"The Heron's Cry" by Ann Cleeves: #2 in the Two Rivers Series

It's a great moment in any crime novel when the detective realizes, "Oh, I've been looking at this all wrong." There's a sudden burst of energy, maybe a laugh, like when you suddenly notice the little detail that makes a cartoon funny.    

Before that moment blows us away in The Heron's Cry (New York: Minotaur Books, 2021), Ann Cleeves diverts us with characters we mostly like, pursuing suspects we mostly don't.

One significance of the title is how her chief detective Matthew Venn makes his husband think of a heron "just willing to wait. Entirely focused on their prey [and] silent. I'm never quite sure what you're thinking" (236). We do know what he's thinking, how he questions himself silently even while he's questioning a witness or directing his team.

Ditto, the team, detectives named Jen and Ross. Cleeves alternates chapters among these three detectives as they investigate the murder of a wealthy do-gooder. They have complementary strengths -- Jen's intuition and emotional sensitivity, Matthew's cerebral doggedness, and Ross's ready - for - action - and - then - can - we - go - home - please impatience. Already, two books into the series, they are influencing each other.

(BTW - My strongest emotional memories from other books by Cleeves involve the lead detectives' seconds: a young police detective who realizes suddenly that his daughter is in danger, and a diffident country cop who overcomes self-doubt on a mission to London and does just the right thing.)

Our interest in the detectives is one feature that keeps us reading; interest in the cohort around the victim is another. The victim is a benefactor of the arts. We meet a pair of artists dependent on his generosity, and his daughter, whose glass sculptures are weaponized in his murder and another. There's a curious couple who are sort of tenants, sort of live-in servants.

Many of the characters relate to suicides that happened long before this story starts. The murder victim was involved in suicide prevention counseling. The detectives uncover a web-based community that encourages dark ideations.

As this second novel in the Two Rivers series explores issues around suicide, the first one explored questions surrounding adults with intellectual disabilities, their safety and independence. In both novels, the themes emerge naturally from the situations. While there's no authorial preaching, we do develop empathy for people with different perspectives. Such themes give resonance to a genre that can be just an exercise in puzzles and procedures.

I'm looking for more stories to happen in Venn's town of North Devon, between two rivers.

Virtual Bike Ride on Maine Street

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287 miles from Boston to Bar Harbor
November 21 - December 29, 2020 After my visit to Bar Harbor in July 2013, I wrote how different things are in Maine,

where billboards evidently aren't allowed, where pine trees are shaped like Christmas trees, and white-barked birches fill forests; where my friend Suzanne and I drove 100 miles without seeing traffic, a truck stop, a shopping mall, or McDonald's. These are high on my list of things I don't want in my life any more.

I hear that's a common reaction. A Mainard on NPR said that many people move to Maine for a life of picturesque isolation and leave after one winter.

That would be me. My doctored selfie shows Bar Harbor's Main Street during this week when the temperature there never topped 34 degrees Fahrenheit. I purchased that sweatshirt from Acadia National Park nearby when the summer air was a little too cool for me at the summit of Cadillac Mountain. This week, I had to wear it riding because my actual location northwest of Atlanta was gripped by temperatures in the lower 60s. While Bar Harbor's tourism office VisitBarHarbor.com makes winter there sound great, I'm okay with virtual travel.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow my bike tour from the start.

A Silent "Silent Night" & Other Tales from Omicron Christmas

We kept silent during "Silent Night" at the Christmas Eve service. Paul Kelley, organist at St. James Episcopal Church, had rehearsed lots of music with the choir, but the Omicron variant's rampage through our county made it prudent for us to confine exhalations to our own socially-distanced spaces. He added chimes to the melody for a consolation.

Though the advent of Omicron overwhelmed the Advent that our rector Father Roger Allen had planned, he still produced messages for the season that I was glad to hear.

The angels' proclamation to the shepherds to "Fear not!" certainly seems like something we need to hear this year, Father Roger said. He brought us an apposite reflection by author Philip Yancey about how he takes great effort to care for the fish in his salt-water aquarium, yet they dart for cover every time he approaches. He wants them to "fear not." He thinks, if he could only become one of them, they might understand. Father Roger offered this as a good analogy for the Incarnation of God in Bethlehem.

After the sermon, Fr. Roger explained his rationale for canceling plans for a pageant, choir, guest musicians, bells, and lots of congregational hymns. Some parishioners told him they were annoyed, while others were relieved not to be caught between leeriness of exposure and reluctance to let the choir down (that describes me). He read an apt portion of a children's book, referring to himself as the Grinch observing how denizens of Whoville celebrate even without the decorations, gifts, and bells.

After that evening's services, Paul went home expecting to have late dinner prepared by his adult son, but, no. Apologizing, the son ordered pizza instead -- and the delivery boy turned out to be his older brother, who had come in from Baltimore to surprise their dad. Happy ending!

On Christmas Day, Father Roger told the story of a vicar who accosted a parishioner after the Christmas Eve service, saying "We need you to serve in the army of Christ!" The man assured the vicar he did serve. "Then how is it we see you only Christmas and Easter?" The man whispered, "I'm in the Secret Service!" Father Roger encouraged us not to keep our faith secret.

In the same vein, he asked us to think about gifts that we've given. How were they received? With surprise? joy? thanks? Or did the receiver seem distracted? Did they take the gift as just something due? The Incarnation is a gift -- how are we receiving it? Good question, because we know how we feel when the gift doesn't get the reaction we expected. We can have a little empathy for our heavenly Father and try to do better.

Finally, Father Roger gifted us with something he saw Christmas Eve. While Paul played "Silent Night" for a silent congregation, a family in the back followed along in sign language.

Two More Christmas Gifts

Mom's facility had to cancel their Christmas buffet, but sister Kim and I were able to enjoy salmon, potatoes, and chocolate cake with Mom in her room.

The next day, Sunday, I went to the early service, something I rarely do, because my weather app told me there'd be three hours of warm sunshine in the early afternoon, a great gift for a cyclist.

Find a list of my other articles covering our experiences over the past decade in my page Dementia Diary, and a lot more about church at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians

Falling in Love with West Side Story -- Again

Before I could read, I thrilled to Mom's LP from the 1961 movie West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein's music created tension and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics were scary -- Something's coming,/ I don't know what it is, but it is...down the block, on a beach, under a tree, then it's at the door, where I prayed silently, "Don't open the latch!" I imagined it was the Blob.

After TV aired the film in my 6th grade year, my friends and I listened to the music for weeks. This musical wasn't kids' stuff; this was serious!

After studying Shakespeare, I appreciated how the playwright Arthur Laurents had adapted Romeo and Juliet.

But then it became cliché, subject to parody; gun violence made Jets and Sharks look tame; and, while I never stopped loving Bernstein's music, hearing his West Side Story suite on public radio every blessed request day grew tiresome. Steven Spielberg's remake seemed a bad idea: I believed the material had lost its freshness and its edge.

[PHOTO: Alvarez, DeBose, Spielberg, Zegler, Elgort]

FreshThe cast of Spielberg's West Side Story makes the characters fresh. Michael Faist, a lean and hungry "Riff" displays bravado for his gang "the Jets" but his deep vulnerability comes out in bitterness when his closest friend "Tony" (Ansel Elgort) seems to have outgrown the gang -- and him. From a bit of background added to the dialogue, we know that Tony is the closest thing he has to family. Like Shakespeare's "Mercutio," Riff jokes right up to the moment of his death, but Faist delivers quips as challenges. Riff's silent response to a loaded gun makes an old man laugh, but Faist is intense, not funny.

On the other side of the white-Puerto Rican divide that defines the story, David Alvarez plays "Bernardo" as a boxer who's as quick to laugh as to fight, always dressed to impress. Alvarez is a fine singer and great dancer, but it was his "gravitas" that impressed Spielberg. While Riff sang that being a Jet makes him "a family man," Bernardo revels in his actual family, delighting in his lover "Anita" (Ariana DeBose), protective and fond of his little sister "Maria" (Rachel Zegler). His confrontation with both women at breakfast is unexpectedly funny: as he tries to be the strong and wise paterfamilias, they pick apart his decrees, and he's reduced to spluttering into his scrambled eggs.

When Tony and Maria fall in love at first sight, as hackneyed as that could be, the actors' wide-eyed surprise and joy land the moment. During their awkward dialogue and an elegant dance behind the bleachers, we fall in love with them. There's magic in the camera work, too, as dozens of frenetic dancers between them seem to fade away. Bernstein's music underscores the moment by a sudden shift from super-heated Mambo to a gentle cha-cha-cum-minuet. The actors prolong that magical moment when they sing the familiar songs "Maria" and "Tonight" as beautifully as I've ever heard (around 50 versions), high notes and harmony expressing their exuberance.

We're enchanted. Although we know they're all doomed, we're lured into a hope that it'll all work out for those kids this time.

Sharp Edges To sharpen the edge of Arthur Laurents's original script, scenarist Tony Kushner and director Spielberg redefine the context for the gang war. This time, the turf they're fighting for is marked for demolition to make way for Lincoln Center -- the very same abandoned streets where the 1961 film was shot. For the first image of the film, a camera tracks along yards and yards of wreckage on the ground until suddenly, a door opens upward and Jets climb out. We're disoriented; and so in a way are the Jets, as Spanish has replaced English in streets they used to know. Their own futures are closing shut. Police Lieutenant Shrank berates them as nogood sons of the only immigrants who ever failed to advance out of the neighborhood. When they sing that they rule "the whole ever mother lovin' street," they're posed like fighters, kings of the hill -- but the actual hill is rubble. The story isn't just boys' behaving badly; it's existential despair.

The Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, are upwardly mobile. Bernardo, Anita, and Maria all have jobs, nice clothes, and plans for the future. Bernardo has promised Maria to an awkward young man named Chino, whom he bars from the gang to save him for college. Bernardo plans a return to Puerto Rico with money and children, but Anita has sights on building a business in New York. Their playful banter develops in the song "America," a witty catalog of the obstacles they're overcoming. Always a show-stopper, the song in this context expands to involve their entire community in a celebratory dance. Even the traffic is choreographed: three cars hit their brakes on three successive beats of a measure!

[Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez as "Anita" and "Bernardo"]

Song and Dance The music is sharp as ever, due in part to a choice Bernstein made back in 1957. The first two notes we hear are three whole steps apart, an interval we don't hear much in popular music. Called the "tritone," it's a musical edge, a literal tipping point between fa and sol in the familiar scale. Because we are conditioned to hear the note tip towards one note or the other, the repetition of the tritone makes us as tense as if we saw a tightrope artist waver. This effect made "Something's Coming" scary for me as a kid, as the tritone repeats in the accompaniment and the melody. The first two syllables of "Maria" make a tritone; it's the basis for "Cool," and it even peppers the comic song "Gee, Officer Krupke." The tritone lurks in almost every number.

Yet Bernstein's music can be exuberant and joyful, as in "America" and "Tonight," or tender, as when Tony and Maria sing "One Hand, One Heart," their voices overlapping on the ominous lyric, "Even death won't part us now." Anita's furious aria "A Boy Like That" is pitched in her highest range, close to screaming at Maria with the full force of Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic behind her, making very sweet and very sad the moment when her fury melts into harmony with Maria's anthem, "I Have a Love."

All the dances flirt with fighting, and all the fights teeter on the edge of ballet. In Jerome Robbins' original choreography, the song "Cool" is a highlight, as the Jets try to hold it together after the fatal rumble. In this version, "Cool" is re-imagined as a confrontation between Riff and Tony. When Tony calls Riff a "yo-yo schoolboy" in a bid to prevent the rumble, he's only deepening the rift between the young men. The dance grows out of a dangerous game of keep-away with Riff's loaded gun.

[PHOTO: Faist and Elgort as "Riff" and "Tony"] In the 1961 movie, "Gee, Officer Krupke" is comic relief. With slapstick staging, the boys mock the runaround they get from the authorities in their lives. It always had a subtext of anger, but this version, set in the police station, brings rage close to the surface. The horseplay is aggressive, even vicious.

Other choices by Spielberg and Kushner palliate faults that have embarrassed Sondheim since 1957.

• In "Maria," young lyricist Sondheim gave the actor nothing to do but stand and repeat that he liked the young woman's name -- because, what else does Tony know about her? Exasperated, the director Jerome Robbins told Sondheim to stage it himself. (Sondheim learned from then on to write every song with action in mind.) For this version, Spielberg follows Elgort as he strides through the nighttime streets exulting at the top of his lungs. In gentle homage to "Singing in the Rain," there's a puddle for splashing and a street cleaner who looks askance at the singer.
• I've seen Sondheim shudder at his overripe poetry, "Today the world was just an address / a place for me to live in / no better than alright." The words of the song "Tonight" haven't changed, but it's okay if they're a bit over-the-top because Spielberg and Kushner go back to Shakespeare to punch up the comedy in this updated balcony scene. Like Romeo, Tony has to beat obstacle after obstacle to get a kiss: the neighbors can hear them, the fire escape is out of his reach, there's a grille in their way. Like Juliet, Maria is worried but kind of enjoying his plight, and she forgets why she called him to come back. Because they're a little foolish in this situation, their fond lyrics are forgivable. It helps that the first line of this song, "Only you / you're the only one I see" is what we experienced when they met, and that the line is doubly poignant when we hear it again later.
• Sondheim was proud of clever rhymes he fit to Bernstein's lilting waltz for Maria, "I Feel Pretty," before Sheldon Harnick (lyricist for She Loves Me and Fiddler) pointed out that a girl learning English shouldn't sound like a guest in Noel Coward's living room. Bernstein didn't care about that, so the words remained. But Spielberg and Kushner make it right by finding a credible way to set the song in a place very much like Noel Coward's living room. I was delighted, and I think Sondheim was, too, because he told Steven Colbert he loved the ways that songs were re-imagined for the movie.
• Sondheim regretted that, given the music for "Somewhere," he set his least significant syllable on a high half note, giving it ridiculous prominence: "There's AAAAA place for us." As this is the go-to song for classical musicians' pop concerts, I've heard lots of opera singers go full-throttle on that "a." For this remake, Kushner gives the song to "Valentina," a new character who replaces the shopkeeper "Doc" from the original script. As Doc's widow, Valentina is Tony's employer, surrogate mother, and confidante (he sings "Something's Coming" to her). She's also Puerto Rican. When things are going wrong, this little old lady sings "Somewhere" alone in her shop, gazing at a photo of herself with her husband, expressing her hopes for Tony and Maria. In that setting, the actress can under-sing the melody and act it, instead. Kushner wrote this part for Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing "Anita" in 1961.

Many iconic moments are left as they were in 1961, barely re-touched, such as the "Jet Song," the final scene, and my personal favorite, the "Tonight" Quintet. That was my first exposure to the technique of layering multiple characters' perspectives in one slam-bang number, cutting from Jets, to Sharks, to Anita anticipating a hot night, to Tony and Maria foolishly believing they can stop the violence.

Spielberg has said that he loved the original; he has made me love this material again. I want everyone else to love it, too. Ecstatic reviews didn't draw big audiences to theatres in its first two weeks; my hope is that this film will get the audience it deserves in time.

New Opera "Eurydice": Something Nice

On December 4, the Met broadcast in HD the new opera Eurydice, music by Matthew Aucoin, libretto by Sarah Ruhl, based on her play of the same name. The title character's name appears to combine the prefix eu- meaning "pleasant" with dice meaning "speech," reminding me of Mom's dictum, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it." So I'll be writing mostly about the captivating first hour.

Matthew Aucoin's orchestral prelude instantly created an atmosphere with delicate colors, a propulsive pulse, and ominous shifts of harmony.

The first moments with the title character and her lover Orpheus on a beach were sweet and a little puzzling in a way that intrigued us. Orpheus seems at first to be mute, drawing Eurydice's attention to the flight of birds with a sweep of his hand; she translates. Once a winged double for Orpheus descends from above, Orpheus and his muse sing his thoughts in harmony, Orpheus a baritone, his double a counter-tenor. By this very effective conceit, we understand that, while Orpheus may be affectionate and devoted to Eurydice, his attention is divided between his love and his music. For the rest of the opera, the energy in the interaction of these two voices generates a lot of good will.

[PHOTO: Eurydice, Orpheus, and his double.]

The story is well-known, so we appreciate the significance when Eurydice, teasing her lover, makes him walk ahead of her without looking back. Moments later, he sweetly ties a string around her ring finger to remind her of his love always. When string appears again in this story of loss and memory, we remember, and it's telling.

Another great invention of the librettist is to show us Eurydice's late father in the underworld. Having evaded his prescribed bath in the river of forgetfulness, the father retains his literacy and his love for Eurydice. Though he writes his daughter a tender blessing for her wedding day, he cannot deliver it. The plight of this character and, later, his care for Eurydice in the underworld, are strongly affecting throughout the opera, right up to his last words.

Hades, lord of the underworld, gets laughs for being so over-the-top creepy. Played by tenor Barry Banks, he's a plump and pasty bald man dressed like a Rat Pack wannabe. He seduces Eurydice to his swinging 60s bachelor pad, offering to show her a letter from her father. I've read on the website that he engineers her falling down the stairs to her death, a little detail that I totally missed.

In an interview backstage with host Renee Fleming, Banks admitted that he's challenged by a vocal part for which no entrance is lower than B-flat, but he also enthused about the logic and singability of the composer's lines.

The backstage interviews before the curtain and at intermission are always a highlight of these HD productions. These professionals are so collegial, and occasionally goofy in a gee-whiz-I'm-on-screen-with-all-these-great-stars kind of way. The principals and creative team expressed their appreciation for the music and libretto, and also their commitment to the project.

After intermission, the story went to hell. Still trying to say something nice, I'll list some intriguing themes that emerged:

• The language of stones
• The power of written language. Sometimes characters who seemed puzzled by pages of a letter stood on the paper, perhaps suggesting the limits of written language.
• Memory loss. Some of the interactions in the underworld were like those that I see in my mom's memory care facility.
• A woman's conflicting feelings for two men in her life, her father and husband.
• The nature of love for a creative artist.
• Loss.

Finally, I'll say something nice about a different musical theatre piece, Passion by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim. Like this opera, its story is schematic, its characters on the edge of being mere illustrations of a theme: a soldier in love with a healthy beautiful woman whose name means "light" gradually comes to love a sickly repulsive woman whose name means "dark." On NPR's Fresh Air, Lapine explained the pains that he, Sondheim, and the cast took to help their audience to understand the characters' motivations for this unlikely story.

Like Passion did, this opera may need some tweaking. I'd work backwards from the moment in the libretto when Eurydice is asked to explain why, at the climactic moment of decision, she did what she did, and she answers, "I don't know." I felt cheated. I don't have anything nice to say about that.

Eurydice
Music by Matthew Aucoin, libretto by Sarah Ruhl, based on her play Eurydice
Conductor...Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Eurydice...Erin Morley
Orpheus's Double...Jakub Józef Orliński
Hades...Barry Banks
Orpheus...Joshua Hopkins
Father...Nathan Berg

Sondheim is Alive ( with links to Sondheim tributes )

Sondheim lives. At the time of his death last week, his shows Company and Assassins were on stage in New York, the new film adaptation of West Side Story was ready to hit theatres December 10, and he himself was a character in a film of Jonathan Larson's Tick, Tick, Boom that started streaming around the time. Sondheim shows play around the world 12 months of every year.

That may be surprising, as the "smash hit" always eluded Sondheim, and many of his shows lost money (a lot!) in their original productions.

But Sondheim will live because actors love him. That's the strong message that comes through in tributes since his death.

[PHOTO: Actors and fans gathered in Times Square after his death to sing "Sunday," Sondheim's anthem about art that transforms ordinary life into something that lives "Forever"]

On screen and in print, actors have testified how Sondheim's words and music are so particularly expressive, giving them so much to do. Bernadette Peters said that a quarter note rest in a Sondheim song is there because of something the character is feeling. Patti Lupone suggested to Sondheim that his acting in student productions carried over into his songwriting, and he agreed. When she asked about characters he'd created, he reminded her that his collaborators created them, but he explored them the way good actors do. (He admitted to her that Mama Rose from GYPSY was his favorite - such a monster, and "so full of life.")

In my teens, guided by critics, I loved Sondheim for all the wrong reasons. He revolutionized the art form, he dared to write dissonances in his music, he used the word "Goddam" in a musical, he chose dark subjects.  By touting the difficulty of Sondheim's music and the cleverness of his rhymes, I claimed my own sophistication. 

In the same way, professors and critics teach how Shakespeare advanced the art form, examined dark themes, and wrote dense poetry.  But Shakespeare has lived in spite of being reduced to quiz points and essay topics.   Since Shakespeare's grateful actor friends published his work in 1623, actors and directors have delighted in the challenges of his work. They've related to the characters; they've owned the insights; they've enjoyed opportunities that Shakespeare gives them to show off their range.

Likewise, Sondheim.

I've already seen well-regarded novelists, favorites of mine, fade into irrelevance within a couple of years of their deaths. I expect Sondheim to live on. 

[See my grown-up reflection on Sondheim's virtuosity in music and lyrics. See my Sondheim page for many more articles about him, his craft, shows, collaborators, friends, and competitors.]

Links to Sondheim Tributes

• Central Synagogue in New York did a solemn, beautiful tribute with thoughtful words and a medley of Sondheim songs that fit the context of a religious service. Synagogue Tribute.
• A British actor/musician has put together a wonderful video using clips from shows with animated snippets of piano score and lyrics to explain why Sondheim's work is so compelling. He ends with a heartfelt thank-you to Sondheim for the "humanity" (understanding, honesty, acceptance) that helped the author through difficult teen years. See Why Sondheim's Music is so Addictive
• NPR's tribute by Jeff Lunden
• NPR critic Bob Mondelo's tribute is both comprehensive and personal. The conclusion got to me: Sondheim always did "Move On," and "now we must, too."(My friend Susan and I chatted with Mondelo about Sondheim's Road Show during our visit to NPR HQ the day we saw that musical.)
• A New York Times article celebrates Sondheim's lifelong mission to encourage theatre writers and performers, often with typewritten notes.  (I have four examples framed on my wall.)
  
• Scott Simon on Sondheim's Essential Lyrics: A Soundtrack for Life is the most personal assessment, and strong. I especially appreciate how Simon draws from the song "Someone in a Tree" for Sondheim's celebration of the particulars in life that we hold in our hearts.
• Broadway actors sing SUNDAY
• Patti Lupone's tribute incorporates her interview with Sondheim at his home when COMPANY was about to open, just before the pandemic closed everything down. She focuses on his early experiences as actor, and there are surprises and laughs. She tries to tell him directly "thank you" for all of us and tears up, but he gets the message.
• Max Freedman, journalist and former actor from a musical theatre family, creates a "playlist" of Sondheim songs by way of showing what the bard of ambivalence taught him in life. It's great!
• Not a posthumous tribute, this compilation of teenagers telling what Sondheim has meant for them is very affecting. It's posted by the guy who does the wonderful YouTube series Musical Theatre Mash.
• NPR's list of 10 Sondheim songs we'll never stop listening to
• Video from PBS News Hour features Sondheim on rhymes, then an interview with critic Ben Brantley and theatre director Eric Schaeffer
• New York Post obituary
• Classical music figures including Jake Heggie and Renee Fleming share their tributes to Sondheim
• An appreciation in LGBTQ Nation focuses on Sondheim's growth from closeted gay man to gay icon.
• Michael Granoff wrote Sondheim and Me, personal memories of the composer, who was a family friend.

Chris Thile, in Atlanta, Alone

We've seen Chris Thile in Atlanta with his group Nickel Creek and with a large cast of actors and musicians for his variety show Live from Here [see my blog posts of 04/2017 and 05/2018]. He's always been the life of the party, playing off the others on stage.

So what could he do all alone last Monday, November 22 at the vast Symphony Hall of Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center? In disbelief before the show, several members of the audience took photos of the forlorn stage, draped in black, bare except for a microphone stand and stool.

Thile filled the space and a good 90 minutes with a dozen or more characters. He greeted us as old friends that he hadn't seen in a long time -- which, in fact, we are.

He opened with a suite of songs and followed up with amusing stories about his connections to each one. He brought Bach into the mix, whose persona and imagination are crystal clear when Thile plays his mandolin. Later, he introduced Bach to an admirer, Bartok.

We got to meet young fundamentalist Chris Thile in dialogue with his older agnostic-but-still-searching self, performing songs on the theme of spirituality from his truly solo album Laysongs. He conjured the devil for a 12-minute musical drama "Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth." He explained, "The voice is Screwtape," a devil from C. S. Lewis's book The Screwtape Letters, "and the mandolin is me." (November 22 happens to be the day in 1963 Lewis died concomitantly with JFK. The Episcopal church honors Lewis on that date.)

Bob Dylan's fare-thee-well song "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" was a piece of musical theatre. When Thile sang, "It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe," the presence of that woman was reflected in his face and tone, and we felt as if we were witnessing the break-up of a tumultuous relationship.

Of course, Thile shared the spotlight with his mandolin, a character with a mind of its own. Between verses, it veered off into other keys, moods, and strange sound effects.

Thile's voice plays many parts. At times it's a crooner, a yodeler, and an operatic countertenor sustaining straight high tones. In a very affecting moment, Thile stepped away from the mic to sing softly with the house.

At age 62, now, I recognized the same mix of ages and types that I found so remarkable 20 years ago when he performed with Nickel Creek at the Variety Playhouse -- teens and their grandparents, and everyone in between - hipsters, ex-hippies, cowboys, churchgoers, Bohemians.

That bodes well for Thile's professional longevity. If mine holds up, I'll see him again.

Stewardship Message: "The Creator Doesn't Need Our Money, But..."

Good morning. Besides singing with the choir, I work with EfM, and I’m clerk of the Vestry. That means I take notes while others explore options and make hard decisions. That means I have all the fun with none of the responsibility.

But when I was a voting member of the Vestry, I would wake in the night worried because pledges came in so slowly. We saw needs and we saw opportunities, but without pledges to make the budget, our hands were tied. Worse, we had to contemplate cutting programs and staff. This happened every year that I was on the Vestry, and it has happened every year since. We’ve always made it, but it has always been a close call.

When I became Senior Warden, I read books on stewardship. They offered nothing that I didn’t already see here.

[PHOTO: The view from the lectern at evening. Photo by Susan Rouse, 2018.]

Then, doing research for EfM, I ran across a great stewardship message from the days of Queen Elizabeth (the First). For a pledge drive in 1599, Richard Hooker preached that “the Creator of Heaven and Earth does not need our money. Rather, it is we who need to give it.”

That message resonated with me, because of something a counselor said when I was just out of college and he was helping me to find my way. I was working a minimum wage job, and one hour with him cost as much as rent. But when I told him that I would ask Mom and Dad to foot the bill, he said no. He explained that money does more than pay for a product or service; money is a symbol. It expresses our values. He said that, unless I paid to the limit of my ability, I would not be committed to our work. He cut his fee in half so that what I gave would be mine, and would mean a lot to me.

Likewise at St. James Church. The more I’ve given, the more deeply I’ve felt invested in the ministries of the church, even the ones that don’t involve me.

For the sake of maintaining this campus, our staff, worship, music, education, and our ministry of hospitality;

for the sake of the youth and families, couples and singles, retired people and those beyond our walls that we want to draw in;

for the sake of our own faith and personal connection to the Body of Christ; and

for the sake of our Vestry’s getting a good night's sleep,

Pledge to the limit of your ability, and pledge now.

How Stephen Sondheim Responded When I Told Him His Impact on Me

Mr. Sondheim died at his home today at age 91. On his 80th birthday, I sent him my blogpost about him as my teacher (see my tribute).

His response, typed on the same tiny rectangle of stationery as communications going back to 1977, read "Dear Scott Smoot, Thank you for sending me the article. I blush."

I feel so much gratitude.

PS - Tonight my friend Jason sent this perfect selection from Sondheim's work:

If I cannot fly, let me sing.

See my Sondheim page for a curated list of articles about him, his work, his collaborators and competitors, and his impact on my personal life and faith.

Boston, "City on a Hill"

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356 miles from Shillington PA to Boston MA
October 19 - November 18

I've biked enough miles on trails around Atlanta this past month to reach Boston, latest stop on my virtual world tour of places I've lived and loved.

I visited Boston in 2013 with my friend Suzanne to see where the city's founder John Winthrop and his nemesis Anne Hutchinson faced each other in the 1630s. Since 1992, I've drafted three or four scripts for an opera that I want to compose about them. Their confrontation is mythical, i.e., a true story that keeps happening -- and not just because their descendants faced off for President in 2004 (Kerry descended from Winthrop, Bush from Hutchinson).

[PHOTO: My friend Suzanne happened to be in Boston again Saturday, where she photographed one of the public gardens. I slipped in a selfie from my ride in downtown Atlanta the week before.]

My opera's working title is City on a Hill, because John Winthrop made that Biblical epithet for Jerusalem into the Massachusetts Bay Company's mission statement. Preaching on the deck of the Arbella before they landed, he said the Puritans must show the world how a faithful community can govern itself with mutual care. His inspirational sermon is history's first statement of "American exceptionalism" and the opening number for my opera. Then a big chorus number will cover the next few years as everyone pitches in to build Boston -- homes and government -- from scratch.

But I've also considered calling the opera Inner Voice for Anne Hutchinson's inner assurance that God had chosen her for heaven. When you've got that, she preached, you don't need "good works," sin isn't a deal-breaker, and no one but no one can tell you what's right for you to do. In the precarious balance between individual choice and community responsibility that we still see today in battles over mandates and gun regulations, she tipped the scale on the side of radical individualism. I wrote her first song with a scale outside the usual major-minor ones because she brings an alien element into Winthrop's precious project.

I love the fact that she moved across the street from the Winthrops with her doting husband and their 20-odd children. [A pizza place and a bank occupy those spaces today. See a photo from my pilgrimage to the site, along with other pictures of Suzanne and me on our New England trip in 2013]. Winthrop was alarmed to see both men and women, his wife included, filling Hutchinson's house to hear her teach, with an overflow crowd in the street. On Sundays, her followers heckled preachers who implied that salvation depended on doing "good works." Her male disciples gained office, including the governorship.

It took a couple of years, but Winthrop out-maneuvered her. The finale of act one is the chaotic election that he relocated outside of town where his rural supporters would outnumber her urban ones -- a kind of gerrymandering before that term existed. Once he re-takes the reins of government, he puts her on trial.

Although Winthrop wrote a book about their confrontation to justify his behavior to the English public, he's remarkably candid about the unnamed adversary he refers to as "that woman." Since Anne Hutchinson left behind no writings, we can thank Winthrop for reporting how she out-argued him and his minions on points of law and Scripture. In the end, Winthrop abandoned all pretense of reason and just pulled rank to expel her and her supporters.

For my opera, the climactic aria would be Anne's prophecy. When she saw that facts and law weren't going to win her case, she cut loose and predicted doom for all of her enemies. Officers sought to silence her, but Winthrop signaled them to let her go on: he saw an opportunity. When she finished, he asked innocently how she could be so sure about the future. God told me, she said. Even her supporters gasped, for everyone accepted that the time of God's revelation ended with the book of Revelation. She was effectively admitting to some kind of supernatural spirit communication, i.e., witchcraft.

When my friend Suzanne and I visited Boston in 2013, we saw posters for a new opera about, yes, Anne Hutchinson's confrontation with John Winthrop. Sigh. I was deflated.

Still, there are multiple operas about some characters, Orpheus, Figaro, Manon Lescaut. I'm retired now, with some time on my hands, so there may yet be a future for City on a Hill.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow my bike tour from the start.

Dementia Diary: "Miraculous"

These days, Mom's thoughts often get scrambled before she can push them out. But she said very clearly that turning 87 was "miraculous." She'd had no idea she was that old, and she seemed pleased with herself.

The staff at Arbor Terrace had done up her hair. Laura, her longtime companion from Visiting Angels, brought balloons and a card. She made sure Mom was spiffy in nice clothes with pearl earrings and she was helping Mom with lipstick when my sister Kim and I arrived after lunch. Reminded to "kiss" a tissue to remove excess lipstick, Mom instead used her fingers and blew a kiss to us.

We brought an orchid, cupcakes with blue and yellow icing, and a chocolate shake. When we observed that the icing colored her mouth, she stuck out her blue tongue.

During a visit on October 28, Kim helped Mom to don her old tap shoes. Seated, Mom immediately tapped.

Find a list of my other articles covering our experiences over the past decade in my page Dementia Diary

Thelma Craig Maier Remembered on All Soul's Day

On All Souls Day, Episcopalians remember people who helped us in our spiritual growth. My maternal grandmother Thelma Craig Maier (1902-1991), who died thirty years ago, said nothing to me about spirituality except "God is love." She attended church for awhile near the end, but never went back after the preacher announced that she was the church's oldest member.

Still, she was part of my spiritual growth, and she is still with me, as I wrote in a blogpost about significant dreams:

My grandmother lived in a modest but immaculate home in Madeira, north of Cincinnati. It was a home purchased by her son, my Uncle Jack, in the late 1940s. She moved in when Jack and his wife Blanche moved to the swanky Indian Hills neighborhood.

Not long after my grandmother died, I had a vivid dream from which I awoke with tears streaming down my face. That was unprecedented, and I took notice! In the dream, I searched every room of her home for "the secret to me." Something there, I didn't know what, was the key to my personality and my future. I cried because I could not find it.

On reflection, the "key" was nothing in the house, but the house itself: the sense of myself as loved, worthy, special, that I felt whenever I visited my grandmother's home. Her antiques and her notions of interior decoration (pink shag rug in the kitchen, pink marbled wall paper in the tiny bathroom along with and chandeliered sconces) made the place, for me, the epitome of class.
from Geography of the Self (blogpost of 04/2013)

[My poem Wingtips condenses a much of what I say here in six short stanzas.]

She had no use for the past. "Rome," she said after a visit, "would be all right if they'd clean up all those ruins." She kept up with the times, buying a new Pontiac (remember Pontiacs?) every year, installing central air conditioning before anyone else I knew, and buying a great big color TV, the first one I ever saw.

She laughed when I asked for her earliest memory, saying, "I don't know; I've never thought about my memories." But she did recall riding the train to Kansas with her mother Myrtle Craig to the end of the rail to stand on a hard-packed dirt floor at her grandfather's deathbed.

We were reminiscing on the evening after my cousin Michael's funeral. When Michael came out as gay around 1970, his parents thought he would be a bad influence on his siblings, and he left for San Francisco. First, he stopped by our grandmother's house to tell her. "He sat right where you are now," she said, "and told me he was gay. And I said that didn't matter to me, I always love him." When he contracted AIDs, his parents welcomed him back and provided him hospice care in their home.

I never heard her discuss memories of her husband Lee, who died before I was born. My mom's cousin Pat Clark Mathers recently told me that Thelma grew tired of Lee, but Lee always adored Thelma and admired her feisty spirit. I suppose an example of that spirit was during the War, when she took a man's place on an assembly line. Her male supervisor fired her for insubordination. In the next decade, she became a real estate agent who worked her way up to high-end properties by the 1970s. Both parents doted on their children Jack and Frances.

I recently uncovered this photo of her, one I never saw before. It's posed as artfully as an 18th century portrait of a queen: expression dignified, posture erect, hair sculpted, nails done, enthroned in her favorite chair, every object in view a valuable antique.

But this is the way I remember her best, dressed for dinner out, smiling, on a pink sofa:

Here is Thelma Maier, looking professional in the late 1940s (I think). Thanks to Amy Liss for the photo!

Here she is with her two children, very early in World War II:

While I've devoted no single page to my grandmother before today, I can see her everywhere in this blog. She's mentioned specifically in these postings:

• Memory and Ritual: Solace at the Solstice (09/2015) recalls when Dad took me at age six on a business trip to Cincinnati to spend one unforgettable day with my grandmother
• Conversations with the Dead (12/2011) includes a passage about my grandmother's "receding" into a world of ghosts during her final years.

Liturgy Adapted from Mary Oliver's "Thirst" (mostly)

Every week, our Education for Ministry seminar (EfM) begins class with a worship service. We are encouraged to be creative, so long as our liturgy hits the same marks as ones authorized in our prayer book.

I'd been reading about Mary Oliver's collection Devotions and made the jump to creating a liturgy that would be a sort of collage of pieces from her work. I read her collection Thirst when it was new during the weekend of my first vestry retreat, and blogged about it. That post A Doorway into Thanks is a perrennial hit, read now by thousands.

A Short Worship Service Adapted from Poet Mary Oliver's Thirst (2006)

The ellipsis [...] marks my omissions from Oliver's text; two asterisks ** mark space breaks inserted for the purpose of group reading. Other spaces are Mary Oliver's own.

Opening from "Six Recognitions of the Lord" p. 26
I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.

Confession ibid
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour
me a little. And tenderness too. My
need is great. Beauty walks so freely
and with such gentleness. Impatience puts
a halter on my face and I run away over
the green fields wanting your voice, your
tenderness, but having to do with only
the sweet grasses of the fields against
my body. When I first found you I was
filled with light, now the darkness grows
and it is filled with crooked things, bitter
and weak, each one bearing my name.

A Song of Praise from "Messenger" p.1 (adapted for responsive reading - response after each asterisk)
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird -- equal seekers of sweetness,*
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled mud.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?*
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished,[...]*
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,*
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

Homily "The Summer Day" from The House of Light (1992)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.**

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.**

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Prayers from "Praying" p. 37
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Silence may follow. Worshipers are encouraged to speak their own petitions.

We sum up all our petitions in the words that our Lord Jesus Christ taught us, saying...
The Lord's Prayer

Collect to be selected from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

Closing "Thirst" p. 69
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers whic, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.

Theology for Breakfast: Fr. Adam Trambley in Forward Day by Day

After feeding the dog, birds and squirrels each morning, I sit with my coffee to do morning prayer ("Open my lips, O Lord" --sip--"and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise") and to read the meditation on the day's scripture from the quarterly publication Forward Day by Day. In August 2021, I especially looked forward to the insights of Adam Trambley, a priest in Pennsylvania.

Maybe because this was my first August in 40 years that I had no classes to plan for, I responded to his message that cultivating your inner life is a good and necessary thing but not the only thing. You have to get out of yourself, and our church has to get out of itself, too.

CalmOne message Trambley takes from scripture is calm down. The 5000, having just been fed, clamor for assurance that they'll always have bread (John 6); Trambley says they want a "silver bullet" to make everything fine forever, and that's not what Jesus offers. So calm down, and get on with life in Jesus.

Jesus takes the blind man away from the crowd in Bethsaida to restore his sight, then sends him away from town (Mark 8), because, as Trambley writes, "Our most profound experiences of God can initially feel quite fragile," so we need time alone to "process and appreciate what has happened."

For the Feast of Transfiguration, Trambley tells how disappointed he was to discover on a pilgrimage to Mt. Tabor that a modern church there has set aside three grottoes for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, just as Jesus forbade the disciples to do. But Trambley relents: how else can we "hold on to encounters with God that transcend what we can process?" (I call this blog my "word sanctuary" as I use it for that purpose.)

When Paul admonishes us to be "careful...how you live...making the most of the time" (Ephesians 5.15-16), Trambley says it's not about being more efficient in tackling our to-do lists:

A wise relationship to time means appreciating every moment and relishing it. Drunkenness and debauchery are shunned because they numb us to the beauty and wonder pregnant in every instant.

When we open our calendars, God would have us grateful instead of stressed.

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another (Mark 9.50) In these words from Jesus, Trambley sees instruction that we are responsible for nurturing our own souls, and we'll be "disappointed if we depend on others to make our lives complete." But when we do find "wholeness in ourselves," then "we can accept and love people for who they are" and be "at peace with one another."

"Silence" was Trambley's last word on this theme. Among myriad instructions for the building of Solomon's temple in 1 Kings 6, Trambley draws our attention to a detail in verse 7, that noisy cutting and hammering of materials for Solomon's temple were to happen off-site to hallow the site of the temple with silence. The reading was assigned for August 27, a day set aside to honor Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle, pioneering ministers to the deaf. Trambley challenged us to sit ten minutes in silence, eyes closed. (I tried all week and couldn't do it.)

Fun with ScriptureThen Trambling picks up on some fun things in scripture that I had not noticed or at least had not savored before.

• Psalm 136 is a litany of thanksgiving that gets weird in the middle where a slew of obscure kings get slain, each killing followed by the refrain "and [God's] mercy endures forever." Trambley takes comfort from the knowledge that "the geopolitical events of ancient Israel were as problematic as our own," and, God's mercy endures forever.
• Trambley compares Shimei, son of Gura, to a scrappy baseball manager leaving the dugout to scream at the umpire. I'm glad he picked up on this obscure episode in the 2 Samuel 16, where Shimei runs out of his home to curse David and his soldiers. With so much screaming, name-calling, and mockery in our media today, David's response is cool: either he really deserves it and God will let the curses rip, or David will earn credit for his restraint.
• "Wily" isn't a word we associate with Jesus and St. Paul, but Trambley does. He sees wiliness in the readings that go with Psalm 18.27, With the pure you show yourself pure, but with the crooked you are wily. For example, when Jesus tells the disciples to follow a man with a water jar to the unnamed place where he'll meet them for their Passover seder, "he ensures that his disciples receive the gift of the first eucharist since Judas cannot tell the authorities where to find him until after the meal." Then, Paul tells a centurion to "jettison the ship's lifeboats rather then let sailors sneak away and leave his party to their deaths." Then Solomon uses "a wily trick" to identify the infant's true mother. Trambley asks us to think when we were ever "wily for Jesus."

Prayer Walks I was so taken by his insights and easy writing style that I bought a book that he co-edited and contributed to. His collaborators take turns drawing lessons for the Episcopal church in this time of declining membership from the building up of the church in Acts 8. So, for example, in Philip's ministry to the city of Samaria, Trambley sees an apostle responsive to the needs he finds. "Loving, thriving churches see themselves as being called to give away their resources to meet the needs of the community," he writes in Acts to Action, compared to dying churches that keep trying to draw support from the community for what they've been doing for decades.

Trambley tells how his spiritual director pushed him to get involved with the city council soon after moving to his new church. Soon, he was offering the church to the council for some community needs, and then there was reciprocation and mutual gratitude.

Trambley also describes taking "prayer walks" sometimes alone, but more often with officials and parishioners. All that's required is

...to take a thirty- to sixty-minute walk in the community or neighborhood and to be in coversation with God about what you see. As you encounter places where things are going well, give thanks. Where you see problems, ask God to intervene. When you find the beginnings of new life, ask God's blessing. The more you walk and pray, the more you will see in the community and what you see will draw you deeper into prayer.

And prayer changes the person who does the praying, especially in growing their awareness.

He seems to be a wise and humble priest working with the Acts 8 Movement to find a way forward for our national church. I'll look for more. See acts8movement.org.

"Fire Shut Up in My Bones": Opera Makes a Man

The opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones puts everything out there in the first three minutes. Before the curtain rises, we see a projection of a verse by the prophet Jeremiah from which the title comes, a signal that a truth "shut up like fire" will be spoken. The curtain rises on a young man with a gun singing to us "they're here," the tears and anger walled in since childhood. A woman enters his space but stays behind him as she urges him to use the gun to fulfill his destiny. We understand that she personifies Destiny, and that she is tempting him the way the Devil tempts Everyman in the medieval drama.

But where's the angel who should be standing on this Everyman's other side? When the scene is repeated in the dramatic context of Act Three, the identity of the character who fills that angel space has meaning and great emotional impact.

[I'd forgotten many specifics of the opera when I revisited this article months after the broadcast, but just re-reading the previous sentence brought back the impact full force, with tears.]

Based on the 2014 memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, the opera's three acts tell of his childhood in rural Louisiana before an incident of "betrayal" by an older cousin, his adolescence after that incident, and his freshman year at Louisiana's Grambling State. In an inspired choice, the librettist Kasi Lemmons has grown-up "Charles" (baritone Will Liverman) on stage shadowing his childhood self "Char'es-Baby" (13-year-old Walter Russell III), to amplify emotions and interpret the significance of certain memories.

Lemmons writes mostly in couplets, the rhymes assisting us to follow the development of each thought. She re-introduces certain phrases throughout the story so that different scenes "rhyme" in a way, too. I recall Kiss me, hug me... You've got to break up the dirt to make things grow... sometimes you have to leave it in the road... love with a laugh [isn't worth much -- pardon my incomplete memory of this and the other phrases].

Composer Terence Blanchard propels the action with a variety of colors and tempos in the orchestra with incidental references to gospel, blues, and even disco. From repeated phrases in the libretto, he creates musical "hooks" that, like the opening scene, gain new meaning as they repeat in new contexts. Like rhymes, these repetitions serve as benchmarks for the development of the protagonist. For the specially-paired "Charles" and "Char'es-Baby," Blanchard has written vocal lines that the boy handles with power and self-assurance and the baritone enriches with his trained sound.

During the Live in HD broadcast Saturday October 23, different singers and members of the creative team spoke of what the piece says about perseverance and survival of trauma.

For me, the theme that emerged even more than perseverance is an exploration of what it means to "be a man." From the first time we see "Char'es-Baby," he's being told not to skip, not to be such "a mama's boy"; older Charles describes him as "a child of peculiar grace." For his father, being a man is about playing around. His sons echo him, showing their youngest brother that love is something men laugh and brag about.

His brawny uncle Paul models physical strength, but more than that, a man's responsibility to provide for his sister's family when the boys' father cuts out.

The mission to "make a man" out of Charles opens an opportunity for the traumatic betrayal. His older cousin Chester rooms with Charles and teaches him to steal candy, because, he says, a man makes up his own rules. Then Chester introduces a new "game" behind the closed door to Char'es-Baby's bedroom. The creative team makes the tension of the scene unbearable. There is no enactment: the actors stand apart from each other, facing the audience. But the effect is powerful and painful to watch (or recall). The music draws out the tension while lyrics repeat what the cousin said about a game, stealing candy, implying what's happening from an oblique angle.

[By coincidence, I saw the opera on the same day that I heard an interview on NPR's Fresh Air with actor/singer Billy Porter, whose stepfather abused him under the same pretext of "making a man out of him."]

Keeping the event as a secret shame, Charles continues to doubt his own manhood. When his brothers learn that he "got laid," they say, "You're a man, now." But he's disturbed by erotic dreams suggested on stage by an ensemble of male dancers, and thinks something's wrong with him. The Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, step-dancing with their "Kappa canes," presents another model for masculinity that involves service, military discipline, and self-sacrifice for sake of brotherhood.

In the very satisfying resolution, being a man isn't about sex or sexuality, physical strength or dominance. Charles has the courage to be honest and the strength to leave those other games behind.

Terence Blanchard, composer / libretto by Kasi Lemmons
adapted from Charles M. Blow’s moving memoir
co-directed by James Robinson and Camille A. Brown. Brown also choreographed the production.
Baritone Will Liverman as Charles, soprano Angel Blue as Destiny/Loneliness/Greta, soprano Latonia Moore as the mother Billie, and 13-year-old Walter Russell III as Char’es-Baby.

On a Bike to Updike's Childhood Home

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147 miles from Washington DC to Shillington PA
October 14-19

Heading towards Boston on my virtual world tour, I've taken a side trip to revisit a town where I've never set foot, Shillington PA. John Updike's childhood home opens there as a museum this very week. Updike fans know the place well enough from his fiction, poetry, and essays for it to feel like a home they remember.

[PHOTO: With most, but not all, of the Updike books I've read, I'm pictured in front of the old Updike home in Shillington, PA, now a museum.]

When I covered the last 24 miles on a bike trail near Atlanta yesterday, the sunlight was so clear and the October air so clean and dry that I could count the needles on a pine 100 feet ahead. That's how John Updike's writing is, precise to the tiniest detail, spacious to encompass an entire time and place. It's been refreshing to read his work again to prepare for this visit.

In his poetry collection Endpoint, completed during his final illness, Updike tells why he returned so often to his Shillington years in his work. "I've written these before, these modest facts, / but their meaning has no bottom in my mind" (27). Updike expresses gratitude that his words have "formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts" (19).

That same desire to praise and preserve what I've loved is what drives me to write this blog. Updike wrote elsewhere that it's an act of worship to describe as accurately and honestly as possible what the Creator has made.

In his last years, Updike returned to the old place in valedictory stories and poems that are deeply moving. See my blogposts Endpoint: Light at Sunset (04/2009), My Father's Tears: The Updike Variations (07/2009). In Jung Over: Geography of the Self (04/2013), having re-read the Shillington part of Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness, I reflect on a dream of my own personal "Shillington." See my Updike page for a curated list of blogposts about his work and about him.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow my bike tour from the start.

Missing Janet Jackson

Sam Sanders, the ebullient host of NPR's broadcast-podcast It's Been a Minute always ends his show asking us to send him a message about the best thing that happened all week. The best thing that happened to me was that he programmed a whole hour on Janet Jackson (October 9) introducing me 35 years late to her album Control. Since then, her music has added a swagger to my step wherever I've gone. I feel 27 again.

Sam interviewed Jackson's producers James Harris III ("Jimmy Jam") and Terry Lewis. They chose the assignment to record an album with Janet Jackson because they saw in her TV sitcom performances an "attitude" that didn't show in her two lackluster pop albums. They thought that she would be interesting to write songs for.

Their collaboration started with "therapy," just hanging out with her at restaurants and movies, asking her questions. After a week of that, she asked when they were going to start work. They presented her these lyrics from "Control":

When I was seventeen,
I did what people told me.
Did what my father said
and let my mother mold me.
But that was long ago.
I'm in control...

Other verses were about regaining control after losing it over first love -- "I didn't know what hit me" -- and her determination to take control of her career. Incredulous, she asked, "Do you mean that you're going to make songs from everything we talk about?" Yes. She said, "Then I want to talk to you about this and this...!"

The songs that resulted are all different in character, "but they hang together," Sanders says. From taking control, kicking back against "nasty boys" and the lout who hasn't done anything for her lately, she looks for someone better. She surrenders some control when she finds someone who gives her joy. She warns, "Let's wait awhile / before we go too far," but undercuts that message when she ends the album with a make-out song "Funny How Time Flies (When You're Having Fun)."

Listening to the album for the first time, I hear what makes Harris and Lewis call her "fearless, relentless, beautiful." Hers is a supple voice capable of both piercing high notes and of a low whisper so sensuous in the last song that my mouth goes dry. The one song that I recognized as hers before this week is "Nasty Boys," more growled than sung, but I marvel now at how she draws the word "boys" out to four expressive syllables.

Janet's work with Harris and Lewis shares some qualities that I'd loved in Michael Jackson's work with Quincy Jones. In their songs, you get some bright colors, a layered texture with some fast-moving parts, some over-arching slow melodies, and unexpected bits of punctuation from brass or percussion. Other 80s acts used this layered approach -- and so does Mozart! -- but I hear more care for variety and surprise in these early works by Michael and Janet. Also, these dancers' voices dance: breaths, cries, and segmentation of some phrases amount to a solo rhythm track like a tapper's tattoos.

Sam's radio show moved on to the incident that halted Janet Jackson's career in 2004. Sam plays a clip of Justin Timberlake's admission that their "stunt that went too far" was a 50-50 mistake, but, he said, "I'm only getting 10 percent of the blame."

I hear that Janet's doing well in Europe and winning awards for previous work. I'm planning to catch up with her. Only 34 years of music to go.

Kennedy Center's Summer of Sondheim 20 Years Later

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258 miles from Durham NC to Washington DC
September 9 - October 13

Kennedy Center is where I found my tribe. It was 2002, summer of the center's "Sondheim Celebration." Cycling around Atlanta this month, I've covered enough miles to take me to Washington, where I can virtually revisit this place and that time.

On the shuttle from the Metro to Kennedy Center, I overheard conversations among Sondheim fans from as far away as Australia who, like me, had donated $2000 to the Center in 2001 for the privilege of buying $500 seats to six Sondheim shows being staged at the center during the summer of 2002. I subscribed to The Sondheim Review and I checked out a couple of Sondheim web sites, but I still felt pretty isolated in my fandom. Sondheim himself called his work "caviar to the general," an acquired taste. So what a joy it was to be in a space where so many of us shared the same appreciation for his work.

We rose to our feet as one to roar our approval for Jonathan Tunick when he took the podium to conduct Company. The hall was filled with people who, like me, knew Tunick's orchestrations for 30 years of Sondheim shows, had probably read all the same interviews with him that I had read, appreciated the nuances of his work, and wanted him to know how much the music meant to us.

At Sweeney Todd, the plucky understudy who took Christine Baranski's role of "Mrs. Lovett" went up on a line during the song "A Little Priest." All of us shouted the cue; she said, "Thanks," and finished the song with applomb.

Seeing so much Sondheim back-to-back at one venue brought out some commonalities in his work.

• What was the same is how it was all so different in subject, look, sound, and tone.
• At least one number in every show challenged actors to perform some combination of multi-tasked staging, multi-layered character, rapid patter, and vocal athleticism that earned them huge heartfelt hands. I thought again and again how much Sondheim gives to the actor.
• Different as the shows are, one common theme emerged: we don't have a lot of time on earth to connect to others, so get to it. (Autumnal leaves in the otherwise summery setting for A Little Night Music tipped me off to this one. I'd thought of it as a romantic comedy. At Kennedy Center, I realized, it's about death!)

My Sondheim summer wouldn't have happened without Gloria Friedgen, a dynamic and innovative science teacher who had been my colleague at The Walker School in Marietta, GA. I'd taught her daughters Kristina and Katie in class, and had spent hundreds of hours with them in the after-school drama club doing Midsummer Night's Dream, Little Shop of Horrors, cabarets, and Into the Woods, Jr. which featured Gloria as the cow. For two weekends at different ends of the summer of 2002, Gloria hosted me at her home in Maryland, where I met her charming Italian mother and Coach Ralph Friedgen. While he worked with his team, Gloria and the girls took me to DC to see Sondheim shows.

The shows that we saw, though not the specific productions, are covered in other posts on this blog. Here are some samples: Company, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Passion. See my Sondheim page for a curated list of many, many articles about Sondheim, his shows, and his collaborators.

Since then, I've returned to the Washington area two more times for Sondheim shows. Read about those in my blog reflections Follies Haunting and Haunted, and Road Trip for Road Show.

More Kennedy Center connections: The center opened in 1970 with Leonard Bernstein's Mass, (11/2013) about which I have many very strong very mixed feelings. Then, for many years, my colleague Julia Chadwick and I took 8th graders to see the play Shear Madness on the rooftop theatre of the KC, a model for audience participation that I used in my own series of mystery dinner theatre plays (05/2014). Finally, Julia let me skip a night to go with student Buck C. to a concert hall nearby to see singer Cleo Laine (05/2009) whom I'd been trying to see for 20 years.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

How John Adams Composed for 9/11

Before John Adams composed a single note for his commissioned commemoration of 9/11, he took a month to map a strategy and gather words and images of people close to the events of that day. His thinking for this one-of-a-kind assignment could be a good model for any artist with a public responsibility.

His plans worked.  When Robert Spano conducted On the Transmigration of Souls for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in 2007, I was there with a group of teens and teachers in the balcony startled when sounds of New York streets surrounded us. A distant siren cued a boy's recorded utterance, "missing," looped to make a pulse over which the orchestra played extended chords. Soon other recorded voices spoke some of the names of the victims, then sentences about lost loved ones, such as

He was extremely good-looking...
She had a voice like an angel...
His mother says "He used to call me every day."

On his website Earbox.com, Adams says that, for occasions like these, "words fail." He chose, instead of poetry or rhetoric, these "humblest expressions" of feeling without adornment or drama. Adams writes that we

know how to keep our emotions in check, and we know how to mask them with humor or irony. Music [can] unlock those controls and bring us face to face with our raw, uncensored and unattenuated feeling.

Even now the memory of hearing a hundred voices in harmony singing those phrases in a conversational rhythm breaks my heart.

When the text came down to irreducible words "I loved him," "light,""day," and "sky," the music brought catharsis with turbulent strings and keening voices before subsiding into sounds that convey what Adams intended, "gravitas and serenity," through chimes, whispered voices, and eerie celesta. When sounds of New York returned, we, too, had "transmigrated," not from state of body to state of soul, but from sorrow of remembrance to ordinary time and life going on.

On the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last month, a critic placed Adams's work above the "musical ambulance chasing" of other composers' 9/11 pieces.

Adams tells how he prepared for the composition in his memoir (Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). He foresaw that any composer who might seek to amplify the "tortured emotions" and "iconography" of that days' events would produce something in poor taste, an embarrassment. (I heard an egregious example in the same concert hall, the only time I was ever embarrassed for Robert Spano.) Adams was also uneasy about how our grief on that day was mixed with indignation at "the temerity, the outright flamboyance of the attacks" (263). He resolved to "make a public statement that went beyond the usual self-centered auteur concerns" without getting into the political debate over the meaning of the event.

Instead, he wanted to create "a memory space." He writes "I decided that the only way to approach this theme was to make it about the most intimate experiences of the people involved" (265). He took his text from notices for missing people papered around the city soon after 9/11 and from short memorials printed in the New York Times over the months that followed. He recorded the sounds of the city himself. He took inspiration from silent amateur video footage of "millions of pieces of what looked almost like confetti [that] drifted gently amid the clouds of dust and smoke," paper from all those offices (266).

Form followed content as Adams conceived his piece with Charles Ives in mind. Adams had recently conducted the maverick composer's work, appreciating how his compositions are like landscape paintings with foreground, middle ground, and background all visible at the same time (227).

In my mind, Ives was the first composer to approach the orchestral setting as if it were a giant mixing board. Objects, be they fragments or tunes, atmospheric effects, or enormous blocks of sound, appear on the listener's radar as if the composer were moving faders in a grand mix. This is a radically different way of treating musical materials from the traditional rhetorical procedures of European art music, where the discourse is far more linear and logically spun out.

Also, he adds, Ives "kept the vernacular roots of the art alive within the context of formal experimentation," unlike other twentieth-century composers who were "super-refining" their ideas and "following self-imposed protocols that robbed the experience of its cultural connectivity" (228). Hence Transmigration's layers of action: taped sounds, orchestral music, text spoken and sung. Adams also quotes from Ives's piece The Unanswered Question, its elongated chords in the strings and its probing trumpet call (266).

Early performances in New York and London had Adams thinking his piece was "a dud," but the performance that I heard in Atlanta and another in Cincinnati encouraged him. There were better balances of the digital sounds to the live ones. "The pure American quality of [the choruses'] enunciation and their perfectly balanced sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the words to a transcendental level" (267).

I remember hearing the piece's premiere in a radio broadcast from New York. Already very familiar with Adams's work, I was disappointed because I thought that Adams had only put together the most obvious things using some tools of his post-minimalist style, taking us on a predictable, inevitable emotional journey; he hadn't really composed anything. Now I see, that's the beauty of his achievement. 

[See a curated list of many more articles about Adams on my page The Minimalist Zone. One of the best is Slow Motion Emotion about the piece "Christian Zeal and Activity."]