Peter Sagal with Lois Reitzes on Atlanta's WABE FM

Local radio personality Lois Reitzes interviewed Peter Sagal for her program City Lights on WABE-FM in Atlanta. I enjoyed hearing the backstage perspective on his radio program Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Lois asked him about a distinction he draws between insults and mockery. Sagal says he hopes never to insult anyone. "It doesn't help the person you insult," he said. "No one ever says, 'He called me a moron. Maybe I should reconsider my approach.'" He added that insults don't do anything for the insulter beyond feeding the adrenaline rush we're all addicted to on social media.

"But mockery," he says, "brings powerful people down to our human level. It doesn't change anyone, or else Ted Cruz would've resigned years ago," but it's a comfort and it takes the anger out of the news. That's what has brought me back to his show regularly for many years now.

That, and the enjoyment I have just feeling that I know the panelists. Sagal's producer and benevolent overlord Doug Berman, who also produced the much-beloved Car Talk, taught Sagal that it's not how clever you are, but whether people who listen alone in their cars or in the shower get to feel that you're someone they like to be with.

I first heard the show when it was studio-only panel show, and the jokes were about Bill Clinton and the Blue Dress Scandal. When the ex-President was a guest on the show years later, Sagal started by asking Mr. Clinton, "Have you ever heard our show, Sir?" Hearing "no," Sagal said, "Then I just want you to know that we have always treated you with the utmost respect." Big laugh. By the way, Clinton had to answer trivia questions about My Little Pony.

Recently, Sagal made me cry. He waited to the last five minutes of the show to pay tribute to longtime panelist P. J. O'Rourke who had just died of lung cancer. "That persona of the cantankerous grouch was just that, a persona," Sagal told us. When Sagal's mother died, O'Rourke in a note told him that "you never get over it, but" you develop a nostalgic ache that becomes "a kind of comfort."

The next week, Sagal played clips of O'Rourke from the show, including one from 2016 in which the conservative columnist made an announcement, later quoted on NPR's website:

I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises.... It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.

Me & Canada's PM

←← | ← || →

Atlanta weather hasn't permitted me much time on my bike this year so far, but I've pedaled 130+ miles, enough to advance my virtual bike tour from Bar Harbor ME to the Canadian border. The guy on his bike photobombing me is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau patroling the border one day before his mask mandate expires.

For the record: I'm adding in 48 miles of swimming to my total, putting them "in the bank" for when I may need to cross a body of water in my forthcoming world travels. I've been swimming at least six miles a week since mid-December at the average speed of 1.5 m.p.h.

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

Sheepish Confession

The priest who contributed meditations to this month's issue of Forward Day by Day responds to John 10.10-11, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I am the Good Shepherd...." She confesses that she knows no sheep and has always accepted what she'd heard, that they are stupid animals. But, no:

Sheep have strong opinions, complex emotional lives, astonishingly good memories, and the ability to run at speeds of more than twenty miles per hour!

That changes the Good Shepherd metaphor:

[Jesus] is not describing us as helpless or expecting us to follow him without question. Instead, he is promising to lay down his life for us exactly as we are: by turns headstrong, doubtful, fearful, and joyful, sometimes eager to follow and sometimes reluctant.

She concludes that "if we can find it within ourselves to follow him, he will lead us into abundant life."

In this context, the word "abundant" suddenly revealed its DNA to me. The prefix a- means no and bund is related to our English boundary, itself related to a binding as, being bound in chains. I've always pictured "abundance" as a pile of stuff, but it really suggests freedom, fearless exploration, going "out of bounds" in a good way.

I'm glad that I checked into Sheep 101 info, a web site run by Susan Schoenian of the University of Maryland for the benefit of 4H and other youth programs. She includes great examples of smart sheep. My favorite one is the flock that figured out that they could roll across the cow-catcher bridge on their backs to reach the neighbors' garden.

But how did sheep get their undeserved reputation? That comes from their being followers, Shoenian says. But when there's a predator, safety for the individual lies in being close as possible to your neighbors. Smart ewe: Who knew?

Isn't it Romantic?

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?"

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."

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.

[For a curated list of my blogposts about these artists and others, see my page Saloon Singers.]

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 Radio Deluxe. (I listen to them Sundays online from Toronto's CJRT 90.1).

[PHOTO, clockwise from top: John Pizzarelli, Jessie Molaskey; Barbara Cook; Peggy Lee; Johnny Hartman, John Coltrane, and McCoy Tyner]

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 say... so they tell me,'" Cook added. "This character hasn't experienced love, and doesn't know if he ever will. Sing it like that." Johnny Hartman does.

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.

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.

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.

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 Follies. 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.

[PHOTO: "Joe Alterman: Joyous and Joyful Young Virtuoso" from Theater Pizzazz.]

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.

Three of the numbers that Alterman 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:

I can only give you love that lasts forever
And a promise to be near each time you call
And the only heart I own
For you and you alone
That's all
--"That's All" by Bob Haymes

...and sometimes, this...

It's not the pale moon
That excites me
That thrills and delights me
Oh no
It's just the nearness of you
--"The Nearness of You" by Hoagy Carmichael

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."

Awwwwwwww.

"For These Eyes of Mine Have Seen Thy Salvation"

Yesterday evening, I joined my friend Susan for one of those church Feast Days that fall on weekdays. The Feast of the Presentation falls 40 days after Christmas. We were delighted to see around ten other people -- a crowd, for something like this.

The service celebrates the story in Luke, chapter 2, of what happens when Mary and Joseph present the baby Jesus at the temple. The main characters are the holy family, of course, but all the lines go to an old man named Simeon, and an old woman named Anna. He has come to the temple every day for years, having been told that he'd not die before seeing the Messiah. She has lived in the temple fasting and praying for years. Each one recognizes the baby, and Simeon gets to sing a song we call the "Nunc Dimittis" that I've performed with choirs at every evensong for 40 years:

Lord, you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised. For these eyes of mine have seen your salvation which you have prepared for all the world to see: a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of your people Israel.

20 years ago, I set those words to music for choir and organ that I'm still very proud of. Composers I love have set these words to music that can bring tears to my eyes, but they invariably set the long sentences as long lines, and I, for one, gasp in the middle of the phrases.

So I imagined the old man out of breath after rushing up to the family: Lo-ord (breath) you now (breath) have set your servant (breath) free (breath) to go in peace (breath) as you have promised. The accompaniment plays with the first notes of his melody, slowly at first, building to rapid arpeggios, a glittery vision of world-wide salvation.

Fr. Roger Allen delivered a very simple sermon that captured my imagination. "What if Simeon had taken the day off? What if Anna had been looking at something else?" That got a laugh. But then he asked us what we're looking for, and will we miss it? I've not stopped thinking about that in the 24 hours since.

Macbeth for the Fun of it

Macbeth clobbers Spider-man! With Joel Coen's Tragedy of Macbeth, Shakespeare's murderous Scot ties Marvel's web-slinger, boasting nine films (2021, 2018, 2015, 2010, 2006, 1997, 1983, 1971 and 1948) and winning outright when you count the famed Japanese version Throne of Blood and filmed stage productions.

Why? For years prior to the latest Spider-man, Marvel fans flooded social media with speculation about a sequel, but I didn't see Shakespeare fans clamoring for a new Macbeth.

No, the fans who keep Shakespeare's franchise going are directors and actors, because they know that Macbeth is fun. Shakespeare's poetry is long on feeling and relationships, but short on staging specifics, so you're challenged to make something different with material that a thousand stage companies have performed before. Within the boundaries of story and verse, Shakespeare packs a playground of images and themes for your creative pleasure.

So, for example, Shakespeare repeatedly calls Macbeth's world both "foul and fair" with other pairs of contrasting words. That gives film connoisseur Coen a good excuse, if he needed one, to shoot in classic black and white.

Macbeth, by calling himself "a poor player who struts and frets his hour on the stage," gives Coen license to skip the rock and muck of medieval Scotland and film most of the action on a dream-like sound-stage set. No actual castle would contain such a maze of infinite passageways, high smooth walls, indefinite light sources, and sharp black shadows that fall in acute angles. Even the outdoor scenes -- a field, a forest, a distant ridge -- are backdrops for action more than environments for it.

Coen makes this a bird-eat-bird world. Scavengers circle above the battlefield in the opening shot; apparitions of witches and Banquo's ghost are re-imagined with ravens. I've thought about Macbeth with every flock of crows I've seen since the movie. Shakespeare may have suggested the avian motif to Coen: I heard references to crows, ravens, wrens, an owl, a falcon, and chickens. A Google search turned up eagles, martens, kites, maggot-pies a.k.a. magpies, choughs, and rooks.

Macbeth is a playground for actors, too. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, older than actors who've recently played the Macbeths on film, make it the story of a passionate couple who, childless, are running out of time to make a legacy. Grizzled and bearish, Washington's Macbeth is furious when a slighter, younger man gets the promotion that Macbeth has earned; the Lady prays to be "unsexed" so that killer instincts may replace maternal ones. When Macbeth wavers, she reminds him of the child she "gave suck" that evidently didn't survive, in order to pull her husband back from the brink of decency. But when he says in admiration, "Produce men-children only," McDormand appears not gratified, but hurt. That dialogue is Exhibit A for what makes Shakespeare fun for actors: in a very short while, they get to show off a range of emotions from dread to scorn to horror to passionate love.

Shakespeare hands a great part to the actor who plays Macduff, Corey Hawkins. He's a young warrior in the background for much of the play, but then we see how Macbeth's hired assassins, failing to find Macduff at home, slaughter his family. Shakespeare gives the wife and eldest son just enough banter to get a sense for their family's warmth; Moses Ingram as the mother is fearful but trying not to show it, and young Ethan Hutchinson is precocious without being precious, making the violence that follows more affecting than I've ever seen. We're still reeling from that when Macduff, in exile, asks how his family is doing. Shakespeare does a remarkable thing, making Macduff silent. Other characters tell him to give voice to his grief. Even now, I'm moved remembering Hawkins' performance, as his Macduff holds the emotions in until he can face Macbeth.

So, I'm crying when I write a piece about how Macbeth is so much fun, but that's the point: Shakespeare's work works, and seeing what different artists find in it is what has kept us coming back for 500 years.