Found this tucked away in an envelope the other day, a relic of my Nashville days — post-college days, that is.
I went to one. I think it was the August 19 party, but I’m not sure. They were held on land not far from town that included a barn. I don’t know who organized them or how I knew about it, though I did go with some of my Nashville friends.
People showed up and sang and played their fiddles and mandolins and banjos and whatnot. Being Nashville, the music was good. No admission, but I think hats were passed around; someone had to pay for the schedule cards and the July 4 fireworks. It was a hoedown. Or a shindig. Or my own favorite of these words, a hootenanny.
That’s more a folk music term, but never mind. I like the word so much I’m going to use it: As a young man in Nashville, I went to a hootenanny. Recommended.
At noon on Saturday, the sun was high and mighty and toasting northern Illinois well into the 90s F. Later in the afternoon, an unexpected storm blew through. Unexpected because I hadn’t looked at any weather reports. By late afternoon, the storm was over and temps were in the pleasant 70s.
A good time to take a short walk in Woodstock, Illinois, which might be one of the state’s most pleasant towns. A good place to start was Woodstock Square. At the very center of the square is a GAR memorial to Union soldiers and sailors from Woodstock, which was founded in 1852. What’s a town square without a gazebo? Strolling south from Woodstock Square, I passed by the Blue Lotus Buddhist Temple. I noticed it on a previous visit to Woodstock.
I don’t believe these statues were there the last time. It’s been seven or so years, after all. Plenty of time to add a few depictions of Buddha. The temple isn’t the only religious site in the vicinity. Cater-cornered across the street is Woodstock’s First Church of Christ, Scientist. Not far away are the First United Methodist Church and the Unity Spiritual Center of Woodstock.
It was dark after the show, but I didn’t want to hurry away from Woodstock. Besides, I’d read that there was a new(ish) mural just north of Woodstock Square. So it is, in an alley — which the town calls a “pedway” — off Main Street next to Classic Cinemas Woodstock Theatre.
The mural honors the likes of Groundhog Day, filmed locally and remembered elsewhere in town.
Orson Welles, who spent part of his youth in Woodstock.
The town also remembers Chester Gould, though the Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock closed a number of years ago. The alley features two statues as well. One is a wood carving of Woodstock Willie, presumably the town’s answer to Punxsutawney Phil, created by carver Michael Bihlmaier. Oddly enough, also near the mural is a small bronze of Welles by a local artist, Bobby Joe Scribner. According to the information sign near the work, it’s the only statue of Welles on public display in the United States. Interesting that it depicts an older Welles. His Paul Masson period, you might say.
When were driving through LaGrange, Texas, on the first day of the trip, I began to wonder. What’s this town known for? I know it’s something. Then I saw a sign calling LaGrange “the best little town in Texas.” Oh, yeah. Famed in song and story.
On the way to Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston, we took a quick detour — because I’d seen it on a map — to see the Beer Can House at 222 Malone St., a quick view from the car. Looks like this. Had we wanted to spend a little more time in Houston, I definitely would have visited the Orange Show. Ah, well.
We enjoyed our walk along Esplanade St. in New Orleans, where you can see some fine houses. Plus efforts to thwart porch pirates. We saw more than one sign along these lines during our walk down the street. We spent part of an evening in New Orleans on Frenchman St., which is described as not as rowdy or vomit-prone as Bourbon St., and I suppose that’s true, though it is a lively place. We went for the music.
At Three Muses, we saw Washboard Rodeo. They were fun. Western swing in New Orleans. Played some Bob Wills, they did.
At d.b.a, we saw Brother Tyrone and the Mindbenders. Counts as rock and soul, I’d say. Also good fun, though they were playing for a pretty thin Monday night crowd.
Adjacent to Frenchman St. is an evening outdoor market, the Frenchman Art Market, which we visited between the two performances. The market featured an impressive array of local art for sale, though nothing we couldn’t live without.
Something you see on U.S. 61 just outside of Natchez, Mississippi: Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant.More about it here.
In Philadelphia, Mississippi, Stribling St. is still around. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, but after nearly 30 years, I wanted another look.
So is the local pharmacy run by distant cousins. Glad the chains haven’t spelled its demise.
During our drive from metro Jackson, Mississippi, to Montgomery, Alabama — connected by U.S. 80 and not an Interstate, as you might think — we passed through Selma, Alabama. I made a point of driving across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, though we decided not to get out and look around. Remarkably, the bridge looks exactly as it does in pictures more than 50 years old.
In downtown Montgomery, you can see this statue. I understand the bronze has been around since 1991, but was only recently moved to its current site not far from Riverfront Park, the river of course being the Alabama. I’d forgotten native son Hank Williams died so young. Some singers die rock ‘n’ roll deaths, some die country deaths like Hank.
Speaking of death, early in the trip, I was activating my phone — whose dim algorithm always suggests news I seldom want to see during the process — and I noticed the name “Doris Day” in the feed. I figured that could mean only one thing. Sure enough, she became the first celebrity death of the trip.
I hadn’t known she was still alive. In fairly rapid order during the trip after Ms. Day, the reaper came for Tim Conway, I.M. Pei and Grumpy Cat. I didn’t know that last one, but Lilly did.
I remember a time that Tim Conway described himself as “the funniest man in the universe” on the Carol Burnett Show. We all took that as a comedian’s hyperbole. But what if he was right? What if some higher intelligence has made a four-dimensional assessment of human humor and come to that exact conclusion?
As for Doris Day, I will try to park as close to my destinations as possible in her honor for the foreseeable future (a term I remember hearing as long ago as the ’80s in Austin).
Also in Montgomery: the Alabama State Capitol. The Alabama legislature had been in the news a lot before we came to town, as the latest state body to try to topple Roe v. Wade. That isn’t why I visited. I see capitols when I can.
From a distance. Closer. The capitol was completed in 1851, though additions have been made since then. The interior of the dome is splendid.
Actually, the Alabama House and Senate don’t meet in the capitol any more, but at the nearby Alabama State House, something I found out later. When we visited, the capitol’s House and Senate chambers seemed like museum pieces rather than space for state business, and that’s why.
Seems like hipsters haven’t discovered Decatur, Alabama, yet. But as real estate prices balloon in other places, it isn’t out of the question. The town has a pleasant riverfront on the Tennessee and at least one street, Bank St., that could be home to overpriced boutiques and authentic-experience taprooms. Of more interest to me was the Old State Bank, dating back to 1833 and restored toward the end of the 20th century. It is where Bank St. ends, or begins, near the banks of the Tennessee River.
Even more interesting is the Lafayette Street Cemetery, active from ca. 1818.
It’s more of a ruin than a cemetery, but I’m glad it has survived. During the entirety of the trip, there were plenty of random bits of the South to be seen along the way. We also listened to a lot of Southern radio on the trip — something Lilly plans to avoid on future trips, Southern or not, with her Bluetooth and so on — and we had a little game whenever we tuned into someone discussing some social problem in earnest on a non-music, non-NPR station. The game: guess how long will it be before the discussion turns to God. It was never very long.
I found this bit of ephemera at my mother’s house last year. She had saved it, tucked away in a envelope. I’d forgotten about the event, but it jogged my memory.
Jog might be too strong a verb. I still don’t remember much about the event, including why I participated. I was in the sixth grade, toward the very end of that year, and didn’t usually participate in choruses. Mainly, I think, because I can’t sing. But somehow or other I decided to do it, and there I am along with scores of other kids. At the time, Alamo Heights had four elementary schools that fed into a single junior high and high school. Among the names of the kids at the three other elementary schools that I didn’t attend, I recognize a lot of people I didn’t know in 1973, but whom I would know by the time I finished high school six years later.
Considering the structure of the district’s schools, and the passage of time, and the way social interaction goes, that isn’t really so strange, and yet it feels strange when I think about it.
Another irrational feeling that comes to me when looking at the list is how normal most of the first names sound. Especially the girls’ names, like Amy, Barbara, Caroline, Laura, Lisa, Lynn, Mary, Melissa, Patricia, Sharon, Susan and variations on Deborah, Julia, Rebecca and Sandra.
The evening’s program.
Three of the four songs by the elementary chorus were from Up With People. I didn’t know that until reading the program recently. Guess they produced the kind of anodyne songs considered good for elementary school children in the early ’70s.
I’ve read a little about that organization, though I can’t say that I know much about it. But I can’t shake the lingering idea that if Ned Flanders founded a cult, it would be something like that.
The point of going to Hyde Park on Sunday wasn’t merely to tool around the neighborhood, though that’s usually fun, but to see the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company’s performance of Merrie England at Mandel Hall.
It was the fourth production of theirs we’ve seen, besides Patience (last year)Iolanthe (2017) and Yeomen of the Guard (2015).Seems like the company wanted to do something a little different this year. Like Gilbert & Sullivan, but not Gilbert & Sullivan.
Composer Edward German and librettist Basil Hood collaborated on Merrie England, which had its first run in 1902. G&S might not have been working together by then — Sullivan especially, who had the handicap of being dead — but clearly German & Hood were giving the people what they wanted, for a little while longer anyway. I understand that it was among the last new light operas produced by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Merrie England has all the same sort of whimsy and nonsense as G&S, set to music and enlivened by dance as in G&S. Supposedly it takes place in the age of Elizabeth I, who makes an appearance, along with other historic figures like Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex.
The show has all you need in this kind of comic opera: love declared, thwarted and finally triumphant; word play and a few patter songs; a little swordplay and some chasing around the stage; even a cameo by an actual corgi and a supporting character who unexpectedly breaks out a trombone and starts to play it.
All of the cast struck me as talented, but I particularly enjoyed the comic styling of Jeffrey Luksik as Wilkins, who says he’s “poet and chief player in Shakespeare’s Company” who, in a bit of meta fun, insists that everything is better when put to music.
“I prophesy that he [Shakespeare] hath a misconception of the part of a writer in writing a part, in that he hath too little regard for the matters of singing and dancing; for a time will come when all comedies shall be musical, or the public will have none of them…
Dost remember in ‘To be, or not to be’?
Come the words ‘a sea of trouble’
The applause, I trow, would double
If he forthwith sang a song about the sea!”
Dorian McCall did a fine turn as the Earl of Essex, the villain but not really the villain. As the program notes put it, he has an “even baritone and a rich and flexible voice, recognized as having great style, musically and physically, on stage.”
Also impressive: Emma Sorensen, who played a woodland-dwelling character called Jill-All-Alone, a witch but not really a witch, unless she really was a witch. How such a slender woman can project such a powerful voice is beyond me.
A fuller review — “hijinks and humor galore” is in the apt head — along with a picture of the cast, is at the Hyde Park Herald.
Sometimes you pick up a book that’s been on the shelf unread for many years and you think, time to read it. So it was around the beginning of the year with a copy of Stalin, subtitled “The History of a Dictator,” by H. Montgomery Hyde (1907-89).
It’s a paperback, originally published in 1971 and which no doubt my brother Jay bought. The copy’s pages are yellow and a little brittle with the passage of so much time, and the front cover is partly torn — and repaired with tape — but the book withstood my reading it. Not bad for a paperback not meant to last long.
Of course there are newer biographies of Stalin, such as the work of Stephen Kotkin, whose three-volume bio had its second volume published in 2017. Those sound really good. Later books have the advantage of at least partly open former Soviet or other Communist archives, including things unimaginable in 1971, but even so I wanted to read Hyde’s book. For one thing, it’s on my shelf.
More than that, I was curious how Hyde approached the subject without access to those archives. With a fair number of workarounds, it turned out, and perhaps leaning a little too much on Khrushchev, who has to count as an unreliable narrator. On whole, though, I’d say Hyde did a good job with the material he had to work with.
Sometimes, Hyde pointed out, history and the fate of millions (very possibly) turn on a small event: “If the final stroke of apoplexy had been delayed for a few months or weeks, or even days, Lenin might have succeeded, even without Trotsky’s help, in ousting Stalin from his place of power, such was the immense following Lenin could command in the Party and country. But it was not to be.” (p. 203)
The book isn’t the only Stalin-related diversion for me lately. As in the last year or so. While in New York last March, I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas, where I paid New York prices to see The Death of Stalin, then a first-run movie.
It was worth full price. As dark as comedy gets, Death managed to be a funny movie about one of history’s most unfunny subjects, Stalinism. Loosely based on actual events and hardly solid history, but that didn’t matter because of the rule of funny.
Another reason to like the movie: it irritated humorless, authoritarian bureaucrats. According to the imdb: “The movie was banned in Russia on January 23, 2018, two days before it was due to be released… One member of the Culture Ministry’s advisory board was quoted as saying, ‘The film desecrates our historical symbols — the Soviet hymn, orders and medals, and Marshal Zhukov is portrayed as an idiot,’ and added that the film’s release in advance of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad (February 2nd), would be ‘an affront to Russia’s World War II veterans.’ ”
Whatever, Ivan. I will point out that Zhukov wasn’t played as an idiot, but as canny and flamboyant. Canny the real Zhukov surely was, but flamboyant I doubt. Again, the rule of funny. The movie Zhukov was a hoot.
One more Stalin-oriented bit of entertainment: “Joe the Georgian,” an Al Stewart song (1995). Back when I saw him at the Woodstock Theatre in 2008, he sang it, and did his usual patter beforehand. I don’t remember the exact words, but he said that his agent or his label or someone encouraged him to write a dance song. Dance songs sell.
“So I wrote a dance song,” he said. “The trouble was, it was about Joseph Stalin.” Enormous laughter from the audience.
In the song, an unnamed Old Bolshevik, newly arrived in Hell, ponders how he got there.
We all set off together On this sorry ship of state When the captain took the fever We were hijacked by the mate And he steered us through the shadows Upon an angry tide And cast us one by one over the side
His consolation is that when Stalin arrives in Hell, as he surely will, the Old Bolsheviks will torment him with heated pitchforks for “the next few million years” while they “dance, dance, dance.”
On Saturday, Ann and I went to see Ruddigore by the same troupe that did The Pirates of Penzance last year, the Savoyaires, who do their shows at a junior high auditorium in Evanston. Musical direction by Timothy Semanik, stage direction by Kingsley Day.
Except for the hard seats, it was a good time. I understand that the work was originally the followup to The Mikado, which must have been a hard act to follow, but Ruddigore was topsy-turvy fun anyway, as Gilbert & Sullivan tends to be. Probably it helps that we have no reason, more than a century later, to compare one work too closely to another that happened to come just before it.
Ann said it was enjoyable too, partly because the story wasn’t quite as convoluted as the other productions she’s seen. Not that the story’s ever the main thing, but as she said, it was nice to be able to keep track of the characters.
All of the main cast acquitted themselves well. I was particularly fond of the energy that Jonathan Joseph Larson, a large man with a large beard, brought to the sailor Richard Dauntless, and Lane Halverson’s amusing performance of the relatively small part of Old Adam, Robin Oakapple’s faithful servant. He has his moment when he’s tasked to abduct a maiden.
There were some laughs. Maybe not as many as in Patience, especially when the Duke of Dunstable emerged in pink tights, but even chuckles are impressive in a work that’s more than 130 years old. Some clever lines I chuckled at:
RICH. And I make bold to ax your honour’s advice. Does your honour know what it is to have a heart?
SIR D. My honour knows what it is to have a complete apparatus for conducting the circulation of the blood through the veins and arteries of the human body.
ROB. My good sir, if I can’t disinherit my own unborn son, whose unborn son can I disinherit?
SIR ROD. Humph! These arguments sound very well, but I can’t help thinking that, if they were reduced to syllogistic form, they wouldn’t hold water.
MAR. Listen – I’ve come to pinch her!
ROSE. Mercy, whom?
MAR. You mean “who.”
ROSE. Nay! It is the accusative after the verb.
Of course, no joke about grammar is as funny as this.
The Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company’s performance of Patience drew a sizable crowd to Mandell Hall at the University of Chicago on Sunday (including us), as did previous Gilbert & Sullivan productions that we saw, Yeomen of the Guard and Iolanthe.
For good reason. The company, directed by Shane Valenzi, did a fine job of it, their talent augmented by the skillful University of Chicago Chamber Orchestra, a 40-member ensemble.
Remarkable how something funny almost 140 years ago can still be funny. Not only that, spot-on satirical. Then again, while the aesthetic poetry movement might be a thing of the increasingly distant past, fads — and more particularly, the fickle adulation of male sex symbols — are still immediately recognizable.
All of the leads, including Jeffrey Luksik as Bunthorne and Olivia Doig as Patience, brought considerable talent to their parts, but I was especially amused by Brandon Sokol’s take on Grosvenor. As the program notes put it, “Grosvenor is Fabio, a pure sex symbol without anything resembling artistic sensibilities,” and Sokol played it up delightfully.
Also amusing was Grosvenor’s transformation into “appearance and costume absolutely commonplace.” He came out with his golden hair shortened and wearing sports apparel, namely a Cubs cap and a Bears t-shirt. That was part of the costuming of the entire production, overseen by costume designer Rachel Sypniewski. The costumes were decidedly not Victorian, but that design decision worked.
“We’ve attempted to draw that comparison [between Victorian and modern faddishness] more or less overtly,” the program says, “modernizing the dress of the women and the poets to reflect a Poe-ish aesthetic evocative of the vampire-esque gothic movement that evolved from aestheticism and [which] enjoyed a revival during the popularity of the Twilight saga… The men [Dragoons] are Canadian Mounties who, despite their fearsome competence and justifiable pride, and nonetheless often the subject of light ridicule in American popular culture.”
(Such as Dudley Do-Right. Something I didn’t know about the Mounties, per Wiki: “Although the RCMP is a civilian police force, in 1921, following the service of many of its members during the First World War, King George V awarded the force the status of a regiment of dragoons, entitling it to display the battle honours it had been awarded.”)
Three of the Dragoons, usually dressed as Mounties, got the biggest laugh of the night when they tried to be aesthetics, dressed in tights. Actually, the very biggest laugh came when one of their members, the Duke of Dunstable, played by an enormous, hairy actor named Dennis Kulap, came out in pink tights.
One more thing about Patience, which I discovered just today: Oscar Brand and Joni Mitchell singing “Prithee Pretty Maiden.”
WGN said this morning: “Periods of rain and thundery downpours are to persist into Tuesday evening, maintaining a flood threat across the entire metro area.” Just what we need.
“Chicago lies on the warm side of a front extending from the southern Plains, to lower Michigan. Unseasonable, moisture-rich Gulf air is being focused along this boundary which separates polar air from unusual warmth, more typical of late April. The ground is frozen and where it has melted, soils are saturated.” Yep.
Regrets, I’ve had a few. Here’s one: I could have seen Cab Calloway live. He was still performing in the 1980s, with more vigor than anyone over 80 can expect to have.
But I didn’t seek him out. I’ve got no excuse.
Sometimes, you do the next best thing. I thought of that on Sunday evening when Ann and I went to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at the Old Town School of Folk Music in the city. At one point, frontman Scotty Morris and his hoppin’ band did a cover of “Minnie the Moocher.” It wasn’t Cab, it couldn’t be, but it was a gas.
The whole show was a gas: rousing swing revival tunes by enormously talented musicians who’ve been playing together for decades. Loud but not too loud, brassy but leavened by strings, as much of a righteous riff as I’m ever likely to reap. It might be the 21st century, but they’re the cats shall hep ya, even so.
Morris, in his suit and tie and what must be his trademark fedora, sang and alternately picked guitar and banjo, and did a little patter for the audience. Not too much, but he included the fact that the band has been together for 25 years this year.
“Twenty-five years ago, the most famous band in the world was Nirvana,” he said. “I think they had four hit songs that year. So I figured that was the perfect time to start a swing band.”
According to the band’s web site, it “was named Big Bad Voodoo Daddy after Scotty met Texas blues guitar legend Albert Collins at one of the latter’s concerts. ‘He signed my poster “To Scotty, the big bad voodoo daddy.” I thought it was the greatest name I had ever heard on one of the greatest musical nights of my life.’ ”
Morris and eight other men took to the stage and made the music come alive via trumpet, all manor of sax, clarinet, trombone, double bass, keyboard, drums and more, playing and jumping and swinging, while their instruments reflected the variable colored spotlights of the venue. Smoke and the clink of glasses would have added to the ambiance, but we don’t get those in the 21st century (or even earlier: the difference between Preservation Hall in 1981 and 1989 was smoke).
BBVD did an energetic mix of swing standards — “Minnie” with all the call-response Hi-De-Ho you could shake a stick at, but also “Diga Diga Doo,” “Mambo Swing,” “The Jumpin’ Jive,” and “I Wan’na Be like You” — along with tunes of their own. Neo-swing, you might call those, or the commonly used term, electroswing.
Such as “Why Me?”
The video is fun, and I like the recorded version, but it isn’t as much fun as the live version. I suspect it’s their biggest hit, if you can call it that, because they did it during the encore.
Though BBVD has always been a touring band, I think they were also promoting their latest record on this tour, Louie, Louie, Louie. Record indeed, since vinyl copies were for sale in the lobby.
Named, according to Morris, after the three Louies: Armstrong, Jordan and Prima. “We stole a lot from them,” he said. Well, sure. They stole from the best and made it their own.
Back on Sunday, November 26. A good Thanksgiving to all.
At about 9 p.m. on November 21, I went outside and there he was. Orion, just rising in the southeast. Winter’s here. Fitting, since it will be well below freezing until tomorrow morning.
Visited the library again recently. Did another impulse borrowing: a box set with five Marx Brothers movies on five disks. Their first five — The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup. I’m going to work my way through them over Thanksgiving because it occurs to me that, except for Animal Crackers and Duck Soup, I haven’t seen any of them in more than 20 years. Maybe 30 in some cases.
A booklet comes with the box, including reproductions of the movie posters. The Cocoanuts is praised on its poster as an All Talking-Singing Musical Comedy Hit! Talkies came along just in time for the Marx Brothers.
I’m glad the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville is a long-standing success. I remember visits there as far back as 1984, for meals or music, such as a show by Kathy Mattea sometime in the mid-80s, and always chocolate chunk cheesecake. But I wasn’t glad to read the following in the Washington Post this week:
“Nashville, first on ABC and now CMT, has made the 90-seat venue so incredibly popular over the last five years that it’s impossible to get in unless you have a reservation (snapped up seconds after they’re available online) or wait in line outside for hours.”
Hell’s bells. Not that I visit Nashville often enough for this to affect me, but still. The thought that the Bluebird has lines like a Disneyland ride bothers me.
Still, I have many fond memories of the 1980s Blue Bird, along with a number of other small Nashville venues I used to visit, such as the Station Inn, Exit/In, Springwater, 12th & Porter, the Sutler, and Cantrell’s.
The Station Inn offered bluegrass. One fine evening ca. 1985 I saw Bill Monroe himself play there. Some years earlier, I went now and then with friends Neal and Stuart. After ingesting some beer, Stuart in particular was adamant that the band, whoever it was, play “Rocky Top” and “Salty Dog.” Usually the band obliged.
While putting the “detach & return” part of my water bill in the envelope the other day, I noticed in all caps block letters (some kind of sans-serif): PLEASE DO NOT BEND, FOLD, STAPLE OR MUTILATE.
Two of the classic three. Poor old “spindle.” As neglected as the @ sign before the advent of email. As for “bend,” that’s an odd choice. I bend paper a lot, but unless you fold it, paper pops right back.
Correction: Not long ago, I recalled a kid that came to collect candy at our house one Halloween in the late ’90s, dressed as a Teletubbie. I had the time right: it was 1998. But oddly enough, I actually saw two little kids as Teletubbies, at least according to what I wrote in 2004:
“That year, all the kids came during the day, and I have a vivid memory of two kids aged about three to five, dressed as Teletubbies in bright costumes that looked like they could have done duty on the show itself.”
Odd. Memory’s a dodgy thing. How much remembering is misremembering? Or are the details that important anyway?
