OvKaLaciVdM0xjJ02Q/s674/Halloween%20collage.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="262" data-original-width="674" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYL8LfPoB37xqeTzenobedtpFJxmBciOQ9K11aM85IIAvM6TSSX3QDf09as_SHdLcir9c4ZXVBodDG67p6z-oIKqrCgMjhVMcsQZiERXQzhTXCnTeXl_LQDslnYLZnKlD2p35y33EjpV-hyZVIGsLWWox3vbA3oL4_OvKaLaciVdM0xjJ02Q/w576-h223/Halloween%20collage.png" width="576" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>(left) The edition I purchased in Ireland, 1977; the cast of the movie, 2023</i>.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p><p>This is not a doctoral thesis, just a game I played to keep up my interest in Agatha Christie's 1969 novel <i>Hallowe'en Party</i>, nominal inspiration for <o><i>A Haunting in Venice</i></o>, directed by its star actor Kenneth Branagh. I kept a mental inventory of bits from the novel that went into the movie -- which otherwise has nothing to do with the book. <br /></p><p>The premise for the book is pretty good, with some promise of atmosphere. During a community Halloween party at the home of Rowena Drake, a small town's most prominent church lady, an awkward girl has been found dead, head submerged in the tub where kids had bobbed for apples minutes before. The teaser is that the girl had boasted loudly about having once seen a murder "years" before, only she hadn't recognized that it was murder at the time. Hercule Poirot, called into the case by his friend Ariadne Oliver, suspects that someone who overheard the girl has killed her to protect their own secret.
</p><p>But, as Agatha Christie's novels go, <i>Hallowe'en Party</i> seems pretty tired. The murder has already happened when the novel begins, so forget about rich Halloween atmosphere. The dialogue is freighted with red herrings as people speculate about every disturbance of the past few years that the girl might have witnessed -- most of these dismissed out of hand after we've gone through the tedium of reading about them. An inordinate amount of dialogue contains phrases to the effect, <i>nowadays,</i> (young people, parents, legal officials) <i>are too</i> (coddled and immoral, too indulgent, too merciful) <i>and the murderer is probably</i> (one of the insane people -- addicts, probably -- that indulgent policies have allowed to roam among us). The only thing to stand out here is that the town's foreigner -- Olga Seminoff, nursemaid -- gets some respect, not always the case in Dame Agatha's books.
</p><p>The movie, on the other hand, goes the other direction, more atmosphere than story. Does Venice even celebrate Halloween? A voiceover narrator says that Venice adopted the holiday from American soldiers recently stationed there at the end of World War II. Poirot is staying in Venice, retired from detective work, when his friend Ariadne Oliver invites him to help her "crack" a local seer's seance routine. The movie makers have fun with dark water, visions of the dead, crashing objects, cobwebs and skulls in tunnels, a legend of orphans left to die in the dungeon during the Plague.
</p><p>I think the movie's creators also had fun picking little bits of Christie's novel to justify their claim to have "adapted" it. Here's what I picked up:
</p><ul><li>Big picture: a Halloween party for kids at the home of a socialite named Rowena Drake. In the novel, she is a widow whose wealthy mother-in-law died suddenly over a year before. In the movie, she is an opera singer who hasn't sung since her grown daughter drowned in the canal the previous year.</li><li>Ariadne Oliver, mystery novelist, is present. Her supposed love of apples is referenced several times in both stories. She invites Poirot to get involved.
</li><li>An intelligent 11-year-old boy named Leopold knows secrets about the adults in the room.
</li><li>A nursemaid named Olga Seminoff is under suspicion.
</li><li>A pair of teenagers (both of them boys in the novel, a brother and sister in the movie) rig up some ghostly special effects. The ghostly effects include sightings of spirits in mirrors.</li><li>Someone's head is forced underwater in the tub of bobbing apples. </li></ul><p>For me, the best parts of both the movie and the book are those where Poirot goes on a tear, separating false claims and false theories from what must be true. Branagh's Poirot goes moping through much of the movie, feeling a bit ill, he says, seeing things that he can't possibly be seeing -- so the moments of clarity were welcome. </p><p>The role of the medium was built up to be a larger-than-life character, one that Michelle Yeoh inhabits with no room to spare. Young Leopold is another scene-stealer. </p><p>Branagh's other two Christies, based on much stronger novels, made sharper, stronger films; but I do enjoy seeing the grand structure he and his writer Michael Green have fabricated from a few clues left by Dame Agatha.</p><p>[<i>See my </i>Crime Fiction <i>page for a </i><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/detective-fiction.html#christie">curated list</a><i> of my reflections on other Christie books and movies, including a biography of her and a memoir by the actor who portrayed Poirot for decades, David Suchet.</i>]<br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-4945024739958144672021-06-28T10:52:00.124-07:002024-02-10T13:32:04.987-08:00History Hysteria: Nothing New<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5a3OVwe7RYwKLJcJxFqPunqndhSEatH1_aMyeHJp8Ye-RSKEC5Jt4XnyXr_6yS4MWl3M_H9aRqI0dOVTdq2XGuTvWJwJdVYLRlLCN-wM5HeH66CP3qLedNk6TYw2n2awpdw/s959/sam+sanders+and+adam+laats.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="959" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5a3OVwe7RYwKLJcJxFqPunqndhSEatH1_aMyeHJp8Ye-RSKEC5Jt4XnyXr_6yS4MWl3M_H9aRqI0dOVTdq2XGuTvWJwJdVYLRlLCN-wM5HeH66CP3qLedNk6TYw2n2awpdw/s320/sam+sanders+and+adam+laats.jpg"/></a></div>Bless Sam Sanders, host of the NPR program <a href="https://www.npr.org/about-npr/533524579/npr-debuts-its-been-a-minute-with-sam-sanders"><I>It's Been a Minute</I></a> for bringing on a guest who could give us a long view on the uproar over Critical Race Theory. Sam often gives voice to feelings that many of his listeners share (myself included), and this time it's a sickness in the pit of the stomach as he hears of disruptions to school board meetings, threats to members, and legislators resolving, in effect, to ban the teaching of historical facts that might make students feel bad.
<P>Sam's guest Adam Laats, a professor of educational leadership at New York's Binghamton University, focuses his reasearch on cultural reactions to school reform. He taught history in middle school and high school for ten years.
<blockquote>[Photo: Sam Sanders (left), Adam Laats]</blockquote>
<P>Sam wanted to know, has this happened before? If so, has it ever been this bad? And is it unprecedented that it's erupted so quickly in school districts and state legislatures all across the nation?
<P>Dr. Laats gave examples from 1930s, 50s, and 70s to show that, yes, parents have called for the banning of books for drawing attention to inequities in American history; yes, they've burned books and even bombed school buildings (1974, West Virginia); and, no, there's lots of precedent for national media and Washington politicians whipping up coast-to-coast hysteria over local school affairs. <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/critical-race-theory-curriculum-panics-history.html?via=rss_socialflow_twitter&fbclid=IwAR0qvZ1AzWebdcHAqNCqhvsd0YbQzPZM5mVSz5Vgbt-5gAXvAyDuQYdJP84">Laats's own article</a> on the current CRT "panic," written with Gillian Frank for <I>Slate</I>, concludes that each of these eruptions has succeeded in the short term by removing the curriculum in question, and in the long-term by discouraging teachers from asking questions that might stir up another hornets' nest.
<P>Adam Laats's own website includes a page called <a href="https://adamlaats.net/my-two-cents/">My Two Cents</a> where he curates links to his articles and media appearances. Judging his books by their covers -- risky, I know -- I'd say that Laats is finding ways to bridge gaps between fundamentalists and teachers who encourage critical thinking about science and history.
<P>So my blood pressure is down again. Thanks Dr. Laats and Dr. Sanders.
<P><center>Of Related Interest</center>
<UL><LI>To open up critical inquiry for 8th grade history students, I designed a year around four questions derived from the Pledge of Allegiance: <I>How</I> true is it to say that America is, or ever was, one nation? under God? indivisible? with liberty and justice for all? We studied primary sources and reached no simple answers. See details at <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2017/07/teach-us-history-with-pledge-of.html">Teach History with the Pledge of Allegiance</a> (07/2017).</LI><LI>"We've been here before" is the somewhat comforting message of Jon Meacham's <I>The Soul of America</I>, a survey of US history composed in 2017 to answer the popular perception that America had never been so divided. See my reflection <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2018/07/jon-meacham-looks-to-history-for-soul.html">07/2018</a>.</LI><LI>I've thanked Sam Sanders another time for his friendly inquiry into a fraught subject. See <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2020/03/memo-trans-eye-for-bible-guy.html">Trans Eye for a Bible Guy</A></LI> </UL>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-89520246633141678922018-11-22T08:01:00.000-08:002024-02-10T13:15:37.978-08:00Lentennial: Bernstein at 100, Profane and Sacred<div>
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating the 100th birth anniversary of maestro - composer - celebrity Leonard Bernstein. The local NPR station's arts maven Lois Reitzes calls it the "Lentennial," appreciating Bernstein's legacy in conversations with music educator Scott Stewart. For my own personal celebration, I curated the ASO series for my fellow subscribers Susan and Suzanne and read Jamie Bernstein's <i>Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.</i> The big surprise in her book is that her experience of him up close was not so different from mine, long - distance.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMXW58kUFqK-3LzuU4uf6sQTTe8oZ_eTgsojigTg8WopzgQKxmC86mIzp7Nghlq5M0oHvFlLN3BWhXotBEBnW886zS-nH-Zzb0CiHdUU5K4qtZj5ZniqgrFrqpBRJXDzTTw/s1600/Lenny_1960.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMXW58kUFqK-3LzuU4uf6sQTTe8oZ_eTgsojigTg8WopzgQKxmC86mIzp7Nghlq5M0oHvFlLN3BWhXotBEBnW886zS-nH-Zzb0CiHdUU5K4qtZj5ZniqgrFrqpBRJXDzTTw/s320/Lenny_1960.jpg" width="320" /></a>In the early 1960s, while Jamie lived with Lenny in a town home across the street from Carnegie Hall, Lenny was also a presence in our family room, both on the black and white television and on the LP of the film <i>West Side Story</i> that I played obsessively. I recognized Leonard Bernstein before I recognized Superman. Lenny was a spectacle, arms waving, hair flying. <br />
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When<i> West Side Story</i> first showed on TV, I was 11 years old, and captivated all over again. A few years later, our family saw his<i> Mass</i> directed by Robert Shaw with the ASO, a piece that grew on me over the next few years, with help from musician friends, who delighted in mastering his tricky time signatures. I fell in love with<i> Chichester Psalms</i> the first time I heard it, and it helped me to fall in love with God and the aesthetic of Anglican church music. By the time I graduated high school, Bernstein's music was what I sang at the top of my lungs when I was driving alone and happy, and it was his gnarly dissonances that I pounded on the piano when teenage angst overwhelmed me. </div>
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I wrote all this in a letter to him around his 70th birthday, when there had been several unkind re-assessments of him in the press, abetted by a salacious unauthorized biography of him. Flattered, he wrote me a letter, addressing me as "W. S. S.*", the asterisk taking me to a post script that pointed out that I shared initials with<i> West Side Story</i>. He invited me to write lyrics for his next musical -- absolutely my own fantasy since 9th grade -- and set up a phone conversation. </div>
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Jamie Bernstein is able to describe what happened next, because Lenny did it so often. Jamie calls it "shrinking" a man over the phone, "asking him personal questions and drawing him out," looking for a fresh young admirer to bed (307). Within seconds on the phone, I knew he was drunk, alone, mouth full ("Crab; delicious"), and he was insinuating sexuality into the conversation: "You teach eighth grade, eh? Their sap must be rising...." He mocked my midwestern family's background ("How do you know so much about music when your family comes from Cincinnati?"), said he could barely understand me with my Southern accent (I have none), and volunteered that "some people say" his friend, my hero, Stephen Sondheim isn't much of a composer. When he'd gone too far, and I was too angry, I fell silent. He said, "You're not comfortable talking about this?" We left the matter of collaboration for some other time -- I wasn't going to quit teaching to stay with him in New York.<br />
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Jamie, too, was appalled by her father's behavior, such as calling people "f***face," and sticking his tongue in the mouths of new acquaintances. "I'm pretty sure he thought he was being an adorable rapscallion," she writes (266). Throughout the book, she describes how he got away with speeding, bad behavior, unhealthy behavior, and never felt the consequences. She says he lived within a "magic circle." But it all came home to him in his sad, excruciating last two decades. His much - touted collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner for the musical<i> 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue</i> was a "capital F failure" in the Bicentennial year; the death of his wife Felicia Montealegre left him unmoored (264). There had been truth in one of those unkind reassessments, by Leon Botstein, who wrote in 1983 of Bernstein's "haze of decadence and mental drowsiness, a mind exhausted by exposure, excessive fame, and wealth" (omitting, Jamie writes, the scotch and prescription pills) (267). <br />
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Like Jamie Bernstein, I cringe at a lot of Bernstein's choices. She and I were repelled by his Kaddish Symphony, with its self-indulgent spoken text, which may have been directed at God, or at Lenny's own father:<br />
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...ancient, hallowed,<br />
Lonely, disappointed Father:<br />
Betrayed and rejected Ruler of the Universe,<br />
Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty... (290)<br />
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(Jamie suggests that text was a description of Lenny himself, at least as he was in the last decade.) We cringe at some arch and clumsy ideas in<i> 1600</i>; we're embarassed by the way Lenny's opera<i> A Quiet Place</i> exposes private corners of his own life -- pansexuality, filial relations bordering on incest (explicit in the opera), resentments of his own father Sam -- the name of the father in the opera. "And yet, and yet," Jamie writes of <i>1600</i>, but she could mean any of his compositions, "So much of Daddy's music was beautiful. Wipe - your -eyes beautiful.... But his huge score had been stuffed into a vehicle that could not carry it" (183). She quotes Stephen Sondheim saying," At least when Lenny falls off the ladder, he falls off the highest rung."<br />
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Lenny expressed his best self in the passages of his music that, for me, rise above everything else about him. In my teens, I liked best his propulsive passages, present in so many Bernstein scores, where an orchestra exults in a rhythm that Jamie mimics with "Hot dog! Hot dog! Hamburger!" That would be the first Chichester psalm, the glorious "Rosinante" passage of the poem "To Julia Borgos" in <i>Songfest</i>, and the uplifting "Gloria Tibi" in <i>Mass</i>, shortened to "Hamburger! Hot dog!"<br />
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But now I love most those places where Bernstein draws a melody of spiritual yearning out of accompaniment that he himself calls "profane." The strings in the<i> Jeremiah</i> rise above the pounding of the orchestra in the second movement, subtitled "Profanation"; in <i>Chichester Psalms, </i>the boy soprano sings in Hebrew "The Lord is my shepherd" over a chorus that shout-sings "the nations rage!" (music intended originally for the Jets and Sharks, Stephen Sondheim tells us in his memoir); for<i> Mass</i>, Lenny makes the beautiful<i> a cappella</i> choral prayer "Almighty Father, Incline Thine Ear" from the melody of his "fetishistic" dance around the altar. I'd include with these an intensely moving piece from<i> Songfest</i>, Bernstein's setting of a fragmentary Walt Whitman letter or poem,"To What You Said," making it a song of repressed love -- "Behold, love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious" -- over a relentless <i>ostinato</i> in the bass. (What a testament to Bernstein's resourcefulness that this music, perfectly fitted to Whitman's restrained, aching lines, was actually salvaged from<i> 1600</i>.)<br />
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This little man, so self-centered, so arrogant, so voracious for adulation - was also a generous teacher, whose legacy lives in major musical performers and composers today. There was the gross, profane side; but this lovely music rises above it.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8bOfflcHF1wOuQZLAcr1_syrant20HhSiA4nQPQF-NEV29C2CA23mv8A2_rKStStcf9a-OolBd1u0absbFNalbe9JFVlACNMBftDAW1RpWz2Mcl4U4sVySexezIMCv3Qp3g/s1600/Lenny_1990.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8bOfflcHF1wOuQZLAcr1_syrant20HhSiA4nQPQF-NEV29C2CA23mv8A2_rKStStcf9a-OolBd1u0absbFNalbe9JFVlACNMBftDAW1RpWz2Mcl4U4sVySexezIMCv3Qp3g/s400/Lenny_1990.png" /></a></div>
<ul><li>Read my piece, "<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-weight-of-bernsteins-mass.html">The Weight of Bernstein's<i> Mass</i></a>." </li>
<LI>I review performances by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra of Bernstein's first symphony <I>Jeremiah</I> <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2018/01/aso-plays-kurth-bernstein-beethoven.html">(01/2018)</a>, second symphony <I>Age of Anxiety</I> <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2017/09/homecoming-with-atlanta-symphony.html">(09/2017)</a>, suite from <I>West Side Story</I> <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2013/04/robert-spano-and-aso-bringing-new.html">(04/2013)</a>, and <I>Chichester Psalms</I> <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2019/04/joyful-symmetry-bernstein-beethoven.html">(04/2019)</a>.</LI>
<li>"Make Our Garden Grow," final chorus of his musical<i> Candide</i>, didn't mean much to me when I saw the show in 9th grade (my first Broadway musical!); but then, hearing it on the radio one Sunday thirty years later, I had to pull my car over because I was weeping. Why? I'm still not sure; but I write in detail about Barbara Cook's treatment of the song in <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2016/07/deep-diva-barbara-cooks-memoir-then-and.html">my reflection on her memoir</a>.</li>
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I reflect on Bradley Cooper's film about Bernstein's marriage <I>Maestro</I> in <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2024/01/bradley-coopers-maestro-star-is-torn.html">A Star is Torn</a>.<P>The Spielberg remake had me falling in love with <I>West Side Story</I> again <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/12/falling-in-love-with-west-side-story.html">(12/2021)</a>.<P>My anecdote about the phone conversation gets a bit more detail in a piece about Stephen Sondheim's Kurt Weill - Ira Gershwin parody, "<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2006/12/sondheim-bernstein-weill-saga-of-lenny.html">The Saga of Lenny</a>."
W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-12153701470773386372024-01-06T04:37:00.000-08:002024-02-10T12:59:08.279-08:00Bradley Cooper's Maestro: A Star is Torn<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9dH-N_AC6ux3QRxwtqH0iGqCYAzfTqNoyOT5Z6_VpewDkU6epvnx2kBtLxPlvTl5RO6SxYDkB1b8yIvnL0s3_FHie2eGsURflCMIos-DIm3rC7nMi4-91Z7MfA4etxrpZuEybUnfCYGmAhawK97qCP0qCNH-saivqzQYpeWV5pV0FomjaMg/s719/Maestro%20poster.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9dH-N_AC6ux3QRxwtqH0iGqCYAzfTqNoyOT5Z6_VpewDkU6epvnx2kBtLxPlvTl5RO6SxYDkB1b8yIvnL0s3_FHie2eGsURflCMIos-DIm3rC7nMi4-91Z7MfA4etxrpZuEybUnfCYGmAhawK97qCP0qCNH-saivqzQYpeWV5pV0FomjaMg/s400/Maestro%20poster.png"/></a></div><P>As Leonard Bernstein went out to the maestro's podium unrehearsed and came back a world-famous conductor, so I went into <I>Maestro</I> a fan of Leonard Bernstein and came back a fan of Bradley Cooper. He co-wrote the screenplay with John Singer, directed the movie, acted the title role, and conducted a real-live orchestra.
<P>By choosing to start where so many biopics end, when the artist becomes a star, Cooper turns a Hollywood cliché on its head. He's telling us that the artist's stardom is not the story.
<P>The focus instead is established in a prologue, when Bernstein (Cooper convincing as Lenny ca. 1990) tells an interviewer, "I still see her sometimes." <I>She</I> is the actress Felicia Montealegre, his wife, who died of lung cancer in 1978.
<P>When Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan) meets him at a party, he has already composed symphonic works and he's at work on a Broadway musical. She enters her relationship with him open-eyed. She knows that he is promiscuous in loves -- of music, theatre, young men, intoxicants, and cigarettes. She knows, and wants to encourage his artistic growth, as he encourages hers. Can such a marriage work? That's the question behind the rest of the film.
<P>One of Cooper's choices was to film this very public couple's story in black and white until the point in their marriage when color TV became a thing.
<P>A TV interview in the Bernstein home reveals how the marriage is going in 1957: not well. Felicia tells newsman Edward R. Murrow that "it's hard" to raise three children while your husband's in concert halls around the world, on Broadway writing <I>West Side Story</I>, in a TV studio producing an educational series. She says she scarcely has time to be an actress. The subtext is, "It's not working," audible in Carrie Mulligan's tense voice through her forced smile. To a question about conducting v. composing, Lenny says one career is public and "extroverted," while composing opens up a "grand inner life." The subtext is, you're there alone -- no wife, no children. Cooper, as Lenny, makes clear that Lenny hadn't quite realized how torn their relationship and his life are until that very moment. After a pause, he laughs that such a life can make you "schizophrenic."
<P>Another of Cooper's choices was to make Bernstein's own music the soundtrack to his life. Seems obvious, but so effective. Lenny's exuberant, jazzy music from both the ballet <I>Fancy Free</I> and its spinoff musical comedy <I>On the Town</I> is used for a scene of Lenny and Felicia watching a rehearsal that morphs into a fantasy as they join the dancers. Lenny and his longtime lover, splitting up for the sake of appearances, kiss in Central Park for the last time to the accompaniment of "To What You Said," Bernstein's setting of Walt Whitman's poem about the end of a relationship with a "comrade" outside "the customary loves and friendships." In another scene, Felicia cries to see her husband at his best, teaching a chorus of young singers his anthem from <I>Candide</I>, "Make Our Garden Grow." At the gala premier of his <I>Mass</I>, while his music wreaths Kennedy Center with overlapping iterations of his melody for the phrase <I>Laude, laudate</I> -- praising God -- Bernstein grasps hands with his latest boy toy, ignoring Felicia at his other side.
<P>A climactic confrontation takes place in their New York apartment during the Thanksgiving Parade. The family's guests can be heard outside the door, the parade can be heard and seen outside the window, while Felicia and Lenny talk over each other in waves of recrimination. I may be wrong, but I remember that Cooper filmed (and performed) it in a single continuous shot, like a prize fight with several rounds.
<P>Cooper's most daring choice was to take six minutes of the movie to show him as Lenny conducting Mahler's <I>Resurrection</I> symphony in Ely Cathedral, England. No dialogue, no cuts to other locations, only the building ecstasy in Mahler's finale, the intense concentration of the orchestra players, the beatific expressions of the singers, and Lenny's full-body immersion in the music -- leaping, breathing the words, sweating, crying. We cry, too, it's so beautiful. Felicia is there, too, also crying. They embrace: it's an artistic consummation, partly resolving the long line of their story.
<P>There is the sad coda of her cancer. For two of the most moving scenes in the film, Cooper chose to have no dialogue. Lenny, holding Felicia in her sickbed, simply breathes with her. Another scene, Lenny leaves the family in one room, closes the door and grabs a pillow to muffle his own wailing and weeping.
<P><I>[Read my reflection on the composer whose face, name and music I knew before I was five, and about our phone conversation when I was around 30. <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2018/11/lentennial-bernstein-at-100-profane-and.html">See </I>Lentennial: Bernstein at 100 (11/2018)<I></a> That article includes links to my reviews of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts that featured LB's music. I've also blogged in appreciation of two people in Bernstein's life who appear in the movie at the party where Felicia meets Lenny. They are playwright-lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, doing "Carried Away," a song they wrote with Lenny for themselves to sing in the musical comedy </I>On the Town<I>. Comden and Green are lovingly remembered in my blogpost </I><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2006/11/make-someone-happy-remembering-betty.html">Make Someone Happy (11/2006)</a>]</I>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-28078101788274840712024-02-07T13:30:00.000-08:002024-02-07T13:47:11.674-08:00Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day Nov 2023-Jan 2024</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjJgFGdZLuSDMJZKQxJ39gPnREsrVbgPb__0a28uQwADfxPlCCGLm8FzjKD7Bw6NFCox_TpXIYNbPNIaRg-Si8dDNfdoAH0PoPh2Onj7ez96lAHxO0KQmZ34dlbsYh8NiGPg/s1600/20181220_072823.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjJgFGdZLuSDMJZKQxJ39gPnREsrVbgPb__0a28uQwADfxPlCCGLm8FzjKD7Bw6NFCox_TpXIYNbPNIaRg-Si8dDNfdoAH0PoPh2Onj7ez96lAHxO0KQmZ34dlbsYh8NiGPg/s400/20181220_072823.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Every morning I read scripture assigned for the day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly <a href="https://forwardmovement.org"><I>Forward Day by Day</I></a>. Every quarter I've culled highlights, <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/theology-for-breakfast.html">going back to 2013</a>.
<P><center>November</center>Scott Robinson of Philadelphia put me off with his twee spelling of "Renaissance Faires" in his r&eacut;sum&eacut;, (not to mention what one thinks of Renaissance fairs <I>per se</I>). But he drew me into his meditations, first by laying down his defenses, then by making thoughtful use of scripture and experience.
<P>Robinson owns a set of character flaws that I can identify with. Responding to the parable of the weeds, he writes, "I wish I weren't so defensive. I'm confident God didn't plant that." Nor did God plant his envy, his quick temper, and his need for approval. We may assume that the burning of weeds is an image for God's punishment of infidels, but it's more meaningful to imagine that God rips and burns the weeds in us so that we may grow into our true nature.
<P>Much to his own surprise, Robinson wept in church at the parable of the mustard seed. Why? He had been lashing out at his family in his impatience with rehabilitation following surgery; the parable convicted him of expecting instant results from a tiny seed. When Robinson reviews some hard times in his life, such as when he had to sleep in a barn or bathe in the sink of a public restroom, I could buy in, especially when he admitted, "But I could always call my family and return home." We can all count on God, he says, but we should remember that Jesus at Gethsemane did not call his Father for a bailout.
<P>In one meditation, Robinson imagines how others see him. He is separated from his wife, he once exploded at a pharmacist's mistake, he didn't honor a trans person's pronouns: <I>so much for his faith</I>, they must be thinking. He sorrowfully concludes with a quote attributed to St. Francis, "Remember that you may be all the Gospel your neighbor will ever read."
<P>Robinson doesn't like verses that impute violence to Jesus, such as the swords that shoot from the divine mouth in Revelation 19. Like Robinson, a young woman he knew in seminary downplayed such verses, her reaction to her upbringing in a macho fundamentalist church. But she recognized that the "flower power" Jesus is good only for people of her socio-economic status, shielded from hunger and violence. Justice needs a Jesus who wields a sword. For November 11, Robinson selects a line from Psalm 16, <I>He broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, and the weapons of battle</I> and introduces the saint honored on that date, Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier turned Bishop. Robinson tells us that Martin gave up weapons to use his moral clout to save prisoners from torture and execution, even the heretics.
<P>Robinson applies Micah's words to us: <I>Hear this, you who build Jerusalem with wrong</I> (Micah 3.9-10). Robinson writes,
<P><I>They all seem like isolated decisions. A church locks the doors, keeping out desperate hurricane refugees. A community makes it harder for people of color to vote or bans books by and about them in our libraries. We allow the income gap between rich and poor to grow ever wider. ...We proclaim ourselves a Christian nation so often that it doesn't seem possible that God could be looking upon us with anger. </I></P>
<P>Robinson puts a happy twist on parables of the kingdom. In one parable, the kingdom of heaven is like the treasure that a man finds; another begins <I>The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.</I> The merchant gives up everything he has to buy the pearl of great price. Robinson writes, "In the previous parable, the man is enriched by finding the kingdom. In the second, the kingdom is enriched by finding us. We are the pearl of great value. It is for us that God gives everything." In the bottom line, we're asked, "Have you thought of yourself as the pearl God seeks? How does imagining yourself as the treasure in the field shape your relationship with God?" Let's think on that.
<P><center>December</center>Aptly named Christine Woodside often draws on her experiences outdoors in New England. She is a writer, editor, wife, and mother in Connecticut. Something I'd like to emulate in her theological reflections is her knack for finding a deeper lesson inside an obvious one.
<P>Her very first story responds to Jesus, <I>Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant</I> (Mt 20.26). She remembers working at a restaurant where the boss joined the guys who unloaded deliveries at the back. That's a good example of the scripture. But there's more: she knows what the boss did only because a co-worker told her about the boss's joining the crew. The co-worker was not religious, but he's the one who taught <I>her</I> what Jesus meant.
<P><I>Keep alert</I> (Mk 13.33) reminds Woodside of a night in her childhood when her mother was sewing in the basement and ran upstairs to get some cloth. She found a door open to the outside and bolted it before going to bed. In the light of morning, the family realized that burglars had entered the house and must've heard her footsteps on the stairs and fled. So, like the teaching of Jesus, we should keep alert. But also, sometimes, you have to "run up the stairs without fear."
<P>Hiking and running up steep hills a lot, Woodside naturally thinks of those activities when she reads 2 Peter 1.3, 5-7 instructs us <I>support your faith with self-control and endurance</I>. She feels the exercise prepares her for service. <I>Bring me to Your holy hill</I> gives Woodside an opportunity to turn the usual lesson on its head: such an experience <I>does</I> stay with us forever, in the decisions you learn from on the way, and in the gratitude for returning to home, running water, and a loving family.
<P>Woodside loves weather, Through horrific scenes of Revelation, she sees the presence of God (21.3-4): <I>The house of God is among mortals... God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.</I> Our consciousness of God should be like Woodside's consciousness of weather: it's more to her than the (in)convenient background to human activity. She remains acutely aware and appreciative.
<P><center>January 2024</center>The author of January's meditations has attended my church with her husband, our bishop. She's Beth-Sarah Wright, an author and speaker. Her response to Psalm 22 (<I>My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?</I>) was to quote Romans 8:26-67, about "the Spirit intercedes for us with wordless sighs." The assurance that you don't have to be able to speak what you pray comforted my sister. Wright offers Psalm 139 as an antidote to feelings that we're not good enough. When Jesus asks Philip how they'll feed 5000, it is to "test" the apostle; Wright tells how she once failed such a test by declining an offer to speak. Her father told her, "Always say yes and figure out how to do it later. God has already put inside you what is needed to accomplish the task."W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-31480366155179687042015-10-30T14:57:00.002-07:002024-01-21T05:22:39.232-08:00Barry Moser's We Were Brothers: "Let Them Grow Together"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's serendipity: on the same morning that I finish reading a memoir of brotherhood, I read a gospel meditation that turns on memory and the phrase "let them grow together." . <br />
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Jesus' parable of the weeds sown among the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30) gets a new spin in today's meditation by Christine McSpadden in <i>Forward Day by Day</i>. When the landowner directs his servants to let both crops "grow up together" until the weeds can be reaped and burned, I've always taken that for an image of retribution for unrepentant sinners. But McSpadden applies the landowner's wisdom to something in all of us, our memories. She writes<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Very often, the core of our stories begins in childhood, and over time we sort through experiences, aligning them with that core or discarding them. We compose a narrative line, cobbling together even the most disparate of fragments, weaving meaning and purpose into our stories. Over time, we create a cohesive tapestry of identity for ourselves. ...Then, as we go forward in our lives and ministries, we can choose again those bits that give life, hope, vitality, and promise. (Aug-Oct 2015. p. 92)</span></blockquote>
McSpadden's view fits what I've learned in the Episcopal Church's "Education for Ministry" program, for which participants re-examine their life stories regularly, looking for threads, especially any sign of God's influence. <br />
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In the new memoir <i>We Were Brothers</i> by famed book illustrator Barry Moser, brothers growing together turn out very differently. In adulthood, one is a cosmopolitan artist known to readers of <i>The New York Times Review of Books</i> while the other is a small-town banker and overt racist.<br />
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Writing perhaps in the same way that he makes his famed wood cuts, Moser sketches the whole story in early chapters before filling details in second and third passes over the same outline. His was a genteel Chattanooga family fallen on harder times; he and brother Tommy were apart three years but only one grade at the local military academy Baylor; by mid-book, we understand how the older brother bullied the younger
one; by the end of the book, we've read bloody details of their most
memorable fights. Through all, Moser traces a theme of the family's relations with African Americans: Klan members, yet cordial to individuals such as the mother's best friend Verneta.<br />
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As the meditation on the parable suggests, however, Moser's memories differ significantly from his brother's, as they discover in a remarkable set of long letters to each other that bring reconciliation after years of estrangement. <br />
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Moser naturally illustrates his own memoir with delicate renderings of family photos. His own writing gives us more than the visual. Here is a complicated incident where the stepdad, evidently fed up with young Barry's hiccups, pulls the family car over, kicks the boy out, and drives away. Sure, he comes right back -- it was all to cure the hiccups -- but the damage is done:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Daddy kissed me -- smooched me, actually -- several times, put me down, and opened the back door. I snuffled my way back up onto the backseat behind Mother. Tommy wouldn't look at me. He was crying. Daddy picked up my shoe and put it on my foot before he closed the door and drove on. (286)</span></blockquote>
The fight scenes are tremendous! There's a big fight in the basement when mother sends the stern uncle in to stop the teenaged boys:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">...but perhaps our shared, pent-up anger at him for his years of sullenness and irascibility toward us kicked in. No matter, we took him by his arms, dragged him out onto the front porch, and threw him bodily into the front yard... (1042) </span></blockquote>
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...and kept fighting.<br />
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<a name="brothers">I'm hardly estranged from my own brother</a>, but I can attest that Moser's
experience is universal. For that matter, so can the Bible, in every story of
brothers from Cain and Abel to James and John: Rivalry, shared
interests, common memories, conscious differentiations, and affection.
One afternoon during second grade, I came home and bullied him. Mom told me
that he'd spent all afternoon waiting for his big brother to come home from
school. I never think of him without thinking of that! At a crucial
time in our twenties, he shared his perspective on our lives, stunning
me: I'd had no idea.<br />
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[Photo: This is my favorite among all our family photos. I remember coming home from the bus stop after a day at first grade, to find the photographer at our home. ] W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-90346855987044125972022-02-13T13:48:00.010-08:002024-01-21T05:00:09.583-08:00Isn't it Romantic? <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhuMMK5WcVaTlC0KEM8ZoU7CiL0UQ6pPuStWmPYCOyYJWGA9Qlr7BGggq8SoVuDcBVRJqz6tkGtjt53ECEMUY8VbUCkqlTXzhQNEg_mrzIsRXh5qlmnu6IgKTL7ZYyH9x_eTwRmprLshPe7IsbiRpSOtROjfp9UBNU8-sgvHMUEQMi17DY=s872" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="872" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhuMMK5WcVaTlC0KEM8ZoU7CiL0UQ6pPuStWmPYCOyYJWGA9Qlr7BGggq8SoVuDcBVRJqz6tkGtjt53ECEMUY8VbUCkqlTXzhQNEg_mrzIsRXh5qlmnu6IgKTL7ZYyH9x_eTwRmprLshPe7IsbiRpSOtROjfp9UBNU8-sgvHMUEQMi17DY=s400"/></a></div>
Valentine's Day has me thinking about singers of the Great American Songbook who bring out the charm and the sentiment of those great old songs. The title of a song by Rodgers and Hart was the caption for my Valentine's photo of me and my dog Brandy, "Isn't It Romantic?"
<P>Of all the great songs that Hart wrote with Richard Rodgers, that's not one of them. I'm much happier to write about "Have You Met Miss Jones?" a lyric by Hart that conveys in a few lines the meeting between a cocky and maybe pretentious young man and a woman who sees through him: "All at once, I lost my breath / and all at once, was scared to death / and all at once, I owned the earth and sky."
<P>I learned a couple dozen of the Rodgers and Hart songs from a 2-LP survey by Bobby Short. Playing piano and singing, Short brought exuberance to the songs and sometimes brought out the edginess in Hart's lyrics -- Hart, I understand, loathed himself, and wrote about his own "laughable" looks for "My Funny Valentine." In a similar set of Rodgers and Hart tunes recorded in the late 1970s with just guitar and trumpet, Tony Bennett creates an intimate and personal feeling. <P><I>[For a curated list of my blogposts about these artists and others, see my page <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/saloon-singers.html">Saloon Singers</a>.]</I>
<P>For Valentine's Day, husband-and-wife saloon singers John Pizzarelli and Jessie Molaskey offered commentary from experience for some wonderful recordings they played on their podcast <I>Radio Deluxe</I>. (I listen to them Sundays online from Toronto's CJRT 90.1).
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEghZAzB-O4oDtO-mhqZqf_s4s08h68AHIV3T7LuqBEIjsbhIvwSpIxUhM7GOzagZ5lh9XkyQ4liXsOGsWgnYp1m1F3GlNhauFa0isCQGuGmHExkEb1rawQVAYSZOkCVQQXgoa0H6ubgkkfDU1aGBIgEbmsko_BGU9wiQO5KOmUGPPQnLME=s3264" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="3264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEghZAzB-O4oDtO-mhqZqf_s4s08h68AHIV3T7LuqBEIjsbhIvwSpIxUhM7GOzagZ5lh9XkyQ4liXsOGsWgnYp1m1F3GlNhauFa0isCQGuGmHExkEb1rawQVAYSZOkCVQQXgoa0H6ubgkkfDU1aGBIgEbmsko_BGU9wiQO5KOmUGPPQnLME=s400"/></a></div><BR>[PHOTO, clockwise from top: John Pizzarelli, Jessie Molaskey; Barbara Cook; Peggy Lee; Johnny Hartman, John Coltrane, and McCoy Tyner] <P>From Johnny Hartman's collaboration with John Coltrane in 1961, they selected Irving Berlin's tune "They Say It's Wonderful." The recording is wonderful, with Hartman's rich baritone voice, backed by McCoy Tyner on piano, and Coltrane's elegant sax obligato. Molaskey remembered a Julliard student singing this song during a master class with Broadway diva Barbara Cook. Molaskey imitated the young man's big operatic voice and told how Cook halted his performance to ask what the song was about. "Falling in love," the guy said. "'So they <I>say</I>... so they <I>tell me</I>,'" Cook added. "This character hasn't experienced love, and doesn't know if he ever will. Sing it like <I>that</I>." Johnny Hartman does.
<P>Molaskey asks the radio audience, "What's more romantic on Valentine's Day than playing your own husband's recording of 'Our Love is Here to Stay?'" She remembered Pizzarelli's band playing arranger Don Sebesky's chart the first time and crying because Sebesky had worked the song "Little Darlin'" into the accompaniment. Pizzarelli's vocal performance, as always, is clear and affable, tossed off as if the words and music are just the way he feels.
<P>Then he set up the final track of the episode by pointing out that he and his wife are empty nesters, now. The recording was "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," Peggy Lee singing Jerome Kern's music and Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics. I'd heard the song before, and it seemed homespun and obvious.
<P>Maybe the host's introduction helped me to appreciate "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," or it may be the simplicity of Lee's delivery, but this recording today made me cry. It's your basic AABA lyric, each "A" ending with the title phrase, but in that space Hammerstein tells the life story of a couple, from courtship to parenthood to empty nest and beyond, a time when the couple "who live on the hill" are remembered in past tense. It's a sweet love song that anticipates all of their life together, 'til death parts them. That was my parents' story.
<P><I>PS: Knowing that Pizzarelli and Molaskey did a Sondheim tribute at the Cafe Carlyle some years ago, I checked out their show for December 4, a week following Sondheim's death. They reminisced about him, and told of director Hal Prince's annual party where the rule was, sing anything but Sondheim. That changed following 9/11/2001, when it was all Sondheim songs, composer Jason Roberts Brown at the piano. Sondheim wept to hear everyone in the room singing every word by heart. When Barbara Cook arrived late (following a gig), Sondheim requested "In Buddy's Eyes" from </I>Follies<I>. He once said that had been a "throwaway" bit of exposition, but Cook was a revelation in her first pass at the song during rehearsal for the 1985 concert recording. She took the words at face value, and sang the character's appreciation for her hapless husband as if she were totally sincere.</I>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNIzuInT1FYiuvelUxwyeN2H-DtpukradPcWzip0mbZ4ny4LevtDBaE6JhB6a21N9djx1npDklBwBxuTIm8Gs3ux60237H7aZVKzkzsQLlHVqfm7Ev0eeymHmymTxmkG0MqfBmMwcAanVBTOcTLaFCLsKKe6PgKTx5OpFntBxdktpvy1g=s450" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNIzuInT1FYiuvelUxwyeN2H-DtpukradPcWzip0mbZ4ny4LevtDBaE6JhB6a21N9djx1npDklBwBxuTIm8Gs3ux60237H7aZVKzkzsQLlHVqfm7Ev0eeymHmymTxmkG0MqfBmMwcAanVBTOcTLaFCLsKKe6PgKTx5OpFntBxdktpvy1g=s400"/></a></div> <BR>[PHOTO: "Joe Alterman: Joyous and Joyful Young Virtuoso" from <a href="https://www.theaterpizzazz.com/joe-alterman-joyous-and-joyful-young-virtuoso/">Theater Pizzazz</a>.]
<P>Young jazz pianist Joe Alterman primed me to feel this way by his selection of songs at his performance last weekend at the Marcus Jewish Cultural Center north of Atlanta, a facility he loved when he was growing up (which was, maybe, 10 years ago). I watched his hands amazed, as he seemed sometimes barely to be touching the keys when cascades of sound were coming at us. He takes us to surprising places, but never too far away from the melody to know where we are.
<P><a name="Alterman">Three of the numbers that Alterman</a> played with his trio were songs that my parents sang. Before I even started school I remember musical evenings when my siblings gathered around Mom's electric chord organ and Dad's guitar to sing with our young parents. Sometimes, Dad serenaded his wife with this song:
<blockquote><I>I can only give you love that lasts forever<BR>
And a promise to be near each time you call<BR>
And the only heart I own<BR>
For you and you alone<BR>
That's all</I><BR>--"That's All" by Bob Haymes</blockquote><P>
...and sometimes, this...
<blockquote><I>It's not the pale moon<BR>
That excites me<BR>
That thrills and delights me<BR>
Oh no<BR>
It's just the nearness of you</I><BR>--"The Nearness of You" by Hoagy Carmichael</blockquote><P>
Alterman played many other songs, but these were sentimental favorites. When Alterman announced what his final number would be, and it was my Mom's lullabye to us, "You Are My Sunshine," I made a sound to which Alterman responded, "I get that reaction every time."
<P><I>Awwwwwwww.</I>
W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-50571739433815838972019-02-19T09:10:00.003-08:002024-01-20T13:13:01.653-08:00Atlanta Opera's "Dead Man Walking" <br />
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Jake Heggie was a novice at composing opera when acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally collaborated with him to adapt Sister Helen Prejean's memoir <i>Dead Man Walking</i>. But Heggie's background in both concert music and musical theatre served him well, first time out. Heggie's music propels the action, sustains tension under monologues, and ties scenes together thematically. Though I had not seen the opera since it was new (Cincinnati Opera, 2002), Heggie's music instantly brought back emotional memory of that first time: the dread during the prologue, the warmth of an original hymn tune "He Will Gather Us Around," and, most of all, the heart - breaking pavane as each parent remembers the last words they said to their children. <br />
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While the real Sister Helen Prejean speaks out against the death penalty, Heggie and McNally don't stack the deck. They leave no doubt that "Joseph DeRocher" (Michael Mayes, baritone) is entirely guilty, dramatizing his savage murder of a teenage couple; nor is there ever doubt that the death penalty by lethal injection will be executed on him. They don't make "Sister Helen" (Jamie Barton, mezzo - soprano) a saint: challenged to say if she "really" believes "this monster deserves to live," she replies, "I believe that is what my Lord and Savior wants me to believe. I'm trying to get there." Confronting the parents, she appears to be what they tell her that she is, naïve, oblivious to their needs while she attends to the convict, and ineffectual as she repeats, "I'm sorry... I'm sorry." Meanwhile, DeRocher is defensive, pugnacious, unwilling to admit his guilt.<br />
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Instead of taking one side, Heggie and McNally go inside: They ask, what good, if any, can be salvaged from the horrible situation that DeRocher himself created for himself and for all the others? One of the parents "Owen Hart" (Wayne Tigges, bass), remarks to "Sister Helen" that he and she are both victims of the killer. As many scenes take place in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, we also see that the inmates and officers are equally trapped, frightened, and resentful of each other.<br />
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Our sympathies are engaged most strongly when "Mrs. Patrick DeRocher" (Maria Zifchak, mezzo - soprano) testifies to a clemency board, her two younger boys watching, along with Sister Helen and the parents of the victims. Singing simply of her son when he was a child, she's interrupted by Mr. Hart's plain description of what DeRocher did to his daughter. What follows is the moment of the opera that I've never been able to discuss with anyone, because (even now) I tear up. (In 2002, I'd looked forward to seeing diva Fredricka Van Stade in the role; but I was so wrapped up in this drama that I didn't realize until intermission that she had been the mother.)<br />
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The singing actors played their roles with energy and integrity; the orchestra and chorus were strong and clear. <br />
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While <i>Dead Man Walking</i> sidesteps easy answers, one unfortunate image in Atlanta's production makes me uneasy in another way. Because the convicted killer is strapped down for lethal injection, his arms are spread in a manner that could be construed to make him Christ - like. I've surveyed still images from other productions to see that some designers have wisely chosen to play down that resemblance; only Atlanta's production punched it up, making the execution chamber's wall cruciform. That's a jarring and inappropriate statement imposed on the action. At his end, Joseph De Rocher seeks forgiveness, and he looks for love in the face of Sister Helen; but he is not anyone's redeemer, innocent sacrificial lamb, or a sacrifice of any sort. The designer's intrusion marred the production in its last moments.<br />
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[I met Jake Heggie a few years ago, at the Atlanta premier of his opera <i>Three Decembers</i>. See my post of <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2015/05/atlanta-opera-launches-series-of.html">05/31/2015</a>.]<br />
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W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-78835036295341042582014-11-23T13:08:00.000-08:002024-01-13T14:51:44.070-08:00Crime Drama Reset: 8th Graders Find their Story<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[design by D.Alfi]</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If you discover that one of your friends
has killed the professor, do you still have to complete your class
project? That's the premise of <i>Reset</i>. When eight college students show up
at their professor's mountain lodge on a snowy weekend to play his
famous international simulation game "Global Crisis," they find his car,
but no sign of him.<br />
<br />
Through October and early November, the students and I improvised
the scenes first, finalizing the dialogue on a shared document after
class. Because the actors seriously
bought into their characters' feelings and dilemmas, they performed
with intensity.<br />
<br />
As their teacher, I was especially pleased at the tight
construction of the play. Lessons that emerge from the simulation game
early in the play become the template for choices made in the end: <i>Respect is more important than money; Don't
act before you have all the information; Coalitions are good</i>; and <i>If
one player wins, everyone loses</i>.<br />
<br />
Collaborating with eighth graders on <i>Reset</i>, I once again felt that we didn't so much build our play as find it. This is often my experience in creative work, and yet it's always a surprise.<br />
<br />
They found the outline early, once they decided on some kind of crime drama. They would all play college students because the nine young actors didn't want to play anyone "old," nor anyone their own age, explaining, "we have no personality, Mr. Smoot." Grabbing the opportunity to improvise on the Upper School's unfinished set for another play, the actors "arrived" at their professor's mountain lodge for a class "retreat." As they arrived, other elements of the story emerged: Snow was coming, the professor was missing, but his car was parked outside; the rich kid's dad and fortune were both in legal jeopardy; the students discovered video cameras hidden around the lodge. They came up with their reason for being there, to play an international relations simulation game. When one girl proclaimed, "I wannabe Vladimir Putin!" I knew we had a good premise.<br />
<br />
We put some time into creating that game because, unless its elements could somehow inform the rest of the story, playing the game would detract from the action. The kids took this to heart, and found ways to connect their characters and dialogue to themes of "respect" being most important, and "coalitions" being good, and knowing all the facts before taking action.<br />
<br />
For example, three different characters point guns at others over disrespect. The play's climactic moment comes when all but one of the college students join a coalition to protect the guilty. Our title first surfaced when our improvised game ended in simulated global destruction: "Reset!" said the young Teaching Assistant, handing us a theme that ran through other scenes.<br />
<br />
Then we hit a wall: None of the characters had a goal. When I asked the actor/writers, "What is your character hiding?" I love that they were such nice kids that they could not bear to have their characters be guilty of anything worse than cheating on a test. I talked them into committing felonies, from use of performance-enhancing drugs to parricide.<br />
<br />
We still couldn't answer, what was the crime? And where was the professor? Just asking the questions gave us both the answer and the professor's name: Dr. Boyd, anagram of "body." To find out who he was, and why someone might kill him, the T.A. and I improvised a scene at the professor's home prior to the retreat. Egged on by the class, we escalated tension by adding detail to each "take": the professor's wealth, the papers discovered by the T.A., blackmail, Boyd's attempt to burn the evidence that his fame and fortune are based on plagiarism, and what happens when he pulls a gun. <br />
<br />
One of the students loved that scene, and said that we should put it first in the play. That would not have occurred to me. I thought we would "discover" all those facts through investigation, and might have a "flashback." But if the audience knew all the details of the crime from the first, then the play wouldn't be about the audience finding out "who dunnit," but the friends of the killer finding out -- and then deciding what to do about their own "crisis." Suddenly, we had a situation that would mirror the game, and we saw our way to the end of the play! <br />
<br />
The kids and I relished the melodrama of it. One of the actors, an upbeat and energetic young man, bounded over to me after a rehearsal to tell me, "I just got really mad at him! And I never get mad at anyone! It felt <i>great!" </i>Here's a sampling of lines that they wrote for themselves: <br />
<ul>
<li>"Reacting" is screaming at someone. Shooting them in the head is <i>murder!</i></li>
<li>Professor Boyd's car smells of old tacos, and disappointment.</li>
<li>This isn't a game anymore. And I'm tired of waiting. If you don't do something about him, I will!</li>
<li>You think you're so smart! You think you've found a way to make your future out of my past! [That's my own melodramatic line; the young T.A. couldn't keep a straight face when I growled it at him!]</li>
</ul>
As we worked, I remembered how my number one ambition at their age was to act in a script that would allow me to aim a gun and say, as I do in this play, "I can't let you leave here alive. Will you please stand over there -- away from the carpet?" <br />
<br />
We performed <i>Reset </i>for an audience of parents at the end of six hours' rehearsal. The kids were proud, the parents, impressed. We played it one last time for their classmates during school the next Tuesday. <br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I've been involved in other crime dramas, reflecting on them in this blog. With members of the parish, I wrote "Curse of the Waffling Bishop" for St. James' Episcopal church and wrote a <i><a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2014/05/mystery-dinner-theatre-for.html">Post-Mortem</a></i> on the process; another essay, "</span><a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/05/from-zero-to-murder-mystery-in-21-hours.html"><span style="font-size: x-small;">From Zero to Murder Mystery under 21 Hours</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">" tells how 8th graders and I created a successful play over nine weeks.</span><br />
<div>
</div>
<br />W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-71415333310305313412017-12-26T18:30:00.001-08:002024-01-13T08:40:00.816-08:00A Merrily Little Christmas, with Lonny Price's Documentary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's been a <i>Merrily </i>little Christmas this year. Songs from the musical <i>Merrily We Roll Along</i> figure prominently in the hit movie <i>Lady Bird</i>, and Lin - Manuel Miranda's performance of the <i>Merrily </i>song "Franklin Shepard, Inc." was re-broadcast December 26 on NPR's <i>Fresh Air</i>. But why should there be attention today for a show that ran only two weeks, closing before I got to use my tickets for Christmas, 1981? <br />
<br />
The answer to that question is part of the interest in <i>Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, </i> a documentary abou the original Boradway cast of the show originally directed by Harold Prince, with book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim<i>. </i>The documentary's director is Lonny Price, who co-starred as "Charlie" in the original cast. His title comes from a lyric in the show, when friends try to assure the central character that the collapse of his marriage is really "the best thing that ever could have happened." I just watched the film twice.<br />
<br />
Early
in the documentary, Price shows us his collection of Sondheim show cast
albums ("long-playing" LP vinyl records, for those too young to
remember), and asserts that "no one my age loved Sondheim as much as I
did. No one." But he's way off. Immediately, every cast member gets to tell the camera
how they, too, knew every song, owned every album.<br />
<br />
I'm Price's age, and I owned every album, too. In September 1981, when Price and company began rehearsals for
their preview in November, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, a rookie
teacher of drama and humanities, saving money for my trip to see <i>Merrily </i>during Christmas break. I'd memorized Carly Simon's recording of the show's big ballad "Not a Day Goes By," released two months in advance of the show's opening. <br />
<br />
Because <i>Merrily We Roll Along</i> is the story of middle-aged friends ruing how, "rolling along" with life, they've ended up far from where they'd hoped to be in their high school dreams, the documentary about the cast's reflections in middle age is full of <i>meta- </i>moments, for Price, for the actors, and for me. We see how <i>Merrily's</i> theme has been lived in the time between two comments recorded by the documentary. In 1981, Hal Prince explains to actors age 24 or less that he's casting them for middle-aged roles because "you know something we [50-year-olds] don't know."
But in 2015, Terry Finn, once one of those young actors, now tears up when she reflects, "Young people don't know... you're building something." <br />
<br />
Price's making of the documentary is itself part of the documentary. We see on camera Price's first viewing of a long-forgotten tape of him at age 21, when young Price said that being cast in the show was "it," that he could be hit by a truck the day after the show opened and not mind, because his whole life's dream was fulfilled. At age 55+, Price gets asked, "Do you like him?" about his younger self, and, "Would he like you?" Price tears up, and so do I. Price says yes, although he'd feared that "he'd" be embarrassing, and, "I like to think he'd like some of my work." And that's both musical and documentary in microcosm.<br />
<br />
The other time I get emotional during the documentary is watching the benefit performance onstage in 2002. The actors today remember aloud what clips from 1981 confirm, how troubled the show was, how the creators --"theatre gods" -- were all too human, realizing too late that they'd made bad choices: casting young amateurs, going for a stripped-down look, losing sight of the "simplicity" of their original concept, to the bafflement of audiences. But then an actress who remembered "waves" of people leaving the theatre during her performance in 1981 tells of people standing and cheering for the reunion concert twenty-one years later, "not just Sondheim fans, but <i>Merrily </i>fans." We see Sondheim and Prince hug center stage before the ecstatic crowd.<br />
<br />
Why do I weep at that happy moment, I wonder? "Redemption" always pushes my buttons. Sondheim tells Price that he was angry at the "glee" people took in hating the show, but he also felt that he'd let people down. Prince tells Price that he didn't want to go to the reunion concert in 2002, but it ended up being "the best night of my life." My reaction to the triumphant curtain call of that reunion concert may also be from a validation: in the depth of my engagement with Sondheim's work, I've always felt pretty isolated, but there on the video is the roar of my tribe; I belong.<br />
<br />
For fans of the show, there's a meta-moment to end all meta-moments. In 1981, Lonny Price invited the cast and creators to his birthday party. Through cassette tape and Polaroid snapshots, we get the moment when the party gathers at the piano to hear Stephen Sondheim premiere his song "Good Thing Going," written for the scene in which a party gathers at the piano to hear Lonny Price's character "Charley" premiere <i>his</i> song "Good Thing Going."<br />
<br />
What a gift <i>Merrily We Roll Along </i>is, 37 years after that miserable Christmas flop, a good thing going and still giving.<br />
<br />
<b>Of related interest </b><br />
On Christmas night, just yesterday, my friend Suzanne and I were surprised that songs of <i>Merrily We Roll Along </i>show up in the hit movie <i>Lady Bird</i>. She had accompanied me to Cincinnati in 2012 to see <i>Merrily </i>in a high-profile production directed by John Doyle. <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-did-you-get-to-be-here-merrily-we.html">Read my review of Doyle's </a><i><a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-did-you-get-to-be-here-merrily-we.html">Merrily</a>.</i><br />
I also saw the HD broadcast of the Olivier-Winning London Version with my friend Susan, and wrote a long piece about the impact of a single song on the whole show: <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2013/10/rhymes-with-integrity.html">Rhymes with Integrity</a>. I reflect on <i>Lady Bird, </i>with director Greta Gerwig's observations about <i>Merrily We Roll Along </i>(<a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2017/12/greta-gerwig-on-church-and-sondheim-in.html">link</a>). <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[Photo: After seeing <i>Lady Bird, </i>Suzanne and I found no place open for dinner. We ended up at the Waffle House, where I also received a Christmas text from my former student, bike buddy Jason, who takes me to Waffle House during my annual Thanksgiving visit to him. Both Jason and Suzanne were tots in 1981; they are now the age I was when I moved away from Mississippi to the Atlanta area. More <i>Merrily</i> reflections come to mind. Here's my photo to Jason, sitting across from Suzanne, at Waffle House, Christmas night, 2017.]</span></blockquote>
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W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-70390179358987811472023-11-28T04:13:00.000-08:002024-01-11T14:32:04.212-08:00Mom's Feminist Marriage<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPIYH6HBIHsrXLOwAKMMdjz_7p9FBv0CVUGIoMxs4kZr21SIjg59NWzuzKUN4nSbGC6BW0f4MbZ8LEYNFOORL-PzbwRZCdzm0BPxW4Ak8WIIKVAxPm5XdEWN8PYRv3iUkBCyK498l5L6vpkIbJHdG3mdOGgrejrFfkN0RKraQOKIpV13hPyA/s852/Mom%20ca%201965.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="852" data-original-width="572" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPIYH6HBIHsrXLOwAKMMdjz_7p9FBv0CVUGIoMxs4kZr21SIjg59NWzuzKUN4nSbGC6BW0f4MbZ8LEYNFOORL-PzbwRZCdzm0BPxW4Ak8WIIKVAxPm5XdEWN8PYRv3iUkBCyK498l5L6vpkIbJHdG3mdOGgrejrFfkN0RKraQOKIpV13hPyA/s320/Mom%20ca%201965.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Frances Smoot ca. 1970</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>When Dad retired, he complained that just going to the bank, the store, and the post office had taken him all morning. Mom quipped, "Try it with three small children in the car." Thus Mom described her life as a wife and mother in the 1960s.
<p>So Betty Friedan's book <i>The Feminine Mystique</i> (1963) spoke to her. Friedan begins her book with a survey of the best selling women's magazines. In 1960, a year of startling changes in politics, culture, and technology, <i>McCall's</i> and <i>Woman's Day</i> contained no mention of the world beyond the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Women, now largely college-educated, were dependent on their men and spending their days on trivial chores.
</p><p>But household chores are sacred, women were told, not trivial. The "feminine mystique" was the party line that women, with their mysterious child-bearing powers, were "closer to nature" than men, to be cherished and protected from the harsh realities of the working-day world. (The hit TV sitcom <i>Bewitched</i> embodied the myth of the mystique, as a super-powered wife stays home doing chores while her husband goes to work, so that he can have what he calls a "normal family." Made explicit, the feminine mystique was ridiculous.)
</p><p>Years later, Mom remembered how she drove with Friedan's book to a signing in downtown Pittsburgh. "But when I got to the front of the line, I saw how ugly she was and thought, no wonder her husband left her!" Mom dropped out of line.
</p><p>Still, within a couple of years, Mom was changing her life. When my big sister was in elementary school, Mom became President of the PTA. She was also elected chairwoman of the local chapter of the Republican party [I remember being fascinated by the gavel that she brought home.]
</p><p>So she was a community leader when Dad told her he'd taken a new job in Chicago and we'd be moving. "And you didn't even <I>ask</I> me?" she said. Decades later, Dad was still abashed about that. "She went along with it that time," he said, "but I never made that mistake again."
</p><p>In that same conversation with my parents, they were astounded that I didn't remember Mom's Day Off. Saturdays, Dad fed us breakfast, supervised cartoon-watching, and took us on excursions to the garden center and hardware store, while she dressed up and drove away to no-one-knows where. Mom told me that her Saturdays probably saved their marriage. </p><p>
<P>In the 1970s, Mom went back to work as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School. (She'd taught sixth grade one semester before her first child started to show.) Dad encouraged her to get her Master's in Education. Laughing, they told me that he even wrote some of her papers. She became the team leader for 3rd grade and created the school's summer program, which she directed for two decades. Mom also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.” When she was called forward at an all-school faculty meeting to be honored at her retirement for her 33 years of service, she astonished the crowd by doing a handspring.
<P>Super-powered indeed.
<P>[<I>See my page </I><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/family-album.html">Family Corner</a><I> for much more about Mom, Dad, and their families. See my </I><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_14.html">Dementia Diary</a><I> about the downs and occasional ups in Mom's life since she moved alone to a retirement home near me. See also <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2014/07/bewitched-craft.html"></I>Bewitched<I> Craft</a> for more ways that the sitcom reflected its time.</I>]W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-29474672537859514422021-06-14T08:22:00.013-07:002024-01-06T10:43:25.465-08:00Can't Sleep? Pray This<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYP4Z5ZRYp3qC7gvCD0uIixMQa1-Yi1dFZhqqgQbrE5LCH5LHG_opt_kfa114QiICRLTcEcpdfZGvxeruxBQ6fE81EfSTcsdQg2GCMRmv3jggK_6rORp6kShVERtwcJvtWbQ/s2048/20210614_153031.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYP4Z5ZRYp3qC7gvCD0uIixMQa1-Yi1dFZhqqgQbrE5LCH5LHG_opt_kfa114QiICRLTcEcpdfZGvxeruxBQ6fE81EfSTcsdQg2GCMRmv3jggK_6rORp6kShVERtwcJvtWbQ/s320/20210614_153031.jpg" /></a></i></div><i><br />When I lie awake trying not to think how many hours of sleep I may be missing, I often wish that our Episcopal Book of Common Prayer had a few pages set aside for the hours before sunrise. Now I've composed such a liturgy for myself. I hope that the texts are calming in their reassurance and soporific in their familiarity, and I hope that I don't have to try it out anytime soon</i>.<p></p><p>[Photo: BCP, a copy of this liturgy, and Brandy.] <br /></p><br /><p></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Prayer During a Restless Night</span></b></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “Yours is the day, yours also the night.” <i>Psalm
74.15</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>or this: </i>"I commune with my heart in the night; I ponder and search my mind." <i>Psalm 77 <br /></i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;"><p><i>or this:</i> “My eyes are open in the night watches, that I may meditate on your promise.” <i>Psalm 119.148</i>
</p></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span> </span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Confession of Sin<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></b><i><span>Book of Common Prayer </span></i><span>p. 79</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br /><br />Most merciful God, We confess that we have sinned against you <br />In thought, word, and deed, <br />By what we have done, <br />And by what we have left undone. <br />We have not loved you with our whole heart; <br />We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. <br />We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. <br />For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, <br />Have mercy on us and forgive us, <br />That we may delight in your will, <br />And walk in your ways, <br />To the glory of your Name. Amen. <br /><br />Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us all our sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep us in eternal life. Amen. <br /><br /> <span style="font-size: small;"></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Invitatory and Psalter</span></b></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">In returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness
and in confidence shall be our strength. <i>Isaiah 30.15</i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span> </span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Psalm</span></b><span>
16.7-11</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br /><br />7 I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel;* my heart teaches me, night after night. <br />8 I have set the Lord always before me;* because he set my right hand I shall not fall. <br />9 My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices;* my body also shall rest in hope. <br />10 For you will not abandon me to the grave,* nor let your holy one see the Pit. <br />11 You will show me that path of life;* in your presence there is fullness and joy, and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore. <i> </i></p><p><i>Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.* As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, amen</i>. <br /><br /> <span style="font-size: small;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>The Lessons</span></b><span>.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>A reading from 1 Samuel</span></b><span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3.8-10.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> And the Lord called Samuel again the third time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here
I am, for you called me.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then Eli
perceived that the Lord was calling the boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you
shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant hears.’” So Samuel went and lay down
in his place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the Lord came and
stood forth, calling as at other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” and Samuel said, “Speak,
for thy servant hears.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">The word of the Lord. <i>Thanks be to God</i>.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Hymn 24</span></b><span>, <i>to
be sung or said</i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended, the darkness falls at thy behest; <br />to thee our morning hymns ascended, thy praise shall sanctify our rest. <br /><br />We thank thee that thy Church unsleeping while earth rolls onward into light, <br />through all the world her watch is keeping and rests not now by day or night. <br /><br />As o’er each continent and island the dawn leads on another day, <br />the voice of prayer is never silent, nor dies the strain of praise away. <br /><br />So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never, like earth’s proud empires, pass away; <br />thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever, till all thy creatures own thy sway. </p><p> (words: John Ellerton) <br /><br /> <span style="font-size: small;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>A reading from Matthew 6.26-27, 33-34</span></b></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor
reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you not of more value than they?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And which of you by being anxious can add one
cubit to your span of life?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">But seek ye first the kingdom and his righteousness,
and all these things will be yours as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Therefore be not anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for
itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for that day.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>The Apostles’ Creed. </span></b><i><span>Book of Common Prayer, </span></i><span>p.96</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. <br />I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit <br /> and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. <br /> He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, <br /> the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, <br /> and the life everlasting. <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Amen</i>.</span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>The Prayers.</span></b><b><span> </span></b><i><span>Include one or more of the following prayers.</span></i></span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span>from Compline, Book of Common Prayer </span></i><span>p. 134.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch,
or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the
weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the
joyous, and all for your love’s sake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Amen</i>.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span>For the Aged</span></i><span>,
<i>Book of Common Prayer </i>p. 830.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Look with mercy, O God our Father, on all whose
increasing years bring them weakness, distress, or isolation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Provide for them homes of dignity and peace;
give them understanding helpers, and the willingness to accept help; and, as
their strength diminishes, increase their faith and their assurance of your
love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This we ask in the name of Jesus
Christ our Lord.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Amen</i>.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span>For restfulness.</span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Eternal Father, at sunrise you blessed Jacob who had wrestled through the
night:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>calm our restless minds when the
Enemy turns up old regrets and disappointments, or lures us into dark
speculations about our futures, that we may return our minds to you and rest
with quiet confidence in your love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Amen</i>.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span>Silence my be kept, and free intercessions and
thanksgivings may be offered.</span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>The Lord’s Prayer. </span></b><i><span>Book of Common Prayer, </span></i><span>p. 97.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>General Thanksgiving </span></b><i><span>Book of Common Prayer, p. 836.</span></i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love. We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side. We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us. We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone. Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ, for the truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying, through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom. Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know Christ and make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen. <br /> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Antiphon</span></b><span> <i>from
Compline, Book of Common Prayer </i>p. 134.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping, that
awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>The Song of Simeon</span></b><span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Book of Common Prayer, p.
93.</i> </span></span><br /><br />Lord, you now have set your servant free* to go in peace as you have promised; <br /> For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior,* whom you have prepared for all the world to see: <br /> A Light to enlighten the nations,* and the glory of your people Israel. <br /> Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.* As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. <span style="font-size: small;"><i>Amen</i>. <br /></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span>Repeat the Antiphon</span></b><span> </span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping, that awake
we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Let us bless the Lord.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thanks be to God.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">The almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, bless us and keep us. <i>Amen.</i></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <i><span><br /></span></i></span></p>
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<![endif]--></p>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-66319972127457793472023-09-24T14:02:00.015-07:002024-01-02T13:38:45.912-08:00Between Alice Parker and Eudora Welty: My Experience in the Opera The Ponder Heart <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMof9kQF-6gxrVCmbCOyZuP5lEpc1neYrk4SqV1fDiT4XJia28ogTJBlZaF4HeDfnji-Bsjw8NrqKQv6yO3-IX67O_ta15L6OWgTtDsnPlEp8IqY8gaMHk5TMIxXfEdMVLoEVX_TWUwSU-jTvg16Q58Af1BogltlOawwKkm13xaru6TCZVCg/s887/Alice%20Parker%20at%20Piano.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="574" data-original-width="887" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMof9kQF-6gxrVCmbCOyZuP5lEpc1neYrk4SqV1fDiT4XJia28ogTJBlZaF4HeDfnji-Bsjw8NrqKQv6yO3-IX67O_ta15L6OWgTtDsnPlEp8IqY8gaMHk5TMIxXfEdMVLoEVX_TWUwSU-jTvg16Q58Af1BogltlOawwKkm13xaru6TCZVCg/s400/Alice%20Parker%20at%20Piano.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A recent photo of Alice Parker. Inset: Eudora Welty, when I was her neighbor, ca. 1980</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p><p>I'm pleased to learn from a web search that composer Alice Parker received an award for "Sacred in Opera" from the National Opera Association just last year. We go way back. I thought of her last week when I saw her name on music that our choir director pulled out of our library, the pages yellowed with age.
</p><p>In 1982, with the Choral Society of Jackson, Mississippi, I sang in a workshop production of Alice Parker's fourth opera <i>The Ponder Heart</i>, her text drawn entirely from the novel by Pulitzer-winning writer Eudora Welty, lifelong resident of Jackson. We were to sing the score for potential investors who might be persuaded to fund a full-scale production.
</p><p>Alice Parker was well-known to all American choral singers for her arrangements of Negro Spirituals and other sacred folk material. The music was published as "the Robert Shaw" series, after the famed choral conductor. Her name was always in smaller print than his, but the arrangements were all hers.
</p><p>At our first rehearsal, she was courtly, commanding, unflappable and always ready to laugh. In my mind, I see high heels, flowing skirt, tightly cinched waist, straight back, a scarf, and firm hair -- but my memories of her blend with images of elegant movie stars of her vintage -- Lauren Bacall, for instance.
</p><p>The small town setting of Miss Welty's novel gave Parker opportunities to write in different styles of what we today might call Americana: shape-note singing, blues, and gospel. But I was a music nerd less excited by simple folk tunes than by techniques she used to layer authentic material into the texture of her dramatic story.
</p><p>My favorite instance of a technical twist was in Parker's arrangement of a sentimental gospel song that began with the words, "Somewhere the sun is shining." In the story, the central character "Uncle Daniel" Ponder falls in love with a certain soprano in the church choir. Given the perception that sopranos are enamored of their upper registers, Alice Parker arranged the soloist's music in a different meter from the choir's, allowing her a couple extra beats to massage her high notes while the choir waltzed on in strict time. (I think we sang in 6/8 while the soprano had some measures in odd meters).
</p><p>At one rehearsal, the director handed me freshly-composed music for the big trial scene in act II. I was to play it on the piano for the chorus while Miss Parker, in another room, rehearsed the leads. We were all sight-reading, and I recall that it was difficult material with dissonances and varying meter -- my favorite things! After a couple of hours, when Alice Parker heard her music for the first time, I was playing it. The next day, she brought in new music for the same scene, throwing out everything we'd worked on.
</p><p>I was enraptured, not disappointed. That year I'd been singing with a cassette tape of <i>Marry Me a Little</i>, a musical revue made up entirely of songs cut from Stephen Sondheim's musicals. Having put so much effort into a number that was cut from the opera, I felt that I had paid my dues to join the exalted company of musical theatre professionals.
</p><p>When we performed the score at New Stage Theatre, located in the neighborhood where both Eudora Welty and I lived, it was a social occasion. Drinks and finger food were laid out on long tables; the musicians took seats on one side of the room, while the wealthy guests sat on the other. Just before we started, Ms. Welty approached and asked me, "Young man, may I have this seat?" She sat at my side throughout the performance.
</p><p>The guests backed a full-scale production by New Stage. Immersed in my second year of teaching, I did not participate in that one, though I did go to see it, of course. I remember thinking that it was a sweet story, but not one to excite you. The critic from <i>The New York Times</i> said pretty much the same thing. Edward Rothstein concluded, "But what made the music work was some of what Miss Welty called the Ponder heart – a love of simplicity, good humor and plain speaking."
</p><p>The opera was cited for recognition of Sacred in Opera along with her operas on more overt religious themes. In their citation, the National Opera Association wrote that all of Parker's operas demonstrate “what it means to live a productive life as a member of a community, whether that community is a town, an extended family, or a musical or faith tradition.”
</p><p>I'll admit that I thought Alice Parker was ancient in 1982. Actually, she was then seven years younger than I am now, and she's still active. If you're Googling yourself, Ms. Parker, and you see these lines, come on to St. James Episcopal in Marietta, GA for our All Saints service, and hear us do your music.
<P><I>[Update: Alice Parker died on Christmas Day, 2023.]</I>
W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-60459374321573700672020-07-22T17:10:00.004-07:002024-01-02T04:30:01.213-08:00"The Ladies Who Lunch" 50 Years Later<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXp3qrEsj40x4fVfSXPwI1_amcfhY0iYcCB_ZBBV7Z_jGKHjEarA2UGgmM4JoV6kbP0SWofv7rp3DZ5TSiJLmwXEUL1vbCJhS_Gat2e8gXNgeZdVyHGuRDMylCVhGXSt961g/s2574/Stritch.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2574" data-original-width="1222" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXp3qrEsj40x4fVfSXPwI1_amcfhY0iYcCB_ZBBV7Z_jGKHjEarA2UGgmM4JoV6kbP0SWofv7rp3DZ5TSiJLmwXEUL1vbCJhS_Gat2e8gXNgeZdVyHGuRDMylCVhGXSt961g/w238-h500/Stritch.jpg" width="238" /></a></div>YouTube suggested I might like a video from 1970 of actress Elaine Stritch singing "The Ladies Who Lunch." The song was from a musical that had just opened on Broadway, <i>Company</i>, book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, who composed the song for her character "Joanne."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>YouTube was right. It's a good excuse to reflect on this song, that performer, and how the song holds up 50 years later. (See <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwieoq_KwOHqAhWnm-AKHZNvC8UQyCkwAHoECBMQBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dvirv-1o2KjE&usg=AOvVaw08vXa7ALMBOFU0E7AeWjov">Elaine Stritch's TV studio performance from 1970</a>.) <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Before I'd ever heard of Stephen Sondheim or <i>Company</i>, comedian Carol Burnett shocked America by staging this bitter song in the middle of her beloved, folksy, charming TV variety show. At age 11, I knew she was singing about my mother and my Aunt Blanche, and it wasn't funny at all. For years after, I'd find others impacted by Burnett's serious turn.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sondheim writes in his memoir <i>Finishing the Hat</i> that "the character of Joanne was not only written for Elaine Stritch, it was based on her" with her "acerbic delivery of self-assessment" (193). <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Until I saw this video artifact from 1970, I thought I knew everything about the song. I've heard and seen dozens of performances of the song, and I've accompanied myself singing it a few dozen more. The music has the mid-60s basso-nova feel, with dark coloration in the harmony, and a fun detail in the melody: whenever Joanne repeats the phrase, "I'll drink to that," the notes slide downward with notes out of the key, in a musical expression of inebriation. The lyric is a toast to different kinds of women that Joanne observes - the ladies who lunch, the ones who stay smart, the ones who play wife. In each verse, Sondheim hides an inner rhyme "to give the lines a tautness." I've italicized the syllables that rhyme to show what he means:
</div><blockquote>Here's to the girls who play <i>wife</i> -- <br />Aren't they too <i>much</i>?<br />Keeping house but <i>clutch</i>ing a copy of <i>Life</i><br />just to keep in <i>touch</i>.</blockquote><div>
He explains, "The 'clutch' is hidden, there's no musical pause there, no way of pointing it up, but it's there to help make the line terse, the way the character is" (quoted in Craig Zadan's book <i><a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2016/07/every-minor-details-major-decision-two.html">Sondheim and Co</a>.</i> 2nd Edition 1986, p.232). <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>So I cried to see Stritch, some 15 years younger than I am now, perform the lines in ways that bring tenderness out of this "acerbic" and "taut" song. It was a surprise, though I've seen another video of Stritch from around the same time. It's in the Pennebaker documentary of the original cast's recording. Stritch fails in multiple takes. Everyone else had gone home hours before, and she's there screaming the song at the microphone, looking harried, insecure, ashamed. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>This is different. "I'd like to propose a toast," she says, while an off-screen pianist plays the first chords <i>rubato</i>. Stritch is wearing her own signature outfit - a man's dress shirt, leggings. There's that late-60s eye-liner, but no other noticeable makeup; no accessories, no prop tumbler. Hands folded on her lap, she sings, "Here's to the ladies who lunch" the way I'm used to hearing it, as a clarion call. But then she sings softly, "Everybody laugh." <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Already, she's laid out her attitude. These women are ridiculous, but she feels for them. They're "planning a brunch" she sings, scowling as if to say, "really?", then clasps her hands to sing softly, "on their own behalf." <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>This was taped at New York's Channel 13, a low-budget production, without any fancy camera work. The camera moves in on her sarcastic question, "Does anyone still wear a hat?" Her anger picks up as she rips through the girls who stay smart, giving us sarcastic jazz hands for "a matinee," and an-oh-so-serious scowl as her forefingers touch her thumbs -- we're being intellectual, now -- for "a Pinter play," and then an extravagant gesture for "a piece of Mahler's." (Sondheim reveals that Stritch didn't get the reference. She thought a piece of Mahler's would be some kind of pastry. In the full orchestration, Jonathan Tunick quotes a riff from Mahler's 4th after this line.) <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>She mocks the "ones who follow the rules, and meet themselves at the schools" before mocking her own kind, "the ones who just watch," who take "another chance to disapprove... another reason not to move," screaming "I - I - I - I'll" drink to that. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>In the final verse, Stritch conveys strongly what's implied in the lyrics. Mock them she might, but she's with them, too. The camera moves in close on her eyes as she begins the last verse, when the internal rhymes punch up what these women all face together:
</div><blockquote>So here's to the girls on the <i>go</i><br />Everybody <i>tries</i>.<br />Look into their <i>eyes</i> and you'll see what they <i>know</i>:<br />Everybody <i>dies</i>!</blockquote><div>
We've already had several "Everybody" lines: this is the ultimate. Sondheim tops it with a scary grand finale. Joanne commands an ovation, "Everybody <i>rise</i>! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!" Stritch is uninhibited here, unafraid to sound hoarse, angry, and hurting. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Fifty years later, the song doesn't sound dated. I know these women. Stars keep wringing meaning from it -- Meryl Streep, Audra MacDonald, and Christine Baranski did a Zoom cocktail hour version for Sondheim's 90th birthday. If Mr. Sondheim is reading this, I suppose an update should include a toast to the ladies with jobs.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>For now, as for the past 50 years, here's to "The Ladies Who Lunch."</div><div><br /></div><div><i>[See my </i><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html">Sondheim Page</a> <i>for much more about the man, his shows, craft, and colleagues. I write about what I learned from interviews with Elaine Stritch and a folk singer, her contemporary Jean Redpath, at <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2014/02/diverse-divas-and-art-of-showbiz.html">Diverse Divas and the Art of Showbiz</a>]</i></div>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-21939368219569433652021-09-09T07:18:00.017-07:002024-01-01T08:39:42.787-08:00Cycling America, Virtually: Home again, Marietta GA<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2020/07/update-cycling-across-america-virtually.html">←←</a> | <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/09/cycling-across-america-virtually.html">←</a> || <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/09/duke-revisited-in-spirit.html">→</a><p>
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzV_-p4fTKj4me7V1WdEiumZPwf5fnMtqQfCQAKUOAKFNGF-NFuu1Igg2QIjpwcFM2Yqqkvh7efXRnlZm0f_5ZjgwoMk8qf5yyIaJKcXuYLzbAFkjaD84hsFZgLHgpv9lcWw/s1694/Smoot_TWS_red+shirt.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="827" data-original-width="1694" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzV_-p4fTKj4me7V1WdEiumZPwf5fnMtqQfCQAKUOAKFNGF-NFuu1Igg2QIjpwcFM2Yqqkvh7efXRnlZm0f_5ZjgwoMk8qf5yyIaJKcXuYLzbAFkjaD84hsFZgLHgpv9lcWw/s600/Smoot_TWS_red+shirt.jpg" width="600" /></a></div>
<center>178 miles from Montgomery AL to Marietta GA<br />September 2-8</center>
Riding my bike around Atlanta, I've been plotting miles on a map of the US, making virtual stops in places that I've lived and/or loved. I'm "back" home in Marietta, GA. Yesterday, I posed for a virtual picture at The Walker School, where I taught 23 years until retiring this summer. Today, I think back on happy memories there.
<p>What warms a middle school teacher's heart is any time a student discovers the inner adult they didn't know was there. It's like discovering a super power. A middle schooler can take a giant step towards adulthood, then go back to being a kid again.
</p><p>One of my happiest Walker memories is a recent one, a father’s conference on Zoom with Jamie Rubens and me. Jamie and I did nothing more than describe the son’s classroom demeanor. Courteous, curious, determined to make class go well, and funny, the boy was so adult, and such a kid. To our surprise, the dad wept, he was so happy.
</p><p>In fall 2001, my 6th grade MSD class (Music, Speech, and Drama) composed our own opera <i>The Frog Prince</i>, but we ran out of time. The performance was coming up, but we still had no finale. Andreas Wilder volunteered to write something for all 24 characters to sing at the end. The next day, he apologized, "I just took some of the music from earlier scenes and changed the words. Is that okay?" I reassured him that Mozart did the same thing. Andreas had transformed what the princess sang about the frog who had risked his life to save hers. Kneeling beside his unconscious body, the princess had sung,
</p><blockquote><i>He's short and green,</i><br /><i>not tall and clean,</i><br /><i>but I think I could love him.</i><br /></blockquote>
In Andreas's finale, all the students faced the audience and sang
<blockquote><i>We know we're young</i><br /><i>Sometimes we're lazy</i><br /><i>Do you think you could love us?</i><br /><i>We know we're small,</i><br /><i>sometimes we're crazy.</i><br /><i>Do you think you could love us?</i><br /></blockquote>
<p>The parents, our MS secretary Terri Woods, and even our unflappable principal Nancy Calhoun wept.
</p><p>I remember fondly "Cocoa Cabaret," a middle-school version of a coffee house open mike night that we did each spring in the early 2000s. Kids went up to the mike scared and came back stars. Back then, the Middle School Band had only five players, but they wowed the audience. A shy girl with a beautiful voice had trouble with pitch, so I played a few chords from a 1920s ballad and paused when she sang a line, then I played a little more, and so on. Her voice never clashed with the piano, and no one knew that she made up her own tune in her own key. Big success!
</p><p>The most memorable moment like that was a performance by Samantha Walker's middle school singers during our Black History program for Arts Month. When Rashan sang the first notes of his solo, I heard the audience of children and adults gasp at his pure, rich sound and the conviction of his delivery.
</p><p>During an arts showcase, Mrs. Boyer's art classes risked monumental failure but triumphed when teams painted large landscapes live on stage. We watched the canvases go from blobby to beautiful.
</p><p>At performances by the Upper School, I loved to see how students had grown. I think of Liane's singing with the jazz band, and Patrick's deep and intense performance in <i>All My Sons</i>. The most fun I ever had at Walker -- or <i>ever</i>! -- was playing piano with the orchestra for Katie Arjona's production of <i>Sweeney Todd</i>. Moved by the dedication and concentration of the upper school instrumentalists around me and by how each separate part fit together to support the passionate cast on stage, I had to find the notes for the finale through tears.
</p><p>Grace under difficult circumstances isn't something you can always count on with middle schoolers, so it was memorable when rain and technical glitches wiped out our entire program for a retreat at a distant camp. We teachers faced the seventh grade in one room with nothing to do for the entire evening. Mike Mackey, Ayren Selzer, Susan Boyer, Lydia Drown, and Dennis McElhaney stepped up to get everyone involved. Dennis has had to fill this role many times, leading the game "Nibblety-Bibble." Some of our kids now play that game at Olympics level.
</p><p>The teachers couldn't have done it, though, without the students' grace and goodwill. This wasn't what the kids wanted to do, but they understood the situation, and they played along with it.
</p><p>That same grace and goodwill allowed me to fail numerous times during the months of online COVIDucation until we found ways to keep everyone engaged and producing great stuff. For that reason, I will remember the last two years of my teaching career as the best ones.</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote>See cherished memories from the 17 years I taught <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/08/cycling-across-america-virtually_15.html">at St. Andrew's School in Jackson, MS</a>.<p></p><center><b>7202 miles on my second world tour begun June 2020; <br />3290 miles year-to-date in 2021, average speed 15</b></center><p><a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2020/07/update-cycling-across-america-virtually.html">←←</a> | <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/09/cycling-across-america-virtually.html">←</a> || <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2021/09/duke-revisited-in-spirit.html">→</a> <i>Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-74384897700201545002023-09-16T06:40:00.005-07:002023-12-30T05:52:19.148-08:00Dread and Hope for Sondheim's Last Show<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMyOed51IWI7fT6d0vB01Rrr_rZ_mWDKsVZBDjsYTi_MxlTkIJ6hTeS3J5o1RI4_6ohVnTCBM2ndgElbIDIphp2t5FACpr3Gi3CKUC6CE9yotlkafkCu8eYd3chadB-m_mHLwxn6jpGBIh7ax6b1JM8fm0RsJYwQUbDMCTdsfcL58ZcPcoZA/s1099/tn-500_hwa_keyart-652x1024%20here%20we%20are%20SOndheim.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1099" data-original-width="700" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMyOed51IWI7fT6d0vB01Rrr_rZ_mWDKsVZBDjsYTi_MxlTkIJ6hTeS3J5o1RI4_6ohVnTCBM2ndgElbIDIphp2t5FACpr3Gi3CKUC6CE9yotlkafkCu8eYd3chadB-m_mHLwxn6jpGBIh7ax6b1JM8fm0RsJYwQUbDMCTdsfcL58ZcPcoZA/s400/tn-500_hwa_keyart-652x1024%20here%20we%20are%20SOndheim.jpg"/></a></div>On the <I>Vulture</I> page of <I>New York Magazine</I> online, Frank Rich's interview with playwright David Ives and theatre director Joe Mantello has me intrigued about something I've been dreading: Stephen Sondheim's last show <I>Here We Are</I>.
<P>I've seen the films on which the two acts of the show are based (Luis Bunuel's films <I>Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie</I> and <I>Exterminating Angel</I>). Act one is based on the former, in which well-heeled friends can't get food or even a drink from any vendor they visit, for a variety of unlikely reasons. Act two is based on the latter, in which well-heeled guests have eaten a banquet, but, for no apparent reason, cannot exit the dining room. The Met presented a tedious opera that Thomas Ades made of the latter story. These are, for me, arch social allegories. You hear the premise, you get the point; you don't need it drawn out to three hours.
<P>Still, David Ives is dynamite. A student production of his short play <I>All in the Timing</I> gave me ten of the most delightful minutes of theatre I've ever experienced. Montello's production of <I>Assassins</I> set a new standard for that show (see my recent reflection <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2023/01/assassins-on-target.html"><I>Assassins</I> On-Target</a> 01/2023). And Sondheim made marvelous shows from dry material, such as the history of the industrialization of Japan in <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2017/05/pacific-overtures-sondheims-joy.html">Pacific Overtures</a>, and from off-putting characters, such as a cannibal barber in <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2018/06/reliving-40-years-of-sweeney-todd-with.html">Sweeney Todd</a>.
<P>But when I heard that Sondheim had not completed any songs for act two when he died on the night of Thanksgiving, 2021, I felt relief that we'd be spared a miserable coda to Sondheim's brilliant career.
<P><I>[Update: The show is "Three hours of sophistication that I've not seen [on Broadway] in 25 years" (<a href="https://w42st.com/post/2023s-high-and-low-notes-for-hells-kitchen-pianist-paul-ford/?fbclid=IwAR0KsW1-2Vq-FV2ja_m9njhWKf7nuEQY9KqQNvPJMxIbW67S5VG5Bk8vEmE">W42st.com</a>) says Paul Ford. The teacher who got me into Sondheim in 1974, Paul went on to play piano for the original productions of many Sondheim shows and wrote a book about it, <I>Lord Knows at Least I Was There</I> <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2022/04/pauls-turn-pianist-paul-ford-remembers.html">(blogpost of 04/2022)</a>. </I>]
<P>The corrected story, according to Ives and Mantello, is that Sondheim et. al. agreed that the second act <I>shouldn't</I> have music. "Why would these people sing?" Sondheim said. In the depths of the pandemic lockdown, Ives and Mantello realized that, logically, they wouldn't.
<P>Of course, as my friend Susan observed, "logically," <I>no one should be singing at all</I> in any musical, except that it's billed as a musical. And for half a musical, she said, Mantello and Ives should charge only half price.
<P>All that aside, I treasure the article because Rich presents us with the parts of his conversation that focused on the creative process behind the show. Rich is a longtime theatre critic for the NY <I>Times</I> who interviewed Sondheim on many stages around the country.
<P>Is there any other artist whose every draft of every piece of his work has been so open to public view? I've been lapping up writing about Sondheim's collaborations and personal writing process since 1974, when, at 15, I read Craig Zadan's <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2016/07/every-minor-details-major-decision-two.html"><I>Sondheim and Company</I></a> in one sitting. There are dozens of recordings of Sondheim's songs that never made it into shows that never made it on Broadway. He and his collaborators tell all about intentions, first drafts, and fulfillment in interviews, biography, and memoirs (link to my digests of every single book at my <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html">Sondheim page</a>).
<P>The story of his exhilaration in the initial stages and the long periods of enervating self-doubt are still models for creatives and, considering that he was still working at 91, touching. His eyes failing, he ordered oversized music paper so that he could see where he was putting his notes. He didn't want to be "a pointillist composer." When Ives fiddled with a lyric, Sondheim mock-objected, "Come on, I'm an icon of the American Musical Theatre!"
<P>The search for a title is part of the story. For years, it's been referred to variously as <I>Bunuel</I> and as <I>Square One</I>. Because Sondheim procrastinated with so many excuses, including an ingrown toenail, someone suggested <I>The Dog ate My Homework.</I> Montello thinks <I>Here We Are</I> fits because it suggests "a destination, a state of being, and also an offering."
<P>For Ives and Montello, <I>Here We Are</I> is a "distilled, smaller-scale version of a life's work" and "a sort of requiem" for Sondheim.
<P>Here's hoping.
<p>I recommend <a href="
https://showriz.com/blogcategoryreviews/2023/10/22/my-own-take-stephen-sondheims-last-new-work-here-we-are">a blogpost by Showriz</a>, clearly knowledgeable and appreciative of Sondheim.W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-90103413578371053172022-01-08T03:13:00.011-08:002023-12-28T03:39:42.079-08:00"Art + Faith" : Joy and Discovery in Making Church"Well, <I>duh</I>."
<P>That was my first reaction to artist Mako Fujimura's book <i>Art + Faith: A Theology of Making</i> (Yale University Press, 2021). I've always experienced my faith through the arts. <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/those-crazy-episcopalians.html#culture">(see how)</a>
<P>My second reaction is, Fujimura's idea to integrate art-making with "doing church" might bring new seekers and new commitment to an Episcopal parish.
<P>His idea might also alienate parishioners who've told me they're just not creative. Fear not! Here's what I know from teaching middle school:
<UL><LI>The difference between an artist and anyone else is not <i>talent</i> or <i>creativity</i>, but only the <I>curiosity</I> to see what emerges if they keep working on a project. <LI>That's why making art is a <i>way</i> to <i>discover</i> something. <LI>That's why making art is also (1) as hard for a pro as for a novice and (2) a joy.</UL>
<P>Let's see what Fujimura has in mind, and then look at possible applications to St. James of Marietta GA.
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhhT3h8kLSec55g2GMvEHJmhE1UqC2QXNBr3uQsigcUS9XDc7yOvReQ3_PFXqmKBYnX1gfCXOmBn_8MfKHmBLitfetEqVWaF7r41CvyfrNXV2sh57SXQGdr00_xyl5zjXiiagxf8b1AX6qIAF4IGlaRhmvB8QtVGZV2lMEGyfTh1_aI7WA=s2221" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="2221" data-original-width="1898" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhhT3h8kLSec55g2GMvEHJmhE1UqC2QXNBr3uQsigcUS9XDc7yOvReQ3_PFXqmKBYnX1gfCXOmBn_8MfKHmBLitfetEqVWaF7r41CvyfrNXV2sh57SXQGdr00_xyl5zjXiiagxf8b1AX6qIAF4IGlaRhmvB8QtVGZV2lMEGyfTh1_aI7WA=s400" /></a></div><blockquote>[PHOTO: Quilt makers at St. James Church honored our change-ringers. Each color represents a different bell in St. James's tower; the sequence never repeats during this set of changes.]</blockquote><P>
<p></p><center><B>Practicing Resurrection</B></center><BR>
Fujimura wants Church to appeal to his friends who, when asked their religion, check "none." These "Nones" find spirituality in art, not in church. At the same time, Fujimura doesn't want to alienate Christian friends who are suspicious of unbridled self-expression.
<p>So Fujimura does not limit his idea of "art" to what's in galleries and concert venues. For him, the salient characteristic of art is that something be made, not for utility -- not <I>just</I> for utility -- but for love (18). He finds numerous examples of "making" in our tradition. In Scripture:</p><ul><li>God creates for love</li><li>Adam names the creatures</li><li>craftsmen make the Ark of the Covenant, their names recorded in Exodus for posterity, their work described with loving detail</li><li>the woman at the last supper anoints the living Jesus for burial</li><li>Jesus favors storytelling and metaphor to express his vision</li><li>Poetry fills the Bible in psalms, prophecy, and Paul's letters</li><li>Apostles are works of art in their transformation, Fujimura says</li></ul>Our liturgy, its words and music, is art. I would add that the Eucharist, originally a pot luck "love feast," has become today a kind of musical drama that we all participate in. [See my short essay <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2013/03/meditation-for-holy-week-liturgy-as.html">Liturgy as Theatre</a> (03/2013)].
<P>Fujimura also finds the Christian world view reflected by secular works of art. Seeing a movie or novel, he would have us ask, where is God in the world of this work? Sin? Judgement? Redemption?
<p>Fujimura reframes "making art" as "practicing resurrection" (147). By "resurrection," he doesn't mean "resuscitation" but the "new creation" we read about in apocalyptic scripture. He explains that the word translated "new" isn't <i>neo</i> but <i>kainos</i> -- metamorphosis, like caterpillar to butterfly. He likens this to the Japanese art called <i>kintsugi</i>, "new newness," exemplified by a broken tea cup that's not just repaired but reimagined as an amalgamation of fragments with gold (ch. 4). Jesus says the kingdom of God will be as different from the life we know as the full-grown plant is different from the seed.
</p><p>Fujimura finds that "practicing resurrection" appeals both to his evangelical friends and the Nones.
</p><p></p><center><B>Art + Faith in an Episcopal Church</B></center><BR>
I know from parish surveys that music and the church's elegant liturgy are high on the list of what draws worshipers to the Episcopal church in general, and to St. James in particular. Can we build on this baseline of appreciation for arts? Might we draw a larger, more committed congregation through an emphasis on what we <i>make</i>?
<p>Sadly, COVID-19 has given us a real-life experiment with what happens when there's no "making" in the church. While we've passively received prayers and sermons, whether online or sitting in pews six feet apart, attendance has fallen. That's not a knock on the preaching of our clergy, but a demonstration of what Fujimura believes:
</p><blockquote>[U]nless we are making something, we cannot know the depths of God's being....God cannot be known by sitting in a classroom, or even in a church taking in information about God. I am not against these pragmatic activities, but God moves in our hearts to be experienced and then makes us all artists of the kingdom. (7)</blockquote><P>
He imagines art not just for display or presentation to an audience, but about spiritual formation for the creators themselves. He writes that faith is like an omelette: you can read the recipe, but to <i>get it</i>, you have to <i>make</i> it (61).
<p>Prior to the pandemic, a lot of us were indeed making things at St. James, Marietta. Every week, not just on Sundays, we would sing hymns and anthems, ring bells (hand- and tower-), sew quilts and knit blankets for the needy, guide children through imaginative responses to Bible stories, and set the chancel with linens and silver, candles and flowers, vessels of bread and wine for eucharist. Our church also practiced outreach through hospitality, offering Sunday breakfast and Wednesday supper, providing food and entertainment through the program we call Reach Out Mental Health, and hosting homeless families.
<P>Two of my favorite pieces of art in our church were made by church members. One is a quilt that hangs in our stairwell that represents two communities of art-makers in our parish, the sewing group and the North American Guild of Change Ringers (NAGCR). Squares of different colors alternate in patterns that correspond to our different tower bells ringing changes, never repeating a pattern to the end of the series. (See photo above)
<P>Another is a processional cross created for use during the penitential season of Lent by Bill, a woodworker in our parish. Elegant and polished, it's beautiful, but the wood at the center of the cross has a crack in it. Bill's choice to use that flawed piece at the heart of the cross suggests the suffering at the heart of the season. <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqjGD5zJeUxVKKplNxHN10adn8qTmB04XWNWYebfEkXQqZjz0MIU8u-3KLNs0EkIcIg0y4bItG0c77SfnuTfet4n_EbYvKghJhrB02-ccZ3KjoQ5fMd13PPBUP0SrYTlMnqA54QTOsOF_kO5fPs7HbZC1d5PGTywc3rN12vYVatZP_2Dc=s4032" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjqjGD5zJeUxVKKplNxHN10adn8qTmB04XWNWYebfEkXQqZjz0MIU8u-3KLNs0EkIcIg0y4bItG0c77SfnuTfet4n_EbYvKghJhrB02-ccZ3KjoQ5fMd13PPBUP0SrYTlMnqA54QTOsOF_kO5fPs7HbZC1d5PGTywc3rN12vYVatZP_2Dc=s400"/></a></div>
</p><p>How else could parishioners be involved in "making?" Do we envision art classes and rehearsals, concerts and displays -- at what cost of money and time? Would clergy have to vet every piece of work to be certain it aligns with our tradition? What if the work of amateurs isn't so good? Will parishioners be asked to sit through awkward performances during services or evenings? Will artists be offended if we don't hang their work in our halls?
<p>If the Rector appointed me Director of Arts, I'm not sure that I'd do anything more than draw attention to the quilt and cross, the making we already do, and then proclaim: "Let us intentionally make 'making something' a part of whatever we do -- whether we are engaged in worship, study, socializing, or reaching out to the community."
</p><p>It wouldn't have to be any scarier than when a fellow teacher challenged me to plan a collaborative "active experience" for our seventh graders at the end of every unit <i>after</i> the chapter test. She knew what Fujimura knows: once they'd learned the facts, our activities would help them to relate their knowledge to their lives.
<P>We already do this kind of artistic thinking in educational activities at our church. Our director of children's education plans collaborative creative experiences with her Bible story curriculum, varying the activities to suit children of different ages.
<P>Adults in EfM (Education for Ministry) practice "theological reflection," a process that might as well be called "thinking like poets" as they explore an event or text with imaginative empathy, memory, Scriptural analogies, and metaphors. Often, they draw all the threads of their discussion together into a "collect," a concise form of prayer that comes close to being poetry. [See <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2020/05/where-prayer-meets-poetry-collect.html">Where Prayer Meets Poetry</a> (05/2020)]
</p><p>Even making a list is creative. I asked my adult EfM class, "What ministry do you imagine for yourself? How could the church be of service to YOU in this?" As they answered, they grew more animated:
</p><ul>
<li>to provide a type of caregiver support group – “caregiver” broadly defined (illness, parenting, eldercare) -- that takes “me” out of the equation, helping the caregiver to REALLY see the person they’re caring for. Church? Bible study can help, but a group with activities that everyone does together is also important. (Art, music, poetry, conversation…)
</li><li>to create a program that might be called "The Inspired Retired" for retirees to find new ways to become engaged with (1) their own ordinary routines and (2) others
</li><li>to fulfill the 12th step, i.e., to work with others struggling with substance abuse.
</li><li>to make a deliberate effort to engage with people as equals -- especially strangers we encounter, in public, even at the drive-through -– a ministry one conversation at a time. Church could be a place that welcomes people in this way.
</li><li>to pay attention to students who need advising to get through myriad hoops and obstacles during this particularly difficult time.</li></ul>
<p>"Making something" might be sharing participants' insights on video, or using software or art materials to create an image for what they've learned. The subject matter may not be Scripture, but about the church community, about traditions with food and decorations, about life experiences. For example, <UL type="square"><LI>The most intense half hour I shared at a weekend retreat with EfM mentors was when we were given 30 minutes with old magazines to find images that represent elements of our spiritual lives, to cut and paste them into a circle (making a <I>mandala</I>). </LI><LI>When I sent adults of in my EfM class to roam the church campus with their phones to bring back images that "spoke" to them strongly of our faith, they returned exhilarated and eager to share. (My images were the ones in this article of the quilt and the cross.)</LI></UL>
<P>No activity has to be shared beyond the small group, but, posted on the church's social media, such "makings" would show online scrollers that we are a church where people learn, search, wonder, think, connect "church" to their own lives, the larger community, and to popular culture.
</p><p></p><center><B>Bottom Line from Self-Appointed Director of Arts</B></center><BR>
<p>Art takes work more than talent; it's more a joy than a grind; it's a process of discovery that goes beyond the delivery of a message; it doesn't have to be about religion to be religious.
<P>Fujimura writes what our experience at church bears out, that thinking like a "maker" is a way to "the deepest level of knowing" (Fujimura 72), an intensifier of our response Scripture and liturgy. In an interview, Fujimura says, </p><blockquote>The arts are a cup that will carry the water of life to the thirsty. It’s not the water itself; it’s the vessel. What we are doing in the church today is we are just picking up water with our bare hands and trying to carry it to the thirsty. We can still do it, but the effect is minimized by not fully utilizing what God has given us. (<a href="https://faithandleadership.com/makoto-fujimura-the-function-art">Faithandleadership.com</a>)</blockquote><P>
Our rector in his Christmas Day sermon this year had a message compatible with Fujimura's. He emphasized that we all should be living out our thanks for the gift of the incarnation. Teaching and debate are not the only ways to do that, he said.
<p>Art is also a builder of community through collaboration, and a value in itself (17-18).
</p><p>When we re-boot church after the pandemic, what additional "making" could involve parishioners, and how else can we make everyone aware of what we're doing? W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-52782027304818095762020-08-09T04:20:00.069-07:002023-12-11T04:23:57.347-08:00"1919": Poems Layered with Chicago History<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirR6uQXXvjNKCOt-65CDuuWxIaNE3qrvGgRTGPc9-SlrqgCQ73xGMQTIi1qpylzfnmonNGgCj8O5JC62Nz6BJ2uY_4mBv-eTGCCxYN3dleGFfNhi28czBQxrhAKP6-d2NRqQ/s1202/1919_cover_drafts_15_2-9ed4f9af32099ed4a27f39d00b8c84f2.jpg" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1202" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirR6uQXXvjNKCOt-65CDuuWxIaNE3qrvGgRTGPc9-SlrqgCQ73xGMQTIi1qpylzfnmonNGgCj8O5JC62Nz6BJ2uY_4mBv-eTGCCxYN3dleGFfNhi28czBQxrhAKP6-d2NRqQ/w410-h409/1919_cover_drafts_15_2-9ed4f9af32099ed4a27f39d00b8c84f2.jpg" width="410" /></a></div> <p></p><p>"It's hard to explain," I said. The kind woman on the trail could see that I'd pulled my bike over to stand still and cry.
</p><p><i>Hard to explain</i> how a poet I don't know, Eve L. Ewing, reading a poem from her new collection <i>1919</i> about a racial incident in Chicago during that year could have such an impact on me now listening to NPR one day in June 2020.
</p><blockquote>PHOTO: <i>1919</i>. Poems by Eve L. Ewing. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Cover artwork by Brian Dovie Golden, www.briandoviegolden.com </blockquote>
<p>There are so many layers to the work. You had to hear Ewing explain how the killing of seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams touched off three days of race-specific violence in Chicago, late July 1919. Ewing told interviewer Terry Gross on WHYY's <i>Fresh Air</i> how the young man, cooling off in Lake Michigan, drifted to an area claimed by whites, who threw stones at him and at any blacks who came near. No one knows for sure if a rock struck Eugene unconscious, or if, afraid to come ashore, he exhausted his strength. He drowned.
</p><p>The background gave immediate power to the poem "Jump / Rope." The poet began
</p><blockquote>Little Eugene Gene Gene<br />Sweetest I've seen seen seen<br />His mama told him him<br />Them white boys mean mean mean...</blockquote>
She sang the words in the style of ditties that little girls chant when they jump rope together. But she halted, "no, it goes like..." and started over; then she did it again. Each childlike verse comes closer to the harrowing event, closer to what we can imagine of Eugene's own experience:
<blockquote>Sweet sweet baby<br />Don't make me let you go<br />Swallow swallow grab the sky<br />Swallow swallow dark...</blockquote>
<p>How can I explain that, even writing this now, I'm tearing up? The story was sad enough, but the emotion hit hard when the story was filtered through those sing-song lines. The playfulness of the form gets us into the mind of young Eugene, playing in the water, free of care for the invisible line he had crossed.
</p><p>Ewing didn't have to explain how the title suggests both the child's game of jump rope and the lynchings by noose, so common for so long. Nor could she have known that her book would come out on a wave of current stories of young black adults killed for nothing: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rashard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain.
</p><p>In the moment that Ewing read her poem, I couldn't sort all these threads of meaning and feeling that constricted my throat. To the helpful woman, I just choked out, "It's hard to explain." When she was gone, I ordered the book.
</p><p>Ewing's <i>1919</i>, brief and illustrated, appears to be a simple children's book, but the cover depicts a moment of horror, Eugene's face, half submerged, eyes wide open in distress. Ewing enriches her collection with the layering of history texts and photos, of different voices past and present, and a variety of forms. Each layer reinforces the other. Where the historical note seems dry, her poetry pulls us in; where the verse seems obscure to me, the historical record fills in the back story. For most poems, there's an epigraph, usually taken from the report of community leaders in Chicago in the early 1920s, half of them black, half of them white, commissioned to explain why the incident and the riots happened.
</p><p>The tense prelude and violent aftermath of Eugene's death are central to the collection. Before that, the first part of the book enlarges on the commission's report about the influx of black families escaping the South since the collapse of Reconstruction. A third part, looking across the intervening decades, includes some poems previously published.
</p><p>Ewing begins each part of the book with a poem called "Exodus," 1, 5, and 10. She's taking off from the commission's observation that the black migrants to Chicago spoke of their leaving the South in Biblical terms from the exodus of God's chosen people out of slavery into the Promised Land. Ewing plays with the Biblical stories and phrases. In Exodus 1, not the mother of Moses but all young black mothers in the South place their babies in baskets to send them up the river to freedom. Exodus 5 brings God into judgement on the Chicago politician Richard Daly, whose biographer called him the <i>American Pharaoh</i>. In 1919, Daly was member of a gang of white boys who terrorized black neighborhoods in the riots. Exodus 10 takes off from the plague of darkness, reassuring to the black community, fearful to the wicked.
</p><p>For other poems as well, Ewing fits the form to the subject. A former teacher now covered in offal from working in the stockyard remembers fondly in 26 alphabetical lines how he instilled self-respect with literacy for black children in the South. A domestic worker, silently resenting her employer, speaks to us in short journal entries, all lower-case letters. Ewing gives us banter about "how hot is it" under an ominous title from Langston Hughes: <i>or does it explode</i>, expressing the tension rising during the heat wave of July 1919. The story of a barricade that black men set up to protect their neighborhoods is told in a poem shaped like that barricade.
</p><p>An outstanding poem, "James Crawford Speaks," tells of Eugene from the point of view of a black eye-witness, who fired his gun at policemen that arrived on the scene, who was himself shot and killed. "I saw the whites of [Eugene's] eyes," the voice begins, </p><blockquote>before he let go the railroad tie<br />that kept him almost afloat<br />almost alive, almost able to walk home...</blockquote>But what's at home for a black boy in Chicago of this time? The boy is "almost nobody, nowhere, gone home / to nothing. Me, too." The poem is very strong, imagining the gun shot as a statement: We are somebody. Black lives matter.
<p>Ewing reminds us of another teenage black boy from Chicago who died violently at the hands of white men, only the poem is gentle and sweet, a vision of what might have been had the boy lived to become an elder in the community. We know the photo of Emmett Till at 14, grinning under his porkpie hat, taken in the year of his gruesome murder. We know the photo of his bludgeoned face in his open casket. Ewing's poem begins, "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store," a gentle old man grinning under his porkpie hat. The poem is a benediction.<br /></p><p>Telling a friend about that poem, I cried again. Hard to explain.There are so many layers.<br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-1933031396707193482023-02-26T05:11:00.022-08:002023-12-11T04:09:37.436-08:00Boomers for Bacharach<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCQMCFTmsSta6w_WhX4MNBNxoxwfXTt21OU3ZzuaLEU_gq1muaIgdXtZ5GUA-0fnu-k0p1pWYPSneRIGMZMDbaPhqinVWPToIHKroF61zP8EYRCLhpZYyP1CiYnPpHmkEeKFvWXv_oiByJBnVQcBvIikmLysE-_Y-nxL_0CTLlonUHBXs/s467/Bacharach%20on%2060s_wallpaper.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="467" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCQMCFTmsSta6w_WhX4MNBNxoxwfXTt21OU3ZzuaLEU_gq1muaIgdXtZ5GUA-0fnu-k0p1pWYPSneRIGMZMDbaPhqinVWPToIHKroF61zP8EYRCLhpZYyP1CiYnPpHmkEeKFvWXv_oiByJBnVQcBvIikmLysE-_Y-nxL_0CTLlonUHBXs/s400/Bacharach%20on%2060s_wallpaper.jpg"/></a></div><P>Nostalgia is the first reason for me and my fellow Boomers to like the music of Burt Bacharach, who died this month at 94.
<P>With lyricist Hal David, Bacharach wrote songs that we learned from our parents' radios and 8-track tape decks, including <I>Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head</I>, <I>Close to You</I>, <I>What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?</I> and my dad's favorite, <I>What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love)</I>. Like lava lamps and floral prints on plastic cushions, those songs are part of a Boomer's mental furniture. Like those fashions, Bacharach's blend of soft rock percussion with brass and strings gave our parents a way to stay "with it," to be "cool." It didn't work, but, B+ for effort. When I hear any of his songs, I think fondly of Mom and Dad in their prime.
<P>Then, in my teens and early adulthood, Bacharach's advanced musical vocabulary was what I liked. I displayed my musical knowledge by commenting on Bacharach's complex harmony, mixed meters, and odd song structures. When I played Bacharach's song <I>Promises, Promises</I> on the piano, I pounded its dissonant chords in shifting time signatures of 3/4, 4/4, 3/8, and 4/8 to show off my musical machismo -- which, I admit, was the only machismo I had.
<P>But I learned how to appreciate Bacharach's <I>expressiveness</I> over <I>impressiveness</I>. Bacharach told interviewer Terri Gross that he set phrases the way they made sense to him; he never realized he was changing meters in a song until he notated it. So the character in the Broadway show <I>Promises, Promises</I> spits out the title phrase in 6/8, disgusted by the sleazy promises he's made; when he imagines life free of moral compromises, the meter shifts for expansive declarations: <I>I can live with myself and be proud - I laugh out loud!</I>.
<P>In another song for that show, Hal David wrote, <I>Go while the going is good. / Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing that anyone can learn. / Go!</I> On the second phrase, Bacharach spikes the melody up an octave on the <I>-ing</I> of <I>knowing</I> and sets all the following syllables on fast notes, all one pitch, like the hammering of an alarm bell: <I>ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!</I> Then that single syllable <I>Go!</I> swells like a siren for a full measure. The music conveys the urgency that the lyrics express.
<P>The song "This Guy's in Love with You," without hook or bridge, consists of just two verses and a tag line, a structure both unusual and very effective. Read the opening phrases aloud and you've got the basic rhythm for the whole song, a slow shuffle: <I>You see this guy? This guy's in love with you</I>. We hear the tune played on a muted trumpet before we hear the words, with just a piano for accompaniment. The singer asks the person he loves, <I>Who looks at you the way I do?</I> By the end of the second verse, evidently not getting a straight answer, "this guy" is breaking down: <I>My hands are shaking; don't let my heart be breaking</I>.
<P>Up to this point, Bacharach has kept a full orchestra in reserve. The strings and winds come in <I>forte</I> when the singer opens up, <I>I need your love, I want your love</I>. Same pitches as the opening phrase, same rhythm, but so different now. Bacharach expands the phrase in two more lines: <I>Say you're in love / in love with this guy.</I> At peak volume, the orchestra plays chords in triplet and stops. After a pause, the singer finishes softly, <I>If not, I'll just die.</I> The trumpet and piano repeat the intro, the musical equivalent of shuffling sadly away.
<P>I don't remember caring about that song before Vic Bolton, a tenor in our high school chorus, sang it for our concert. I wanted to cry.
<P>Bacharach once said his own favorite was his title song for the 1966 movie <I>Alfie</I>, because he liked the message. You don't have to see the movie to gather from Hal David's lyric that Alfie is a cynic who believes <I>it's just for the moment</I>, <I>we [should] take more than we give</I>, and <I>life is for the strong</I>. The song is an intervention, as the singer challenges Alfie's worldview and then offers an alternative. The song tickles my nostalgia for the 1960s when philosophers, poets, and theologians were part of our popular culture, along with their discussions of existentialism, "Is God Dead?" and the absurdity of life. I like the message too.
<P>But I also like the way Bacharach's music expresses that message. Bacharach sets the syllables of the name "Alfie" on a rising fifth, like a fanfare (e.g. the <I>Star Wars</I> theme), perfect for the name of a cocky character. But Bacharach undercuts that confident sound with dissonant intervals (m6, M7, m2) in lines intended to discomfort Alfie, such as, <I>if only fools are kind, Alfie / then I guess it is wise to be cruel</I>. Two verses follow that pattern before Hal David's words shift towards the singer's creed, one that <I>even unbelievers can believe in</I>. The vocal lines for that part climb up and down wide intervals over shifting chords. When the singer settles back into the notes of the opening line, it's a sunny declaration emerging from clouds:
<blockquote><I>I believe in love, Alfie</I><BR><I>Without true love, we just exist, Alfie</I><BR><I>Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie.</I>. </blockquote>
<P>A recording of <I>Alfie</I> by Cleo Laine made this my favorite of all Bacharach's songs. It's on her 1983 album <I>That Old Feeling</I>. She's a virtuoso musician and an actress, and she brings out every nuance in the words as she navigates the twists and jumps in Bacharach's music. The song was recorded in her living room with simple piano accompaniment, making her quiet rendition almost uncomfortably intimate. (<a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2009/05/memoir-by-singer-cleo-laine-footnotes.html">See my reflections on Cleo</a>.)
<P>About Bacharach's later work, I'm agnostic. I liked his theme from the 1981 movie <I>Arthur</I>, and I enjoy an album of Bacharach songs played by jazz pianist McCoy Tyner with trio and full orchestra. I bought that because I'd heard Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach talk on the radio about new songs they had written together. I've downloaded those, but they're hard for me to appreciate because -- well, I prefer Costello's <I>talking</I>.
<P><I>[I first admired <a href="https://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html"></I>Stephen Sondheim<I></a> for the difficulty of his music. Read about how his music is hard to sing, and why that's a good thing, in my blogpost from <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2015/06/musicologist-analyzes-how-sondheim.html">06/2015</a>.] </I>
W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26050421.post-64533322964761870602016-07-04T12:40:00.001-07:002023-12-10T13:16:22.391-08:00Deep Diva: Barbara Cook's Memoir Then and Now<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAIEP9r5e_copicL5WZ0egD-vC11H10UcS7OqfhB6eKkh9fE5gU78Xlk6YEDPU1FJW1Mzp3nckV_2Hx2Wx5Z6obbgfjk-qSYhBoGZWTRPjXSmWdFc3t9iwYj0aQWaLRxSapA/s1600/barbaracookcarnegie200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAIEP9r5e_copicL5WZ0egD-vC11H10UcS7OqfhB6eKkh9fE5gU78Xlk6YEDPU1FJW1Mzp3nckV_2Hx2Wx5Z6obbgfjk-qSYhBoGZWTRPjXSmWdFc3t9iwYj0aQWaLRxSapA/s320/barbaracookcarnegie200.jpg" width="320" /></a> Barbara Cook's 2007 album <i>No One is Alone</i> ended with "Make Our Garden Grow" from <i>Candide</i>, the show that put her front and center among Broadway ingenues of the 1950s. But she was not merely reprising an old hit. At 78, she couldn't be sure that ten more years of concerts and even a Broadway show lay ahead. Her trademark silvery voice had grown a bit husky, her range a bit lower than it used to be. She sang Leonard Bernstein's setting of these words by poet Richard Wilbur:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">You've been a fool, and so have I;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">But, come, I'll be your wife.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">And let us try</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Before we die</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">To make some sense of life.</span></blockquote>
The music for this anthem is stately, with wide yearning intervals, glancing dissonances, and a rising bass line, all expressing the calm resignation and hope articulated in the lyrics.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">We're neither pure nor wise nor good;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">We'll do the best we know.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">We'll build our house, and chop our wood,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">And make our garden grow. </span></blockquote>
After one verse, we hear Cook no more. Kelli O'Hara takes the soprano solo, a young actress who exudes warmth and intelligence - a new generation's Barbara Cook. Has any diva ever ceded the finale to someone else? Cook's generous passing of the torch hit me so hard that I waited ten years to hear the album again this week. The occasion is the release of her memoir <i>Barbara Cook: Then and Now</i>, written with Tom Santopietro (Harper Collins Books; Kindle edition), in which she makes some sense of her own life.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>"I've Been a Fool..."<br /> </b></div>
She could be a fool indeed, but she had the wisdom to stop in her tracks, reassess her life, and change on the instant. During a visit to New York at age 20, Cook decided not to return to Atlanta with her grasping, possessive mother. In the fifteen years or so that followed, she built her reputation on Broadway in <i>Flahooley,</i> <i>Candide, </i>the smash hit <i>Music Man, </i>a superior revival of <i>The King and I, </i>and the beloved <i>She Loves Me. </i>She married an actor who coached her for years and was father to her son Adam.<br />
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By the time of <i>Hair, </i>opportunities for ingenues had dried up on Broadway. Disappointments in marriage and the end of her affair with a married man deepened an alcohol-fueled depression, with food addiction. Despite a load of self-doubt and about 150 extra pounds, Cook took the offer from music director Wally Harper to produce a one-woman show at Carnegie Hall in 1975 that launched a new career as cabaret artist. Within the next year, she awoke in a panic from a night of drinking, grasped the connection between alcohol and her frequent anxiety attacks, and never took another drink.<br />
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Cook bitterly regrets that she never convinced Harper to recognize his own drinking problem. He died in 2004. (Personal note: I joined Harper and Cook for a reception onstage following their concert at Georgia Tech's Ferst Center, November 1, 2003. Harper and I talked Sondheim.) Another theme in her memoir is the fact that Harper never expressed love or even appreciation directly to Cook, though he fulfilled her dream of seeing her name on an old-fashioned marquee with flickering bulbs: he arranged for the sign to lower during a song at Carnegie Hall in 2001. "He couldn't say 'I love you' to me, but he expressed that love through the gift of that wonderful sign." (2941)<br />
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When her adult son came out to her as gay, she cried a week, sorry for herself because she'd thought he'd "plug" her into a normal family life at last, until she sat up and realized, "Adam wasn't here to plug me into anything. I was here to help him be Adam -- as fully as possible." (2731) She caught herself thinking of her son as a part of herself, the same thing her mother had done to her; and she stopped.<br />
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<b>Singing the Story</b></div>
Reviewing Barbara Cook's program of songs at Feinstein's in 2012, Stephen Holden of the <i>New York Times</i> wrote, "In each [ballad] she located its universal sweet spot and extended herself as if she were telling her own personal stories of happiness and loss."<br />
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In her memoir, Cook tells how she learned to convey her personal story in performances of songs. She learned from watching masters of song. In the early 1950s, a friend brought Cook to the Gold Key Club after hours, when Judy Garland sometimes stopped by to sing for friends. "[L]istening to Judy taught me how a song must contain a beginning, a middle, and an end -- that it should possess an unbroken line both musically and lyrically, while taking the listener on an emotional journey." (818). Without much of a singing voice, Mabel Mercer "communicated the richness of good lyrics, the subtext lying beneath the surface" and would "lay into" consonants as other singers wouldn't do. (827) From listening to Sinatra, she learned to "sing like you talk."<br />
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Aside from some TV work, Cook didn't make it on screen. About the film version of <i>The Music Man</i>, she thinks Shirley Jones was good, but the whole thing was "too clean": "the horses never s--- in those streets," she writes (1790). She tells of auditioning for a movie role alongside the unknown actress Joanne Woodward. "She was terrible," Cook thought. "She wasn't <i>doing</i> anything." But the director called Woodward a real film actress. There's a lesson about acting on screen. <br />
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She's still learning. Commenting on her performance of the Rodgers and Hart song "He Was Too Good to Me" in the 1975 concert, she writes, "I sing the song much better, with greater depth of feeling.... I can't sing like I sang ten years ago, or even five years ago, but ... I probe more deeply into the lyric now and have a lot more courage to keep going, deeper and deeper." (2417) She tells of leading master classes for aspiring singers. She hears people who "want you to know right away that they can SING, in capital letters. They come on singing like machines." She humanizes them. "You are enough," she assures them. "You don't need to [look or sound] like anybody else." (3176) I've read, not in this memoir, that she listens to the song once, then seats the singer across from her, knee to knee, takes the singer's hands, and says to sing to her as if telling a personal story.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Gossip</b></div>
Of course, in a showbiz memoir, we expect to get some dishing on celebrities. Generally, though, Cook doesn't speak ill of others, even the dead ones. She writes of good relationships with her ex-husband, right on up to his death, and with both her ex-lover, and his wife. She regrets never completing a letter of gratitude for his helping her to recognize her own intellect and curiosity; he died with Alzheimer's. Sometimes you gain and lose at the same time, she comments.<br />
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She does give us the spectacle of Leonard Bernstein's "sweeping in" to <i>Candide </i>auditions wearing a "long, green, loden cape lined in red satin" and black patent-leather loafers. Cook's comment? "Wow!" (1197).<br />
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She writes about working with another Broadway diva, Elaine Stritch, in a star-studded concert staging of <I>Follies</I> in 1985. While Cook does complain how the actress had to be the center of attention, she lauds Stritch's skills and kindness. During one rehearsal, Cook and co-stars figured Stritch had some reason of her own to be wearing a shower cap, until Stritch interrupted rehearsal to say, "This is what I love about show business. I walked in here forty-five minutes ago with a shower cap on my head and nobody said a goddamned thing!" Cook substituted for the star in Stritch's cabaret show at the Cafe Carlyle, explaining that Stritch had joined the cast of <i>A Little Night Music. </i>"But you're not missing much," Cook told the audience. "This is the point of the show where she drops the names of all the famous people she's f----d." Cook assured the crowd that she'd f----d a lot of people herself, only they weren't famous (2845).<br />
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Cook accepted a role in the musical adaptation of Stephen King's <i>Carrie</i> under development at the Royal Shakespeare Company before she discovered that none of the people involved had any idea what they were doing. It's hard to believe her story how the designer, told that the show was to resemble <i>Grease</i>, understood that it was to be set in Greece, complete with drapery and helmets. The director Terry Hands, taking the mistake for serendipity, staged the show as a Greek Tragedy (2866). The show is a byword for musical calamity, but Cook still singles out the girl in the title role for superb ability, professionalism, and unselfish effort.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Cook and Sondheim</b></div>
Cook mentions Stephen Sondheim frequently in her memoir, although she had no professional contact with him until very late in her career. Early in the book, telling how her mother explicitly blamed three-year-old Barbara for "giving" the pneumonia that killed her infant sister, Cook comments, after Sondheim, that "children will listen" and internalize the careless messages of their parents. She relays Sondheim's judgement that<i> </i>Meredith Wilson's "Rock Island" for <i>The Music Man</i> was one of the best opening numbers of any musical, ever.<br />
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A few years into her second career, Sondheim met her in the street and asked, "Why don't you ever sing my stuff?" She had come close, in 1971, auditioning for the role of "Sally" in <i>Follies,</i><i> </i>but she was deemed "too good looking" for the role of a woman on the edge of breakdown. One reason she never sang Sondheim, she admits, is that she didn't care about the characters in Sondheim's breakthrough musicals <i>Company </i>and <i>Follies</i>, and she was repelled by <i>Sweeney Todd. </i>She tells us that her opinions have been revised. She also speculates that Wally Harper, whose hopes of seeing a musical of his own on Broadway never panned out, envied Sondheim's success (3007).<br />
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But that all changed with Sondheim's invitation to her to play "Sally" for a two-night staged reading of <i>Follies </i>in Avery Fischer Hall in 1985, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic. Sondheim himself has written of hearing her perform "In Buddy's Eyes" for the first time, turning it from a "throwaway" bit of exposition into a showstopper. Heart-stopper is more like it: The moment is captured on the video documentary about the show. Her own explanation? Cook has said that she took the character at her word. That's going against the grain, for the lyric and orchestration give numerous clues that "Sally" is lying when she sings of her happy marriage. That's why it's so effective when Cook sings, without irony, "In Buddy's eyes, / I'm young, I'm beautiful" and "All I ever dreamed I'd be / The best I ever thought of me / Is every minute there to see / In Buddy's eyes."<br />
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After that, Cook and Harper worked songs from <i>Follies</i> into her act. Around the time that others had celebrated Sondheim's 70th birthday in 2000, Harper had the idea for a program of songs that Sondheim had written, alongside songs that Sondheim listed in an article for <i>The New York Review of Books</i>, "Songs I Wish I'd Written." The show and its recording, <i>Mostly Sondheim</i>, solidified Cook's reputation as a premier interpreter of the master's works. <i> </i><br />
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Ten years later, she performed on Broadway again in the revue <i>Sondheim on Sondheim, </i>finding, as Holden wrote, "the sweet spot" in each song to make it feel real, and personal to her. <i> </i><br />
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"We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good; / We'll do the best we know." Barbara Cook cares about integrity, learning, and generosity: The best she knows is as good as it gets.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Of related interest:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I've blogged recently about <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2016/07/she-loves-me-live-stream-from-broadway.html"><i>She Loves Me</i></a>, the musical that starred Barbara Cook in 1963. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">See my <a href="http://smootpage.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html">Stephen Sondheim page</a> for articles about his musicals mentioned here. </span>W. Scott Smoothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14233489378056195307noreply@blogger.com0