Death in Stitches: How to Knit a Mystery - Comedy

For the fourth, and probably final, time, my friends and I at St. James Episcopal Church in Marietta, GA devised a murder - mystery - comedy.  We performed Death in StitchesApril 21st in four acts between courses of a $50 - a - plate dinner produced by the Episcopal Church Women (ECW) for charity.

On this Memorial Day, I reflect that freedom works best within a few constraints. 40 blank pages to fill gave me too much freedom as a writer. Even to get started writing the script, I needed a matrix of constraints, both mandates and limits.  Like the victim's knitted blue bootie, the play emerged from stitches going across and down.

The ten parishioners who volunteered to act were like the foundation row that begins any knitted piece.  Six characters were series regulars: the choir's loudest soprano (Leslie Thompson), the hippy-dippy cat lady on the make (M. Susan Rouse) , the domineering Supreme Verger (Jim Chester), the socialite in community theatre (Mary Nimsgern), the former NYPD cop on the altar guild (Mary Duffe), and the wise-cracking parish chef (Tonya Grimmke) who would host a parish dinner with a 1950s theme. As we really did just celebrate 175 years as a parish, we imagined the dinner to be one in a series of "Dinners through the Decades."

Because the actress Dee Gee Reisinger doesn't like to memorize lines, we've always killed her off after act one. She has played a controlling parish secretary asphyxiated with incense, a prying investigative reporter flash frozen into an ice sculpture, and a crass real estate developer done in with a croquet mallet.  This time,  Dee Gee took a character from the news:  the husband - and - wife owners of Hobby Lobby opened an evangelical Bible History Museum in summer 2016.  Dee Gee created artsy-craftsy Celeste Chapel, "like Martha Stewart, only cheaper," and Tom Erb, an actor new to our cast, played her husband, Baptist businessman Elijah Kraft, CEO of the Kraft Kroft.  Naturally, Celeste was ensnared in her own knitting.

My friend Susan Rouse and I had another notion that became important to the story.  Working from Episcopalians' reputation for being conservative about proper ceremony, we wondered what would happen if someone uncovered a missing epistle from St. Paul to an early Altar Guild, specifying some detail of worship that we've been getting wrong for 2000 years?  That gave an opportunity for a newcomer to our cast, Nancy Mitchell, to join the story as Professor Doctor Virginia Howard,  archaeologist, expert in ancient Greek.

That left one more actor to be our detective.  George Marks is a big guy, who readily acceded to my suggestion that he be a TV detective visiting the church. Since Atlanta's now a movie production center, our parking lot has been a staging ground for studios, and the actor Robert Patrick (Terminator II) really did visit our church recently.  The TV detective would team up with the Altar Guild's ex-cop.

With the foundation row of ten characters in place, we had to spin our yarn out across four acts, under 15 minutes each, to accommodate the courses of the dinner. Because we discover the body in act two, we had the 15 minutes of act one for seven characters to meet Celeste and develop the urge to kill her: that's a rate of one motive every two minutes.  I sought guidance from the actors, who told me, in character, what they came to this dinner to get, and what grudge they might have against Celeste.  

Producers Tracye Kampermann and Christina Toland handed us another important idea when they told me they wanted parish youth to dress up as 1950s personalities.  We wrote a hamper full of costumes into our script, and put the body under all the cloth.  Acts three and four always have to be fast -- as the audience, well-libated, gets antsy -- and each act has requirements of its own: audience members cross-examine the suspects in act three; in act four, the truth always emerges in a re-enactment of the incidents around the deed.

There's another important mandate.  It's a comedy, so we expect a laugh about every third line.  During the performance, I kept score, and we did pretty well. There were some flat-out jokes (the cute actor has gone "from hunky to chunky"; a salt shaker in an auction of religious relics is offered as "one ounce of Lot's wife"). But most of the laughs came from putting characters in situations where their most salient traits stuck out. For example, Elijah Kraft, who tried to keep his wife Celeste from donating three million dollars to the church auction, approaches the laundry hamper where the diva and the chef have found a body:

SERENA:  Who is it?

ADDIE: Hard to tell.  Her face is masked by a giant blue bootie.

ELIJAH: (comes forward) Is it -- Celeste?

ADDIE: ...It must be hard for you, Mr. Kraft.

ELIJAH:  Oh, this is terrible, terrible.  I don't see her checkbook anywhere!

Something I love about the process, something that the audience can't appreciate, is that we really do discover the solution to our mystery through rehearsal.  Our cast met one cold day in December and actually went through the motions of what each character did when he or she left the parish hall at the end of act one.  Celeste rushed to the corner to await a ride; who followed her?  Who was diverted, and why?  Who grabbed a costume from that hamper to impersonate an Uber driver?  Where did the false Uber car come from, and how did it end up at another church nearby "in a space reserved for handicapped Presbyterians?" How did the murder weapon end up in the sacristy? The most important question came from George: How did the murderer lift the deceased into that hamper, being as "she wasn't what you would call a size two"?

As the performance approached, our friend George was felled by health issues.  Mary Nimsgern contacted an actor in our parish, Alan Powell, to take over as detective "Brock Salty." Alan was a sport, learning the lines and staging in just a couple weeks. Then a death in the family took Alan away for a week.  He came back, ready to make the show a success.  George was able to see the show.

ECW reports that we cleared $14,500, to be used for parish outreach to the community.   After more than a decade of mystery dinner theatres, they're looking at other ways to raise funds in the future.  Besides, it's not so easy any more for some of us to run across the parish hall, dive and roll, hide in hampers, and die dramatically.  So Death in Stitches was probably the last in our series.

I'm grateful to this cast of actors who helped me to realize a life-long dream to write a series of murder mysteries.

Read about others in the series:  Church and Theatre: Laughing Matter?; Mystery Dinner Theatre for Episcopalians; and Post Mortem: What Slays in Vegas.


[Photo, left to right:  Susan Rouse, Tom Erb, Mary Nimsgern, DeeGee Reisinger, Nancy Mitchell, Jim Chester, Mary Duffe, Leslie Thompson, Alan Powell.  Not pictured: Tonya Grimmke -- see the upper-left hand corner of the Stitches collage.]

Nothing Could Be Finer: Parody for Friend's Retirement

[Top Photo:  Portrait of Mr. Powell by middle school art class, directed by Mrs. Susan Boyer, painted live (mostly) on-camera during our recent arts showcase performance.]

Our friend Bruce Powell finished up his last day as middle school science teacher today, headed for relaxation with his wife Faith, visits from son Davis, and weekends at his rustic cabin in North Carolina.  That all suggested this song parody, performed with colleagues pool side at an after-school fete today:

Bruce’s Retirement
Based on “Carolina in the Morning”
Original lyrics by Gus Kahn, music by Walter Donaldson
New lyrics by Scott Smoot

Nothing could be finer
Than to be in Carolina
For retirement,

When you’ve got a cabin
Nowhere near a science lab in
Your retirement.

Watching vintage westerns
On your V . C. R.
You will get no questions,
Like, what electrons are.

Reading, prone positioned,
In your non - climate - conditioned
Environment

Having Faith and Davis
We suppose that you won’t crave us
In retirement.

No more meetings,
Walker Work,
Or comments to write:
One glass of sangria --
You’ll sleep well at night.

While you dream of soccer,
Don’t forget your friends at Walker
In retirement!

Bruce and Faith at "Death In Stitches," my church play.

"Live From Here" From Atlanta

For Christmas, my friend Suzanne got us tickets at Atlanta's Fox Theatre to see a show then called "Prairie Home Companion," now re-Christened "Live From Here."  We'd seen PHC in the same venue just a couple years ago, when He Who Must Not Be Named dominated the proceedings.  Back then, I wondered about the future of this folksy variety show, seeing mostly grey-hairs.

This time, the crowd was a lot younger, and they picked up on Outkast references that I missed.  (I hear that Outkast is classic.  Now, is Outkast a rap artist, or is it hip - hop?)The place was packed, and we roared approval when Chris stepped out a quarter to six to warm us up.  He mentioned all the other times he's been to Atlanta, and, not bragging, but, I was there for every one. He was maybe 19 when I first saw him here; he must be close to 40 now.  He's just as exuberant as ever, and goofy but endearing in his head-banging and jumping around with that tiny mandolin strapped around his neck, and his giggling.
What strikes me now, as always, is that this guy is learning even as we watch.  He looked genuinely surprised by interactions with his guests Neko Case, Father John Misty, comedian Rory Albanese.  He led an improvised performance of Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" that cycled through subtle iterations of the familiar theme, and ones that rocked.

His guests, unfamiliar to me, had a vocal following in the hall.  To me, the musical guests seemed a bit pretentious, a bit middle school, a bit "Hipster" in a silly way: beards, introverted behavior on stage, black yoga pants and tank top, or baby doll dress -- ugh.  But the headliners had strong voices, layered accompaniments, and lyrics that were at least suggestive of mood, even if they didn't add up to any conclusion.

The comedian's intro to us was a sketch about Chris's future self coming from the future to warn him, "Don't buy that orange shirt!"  He kept us laughing with a gentle domestic tale about being an uncle, meaning that he could help his brother find the niblings' pet gerbil, but, if it didn't work out, well, he's not the one who has to be there when the kids wake up -- been there, done that!   Tom Papa's weekly installment "Out in America" dwelt on Greeks in Detroit, and was sweet.

While the genres of music are wildly divergent, Thile's mandolin always sounds hopeful, energetic, and humane -- even when the context is pensive or downright dark.

Chris ended the evening with his guitarist in duet, paying tribute to a bluegrass legend from Georgia that I've never heard of, Norman Blake. Very sweet, very exciting.

Chris had paid a lot of attention to his location in the show. His "Delta Blues" merged musical allusions to Robert Johnson with jokes about the town's largest employer.  References to Outkast and John Meyer and other Atlanta musicians went mostly over my head, but Suzanne got them.  We had arrived at the Fox via the MARTA transit system, and we enjoyed a ride back to Lenox Square, a place I've known since I was ten years old, running to F.A.O Shwartz to buy puppets.  Now, somewhere near the spot where my 16-year-old self first paid for my own meal at a sit-down restaurant (an early incarnation of Houston's, I recall), she and I enjoyed "True Food." I felt great.

I feel gratitude to Chris, his writing staff, and the stalwart Tim Russell and Rich Dworsky, holdovers from the years with G. K., and the newbies:  It's all one, all kind, all kinds, and very American.

Read earlier posts about the show, from 2016, "Garrison Keillor's Farewell Tour" (06/2016); and "A Daring Home Companion" (04/2017) focused on Chris Thile's debut as host of the show.  When Minnesota Public Radio abruptly pulled Keillor's name and all remnants of his "brand" from their programming, Thile began that week's show with an elegant expression of gratitude to Garrison Keillor for years of enjoyment and for bringing Thile and his friends of Nickel Creek to national attention.

Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy"

On the evening of Sunday, April 29, the Georgia Festival Chorus performed a program they called "Legacy."  Associate Director David Scott tied "legacy" into Scripture whenever he could, but many of us were there to celebrate the legacy of their founding director Frank Boggs.

I sat with my friend Susan in a row up front reserved for Friends and Family of Frank, so we were among the first to learn that he had fallen just minutes before.  With a sturdy caretaker and a daughter at his side, Frank used a walker to take his seat at the front.

Two-thirds of the way through the program, Frank gripped the walker to stand.  His caretaker, helping, pushed the music stand farther away.  Turning to the caretaker, Frank quipped, "Whose side are you on?"

The songs were mostly sacred texts set to music anytime in the last four hundred years, though the program included a clever piece by Cy Coleman with a gospel feel, and "Danny Boy" -- not a religious song, said David Scott, "but a lot of people feel religious about it." Naturally the program ended, as did all the concerts I performed with Frank my high school director in the 1970s, with Lutkin's "The Lord Bless You and Keep You."

The legacy was all there to see and hear in the performance.  Frank, then his associate and assistant conductors, then his choir, bring out of the music some qualities that I learned from him 40 years ago in high school:

• Dynamic contrast.  There was always power "under the hood" that the conductors saved for special occasions.  "You think you've heard fortissimo?"  I could imagine Frank saying, "You ain't heard nothin' yet!"
• Diction.  Much as Frank taught us to love music, he always emphasized the clarity of the words, and made sure that we related to the words, even when they were in foreign languages.
• Commitment.  These people looked so "into" the songs.  Frank taught us to believe in what we were singing, and to put it across, whether it was Vivaldi or Gershwin.
• Music for the Ages.  Frank with his walker, numerous singers unable to stand, one soloist hobbling to the microphone with a cane -- the chorus is old, but, close your eyes, and you wouldn't be able to tell.  Not a wobble, not a crack, but there's a wall of rich tone in every number.

When I saw the title "Legacy," I wondered if Frank is close to giving up?   I see what he had in mind was the opposite:  Making sure that this kind of music, this kind of chorus, the kind of experience he has provided for singers for decades, will last!

Check out past blogposts about Frank and his chorus:

• Carols By Candlelight (Dec. 2008)  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Presents "Total Praise" (Jun. 2009)
• Education: Drill it In or Tease it Out? (from Oct. 2013, a reflection on teaching methods, featuring Frank Boggs) 
• Georgia Festival Chorus "Carols by Candlelight" (Nov. 2014)
• Frank Boggs Celebrates 71 Years of Song (Apr. 2015)
• Tribute to My Teacher (written around 2005)
• Song parody as tribute, "You Seem to Be So Young", for Frank Boggs at 90 

Dementia Diary: "I'm Lost Without My Dog"

"I'm lost without my dog," said Mom, after our regular Saturday breakfast.  You and me both, Mom.

When Valdosta's dog pound advertised a mother dog slated for euthanasia the next day, since her litter had been adopted without her, Dad saw her picture.  He wanted to adopt this "Min-Pin" (a miniature Doberman Pinscher) who resembled his boyhood dog Peggy, but Mom was reluctant to commit to another dog. Then, at the pound,  the dog ran at Mom and jumped in her lap.  Love at first sight! 

That was ten years ago.  Since then, Dad died, Mom moved near me, and then she got her diagnosis of dementia. 

For six years, we had breakfast at the café where little Sassy could join us and take a share of Mom's potatoes.  Then we'd all stroll in the cemetery.  Whenever I left Mom at the front door to Assisted Living, I knew that, next, Sassy would prance beside Mom down the hall, exciting comments from the facility's clients and staff.  Regarding the elevator's door with imperial patience, Sassy would be first to go in, first to get off.  Mom would let go the leash for Sassy to run down the hall to their room, to turn, and wag her tail at the door.  Both would settle in.  Every hour for the remainder of the day, Mom would look at Sassy and say, "You haven't been out, have you?  Let's go." 

Whenever Mom was anxious, or annoyed, I could count on Sassy to distract her from the negative and bring Mom back to laughter. Sassy was always so happy to see me that just my walking through the door set her to capering and licking my face, making Mom laugh.

In March, Sassy suffered a confluence of conditions: inoperable bladder tumor interfering with urination, a syndrome that increased production of urine, and, by March 30, she also had an infected tooth.  Mom and I walked the cemetery with Sassy, and Mom observed the dog's anxiety about wetting, her foaming mouth, her shying away from our hands where the mouth hurt:  "It's time," she said.

Within a week, Mom had gotten lost walking in the neighborhood outside the facility.  Without Sassy to tug Mom around the block, Mom walked aimlessly. Now she has 12 - hour -a- day  "Visiting Angels" for company and safety.

Sometimes Mom forgets that Sassy's gone, and then has dark thoughts about what happened to her.  Did "they" put her down?  Was I responsible?  I took her to play with my dog Mia, and we all drove back in my car. Mom opened the door to Mia and said, "We're home, Sassy!"  A sad moment.

[Photos:  Mom and Sassy at the cemetery; Sassy on the sofa (forbidden!); Mom and Sassy, cuddling;
French Café; amusing Mom; Sassy with me, Mom, and Laura, Visiting Angel, at the Vet's on her last morning.]


.  .

  More photos of Sassy with Mom at "Easter Vigil after Painful Holy Week."  See links to other posts on my page Dementia Diary.

Verna Dozier's "Dream of God": Good Cop, Bad Cop

Reflection on Verna J. Dozier's The Dream of God: A Call to Return (New York: Church Publishing, 2006).

At 19, my Bible-study friends and I sometimes discussed our feelings of guilt for being upper-middle-class college kids with cars, vast collections of LPs and books, and passports. We'd review Jesus's response to the earnest young man, "Sell all your goods for money to give the poor, and follow me." Centuries before in Assisi, a wealthy merchant's son had stripped naked in the public square and gone on to minister to the poor, the sick, and the animals. But we concluded that St. Francis just wasn't a practical role model today, that our living in poverty wouldn't raise up anybody else, and that we'd do better to continue our educations and carry the Gospel forward into our professional workplaces.

Verna J. Dozier takes that same conversation deeper, but reaches essentially the same conclusion.

The "dream of God" in her book's title is a vulnerable God's dream of love, freely bestowed upon His creatures, freely returned by them. Without the vulnerability to rejection, there could be no true love -- and thus, she writes, the Cross was embedded in creation from the very start (24).

Jesus, she writes, modeled how to live out that dream. Instead of following Jesus, we've substituted worship. There's a "good cop, bad cop" angle to the book, and she calls in a team of three "bad cops" to poke holes in the Church: Thomas Sheehan, author of The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity; Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity; and Lucas Grollenberg, The Unexpected Messiah: How the Bible Can Be Misleading. At least in her summaries of their works, I didn't find more than I'd long ago internalized from Tim Rice's words to the first song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's score of Jesus Christ Superstar:

[Jesus], all the good you've done
Will soon be swept away.
You've begun to matter more
Than the things you say.

Still in "bad cop" mode, she generalizes that one half of the Church's members struggle to maintain the institution while the other half "drops by on holy days to participate in an archaic ritual that has no effect on the lives they are leading the rest of the time" (108). My friend and EfM co-mentor Susan dismissed this: "How can anyone know what effect the ritual has on anyone's lives?"

What does Dozier the "good cop" offer? There's her vision of the laity as a "sleeping giant" and the signs she sees in recent history that the giant is awakening (108) -- though I think EfM's curriculum shows influence of laity and local churches throughout church history. And she offers the vision that followers of Jesus should be involved in all the "structures of society where people find meaning -- in the arts, in journalism, in universities, in city planning, in the sciences."

In her way of offering incidental insights throughout her book, Dozier tells us not to be afraid to be wrong as we try to carry the Kingdom of God into the office, because, through Jesus, God's "forgiveness goes ahead of me, and [His] love sustains me."

Now, how is that different from my favorite prayer at the end of the Rite Two Eucharist, from which the word "Mass" gets its name (from missa, sending out on a mission)? "You have fed us with spiritual food in the sacrament of His body and blood. Let us go in peace to love and serve You with gladness and singleness of heart."




I wrote about the first half of the book on my EfM class blog. Link to those reflections here.

Easter Vigil after Painful Holy Week

I'm ready for marathon singing at both the 9 and 11 a.m. Easter services this morning, but the Saturday night Vigil may be my new favorite service. 

This year, the Vigil came after a particularly tough Holy Week.  Monday, both the beloved dogs in my life received the diagnosis of inoperable cancerous tumors choking off the narrow tube at one end of the bladder.  For my Mia, prognosis is some months of health with palliative drugs to shrink the tumor; Mom's Sassy, nearly 13 years old, had complications.  I spent a few hours with her at an emergency hospital Monday night, and we had some hopes. 

But Good Friday, Sassy couldn't swallow her food or drink water, and, for once, she shied away from my affectionate stroking of her face; Mom said, "It's time."  Laura, Mom's Visiting Angel, was there with us, and everyone cooed and patted her as she fell asleep, then "fell asleep."

Saturday morning, Mom and I went out for breakfast as we have for six years, and walked slowly through the sunny town square.  When we opened the door to Mom's apartment, she called out with a smile, "Here, Sassy!"  That breaks my heart.  She had to relive the whole story, and it must happen now several times a day.

I had all that in mind when I suited up for the Easter Vigil.  The choir and clergy gathered with acolytes on our church's portico, incense scenting the clear, warm evening air.  The church was darkened. With a prayer, Father Daron blessed, prepared, and lit the Paschal candle that will be lit to start worship all year.  We entered, singing the chant, "The light of Christ / Thanks be to God," spreading light with hand-held candles. In the semi-dark, we reviewed our salvation history in chant and spoken word and collects.  All built to the Easter acclamation, full light, and music with brass.

Fr. Roger's sermon pointed out how this one service used to be the peak of the church year until around six hundred years ago.  It used to last all night.  The Vigil contains everything in our faith:  the movement from darkness to light, the salvation history, baptism (of a tiny infant, last night), renewal of our own baptismal vows to serve in the world, acclamation of resurrection, and eucharist with the final prayer to go out into the world to love and serve the Lord -- in peace.

That's how I feel now.  

Here are some favorite photos of Sassy in her last year:

And here's the photo I took of Mia, tears in my eyes, when the Dr. Egan said, "I'm sorry" and left to call a surgeon who might be able to give her a couple more years.

Black Panther: Mirror Image

A symposium in the men's room followed a screening of Black Panther. A gentleman in long flowing yellow dashiki asked how the rest of us liked "the movie." (There were other titles at other screens, but there was no doubt which movie he meant -- car loads of men and women came to Black Panther in African garb).  I didn't hear the comments others made as they left, but I said that I had enjoyed the sense of family and community.

He agreed, but said he was disappointed, because he'd anticipated action in the USA, rather than in the fictional kingdom of Wakanda.

He may have preferred the prologue to the movie. The setting flashes on the screen, "Oakland, 1992," shorthand for dead end neighborhoods, gang violence, drugs and weapons. In dialogue, the estranged brother of Wakanda's king  attributes world-wide misery to centuries of colonial exploitation, slavery, and race-based oppression.  What happens next makes a more compelling origin story than Bruce Wayne's for the movie's alpha bad guy, Erik Killmonger.  But following that, the action shifts to the continent of Africa.

I suggested that Wakanda was in fact a kind of mirror-image of the USA.  He wasn't convinced.  End of discussion.

I could have  mentioned being swept up by Ludwig Göransson's colorful score, composed with what he picked up from his month with musicians in Africa, or the delightful interplay of star Chadwick Boseman with a trove of female co-stars: Angela Bassett as Queen Mother, Danai Gurira as General Dora, Lupita Nyon'o as the spy Nakia, and Letitia Wright as Shuri, the king's kid-sister and scientist. Breath-taking vistas of paleo-futurist Wakanda and rapid-fire special effects fights were entertaining, too -- though such effects are pro forma in Hollywood movies by now, and I confess that those wear me down.

But I was most stimulated by the way the conflict over the future direction of that fictional kingdom  reflects our own deep-seated national conflicts back at us clarified, as a fable.

We Americans, too, have lived centuries in defensible isolation,  proud of our resources, wealth, military might, and advanced technology, unduly paranoid about invaders (counting down from 1796: French, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Reds, Latinos, Terrorists).  Our super-hero T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, is a king whose policy is Wakanda First.  Yes, he can befriend a CIA agent, and he knows the streets of L.A., N.Y., and Seoul, but he will neither send his armies out to liberate oppressed people nor allow refugees in: "I am not king of the world; I am king of Wakanda."

I'm hardly alone in taking the movie this way.  Others I've read say that this fictional kingdom of Wakanda is the real star of the film.  David Edelstein allows that Michael B. Jordan's seething revolutionary Eric Killmonger, who wants to arm the African diaspora to overthrow the other races, is more charismatic than Chadwick Boseman's entitled king T'Challa, who determines to preserve his kingdom Wakanda in its bubble of isolation. Critic John Podhoretz in Weekly Standard  praises Black Panther's co-writer / director Ryan Coogler for putting the strongest arguments in the mouth of its radical. The final face-off between the two characters results in a satisfying, even redemptive, synthesis.

Black Panther was not in my pantheon when comic books dominated my early adolescence,  so I'm surprised to learn in a little research today that those elements that fascinated me in the movie were present from the very first appearance of the character in an issue of Fantastic Four during the 1960s.  The Black Panther was always T'Challa, king of a technically-advanced Wakanda, responsible for his people as much as for fighting the threat du jour.  See the article.

ASO Plays Kurth, Bernstein, Beethoven: Between the Ephemeral and the Eternal

Composer Michael Kurth's photo of graffiti that inspired his piece.

There's an essential mystery about live music, according to program notes by Michael Kurth, composer and bass player with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  He writes about what he had in mind titling his orchestral suite "Everything Lasts Forever."  

The individual qualities of each performance are what make live concerts irreplaceable.  Music's delicate and never-ending balance between the ephemeral and the eternal is a source of its mystery and joy, and a temporal art form such as music has the remarkable capacity to communicate to its audience with immediacy and insight.  And its audience, in turn, is able to respond viscerally, at the moment of the art's live creation.  I hope audiences find my music appealing, ... and that the memory of the feelings they experienced stay with them for a long time -- but above all, I hope they find the joy and exhilaration of live music irresistible and keep coming back for more.   

We had a lot of joy and exhilaration Saturday night.  Atlanta's Symphony Orchestra played to a packed house. People around me looked fascinated or delighted.  In the first half, we jumped up to applaud Michael Kurth for his composition as he hugged conductor Robert Spano; and again we stood for Bernstein's First Symphony, conductor Robert Spano, his orchestra, and mezzo-soprano  Jennifer Johnson Cano.  After intermission, we cheered encouragement to young assistant conductor Stephen Mulligan who made his regular season debut unexpectedly because venerable Robert Spano went home to nurse his flu.  Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, with Jorge Federico Osorio at the piano, was much more familiar than the other two pieces, and a delight.

Years after I wrote about Kurth's piece, I'd forgotten all about it, and all about the graffiti on local landmarks that inspired each movement.  But the experience was once again just what I wrote then:    Images of feet by a tagger with moniker “Toes” suggested a foot-stomp motif that kicked off the piece.  Dancing around different sections of the orchestra, these stomps developed through different colors and moods.  A black-and-white image of a bird to which some tagger later added a red heart, inspired “Bird Song Love.”  It’s a simple song played first on celesta, repeated with new colors added on top, until it developed into something much bigger for full orchestra.  The foot stomps returned in the sweet third movement, "We Have All the Time in the World," but gently this time, to tie the piece together in a way that satisfied and charmed. (View more)

Probably more than anyone in the house, I know the Bernstein piece by heart, having listened for years to an LP of the composer conducting it.  I tensed with anticipation of my favorite moment, and then felt great satisfaction as a sweet melody rose up over the percussive "Profanation" of the second movement.  As Kurth observes, the music had its ephemeral visceral effect, apart from my life-long memory of the music.   

Ditto, for all of us, that moment in the Emperor Concerto described  by Ken Meltzer in the program:

Toward the conclusion of [the second movement], one of several masterstrokees in this work creates a moment of incomparable magic.  After a sudden and unexpected shift from B to B-flat, the soloist quietly entices the listener with fragments of the principal theme of the spirited finale, which follows without pause.

The fact that we may have heard the piece scores of times on recordings and concerts doesn't inoculate us against the effect of live music. 

Part of the superlative effect is simply acoustic, I'm sure.  Another part is the investment that hundreds of us have made to be there: money, time, preparation.  There's a visual element, as we see so many musicians intent on their separate parts, moving in concert with the conductor's hands.  Then, the music's shared.  And, as we apprehend it, it's gone.  Listening to a recording is like looking at a photo album of a loved place. For pieces I've never heard live, the recording is good; live is better.  

Bobby Short Sings Coleman and Leigh: My Personal Favorite

"Delightful!"  Dad said, listening to Bobby Short sing songs by Cy Coleman; and then, a few rhymes later, "Just delightful!"

Forty years after I first played Bobby Short's LP My Personal Property, I can't add much to Dad's one word review.  But I'll try to be more specific.

Opening with the promise that "The Best is Yet to Come," the first minute of the album exemplifies what we'll hear all the way through.

First, there's elegance: Cy Coleman's signature vamp, still used in ads today as shorthand for sophistication, is a series of chords snaking down in half-steps, lightly struck on the off-beat, with bass and brushes softly setting an ambling tempo.

Then, there's a playfulness that keeps us off-balance, surprising us from first song to last. Carolyn Leigh's first line is a bit ripe, but her idea clicks in place with the second and third rhymes (numbers highlighting the pattern of rhymes):

Off of the Tree of Life, I just picked me a plum (1);
You came along, and ev'rything started to hum (1).
Still, it's a real good bet (2), the best is yet (2) to come (1). 

Coleman sets "plum" and its rhymes on two syllables, two pitches, sliding down to suggest -- what? a tease? sensual pleasure? Playfulness, for sure.

Pulling it all together is Bobby Short's presence, vocal and instrumental.  He draws out the"m" in "plum" as if savoring something sweet; the "t" in "yet" and "bet" is percussive, contrast to the languid end rhymes. He plays rich block chords or perky little fills in the spaces between phrases, an updated version of how an opera musician accompanies classical recitative:  The music punctuates, but leaves space for the words.  Short's longtime accompanists Beverly Peer on bass and Dick Sheridan on drums discreetly offer variety and emphasis, but the words are always paramount.

Bobby plays a different character with an edge of sarcasm in his voice when he begins "I've Got Your Number":

You've got no time for me,
You've got big things to do.
Well, my fine chickadee,
I've got hot news for you!

For all the playfulness of Coleman and Leigh, Bobby can wring deep feeling from their songs, too.  I'm touched by the final line of "It Amazes Me," because Leigh has set it up so well.  She piles up rhymes, assonance, alliteration, with words in quick succession, amazes, dazzles, dazes, ways, praises, leading us to a conclusion that clicks into place as the inevitable, right, and meaningful topper:

I'm the one who's worldly wise
And nothing much fazes me,
But to see me in her eyes --
It just amazes me. 

Bobby's voice is tender, here, as he plays the sophisticated man of accomplishment who hasn't thought of himself as lovable.

Coleman and Leigh spring their surprises on us in every number, here.  In the liner notes to the album, Rogers E.M. Whitaker says it well:

The Coleman-Leigh legend could live forever on "Witchcraft" alone.  Its glittery, stainless-steel structure, the diamond-cut-diamond humor in the wording, offer a fully equipped playground for Master Short, who knows exactly where every accent, every twist of the tongue should fall.

Just today, Mom and I had to laugh over a triple - rhyme from "Witchcraft" that we've heard dozens of times:

When you arouse that need in me, 
My heart says "yes, indeed" in me.
Proceed with what you're leadin' me to.... 

 Other examples abound from other songs.

On the other side of that line
Where the life is fancy and free,
Gonna sit and fan
On my fat divan
While the butler buttles the tea...  ("On the Other Side of the Tracks")

It's the kiss that defies every dictionary.
Tell you this, though, whatever it is,
It's very.      ("It's")

My favorite may be the one with outrageously long phrases, a dozen "-ate" rhymes (including "reprobate!") and double-entendre that points up the tension between our singer and the silent object of his attention:

I have a feeling underneath that little halo on your noble head
There lies a thought or two the devil might be interested to know.
You're like the finish of a novel that I'll finally have to take to bed -
You fascinate me so!    ("You Fascinate Me So")

I know from reading Bobby Short's The Life and Times of a Saloon Singer that he recorded this album just when this kind of song was being edged out by Bob Dylan and folk music, just a year before the Beatles made their US debut.   It's such a shame, because Coleman and Leigh were bringing new life to the tradition of Porter and Gershwin, building on the work of those pioneers to create songs even more dazzling in variety and wordplay.

I got to see Bobby Short at the Cafe Carlyle in June, 1977, but I was so distracted by not having enough cash to pay cover charge, minimum tab and required tip, that I don't recall the experience, except that Mr. Short, passing by me on his way to the piano, really was short.

When he came to Atlanta around the same time, I had reservations to see him with my mentor Frank Boggs, but I got flu, and my buddy Mark went instead.  Mr. Short invited my friends up to his hotel room for hours of talk after the show.  Reportedly, he was very kind, and pretty annoyed at how customers continued to talk while he played.  "I imagine the two or three people who are out there appreciating every word, and I sing to them," he told Mark.

He and I did sing a duet, once.  In  June 1983, he performed at Chastain Park Amphitheater north of Atlanta.  I sat with eighth graders in a back row.  Mr. Short began a famous verse by Cole Porter: "As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend --."  He paused, and said, "What did she say, Atlanta?"  I shouted, "Fare thee well."  "Very good!" he said, and we continued line by line to the end of the verse, he setting it up, I finishing the rhyme.  "Who says Atlantans aren't smart?" he said, before launching into the chorus of "Just One of Those Things."  Everyone turned to look; the eighth graders were mortified. 

I had plans to see him in New York in 2005, when he died of leukemia.

This album stands out, even above his tributes to Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, and Coward.  The title song, the one with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, ends a catalogue of New York sights with this exuberant line:  "Since today I feel New York is really my personal property -- I'm gonna split it with you."

I'm happy to share the good news about Bobby Short's My Personal Property.

What a Little Sunlight Can Do

As long as I've been a teacher, I've had serious doubts every January and February about my efficacy in the classroom, my worth as a human being, and my ability to keep going to the end of the year.  I'm not the only teacher who feels this way at this time of year: after all the effort to start the school year well, and the exciting build up to the holidays, the "honeymoon is over" in the New Year.

Add to it the feeling that I've been stuck inside, that I'm just going to waste.

Add to that the church's annual budget impasse.

But today, the sun was out, the temperature was up, and the parish gave the Vestry support for pushing forward -- "We all need to give more!"

I even got out on my bike for a twenty-ish mile ride, taking the photos below, sort of a 360 degree view of the spot on the Silver Comet Trail where I turned around in Hiram, GA.  In my ear buds, NPR was playing "The Pulse," a science program that focused today on "wilderness," and I was strangely delighted by the recorded sounds of birds.

Thinking about school, I remembered that my job is to open up the young minds to reading and writing; all the specifics about compound-complex sentences and the difference between "metaphor" and "simile" are secondary, and will come.  No worry!

Let's remember all this the next time I feel so down.

Tivon Pennicott and Quartet Play Spivey Hall

Tivon Pennicott and his quartet play jazz, but they also just play.

My friend Susan and I enjoyed them Saturday night at Spivey Hall, an elegant venue south of Atlanta.  For Tivon, who grew up north of Atlanta, it was a homecoming.  He warmed up a bit before he explained to us, "I'm waiting to play until my family sits down." He smiled at the crowd of people just then sliding into our row - his dad, mom, sister, nephew, niece, and music teacher.

Tivon is a diminutive guy with a big presence and winning smile.  He could concentrate our attention on him as he alternated between passages of soft lyrical melody and some aggressive marcato passages.  I especially enjoyed a moment at the end of a Coltrane piece, when he reshaped a squiggly little phrase  into a full-fledged version of "Stardust."   He was eager to connect to us, and connect us to his friends.

One game they played was, How many sounds can you make with your instrument?  Pianist Sullivan Fortner tickled the wires in his piano, and beat the sounding board; bassist Dominique Sanders plucked the strings below the bridge; drummer Joe Saylor scraped a cymbal with the head of the drumstick and once brought out a tambourine.  Tivon himself tapped the bowl of his tenor sax, and blew air alone, without tone, for effects in a couple of numbers.

But most of the time it was just the game of improvisation that makes live jazz fun.  It's a musical, visual image of male bonding, as the guys pass around the melody the way four guys might pass a basketball and show off with it.  Tivon and his musical partners made each other laugh at musical choices, as, just when they were all ready to come in at the end of Fortner's solo, the pianist took an extra pass at the chorus.  Tivon smiled throughout the show, often stepping to one side to enjoy interplay of Fortner and bassist Dominique Sanders.

During a break, his dad chatted with Susan about Tivon as a boy, telling how he was always at the piano; sax came in high school.  The family was proud to see him traveling the world and recording his second album.  He's working hard, just playing.

Episcopalian Church at Work

Though Sunday's service was just the regular 10:30 at St. James Episcopal church, I was acutely aware how much loving attention to detail lies behind our worship -- behind in hours and centuries. The form of our worship generates meaningful coincidences both by accident and design.

[Photo: View of the church at rest, late afternoon, St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA -- http://www.stjamesmarietta.com/ ]

A meditative organ piece chosen this week by organist-choir master Peter Waggoner prepared us for something solemn; bells in the tower rang out over our silence.  Peter, with the clergy, chose the opening hymn Truro, a melody from 1789 that takes stately steps upward on the lyric phrase, "Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates (436)."  The verses, written around 1600, translated around 1860 by invaluable Catherine Winkworth, take off from a Psalm about entry of "the King of Glory" through the gates of Jerusalem, and end up at a more personal plea that the gates of our hearts might also open wide for our King to enter in.

Our readings from the Bible were prescribed by scholars here and abroad who've devised and revised the lectionary since our church broke from Rome in the 1500s. They chose the readings to fit the overarching narrative of our church calendar, and to relate in some way to each other.  The collect appointed for the day by the Book of Common Prayer, likewise composed for our prayer book to "collect" the thoughts and concerns raised by the readings, also paralleled the outward-inward arc of our opening hymn:

Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world:  Grant that your people, illumined by your Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ's glory, that he may be known, worshiped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.... 

By accident, two of our oldest, most frail parishioners were designated Lay Readers on Sunday.  Their conditions added resonance to the substance of their texts. Dave read about youthful Samuel ministering to old Eli saying, "Here I am."  Anna, who needed help at the stairs, read how the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.  Their determination to step up to the lectern was an image of commitment to our worship.

Our choir director Peter Waggoner wrote the chant tone that we used for Psalm 139, appointed for today.  This one expresses God's love for us in terms unusually intimate -- "You have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up.... You press upon me behind and before.... Such knowledge is too wonderful for me."  It seems of the same character as the youthful Samuel.

Fr. Roger picked up on the "light" imagery in the collect and spoke about the Spiritual "This Little Light of Mine" -- appropriate for the Sunday of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.  He had learned the song as a little child, but had always misunderstood it, he said.  The light is not "mine," or mine alone; and, as every light needs an external source to stay lit, we need those words and sacraments; we need each other; we need what this very church service provides. 

Our anthem by Healey Willan, who wrote the organ voluntary at the start,  was his setting of words I recite many mornings, recommended for the daily morning prayer: "Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee...." (from Isaiah).

Of course, communion is beautiful. Around 200 parishioners walked, skipped, or limped forward to the altar; clergy and lay ministers went out to those who can no longer walk that distance.

We sang two hymns, "What Wondrous Love is This?" from the early American shape-note tradition (echoing the Psalm's phrase, "knowledge too wonderful for me"), and another early tune new to me, Hymn 702.  The verses were rhymed versifications of the day's wonderful Psalm 139:

Lord, thou hast searched me and dost know
Where e'er I rest, where e'er I go;
thou knowest all that I have planned
and all my ways are in the hand.

I saw in the room many others involved in different aspects of the Church's operation and ministry -- ushers, decorators, servers, committee members, Sunday school teachers and adult education students, lay eucharistic ministers who take the sacrament to some 15 different shut ins, choir, acolytes, bell ringers, technicians.  Down the hall were those working on hospitality, and promoting our day care's big fund raiser this month.

While I felt buoyed by the service, in the back of my mind are the money worries that have nagged me as long as I've been involved in the church's vestry, about twelve years.

When the church is working well, as it was this morning, I feel like we've got to keep it going, and, should we need to chip away at the Endowment, well, let the chips fall where they may.

"Fighting with the Bible" by Donn Morgan: "Why Scripture Divides Us and How It Can Bring Us Together"

Fighting with the Bible by Donn Morgan,  is part of this year's curriculum for Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension program of the School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee.  Morgan is Dean of Old Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.  As a co-mentor at St. James Episcopal, I'm writing after our class's discussion. (More of their comments are at our class blog.) 

Morgan first writes about "Why Scripture Divides Us." As he demonstrates with several juxtapositions of passages, Scripture gives us ammunition to fight opposite sides of issues, religious and social.  The funniest example is a selection of Proverbs, one that condemns bribery and one that recommends it.  A telling example is Morgan's offering of vicious passages about Moabite intermarriage and about expelling Moabites back across Israel's border, subverted by the lovely story of Ruth, the Moabite woman whose progeny includes David.

But, telling us "How [Scripture] Can Bring Us Together," Morgan offers two insights that have caught me off-guard.

The core insight is what Morgan calls "the surprise of canon."  Describing how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be canonized for one book, he tells how "the existence of strong and important Jewish communities outside Israel forced the canonizers to include books such as Esther and Ruth" (79). Ironically, the canonizers who wanted "limits, scope, and control [instead] got diversity, difference, and variety, all within a single authoritative book." 

Now we have a Torah that mixes the final perspectives of several sources, as witnessed to by ... two very different stories of Creation (Genesis 1 and 2). Now we have two different "official" stories of the history of Israel (Samuel-Kings; Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah).  We have ended up with a canon that lifts up both the universal [i.e., God's promise to all nations] and the particular [i.e., to Israel], that bashes foreign nations on the one hand and makes them vehicles of God's love and justice on the other.

This dialogue, set up between outlooks in the Hebrew Scriptures, multiplies in the dialogue between those and the Christian canon.  

Another insight is in the way that Morgan foregrounds the exile of the Jews. Until this year, I've been more focused on the dramatic foundational stories of the Torah, from Abraham to David, a narrative of God's favor to a particular people.  I missed the story of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which the foreign king is God's agent.  I missed the exiles' evolving lines of defense against despair: to expect a hero in the line of David to restore the Kingdom; or, to accept exile as part of God's plan to make them "a light to the nations."  Morgan, and our EfM group's "theological reflection" on passages from II Kings 22 (here) and Nehemia (here) have made me more aware of how much of our tradition and prophetic passages (about "remnants" being saved, for example) come from that post-exilic period. 

Churchill, the End of 2017, and Darkest Hour

For the end of 2017, a film and its book companion Finest Hour about Winston Spencer Churchill make a fitting prism for personal reflection.

The actor Gary Oldman, director Joe Wright, and writer Anthony McCarten have beautifully portrayed a character who's practically a member of my family.   Memoirs by and about him lay around our home;  Mom and Dad admired him and referred to him often; I went to Winston Churchill Elementary School in Homewood, Illinois, 1966-1969; I lived off of Churchill Rd. in Jackson, MS; the first dog I adopted in my adult life was named Churchill; and my first several years in education were spent finding a way to make Sir Winston's History of the English-Speaking Peoples accessible to 13-year-olds in Mississippi.  For my students, I wrote a biography of WSC, alongside biographies of Hitler and FDR.  A fifty-pound clay bust of the man, gift from a colleague in Mississippi, still presides over my classroom.  I know the subject well.

Winston Churchill in many ways bears comparison to our current U.S. President.  I've often observed that WSC was a perpetual adolescent, mischievous, fond of secret strategems, liable to disappear underwater in his bath while he dictated to his secretary.   In the movie, he's viewed as erratic, "delusional."  In the book, he's also labeled "narcissistic." Unlike the current President, however, he was also voraciously curious and deeply aware of history.

McCarten follows daily events May 1940, but structures the story on three speeches that Sir Winston gave that month.  We get to see what goes into each speech through intense encounters with politicians and military advisers. In the first one, his "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech, Churchill proclaims, "Our policy is victory at all costs," but he seems to be spitting into the wind.  In the second, a radio address, his upbeat assessment of the situation in France is pronounced "delusional" and he admits to shielding the public from the dark truth of the situation.  Things get considerably darker before he gathers his wits and strength for the third speech.

During each of the speeches, we get close-ups of the seething, silent Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and the man Churchill replaced, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), the one who proclaimed that his agreement with Hitler had ensured "peace in our time."  Writer McCarten stacks the deck in favor of Lord Halifax, who appeals to common sense regarding Hitler's superior forces, and also tearfully appeals to sympathy for the men who will be sacrificed by Churchill's blithe command to "stop Hitler."  Halifax says exactly what we in the audience see:  Hitler is invincible, the good guys are powerless, and it's time to save the children and everyone else by making peace with him.

[Photo collage:  Actor Gary Oldman, left, and his remarkable transformation into Churchill, lower right.  Upper right: Kristin Scott Thomas and Oldman tete a tete as "Clemmy" and "Pig" ]

For a private view of Churchill, the creators of the film give us his interactions with two women, his wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas) and his secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James).  Through his private dialogues with them, we see the personal agony and uncertainty as WSC chooses between the certain loss of 4000 men in Calais, the expected loss of 300,000 men in Dunkirk, and the option of coming to terms with Hitler. In scenes between Churchill and Clementine, he calls her "Clemmy" and she calls him "Pig."  The two are flirtatious, witty, adolescent, and combative. She sums up his whole life when she recasts his doubts and the many failures in his decades of public life as the very qualities that make him the right leader for the moment.

Typing the man's words, the secretary Layton helps us to appreciate what goes into each of those speeches.  Sometimes he rumbles with an avalanche of clauses, and sometimes he rambles, paralyzed by uncertainty.  Her own agony over a brother in battle touches Churchill.  We also get to see what I'd read about in her real-life account of those times, how he'd give dictation to her from the bathtub and wander around au naturel.

King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) sides with Halifax and Chamberlain early in the film.  But, looking out from Buckingham Palace at London blacked-out, the King comes to appreciate Churchill's defiance of Hitler.  In a scene meant to contrast his first meeting with Churchill, when Churchill approaches stiffly through a vast Palace hallway for a stiff formal kiss of the King's hand,  the King calls on Churchill at home, sitting beside the rumpled Prime Minister in a dark garret where Churchill seems to have retreated, and says, simply, "You have my support."

At the titular "darkest hour," Churchill gathers strength from "the people" and calls the secretary to help him dash together the third speech, one that really did turn the tide.  The United Kingdom was unprepared to fight Hitler, but, in a phrase that writer Anthony McCarten borrows from an obituary for WSC in 1965, Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."  McCarten writes in his book, "With words, Churchill changed the political mood and shored up the nervous will of a shaking people" (intro, xi).  The unexpected defiance of Prime Minister, Parliament, and the public gave Hitler pause, just long enough for WSC and FDR to cobble together a military defense.

It's a lovely movie that made me cry and laugh in equal measure - as did the year 2017.

The Privilege is Mine

Me at 5, a little prince

A man in that white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last fall told NPR's reporter that Christian white males are "the most endangered species in America today."  I agree that men of European descent are now under scrutiny for our privileges, and that people of other backgrounds are standing up to insist that their lives, too, matter.

But those developments, long overdue, hardly matter when I walk into any public place.  I'm a medium-small white guy with glasses, age 58.  Whether I wear khakis and a tie, or jeans and a tee, I'm protected, connected, respected: in a word, privileged.

For example, when I entered different car-repair establishments one week last fall, better-dressed black men behind the counters straightened and smiled. In each place, those same men were wary of a casually-dressed black man who passed through the same doors moments after me. 

With my privilege comes confidence. I gulped when they told me the cost of repairs, one-third of my savings, but I recovered quickly. My assets include mutual funds, a retirement fund, and my house. Should all that go away, I still can expect a share of Dad's estate.

Now, I have worked hard for what I've got, but I'm aware that others also worked hard for what I've got.  Mom and Dad both had full time jobs to pay my tuition to a prestigious school, where well-connected teachers got me a scholarship to Duke with their recommendations.  The school network kept giving: for each teaching position I've held, a phone call from a well-connected friend moved my file to the top of a pile of applications.  I humbly acknowledge that I deserved those good recommendations, but I'm aware that others whose applications no one ever saw must have worked just as hard.

[Photo: Graduation, with Mom and Dad, May 1981, at the door of my first apartment. I'd already signed the contract for my first teaching position.]

The network I was born into helped me to build my net worth.  A lawyer friend of my parents helped me, while I recovered from an accident, to get a settlement that I invested in mutual funds.  My retirement fund comes from my generous employers.  My current home is worth more than my previous two homes, combined; but I got it with help from some crazy loans before the sub-prime lending bubble burst; house number two was bought cheap, one of Mom's investment properties; and I couldn't have qualified for my starter home without Dad's guarantee, sale of my uncle's stocks, and going in 50-50 with my brother.

The network isn't just wide; it's deep, reaching back decades.  Mom and Dad got their starter house in 1963 with loans from my uncle; the same uncle helped Dad buy the little business that Dad worked so hard to build up.  One hot summer night, when Dad and I were carrying hundreds of pounds of iron castings in buckets of hot acid across a slippery concrete floor, Dad quipped around midnight, "I got my PhD so I wouldn't have to work this hard."  My uncle, in turn, built his business from a small restaurant started by his father-in-law during the 1920s.

That young man in Charlottesville would probably say how this just proves that it's not privilege, but a strong work ethic, that earned me such advantages: True!  But I'm also aware that, during the same decades that my relatives built up all that value, discrimination against people of color was official federal government policy and unofficial social practice. Up to the Fair Housing Act of the mid-1960s, Black families faced higher hurdles to get loans, and were officially "red-lined" to be segregated near garbage dumps and factory fumes;  existing neighborhoods were intentionally bisected by the new interstate highways.  Their starter houses were dead ends. Add more than a century of official and unofficial racial discrimination for hiring, schools, and incarceration: I've started way ahead of others whose families worked just as hard.

I'm also aware of the black men who got a different treatment at those service desks where I was treated like a prince.  I used to be puzzled that an imposing black man, father of a boy in my class, always wore a suit, even to a middle school basketball game, even on a Saturday night.  I learned why, when another black man on NPR explained that he'd wear dress shoes and a suit to town on Saturday, because even other black people presume, if he wears running shoes, that he's dressed for purse-snatching.

We don't have to be "racist" to place a burden on our friends of color.  An earnestly well-intentioned student, discussing black poet Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B,"  said that Hughes wanted us to understand that a black man was "just like a normal person."  

My privilege is something I wear that opens doors to me, a protective aura, a network that guarantees my net worth.  As others are finding ways to build the same networks, demanding to be presumed innocent, credible, friendly and intelligent until proven otherwise, I don't feel endangered.

[I reflect on these same realities from essays collected and edited by black Episcopalian Catherine Meeks, Living Into God's Dream (12/2018). I remember the men who worked at Dad's company in Prep Kid a Factory: What My First Multi-Cultural Experience Gave Me (09/2022).]

[See my poems that relate to aspects of this essay, Behind Prejudice and On Track. They're on my poetry blog First Verse.]

Tony Bennett's Just Getting Started: Joyful, Thankful

Tony Bennett's tributes to his mentors have been piling up in my music library since the 1990s - the singer's recordings of music associated with Fred Astaire, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and his collaborations with Bill Evans and Lady Gaga.

Bennett's Thanks for Others

No surprise, tributes to those musicians are among those collected in Just Getting Started. Written with NPR host Scott Simon, the book is Bennett's memoir, 91 years ingeniously meted out among 42 appreciative profiles of musicians, actors, writers, and family, with a lesson he learned from each person (or place -- his grandparents' home in "rural" Queens, for instance).

But Bennett springs some surprises in his memoir. (Tony Bennett with Scott Simon.  Just Getting Started.  Harper Collins. Kindle edition, November 2016.)

His long appreciation of Frank Sinatra alludes to "another side of his character" that Bennett knew only through gossip in the press.  To Bennett, Sinatra was kind and courteous, bestowing invitations and one heckuva compliment that catapulted Bennett from being just one of many crooners to being Sinatra's heir apparent: "For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business.  He excites me when I watch him.  He moves me.  He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more" (quoted from Life magazine, April 23, 1965).

Sinatra makes a surprising appearance in a chapter about Judy Garland.  A little woman under five feet tall, a child star who'd never had a childhood, Garland's appeal was due to her genuine vulnerability, Bennett says, even more than it was due to her vocal power and interpretive skills.  "When she came out onstage -- small as a wounded bird but with that huge, gorgeous voice that reached the back of the house -- everyone wanted to take care of her."  Bennett tells about taking an urgent call from Garland just before he went onstage in London.  She was in London, too, and pleading for Bennett's help, because a man she had invited to her hotel room was beating her up.  Bennett tells us, "Some people would have called the cops.  I went one better: I called Frank Sinatra."  After his set, Bennett checked in with Garland, who laughed, "I wanted help, but this is ridiculous! ...There are nine hundred cops downstairs and five lawyers in my room."


Bennett includes a chapter on Abraham Lincoln, because, "Hasn't every American been influenced by Abraham Lincoln?"  Bennett, whose paintings of landscapes and still life arrangements conclude every chapter of the book, sees "the very face of America" in photos of Lincoln.  Bennett applies his singer's sensibility to the Gettysburg Address, analyzing it as he would a song.  "[Lincoln] begins with a phrase that draws you in and puts what follows into a rolling tide of a story. He sets up a rhythm and cadence... on his way to a shattering end."

Two chapters concern substance abuse that killed two of his collaborators.  "I loved Bill," Bennett tells us about the pianist Bill Evans, with whom he recorded the two albums he's most proud of in the mid-1970s. "A lot of people in show business (including me, I have to confess) used cocaine during that time, and we all kind of pretended with each other that it wasn't a problem... that drugs were just what creative people used to open their imagination...."  Evans's death by hepatitis, due ultimately to the needles he used for his addictions, was "an alarm bell" that scared Bennett straight.  He writes ecstatically of getting to know the young singer Amy Winehouse when they recorded "Body and Soul" for his Duets album, and tells how he wept when she died of alcohol poisoning.  He gives us good reasons why a word from him would have probably made no difference to her addiction, but still rues the fact that "I said nothing on the day that I might have had a chance."

Silent film pioneer Charlie Chaplin gets a long biographical chapter in this singer's book, but not because Chaplin sent Bennett a rare gift as thanks for his recording of Chaplin's song "Smile."  It's because Bennett, strolling past Chaplin's home on Lake Geneva, hesitated "the better part of an hour" to knock on the door. "I guess I wondered how he would receive an uninvited visitor from the United States.  I guess I worried that he wouldn't recognize my name at first... I guess I just didn't want to disturb a great artist...."  So they never met. Bennett's missed opportunity to express his gratitude is a singular moment of regret.

My Thanks for Bennett

I'll take that cue from Bennett to express my thanks to him for his two albums with Bill Evans.  "You couldn't give them away at the time," he writes, and it's true.  In 1979, I was in New York to see Sweeney Todd.  I found the LPs at Colony Records on Broadway, a store famous for having music that one could find nowhere else.

I fancied myself a singing actor, an apprentice saloon singer, an aspiring pianist-composer.  I'd read with interest an article about Bennett that started, "The most underrated singer in America today is Tony Bennett.  Tony Bennett?! "  With that intro, the reporter acknowledged that Bennett was a dinosaur, repudiated by Boomers.  Compared to rock, folk, and soul, the polished American standards in Bennett's songbook were considered inauthentic.  But Bennett told this reporter the same thing that his mother tells him in the first chapter of his memoir, that he would stick to quality.  So Bennett had lost his contract at Columbia, and was gambling on his own recording company, called Improv.

In the article, Bennett claimed to have a new song written for him by Stevie Wonder.  He told the author something that doesn't show up in the memoir, how he would sing along with recordings of jazz pianists, "to learn their phrasing." I was intrigued.

Then I was disappointed.  Bennett's second album with Evans, Together Again, was the first one I heard.  His voice seemed gravelly, he strained for high notes, his New York accent distorted some syllables.  I was mystified by Evans' piano playing - understated, not flashy.  I wanted bass and drums, some "production values."  My friend Matt Hutchinson winced. "You can tell he has a good voice," Matt said, "but he's not using it, you know what I mean?"  I did.

But I'd had a similar experience listening to Cleo Laine, so I gave Bennett another listen.

What we hear on the album is exactly what my generation said we wanted, authenticity.  Bennett remembers,

It was one of the most intense musical experiences of my life.  I'd suggest a tune, and Bill would say, "Good, let's try that."  We'd find a key, than work it out note by note.  No take -- no measure -- was the same as the next.  Bill was always changing, jamming, winging it, and inviting me to come along.

You'd think you'd know a song...but Bill would turn it over, note by note, phrase by phrase.  It was like setting off on great expedition and never knowing what was around the next turn - but you couldn't wait to find out.

That joy in discovery, almost childlike excitement, comes across in Bennett's first song in the set, "Lucky to Be Me," music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.  To this day, that's the song that comes to mind when I'm happiest, and I hear Bennett and Evans when I sing it. The next song, lyrics by the same Comden and Green, with music by Jule Styne, is "Make Someone Happy," made a little sad, tinged by regret, in this performance.

Sometimes Bennett belted, sometimes he whispered.  I learned to hear expressiveness in the gravelly voice, energy in the reach for the high note, and color in the bend of a syllable. 

Just Thanks

Only once, in his appreciation of Duke Ellington, does Bennett speak of faith. Ellington told him that the Bible was the only book he ever read cover-to-cover, and the only one anyone needs to read.  Ellington drew the conclusion, "God is love."

It's synchronicity that, midway through reading Tony Bennett's tribute to his mentors Just Getting Started, I happened to hear a discussion of songs in the Bible, collected as the Psalms. The episode was called "Anatomy of Gratitude" for Krista Tippet's program On Being, and a monk Bennett's age, 93, discussed with her how the Psalms cover the full range of human emotions, yet often "choose" to be grateful.  "You can't be grateful for everything that happens," said her guest David Steindl-rast, "but you can be grateful for every moment."

There's pain in this book.  Bennett tells of unrelenting cold and horror, of arbitrary death in war -- and the unexpected gift of Bob Hope's USO performance.  He writes earnestly of Civil Rights struggles, and he records some indignities suffered by people he revered -- as when a white man mistook Count Basie for a valet after their Carnegie Hall triumph, and when Duke Ellington could not join Bennett in the club where both of them had just performed.  He tells us how, like every son, he saw his dad as strongest  man in the world, but how illness killed his dad when Tony was ten.

But Bennett chooses to be grateful: for others' generosity, for their wisdom, for Bennett's own opportunities, for his successes, for the principles to which he held during the lean years.

Thank you, Tony Bennett.