Freewater: Up in Air, Grounded in Reality

Freewater is the name for both Amina Luqman-Dawson's first novel and for the community of escapees from slavery that she has imagined, their treehouses and rope bridges in the air high above America's "Great Dismal Swamp." The story begins with young teenager Homer's escape with his little sister Ada from a plantation called Southerland.  They've made it through the swamp as far as they can when Suleman, a scout from Freewater, takes them to the community.

Through chapters focused on different characters, we come to see the symmetry in the worlds of Freewater and Southerland, both formed by the institution of slavery. Freewater's design and protocols all stem from the determination not to be found and recaptured, while Southerland's master Crumb and his crony Stokes are determined to recapture the children lest any of the plantation's "darkies" get the idea that they can escape alive.

While Homer and Ada make friends and learn the ways of Freewater, we readers have a nagging sense of unease that the goodness cannot last. Homer feels guilt for leaving behind his mother Rosa and his friend Anna. While he grows to love his new home, he is drawn back to the dangerous old one. At the same time, one of his new friends Sanzi, born in freedom with no sense of limits, yearns for adventure beyond the swamp. She dreams of raiding a plantation like her hero Suleman.

In each community, preparations for a wedding create opportunities for characters to take risks.  I stopped feeling uneasy when I realized that the author had set up a romantic comedy:  each of the friends has someone they really like, but...   shy Billy adores beautiful Juna but can't find the courage to express himself;  Sanzi despises the bully Ferdinand, but she softens when her revenge goes too far;   Homer longs to bring Anna with his mother to Freewater, but how?

Meanwhile, at Southerland, Anna has plans of her own to escape; the owner Mr. Crumb has hired a militia to raid the swamp; his silent younger daughter Nora has a plan to help her nursemaid Rosa to freedom.

All these characters and their plans converge for page-turning suspense, laughs, and the satisfaction of seeing young characters find their own strength.

Luqman-Dawson adds a note about the actual "Great Dismal Swamp" and the real-life "maroon" communities here and abroad where escapees from slavery really did thrive in secret. "Freewater" is her own creation, as marvelous as Oz or Hogwarts.

While her adventure book touches the deep pain of real slavery, the meaning of freedom, and the distortions of personality that slavery imposed on all their lives, whites and blacks alike, the wonder of this book is its joyfulness.

Saturday, Summer Evening

Rode my bike 38 miles in Atlanta in the morning; lunched with sister; napped with dog Brandy. At 6PM, patio, ceiling fan, breeze, jazz on laptop, martini, new book: paradise, captured in this photo, made into a pop art image with a filter at BeFunky.com

Two Steps Back from the Precipice

In May, Mom had grown listless and a bit grumpy, and I thought dementia was pulling her down. Then the staff at Arbor Terrace found her conscious but unresponsive. At the ER, doctors discovered the cause for her recent decline: she had developed diabetes, and tests of her blood that should have been "around 110" were around 600. Doctors and nurses were alarmed.

Once she was back home on a regime of low-sugar meals and meds to control her blood sugar levels, she regained a lot of the energy and sparkle that had been missing for weeks. Her sentences are making sense more often. Even when she substitutes wrong words for the ones she means, the sense is in her tone. For instance, she told me and her doctors, "I have to frock all the time. All that mingling and dangling." Then she laughed, and we laughed along with her, the response she seemed to expect.

Today, she seemed tired, until a conversation with Laura about riding trains moved me to sing that wonderful old song that begins, "I took a trip on a train / and I thought about you." She snuggled closer and laughed and said, "Wonderful!"

In one photo, she welcomed a visit from her daughter Kim. In another, she's enjoying a visit with me. Laura is also present out of the frame.

Starling "Murmurations" in book Black Sun

Photographer Soren Solkaer has published a book Black Sun collecting photographs of starlings who congregate each winter by the hundreds of thousands. When they take flight together, they respond to any stimulus or threat to any member with nearly-instantaneous shifts in formation. He has seen them form a solid black wall to repel a falcon.

Robin Young on NPR's Here and Now (hear the story) asked him about similar behavior in schools of fish, and about the phenomenon as a metaphor for collaboration. But the two of them agreed that the sight is beautiful enough without adding another layer of meaning to it.

Here is the video embedded from the Here and Now website:

Biking to Iceland

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Scott Smoot on his bike in the North Atlantic, virtually

This week, my bike's odometer hit 10,000 miles. When it happened on the Silver Comet Trail in Hiram, GA, I took this selfie, which Photo 3D helped me to transplant from Georgia to the north Atlantic Ocean, almost midway between Newfoundland and Iceland. That's where I am now on my virtual tour of the world.

Wondering how I'm doing this on a bike? Well, I'm relying on the physics of surface tension that I learned in 3rd grade from DC comics. The world's fastest man, i.e., The Flash, moves forward before he breaks the surface of the water. (This selfie had to be taken quickly, of course.)

My next goal is Reykjavik, where Mom and Dad joined Uncle Jack and Aunt Blanche for a tour about 15 years ago. That's enough to make it "a place I've lived or loved."

I've cycled 444 miles from Gander, Newfoundland, to this spot in the North Atlantic
May 18 - June 8, 2022

Since June 2020, I've totaled 10,300 miles on my second virtual bike trip around the world.
Just in 2022, I've cycled 1633 miles, average speed 15.3 m.p.h.

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

Creator at Play

Sunday morning I read this wonderful line from Psalm 104: "Yonder is the great and wide sea... and there is that Leviathan, which you [God] have made for the sport of it." The commentator in the quarterly Forward Day by Day wrote that it's "encouraging" to know that the "daunting" command to "be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" can include "taking pleasure in creation, which, through the work of the Holy Spirit, pulses with life" (Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale).

A Day of PlayPlayfulness in creation set the tone for everything else Sunday. First, of course, there was my dog Brandy, who seconds ago interrupted my writing to get me to play with a ball. Once she caught it on the fly, she carried it away to chew in private, and now she's resting. She reminds me that Leviathan, some kind of giant sea-serpent, is said in Job 41 to be God's pet on a leash to play with.

Then, on my way to church, the classical station played Bach's Concerto for Three Keyboards, its first sixteen notes tossed around like Brandy's tennis ball for each player to do tricks with. Sure, Bach committed it to paper for musicians to learn, but it has the playful character of improvisors who try to keep the ball of melody up in the air while putting their own spin on it.

[PHOTO: A playful photo - birds on lines looking like musical notes.]

Fr. Roger Allen's sermon for Pentecost also seemed to be about the element of improvisation. In the 40 days since the crucifixion, the apostles have been huddled in fear, or scattered in their old home towns, "not ready" for mission, Fr. Roger said. God doesn't wait until they're ready for the Spirit, He just hits them with it, and off they go, improvising the church.

The sermon was accompanied by some recreational crying from eight small children there for baptism, one crier setting off another. From the choir, I saw smiles throughout the nave. We also enjoyed an unplanned drama when a toddler reached for the flame on the candle given his mother: there was a collective gasp and then a laugh when the quick-thinking mom blew the candle out just in time.

As a retired drama teacher, I know something about improvisors. They may have been given the goal to reach a happy ending in a scene, but they each have to "go" with what their partner(s) come up with. Any quirky "mistake" has to be made a part of the story.

Looking at the Bible from this angle, we see how God left himself vulnerable to our choices. It doesn't seem as though he'd planned for Adam and Eve to rebel, or for King Saul to go mad, or for David to rape Bathsheba.

But, like a comedian, he chooses to redeem our mistakes through unlikely agents -- Jacob, the mama's boy; Joseph, the arrogant young brother; the Hebrews, refugees from slavery; David, the youngest brother; Mary, a modest unmarried girl; Jesus, the carpenter's son; Peter, the uneducated fisherman; Paul, the baddest anti-Christian in Jerusalem.

And us. I don't want to lose the insight that, for all the challenges and pain involved, God enjoys the process of bending creation towards justice and reconciliation.

Other posts in this blog that relate playfulness to faith

• The Brick Bible: Theological Reflection (11/2020) records how our EfM seminar processed the Old and New Testaments illustrated with Legos: blasphemy? or enlightening playfulness?
• Teaching Playfulness, Reaching God (12/2012) curates other articles I've done on the subject, ending with an extensive quotation about God's improvisation from Tom Stoppard's wonderful play Arcadia: "If all the answers are in the back, what's the point?"

New Poems from May

I finished two poems in May. A favorite from February needs more love. I hope you'll check them all out!

• Solar Power What a little sunlight can do. [Revised from January].
• Evolution Bird v. man.
• Interview with Box Turtle Self-portrait as spirit animal.

As always, here's an image by my friend Susan Rouse, whose discipline of painting each week inspired my blog First Verse, where I present at least two poems each month along with her art.

First Verse

Theology for Breakfast: Forward from November 2021 to April 2022

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in Forward Day by Day, and I've culled highlights every quarter going back to 2013.

I'm way behind. (Blame it on my new poetry blog First Verse, as a poem a week takes more time than I anticipated.) After a quick selection from November and December 2021, I'm digesting the issue for February-April 2022, which was especially rich.

November and December 2021

November's meditations were contributed by Robert Two Bulls, who describes himself as "Oglala Lakota, Episcopal priest, artist, husband, and father." Reading in Hebrews 10.24 the admonition to "provoke one another to love and good deeds," Two Bulls tells how, in his early days in the priesthood, he was assigned a mission he didn't want, to provide housing for needy families in DC's inner city. By the end of that year, he knew he had "been provoked by others 'to love and good deeds.'" He asks us to think if we've ever been provoked that way. Did we answer the call? "It's not too late," he adds.

My favorite meditation from Two Bulls begins, "I have never run a marathon and I'm certain I never will." He's responding to 2 Peter 1.5-6 -- "support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness." One's own spirituality, he writes, is a combination of beliefs, practices, and feelings that are exercised with some mix of "prayer, meditation, contemplation, and fasting." Telling us we need "persistence and stamina," he asks, "Which spiritual exercise needs a little more practice?"

In December, meditations came from a young freelance writer Cara Meredith. She struggles to relate our culture's jolly Christmas season to the harsh and even scary warnings from Old Testament prophets that our prayer book assigns for Advent. When Amos says prepare to meet your God, she advises us that he's not imagining a baby in a manger (Amos 4.12). God's threat to pursue the wayward Israelites wherever they try to hide seems scary too, until Meredith relates it to The Runaway Bunny, a children's book in which the mother tells her son, "If you run away... I will run after you. For you are my little bunny." Even in Amos, Meredith "can't help but see love squeezed into the center of the text."

February
Catherine Healy, rector of St. Paul and the Redeemer in Chicago, applied her experiences hiking and biking to Luke's account of the Transfiguration: going up on a mountain isn't easy. When we long for a transcendant experience, we should remember that "mountaintop" moments are often preceded by years of work. She asks us what steps we're taking to prepare ourselves to go "up the mountain." One of my answers would be, I'm writing this. Another would be, I bike 1-3 hours a day with media off -- just me, the world, my cascading thoughts, and God --listening, questioning, redirecting.

The whole time I was reading Healy's work, I was preoccupied by an upcoming visit with a valued friend, our first since we discovered deep differences in our ways of seeing current events. Healy addresses that situation in her meditations. After we read the story where Jesus dispels the crowd that was ready to stone a woman, Healy identifies with the crowd. She ticks off ways that she herself gets ticked off at others and admits she's frightened that others will "turn that laser beam of judgment" on her. Yes, that's how I feel. Jesus disarms the situation with compassion, in the sense of showing that he knows what all the concerned parties are feeling.

Partisans were tearing things apart in the time that Paul wrote Romans 14.1-23, and Paul isn't so concerned about what they do or say so long as their "choices give honor and thanks to God."

Identifying with Jacob as he prepares for a rough reunion with Esau, I was interested in Healy's quotation from George Fox, the original Quaker. When we meet someone with a different belief system "who tries to do what is right and true," Fox says we should listen to hear, not in order to answer what they say, but to "answer that of God in everyone." [Shortly after writing this page, I wrote a poem about the Jacob-Esau reunion, Angels Never Know.] A related reflection on Proverbs 3.17-18 tells us that the wise person "may not win every fight, but they will know what is worth fighting for."

I did post a separate article after I read Healy's reflection on the Good Shepherd. See A Sheepish Admission.

March
Mary Lockey wrote meditations for March. She lives with her family in North Carolina, where she's on staff at a community college. She attends Grace Church.

Lockey puts Scripture in dialogue with our culture. There's politics. The governor Pilate is puzzled when Jesus tells him, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18.36). His followers will not be fighting Pilate, Jesus says, meaning, "That's not how we do things here [in the Kingdom of God]." She asks her reader, "Do you meet the world differently because you follow Jesus?"

Then, there's sports. Paul's "pressing on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of Jesus" reminds Lockey of a certain little league baseball game when the catcher, her neighbor's son, paused the game to confer with the pitcher. Her neighbor explained that his son was probably calling for a fast ball, because the next batter was an "easy out." Then the batter hit a double. After the game, the young catcher explained to her, "Sam got hit by a pitch earlier. I could tell it hurt. I didn't want him to be afraid, So, I told the pitcher to let him get a hit." So, no, winning is not the only thing.

Many striking meditations tell us that to own our fears, sadness, doubt, and even anger with God, are not signs of weakness, lack of faith, or illness.

Lockey hears something I've missed in the lovely line, "Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning" (Ps. 30.6). A neighbor used that phrase to console Lockey's mom after the death of Lockey's sister and brother. But Lockey's mother wept night after night for a long time. Lockey observes that the psalm doesn't say we should hurry through the night to get to the morning. "There is no morning without night." I'm reminded of the cathartic moment in the animated treasure Inside Out when the character Joy accepts Sadness.

Lockey's meditations happened to coincide with the first weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. About putting your trust in God when you're afraid (Psalm 56.3), Lockey writes, "God does not want us to pretend that we are fine when we are not." Like her mother, who could not allay her daughter's fear of thunder but stayed with her during a storm, "God wants to be with us ... even when we are deeply afraid." She didn't know when she wrote that how a Ukrainian comedian who had played President on TV would grow before our eyes into the role of real-life President. Sleepless under intense bombing and clear-eyed about Putin's wanting him dead, Zelenskyy stayed put in Kiev.

Lockey notes that Jesus was led by the Spirit not "to" the wilderness -- to be left there alone -- but "in" the wilderness (Luke 4.1). So even when Jesus felt hungry and dry, we are assured that the Spirit was there.

Complaining, the psalmist in Psalm 44 asks God What have you done for Israel lately? Lockey asks her readers, "Have you ever wanted God to wake up?" Yes. "How often do you think God wants you to wake up?" Good question.

When the apostles in the water-swamped boat wake Jesus, he seems peevish (Mark 4.40). "Perhaps Jesus's frustration isn't because they woke him up but that they didn't wake him sooner. How often do we depend on ourselves to weather life's storms, turning to God only when we are in over our heads?"

How can Jesus be fully human, fully divine? Lockey finds an answer in Mark 7.29. Jesus has gone aside to rest when the Gentile woman importunes him to heal her daughter. Lockey writes, "He is tired. He needs rest. A woman intrudes and annoys him persistently. He takes a stance, listens, then changes his mind and heals the Syrophoenician woman's daughter. Fully human. Fully divine."

April
Lay minister Patrick Kangrga, who wrote for April, serves as director of youth ministries at St. James Episcopal Church in Jackson, MS, where I worshipped for 17 years. I believe his meditations resonated with me for reasons beyond that connection.

A passage about God's hearing the suffering of the Hebrew slaves (Exodus 2.21) has special relevance for Kangrga, who is half Japanese and half African American. He writes that he has become more aware of how a system can benefit some races and disenfranchise others. Like seeing how a magic trick is done, he writes, "the mystery has been dispelled, and the trick has lost its power over me."

On April 9, a day for commemorating Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Kangrga connects that martyr's words to Exodus 10.23, about God's plague of darkness: "[The Egyptians] could not see one another... but all the Israelites had light where they lived." Persecuted by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer wrote to fellow-believers, "We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer." Kangrga imagines the suffering of the Egyptians, most of whom were not themselves oppressing God's people, and wants "to shed more light on ... those who suffer in the darker parts of our stories and history."

Kangrga draws on the Japanese art of Kintsugi, mending pottery in a way that draws attention to its cracks, "a broken pot made more beautiful by its brokenness." He's riffing off Psalm 31.12, "I am as useless as a broken pot," but he's also thinking ahead in Holy Week to what emerges from the brokenness of Jesus, the disciples, and the world. [Kintsugi figures prominently in a book Art + Faith. Read more in my blogpost (01/2022)]

Reading about the Last Supper in John 12.2-5, Kangrga reflects on time. At the moment when Judas tells the woman off for the money spent to anoint Jesus that could have gone to the poor, we are also aware of the future, when Judas will betray Jesus. Similarly, in Holy Week and in all our lives, Kangrga writes, "I am ever experiencing the life, death, and resurrection of Christ while attempting to live out my Christ-likeness."

For Good Friday, Kangrga combs the day's Gospel for examples of power. The Pharisees and the soldiers use power to arrest Jesus; Peter uses the power of the sword against a servant; Jesus uses power to heal the servant; Pilate uses the power given him by the emperor, but bows to the power of the mob. "Jesus died at the hand of those who mismanaged and abused power, but he lived in a way that shows how power can be loving, grace-filled and life-giving." Kangrga asks us, "How can you use your power and privilege in life-giving ways?"

Kangrga draws on his experience as youth minister in his reflection on Luke 24.41, where the resurrected Jesus asks the disbelieving disciples, "Have you anything here to eat?" Food and fun can bring joy, and that's essential to dealing with doubts and problems. Good advice to remember when your committee faces a thorny issue, that food and some kind of game or puzzle can open up the group to being creative.

Finally, Kangrga takes on the hatred expressed in Psalm 5. It's misinterpretation to see psalms like this as condoning hatred, he writes. "These are prayers in which people are actively working out their understanding of God and their own salvation." I'm aware that some of the psalms are curses, actively calling on God to cause harm to enemies, and lust for revenge animates a lot of the imagery in Revelation, but Kangrga is right. To state it in the form of a meme that I saw recently, Hatred is Biblical, but it is not Christlike.

Musician Scott Albert Johnson Talks Art and Life

Writing is "like solving a puzzle that you made for yourself." Yes! So simple, precisely what I've experienced writing for my poetry blog and solving crosswords. I've scanned Google for another source of that quote without any hits. It seems to be original to the man who said it, singer-songwriter-harmonica virtuoso Scott Albert Johnson. I may have to get his idea tattooed on my chest.

Johnson recently talked art and life with Pulitzer-nominated journalist-cartoonist Marshall Ramsey for the podcast Mississippi Stories on Youtube.

Ramsey gives his listeners an overview on Johnson's music career before he digs into Johnson's life story, some of which I observed in person. He was my student in 8th grade at a small school where I saw him often during his high school years. He went off to Harvard, New York, and Washington. Years later, when he returned to Mississippi to pursue music, his first love, his gigs brought him near Atlanta, where I had settled, and I got to see him. See more detail in my blogposts about his albums Umbrella Man (10/2007) and Going Somewhere (11/2016).

Johnson cited another musician who expressed his own feeling about playing music for pay. He said that he's getting paid for hauling his equipment to the venue, setting up, and clearing it away after the show, but, "I play music for free."

Ramsey dug deeper into an anomaly in Johnson's c.v., his degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. A professor in an undergraduate English seminar had encouraged Johnson to consider writing for a career. Johnson had always been interested in current events, so Columbia seemed a good next step. Johnson doesn't regret that journalism turned out to be a detour; in that program, he honed his writing skills and developed a way of "interacting with the world." There should be a word, Johnson mused, for mistakes that turn out to be good for your life.

Discussing the pandemic's effect on Johnson's career, Ramsey says they've both lost friends in the pandemic, some to the disease, some, to disagreements about the disease. The two men trade ideas about the internet, which had for both of them once seemed to promise a smaller world, better informed, more connected. Now Ramsey says there's so much money to be made by "tickling the amygdalas" of users by arousing fear. Johnson responds that all we can do is to honor the dignity of others and do our own best work day by day. Maybe art can bridge gaps, he hopes.

Time to get my tattoo.

What's New in that New Commandment from Jesus

Easter celebration this year. Photo: Paul Kelley

"I give you a new commandment," Jesus says to his disciples in John 13.31-35, "that you love one another as I have loved you." Fr. Roger Allen, Rector of St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, posed an interesting question. What's "new" about that commandment, since it's bedrock Hebrew scripture?

Fr. Roger took the unusual step of reading the verses of Leviticus 19 that lead up to the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. In this context, we appreciated how Leviticus recasts the ten commandments as different aspects of loving our neighbors, including the way we're commanded to share our bounty with the poor, to protect the vulnerable, to be honest and fair in our dealings with others, and why? "Because I am the Lord your God."

The newness of the commandment when Jesus says it, is in the context of incarnation: God placing himself on the line, and we, doing the same, as God's body on earth, empowered by the Holy Spirit. Fr. Roger drew on the wonderful reading that we heard from Acts in which Peter hears the angel say, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." Motivated by the vision, Peter drew Gentile men into the movement. Peter's adversaries fall silent, then praise God for sharing the same holy spirit with the Gentiles as with them. Fr. Roger pointed out that it was not argument or rhetoric but a story of relationship that affected Peter's adversaries.

With a quick survey of the gospels, Fr. Roger broadened the idea of love beyond that nice feeling we usually associate with the word to include a dozen other Gospel passages about healing, providing, forgiving -- including (I recall) feeding 5000, the Good Samaritan, the father who forgave his Prodigal Son.

"Love," he quoted Ursula Leguin, “doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” Fr. Roger drew the connection to our rite of communion through bread and wine.

Fr. Roger asked us how we think the Church is doing with this "new" commandment. He repeated a witticism, that Jesus preached the kingdom of heaven, but all he got was the church. Fr. Roger asked us to compare our church today to what was described in ancient history. The early church truly was distinctive, known for the care taken of its members by its members, and the courage and endurance they showed under persecution -- without rancor.

Fr. Roger took another unusual step into current events. The shooting in Buffalo had captured everyone's attention that morning. Fr. Roger put that in the context of the clash of worldviews we have today, that anger and hatred we see in the shooter's adoption of the "replacement" conspiracy.

Fr. Roger held out the hope that we can make a difference by doing what Jesus commands. He also led us in prayer for our enemies: not just for justice to befall them, but for them to be led to rightness.

Bike from Away

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Scott Smoot at Arches Provincial Park, virtually

This month I've biked 448 miles around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, 448 miles takes me from the Gaspé Peninsula to Gander, Newfoundland. For my photo, I bent the path to include Newfoundland's Arches Provincial Park.

Gander is a small town that came to the world's attention on 9/11/2001. When the US closed its air space, 33 planes suddenly had nowhere to land but the regional airport on the northern shore of Newfoundland.  With no advance warning, Gander and other small towns suddenly had thousands of guests for an uncertain amount of time.

The musical Come From Away tells that story. The same actors portray both anxious passengers and townspeople determined to make their guests welcome. For many, it was a life-altering experience -- in a good way. Come Away Feeling Good (07/2019) is my take on the show.

After living the story through that show, I can add Gander to my virtual tour of "places I've lived or loved." 

448 miles from Quebec to Gander, Newfoundland
April 24 - May 16, 2022

I'm 9856 miles into my second virtual bike trip around the world.
Riding on trails around Atlanta, I've cycled 1189 miles in 2022, average speed 15.3

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

"Everything Everywhere All at Once" Lives Up to its Title

The film Everything Everywhere All At Once lives up to its title, but all its multiverses and martial arts melées center on a single moment.

[PHOTO Collage: Poster art by James Jean; Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan; Jamie Lee Curtis]

In that moment, we're at the laundry run by Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh} and her hapless husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). The grown up daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has fled in anger and frustration from a confrontation with her mother over Joy's coming out. Evelyn yells for her to wait, she has something important to say. When they're face to face, Hsu shows Joy's need for her mother to say something that might bring some kind of healing, and we see in Yeoh's face that Evelyn searches for the right words. Then she chooses to say something else.

A new universe forms for every road not taken, physicists tell us. The premise of the movie is that Evelyn, who regrets so many choices in her life, is the churning center of hundreds of multiverses, all of which are in danger from a mysterious mastermind who has created an instrument of universal destruction. For both the multiverse and for her family, only Evelyn can save the day.

She has to "jump" from universe to universe, a process initiated by making unlikely choices, like putting shoes on the wrong feet, or eating lip balm. The laughs and the ecchh factor increase as each jump requires a more bizarre choice.

The writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert told NPR that the universe story is a metaphor for the family story. So even when we're laughing, the gravity of that one moment is still pulling on our emotions.  Yeoh says that she cried when she read the script, because in her forty year career, she hasn't had this kind of opportunity to show off the range of what she can do.  Costar Ke Huy Quan said much the same thing, his opportunities having dried up soon after his debut as the precocious kid in the second Lost Ark movie.

Quan plays Waymond Wang, Evelyn's guide to the multiverse. At the start, he's kind-hearted, goofy, and regretful that he disappoints her -- just as her father had warned he would do when the couple eloped. At unexpected moments, he's taken over by Waymond of the Alpha-universe, a commando who fights off attackers with just a fanny pack. In the universe where young Evelyn listened to her parents, he's a suave but lonely billionaire. But in every incarnation, his spirit is expressed by the goofy Waymond who pleads with Evelyn, "Please be kind."

I didn't recognize glamorous Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of Deirdre, the IRS auditor who'll seize the Wangs' business unless she gets straight answers from Evelyn about back taxes. Pursuing Evelyn from world to world, Deirdre goes from harried bureaucrat to something like the Terminator to a kittenish lover who plays Debussy with her toes. Curtis looks like she's having a blast.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is overwhelming at first. We learn how to watch the movie as we go. Its Wizard of Oz structure helps: It starts at home with the family in an uproar, goes to whirlwind of outlandish places, and comes back.

The fun that everyone had making the film shows to the audience, and is shared.

Remembering Chrys Street (1930-2022)

Chrys Street (1930-2022)

Chrys Street shared her love of the arts with me through gifts of books, clipped articles, and loyal support of music and theatre programs at St. James Episcopal Church in Marietta. I will remember her as she appeared at church in the front pew, wearing jewelry (her design, I'd bet) and always some sweeping fabric -- a colorful wrap, an elegant scarf. She would close her eyes as she savored the best parts of the choir's anthems.

She taught at the Walker School long before I did, and founded institutions that thrive today, including Cobb County Landmarks historical society, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art in Auburn, Alabama, and the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, GA.

[PHOTO: The home of William Root, founder of St. James Church, was salvaged, moved to its current location, and restored by the Cobb County Landmarks Society of which Chrys Street was a founding member. See how the society's Talking Walls program affected me as a teacher (11/2014).]

In their online tribute, her family wrote:

Chrys was a true artist in the deepest sense of the word. She designed and made stained glass windows, some of which are installed at the Cobb Youth Museum and Marietta Middle School. She found joy in taking discarded and damaged materials to incorporate them into her arts, a mural from broken dishes, a rooster from a discarded laundry detergent jug, or garlands for a large outdoor Christmas tree made from pie tins. She was always saving broken and discarded things with an eye for giving it new life as a part of some wonderous display.

Stained glass panels by Chrys Street

Because I wanted Chrys to know how I appreciated the books she gave me about songwriters Sammy Cahn and Cole Porter, I put a lot of care into blogposts about them -- and then sent her printed copies, since she "didn't do" online. They are among the best articles I've written:

• So He's Responsible (12/2013) about Sammy Cahn, lyricist behind "Call Me Irresponsible" and dozens of other songs so natural that it feels like no one had to write them.
• Believing in Cole Porter (02/2014)

She was so proud of her husband John and his career with the Portman architecture firm that re-fashioned Atlanta. Their home on Church Street was his design, built in 1955. It's one story, with floor-to-ceiling windows, walkways through gardens, and books, lots of books. The Eisenhower-era billboard in the driveway that proclaims "SOCIALISM doesn't work!: LOOK at EUROPE" is practically a Cobb County landmark itself.

When John's dementia made him uneasy about going out in public, she stayed home from church to care for him. I saw her just once during that period, at the UPS store, when she confessed how disheartening it was.

After the years at home, she came back to church diminished in body, though not in spirit. Even her walking stick was a work of art!

Peace, Chrys.

iMagination in Opera: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

Atlanta Opera's production of The (R)evolution of Steve Job" told a familiar story in a compelling way with imaginative use of techniques developed in live theatre during the 40-some years of Jobs's career.

The story of Steve Jobs is familiar not just because we all carry his greatest successes in our pockets. The librettist Mark Campbell has highlighted the personal story of a man's single-minded pursuit of his vision of success, subordinating everything else -- love, family, friendship, self-care, ideals. It's the story Faust, Ebenezer Scrooge, and the protagonist of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.

But with composer Mason Bates, Campbell has reshaped the story to be circular, like the Japanese enso design that was so important to Jobs. The enso represents the simplicity and the freedom of open-endedness that were ideals for Jobs.

In the opera's prologue, very young Steve receives the gift of a home-made workbench from his adoring father Paul (Daniel Armstrong) -- and through 17 scenes adult Steve comes back to the bench in an epilogue. By then, "get back to bench" has come to mean getting back to the creativity, curiosity, and connection (love of and from his father) that got him started.

The music that invites us into that sweet prologue catapults us without pause to the pinnacle of the man's success in design and commerce, as Jobs (played by baritone John Moore) introduces "One Device" that will do everything and allow us room to be creative.  In a fugue for the chorus, the composer suggests how the demand for the device multiplies exponentially. Suddenly, at the end of that number, the music sounds the alarm that something's wrong, and a character tells Jobs, "You're dying." For the rest of the opera, the music and libretto take us back and forth through the lifetime of Steve Jobs. 

The non-linear techniques developed in theatre since 1970 allow the creators freedom to make, not a straight narrative arc, but a kind of argument within Jobs  himself expressed as dialogue with people whom he loved and/or hurt. These are Chrisann Brennan (Elizabeth Sutphen), a lover shunted aside when she bore their daughter; buddy Steve Wozniak (Billie Bruley), technical "Wizard of Woz" who built the products that made Jobs rich and famous; Kobun Chino Otogawa (Adam Lau), a Zen master who returns often in the opera to encourage Jobs along his circular spiritual journey; and Laurene Powell Jobs (Sarah Larsen), the woman who marries Jobs, stands up to him, and finally humanizes him.

Mason Bates favors transparent textures in the orchestra. The character Steve Jobs sometimes sees visions of the orchestra and sings about the sounds of its instruments, giving Bates several opportunities to highlight solos. The importance of solo guitar (Onur Alakavuklar) is emphasized by guitarist's credit listing in the space between the cast and the musical directors. Bates cranks up the orchestra and chorus for scenes such as that Broadway-style opener "One Device" and a wordless enactment of Jobs in physical pain and spiritual crisis. But some of the best moments in the opera were very quiet, often with two singers in harmony a cappella or over a sparse accompaniment.

Director Tomer Zvulun, who is also the Atlanta Opera's general and artistic director, designed this show for performances in five different theatres. Screens, so essential to the subject, are an important part of the design. Animations, slides, and full-sized murals shift and change color with shifts in the action. For example, we're startled by the image of an MRI scan that suddenly envelopes the whole stage. Moving on a set of platforms and wagons, the performers set spaces with the simplicity that Jobs would have liked -- swivel chairs for the office, a floor lamp to establish a living room, a workbench to establish the garage where the two Steves created their first products. 

In the title role, John Moore has a commanding presence, whether he's laughing with friends or cutting them down. His voice is strong, but he blends in joyous harmony with Bruley and Sutphen while their characters are still friends. Lau's low bass makes a strong impression, especially when his character tells Jobs to take just one step, that word drawn out to great length each time, to show how a step can be a journey, too. For Laurene's roles as both a muse to Jobs and his down-to-earth domestic partner, Larsen was convincing and appealing.

Poems from April

At First Verse I've managed to keep up with my goal to post a poem every week.

Some of my poems in April reflect the concerns of the month when we Episcopalians experienced the solemn beauty of Holy Week and the release of Easter.

• Etymology of Abundance: implications of Jesus's promise of abundant life
• Coming Soon: imagining Agatha Christie's take on Holy Week
• We Sing a Song of the Choir of Paul: our church choir's COVID experience in a parody of a children hymn
• Do You Believe God Had Your Back?: A crash could've killed me and didn't. Thank God. But for what?
• Behind Prejudice: A confession.

[Susan Rouse's discipline of painting a picture each week inspired me to start the blog, so I include one with each poem. This image is from the latest posting.]

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.

Postmodern Jukebox in Atlanta: Craft Transcends Genre

Thanks to my friend Suzanne Swann, I was introduced to Postmodern Jukebox last night in Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center Symphony Hall. She got tickets for my birthday in 2019, but COVID intervened not once, but twice.

She picked out the right show for me. I've always loved the music of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s -- listening to recordings, playing piano, singing -- and I've been teaching middle schoolers long enough to have picked up on pop and alternative music from Madonna to Adele. To have rock, disco, and rap performed by a jazz combo fronted by virtuoso vocalists was so much fun!

For me, the greatest pleasure was that this treatment reveals how songwriting craft transcends decades and genres. Melody, rhyme, structure: these elements align across the board, though the arrangements and riffs for this show all came from an earlier time. That brought out the polish and artistry in songs by artists who often have downplayed those elements in order to be "authentic."

I especially enjoyed hearing "Material Girl" as a Flapper song, "I Will Survive" as a big swing number, and "All About that Bass" as a hot trio for big-voiced women. "Old Town Road" began with a country swing, but the singing was blues -- Suzanne thought of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

The set-up itself was from the Vaudeville era. Along with a variety of singers, we had a comic emcee, a novelty performer who played instruments while she sang (I recall trombone, flute, recorder, bagpipes, and, for a finale, three trumpets simultaneously), and a tap dancer.

The self-aware pastiche of styles put a postmodern distance between the performers and their material, making it virtuosic but also funny. A singer on the verge of singing the last note of a passionate song paused to pump herself up for the high note - for a laugh. But there were a few numbers where the mood changed, the volume came down, and the performers sang with an earnestness.

[PHOTO: The cast posed with the audience for a selfie at the very end; Suzanne and I popped in a selfie of our own.]

Shakespeare on School Stages

Shakespeare's work is a creative playground for directors and actors.

I wrote that about Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth (see Macbeth for the Fun of It 01/2022), but it's true at school, too: I write from experience teaching drama in high school and middle school for 40 years.

Shakespeare offers a few advantages to school drama teachers. You have no royalty payments, you can access free scripts online, and you get lots of flexibility to cast roles for everyone in your club or class. With freedom to edit and with centuries' precedents for updates and reinterpretations, you can play to the interests and strengths of your students, whether they're 11 or 17.

Updating the Material
While I cut Shakespeare's scenes short, I never changed any words except the most obscure ones. But my actors and I enjoyed figuring out ways to transplant the stories to other times and locales.

• Setting Macbeth in the near-future, our 8th grade club made the title character a cyborg. Why? First, because it's cool! Then, making him more metallic as the play progressed was a visual analog for the character's decreasing humanity. We found modern-day analogs for other characters, too. Lady Macbeth was playing tennis at the country club when we first saw her. For her, being queen was all about being a celebrity: that was the young actor's idea. We used the school's big-screen TV to make the witches into TV pundits, and we simulated security camera footage to show the trees of Birnam Forest marching up the hill towards the castle.
• When we did Taming of the Shrew in the late-80s, Kate dressed like Cyndi Lauper, while her younger sister was the preppie cheerleader. Their music teacher was a country-western guitarist; the Latin teacher was modeled on our school's Latin teacher. Petruchio and his crew resided on a yacht. He arrived at the wedding, late, dressed (underdressed) like Rambo. I should've known better than to trust the 8th grade boys who asked if Jimmy Buffett would be okay for the music at the party scene in the final act. As Petruchio and Kate happily exited to their long-delayed honeymoon, we heard "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw?" Well, it certainly did fit the situation.
  
• We did two of Shakespeare's most popular comedies as 1920s musicals. That gave a dozen 6th grade girls roles as tap-dancing chorines, and gave student musicians a place on stage in costume to be the jazz combo. I wrote 20s-style music for songs in Midsummer Night's Dream, and made Twelfth Night a jukebox musical of early Gershwin songs. Since I made Duke Orsino a Broadway producer, we called the show First Night. Members of "his" theatre company sang songs that expressed the feelings of the dramatic leads. For instance, when young Viola is feeling helpless and alone, her double the Ingenue sang "Someone to Watch Over Me."
• Sixth graders did Julius Caesar ca. 1989 in the school library, where we used the library's heavy TV on rollers to show videotape of General Caesar arriving by jet while TV reporter "Flavia Octavia" interviewed his fans at the airport. Then Caesar and his entourage entered in fatigues and sunglasses: the actors loved it. Updating Shakespeare multiplies opportunities for girls to play big roles as soldiers, senators, doctors, reporters, etc.

Even when my students and I didn't update Shakespeare, we did make our interpretations reflective of the young actors' own feelings.

• When I asked Thomas, a high school senior who had proven himself in many supporting roles, which part he wanted in Twelfth Night, I figured he'd go for one of the comic roles. Instead, he empathized with "Malvolio" for being conscientious, scrupulously honest, and under-appreciated. His belief in the character's basic goodness showed. We had great performances in the other roles, but the injustice done to Malvolio brought pain into the comedy.

• Some of those same actors presented Hamlet in rep with Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Bill, a senior who had played many roles on our stage, was eager to tackle the Prince. Bill told me that he saw the prince, not as a crazed or vengeful man, but a truth-teller and healer, a young man of faith seeking to redeem a sick and sinful situation. I edited and directed the show accordingly (and got it down to 90 minutes!).
• My very first Shakespeare production as director was The Tempest, performed on the tiny stage that our Episcopal middle school used for chapel services. We shaped the show for Episcopalian sensibilities. For a set, we hung images of nature that were mosaics in the manner of stained glass. Prospero was robed like a priest. The banquet in the middle of the play was staged as communion with a procession of spirits robed as acolytes who set the table as an altar with candles, bread, and goblets. When the guilty characters knelt to eat, Ariel commanded them to go, acknowledge their sins, and repent (cf. Psalm 24-25, "Let the table before them be a trap..."). While buddies John and Thomas clowned around in the comic subplot, student actor Peter brought out the dignity and anger of "Caliban."

[Images are my photo collages of middle-school and upper-school productions I directed at St. Andrew's Episcopal School from photos taken between 1983 and 1998. Actors include some people I've seen on Facebook: Emily Levin née Powell, Bill Hamilton, Leigh Ann Evans, Thomas Crockett, Brian Griffin, Caldwell Collins, Emily Vance. The Tempest pre-dated my practice of making photo collages. ]

[My students from St. Andrew's joined me for many summer seasons at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Read more (09/2021)]