My Brother’s tribute to Mom

My brother Todd Smoot delivered this eulogy at Mom's memorial service at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA, January 17.

Frances Lee Maier Smoot.

To sum up 91 years of life is to speak of the lasting impact and memories of the lives she influenced - her legacy.

In her 33 years as a 3rd grade teacher at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School – no less than 750 lives were directly affected by her attention to details, encouraging lessons for life and instilling self discipline to all who spent time in her classroom. Cultivating a desire for reading is unquestionably the main focus of her efforts.

Kim shares that Mother believed each of her children would succeed and Kim knows to her core that Mother was proud of her three children.

(Mom's Visiting Angel Laura Robinson took this photo when Alice, Todd, Scott, and Kim visited.)

Scott recalls advice offered by Mother early in his teaching career – “she told me that every child has to find something they are good at doing. Whatever it is, she said, you find out what it is and build their confidence on that. This advice guided me through 40 years of teaching.”

Alice shares lasting memories of her Mother-in-Law:

• dress shopping for our rehearsal dinner and how the perfect dress was made to fit Alice’s little runner’s body to perfection by my Mother’s seamstress.
• [encouraging] Alice to complete her undergraduate degree which Alice earned in December 2019.
• and [demonstrating] her love to Raymond and Mary Alice when visiting their grandparents.

(Raymond visited his grandmother in memory care, along with his parents)

Raymond’s lasting memory of his grandmother is bedtime stories during overnight visits:

“Grandmother would take one of her well loved books that was taped up and almost falling apart at the seams and read to us. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was a story about a woman who taught children to behave with crazy methods. I still remember a few of the stories – the boy who wouldn’t clean up his room, the one who ate slowly, the girl whose parrot repeated to the girl every rude comment the girl said to others. Grandmother had the best voices and kept our attention effortlessly. SHE is the reason for my own avid interest in reading.”

(When Mary Alice was about to move to Japan for a few years, she knew that her good-bye to her Grandmother might be the last. Mom was polite, unsure who Mary Alice was. Mother's brain fog cleared when she saw Mary Alice's tears. Read more)

Grandmother’s impact on Mary Alice:

I remember a woman who lived her life with a beautiful mix of love, strength, and grace:

• She was a teacher through and through, not only to her students but to me and my brother whenever we visited.
• Whenever things didn’t go our way or I complained, she’d simply say, “tough apples.” And it was her way of reminding us to be strong, to move forward, and to handle life with grit and grace. She carried herself with pride, valued a beautiful home, nice clothes, and proper presentation and she lived that every day.
• My grandmother showed me how to live with grace, curiosity, resilience, and love. I will always carry her with me, and I am forever grateful for the strength she instilled, the love she gave, and the beautiful legacy she leaves behind.

Mother’s impact on her youngest child, me? As Scott shared, she found sports were the only action I was good at and she worked to build my confidence through that activity. A lasting memory is every time I passed by her during a race, I would hear Run faster Todd, run faster.

I am hopeful that each person influenced by Frances Smoot will continue to share what you experienced through her with others. Her passing leaves a vast hole and each of us has a responsibility to fill in where she left off. If what she did was easy to accomplish, then there would not be a void. As Mary Alice expressed, what set Mother/Grandmother/Frances Smoot different from others is she did it all with grace. Unsure about you, everyone who has experience with me will unequivocally state that I do not possess that characteristic specifically. I can deliver the same words, but it was never with the effortless grace as my Mother did.

I conclude with a request to act: Do what you can with whomever you can – contribute to continuing to pass along the legacy of Frances M. Smoot.

* * *

Related articles in this blog

• All the stories I've posted to this blog about Mom since her diagnosis are linked on one-page overview at Dementia Diary. It may be of help to others shepherding a loved one through the same valleys.
• Articles about Mom in the context of generations of my family are linked to a page I call Family Corner.
• Todd's letter to our Aunt Blanche was read as the eulogy at our uncle's burial back in 2005. See Remembering Jack C. Maier.

Bible as Literature

(An enlargement of my "Pulse of the Parish" column for this week's newsletter The Bells of St. James.)

Tuesday I had the pleasure of joining St. Anne's Chapter to present some thoughts on the topic "The Bible as Literature." Glenda Hogg had invited me months ago. From then to this week, I was sifting through piles of ideas every spare moment.

For a warm-up, I brought out internet images of various print publications. Since St. Anne's chapter is part Bible study, I asked if anyone could think of any scriptures that corresponded to each image. So, instructions for a DIY building project reminded the group of chapters that describe the building of the tabernacle and the temple. Photos of Martin Luther King's original Letter from a Birmingham Jail reminded them of Paul's letters from jail. King's letter anticipated where the Civil Rights movement was headed, so I compared it to prophetic writings. A romance novel featuring on its cover a barebacked cowboy embracing a pretty young woman reminded them of forbidden romances in Song of Songs and Jacob's ordeals trying to win Rachel in marriage.

A Batman comic from the 1940s displayed Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo exploded by a giant stick of dynamite. They were stumped. So I asked how that cover would have made a reader feel in its time? "Hopeful. Satisfied. Encouraged." Then we saw the same effect from revenge fantasies in Revelation, Daniel and some Psalms, written to give encouragement to believers under persecution.

Then we studied an acrostic poem about B-A-S-E-B-A-L-L. Some were surprised to learn that many Psalms, all of Psalm 119, and portions of Lamentations are acrostics. That segued to our first activity.

Everyone wrote an acrostic poem about blessings in their lives, beginning each new sentence with one of the letters B - L - E - S - S, in that order. There was some dismay at first, but then people got into it. The results were clever and moving. A participant who said, "I'm no good at this," got applause when she read her poem. Hers was the only one that concluded with a rhymed couplet! Then I asked what they experienced as they wrote. Challenged at first, they became pretty excited, and they got ideas as they went. I said that writers, "inspired by God," were still people like them, facing the same challenge to fit their ideas to a conventional form.

We also did some acting, getting into the minds of minor characters in a famous piece of literature, King Lear. It got pretty emotional, even for "Servant 2" who had no lines. As he stands behind a chair where he and Servant 1 have bound an old man whom the King proceeds to blind with a knife, what is he thinking? What is he feeling? When Servant 1 steps forward to defend the old man from torture, does Servant 2 feel scared for his friend? ashamed of himself for not helping? When Regan the Queen demands his sword, he gives it to her without a word. What is he feeling then? It's important for the actor to know, because his reactions are just as much a part of making the scene "present" as those of the old man or the Queen. In our meeting room, everyone was deeply involved in the emotions unspoken during this unspeakable act.

We wondered: Shakespeare's play is a fantasy about a legendary king, but is this scene "true?" After a pause, the room erupted with answers, reaching a consensus that "it's always true," because criminals and unchecked authoritarians who resort to torture are placing their officers and citizens in the same situation somewhere in the world every day.

We related this imaginative experience putting ourselves in a piece of literature to the way Mother Mariclair had put herself in the roles of Mary, Joseph, and 12-year-old Jesus for her sermon Sunday.

Bottom line: We sell Scripture short if we read it only for lessons and instructions from the past. When we read the Bible the way we read literature, the story, and God, are present with us.

The group had so much to say that I only got through half of my material!

Top Ten Memories of Teaching Middle School

During the year of COVID I appreciated my 40th and last homeroom, socially distanced and masked up. They're playing their original game "Tilleyball," named for the Dean who said to put down their screens and play something active. They made me laugh every day, even online. Evan, third from left, signed into Zoom as "moomoo Mr Cow." He coaxed the shy kid to join in the game.

40 years in Middle School are a blur, now that I've had five in retirement. At the new year, I feel this might be a good time to record my top ten favorite memories of teaching. After the first one, they're in no particular order.

Big One: About 10 years into my teaching career, kids shunned me after I gave Laura a "C" on her term paper. Her mother, on the phone that day, told me how her daughter had stayed home weekends working on her research "just to please you." I protested that I had to uphold standards -- and she scoffed, "'Standards.' You teachers should take the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.'" The next day, I asked students' forgiveness, and asked how I could better ensure students' success in writing class. Their ideas started me in the way I taught for the rest of my career. Their forgiveness -- including Laura's, and even her mother's -- made this painful episode a best moment.

Early one school year, our textbook introduced poetry through "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. After a first read-through, a boy said, "I don't get any of this!" In discussion of poetry, I always let the kids tell me what they noticed -- about what's going on in the world of the poem, and what's going on in the writing of the poem, and what's going on in us as we encounter the poem's twists and turns. They unpacked the poem thoroughly. That same boy said, "I never took a poem seriously before. I really liked it." (On the other hand: Another class was reading "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" the first time when a girl jumped to the conclusion that the speaker was Santa Claus -- harness bells! snow! miles to go! "He has to go around the world, duh!" My first principal Dot Kitchings gave good advice: Sometimes, you just throw your hands up, laugh, and say, "Kids!")

While I gave notes to the 8th Grade Drama class following our after-hours dress rehearsal, an eighth grade boy stood up and headed for the exit. This was so out of character for the polite young man that I paused to ask, "Are you O.K.?" He said, "I'm Muslim. It's time for me to pray." Seeing his classmates gape, he said, "Whoa, this is awkward." The alpha male in class, child of wealthy and powerful parents, master of sarcasm, said, "No. I think it's beautiful."

Our weekly Advisory meeting one week involved a "fishbowl" activity. The boys were "in the fishbowl" answering questions written by the girls. The question was, "What do you look for in a girl?" Tension grew as the boys looked for a response from the tallest, strongest boy with the deepest voice. After an uncomfortable pause, he said, "Kind." The other boys nodded, saying nothing more.

I directed a middle school drama class in the classic American comedy Heaven Can Wait, in which a boxer, taken to heaven before his appointed time, comes back to earth in the body of a millionaire. When he realizes that he has fallen in love with a staffer, he lightly touches her cheek. In the audience, his father, who had seen him only as the goofball in his family, gasped.  Any time when student actors stretched beyond themselves was a favorite moment.

At the center of this collage from 1995, 8th grade actor Brian as Macbeth lays his hand on the shoulder of his wife, played by Caldwell. It's after the guests have fled her banquet, and she has asked what he's going to do. She has been crying; you see his concern for her anxieties and guilt. The line, delivered gently, was, "Be thou innocent of the knowledge."

I learned the day before school started in 2001 that I would have to teach drama AND music to all the sixth graders who hadn't signed up for chorus that semester. Literally mobbing me as I entered the auditorium where we met, the kids clamored to know, how are we going to do music AND drama? On the spur of the moment, I said, "We'll create an opera!" Over the weeks that followed, they reimagined "The Frog Prince" to include a posse of mean girls for the Princess and a gang of frogs who befriend the Prince-turned-into-a-frog. In small groups, they wrote words and tunes for themselves. All was going well, but the day came when I had to say, "It's time we stop writing and start rehearsing. How can we finish the opera?" Andreas volunteered to write the last scene that night. The next day, he apologized, "I didn't have any new ideas, so I just repeated tunes from the rest of the opera with new words. I hope that's all right." I told him it's what geniuses have done since Mozart. Andreas adapted the Frog's song to the Princess, "I know I'm small, I know I'm warty -- do you think you could love me?" In the finale that Andreas wrote, the entire cast turned in a line to face the audience and sing, "We know we're small, sometimes we're crazy -- do you think you could love us?" Many parents and teachers, including School Secretary Terri Woods and Principal Nancy Calhoun, wept.

One of the most difficult students I ever dealt with was Marc. Sharp-witted, charismatic, determined to play around with his pals during class, he was also able to treat any disciplinary action as unfair. Once I wrote a demerit for of his subversive activities and he turned the tables, doing a great imitation of me that day as I'd been on alert to catch him in misbehavior -- and I laughed out loud and ripped up the demerit. A few years later, he visited from public high school, a very big guy. When he saw me, he said nothing: He just came forward, arms wide, and drew me into a hug. Later, as editor of UGA's newspaper, he wrote a kind letter about what his writing owed to my teaching. PS - When he was still in 7th grade, I had a bad accident. Only he, of all my students, visited me at home. My lovely dog Cleo jumped up on the sofa next to him, something she had never done before. What a blessing!

Sometimes, I took the casts of plays to locations that would help them imagine the real contexts of their scripts. The cast of Cheaper by the Dozen inhabited the rooms of a local B+B from 1912 and gave each other Christmas gifts in character; Mr. and Mrs. MacBeth shared dinner; the cast of The Foreigner prepared and ate a meal in character at a private lodge in the mountains of north Georgia, the setting of the play. I took the entire cast of The Miracle Worker to experience a simulation of blindness. These memorable occasions grounded the casts in the reality of their stage settings.

A 7th grade Literature skeptic became my poster boy for what literature can do, as he worked through a term project with several stages. First, the students researched an historical subject. Second, they wrote an essay focused on a turning point in the event. Third, they wrote a story focused on a fictional character connected to their research. Then, they were to pull all of their work together in a poem with a strict length limit. Stephen protested that no short poem could contain all the important things in his long story: a soldier on D-Day, his family and friends, the importance of the battle to the war effort, the sensations of the battle, and the effect on his life. But, as he explained in a short reflection that capped the project, he had an "ah-ha" moment thinking about the iron doors of the troop transport. They swung open for companies to pile out onto the beach under enemy fire. These gates became his metaphor for other "gates" in his character's life. He got poetry, and his work helped others to get it, too.

I'm tempted to say that my entire last year is a best memory because COVID restrictions forced me and my colleagues to become first-year teachers again. Classes met only twice a week, twice as long as before, while half of the class was home online, a different half each meeting. How could I keep them all engaged with literature, writing, vocabulary, grammar? How could we do drama on Zoom? I remember climbing that learning curve as a thrilling experience, once I got the hang of it. But I'll focus on a favorite moment during a Zoom conference mid-year with the dad of David, a kid new to our school that year. The math teacher and I described how the boy was curious, conscientious, polite, focused, funny, and kind to his classmates. The dad wept. PS - In a COVID drama class, this David teamed with Evan (see first picture) and another buddy to write a screenplay for soldier ants who overcome sneakers and other obstacles in a teenage boy's bedroom to capture a potato chip. Cellphones in hand, they broadcast themselves climbing all over the auditorium towards their objective, an outsized panel of cardboard. It worked! [See my poem about the COVID year, Dear 7th Grade]

If I may squeeze in an 11th, there was Michael, a sixth grader with a reputation among both adults and classmates for not being a serious student and for being something of a cut up in class. In Speech class, the kids were working in small groups to present stories of elders in their families, but Michael retreated to a corner of the auditorium alone and didn't finish until everyone else had presented their work. Then he delivered a monologue of a visit to his grandfather in the hospital. Michael sketched in what they used to do and talk about. He concluded, "He says 'Love you' the way he always does, and I say 'Love you, too' and I turn the knob and walk through the door. It was the last time I saw him." Classmates were stunned: such detail, so well-formed, so serious. Michael's reputation changed from that day, and he became a star performer in the upper school drama program.

Inner Light, Inner Life in Charles Addams

One of the best Christmas presents Mom and Dad gave me was an oversize collection of cartoons by Charles Addams, My Crowd, (1970). This big book was the prize of a collection that included small paperbacks Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, and Homebodies, the book I "read" literally to pieces in the days before I could even sound out the words.

A Christmas-themed cartoon from 1947 reproduced giant-sized in My Crowd both fascinated and disturbed me. Addams referred to it in correspondence with The New Yorker as "Boiling Oil."

While I could see the humor in the Family's upside-down ethos, I also felt strong sympathy for those cheerful neighbors and for what they're about to experience. I was in there with them all. Addams cartoons often have that effect on me, and I'm not the only one.

His biographer Linda H. Davis explains how Addams layered his inked outlines with washes that gave his darks and lights a solidity and texture not seen in the line drawings we're used to. She writes that Addams made his Family's house real:

The Family mansion, into which you felt you could step, was constructed of splintery wood worn to the softness of velvet. Bent over his drawing table hour after hour, Wolff's pencil (then brush) in hand, Addams drew every wooden shutter, every carved baluster and warped floorboard, every silky strand of web, creating a fully realized world. Wednesday's room was decorated with a wallpaper border showing a scaly prehistoric creature in happy pursuit of a bat-child. (95)

With "Boiling Oil," Davis writes, "Addams's feeling for his subject and his mastery of technique reached sublime new heights: in the steam rising at an angle from the bubbling pot; in the shawl Morticia clutches against the winter night; in the bars of indoor light filtered through a shuttered window onto the snow." Cartoonist Ed Koren notices the "half circle of light which is mirrored by a circle of molten lead [and] the footprints in the snow ... a wonderful touch" (Linda H. Davis. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Nashville TN: Turner Publishing, 2021).

Those "bars of light filtered through" window shutters are incidental to the story of the cartoon, but essential to establishing the reality of that house. What's going on in that room, we wonder.

I've written before how Addams cartoons are at the heart of some of my earliest and warmest memories:

I could spend quiet hours peering into his cobwebbed corners, imagining what lurked down dark halls, finding little faces [spying from] the black space behind shards of cracked windows. Bliss was to watch ["The Addams Family" TV sitcom] before bedtime on Friday nights, to lay my Addams cartoon collection Homebodies on the bedside table, and to wake before anyone else in the house Saturday mornings to leaf through those drawings, admiring their skill, making up my own stories about them.
(from my blogpost Rediscovering Charles Addams' Family in a Musical)

Vermeer has the same effect on me. The gradations of light from windows reflected on walls, sleeves, goblets, and a certain famous earring make his paintings live. Like Addams, he was often pulling us into a story - the young woman reacts to receiving a letter, for instance; a young woman seems to be startled by someone behind her; a maid is day-dreaming. Like Addams, most of his interiors are rooms of just one house, probably his own. An art historian did painstaking calculations to prove this from the fixed relationships of windows, floor tiles, and doors. Only props and furniture are re-arranged like a stage set. (Hans Koningsberger. The World of Vermeer, 1632-1675 (New York: Time/Life Books, 1967).

Both artists tantalize us with glimpses of other spaces through doors and shutters half-open. I see an analogy between writing and these side-channels that bring such life to the works of these two artists. Even in the Bible, where the action is often simply, even starkly, delineated, an odd detail fixes the story in our minds: the seven sneezes of the boy that Elisha brings back from death, or whatever it was that Jesus scrawls in the dirt -- and the tense silence -- before he answers a mob bent on stoning the woman accused of adultery.

Once you've seen Addams or Vermeer, their settings become part of your mental furniture. In dreams since Mom died over a month ago, I've explored long hallways, a shadowy basement, high-ceilinged spaces in need of repair, cobwebbed alcoves. In the dreams, not unpleasant, this house somehow belongs to me, though I can't recall making any mortgage payments. Somehow, I'm supposed to move Mom and Dad into this space. The levels, the many rooms, dillapidated, so much like Addams's house, give me a feeling of responsibility -- so much to repair, so many spaces to furnish -- and an excitement that comes with creative possibilities. 60 years after I fell in love with that Addams house, it's a metaphor for life now that Mom, Dad, uncles and aunts, the grandmothers, even the old teachers are gone: it's all up to me, now.

More on Vermeer I wrote in 2006 about an exhibit that juxtaposed Vermeer works with those of his contemporaries. At first, I was disappointed. Then:

In peripheral vision, I glimpsed the first Vermeer in the exhibit, and chills started at the back of my neck. I approached. What was the difference? Style, subject matter, and true-to-life drawing -- these were all the same. But Vermeer's paintings seemed to glow from the inside. I felt there that I was seeing not just a slice of life, but that it was reaching out to me.

See Vermeer, Updike, and Poetry Editorial]

Wake Up, Dead Man: Whodunnit Comedy with Heart

Commenting on the grandiose architecture of a church, the young priest tells a visitor, "You can almost feel His presence."

"Whose?" asks the visitor. Uncomfortable pause. "Oh."

The young priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), has been accused of murdering his superior Monsignor Wick (James Brolin) during Mass. The visitor is Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), convinced at their first meeting that the young priest isn't a guilty man pretending innocence, but an innocent man who appears to be guilty. About religion, though, Blanc is dismissive: "God is a fiction."

Cracking Blanc's attitude to religion is a story that underlies the plot in this third whodunnit to feature the detective, after Knives Out and The Glass Onion.

The sacrament of confession punctuates the plot five times. The first confession is played for laughs as Father Jud hears TMI from Wick. In a replay of that situation, the young priest fights back, confessing that he has snooped around to learn all the ways that Wick is abusing his power over his followers. Once a boxer, Fr. Jud has sworn to fight for Jesus with his hands open in love, not with fists. His resolve is tested.

Confessions four and five are spoilers, but number three is the heart of this funny, macabre murder mystery. It has nothing to do with whodunnit, and there's nothing funny about it.

It happens in a phone conversation with Laurie, office-manager at the excavation company that unsealed a crypt. Who ordered that work? Blanc wants Fr. Jud to find out ASAP. But Laurie seems to be in a chatty mood, and Fr. Jud listens patiently while Blanc rolls his eyes.

Suddenly, Laurie stops. When we hear her again, she's sobbing with shame over her angry last words to a loved one. Fr. Jud takes the phone and her confession to another room. It's after dark by the time Laurie accepts forgiveness and finds the information they needed, but Blanc's attitude has changed. "You're really good at this!" he tells his young client.

What Blanc has learned carries over into a key decision he makes during the Big Reveal that usually caps tales of this genre -- not this one.

As much as I laughed and thrilled to all the old mystery tropes - long shadows, a creepy crypt, a sudden storm, and an impossible "locked-room" murder - it's Fr. Jud's solemn and loving pronouncement of absolution to those who desperately need it that I've taken away from the movie. I'm tearing up now, a week later.

The Joy of Singers & SINNERS

When the lights came up after the credits for Sinners, the elderly black man beside me, who had seen me gasp, laugh, and cry throughout the movie, said, "So, I suppose you're a blues man?"

"I am now," I replied.

It's true: to my collection of hundreds of recordings, I've recently added the first two blues albums, both by Buddy Guy, the revered singer-guitarist who appears late in the movie. I've been listening to them over and over, beginning to appreciate what I've been missing.

Sure, Sinners tells a story of vampires who crash a party at a Mississippi juke joint during the Jim Crow era. They do make a bloody mess, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "sundown town." But the tentpoles of this film are music and dance, and, like Blues songs about tough life, the overall effect is joy.

The first words of the movie are voiced by a woman who tells us about music's power to open a door between our world and the spirit world, between past and present, between good and evil. Take that as the thesis sentence for the movie. We will hear the blues, and we will also hear Irish folk music from another race of down-trodden people.

Then there's the character Sammie. The charismatic actor Michael B. Jordan was the draw to this movie, playing both "Smoke" and "Stack," Sammie's uncles. But it's Miles Caton as Sammie who stole the show. Sammie's a teenager, son of a preacher who forbids him to play guitar or sing the blues. Sammie's uncles think he might be a good singer for the opening bash at their new juke joint. So it's sort of an audition when, riding shotgun beside his uncles, he strums guitar and sings. The fullness and maturity of the sound from this deferential, unimposing young man is so unexpected that his uncle gasps, turns to gape at his passenger, then smiles broadly. That was my reaction, and others' too. Caton is now hailed as the "breakout" star of the movie.

Caton admits in an interview that he got the part before he understood SINNERS is a vampire movie.

His is the voice that cracks open the spirit world. Like songs in the best musical theatre tradition, the words of his blues number are very specific to his story:

You threw me a Bible on that Mississippi road
See, I love you Papa, you did all you can do
They say the truth hurts, so I lied to you
Yes I lied to you
I love the blues

It starts as voice and guitar, but ramps up to a surreal dance number. As the camera roams the dance floor, the dancers seem unfazed when they're infiltrated by musicians and dancers from Africa, China, past and future (there's a rap DJ with turntable).

Then a trio of white people ask to be invited in. They're musicians, too, says their spokesman Remmick (Jack O'Connell). He says they're not Klansmen: "We believe in equality." What that really means is, every new vampire joins a "community" of vampires who share Remmick's mind -- including his accent and movements. The trio sings a little ditty about eating a man. Smoke and Stack turn them away, but they lurk in the woods and pick off guests who leave the party, one by one.

Soon, Remmick has enough vampires to make up the cast of Riverdance, and that's what they do. He leads an Irish dance tune, "The Road to Dublin," and the chorus encircles the club doing their Irish jig.

At this point, I was laughing and crying -- one, because it was so incongruous to see blood-smeared black people jigging, and, two, because it was both outrageous and fitting -- perfection!

The film score by Ludwig Göransson is nearly continuous -- bluegrass or blues guitar playing behind images when not accompanying voices. Songs performed by women in the cast express their tangled relations with Smoke, Stack, and Sammie.

Director Ryan Coogler has made a great movie that busts out of one genre to another: music is at the heart of this horror movie. You can watch SINNERS for the thrill of a bloody horror suspense film, and find yourself exhilarated by the season's best musical.

Tom Stoppard and Me

The one thing left on my bucket list is to write a Stoppardian play. That would mean a comedy with characters whose dialogue would mix their personal stories with some intellectual controversy in a collage of images, literary allusions, and scholarly research. A prominent critic said that Stoppard disguises simplicity of thought with complexity of form.

I tried to write my Stoppardian play, but never got beyond the brainstorming stage. It's probably a mistake to start with the form and not with a subject of interest. Anyway, he died today, so he'll never see my homage, should I ever write it.

Regardless, I loved what I read and I liked what I saw.

Bruce Davison, actor on stage and screen, starred in the Duke Players' production of Stoppard's Travesties for which I, a drama major 20 years old, was props manager. Davison was Duke's artist-in-residence that year, around 1980. I felt honored when the actor inserted "Scott Smoot" into a list of names during a performance.

The earth moved for me the first time I saw a play of Stoppard's that I could understand. It was a one-act take-off on Agatha Christie's plays that he called The Real Inspector Hound. Mid-way, the phone rings and just keeps ringing. A theatre critic who has chatted loudly with a colleague during the first half of the play gets annoyed and climbs up onto the stage to silence the phone. From that point on, every line and stage movement is practically a repeat of the first half of the play, only it all means something new with this different character.

Stoppard performed a similar feat in his screenplay for Russia House, which opens with a story told by Sean Connery, heard three times, verbatim. Each iteration comes with images of the events from a different angle that upends our understanding of what Connery describes.

Watching both of these works, I was awestruck and delighted. I felt the ground drop away, in free-fall. I'm always grateful to Stoppard for that experience, unparalleled.

I got that same feeling from Arcadia, a play much more substantial, joyful, and meaningful than Hound. My first time watching it, I didn't get it. The truth is, live performances of Stoppard's plays were rarely as strong as the ones I imagined while reading them, when I could make marginal notes of cross-references, puns, and epigrams. A Broadway production of Jumpers, a play I had read with acute pleasure, was especially disappointing. When the action was happening on stage, I missed so much that I had caught on the page.

That's more or less my experience with other Stoppard plays. Below are links to my blogposts about Stoppard's works:

• Stoppard's The Hard Problem: Dramatizing Thought
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Still Kicking How do we gain when Stoppard crosses Hamlet with Waiting for Godot? Let me count the ways!
• The Invention of Stoppard reviews The Invention of Love, Stoppard's favorite of his own works. I saw it on Broadway and later read it closely. Stoppard eluded me, but I do think my essay about the show hits on something great: the playwright known for verbal virtuosity achieves his greatest emotional effect with just "Oh."
• I read today (Stoppard's death) that he thought Arcadia was his best play. Me, too. I wrote about it in Math and Tenderness.
• I tried to appreciate Stoppard's suite of plays called The Coast of Utopia about the intellectual developments of the 19th century that led Russia to totalitarianism. I didn't succeed. Or maybe, Stoppard didn't. You Had to be There.

I may some day post notes I wrote longhand on Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Real Thing, Professional Foul (a teleplay), Travesties, and Night and Day.

When I studied at Oxford in the summer of 1980, the lords of British theatre were Stoppard, his buddy Pinter, and their less-revered-but-more-popular colleague Peter Shaffer. I wrote about the other two when they died:

Playwright Sees God: Remembering Peter Shaffer with a lot of attention to Equus and Amadeus.

A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinter

Premieres by young composer Nathaniel Davila

Young composer Nathaniel Davila presented a recital of original works Sunday night November 9. Although he is a baritone, he has sung Tenor with St. James parish choir for two years. I and many other members of the choir were there.

In Scott Hall of KSU's Bailey Arts Center, we heard live performances of several chamber works by Nathaniel. The theme of the recital was a question, "How do you express character in music?" In a three-movement work for piano, cello, and bassoon, Nathaniel played with the notion that time changes character while character also changes our perception of time.

We also viewed a short film Distance for which Nathaniel composed the score. The story is about a relationship interrupted when the partners are separated for a summer. The director used split screens to show the action, so Nathaniel created parallel themes. Like parallel lanes of a north-south highway, the characters' themes moved in opposite directions: not a good sign for their relationship!

Another piece featured a choir singing vocalese in close harmony over, and sometimes against, a tonal background created by instruments.

At the conclusion, Nathaniel thanked Dr. Black. "I have learned so much from St. James," he said. In the photo, he's pictured at the piano, surrounded by members of the choir.

Remembering Mom

Frances M. Smoot
Educator, Dancer, Runner
November 5, 1934 – November 6, 2025

Frances Smoot died in her sleep one day after her 91st birthday. She was born Frances Lee Maier in 1934. Throughout her childhood in Cincinnati, she danced ballet and tap, continuing to dance in the annual revues at Walnut Hills High School. There she met Tom Smoot, a “bad boy” who reformed under her influence. She finished her undergraduate degree in Education at the University of Cincinnati, and married Tom in 1955. Over the next seven years, their family grew by three children, daughter Kim and sons Scott and Todd. They lived in Champaign-Urbana, Pittsburgh, and Chicago before settling in the Atlanta area in 1969.

Once the youngest child Todd reached middle grades, Frances started her career as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School in Sandy Springs in 1972. Soon, she was leader of the third-grade team. After she earned a graduate degree in Educational Administration, she instituted the school’s summer program, directing it for twelve years. At the celebration of her retirement from Holy Innocents in 2005, she surprised the faculty by handspringing up onto the stage to accept her plaque.

Frances also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.”

Tom and Frances traveled the world. From Alaska to Peru, Iceland to Italy, Egypt to South Africa, Australia to New Zealand, and India to China, Tom and Frances covered every continent but Antarctica. Her brother Jack Maier and sister-in-law Blanche often accompanied them on their travels. Closer to home, Tom and Frances flew in a hot air balloon and parachuted from a plane. Tom made photo collages of their many adventures, keepsakes that Frances treasured.

Frances and Tom went to great lengths to support their children. When son Todd joined his high school’s track team, Tom and Frances both began to train as well. During the 1980s and 90s, Frances competed in Atlanta Track Club events, often winning her age division, being the only contestant.

While Frances was a consummate cook and entertainer for social occasions, the grandest party of all was a surprise to her. Years in advance, Tom invited guests to her 60th birthday, and they came from as far away as Italy. He rented the top floor of an Atlanta skyscraper, and led her to believe they were going to a friend’s retirement party.

Shortly after Frances retired, she and Tom followed Todd to Valdosta to be close to their grandchildren Raymond Craig and Mary Alice. They continued to race, supporting Todd’s business promoting track events, and they were active in Valdosta’s First Presbyterian Church. They also rescued Sassy, a miniature Doberman Pinscher who had been slated for euthanasia. When Tom died in 2010, Frances wrapped up affairs in Valdosta and returned to the Atlanta area in 2012. At Winnwood Retirement Community, she made friends and kept active walking with Sassy to the end of the dog’s life. During this time, Laura Robinson of Visiting Angels became her daily companion and friend.

In 2018, she moved to memory care at Arbor Terrace, where she was a bright and lively presence. A director there observed that her schoolteacher instincts kicked in, as she encouraged others in warm but firm tones to participate in conversation. With Laura at her side, she never felt alone during months of COVID-19 lockdown.

As dementia progressed, Frances forgot how to walk and talk, but she maintained a regal bearing and sense of humor. Some of the staff at Arbor Terrace referred to her as “The Queen.” During a visit when she hadn’t opened her eyes or said a word, Scott chatted with the nurse who was feeding her. When he rose to go, he said, “Ok, Mom, nice talking with you.” She stopped chewing and said, distinctly, “Yeah. Right.”

Link to Mom's Memorial service, with livestream and a PDF of the service bulletin

More about Mom

• I worked through a range of feelings after Mom's diagnosis. All my articles are linked in a one-page overview at Dementia Diary. I hope that this page may be of help to others who are shepherding a loved one through the same dark valleys.
• Articles about Mom in the context of generations of my family are linked to a page I call Family Corner.

Dementia Diary: Sarcasm

Mom is now in a full-fledged nursing home because they accept Medicaid. When I have visited, she has smiled, she has nodded, and she has opened her mouth when I've held a fork full of Sloppy Joe or beans or rice to her lips. But she hasn't spoken. She has kept her eyes closed.

I spent some time with her Friday, chatting with the young woman who often feeds her mid-day. After awhile, I said, "Okay, Mom, I'm going home, now. Nice talking to you."

She said, distinctly, "Yeah. Right."

[I've posted stories and pictures since Mom's diagnosis in 2012. I've curated links to those stories at my page Dementia Diary. If you're dealing with a loved one's dementia, you may find useful tips and comfort there. ]

[A favorite photo from late 2019, just before the pandemic -- when Mom was still walking and conversing. A sharp drop-off followed in the months after, when only her Visiting Angel Laura Robinson could cross the quarantine boundaries around her.]

This was my Last Visit to New York

Well, I've said that before, in 2010, and again last March. I've seen all I want to see, and I like my routine at home with my lovely old dog, and I look forward to my next colonoscopy more than my next flight. Still, in case I ever go again and want to remember what I learned, or in case I never go again and just care to savor the experience I had, here's what I want to remember:

A bag of peanuts is not worth $300. Using Google.flights, I compared prices for round trips at my preferred times, and found Frontier Airlines for $300, half what was listed for competitors. Buying my ticket was like playing a video game, because offers popped up at different places on my screen, to choose a seat, to carry on a small suitcase, to have more leg room. Each offer required lightning-fast reflexes to admit, deny, affirm, reject. For all the stuff that my no-frills ticket lacked, the flight was fine. I had the window and an empty seat beside me going up, and my friend Susan was beside me going home. So my round trip ticket was only 2/3 the cost of my seat at the Metropolitan Opera, and all the underwear and black tee shirts I needed were able to fit in my laptop bag with room for regulation-sized hygiene products and a book of crosswords. I win!

Frick 'n' Friday. Susan and I took off from Atlanta around 2:30 and arrived in just enough time to check in at the Empire Hotel and hail a cab to reach the Frick Gallery for our reservations 6:30-8:30. We arrived at 7. I didn't expect a musical welcoming committee, but attractive young staffers greeted us in a chorus line. This was evidently a regular Friday evening occasion for art and music. We toured several rooms, serenaded by a couple of young men who played jazz bass and saxophone from music on their phone screens. They were stationed in a central courtyard while Susan (a painter) and I wandered through the surrounding rooms. They got special applause from the crowd and some words of encouragement from me when they played a gorgeous ballad by Monk, "Ask Me Now." Are you guys from Juilliard, I asked. "We wish," they laughed. To my question, the bassist said he had no regrets about not choosing the harmonica, as he struggled to lift his instrument to the exit.

You can love 18th Century Art, too. Mr. Frick had great taste, we thought, as his collection includes many pieces by Whistler and early impressionists. We like a lot of dramatic and opulent 17th century stuff, too -- Frick has lots of Rembrandts. But the 18th century has left me cold.

My takeaway from the Frick was how much I enjoyed the rooms devoted to the 18th century. A portrait of British General Burgoyne by Joshua Reynolds captured so much nuance of personality! We both disliked some "blobby" cloth in the backgrounds, but came to realize that these were like stage curtains gathered up to reveal the backdrop. So our subjects were star actors in front of blatantly artificial natural scenery. There were little domestic dramas in several Vermeers, too. I took a photo of Susan, herself a painter, between a Vermeer (drama: what's in the letter that the smirking maid reads to her startled mistress?) and a Rembrandt. Thanks to Android and AI, it was a cinch to erase another guest for an unobstructed view.

The two of us enjoyed a Goya piece that gave a lot of attention to the woman's face and hardly any detail to the torso. We had both known Hogarth from disgusting etchings of London debauchery, but we liked a Hogarth painting of a smiling woman with her frisky dog. We enjoyed noticing that the features in the face of a girl and the cat at her hand were very similar. "This is a fun room," I told my phone, and "I'm enjoying the 18th century for the first time."

Everybody ought to have a goal. Saturday morning, with nothing else on our agenda, we visited the former home of my hero Stephen Sondheim (see my page of postings devoted to him and his work). So many nights in sleep I've dreamed of finding myself in that home on "Turtle Bay" close to the river. There was no bay, and the only turtles were figures in the wrought iron gates. But I was so excited to be on the street where he lived. Fun fact: My dad's business partner Alfredo owned the property.

Take a jacket. We walked across the street from our home, the Empire Hotel, to see the opera THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY. An hour after the show, we dined a few blocks north of Lincoln Center at Chama Mama, a Georgian restaurant. The temperature was balmy, but the first breaths of a vicious Nor'easter made it chilly for those of us seated on their terrace. Still, we enjoyed bread with a variety of pastes made from walnuts mixed with ingredients such as yams, beets and other plants.

My Time of Day is the Dark Time. Before sunrise the next morning, I walked to Columbus Circle, where cooks stocked their food trucks. I saw a man from one truck order breakfast from a neighboring truck, and I enjoyed how pigeons crowded a rectangle of light cast by one cook's service window to munch seeds that he scattered there so that he could watch the birds as he prepped food for the day. Except for those men and a couple of cars, I had New York to myself. I thought of Frank Loesser's favorite song from his own musical Guys and Dolls, a recitative for the gambler "Sky Masterson" that begins, "My time of day is the dark time / a couple of deals before dawn...."

Noon Departures are Easier. Delays (which we had) are less dreadful when you know that you'll still be back in time to feed dinner to your dog.

Distler's tiny masterpiece

[Editing the weekly church newsletter The Bells of St. James, I've added "Grace Notes," weekly highlights of music that the congregation can expect for the coming Sunday. Here is the first installment, after some improvements.]

A theme of the liturgy for this Sunday, the 17th after Pentecost, is how we in the Church must do our work even while others may reap rewards. "Don't lose heart," we read in Habakkuk. At a discouraging time, Paul lays hands on Timothy to rekindle his heart. Jesus asks rhetorically if servants deserve any special reward for doing just what they're supposed to do.

The hymns we'll sing amplify those themes. Hymn 3 describes serving God from sunrise to bedtime. Hymn 541 expands the meaning of its title, Ora Labora, that work is prayer, "a high calling [even] angels cannot share." In Hymn 704, Samuel Sebastian Wesley writes music for his uncle Charles Wesley's words that ask God to light a candle "with celestial fire" in our hearts.

A favorite of many priests is Hymn 312, composed for the 1940 Hymnal by David McKinley Williams. In words from ancient Syrian liturgy, the poet prays that God will "Strengthen for service...the hands that holy things have taken" in the Eucharist, and will keep the tongues that sang "holy" in church from speaking any deceit. There are verses for ears, eyes, and feet, too -- the whole body of Christ!

The anthem "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty" is a setting of the familiar tune, Hymn 390. We're told to remember, when discouraged, that God "reigneth," and "thy heart's wishes hath been granted by what He ordaineth."

In this anthem, German composer Hugo Distler (1908-1942) has written an a cappella version of the hymn that sounds light as a Renaissance motet, but it's crafted with 20th century techniques such as changing meters and tricky syncopations. Distler's intricacies are playful: on the words "music" and "joyful," voices rhapsodize with flourishes of notes squeezed in to the phrases without adding a single beat to the familiar song. On the word "resound," the low voices make an echo. They toll the last word like ponderous tower bells, while the high voices chirp like birds.

"A masterpiece doesn't have to be a big dramatic number," said music director Bryan Black. "A masterpiece can be like a precision-engineered pocket watch."

Living out the motto ora labora, Hugo Distler expressed intense religious faith in his work, for which the Nazi regime labeled his music "degenerate." Suddenly lost without a career, threatened to be drafted into Hitler's army, he ended his short life in despair. Thankfully, he left behind the gift of his joyful music.

Softening Opposition to Hard Church Music

(for our church newsletter) On his way from the parish hall to church Sunday mornings, Bob Kuzniak frequently sings his favorite hymns and songs of the Big Band era. He likes music to be "uplifting."

So he voiced some doubts about our use of unfamiliar service music by living composer Gerald Near. It wasn't uplifting, he said; it doesn't have a tune.

I pointed out that Near is emulating ancient chant. Bob appreciates the difference in chanting. Instead of fitting words to a tune, the composer of chant elevates the text, sometimes stre-e-tching syllables for emphasis. A communion hymn for a recent service was like that, "Where true cha-a-rity and lo-ove dwell" (Hymnal 606). Unlike tunes, made of repeated phrases with chords and a beat, a chant is all melody. Our word "melody" derives from meli, the Greek word for honey, for such music flows and is sweet, even when (especially when?) expressing solemnity or sorrow.

Bob conceded that some songs are uplifting even when they don't swing like the Spiritual that the choir sang last week. There's a piece Bob loves, with instruments playing chords under a flute melody. It all builds slowly to a high point, then falls. It's not a tune, but it's very musical and uplifting.

Gerald Near, from the web site for the PRM program Pipe Dreams

This week, by coincidence, the choir's anthem follows that same trajectory, reaching a climax at the text "They shall mount up with wings as eagles" (Isaiah 40:31): the voices rise while the chords in the organ add glorious color to the eagle's flight. Guess who wrote it? Gerald Near!

Bob also conceded, as we'll be singing this music through late November, "I'll get used to it."

Still, for Bob's sake, I've started sketching out service music that we might use in the future, based on Glenn Miller tunes. But we have to wait 16 years until Miller's songs go into public domain. Until then, you can imagine the Gloria to the tune of "In the Mood," and "Sanctus" á la "Moonlight Serenade."

[For more on the subject of church hymns, see my essay O Praise Hymn (10/2012)]

Atlanta Ballet's "Balanchine and Peck" Uplifting

This is what I've been missing all along. Everyone else who filled three tiers of Cobb Energy Center already knew: at the ballet, you are amazed and delighted to see a company of men and women exert their finely-honed bodies in runs, lifts, leaps, twirls, falls, each move precisely fit to music and to what the others are doing.

But I've always been a word guy, looking for narrative and ideas, who has always scoffed at ballet for what it lacks. But watching the Atlanta Ballet Company last Friday, I felt delight, amazement, and gratitude all the way through.

The first act was "Emeralds," a portion of the larger work "Jewels" by classic choreographer George Balanchine. To the sweet, aromatic pieces by Fauré, combinations of male and female dancers suggested romance and friendship. Without a story, without ideas, with only the title and green fabric to suggest a theme, I read the movements as characters enjoying themselves by enjoying each other.

The second act was "In Creases" by choreographer Justin Peck, who choreographed Spielberg's film West Side Story in 2021. Two pianists seated upstage at amplified grands played musical patterns by Glass while the company played with spatial patterns. Again with joy, these dancers criss-crossed, lifted, rolled, advanced, receded, circled. Sometimes, briefly, the dancers seemed to be pins or pistons in a machine. Once, dancers took turns high-stepping over their fellow performers in a way reminiscent of a football drill. These incongruities made me laugh every time -- before the image dissolved into something new.

Act Three was Balanchine's telling of the familiar parable of "The Prodigal Son," to music composed for the ballet by Prokoviev. Here, I was intrigued by the economy of the storytelling. A young man at a fence repeats a pair of energetic hand movements that suggest beating a drum and going out beyond the gate. Two sisters and the solemn father (costumed with long gray beard and robes) draw him into prayer, seated in a circle, heads bowed. But the young man rises, hands two serving men some clay jars, and bids them follow as he leaps past the gate.

He arrives in a land of males whose clothing and baldness made them look reptilian. The young man buys their friendship and falls (literally) for a statuesque temptress wearing a tall helmet like Nefertiti's. When the jars are empty, he's beaten and stripped. Crippled, he claws his way across the floor with a staff. When he collapses at the home of the father, the sisters summon the old man.

Only now, thinking back on the simple-looking movement that ends the ballet, I realize what strength and control was required for (SPOILER) the young man to climb up onto the old man's chest and hang there curled up in fetal position. The father wraps his arms around the boy and turns to take him inside the house.

Light fades slowly; former dance skeptic dissolves in tears.

Passage to India on a Bicycle

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[Scott Smoot in central India, virtually, at the Pillar of Ashoka. ]

Since September 2024, I've biked 2600 miles on trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from The Red Sea to central India. The bike in the photo is new, purchased this month when myriad worn out parts failed near Narrow Path Bicycles, located along the narrow path that I've taken to Stone Mountain most warm Saturdays since August 2009.

Since 2020, my bike rides have covered mileage between places I've lived or loved. Though I've never set foot in India, I do have three strong long-lasting connections to the place.

First, with friend Julia Chadwick, I taught the history of India to seventh graders in a World Cultures class for many years. India was my favorite unit because I got to talk about Gandhi, Buddha, and a Hindu holy text that I read and admired, the Bhagavad-Gita.

This pillar of Ashoka unites all three. Ashoka came to power through war, but then he imposed "Ashokadharma," rules that replaced warrior culture, animal sacrifice, and superstitious ritual with values of kindness, truth, social justice, and non-violence. For this reason, Ashoka is often seen as a precursor to Gandhi.

Second, I was hungry then (ca. 1988) for more and more minimalist music. My favorite recording was Satyagraha, the opera by Philip Glass that tells the story of Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa uplifting Indian immigrants. The story advances through Gandhi's early years, but the text is drawn entirely from the Bhagavad-Gita. A key line is one that I've memorized, more or less: "for the athlete of the soul, pleasure and pain, success and failure, are the same." I Invite you to read my reflection on the opera.

Lastly, I taught dozens of students of Indian descent in the middle grades at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Jackson, MS and at the Walker School in Marietta, GA for 40 years. Whether the class was about history, literature, music, or drama, every one of them was unfailingly courteous to me and to classmates, hard-working, curious, and willing to try anything I suggested.

I remember a jumble of names and faces of students from families of Indian descent. Here are the names I remember, some of them family names, some of them given names: Arjun, Arun, Ajit, Agrawal, Amit, Anuja, Anu, Chakravorty, Desai, Gautam, Goel, Gupta, Hisamuddin, Kushboo, Malav, Maya, Nair (Piya Nair wrote one of the most meaningful nice things about me on Facebook -- "In his class, I always felt seen"), Nikhil, Nikhil Moro (an adult friend), Neil, Patel, Rana, Raju, Rahul, Ravi, Sahil, Sanjay, Singh, Srinivasan, Subramony, "Ticha" (nickname for a little guy who turned into a collegiate bike team athlete and helped me to develop as a cyclist), Vijay, and Yanik. I remember all of your names with gratitude and a smile.

PS - After I posted this, the alumni magazine from St. Andrews arrived featuring Alumnus of the Year, "Ticha" Patel. He's in his mid-50s now, but I recognized his smile before I read the name. At the dinner in his honor, last year's winner Arjun Srinivasan introduced him as doctor, lawyer, and entrepeneur, "giving all parents nationwide another reason to be disappointed in their children."

Miles YTD 1795 || 2nd World Tour Total 20,845 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: 2000 miles to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in Vietnam.

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Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Weapons at the intersection of horror and fun

Weapons left me grinning. It was satisfying, not just for delivering thrills when bad guys emerge from unexpected places, but for a neat puzzle where all the pieces click together in a way that serves justice. The climactic spectacle is both a surprise and just what you wanted, both horrifying and exhilarating.

No spoiler, here: what's great in the movie is all in the trailer. In the trailer, we hear that children from one teacher's classroom left their homes at 2:17am and that they have not returned in a month. We see children run, arms outstretched, through dark suburban streets. We see one distraught parent (played by James Brolin) trace lines on a map of the neighborhood from each front door to the last location captured by doorbell security cameras, and we can see at a glance that their multiple lines intersect at a single point.

A cool thing about the movie is that multiple storylines also intersect at one point. We go over the same basic period of time from different characters' points of view, all intersecting at the residence of one outlandish character. This approach helps us to be deeply invested in the different characters before the climax. We are especially sympathetic to the teacher, that father, and the young boy left behind.

The extreme violence (some brains, some dismemberment), doesn't feel disturbing, being all part of this puzzle-constructed game. What does disturb is the resonance with real-life school shootings and their aftermath, those makeshift shrines of stuffies and flowers and the raw emotions when parents confront authorities.

Before the movie, we got previews of several upcoming horror movies. It was a dismal warm-up act. None of them generated the curiosity of the puzzle presented in Weapons.

Atlanta exclusive: Being in Atlanta gives me some proximity to film-related activities, as much of Weapons was filmed here. So the girl friend of a friend of mine took this photo at the wrap party. Viewers of the movie will recognize the cake for its uncanny resemblance to the character Aunt Gladys.

Atlanta Ballet's Rite of Spring reminds teacher of playground

The Atlanta Ballet packed the orchestra and first balcony on Valentine's Day with two pieces that reached me as no other ballet has done.

A piece to music by Bach fascinated me at the time. Bach's music is so abstract and steady: How do you make dance without a dramatic story? Writing this months later, I'm afraid I don't recall more detail than that. But the draw for me that night was the other dance on the bill.

Stravinsky's head-banger The Rite of Spring has pumped up my heart rate since I was a teen. I'd never heard it live, and the arrangement by conductor Jonathan McPhee for a reduced orchestra did not stint on those eerie effects (high bassoon, bird song, sharp contrasts of volume and texture) and the violent ecstasy of those pounding chords and unpredictable jabs.

But the dance that embodied the music affected me strongly -- and everyone speaking excitedly during our exit. The choreographer Claudia Schreier, in a video played before the dance, says that she alluded to other versions in her new version. I wouldn't know: being a word guy myself and no dancer, I've paid little attention to ballet in my 65 years.

But I taught middle school for 40 years, and recognize in this Rite of Spring the energy, neediness, and cruelty of early adolescence. There were runs and leaps, dances in circles, packs of dancers chasing others: typical playground activities.

Like middle school, where the bodies of males and females are not differentiated yet, the differences between the sexes were blurred by diaphonous loose-fitting tunics. Males going with females would suddenly push them away -- so middle school, so cruel.

The most painful moment for me was an almost comical movement. Imagine a playground of children, legs stiff and wide apart, standing in a circle around a girl who has been knocked on the ground. In sync, they all hop a bit closer, then a bit closer.... It was awkward and incongruously menacing.

Despite the energy and athleticism and the power of synchronized movement, there were signs of insecurity and pain. Elbows pinned high at an awkward angle; slouching movements; sudden falling and rising. Some stage images called to mind gang warfare in West Side Story, while others brought to mind the undead in films. Stage fog and vines encroaching from the ceiling added to the zombie effect.

I consulted a review by by Robin Wharton, Arts Atlanta, Feb 12, photos by Shoccara Marcus.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day May June July 2025

Every morning I read the scripture assigned by the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by a different writer every month for the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights. See my responses going back to 2013.

May 2025 - Reflections by Fr. Neil Kumar Raman Rector of Grace Church in Haddonfield NJ, Fr. Raman reports that he is a double bassist and that he loves to cook South Indian food.

Raman tells of a visit to a beautiful church in Poland built under USSR's oppressive atheism, one brick at a time over a period of 20 years. Townspeople would each lay a single brick at the end of their day's work. Raman compares this approach to that of a mentor who made a habit of writing a thank-you note every day. Think of a "brick" to offer God each day - "a cup of coffee, a held door, the opportunity to make a left turn at a stop light." He asks, how are you building your life as a disciple, brick by brick?

A different small church embarrassed Raman by "a generous act of giving" (James1.17) making him and his friend the guests of honor. Awkward, yes, and awe-inspiring. "We drove back in silence."

Were it not for Raman, I might have continued to overlook the significance when Jesus says to his disciples, "Let us go to the other side" of the Sea of Galilee. People on the other side were not Jews. This was an invitation to reach out to communities likely hostile to Jesus and his disciples.

At funerals, we take comfort in a line from Romans 14:7-8, "Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's." In context, Raman points out, the emphasis isn't on someone who has died but on the way we LIVE with each other, fearless even of death.

When Jesus says, "Let not your heart be troubled," he still bears the wounds of his Crucifixion ordeal. Faith does not insulate us from pain.

And I'm always grateful for anyone who highlights Luke 12.25, "Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?" Raman even worries that he's worrying. Humor counteracts the toxin of worry.

June 2025 - Reflections by Sarah Shipman Responding on Trinity Sunday to the eighth chapter of Proverbs, Shipman teaches that "wisdom" in ancient Israel was about preserving order. In this chapter where Wisdom is personified as a woman, there's another side to wisdom: "We would do well to be reminded of the beauty and blessing of wonder an imagination, of the joy that comes in waiting for the Spirit to guide us to the truth. May we, like Wisdom, adore all God's marvelous deeds and be ever mindful that we are part of creation and charged with its care."

July 2025 - Reflections by Roger Hutchinson The writer has written elsewhere about his ADHD, anxiety, and bouts of depression. These topics inform his reflections on Scripture, too.

For July 4th, he chose a line from Hebrews 11, "they were strangers and foreigners on the earth...seeking a homeland" (v.13-14). Recalling his transient childhood (11 "homes" in 17 years), he asked what "home" really means. I took that idea to mentor training with Education for Ministry, and the theological reflection took off! He ends with the idea that we must be "home to ourselves."

Reading that "something like scales fell from [Paul's] eyes," Hutchinson is reminded of a lesson learned during a mental health crisis, that passive "looking" is not the same as active "seeing," which is an art to cultivate. The lesson comes up again after Psalm 50.11, "I know every bird in the sky." Hutchinson took walks to get out of the house during COVID, and noticed more birds each day. When he got a better camera, he took photos and learned to appreciate these fascinating creatures. "I took comfort in the psalmist's promise that God knows all the birds of the air... and God knows me."

He admits that he often yawns during a recitation of the Lord's Prayer (Luke 11.1), but "not because it's boring." Rather, these familiar words give him peace. He asks what we remember about learning the Lord's Prayer.

On Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday, the Psalm includes this wonderful line: "Wake up my spirit, awake lute and harp; I myself will waken the dawn." Hutchinson's appreciation of Bach is crowned by the fact that the composer inscribed his work with the phrase, "To God be all the glory." Hutchinson asks how we can praise and honor God through creative work - writing, knitting, designing, woodworking. I'd add, writing poetry and blogs.

The Glow of Transfiguration

Yesterday, the Feast of the Transfiguration, I read Bible stories of Moses and Jesus, their faces glowing after encounters with the Lord. I imagined the glow of Jesus as any boomer would -- radiation, an eerie emanation, or maybe a force field.

Then my little dog Brandy sat beside me, eyes glowing with her gratitude for the home I provide and her anticipation of whatever wonderful thing might happen next.

Later, at the church office, we had visits by some little ones recently baptized at St. James, Wells and Tomas. They, too, looked as if each new sight was a delightful surprise.

I wonder if the glow of Transfiguration has less to do with something that we see in a holy person, and more to do with how they see the world? The glow we see is a reflection of the glow that they see when they look at creation through the frame of wonder, love, and praise.

[This commentary was first printed in the church newsletter that I edit, The Bells of St. James.]

The Joy of Spider-man: Poet's second take on Miles Morales

In 2023, poet / author Jason Reynolds published his second Spider-man novel Miles Morales: SUSPENDED and I didn't wait to buy and read it. But I've waited until now to write about it. I've re-read it, and have decided to accentuate what I love and to keep my reservations in reserve.

As a boomer, I was surprised this century to learn that the Marvel Universe had expanded. The Spider-man I grew up with was a white teen named Peter Parker who gained super-powers from a radioactive spider's bite. Now we learn about parallel universes where other young men and women have that same experience. In 2016, I read the YA novel by Jason Reynolds, Miles Morales: Spider-man about a 15-year-old boy in Harlem whose father is African-American and whose mother is Puerto Rican. He's a scholarship student in a mostly-white private academy in Manhattan. The novel, which I read in ten-minute intervals during my 7th graders' "drop everything and read" period, inspired one of my best blogposts ever.

In Miles Morales Suspended, Reynolds continues the story. Miles is suspended from class for participating with friends in a protest against white supremacist history being taught at the school. With an assortment of classmates, including his crush and a nerdy library assistant (secretly possessed by a supernatural entity), he's stuck in a room with two proctors and a pile of work to do. Each teacher has sent him an assignment to make the young man reflect on his own character through subject-appropriate metaphor. For example, reminding Miles how brown bananas emit ethylene that turns nearby yellow bananas brown, the Chemistry teacher asks Miles to reflect on times he may have been a yellow banana or a brown one.

While this set-up locks the action into one classroom and one school day broken into one-hour periods, it also gives Miles (and Reynolds) lots of opportunities to take flight in verse. Miles discovered poetry in that first novel. In this one, most of the action is interior, and a lot of the lines in this book don't reach the right-hand margin.

Still, my favorite part of the book takes place during the night before the day of his punishment. When his jovial roommate Ganke is fast asleep, Miles suits up and goes to the window. Pausing to look at the lights of the skyline, he imagines "all the stars that were supposed to be there had fallen, and now sparkled much closer to the ground" (44). A deep breath, and then he jumps -- into some of my favorite poetry in the book:

AIR begins "When I'm in / the air / I feel // free. Like something / someone / has // let go of." By the end of the poem, the lines have led Miles to wonder at himself: "I feel / like I can / let go."

In the next moment, he literally lets go, free-falling before he shoots a web. For an exhilarating paragraph, we experience Spider-man's web-slinging from the inside, as he leaps from building to building, soon landing at the top cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. He sees the lights of Times Square from a distance, and there follow some memories of that place, including an incident when he chased down a pickpocket to retrieve an old man's wallet -- and left the desperate thief with money from Miles's own pocket.

That section is so vivid and joyful that I've remembered all its details since the book was new.

I reopened the book this week because I heard Jason Reynolds on NPR. The format of the interview show is to ask famous people a personal question drawn from a deck of cards. I didn't catch the question, but he gave an endearing answer. He's taking care of his elderly mother these days, "bathing the only Creator I have ever touched, the vessel who gave me everything I have become." Determined to "maintain her dignity and comfort," he says to her, "I'm going to help you transition ... after you taught me to be bold."

His Miles Morales, too, expresses love and gratitude for family as he struggles to be as good as they want him to be.