Tour de Quebec: Tête D'Indien

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Scott Smoot at Tete D'Indien, Quebec - virtually

According to legend at Quebec's Tête D'Indien camp site, the fallen rock bears the profile of an indigenous warrior who died of grief when his beloved, a princess, was stolen by white men.

36 years ago, I heard a different story from the man who lived on the site. I stayed some weeks there at the summer home of Dan Rose in 1986. Dan taught biology at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Jackson MS during my first ten years of teaching there. He had purchased for cheap this property on the tip of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula. There was a little cottage with a barn. He remodeled the barn to be his retirement home and stored firewood in the cottage. (My job on many cold nights in July was to haul logs for Dan's fireplace.)

In Dan's version of the legend, he had simply remarked to a local that the rock looked "kinda like an Indian head." By the time I visited, "Tête D'Indien" had become a tourist attraction. Strangers would park in his driveway and even barge into his home to use the restroom, and he wasted a lot of energy shooing them away. When we discovered a two-story mural of "Indian Head" in the food court of the region's shopping mall, he gave up and negotiated with the provincial government to open a campground.

The photo is the view from Dan's backyard. I was reading there one day when Dan directed my attention up the driveway, where two moose, male and female, were chomping at the grass around his mailbox. Then he said, "Look back at the bay!" and I turned just in time to see a whale spout.

I recently uncovered a couple of forgotten poems in my journal from that trip -- in English and in French. See At a Beach in Quebec / Sur la Plage en Quebec and Island at Indian Head, Quebec / L'Ile Dan Rose.

454 miles from Quebec City to Tête D'Indien
March 5 - April 23, 2022

I'm 9416 miles into my second virtual bike trip around the world.
Riding on trails around Atlanta, I've cycled 749 miles in 2022, average speed 15.2 mph.

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

Paul's Turn: Pianist Paul Ford Remembers Broadway

Pianist Paul Ford played for countless Broadway musicals and concerts between the 1970s and his retirement a few years ago. He played mostly for auditions and rehearsals, but he also played for the original runs of Stephen Sondheim shows Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion. Before leaving for New York, Paul Ford mentored me during a summer theatre program in Atlanta's Northside School of Performing Arts.

He has published his memoir Lord Knows, at Least I was There: Working with Stephen Sondheim. Foreword by Mandy Patinkin. New York: Moreclacke Publishing, 2022. [Photo Collage: Paul with his book and the Sondheim scores I own thanks to Paul's influence.]

Ford's memoir gives us the backstory to his time at Northside, including a lip-synched production of Oklahoma in his family's garage, his realization that he was gay, and his introduction to alcohol. He admits that he played through most of his career with a hangover, but he's been sober now for many years, thanks in part to a miraculous coincidence involving a haunted house, a film made there, and that film's leading actress. It makes a good story.

There are so many good stories in this memoir that I read it through in a day. He has fond and funny memories of stars whose first names are enough for any Sondheim fan: Ethel, Julie, Mandy, Bernadette, Patti, Donna, Marin, Lonny, Jim, Lauren, and even Madonna. For memories funny but cringey from work with other composers there are Chita and Liza in Kander and Ebb's dismal musical The Rink, and his bête noire Teresa Stratas, opera diva, who assaulted him during a rehearsal for Rags by Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz.

My favorite story may be the one about Elaine taking Ford to see a show for which she had no tickets: "I am Elaine Stritch," she thundered at the box office, she wanted seats front row center, and she didn't expect to pay. When he asked if she'd ever been refused, she said, "F***ing Mamma Mia."

Many of the stories are about hi-jinx backstage and during rehearsals, when theatre was fun, Ford says, before everyone retreated to dark corners with their phones to "text, text, text." He tells how he played snippets of songs from the early careers of performers when they entered the rehearsal hall. For Sondheim, he played the disturbing opening bars of Psycho by the composer's favorite film composer Bernard Herrmann.

(When Paul saw me from the pit of Into the Woods in 1987, he warmed up the band with "Georgy Girl," the only sheet music I'd been able to find to fit my narrow range in 9th grade. Throughout that summer program, he embarrassed me with that tacky song whenever he could. I was delighted that he remembered.)

Writers and directors are more of a mixed bag. As often as Ford mentions Sondheim, he thanks him for being a real composer who actually wrote down the notes for his songs and knew what he was doing. Not so, many other so-called composers who left it to Ford and the music director Paul Gemignani to make real songs out of little tunes they hummed into tape recorders. No thanks to many directors who had no musical theatre experience, no musical knowledge, and no clue, who mounted revivals ("revisals," Paul calls them) of musicals with their "improvements."

When the story takes him to the marquee for Cats, Ford pauses for a moment of silence to remember the Broadway musical, killed by Andrew "Void" Webber and his ilk, abetted by the producers who have kept the shows running for generations of tourists. The further into the book we go, the more pointed Paul gets on this subject. So far as I've seen in published reports, Sondheim was diplomatic about Webber, but in one story Sondheim and Ford are waiting in a studio where Phantom star Michael Crawford was recording a song that Paul calls "Muzak of the Night." As Crawford asked to try it again slower, slower, and slower still, Sondheim retreated further behind his newspaper, which trembled -- from laughter.

Sondheim fans know what we're in for when Ford asks rhetorically, "Why did I do it? What did it get me?" In Ford's favorite show Gypsy, those are the questions of the main character Rose in a bitter survey of her disappointments in life, when she declares "now it's gonna be my turn." Like that number, Ford's rant pulls in themes from all the preceding material to indict the current lack of sophistication or joy on Broadway.

But the sun comes out when Paul Ford writes about what he loves:

That is why I like overtures and show music so much. The variety! Film music with its combination of source music and dramatic scoring is equally satisfying. Dance music in films and Broadway shows used to be done with great, if not inspired, imagination. Give some expert arranger a little song and let him go to town on it. I love big band and swing music because of the inventiveness and pure joy and humor in the arrangements. I even love jazz because of its harmonic intricacies (220).

Those are loves he passed on to me. I'm about six years younger, so I was very excited at age 15 to have this sophisticated musical genius pay attention to me during breaks in rehearsals. Knowing that I loved comic books, he gave me a cassette recording to the wonderful 1960s musical It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman (songs I still know by heart) and xeroxed copies of Bernstein's Overture to Candide which I still have, which I used to be able to play, and the Weill-Gershwin song "The Saga of Jenny" from his then-favorite musical Lady in the Dark. His parting gift to me was to insist that I look into the works of Stephen Sondheim. [For the rest of that story, all five decades of it, see my Sondheim page.]

If Paul gets to read this review, I hope he'll be gratified to know that I emulated him by playing piano for rehearsals and performances for school productions of Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, Damn Yankees, Joseph... and Big, and that I introduced generations of students to Sondheim. Some of them are now directors and teachers, doing the same.

Also, he and I are evidently the only two people alive who treasure the totally-overlooked song "Poems" from Sondheim's much-overlooked Pacific Overtures.

[See earlier tributes to Paul that are integrated with blogposts about Sondheim as teacher and Sondheim's Tribute to Leonard Bernstein.]

Episcopalians and Race: One Slice of a Complex Story

By coincidence, the scripture assigned to Episcopalians for April 3 was also the text for a sermon I'd just read by Duncan Gray. An Episcopal priest in Mississippi in 1954, Gray was responding to the Supreme Court's then-recent decision in Brown v. Board of Education. I was following up on information new to me about my church's historical stances on racial equality in Stephanie Speller's book The Church Cracked Open when I ran across Gray's sermon.

I encountered Duncan Gray often when I lived in Jackson, MS. I walked my dogs past his house and sometimes parked in front of it to attend my church two doors down. Bishop Gray officiated when I was received into the Episcopal Church around 1985. I retain the sensation of his hands pressing on my head.

[PHOTO: James Meredith in 1962 and Bishop Gray as I remember him years later.]

I also knew Duncan Gray from hearing that he accompanied young James Meredith in 1962 when the younger man defied a racial ban to enroll at Ole Miss that year. During the 1980s, I also sang at St. Andrews Cathedral in downtown Jackson for midday concerts that Gray had instituted to bring mixed-race audiences together The church offered free admission and free sack lunches to make the concerts feasible for workers on their lunch break and for homeless people.

Gray came to mind because I've been reading The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Spellers, the Presiding Bishop's Canon for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation. For her, this time of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and dwindling membership is a time of vulnerability and crisis for the church, a "crack" that may lead to new growth in new directions.

One of her messages is that the Episcopal Church has long been complicit in enslavement and colonization of peoples outside of its white Anglo-Saxon base. The University of the South, Sewanee, whose extension program Education for Ministry (EfM) assigned her book, was itself established by Bishops who not only wanted slavery to continue, but who wanted research to support their belief that all non-white peoples of the world were inferior to, and should be subordinated to, whites (Spellers 82). As the 20th century heated up, she writes, the Episcopal Church maintained silence, and did worse: black clergy were not seated at conferences, and black congregations were ruled by white vestrymen from other parishes.

My experience in Mississippi in the 1980s gave me the opposite impression. All (ALL) the people I knew in my Episcopal Church had flocked there to get away from other churches where segregation was enforced. My friends Joe and Linda were literally kicked out, pushed and dragged out, of their church because they re-enrolled their children in the newly-integrated public school system. They showed me a newspaper they'd saved from the mid-1960s in which people I knew had paid for a full-page ad listing their names in favor of an end to racial segregation.

Gray's sermon takes off from I Corinthians 14.1-19. (Read the sermon.) Gray doesn't get to race until several pages in, when he says matter-of-factly that the Supreme Court decision was the right one. But he leads up to that by observing that Paul downplays speaking in tongues. It may be a gift, but it's not intelligible, not helpful, not persuasive to observers. From this, Gray derives the principle that what the church says should be relevant to the society. Too often, he says, our religion is self-centered.

Gray's sermon could be chapter in Spellers' book. She decries self-centrism -- concern with individual self, preoccupation with the preservation of the institution itself. That this idea is still so relevant is sad; that the Episcopal Church has not been quite so blasé about injustice as the recent book suggests is reassuring.