pt at large

Memorial Day in Westport, MA: A small town honors its men and women who served

Memorial Day,Westport, MA, May 28, 2012

Nearly fifty veterans, from the Revolutionary War to Operation Iraqui Freedom, are buried in Beech Grove Cemetery in Westport, MA. Today's parade route is from Town Hall to Beech Grove Cemetery then back on Main Road to Town Hall for closing ceremonies and refreshments for all. The event lasted approximately two hours.

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A Day of Celebration and Commemoration

A parade, especially the Memorial Day Parade, is the glue that holds this little town together. Westport men have fought in wars from The Civil War to Afghanistan. There are scores of red, white and blue flags waving in the gentle breeze at Beech Grove Cemetery today.

The Memorial Day Parade was the first parade that hundreds of today’s spectators marched in when they were kids themselves. Yes, they’d heard school lessons about the patriotic meaning of the day but it was really special because they got to wear their uniforms - band or baseball or cub scout or brownie - and hear cheers from their relatives and friends along the route from Town Hall to Beech Grove Cemetery.

Now grown, they are lining the parade route to snap photos of their own children, grandchildren and peers. They understand the excitement on children’s faces.

Understand this. In Westport, nearly everyone in public service and youth organizations marches. It’s been that way a long time.

Dana Reed born 1926, now 86, was in his first parade as an 11 year old with his Westport Boy Scout troop. “They lined us up and taught us how to march, they don’t march properly today,” Reed observed. He knows a thing or two about marching. A Navy veteran, he served in the North Atlantic for WWII and was called back to sea again for the Korean War. Today he was right on cadence with the men of James Morris Post 145 American Legion of Westport, MA.

The Beaulieu brothers, Douglas and Barry, standing with their families atop the stone embankment near the Friends Meeting House, have been coming to the parade since they were kids, heck, they marched in this parade when they were kids. One Beaulieau son is a policeman, one a fireman who served in Iraqui Freedom, one niece is in the band and their granddaughter’s third grade teacher who’s wearing his Cub Scout Leader hat today is leading his “pack”. There’s a sense of pride here. This will be a joyfully loud place to be when these Beaulieu representatives march by.

Veterans of WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan march. The Board of Selectmen marches. State Police, Color Guards from surrounding towns, firemen, police and auxiliary officers march. Like “the wave” at Fenway Park, a quiet and respectful applause ripples down Main Road as each of these groups pass the spectators. And about a hundred of those cub scouts, brownies, and “The Blue Wave” Westport Schools band march. Some day these kids will watch their own kids march.

As the procession makes a turn into the cemetery, the day’s mood abruptly veers from festive to solemn. Those granite headstones point to our ultimate destination, at least for those old enough to understand that life is a finite proposition. Even the children are a little spooked. They don't need much of a reminder to quiet down.

A hush descends upon hundreds of onlookers as they form around the tall white pole with its flag at half staff in the center of the cemetery. The citizens may argue about warrant items at Town Meeting but there’s no discord here. It’s time to remember those who served the country, and to be thankful for what we often take for granted.

Jerry LeBoeuf, entering his second year as Westport Veteran’s Agent after taking over for highly regarded Ron Costa, his recently retired predecessor, sets the tone by reading President Barack Obama’s Memorial Day Prayer For Peace.

One after another, men in uniform come forward. They understand the pain of families like those of Westport's Michael Bono who lost his life in Operation Iraqui Freedom. The cost of war is not a line item in the budget. It is blood.

Words like “the fallen,” “heroes,” “the ultimate sacrifice,” “died for our country,” echo in this cemetery and probably in thousands of burial grounds across America today. The words are true, the sentiment is right, but one of the last men to speak says in less than a minute the truest words I hear all day.

“War is ugly. I hate wars. Hate the war but honor the warriors.” David Cordier, a burly uniformed man in black beret, a man long on sentiment and short on sentimentality, Commander of the Vietnam Veteran’s of America Westport MA Post 207, hit the mark.

A lone bugler blows a mournful “Taps”. A contingent of the parade group retraces its route to Town Hall. Prayers are spoken. The flag is raised to full staff. This Memorial Day is history. Hundreds of spectators head to the rear of town hall to socialize with cold milk, hot coffee, doughnuts, water, juice and home made blueberry cake.

How American is that?

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Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Jeanne Aquilla (photo Left) and Helene Hardin (photo Right) hand flags to spectators. Jeanne Aquilla’s husband Joe has been Commander of the James Morris Post 145 American Legion Post Westport MA for the past five years. “He’s giving his first Memorial Day speech today,” Jeanne says. Five area veteran’s groups rotate hosting the annual Memorial Day event. The Aquillas have lived in Westport for 32 years.

Douglas and Barry Beaulieu and their families (details in story) and Tillie of North Westport, her son and granddaughter.

Every man who served in the military is invited to march

A color guard precedes WWII decorated veteran Leo St.Onge

Longtime Veteran's Agent, recently retired Ron Costa photo at left

Three members of Westport's Board of Selectmen; State Police

Westport's Blue Wave Marching Band; Brownies, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts and Scout pack leader "Mr. T", fourth grade teacher...

Beech Grove Cemetery...

The family of Michael Bono, killed in Iraq, returns to seats after laying a wreath at the flagpole

Veterans listen as Veteran's Agent Jerry LeBoeuf (former Marine) reads President Barack Obama’s Memorial  Day Prayer For Peace

Everyone at "parade rest"

Cub scouts, Brownies, high school children lay wreathes at the flagpole; a 21 gun salute

Back to Town Hall for flag raising ceremony

Organizers said the turnout for the parade was one of the largest in recent memory

Post parade socializing and refreshments

A busy line at the refreshment stand behind Town Hall; pt and Dana Reed, WWII and Korea Navy veteran


 

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein: My Walking Talking Lifetime Achievement Award

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein. Google the name. Ten pages worth of Jeff Kelly Lowenstein later, Google’s still rolling out his name. Impressive.

Let’s see. Award winning reporter for the Chicago Reporter; currently Database and Investigative Editor for the Chicago Tribune’s Spanish language newspaper Hoy (and is becoming fluent in Spanish while he’s at it); the 2007 Racial Justice Fellow at the Institute of Justice and Journalism at USC’s Annnenberg School of Communication; one of a handful of journalists from around the world to be selected in the Climate Change Media Partnership’s first Fellowship Program to send journalists to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban (COP17) in November 2011; contributor to the Huffington Post; awarded a Dennis Hunt Fellowship in 2011; currently president of the Dart Society…I could go on. Run that Google search and see for yourself.

I’ve known him since he was nine years old. And I'm mighty proud of him.

“I want Mr. Tamburello for my fourth grade teacher,” he remembers telling his mom in 1974. Alice Lowenstein was on the board of the Parent Teacher Organization. Jeff was placed in 4T. He was one of the bright spots in a really interesting bunch of kids in my 1974-75 class at the John Pierce School in Brookline, MA.

Jeff (R) interviewing a classmate on the first day of school in 1974

There must be a gene that creates the ability to connect the dots that link human relationships. Jeff is a natural. He made friends with every kid in the class. His style was subtle and steady. Kids respected him, an act that mirrored what they experienced from him. His voice is deeper now but his style hasn’t changed a jot.

He’d stop by to visit me after school from grade 5 through his years at Brookline High School, then during vacations when he returned to the east coast from Stanford (graduated Summa Cum Laude). When Jeff’s mom and dad were involved in a terrible automobile accident after he graduated, his mother nearly died. Fate drew him back to Brookline.  Jeff and his brothers Jon and Michael shared home care for their mother’s arduous recovery and rehabilitation. It was a long road. Jeff needed some structure and a sense of familiar territory to hold his days and nights together. He walked over to the Pierce School.

“We are family,” was principal Alvin Fortune’s motto. A big man with a bigger heart, he offered Jeff a job, knowing that Jeff was not only a caretaker for his mother, but needed some TLC himself. Our teaching community embraced him.

After a stint of running our recess program and the less exciting task of shelving books for our two motherly librarians who fed him snacks every day, Jeff asked if he could sit in on my classes, maybe help teach for a couple of hours a day. The smartest thing I ever did was to say yes. The next two years were the most exciting of my 34 year career.

That summa cum laude from Stanford was not just an impressive certificate to hang on the wall. Jeff authored terrific American History lessons, engineered activities that involved every level of student. Kids loved his style. They knew he was present, a huge gift, and that his desire to teach was balanced by his desire to know who they were and what they needed to succeed. He learned to manage a class of ten year olds. Watching him teach was fun.

Jeff added a program to my series of “Life Talks,” which he called “The You Can Do Anything Program” in which he invited artists, musicians, writers – all friends of his – to talk about the paths that led them to their callings.

Talking with him after class about strategies for content delivery, class management, which kids looked involved and which ones needed help, where the lesson would lead tomorrow… those sessions were a gift. They gave me insight into the depth of experience I hadn’t realized I’d absorbed in my first 18 years of teaching. And I learned a lot by watching Jeff work a room with an inclusive style that made every kid feel like he or she was in the game.

Jeff was an astute observer. I asked him to write anecdotal comments about each student and used them when Jeff sat in with me when we met with parents for conferences about their child twice a year.  Jeff owns a memory that rivals a purse seine trawler for its capacity to collect (and retain) data. When he spoke about their kids, he included specific examples for everything he wrote.

Twenty-four looks pretty old when you’re nine. My students would examine photos pinned to my bulletin board of Jeff as a fourth grader in 4T, look at him as a grown man, then try to figure out how ancient I must be to have been his teacher in the olden days. It was a gas.

Over the past forty years I’ve known Jeff as a student, mentor, fellow teacher, and, for the past twenty-five years or so, as a friend. I’ve witnessed him embrace challenges through his first career as a middle school teacher and through his evolutions as a reporter. He brings an incandescent energy to the cause of social justice that inspires his colleagues. Honest to goodness, I’ve seen him operate with this vision since he was nine years old.

I call Jeff Kelly Lowenstein my “Walking Talking Lifetime Achievement Award.”

On May 17, I’m heading to New York City to the second annual fund raiser/auction for the Dart Society, an organization of journalists that works to tell stories about trauma and violence with sensitivity and compassion, and that also works to help journalists deal with the impact of doing that work. Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is president of the organization.  A perfect match.

Jeff and pt through the years

1974 Jeff learning about Japanese culture with classmates in 4T

1989 Goofing around  as The Dynamic Duo during Pierce School's annual  "Dress Up Day" ; 2001 recording commentaries for NPR affiliate WFCR-FM in Amherst, MA

B/W classroom photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Elena's Ashes

Palm Beach Shores
April 17, 2012

 
If it fits, we ship. There she was. My mom. In that 4x6x2 inch US Post Office carton. Most of the rest of her ashes are interred next to my dad’s grave in Pittsfield, MA.

Way back before she died in 2005, she began telling me how she wanted her burial and funeral arrangements to go. A pillow in her den read, “I’m not pushy, I just have better ideas.” You get the point.

Outside in the real world, I was a successful teacher, respected by colleagues and parents in the community, an honest to goodness adult.

But every time I walked into the door of 15 Coltland Drive, I became an adult son, emphasis on the son part. You do what your mother tells you. I swear, some days I felt like I was standing in the kitchen in short pants with a bag of marbles in my pocket. So, when she told me she wanted to be cremated, did not want a wake, and did want me to throw a party for her after her funeral, that’s exactly what I did.

‘I want some of my ashes to go in the plot with your father,” She also said, “I want to wear a hot red dress for the cremation.”

“And I’d like to have some ashes scattered down at Palm Beach Shores at the Lake Worth Inlet.” I hunted around the house and found a pretty Japanese vase, a wedding present that had sat in the living room ever since I could remember.

“Perfect,” she said. I felt like I’d earned a gold star. The sense of approval from a parent never gets old.

Elena had spent a couple of months in Palm Beach Shores (Singer Island) every winter after she and my dad bought a condominium there in the 1970s. My dad, my mom’s sister and her husband, and my sister and her two young sons were in the annual rotation from January through March.

Elena was a regular at the pool, played cards with the ladies, and strolled around the beach. Late in the afternoon, her favorite jaunt was to head a half mile down to the Lake Worth Inlet, a deep-water canal for cargo and pleasure vessels bound to and from West Palm Beach. Over time, benches were built along a stretch of the inlet. Tourists, condo owners, and local fisherman would banter or just sit to watch the endlessly changing seascape

“Going there when my brother and I had school vacations is one of my biggest memories from when I was little,” says my elder nephew Chris. “I remember Poppi putting the bait on my fishing poles in the first years we went, and after that even Nonni did it for me. We used to fish way out by the abandoned water tower at the end of the jetty.”

A robust tidal current was always running. The water was that impossible Florida blue, the kind New Englanders dream about when they’re shoveling a foot of snow in January. Today, I wasn’t shoveling snow. I was keeping a promise. I was about to scatter Elena’s ashes into the canal.

The next day, the page would be turned on the condo at Mayan Towers North. My nephews had resisted selling the small unit and I can’t blame them.  When one of your fondest memories is being bundled up to fly down to Florida and spend time with doting grandparents who take you everywhere and show you off like prizes, it’s hard to let go.

I found a gold rimmed bowl in the condo, poured Elena’s ashes into it and smiled. She would have loved the synchronicity, another piece of her china used to hold her ashes. I’m not sure how she’d feel about the can of cold Bud Light I brought along to seal the deal, champagne was more her style for an occasion.  But I had no doubt she'd agree that a libation was part of the ceremony.

It took me an hour to work up the resolve to fling her into the onshore breeze. At 7:30 PM, the sun about to settle into the horizon, I timed the swells rolling down the inlet, saw one particularly determined one about to crest in front of me and flung Elena’s ashes from the delicate bowl. The fresh breeze held the powdery remains in a glorious translucent gray cloud that trailed along the inlet, the heavier particles spilling into the water at my feet.

Floating along in the dissipating cloud came the memory of my mom singing to me when I was little until I fell asleep.

I loved to watch trains of all kinds with my grandfather, who often took me to the train depot at the edge of town to watch what he called “the roundhouse,” a huge lazy-susan arrangement that would turn the locomotives around to send them down a different track. Sort of like the track I was sending my mother along with right now.

I was fascinated watching endlessly long processions of coal cars, ice cars, gondolas, tank cars, low riders packed with iron, cattle cars, boxcars in a metallic rainbow of colors, each bearing the symbol or lettering of companies from distant states that made me think of the wild west, and those funny looking cabooses and the grizzled men in railroad hats standing on the rear deck, who would, if I had a great stroke of luck, wave to me and my grandfather (Elena’s father), as we watched them from the hillside above the depot.

Elena knew these images ruled the rails of my imagination. After she tucked me into bed, she would sit beside me in the dark and make up songs about the colorful procession of freight cars…I could hear her softly singing those songs to me as her cloud vanished into the wind. 

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Postscript

When your mother tells you to scatter her ashes and make a party of it, you do what she says.

 

American Airlines Admiral's Club: First Class Comfort

The Admiral’s  Club in Dallas... OMG what a revelation to an economy class pilgrim. American Airlines has sent me a complimentary pass. They may as well have offered me crystal meth.

Blissfully quiet, spacious, civil. Concierges stationed at the entrance answer your every question. Daylight pouring through ceiling to floor plate glass windows splashes into the lounge peppered with pods of couches, chairs, tables, an enclosed area for smokers, and another enclosed business area with computers, printers, and fax machines at the ready. A counter lined with coffee, tea, bottled water, fresh fruit, salties, cookies, all free of charge, is tucked in back portion of room.

WiFi? Just open your device and click away. There are vast peaceful areas of the club with no plasma TVs blaring. A full service bar serves sandwiches, salads, sushi, breakfast items, and assorted entrees.

No waste baskets. The wait staff glides silently through the club to pick up empty coffee cups, drink glasses, stray napkins, remains of lunch or dinner. Family room? Yep. Clean bathrooms? Yep.

I am hooked.

Health Care Debate: Civil Discourse At The Highest Level

How refreshing. For two hours, until the radio signal faded as I drove west to the Berkshires Thursday morning, I listened to lawyers argue their case for or against the Affordable Health Care Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama on March 23, 2010. No shouting, no fabricating, no demonizing, no put downs, no flag waving - just solid argumentation based on legal precedents and references to the powers of the United States Constitution.

The judges probed the lawyers' arguments, asked thoughtful or philosophical or practical questions, even cracked a joke from time to time. It was like listening to a chess match and it was fascinating.

Airing the proceedings was a brilliant idea, a fabulous teaching moment that reintroduced me to the mechanics of how our government works, the checks and balance system between legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

Conservative and liberal philosophies of jurisprudence are still in play but the contention is civil, serious, and based on reason. No matter which way the case is decided, it is a breath of fresh air into the ultra polarized rant climate in the country today.

 

 

Wine and Smoothies

Upon reading reviews of award-winning wines from a well-known Massachusetts vineyard

“Pale golden yellow color. Bright aromas of lemongrass, Kaffir lime leaf, lychee nut, and apricot yogurt with a silky dry-yet-fruity medium body and some pleasant maturing mineral and smoky notes backing the pure tart citrus fruit finish. Very Alsatian-like and a great choice for the table.”

Did the judges uncork a bottle of Pinot Gris or pour themselves a smoothie? I must be the taste equivalent of tone deaf. When I take my first sip of a glass of wine, I think, “Hmmm, it tastes pretty good,” or, “Geez, I don’t think this was a good choice.”

“Deep old gold color. Toasty brioche, baked fruit, and caramel aromas with a crisp, frothy medium body and a long grilled citrus, praline, and apple driven finish. Rich and satisfying; serve with grilled seafood.”

I’ve never tasted a wine that reminded me of toasty brioche, or toasty anything for that matter. I taste something vaguely grape-y, maybe dry, or sweet, or heavy, but "a long grilled citrus, apple driven finish?"  Do they serve peyote mushrooms during these tasting events?

When I first started reading descriptions of wine, I actually thought the vintners dropped a few peaches or lemons or apricots into the vat while pressing the grapes. No, I was told, these were virtual flavors imagined by the judges and reviewers. Imagine what your wine would really taste like if Mr. Beringer threw his half eaten breakfast brioche into his fermenting Blanc de Blanc.

This is why I’m all in favor of the idea of selling wine in bottles with twist off caps or in plastic coated cartons, the kind you get your Hood homogenized 2% milk in. Even if it's a pretty good year for the wine, I dare one of those judges to start carrying on about “spicy caramelized apple and pineapple and coconut flan aromas” when they pour their wine from one of those babies.

Music and "Dope"

I knew there was a reason I'd drive an hour to listen to a great band or fly to Louisiana for one of the zillion music and dance festivals down there. Neurologists at McGill University have evidence of what I already knew. Pleasurable music unleashes a flood of dopamine that rocks my world. Dopamine is the brain chemical associated with experiencing food, drugs, and sex. Do I have your attention now?

It's why I put down the dishes and spontaneously start dancing around the kitchen table or want to put my arms around a like-minded partner absolutely anywhere when I hear a bluesy slow drag or a compelling up-tempo swing, zydeco, pop, rhythm n blues number. The rhythms, instruments, emotive voice, or lyrics or all of it put together in one high-rolling tsumami flip the switch on my internal pleasure meter. I'm momentarily sucked into a fourth dimension. Self-consciousness falls away. A Niagra Falls of playfulness, sensuality, creative juices, levity, and symbiotic connection spills from my synapses. When I dance with a woman who's mainlining the same music, it's like invincibly roaring down Niagra Falls without the barrel.

Tons of you out there know this for a fact. The right music, whatever really gets you off, fires up "dope" you won't get arrested for ingesting in public. It grandly sweeps away any pressing matters in your life.

A scientist will not need a PET scanner or MRI to measure the massive amounts of dopamine I'll consume, or will consume me, during Mardi Gras in Lafayette next week. The goofy smile on my face will be empiric evidence of the first order.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1718831/listening-to-music-releases-same-brain-chemicals-as-food-drugs-sex

Occupy Starbucks

With this brew of corporate chicanery, Starbucks belongs in the same parade as fee-crazed banks that take advantage of the fine print... or in Starbuck's case, no print at all.

Forget Citibank. Starbucks climbed to the top of the corporate greed-heap with the discovery that they’ve had their latte-flavored thumb on the scale, fleecing caffeine starved customers for the past couple of years.

A story in the Boston Globe says the Seattle company has been adding $1.50 to the price of their ½ pound bags of coffee.

The Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation says no disclosure of the extra fee was listed on the packaging or on Starbucks' premises. So, you if you bought a half pound of an $11.95 per pound coffee, you were getting pounded for $7.45. Starbucks transparency policy was as opaque a cup of Skinny Caramel Macchiato.

Apparently, Starbucks customers are so used to paying inflated prices for their java, they never caught on. C’mon. Is the Costa Rica Terrazu or the Guatemala Antigua that good? Or are Starbucks customers out of their beans (sorry if this includes some loyal readers)?

A spokesman for Starbucks said the company charged for half-pound bags to cover “the additional labor and packaging needed to accommodate those customers’ unique request.” 

Really?  Asking to purchase a half-pound of coffee is “unique”? I suppose paying around $5 for a Starbucks "hand- crafted" Mocha Caramel Frappuccino Grande is unique, too (although the message has not been lost on franchises like Dunkin' Donuts).

The hidden fee, my friends, was corporate greed at its most haughty, exceeded only by corporate chutzpah.

Exposed to the piracy, a Starbucks spokesman announced, “We are pleased to be able to now offer our customers alternative sizes of whole-bean coffee in all of our US stores, free of any service charge.”

This is a "Venti" sized cup of corporate bombast.

Note to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Now that you’ve been booted out of Zuccotti Park, consider deploying your tarps and tents outside Starbucks. And BYO coffee, preferably Eight O’Clock Bean Coffee, a bargain at half the price.

A Toy Story from Westport, MA

When owner Ira Hassenfeld walked into the design room at Hasbro Toys in Providence in the summer of 1963, the first thing he announced was, “I want you to make a doll for boys.” The second thing was, “And I don’t want to hear the word doll when you design it!”

For the next several months, the “D” word was not uttered. The toy was always referred as a soldier, or a fighting man. One of the three men on the Hasbro design team was Sam Speers. The combined skills of these men ended up creating the world’s first  action figure for boys, with the decidedly undoll- like name of GI Joe.

A year after he graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Industrial Design, Speers built a cottage in Westport, MA. Speers and his wife Arlene divided their time between their home in North Attleboro and their small cottage in Masquesatch Meadows. It was an easy drive from Westport to Providence.

The next few months would be an ultimate test of Speers ingenuity. “We knew that we could make equipment and accessories for the figure since it had been done successfully five years earlier by another company with the Barbie Doll,” Speers said. They knew that a market existed because boys had always played with soldiers, mostly with inanimate cast iron or lead figures 4 inches high.

The first big question was how could Sam’s design team join together the hands, arms, legs of an 11 1/2 inch tall action figure. Nails wouldn’t stay put, screws could be taken apart, a spring could be flexed out of shape.

“You don’t leave your work back at the office. You’ve got problem you want to solve, you’re always looking for a way to solve it, “ Speers said. “One Saturday, I was wandering into Grundy’s Hardware for a homeowner repair when I saw what’s called a ring-threaded screw, it has concentric rings that can be forced into something but cannot be twisted out easily. Bingo. By Monday morning Norman Jacques and Walter Hansen, the other men on my team, were using them to fasten the fighting man’s limbs together.”

The biggest problem in designing this soldier was that his arms, legs, and body had to support whatever equipment he was to use.  He had to be able to maintain a stable pose when standing, lying down or kneeling with a weapon or other equipment they were inventing for him.

“After reviewing everything I’d ever seen in my life. it came to mind that underwear utilized a cotton elastic braid which was very strong yet flexible and could be used to assume various poses. I didn’t find that in Westport but I knew in my head that it would hold the soldier together.”

For the next six months, Speers and his design team felt like they were in a creative war themselves, as they used their imaginations and design wiles to meet an unrelenting deadline.  By February 1964, GI Joe, an action figure with 21 moving parts, stormed into the Toy Fair in New  York City to a hero’s welcome. Dubbed "GI Joe" by the practical woman who was making his clothing for Hasbro, he became the first boy’s action figure in the world.

GI Joe’s activities weren’t limited to combat. “One of my jobs was to create new adventures for him," story lines that would keep his fans returning to the stores for new outfits and gear. 

“The annual Book Fair at the Westport Friend’s Meeting was where I found them. I’d thumb through old, curled-up copies of National Geographic and find inspiration for dozens of GI Joe exploits,” Speers said, and rattled off examples like "The Secret of the Mummy's Tomb," "The Capture of the Pygmy Gorilla," "White Tiger Hunt," and "The Eight Ropes of Danger," based on a story about an octopus!

One of the highlights of Speers career happened right in Westport Harbor in the early 1970s. “One of the adventures that I thought would be sensational was a GI Joe deep sea diver with what they called then a hard helmet. That toy had weighted boots on so he’d go to the bottom and if you blew into a little tube it would put air into his helmet he came back to the surface. One of the thrills of my life was when my wife and I boated past Boat Beach and saw a little boy and his mother leaning over the side of a boat and dropping the deep sea GI Joe into the water. It was something I thought I'd never see.”

Speers might not have believed that this action figure would still be protecting the motherland in the 21st century but on July 4th, 2004, he attended a fortieth anniversary GI Joe convention at Walt Disney World.  The Hasbro Company commemorated the anniversary by reproducing the entire 1964 product line for a new generation of collectors and players. 

Who knows? By the end of the decade, GI Joe might be headed into Deep Space.

 

A Kinder and Gentler Harvard by Pledge? Methinks Not

Just sayin’...

There’s no way a pledge is going to make people behave kinder. What are the people at Harvard thinking? They’re asking incoming freshmen to sign a pledge affirming they understand the importance of kindness.

Harvard’s pledge reads: “As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.”

Are kindness and outstanding high school grades disconnected? I would suppose that smart kids who are admitted to Harvard are capable of being kind.

Don’t we all get that kindness is a virtue? No. Watch a few hours of TV or listen to some talk radio. Snarkiness and downright nastiness is afoot. Ask Fox News’s Roger Ailes, he’ll tell you that fractiousness and gotchas improves ratings of presidential debates.

Whether it’s learned or taught, kindness happens on its own. It doesn’t get as much ink as the caustic stuff, but kindness is out there. The most well known pledge I can think of is the Pledge of Allegiance. Except for the “under God” part, most people have no quarrel with it.  The Tea Party people and the people way over on the other side don’t pledge to love one another but they do express allegiance to their country.

As a former teacher, I know that kindness, empathy, and community aren’t expressly spelled out in learning outcomes. They have to be modeled and upheld.

A good teacher doesn’t need to pledge that he/she will not tolerate bullying, teasing, or taunting in the classroom. A good teacher just does it. Lots of kids come to school with positive social values and will use them, especially when they’re in an environment that encourages them to do so.

The motto on the Harvard emblem is “VERITAS” (Latin, “Truth”). The truth of the matter is that if you have to ask freshmen to sign a pledge to be kind, you’ve lost the battle already.

The Skinny on Obesity Ain't Pretty

Just sayin’…
An obesity pill? 

Today’s headline in Business Week cites that the stock prices of companies developing obesity pills soared when the FDA approved  Orexigen Therapeutics Inc.’s to resume development  of its obesity pills.

World-wide (no pun intended) the population is becoming overweight and obese. Check this story in today’s New York Times.

In America, 28 percent of the adult population is obese and 68 percent is overweight. That’s topped by a smidgeon by Mexico - 30 percent of the adult population is obese and 70 percent is overweight.

This is crazy. Why aren’t these statistics (largely responsible for the dramatic rise in diabetes) cited in the debate on health care costs? And when they are, why do we primarily blame the consumer for weight gain? Yes, people aren’t forced to put the food in their mouths. And yes, they’re not tied to trees so they can’t exercise every day.

But follow the money. The Center for Responsive Politics says American Beverage Association spent $18,850,000 to lobby for their products (we're not talking sparkling water here).

Obesity pills might be a windfall for pharmaceutical companies but they are not the solution. Until Congress - and people like you and me - put the heat on the food and beverage industry to produce more healthy products and to spend their big bucks convincing people to consume them, no one’s going to lose weight anytime soon.

Showdown at Symphony2: World-Class Squash Titans Compete

Showdown at Symphony2
Boston Symphony Hall
September 14, 2011

How do you bring the sport of squash to a large audience? Drop a four-walled glass cage into the first floor of Boston’s stately Symphony Hall and invite the world’s best players to compete in it. The entire community of squash players from Boston will show up. That’s exactly what happened Wednesday night.

There may not be legions of them but they will pay Boston Symphony Orchestra prices to watch the spectacle of world champion players have at it. Tonight’s crowd, many still decked in suits and ties, looks more like a board meeting than sports convocation. Unlike tennis or racquetball, squash never achieved, possibly never aspired to be, a plebian sport. But the loyalists pony up big bucks to see their heroes do battle.

The sport is often played in four–walled plaster courts crammed into a brick building in the midst of a city. Even the courts with a glass rear wall have limited ability for crowd of any other than the player’s friends and family to watch.

All this changed in the 1980s when some bright light, probably a squash aficionado, invented the portable glass walled court, making the game a true spectator sport.

World championship matches are routinely played in these well-illuminated glass cages with non-skid wooden floors. The courts can be erected on a stage or in the middle of an auditorium or gym. Voila! You have a wrap around sporting event that a thousand people can watch.

Tonight’s four players have either been ranked Number One in the World or won the World Open. This is tantamount to witnessing Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Pete Sampras, and Ivan Lendl play a round robin tournament a few feet away from your seat.

Our seats are perfectly situated in the first balcony, at the midpoint of the court that has been erected on a three-foot dais just in front of the footlights of the stage at Symphony Hall.  Below us, spectators are and wine and cheesing it while sitting at scores of four-seat Boston Pops-style tables that surround the court from Row C to Row J, in case you’re familiar with the floor plan.

According to my friend Myke Farricker, a certified squash instructor who introduced me to this spectacle, competition squash might be the most physically demanding sport: agility, eye hand coordination, stamina for sprinting/stopping on a dime, footwork, arm and hand strength have to be at peak levels.  “These world class athletes are in superb physical condition. It isn’t uncommon for a rally to have 40 or fifty shots just for one point. The matches, best two out of three, usually go to 11 or 15. That’s an amazing workout.”

This is a game of thunderous forehands and backhands mixed with immensely soft touches. With a flick of the wrist, these guys can send the rubber ball into the front glass wall with the force of a howitzer. The thawackkkk on the wall is like a rifle shot – unless a player winds up to power the tiny rubber ball against the front wall like an RPG and instead lofts it in a lazy arc into a front corner, forcing his opponent to sprint forward to volley before the ball bounces twice after rebounding off the front wall.

“One of the things that appeals to me is the sportsmanship between players,” Myke says. “They play each other on tour a lot and know each other’s game. They’re extremely competitive, even combative, but play it as a game. They abide by the decisions of the referee if a shot is contested, then keep playing.” Their level of concentration has to be fierce.

Volleying with astonishing accuracy and speed, these guys make the game look easy. I have to keep reminding myself there’s a reason for this. 2011 World No. 1 Nick Matthew (England), 2010 World No. 1 and 2010 Showdown defender Ramy Ashour (Egypt), with longtime fan-favorites 1999 World Open champion Peter Nicol (England) and 1998 World Open winner Jonathon Power (Canada) have each been at the top of the heap in professional squash.

As a rally continues past thirty shots, it feels like all 1200 spectators are holding their breath. All I hear in the vaunted acoustics of Symphony Hall is the dull thawwaaack of the racquet striking the ball and the sharper thawaaack of the ball pounding against the front wall. Who will be the first to gamble on a “kill shot” to end the rally? Who will make the first unforced error? Who will lose a tiny shred of concentration that spells the difference between winning and losing?

We cheer boisterously after a point like this. Occasionally, one of the players taps his hand against his racquet in a silent gesture of ‘well-played.’

Money’s involved in the outcome. But more than that, prestige is on the line. You can’t see it in a trophy case, but it is the biggest prize for these world-class racquet warriors.

+++++++++
Veteran squash reporter Colleen Turner's story about Showdown at Symphony2

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Sushi,anyone? Spectators dine at courtside before the match.

 

Birthday Salute To My Editors!

Birthday Salute To My Editors!
 
My two trusty editors, Rebecca Wilson and Susaan Straus (yes, the two a’s in Susaan are not a typo), keep my writing on the rails. They’re celebrating birthdays this month and this is a chance for me to wrap a thank you note in a bow and send it to them electronically.
 
For me writing is a creative endeavor, a discipline, and usually fun. The drafts I send my editors are met with objectivity and occasional humor.
 
The admonitions of  “What’s the focus here?” or “Your tenses aren’t consistent,” or  “You need a verb in there somewhere!” or “Way too long and convoluted,” help me become a better writer. I still manage to include typos and assorted gaffes when I publish without “vetting” the work with one or the other of the editors.
 
And they know when to throw a bouquet."Love the ending!,” or, “I especially loved those two turns of phrase!” happen frequently.
 
Rebecca Wilson is an interior designer who specializes in redecorating and space planning. Susaan Straus is a savvy business consultant who specializes in executive coaching, organizational development, and interactive large group programs. They probably won't offer to edit your work but if you need the services they provide, I can just about guarantee you'll be pleased with their input.
 
Thank you Rebecca and Susaan for taking the time to help shape my stories. And Happy Birthdays!!

Apple Stores: Gigabytes Of Service, Every Time

The Apple Store in Chestnut Hill, MA: The Ultimate Customer Service Experience

And you wonder why stock in Apple has tripled in the past three years?

Note: I’ve been using an Apple computer since the ancient Apple IIe’s were introduced into the Brookline Public Schools in the 1980s, Three years ago, I bought a handful of shares of Apple Computer at around $100 a share. I wish I had bought a wheelbarrow full.

The quality of Apple products and the prices they command speak for themselves: iPhones, iBooks, iPads, iTouches… aye aye aye. And mastermind Steve Jobs knows how to create a customer service experience as seamless as the products his company thinks up.

Let’s talk about service. It is possible to enter an Apple Store and spend a fortune and go ca-chinging out the store with a smile on your face. Happened to me when I bought a new computer five weeks ago.

An Apple Store reminds me of a beehive, except the worker bees are all wearing blue, not yellow, and have easily readable nametags. Every single one of them knows his/her stuff. Some are deeply knowledgeable about specific topics. 
 
I spent one morning talking to one of the blue shirts about the prospective purchase, came back the next day with my “old” G5, bought a lustrously new Apple 3.06 Intel Core i3, and returned that afternoon to retrieve both computers.

As agreed, the tech crew had migrated every single bit of data from my G5 to my new 3.06 Intel Core i3. When I opened the hood of the new model, one of the fellows at the Genius Bar patiently answered a list of my questions, helped me set a few new preferences for email, ran it through its paces, and I was good to go.

My desktop and its contents were all in place, in a sleeker machine that can run the applications I rely on faster and with gorgeous color. For the record, it cost several hundred bucks less than the desktop I bought in 2006.

One week later, I toted the new machine back to the store. A CD I had inserted failed to be coaxed out of the CD drive. After a quick inspection, the fellow at the Genius Bar says, “We’re going to exchange this for a new one.” And did. I waited for over an hour while he managed to have the data migrated once again and left with the model I’m typing away at right now.

They have the best customer satisfaction driven business model on earth. Every time I walk into the store in the Chestnut Hill Mall, I’m greeted by a friendly concierge. “Hi, how can we help you today?”

Last week it was, “Well, I need an adapter to  connect my laptop with my TV so I can stream movies onto it. And I might need an HDMI cable to connect the adapter to the TV.”

“Sure,” says the young lady concierge, “Kevin can help you with that…Kevin, this gentleman wants to talk to you about connecting his laptop with his TV.”

A few feet away, Kevin, who’s been chatting with another blue shirt, greets me with a smile and firm handshake, asks me again what I need and off we go to a display area loaded with adapters and cables.

“This is the adapter that you need to connect your MacBook Pro to the TV,” Kevin says after asking me a few questions about the TV.

“Look, Kevin, I might be able to buy the HDMI cable for a lot less at Best Buy so I might wait on it,” I say.

Kevin takes an iPhone out of his pocket. His fingers do some prestidigitation on it and shows me the screen. The cost is comparable.

Onto the pile it goes.

“And oh, when the friend who showed me how to do this used her adapter and cables on my TV, the sound came from her laptop but didn’t come from my TV.”

“When did you buy your MacBook?” Kevin says. Another round of prestidigitation on the iPhone.

“The later ones can send the signal to your TV. If yours was made before around June 2010, you might have to buy cables like these (as he walks me to another display) that you plug into the audio jacks on your TV and you’re good to go.”

You might be able to conduct an air campaign in Libya with this iPhone.

“What credit card would you like to use?” Kevin says.

He swipes my credit card on another gizmo he retrieves from his pocket. “Would you like a printed receipt or one sent by email?”

“Both.”

Kevin reaches under a nearby table to an unseen printer, hands me a receipt to sign, puts my purchases in a nifty plastic bag and I’m done.

On my way out, I pass blue shirts and customers engaged in one to one tutorials, information gathering sessions, and demonstrations. Several people are conferring with young men or women at the Genius Bar – that’s the place I set up an appointment online when my first Mac hit the CD problem and was replaced on the spot.

I also pass the concierge who directed me to Kevin. “How did it go?” she asks.  The smile on my face was a dead giveaway.  So is the price per share of Apple Computer. I sometimes think that the “i” prefix on most every Apple product relates to the “I” as in “me.” The more they keep us ‘i’s happy, the higher the stock will go.

Nice goin’, Steve. 

Charlie Sheen: A Cockeyed View

We need Charlie Sheen.

I hate to say it but Charlie's the guilty pleasure that makes reading the rest of the news bearable. Chuck's been featured on Google's "News" page several times a day for nearly two weeks. At this rate, his shenanigans will eclipse the Wall Street bailout, maybe even make a run at the Health Care debacle.

Watch any  one of the videos on Google or elsewhere. The guy's a certifiable train wreck - like one of those one-trick windup toys that do the same stupid thing every time you fire them up, except Chas displays an artificial intelligence that feeds on its own lunacy and trots out new variations on his theme every 24 hours.

It's entertaining to see a someone we know better as the star of the TV show "Two and A Half Men" be courted by major networks and highbrow interviewers and put  out reliably fabulous megalomaniacal rants. Kicks the crap out of ratings the stations get for an in-depth analysis of foreign policy sketched out by a learned person who's spent a lifetime behind the scenes trying to mediate between obstinate Mideast power brokers.

Pretty soon, Charlie will supersede the weather as the most common topic  of casual conversation.

No more, "Looks like that front from the Midwest is heading here, jaysus, am I tired of shoveling snow."
Now it's, "Can you  believe he's sleeping with those two babes in the same house… and his kids were living there till today when the authorities took the kids away?"

Charlie's Two and A Half Men all by himself. One part 'infant terrible', one part publicity magnet, and one half clueless jerk.

Let's see. During Charlie's streak, he's gone nose to nose with Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya, Oman, and Wisconsin.

If Chinese authorities decide to beat up its upstart dissidents, who, encouraged by Africa's demonstrators, begin chanting "We're tired of this, we won't take it any more!" they will just wait till a juicy moment when Sir Charles throws one of his two mistresses out a bedroom window - an event someone will, of course, videotape and upload onto the internet. We will click to watch the hapless babe free-fall to the lawn even though every fiber in our righteous selves will abhor our gluttonous taste for Sheen's sophomoric behavior.

That's the time, when most of America is glued to one of Charlie's youtube moments, and while lots of men are wishing they could behave so churlishly and get away with it, and lots of women are sticking pins in their Charlie Sheen dolls, that Hu Jintao will order his troops into China's streets to beat the crap out of anyone and everyone who behaves like an Egyptian and has democracy on their minds and toss them in jail.

We'll talk about that international scenario for a few minutes then log back on and google what loose cannon shot Charlie's fired across the bow of agents, producers, writers, and networks in an ego-fueled act that should win him an academy award in the Bizarre Category, maybe even a Twisted Humanitarian award, for single-handedly distracting us from the fact the world is going to hell in a handbasket and we're too drugged with a mainline shot of Sheen in our arteries to have it bother us.

Without Charlie, the daily doses of pain and suffering in the rest of Google's News headlines would be too much to bear.

Bob Edwards: Veteran Interviewer Pitch Perfect with Esperanza Spaulding

“Bob Edwards Weekend” Radio Show

Edwards interviews  people he finds interesting, from newsmakers, historians, and authors to artists, actors, and regular folks too.
A two-part interview with Esperanza Spaulding was aired Friday, September 24, 2010

http://www.bobedwards.info/ftopic1053.html&sid=2f0bb6d0e35c590ff1e55e4e768d197d
part 1
http://www.bobedwards.info/ftopic1054.html&sid=2f0bb6d0e35c590ff1e55e4e768d197d
part 2

This is the way an interview ought to go. Ask questions and listen to the answers - without interrupting the interviewee. It helps to have an interviewee who is self- aware, has a sense of humor, a deep understanding of the technical aspects of her art and can get them across to the ears of a layperson. In this case, I’m talking about Bob Edwards and Esperanza Spaulding.
 
I can't tell you how many times I switch the dial when an interviewer interrupts the interviewee to show how much he/she knows about the subject or diverts the place the interviewee is going to someplace else the interviewer wants to investigate. Not so here.
 
Look, here’s a link to the first part of Bob Edwards’ interview with Esperanza Spaulding, a 25 year-old bassist, composer, and singer. Within that first few minutes, you’ll hear Edwards begin to ask a series of terrific open-ended questions and Spaulding respond with thoughtful, ingenuous, articulate answers.
 
I came across the interview on WGBH-FM as I was in the midst of a homeowner chore. After Spaulding’s delightful burst of infectious laughter while she considered Edwards first question, I turned up the volume. The task could wait. I’d heard of Esperanza Spaulding (who could forget such a name), and knew she was some kind of jazz phenomenon.

Audio clips Edwards played from her recently released album, “Chamber Music Society,” demonstrated Spaulding's mastery of tone and pitch while improvising with her voice alone or with her bass, or with an ensemble. By the time the interview was finished, I realized I’d pay to hear her talk about her craft, let alone play her upright bass and sing.

In her response to Edwards first question on part 2 of the interview, she explains improvisation and harmonics in a way that changed the way I will listen to music. Spaulding has a way of translating her thought processes in a way that resembles improvisation, taking Edwards’s question then answering it with examples and anecdotes that revolve around the core of what he asked.
 
The interview was satisfyingly rounded as Spaulding talked with insight about the way she composes and records music, the ways in which her mother instilled positive energy into their life in a poor, single parent home in Portland, OR, and the many adults who recognized her talent and helped cultivate Spaulding’s innate passion for music.
 
‘When you’re young, it’s easy to take the generosity of others for granted,” she says.

She regrets that by the time she called Hazel DeLorenzo and Dorothy McCormick, two women who ran the Portland, OR, “Chamber Music Society” that found her a violin and gave her free instruction when she was a kid, they had passed away. She did get a letter from Mr. Fred Rogers, to whom she wrote when she was around five years old and saw two actors dress up as an upright bass and play it on his program.
 
If you decide to listen to this interview, pretend that you’re having a cup of coffee or a drink at your favorite bar and happen to sit next to these two people having this conversation. By the time they say goodbye to each other, you’ll want to pick up their tab.

Esperanza Spaulding top photo from her web site, bottom from Sanders Theater site

Bob Edwards photo from his web site

 

New Orleans: Katrina Commemoration Ceremony, March, Rally Part 3

5th Annual Katrina Commemoration Ceremony, Second Line March and Rally
August 29, 2010

Part 3: The Rally was organized by the Katrina Commemoration Foundation, The Hip Hop Caucus, and the National Wildlife Federation.

The Katrina Commemoration Foundation invitation

"The Katrina Commemoration Foundation, a local grassroots organization formed to commemorate loved ones lost during the hurricane, holds the march/second-line, beginning 10 a.m. Sun. with a healing ceremony at the corner of Jourdan and North Galvez streets. The healing ceremony is an opportunity for our spiritual community to share words of hope, remembrance and inspiration.The march travels down North Claiborne Avenue to St. Bernard Avenue, followed by a rally, at 1PM at Hunters Field on the corner of St. Bernard and North Claiborne avenues, with local musicians, community speakers and spoken word artists."

Hip Hop Caucus’s invitation

"Join us this August 29, 2010 for the annual Hurricane Katrina Commemoration March and Rally. This event is in honor of family and friends who died, the community that was abandoned by the government for six days, those killed by the military trying to save their families on the Danzinger Bridge, every community affected by Hurricane Katrina and the Great Flood, and to acknowledge the “Right to Return” for all New Orleanians who were displaced."

The rally at Hunter’s Field Park took the energy of the parade and poured it into a roster of activists  and performers who told it like it is. The Katrina Commemoration Foundation states, “We are of the community and from the community. While we organize this march annually, we support the community's hard work for housing justice, education justice, health care justice, law enforcement justice, and environmental justice.”

The emcee on stage was Wild Wayne, a popular New Orleans Q93 FM radio host, who introduced speakers representing three generations of New Orleanians. He got right to it.

Hop Caucus President and CEO, Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. was one of the first speakers. He set the tone of the afternoon by outlining the issues of the day. He finished with, “New Orleans is our Birmingham, this is our moment, so we must stand up. If we lose this battle ten years into the 21st century, we won’t only lose New Orleans but we lose humanity, We’ve got to stand up, so New Orleans put your fives in the air now… take that five and make a fist, lemme hear you say power to the people (repeats and audience responds three times). I love you, New Orleans!”

It reminded me of the political rallies I was part of in the 1960s except this time I was one of the few people of color in the audience of a couple hundred people.

Sharon Jasper, Housing Activist and self-described Freedom Fighter, delivered an impassioned speech focused on the city’s lack of response to the housing needs of the black community.

Malcolm Suber of Community United For Change said, “The police are not your friends,” and aggrieved families recounted bad encounters with police. The Danziger Bridge incident on September 4, 2005, in which two unarmed black citizens were shot to death by New Orleans police, still festers.

In between speakers, the local disc jockey introduced the younger generation who performed hip hop, rap, and free verse poetry with a political edge.  Groups  of teenagers with names like Young Sino, Team SNO, Y. Luck, MIA X, Partners in Crime, Mr. Tony, Detroit, Shawt, and Asia Rainey are not household names but they performed with passion and purpose.

Rap and hip hop music have come in for their share of objection for lyrics glorifying sex and violence. These kids showed that the genres can have serious political clout, too - and their elders were listening and nodding their approval.

When Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. exhorts "Power to the People," he is coming from the Martin Luther King, Jr. side of the political spectrum, not the Eldridge Cleaver side.

In their Why We March statement, The Katrina Foundation says, "We march for many reasons. We march to never forget family who died without warning on that Monday. We march to never forget the six days our community was abandoned by the United States government to drown in the aftermath of the Great Flood. We remember the suffering of those left in the sweltering heat without food and water on I10, in Convention Center and under the Causeway.

We march to remember those killed by the police trying to save their families on the Danzinger Bridge, in Algiers and on Poland Avenue.

We march to remember the human cost of the destruction and the reason for the destruction – levee failure. The levees in the lower ninth ward were neglected and the failure of the levees devastated hard working families already struggling with poverty long before the Great Flood. As rebuilding has occurred; the hard work of individuals is not enough without government protection and support.

We march because it is the most peaceful way to acknowledge the complete violence and disrespect for our human rights as American Citizens. We march because New Orleans is our home and no matter how many times our community has been flooded out - we shall not be moved.

This is our home and we love our lives here. We march to ingrain in our community, that while we may want to forget Katrina, we cannot because we believe in a brighter hopeful positive future and we must learn from the past to build for the future."

An extraordinarily wide range of 105 organizations, from non-profits to universities, endorsed the march. Loyola University Professor Bill Quigley's August story in the Huffington Post underlines the rally's contentions.

The Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund's mission is aimed straight at the community's youth. No political movement has a chance unless young people are on board and this rally is meant to counter apathy and fuel activism. Its goal is  “to foster civic engagement among young people of color on issues of social and economic justice, human rights, the environment, and international peace, so they can attain increased opportunities for themselves and their communities. We focus on meeting young people where they are, by linking cultural expression with social and political experience.” 

The Hip Hop Caucus is striving to find solutions to 12 policy issues : Climate Justice and Clean Energy, Criminal Justice, Economic Prosperity, Education, Health Care, Housing, Livability of Cities, Media Reform, Peace and Security, Poverty and Helping Families, Rights for New Americans, Voting Rights and Election Reform. This is a heavyweight group. If it taps successfully into the youth culture here, the prediction in Sam Cook’s song, “Change Gonna Come” will happen in New Orleans.

One of the faces of the future of New Orleans is Sess 4-5,  hip hop artist, entrepreneur, community organizer, and co-founder of the Katrina Commemoration March, Second Line/Rally.

Barely out of his twenties, he spoke with a sense of purpose and optimism at the morning healing ceremony. He led the late morning's Second Line Parade, bull horn in hand, leading a chorus of “You don’t want to go to war... with New Orleans…give us our homes, and we'll be all right...” to the beat of the brass band.

On stage, he stood right behind New Orleans disk jockey Wild Wayne, helping introduce each of the young groups of performers. Sess 4-5 is the perfect blend of a motivated, pragmatic, warrior, in the best sense, of a community in need of a galvanizing figure who inspires his peers and reignites the social and political aspirations of his elders.

If anyone has the horsepower to bring power to the people, it's organizers like Sess 4-5 and Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. of The Hip Hop Caucus. The Huffington Post named Yearwood as a 2010 Game Changer in Green.

One of the Katrina Commemoration Foundation's web pages proclaims,"We plan to continue the march forever. We march to ingrain in our community, that while we may want to forget Katrina, we cannot because we believe in a brighter hopeful positive future and we must learn from the past to build for the future."

That is a good thing for New Orleans.

The Hot 8 Brass Band finishes and set the stage for the rally...

 

while people wait in the rain...

Being Louisiana, there will be food, lots of it...

 

Spoken word artist Sunni Patterson...

 

and Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. exhort the crowd...

 

to be politically aware and active

Sharon Jasper, Housing Activist from "G Block St. Bernard," describes housing inequalities...

 

young artists sing...

 

and rap with politically edged songs...

and rain doesn't dampen the spirits...

 

of speakers...

while activists from National Wildlife Federation distribute literature about wetlands and the oil spill (two items on the Hip Hop Caucus agenda)...

 

and other agencies...

 

including the "Save Charity Hospital" advocates, ask people to join the cause or sign petitions...

 

while some kids just relax...but soon it will be their turn to join the action.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

New Orleans: Katrina Commemoration Second Line Parade Videos

5th Annual Katrina Commemoration Ceremony, Second Line March and Rally
August 29, 2010

Since the first time I read about New Orleans' Second Line Parades on Deborah Cotton's posts and videos on the "Best of New Orleans Blog," I've been dying to march in one. I finally got my chance the day after I attended the Rising Tide 5 New Media Conference on August 28, 2010.

I was so excited that I announced the wrong date on each of these three youtube videos (taken with my little Canon camera). The date of this Second Line Parade was August 29, 2010.

I goofed on the streets as well on the first two videos, announcing that I was on North Claiborne when in fact I was on St. Claude Avenue.


Parade on St. Claude Avenue 2

Parade on St. Bernard 


What is a "Second Line Parade"?

Second line is a tradition in brass band parades in New Orleans, Louisiana. The "main line" is the main section of the parade, or the members of the actual club with the parading permit; those who follow the band just to enjoy the music are called the "second line." The second line's style of traditional dance, in which participants walk and sometimes twirl a parasol or handkerchief in the air, is called "second lining." It has been called "the quintessential New Orleans art form — a jazz funeral without a body."

New Orleans: Katrina Commemoration Ceremony, March, Rally Part 2

5th Annual Katrina Commemoration Foundation Ceremony, Second Line Parade and Rally
August 29, 2010

Part 2: The Second Line Parade/March.

Most second line parades are the exclamation mark to a funeral, social occasion, or cultural event. This second line parade was a comma in a three part event that aimed to harness the feelings of grief, loss, and displacement caused by the storm into a positive force for political change.

Once you get in range of a second line march and parade, the world collapses into a rhythmic here and now experience that seizes your entire nervous system. Before you know it, you’re walking to the beat of the Hot 8 Brass Band. Next thing you know, the person shouting responses to the band’s choruses is you. Not long after that, your body insists on rat a tat tat, shimmy-shamming down the street.

The woman pushing the stroller in front of you has a maternity march going on that would make Richard Simmons gasp. Marchers are wildly different in age, class, race, and mobility. In spirit, they’re an ad hoc nation.

Spectators on porches are waving and swaying, cameras flashing. People lining the sidewalk on one side and grassy neutral ground on the other are whooping it up and making video clips. Every single person is in their own little brass band powered universe tuned into the same station, the experience is at once personal expression and group identification. People make eye contact, fist bump, high five, or just plain smile at each other. The music reaches some part of the universal self that no other medium can plumb.

I don’t think anyone gave a second thought to the intermittent showers on this overcast August  hot-house day. Most people couldn’t tell whether their soaked clothes were from falling rain or rolling sweat. And no one cared a jot. I’d wanted to get myself into a second line march for two years. Way before the march had turned down St. Bernard Avenue and reached its destination Hunter Field I was soaked and dialed in to the joyous energy. 

But this energy was in service to a cause. As Sess 4-5, young co-founder of the Katrina Commemoration Foundation, said as the parade halted for a moment on St. Claude Avenue, "We're not here to just have fun, we're out here to honor the people that passed in the storm." video clip of second line parade and beginning of rally.

I didn’t realize it, but the most powerful part of the march was about to unfold.

Photos and videos below by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Only a freight train, certainly not tiny little rain drops, could slow down this parade.

 

Q93 FM has this covered...

Sess 4-5 sings to the crowd..."You don't wanna go to war...with New Orleans...

"We're not here to just have fun, we're out here to honor the people that passed in the storm."

 

Names of those from the Lower Ninth Ward who died in the storm were read aloud in the healing ceremony and memorialized in the second line parade...
  

Camille was a lady, Katrina was a bitch...

A New Orleans brass band gets everybody off the ground...

and thirsty...

 

Mommas march...
 

and if there's a will, there's a way...

' 

down St.Claude to St. Bernard...

while the band keeps pouring it on after 2.5 miles...

 

and people follow...
 

heading under the I-10  overpass ahead...
 

taking millions of pictures...

all the way to Hunter's Field Park.

New Orleans: Katrina Commemoration Ceremony, March, Rally Part 1

5th Annual Katrina Commemoration March, Second Line Parade, and Rally
August 29, 2010

Part 1
New Orleans wears its demons around its neck like Mardi Gras beads. The brass band music of the social aid and pleasure clubs is one way to shrug off the demons, but layered between the silvery peals of the horns, snappy roll of snare drums and second line dancing is often the perception held by many African-Americans marching that they’re still second class citizens in their own city.

5th Annual Katrina Commemoration March, Second Line Parade, and Rally on Sunday, August 29, was a prime example.

The day before, Saturday, August 28, dozens of softer-edged Katrina anniversary events were held in the Greater New Orleans area. Slidell, LA dedicated a memorial sculpture, “Fleur de Triomphe,” to stand by the city’s 9/11 Memorial. St. Bernard Memorial Funeral Home created a “Hurricane Katrina Casket” into which people could place notes and letters about their memories and loved ones lost in the storm. A St. Bernard Parish Recovery Tour looked toward the future and visited several completion construction projects. On Sunday, several faith-based ceremonies were held all over the city to remember those who were lost and the first responders who came to help.

To my mind, the most ambitious and politically conscious event was Sunday’s Katrina Commemoration Foundation March/Second Line and Rally, co sponsored by the Katrina Commemoration Foundation, The Hip Hop Caucus, and the National Wildlife Federation. Video clip here.

The three part event began with a healing ceremony at Jourdan Road and North Galvez at the levee breach in the Lower 9th Ward in which the names of people who died in the flood were read aloud. The ceremony was followed by a jaunty 3 mile Second Line Parade and climaxed with a good old fashioned activist rally at Hunter’s Field Park at the corner of North Claiborne and St. Bernard Avenue.

The Hunter’s Field Park program of singers, spoken word artists, rappers, dancers, gospel choirs, and community activists was pointedly political, a rallying cry for the African American community to push for equality in housing, medical care, education, and treatment by police. It pulled no punches.

New Orleans: Charter Schools And Recovery Part 4

KIPP McDonogh15 School for the Creative Arts  Part 4

I was in New Orleans to attend the 5th annual Rising Tide New Media Conference centered on the recovery and future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Two days before the conference began on Saturday, August 28, the serendipitous time and place I decided to have my afternoon coffee led to the following story about the recovery of the New Orleans public schools. 

Education in America is tricky enough, let alone trying to put together a functional school system after a Category 5 hurricane floods 80% of your city, demolishes entire neighborhoods, and displaces families who've been rooted here for generations. And right on the front lines of New Orleans' recovery plan are public schools and the students and parents they serve. The stakes are high: issues of race, class, economic and political status are all in play, Whether it succeeds will be biggest test of resilience - and shared sense of destiny - that New Orleans has ever faced.

I had more questions after parachuting into KIPP McDonogh15 School for the Creative Arts on Friday. 

My first Google search revealed that  a massive educational reform movement was underway before Katrina became a game changer.

In 2003 the Louisiana Department of Education created The Recovery School District (RSD), a special state district dedicated to turning under-performing schools into successful schools. Orleans Parish was a major part of this district. Without this in place, it's doubtful New Orleans schools would have a fighting chance to survive, let alone recover, after the storm.

According to the April 29, 2010 Times-Picayune report, "All told, the Recovery School District plans to have 47 charter schools next school year, and no more than 23 traditional schools, compared with 37 charters and 33 traditional programs this year. The Orleans Parish School Board will continue to operate 12 charters and four traditional schools. Charters are publicly funded, but run by nonprofit boards."

Googling to find information about the mass firings of teachers in Orleans Parish right after Katrina, I come upon a story in Democracy Now, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Partial quote below:

"Immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, the Louisiana state legislature voted to take over most of New Orleans’ public schools and effectively fire the 7,500 teachers and employees who work in them. The city schools are now part of the state-run recovery school district and control of many of schools is being given to private charter organizations."

One year later in 2007, Democracy Now reported 

"While many in New Orleans have waited two years for recovery, the restructuring of its schools seemed to happen overnight. Not long after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans two years ago, the Louisiana legislature cleared the way for the state to assume control of 107 out of 128 schools in the Orleans district. Immediately, the state began converting many of its newly acquired schools to charter schools–publicly funded schools run by for-profit or nonprofit groups that operate by a "charter," or contract. One result is that the number of unionized teachers dropped from about 4700 to 500."

The top fold headline on the Times Picayune of August 26 reads, "Katrina rewrites the book on education in New Orleans"

Several points in the story detail some of the enormous challenges facing the Orleans Parish schools:

• New Orleans is the first city in the USA to have majority charter schools.
• Many low-income students arrive at school three, four, five grade levels behind.
• Popular charter schools fill up quickly (by lottery), leaving kids of less-savvy parents, and kids with special needs with fewer choices of schools.
• Many schools are still in deplorable shape. A recently announced FEMA grant of $1.8 will give 85 schools a full renovation or a rebuilt school. This will take time.
• Some parents feel charter schools have left them out of organizational process - the fault line here is usually racial, more black parents than white parents feeling left out of the process.
• Regardless of the lottery system, some charter schools have been accused of picking more promising students, avoiding special needs students.

Data from Tulane’s Cowen Institute for Public Education is scary but going in the right direction. It shows that test scores are improving, a fact that can be attributed to the emergence of charter schools, their governance, and compacts with parents who send their children to them. These statistics underline the awful shape public schools were in before Katrina, 2005 and underscore the very long road ahead.

An April 18, 2010 story in The New Republic reports similar findings.

pt’s take

From my 34 years of experience as a public school teacher, I know that one teacher can have a lasting impact on a student, regardless of the student’s social circumstances. Teaching is one of the most demanding jobs on earth. Just knowing subject matter is the tip of the iceberg. In my case, learning how to connect with kids, manage them, motivate them, make them allies in the pursuit of progress, took years to develop. I had veteran mentors and colleagues like myself who were learning as we went along. We learned from our mistakes and built on our successes. We had frequent meetings to learn about "best practices" and were expected to include them in our teaching styles.

As developing teachers, our  progress was uneven and incremental. We spent hours talking about our successes and failures. We knew we entered the field to make a difference, even though we went through dark days when evidence of that was scant. Holding on to that belief was a life ring that kept us from burning out.

Transforming a group of twenty some-odd children from a number into a community of learners who develop a sense of togetherness who understand the struggle and  joy of learning is as consuming a task as any million dollar CEO will ever have. Whether the often underpaid, inexperienced, well-intentioned young charter school teachers can survive for the long haul is an unknown quantity.

Charter schools are using a data-driven business model in which continually failing schools will not be re-contracted. You can have the best data in the galaxy but without a knowledgeable, trained teachers, who know how to use it and how to manage kids, schools will not improve.

The Friday "circle meetings" at the KIPP McDonogh 15 School for the Creative Arts are an important building block to meld data with experience. KIPP's Professional Development Plan will be a key in training and retaining teachers.

Five years out from Katrina, restoring housing and neighborhoods, improving access to hospitals and medical care, restoring a sense of the “just” in the justice system are works in progress. None of those are more important to New Orleans's future than parents and teachers vigorously supporting the fledgling new education system.

Education is low-profile extraordinarily high-value work upon which every resource must be brought to bear  - because if they aren't, the good times will simply cease to roll in New Orleans .

For up to date information about charter schools:
http://topics.nola.com/tag/new-orleans-charter-schools/index.html

 To read a review of Jay Matthews' book about the founders of the KIPP program:
http://kellylowenstein.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/jay-mathews-tribute-to-kipp-founders-mike-feinberg-and-dave-levin/

New Orleans: Charter Schools and Recovery Part 3

I was in New Orleans to attend the 5th annual Rising Tide New Media Conference centered on the recovery and future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Two days before the conference began on Saturday, August 28, the serendipitous time and place I decided to have my afternoon coffee led to the following story about the recovery of the New Orleans public schools. 

So...here I am today about to take Mr. Brad Burgle's invitation to visit the KIPP McDonogh 15  School for the Creative Arts during school hours to get a sense of a charter school in action. Here's the way it worked out.

KIPP McDonogh Part3

KIPP McDonogh 15 School For The Creative Arts
721 St. Philip Street
New Orleans, LA 70116
August 27, 2010


When I arrive at 3 pm Friday afternoon, two uniformed security guards at the entrance to the school parking lot are standing with a woman wearing a purple polo shirt with the KIPP McDonogh label stenciled on it.

“I’m April Griffith, the Business Operations Manager of the school. How can I help you?”

She sees the disappointment on my face when she informs me school is closed, that kids leave school at 2:30 on Friday afternoons, and teachers are all in meetings  - and offers to take me on a tour. It’s the end of the week. I’m sure she’s logged way more than 50 hours here. And here she is offering this retired teacher a chunk of time she probably doesn’t have.

During the tour, Ms. Griffith skillfully manages to answer my questions while managing a few minor discipline matters, and connecting with custodians and the school secretary.

What is your school year?
“July 25 through May 28.”

Do kids flunk out of this school?
“Parents school staff and students sign a pledge to abide by the principles of the KIPP.
Once a student is accepted, we do everything we can to keep them in the program - outreach, mediation, counseling - whatever it takes."

What if kids don’t comply with a part of the pledge?
“If a student doesn’t bring homework in on time, they’re sent to detention at end of day to finish it.”

How are parents involved?
“They have to agree to the KIPP model for their kids to be accepted. That means having their kids arrive for school on time and with homework completed. It means they have to let us know if their child will be absent and that they will read information we send home to them. Parents are also involved as homeroom parents, and help put on holiday concerts and Black History Month concerts and programs.  ”

What’s going on this afternoon after the students are dismissed at 2:30 pm?
“The upper and lower school teachers participate in professional development meetings. They begin with a ‘circle meeting’ in which they talk about what’s gone on in their classrooms during the week.”

Miss Griffith brings me to the door of the upper school meeting run by a one of the head teachers. The tone is lively and light. It feels like the whole young staff is taking a deep appreciative breath that one of the first weeks of school has ended and that they’re still intact.

These meetings are great community building opportunities for a young and often inexperienced staff.

“I’m really glad to know that,” a young woman in the meeting says after a colleague shares an anecdote about a student. “I thought he was only mad at art and with me. Now I know he’s just angry, period.” The room fills with laughter. Meetings like this are necessary tools for venting and sharing.

The teacher goes on to share how she worked out an incident with the boy who’d gotten physical with a classmate.
“What are you going to do when a kid accidentally bumps into you again? I bumped him and he mumbled something. I told him I couldn’t hear what he said.So I bumped him again. He said ‘It’s OK.’”

Getting the boy who’s never had alternatives to fists in this situation to verbalize  just three words is a small step forward. The young teacher modeled a behavior she wants to reinforce. She will build on that for the rest of the year. It won’t appear as a statistic in her performance evaluation but giving him an alternative way of acting might save his life some day.

These young teachers are working their ways through the hardest part of teaching, behavior management, and they can use all the support they can get as they learn to manage and teach at the same time. They’re all in this together. Moment like this solidify the sense of community they all need to survive and then thrive.

These teachers are at the beginning of what will be a career for some or a stepping-stone to another profession for others. One trait they have in common: they want to be here and they want to make a difference.
Miss Griffith is a role model herself.

“Can we start this again?” Miss Griffin says when students use “Huh” or “Yeah” during conversations with her. A moment of recalibration flashes over a kid’s face.

“Excuse me?” or “Yes” restarts the dialogue.

At end of tour, Miss Griffith takes me to the doorway of a  room full of primary grade teachers engaged in their Friday Professional Development meeting.

“We’re refining the way we assess student’s work,” principal Kyle Shaffer says as he steps out the door to talk to me.

‘During the final years of my teaching career in Brookline, we developed assessment tools so we could grade and assess student work in a manner that mirrors the way students are assessed in MCAS tests in my Massachusetts school,” I said.

“I’m very interested in assessment - next time you come back, I’d like to talk about that,” he says.

An hour after I finished writing the first draft of this story, I picked up Friday morning’s edition of The Times-Picayune. The top fold story headline read, “Katrina rewrites the book on education in New Orleans.” A three-page story documented the rebuilding of the school system. Race and class disparities have not disappeared, not all parents are satisfied the new schools are addressing the old problems.

The KIPP school’s partnership between parents, teachers, and students puts learning first. The “Commitment to Excellence” they all agree to and sign puts into writing a compact that is inferred but not insisted upon in public schools. Whether it makes a difference will be revealed in the years ahead.

I know that today’s venture into the KIPP McDonogh School 15 is like using one grain of sand to extrapolate what the entire beach looks like…but that one grain is a good start.

New Orleans: Charter Schools and Recovery Part 4

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Middle School Administrative Assistant Ms. Quien Nicholas knows the names of every kid who passes her desk strategically placed in the hallway.
 
 

 Cafeteria and performance space on the ground level.

School entrance on St. Peter Street.

Parking lot/playground across the street from Community Coffee, where I first saw the sea of purple shirted kids leave the building at 5 pm. The shirt color designates whether student is pre Kindergarten/Kindergarten, or Primary Grade 1-4, or middle school, Grade 5-8.

New Orleans: Charter Schools and Recovery Part 2

KIPP McDonogh 15 School for the Creative Arts is one of the 37 charter schools operating in New Orleans Parish this year (along with 33 traditional school programs).

What are KIPP  Charter Schools all about? Their mission statement sounds like the ideal of an educational system. From their web site, this is what I read.

The KIPP Commitment to Excellence partnership listed below is a plainly written document that asks much of teachers, parents, and students. Like a three legged stool, if one leg fails, the stool will  topple.

What would I see tomorrow, Friday, August 27, 2010?

About KIPP

Who We Are

KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is a national network of free, open-enrollment, college-preparatory public schools with a track record of preparing students in under-served communities for success in college and in life.

KIPP is a national network of 99 KIPP public schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia enrolling more than 26,000 students. The majority of KIPP schools are middle schools that serve fifth through eighth-grade students. The remaining schools include high schools and pre-kindergarten/elementary schools.

Over 90 percent of KIPP students are African American or Hispanic/Latino, and more than 80 percent of KIPP students are eligible for the federal free or reduced-price meals program. KIPP schools enroll all interested students, space permitting, regardless of prior academic record, conduct or socioeconomic background.

What We Do
KIPP builds a partnership among parents, students, and teachers that puts learning first. By providing outstanding educators, more time in school learning, and a strong culture of achievement, KIPP is helping all students climb the mountain to and through college.

Why It Matters
Every day, KIPP students across the nation are proving that demographics do not define destiny. Over 80 percent of our students are from low-income families and eligible for the federal free or reduced-price meals program, and 95 percent are African American or Latino. Nationally, more than 90 percent of KIPP middle school students have gone on to college-preparatory high schools, and over 85 percent of KIPP alumni have gone on to college.

KIPP Schools
There are 60 KIPP middle schools (grades 5-8), 24 elementary schools (grades Pre-K-4), and 15 high schools (grades 9-12). Students are accepted regardless of prior academic record, conduct or socioeconomic background.

Five Pillars

KIPP schools share a core set of operating principles known as the Five Pillars:

High Expectations.KIPP schools have clearly defined and measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that make no excuses based on the students' backgrounds. Students, parents, teachers, and staff create and reinforce a culture of achievement and support through a range of formal and informal rewards and consequences for academic performance and behavior.

Choice & Commitment. Students, their parents, and the faculty of each KIPP school choose to participate in the program. No one is assigned or forced to attend a KIPP school. Everyone must make and uphold a commitment to the school and to each other to put in the time and effort required to achieve success.

More Time. KIPP schools know that there are no shortcuts when it comes to success in academics and life. With an extended school day, week, and year, students have more time in the classroom to acquire the academic knowledge and skills that will prepare them for competitive high schools and colleges, as well as more opportunities to engage in diverse extracurricular experiences.

Power to Lead. The principals of KIPP schools are effective academic and organizational leaders who understand that great schools require great school leaders. They have control over their school budget and personnel. They are free to swiftly move dollars or make staffing changes, allowing them maximum effectiveness in helping students learn.

Focus on Results. KIPP schools relentlessly focus on high student performance on standardized tests and other objective measures. Just as there are no shortcuts, there are no excuses. Students are expected to achieve a level of academic performance that will enable them to succeed at the nation's best high schools and colleges.

Commitment to Excellence - A partnership between teachers, parents, and students

KIPP is a partnership among parents, students, and teachers that puts learning first. All three parties sign a learning pledge called the "Commitment to Excellence," which ensures that each will do whatever it takes to help the student learn. This is the bedrock on which the entire foundation rests. If one part fails, the structure collapses.

For a complete version, go to Commitment to Excellence.

Teacher's Commitment
•    We will always teach in the best way we know how and we will do whatever it takes for our students to learn.
•    We will always make ourselves available to students and parents, and address any concerns they might have.
•    We will always protect the safety, interests, and rights of all individuals in the classroom.

Parents'/Guardians' Commitment
•    We will make sure our child arrives at KIPP every day by 7:25 a.m. (Monday-Friday) or boards a KIPP bus at the scheduled time.
•    We will always help our child in the best way we know how and we will do whatever it takes for him/her to learn. This also means that we will check our child's homework every night, let him/her call the teacher if there is a problem with the homework, and try to read with him/her every night.
•    We will always make ourselves available to our children and the school, and address any concerns they might have. This also means that if our child is going to miss school, we will notify the teacher as soon as possible, and we will carefully read any and all papers that the school sends home to us.

Student's Commitment
•    I will always work, think, and behave in the best way I know how, and I will do whatever it takes for me and my fellow students to learn. This also means that I will complete all my homework every night, I will call my teachers if I have a problem with the homework or a problem with coming to school, and I will raise my hand and ask questions in class if I do not understand something.
•    I will always behave so as to protect the safety, interests, and rights of all individuals in the classroom. This also means that I will always listen to all my KIPP teammates and give everyone my respect.
•    I am responsible for my own behavior, and I will follow the teachers' directions.

New Orleans: Charter Schools and Recovery Part 3

New Orleans: Charter Schools And Recovery Part 1

 I was in New Orleans to attend the 5th annual Rising Tide New Media Conference centered on the recovery and future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Two days before the conference began on Saturday, August 28, the serendipitous time and place I decided to have my afternoon coffee led to the following stories about the recovery of the New Orleans public schools. 

In the course of the next few days, I learned about the abysmal pre-2005 reputation and condition of New Orleans’ public schools, the emergence of charter schools in New Orleans as part of the Louisiana Recovery School District Plan, the slowly rising test scores since charter schools were contracted to operate, and a difference of opinion amongst some parents about the loss of neighborhood schools.

Having taught fourth grade for 34 years in an “urban/suburban” public school system in Brookline, MA, I had little practical knowledge about charter schools.

Writing this story introduced me to the charter school movement, presented a chance to talk with the staff of one charter school in the heart of the French Quarter, and get a sense that recovery of the Orleans Parish schools is an enormous task.

KIPP McDonogh 15 School For The Creative Arts
721 St. Philip Street
New Orleans, LA 70116
August 26, 2010


Katrina savaged New Orleans. It salvaged the New Orleans Parish School System.

Thursday afternoon I was sipping my afternoon coffee at the Community Coffee store on the corner of Chartres and St. Peter when I looked out the window and saw a sea of kids in purple polo shirts swarming out of the red brick building across the street.

This looked like a bunch of school kids - but 5:00 pm? And on August 26? Coffee in hand, I ambled across the street and struck up a conversation with a young man who seemed to be monitoring the beehive. Naturally, I asked questions.

Here on the upcoming fifth anniversary of Katrina, Brad Burgle, a fifth grade math teacher filled me in on one of the few silver linings from the 2005 lashing the storm administered to the city."This is the KIPP McDonogh 15 School For The Creative Arts," he informed me.

“New Orleans public schools were terrible. The state fired every teacher in Orleans Parish after Katrina. Then they began to re-hire for charter schools,” he said. “The system was corrupt. Several school board members were put in jail.” Corrupt indeed.

On June 20, 2006, New Orleans began from the ground up, converted public schools and opened the door wide to charter schools. “This used to be a neighborhood public school,” he said. “It’s now a charter school open to every kid in Orleans Parish.”

As kids waited for an adult to take them home, part of the structure here, Brad kept a vigilant watch and described his school. This is a K-8 school divided into a lower school K-4 and an upper school 5-8 with a principal for each. The staff’s makeup is nearly evenly distributed between men, women, and race.

“KIPP stands for the Knowledge Is Power Program. Eighty percent of kids who attend a KIPP school for four years enroll in college. Before that the rate was 12% in Orleans Parish.”

Stunning.

So was the length of the school day and the way students connect with teachers.

“Students arrive at 7:30 am and leave at 5 pm.  Teachers must be here half hours before the kids arrive and after they leave. Students have our cell phone numbers and can call us after school. I told them they can call me until 9 pm.”

The next statement was no surprise. “There’s a pretty high teacher burnout rate.”

Brad fielded questions from students as we talked and kept a watchful eye on the proceedings. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and take a tour?”

I was curious. I intended to return. But first, I did some homework.

SEE New Orleans: Charter Schools And Recovery Part 2

 

New Orleans: On the Eve of 5th Anniversary of Katrina

“You’re not in America, you’re not in Louisiana, you’re in New Orleans.”
New Orleans cab driver August 7, 2010

That’s a pretty universal sentiment down here. When you stir the stew of music, culture, food, close knit neighborhoods, community action groups, crime, corruption, weather, category 5 hurricanes, and political screw ups with the cultures of Creole, African-American, French, Sicilian, and hardy settlers who originally populated the place and season it with how they manage to live together, you get “New Orleans”.  By any metric, this mix of ingredients should not add up to a city its citizens would love. But it does.

Five years ago, Katrina drowned the city. The storm broke it in ways it wasn’t broken before. The black community that makes up the majority of the city remembers a history of being left to hang out to dry after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and felt it happening again with Katrina in 2005. Conspiracy theories about how and why the levees failed persist in these communities.

Remember video clips of people in New Orleans waving “HELP US” signs from rooftops of houses in over 20 feet of water in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. Remember wondering why the National Guard, Red Cross, and FEMA didn’t show up a day after CNN began filming the horror? Remember thinking the scene looked like it must be happening in some third world country an ocean away?

How does this city balance the duality of injustice and inequality on one hand and exuberance for life on the other by continuing to let the good times roll in their lovable quirky ways ? There’s an old Lloyd Price song titled, “I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do.” Maybe that’s how New Orleanians feel about their city.

This is my fifth visit to New Orleans since the storm. The fact that I love the city certainly colors my writing about it so here on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Katrina, there are some things I’m sorting out.

What kind of city could recover from this disaster? We’re talking about a city that had a crummy infrastructure, a pitiful school system, a police force known for brutality, a crooked politician to go along with every honest hard working one, and a slowly meandering undercurrent of racism perceived by the black residents.

I’m convinced this is the only city in the world that could have withstood the destruction  -emotional and physical - and kept on keeping on. Maybe the fact the place was dysfunctional in its own idiosyncratic way helped prepare them for the aftermath. When I say it marches to the beat of a different drum, I mean that literally and metaphorically.

What did they have to hold on to when all hell broke loose in 2005 and the water filled their neighborhoods like a bathtub? Tires, planks, tree branches, and each other. They also had what no other city in America has. An attitude, a way of life, and a way of deflecting or absorbing all the bad juju and finding salvation in music, food, and family.

Still, New Orleans is far from recovered from Katrina’s assault August 29, 2005.

Katrina wasn’t particular. She hammered black and white residents with equal ferocity. Rebuilding is a maddeningly slow process. Tree branches and upside down cars and the contents of living rooms don’t block the roads today. Red tape, bureaucracy, and insurance companies continue to do that.

Charity Hospital, the one in which most of New Orleanians were born and hold in high regard, is closed and slated for possible demolition. A controversy rages over the demolition's effect on citizens and the neighborhood that will be torn down with it. There are still few local schools for neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward and Charter Schools are a work in progress.

Of the five thousand who lived in the Lower Ninth, only a quarter have returned. The residents who owned their own homes there, which was most of them, have struggled to rebuild. In most cases, the only thing left of their houses is the concrete slab and the steps that led up to it.

Renters and the elderly have suffered the most. Housing stock has decreased, rents have soared. Out in the diasporas of Houston, Atlanta, and elsewhere, these people don’t have the economic wherewithal to return. The size and makeup of New Orleans 2010 is a "matter of wild uncertainty ” even after the 2010 census.

More than 3/4 of the state’s population was born in Louisiana. Many residents in New Orleans have never ventured far from their own neighborhoods. If these still-displaced people don’t return, the oral histories and the fabric of close-knit neighborhoods in every devastated area of the city will have drained away like household belongings in the flood water.

New Orleans was practicing Facebook long before the internet version was born. Social networking took place on front porches, in churches, social aid and pleasure clubs, music and food joints all over town. The storm drowned people. The resulting dislocation of residents threatened to drown a social network stretching back generations upon generations.

A big chunk of the people of color who were directly affected by the storm felt discarded, discounted, and disrespected. Many thought they were getting the shaft because they were black. After watching TV for two weeks after Katrina, and after learning the history about Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and the great flood of 1927, I see the reasons for their deep-seated distrust of government, and the essentially white power structure that runs it.

To add to African American distrust of the white power structure, after the flooding there was a movement to level the Lower Ninth Ward and pursue an urban renewal plan in their prized location,  a potentially commercially-rich area. Residents drew the line. They hollered, petitioned, and stood up for their turf.

Their emotional levee held. The neighborhood is still there. Some homeowners rebuilt on their own. Organizations like Common Ground Relief are rebuilding houses one at a time. Brad Pitt’s “Make It Right” has quietly pitched in to build state of the art, elevated storm proof houses alongside of the traditional one story homes in the ward.
 
Pitt included residents in every single phase of the process, an example of how one white guy understood the process begins with the people who are being served.

“He’s beautiful,” said a young black taxi driver on August 5. He wasn’t talking about Pitt’s face.

The same driver said some residents of the Lower Ninth believed the government intentionally blew up the levee in their ward in 2005 (to protect other, read  "white"  neighborhoods in he city). He said his grandmother heard a low rumbling boom just before the levees flooded New Orleans when Hurricane Betsy ripped through the city in 1965.

“Could have been what happened this time,” he said matter of factly. “Just sayin’.”

He wasn’t the only one who wondered. Those flood waters unleashed an undertow of suspicion that lingers today.

In fact, during the great flood of 1927, the government did dynamite an earthen levee 13 miles south of New Orleans to save the city’s levees from being breached. It killed as many as 1,000 people and displaced about 700,000 more. Race was not a factor. This rural area was populated with poor black and white farmers.

I begin to wonder when I hear stories like this. I cringe when I watch Spike Lee’s  controversial 2006 documentary “When The Levees Broke.” My government’s utter incompetence in dealing with Katrina was breathtaking. The US government takes the cake for ineptitude but New Orleans and Louisiana state officials have to be held accountable for not making enough racket during the past thirty years as the odds of disaster gradually increased as 2000 square miles of wetlands disappeared to make way for channels oil companies use to transport oil from sea to city. Oil money talks.

I could go on.

The magnitude of  Katrina’s devastation would have pounded any other city to the canvas for the count. This city, still majority black, will not bow to natural disaster. Why? Family, history, religion, and pride.  Roots run deep. Whether they will survive intact is an unanswered question.

I know the French Quarter and its surrounding neighborhoods are not the most conclusive ways to judge how they’re doing five years down the line. During two visits this summer, I’ve wondered why the black population, which was about 60% before the storm, didn’t have a chip on the shoulder the size of the Superdome.

In the music clubs and bars I’ve spent time in there are patrons of all ages and races. The music that makes this city tick originated in the black community. Think Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Satchmo SummerFest. Take that away and the city you have is not New Orleans by anyone’s definition.

The music here is a gift.  The unsettling fact that many musicians, especially younger ones, live in at-risk neighborhoods and have died at the hands of others in those same neighborhoods - highlights the less publicized aspects of the good times city.

And yet, at every place I visit, I see people making it their business to have fun, let the music stir their souls, share beer and laughter together because they want to, have to, and need to. They deal with the cultural and political duality of life in this quirky city by declaring that these places are neutral grounds, places where the music shouts that the ties that bind us can be more powerful than the differences that divide us.

Letting the good times roll doesn’t mean letting yourself get rolled over. That may be the biggest difference between 2005 and 2010. Can I get an Amen on that?

A Birthday Salute

Birthday salute!
 
August happens to be the birthday month of my two stalwart editors, Rebecca Wilson and Susaan Straus.

Most of what I write gets eyeballed by one or the other before it gets sent out into the ether. They correct my shaky noun/verb agreement, point out every time I change tenses, remind me to use ‘spell check,’ cheer passages that work, and inform me with brutal honesty when something stinks. My rewrites always result in a stronger piece of work.
 
If you ever need an established interior designer, Rebecca proudly operates RW Interiors based in Needham, MA. And if you’re looking for an experienced executive coach, Susaan Straus has an extensive background in helping people fulfill their potential.

Happy Birthday Rebecca and Susaan!

http://www.rwinteriors.net/
http://www.susaanstraus.com/

New Orleans in June: The Spill Closing In On New Orleans

Shuttle ride to Louis Armstrong Airport, New Orleans, LA
Friday morning, June 25, 2010

As of last week, The Spill is on everyone’s minds but not everyone’s lips. That video of oil and gas billowing unchecked from a broken well drilled into hell under the Gulf of Mexico is a nightmare in the raw. It’s like watching the satellite shot of Katrina dwarfing the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005, except The Spill has been going on for 80 days (65 days on the day of the conversation below) with no end in sight. 

The ongoing assault to the Gulf by the Deepwater Horizon well was on the airport shuttle driver’s mind when he drove me and three others to the Louis Armstrong Airport in the Kenner suburb of New Orleans last Friday. The volume of people flowing in and out of New Orleans is normally slow in June, July, and August. He’s worried because it is even slimmer than usual.
 
“P&J’s Oyster House shut down last week,” he said with a trace of incredulity. “The place has been running on Toulouse Street for 134 years. It shut down because its oyster beds are fouled.”
 
Mind you, this is a place the driver normally touts with enthusiasm and local pride as a major food attraction in the city. Not today. His tone of voice is of a man bearing the news of a death. His remark touches off the first conversation I've overheard about the spill during my visit.

“Lots of restaurants are improvising using mussels instead of oysters,” he says and wonders how long they can keep that up.

“My father in law, retired military, has crab pots in Chesapeake Bay, he’s worried that oil may come all the way east to the Bay,” says a passenger.

“I live in Jefferson Parish. When I go to my local sports bar, all the oil and refinery workers who drink there, they’re worried," the driver says.
 

The conversation drifts toward the consequences of catastrophic events. “People around Tampa have disaster amnesia, we haven’t had a serious hurricane in 80 years,” the passenger says. "It's a problem. They  have no sense of urgency about making plans for a hurricane that  will inevitably come. There's no plan here, either."

The driver pipes up. “My cousin works for a New Orleans bus tour company. Summer is usually bad, slow except for music festivals like the Essence Festival in July. Now most of her work is from driving spill relief workers to the coast at 3 AM, and coming back at 7 PM.  If the weather is bad, she just waits it out, they sit on the bus until it clears or they just head back here."

The man from Tampa again.“There are lots of negative health effects down there with respiratory problems, skin rashes, and heat stroke.  The workers are compensated but I don’t think the risk is worth the compensation. I worry about depression for these people who are third and fourth generation fishermen. There have been suicides here - a way of life might be disappearing.”

“How do you know this stuff,” I ask.
 
“I’m the Manager of Metropolitan Medical Response Team in Tampa," he says.

“To add to the problem, burning the oil in the Gulf increases the temperature of the water which increases the risk of hurricanes. And we have no idea what the effect of the berms and dispersants and burning oil will have in the future. And I worry about the grandchildren of all those people on the coast,” he adds.

“Sometimes I lie awake worrying about my job that depends mostly on tourists and restaurants,” the driver says.

Watching oil and gas gush unabated from the ocean floor has to be the worst living nightmare that millions of people in these Gulf States have ever experienced. The economic, cultural, and environmental effects of this are incalculable.
 
The impact of The Spill will test the heart and soul of every state the waters of the Gulf of Mexico touch. It will test the heart and soul of every voter and politician in the country.  Everyone knows that oil is a finite product. Most agree that it has something to do with climate change. Everyone from the president on down talks about breaking “our dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil.”
 
Everyone also knows that its production creates jobs for millions of men and women, including tens of thousands in Louisiana who, like BP CEO Tony Hayward, want their lives back. How does that happen if we all go back to business as usual?

What, I ask, is the plan to curtail oil exploration and create new energy sources and supply chains to put these people to work in a re-oriented economy. Who, I ask, will convince them it is in their best interests to look to the future, not the past, for solutions.

If we don’t use this disaster right now, while it’s still grisly, to jumpstart a change in our national behavior, we'll succumb to a national case of oil spill disaster amnesia. It will do us in. It’s just a question of when.

Photo courtesy NYTimes

 

Fenway Park: Who But W.B.Mason

Fenway Park
June 16. 2010
Red Sox vs. Arizona Diamondbacks
W.B. Mason Suite 22, Sweet Luxury From Above
 
Forget about getting to Fenway Park early to watch batting practice. Hit Yawkey Way around 6:30 PM when torrents of fans jam through the cordoned off street. This is where the action is. The vendors selling programs, peanuts, hot dogs, Italian sausage sandwiches, are barking louder than Dustin Pedroia in the Red Sox dugout.
 
If you’ve never heard the Boston-ese language in all its glory, this is your language lab for the night.
 
“Prograaams heeyaaah, get yooah programs heeyannnh, $2 heeyaah,  $5 doallaahhs inside…”

”Get ovah heeyah, we got quality heeyah, the cheapest items in the paahk, we gottem, we gottem, we gottem, fresh roasted peanuts heeyah…”
 
The Red Sox Nation drops more dough here than Dominoes Pizza. Red Sox caps, jerseys, T-shirts are flying out of that souvenir shops that line Yawkey Way. Anthropologists would love the sight, a field study in attire, social status, age, race, political leanings, and class all funneling down Brookline Avenue and into the old ball yard.
 
Scalpers with slick backed hair and dubious bona fides stand like rocks around which a river of humanity streams from the Kenmore Square T stop all the way to the park.
 
“Wanna ticket, need a ticket, wegottaticket” The supply siders, tickets clutched in their fists, make their pitches. Wary passersby keep their distance.
 
Tonight I am joining the likes of John Henry and Linda Pizzuti in the rarified level of luxury boxes above the field. A friend has tickets to the W.B.Mason ("Who but W.B. Mason?") box along the left field line. I shall be in baseball heaven.
 
No matter how many times I’ve been here, coming up a ramp from the dark bowels of the park and into Fenway borders the surreal. The expanse of emerald green turf set off by the red clay tone of the infield, dotted geometrically with three white square bases and home plate, the batter’s box bordered with dense white lime, is so perfect my mind can't take it in at once.
 
The piece of little boy heart that never matures inside the grown man beats harder. The field I’ve dreamed of standing on, waiting for the 3-2 pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning, two outs, my team down one run, comes into focus and reactivates every baseball fantasy I’ve ever had.
 
“Jaysus…” is all I can muster. It’s enough. He’s never run on those base paths - but he’s walked on water. He’d understand.
 
The W.B. Mason luxury suite is the last box down the left field line. The left field foul pole looms to my left and the three tiers of fans in the Monster seats perch happily just beyond the pole.

No sooner had I walked to the our seats just outside the suite, I heard the classic “crack” of a white ash wooden bat slamming into horsehide sphere, looked straight ahead and saw the trajectory of Dustin Pedrioa’s hit arc past me, bounce off the top of the Green Monster's ledge, and lazily drift down to the playing field for a home run.

Thirty seven thousand and something fans went wild. I just shook my head, pinching myself to be certain I was  witnessing  the game from a vantage point I’ve dreamed of having some day. This was the day.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. 

"Programs heeyaaahhh..."

   

Show and Tell outside souvenir store

Photo opps galore on Yawkey Way

Suits and jeans...

 

Where you sitting?

Rule 1: Eat a Fenway Frank

   ...or an Italian sausage

 

W.B.Mason Suite 22...watch the game on plasma or...

step outside and sit in cushy seats  - how sweet it is!

 

Christopher Huggins, Business Manager of The Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham, MA and W. B. Mason client ... and my benefactor for this grand evening at the paahk.

   

pt and Helene Sullas Huggins enjoy the memorabila on the EMC level

Hallway around EMC level on the way to the luxury suites

  

Whether in Green Monster seats atop the left field wall or the bleachers in distant center field, you'll feel the magic of the venerable ball park.

View from the top row of the Monster seats. Kevin Youkillis crushed a home run right over my head and into Lansdowne Street a few minutes after I made my way here in the sixth inning.

The 16th Positive Spin for ALS: Powered by "Wheels"

16th Positive Spin for ALS
The Longfellow Club
Boston Post Road
Wayland, MA
Sponsored by the ALS Association MA Chapter

The 16th Positive Spin for ALS kicked into gear on Sunday, June 13. One hundred fifty seven participants biked from the Longfellow Club in Wayland through some of the most picturesque countryside in eastern Massachusetts.

They rode for their fathers, their mothers, their sons, daughters, neighbors, friends, colleagues - all of whom are among the 5600 people diagnosed every year with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS .

For the riders, pedaling one of the 10, 25, 50, or 70 mile courses today was a personal salvo against the cruelest of all neurological diseases.

ALS, also known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease," is a progressive, fatal disease that attacks motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord that control functions such as walking, talking and breathing. Symptoms include muscular wasting, loss of speech, and eventual total paralysis. Identified in 1869, there is no known cure for it...yet.

The ride raised money to support research for a cure for the disease and for the ALS Massachusetts Chapter’s outstanding programs for patients and caregivers in the region.

The special wrinkle in this year’s event was the arrival of a sea of riders in orange T shirts. The fifty Orange shirted men and women all had a connection with the late Pete “Wheels” Farricker, who died of the disease ten years ago.   

Pete Farricker was an Ultimate Frisbee legend whose fame crested on his athletic ability, big-hearted nature, goofy sense of humor, and life-affirming personality. His fierce competitive spirit at the highest level of the sport was matched to a sense of fair play that is the bedrock of this highly charged, fast paced game. 

If the General Mills Company had any sense at all, they would have stuck Pete’s face on their Wheaties Box for a season honoring his membership on National and World Ultimate Frisbee Championship teams.

“We were devastated when Pete emailed us to tell us of his illness in 1999.  We were in our late 30s, not really at that time in our life when mortality was in the lexicon,” former teammate Phil Adams said.

“We mobilized. We organized a reflection/celebration of Pete's life about 6 weeks before he passed, and from that we launched the Peter Farricker Foundation to do two things.  Name Ultimate's “Spirit of the Game” trophy after Pete (kind of like Hockey's Lady Byng trophy) with an endowment to fund it in perpetuity, and raise money for ALS.”
 
The Pete Farricker Spirit Award is given to the player in the open division of the USA Ultimate's Club Championship Series adjudged to have exhibited personal responsibility, integrity, and fairness combined with a high standard of playing ability.
 
Phil Adams, one of six members of the board of directors of the Peter Farricker Foundation, has been the spark plug in the foundation’s engine for the past few years, nudging Pete’s friends to ride in the Positive Spin for ALS. Last year, as about 20 former Ultimate Frisbee jocks huddled around the BBQ after riding the 2009 PSALS, Adams nudged a little harder.
 
"This is great that we can get people to ride in Wayland, but can't we also have our buddies who can't make it to Wayland ride "with us" wherever they are?  Can't Fin ride in Boulder, and Jimmy in San Diego and Gus in Jacksonville, and Kent in Park City?" Adams asked.

Never underestimate this group. Pete Farricker was family to these guys who competed with him when they were twenty something and invincible. Now the guys are family men, businessmen, and immersed in their disparate communities. They’re older, have lost their fleetness afoot but not their fond memories of a man who played hard and made the game fun. They showed up with their checkbooks.

Sunday afternoon, Phil Adams presented a check for $10,000 to ALS Association Massachusetts Chapter President Debra Sharpe.

Photo: T.J. Reilly, Partner at New York Life Insurance Company, Providence, RI and Chairman of the ALS Association MA Chapter Board of Directors; Myke Farricker, key event organizer and co-owner of the Longfellow Clubs; Phil Adams, Chairman of the Peter Farricker Foundation; Debra Sharpe, President of the ALS Association MA Chapter; Paul Tamburello, founder of  A Positive Spin for ALS

Pete’s former team mates are spread across the country. The Positive Spin for ALS in Wayland wasn’t the only place they gathered to raise money and honor his memory. Pete Farricker “Spirit Of The Game” events took place all across the land. Ten years after his death, Pete’s shadow has stretched way beyond the 70 by 40 yard dimensions of the regulation Frisbee field.

“We had over 125 people in 19 locations riding or mountain biking or playing ultimate or walking or playing disc golf or doing Yoga - in the name of Pete… and Ultimate's "spirit of the game" Adams said.

Transforming grief into energy to find a cure for ALS and to support patients and caregivers was what I had in mind when I founded the Positive Spin for ALS in 1995. Pete Farricker's team mates are putting their own spin on the concept.

Photo: Steve Mooney and Myke Farricker of the Peter Farricker Foundation and Paul Tamburello

Pete’s brother Myke Farricker is co-owner of the Longfellow Clubs in Wayland and Natick. Since 2003, Myke has been on site from dawn to dusk on the day of the Spin. A master at event logistics, he has arranged to have his crew set up tents for registration, medical staffing and food, and cook hundreds of burgers and hot dogs for hungry riders. All done with a smile and trademark Farricker wise-ass humor.

The “Wheels” are already in gear for next year. Those orange T shirts will be visible again in 2011. Whether they’re riding in the Positive Spin for ALS in Wayland or creating their own mini events across the country, they’re taking the “Spirit Of The Game” to a higher level.

 

 Zoe Farricker, Myke Farricker, Paul Tamburello, Ian Polombo, who completed the 25 mile ride ("Pete's Ride")
 

Myke Farricker and veteran volunteers Pat Gill and Donna Cook, who baked 300 cookies for the event.

"Golytely": Colonic Fast Lane Pass

Whoever came up with the title “Golytely” for this pre-colonoscopy preparation liquid has a warped sense of humor.  First of all, you’re instructed to drink 8 fluid ounces of this liquid every ten minutes until the four-liter jug is empty.

Anyone with a brain knows that drinking that amount of anything that fast will certainly result in ‘going” that won't be “lyte.” The clear liquid is looks like water but goes down like it’s laced with stealth mineral oil. Mixing it with a crystal light lemon packet improves the taste. Nothing improves the sensation that you’re drinking heavy water.

 By the time the jug is empty, every inch of the 5 feet of your colon, perhaps a whole bunch of your small intestine, and for that matter just about anything that was lurking in your alimentary canal will have been induced to discharge itself. You will not dare be more than twelve paces from a toilet of refuge for the duration. The word fire hose comes to mind.

Once the Golytely begins its volcanic activity within your innards, I warn you - do not read any email that might make you laugh.

  A well-meaning friend sent me Dave Barry’s famous essay about his own colonoscopy experience. Had I read it twenty minutes later than I did, I would have been a sorry advertisement for Depends.

Do be in a mode Code Red of Sphincter Awareness. Do not sneeze. Do not cough. Do not lift. Do not even think about passing gas while your stomach is churning like the agitator in your Maytag.

Do have enough toilet paper handy so that if Christo were to drop by your house to borrow enough toilet paper to construct an installation to drape "Charmin Ultra Strong" from the Quabbin Reservoir to the Deer Island Waste Plant, you could say “Sure, pal, pull up your truck.”

Do have someone drive you home after the procedure, which you won’t remember, since a friendly nurse will lace the IV she inserts into your arm with a very dandy drip of versed and fentanyl. You won’t have been that buzzed since you left college. You’ll walk out of the hospital with a goofy grin and walk the corridor like it was a giant slalom.  You will sleep like a baby for several hours after returning home.

You will have, for the briefest of time, the cleanest colon in town.

The regiMAN

Every time I open one of my email accounts, I’m greeted by a popup with a man’s face alternately looking as wrinkled as a dried prune then miraculously smoothed out by a liquid sprayed over his handsome face.

When I click on the link of the regiMEN High Performance Anti-Aging System for Men, I find out that “When You Look Good Life Is Good.” I sort of thought everyone knew that.

Well, regiMEN claims it has ingredients proven to…"Repair sun-damaged skin, Improve skin texture and decrease dryness and Reduce the appearance of lines and wrinkles."

It helps that the guy whose face has been miraculously plumped up and de-wrinkled was about twenty-five to begin with.

Scrolling down the link I read, “What’s so different about men’s skin?”
I discover that…
It's thicker.
It produces more oil.
It has larger pores.
It dehydrates easier.
It is subjected to the trauma of shaving.
It ages in leaps and bounds.

I never realized I’ve been subjecting my skin to trauma every day for the last fifty years. In my misinformed, naïve thinking, my skin feels softer after shaving, and, I’m told by reliable sources, more caress-able, kissable, and likely to be welcomed when pressed against a woman’s cheek or more intimate territory of her anatomy. Continuing to traumatize my face still sounds like a good option.

It’s taken over sixty years for the skin on my face to leap and bound to its current physiognomy. I’m attached to it like I am to a pair of comfortable worn Levis, the kind of jeans a guy will absolutely not part with until the threads dissolve. 

I’ve earned those creases, wrinkles, and a couple of scars by sailing the ocean blue for thirty years, biking in Ireland, Canada, and Cape Cod, and screaming up and down the Westport River on my Boston Whaler in broad daylight with minimal sissy sunscreen protection. There’s character in those creases. Those brown spots near my hairline are badges of a well-lived life.

And if by some deficiency of self-esteem, I decided to use the regiMEN, what the hell would I do with the rest of my body? Would I have to immerse myself in the stuff to remove  evidence on my abs, butt, and neck of having lived six decades? That could get expensive. Besides, the actuarial tables don’t give a flying you-know-what about how great my face looks.

Guys with younger faces are a dime a dozen. I kind of like being one of the oldest guys on the dance floor. Some of the best dances I have all night are with boomer women who, with their own well-worn faces and bodies, channel the music with a conviction and passion that age can’t touch, and who enjoy grooving with a man who appreciates their experience and the package it comes in.

I like the smile that spreads across my younger partner’s faces when they feel me find their rhythm within the dance and lead them well but within the style they own. I don’t have to drive them around like a piece of furniture and show them how many young buck moves I can spring on them whether they like them or not. Next time they see a guy with gray hair and a well-worn face they might think, “That’s the guy I want to dance with next.”

So the fact is this. I was twenty once and thirty once and forty once and fifty once and now am sixty plus. As far as I know, I’ve been looking the way I ought to look the whole time. I believe I’ll still feel like THE MAN, even if I don’t start a regiMEN to prove it.

So yeah, life is good...still.

Free Enterprise in The Republic of Cambridge

If you live around here, you gotta love Haavaad Square…

What’s this on the corner near the Harvard Graduate School of Education? A crowd of intrigued pedestrians poring over two tables of paperback books. There’s no one in sight to take cash of a potential buyer. 

I thought I’d seen it all in Harvard Square - jugglers, magicians, folk singers, puppet shows, panhandlers, chess players, free spirits, story tellers, tight rope walkers (yep. on a twenty foot piece of rope about three feet off the sidewalk) but this is a new wrinkle in a locale known for its share of zaniness.

In the past month, the students in the Harvard Theatricals’ Hasty Pudding Society marched through nearby streets to honor Anne Hathaway as Woman of the Year and Justin Timberlake as Man of the Year. Dressed in drag, the boys had a grand time roasting celebrities and awarded them with the famed Pudding Pot.

The only pot around today is the kryptonite cash box lashed on to the two tables and labeled HONOR SYSTEM. “Books are priced as marked with a white sticker on the cover.  If you find a book you like please put the money in the box. Your patronage is welcome and appreciated. Thank you!!”

Honor in the mercantile system. How quaint. Just what we need when every day brings a scandal about money managers and Wall Streeters, many of whom just might have graduated from the university next door.

Leave it to a small business entrepreneur in the middle of Harvard Square to try to right the ship.

I ask the fellow leaning against a street sign what he knows about the setup.
“It’s mine,” he replies.
“You have to have a permit to do this?”
“The way I set it up, it’s considered free speech,” he says. “as long as I’m not in the way and pick a good spot, I don’t have any trouble.”

He’s a Gutenberg road warrior, says he’s done this “around two or three hundred times” in the past three years.

“I usually shop for books after I set up the tables. It's such a beautiful day, I decided to stick around. My main business is reselling the more expensive textbooks. I look for them in auctions, thrift shops, and used bookstores. That’s also where I pick up the books for these tables.

They’ve been on the New York Times Best Seller list so I’m sure they’ll sell,” he says with an assured smile. “The money I make today, maybe two or three hundred dollars, pays for my trip and for the some of the books I buy.”

What better place to set up an “en plein air” bookstall, just like the ones on the Right Bank in Paris. Strollers are out in force on a day like today. This one-man Barnes and Noble sets up his tables summer through winter unless it rains.

There are over a hundred thousand books for sale inside the walls of The Harvard Coop and The Harvard Bookstore nearby.  The books on the tables on this sunny day in March are chirping to customers as sweetly as the early arriving songbirds overhead.

It’ll be beach time before you know it. Not too early to have some good lit on board for your first trip to the shore.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Jay O'Callahan: NASA - Forged In The Stars

Storyteller Jay O’Callahan
“Forged in the Stars”
Performed at The Harvard Art Museum

Cambridge, MA

Tuesday, March 2, 2010, 6 PM, free!

Running time 75 minutes

We’re putty in a storyteller’s palms. No matter how many gadgets and apps and iPods we invent, nothing will replace the immediacy of being mesmerized by a man or woman whose voice can create a universe out of thin air.

Give a guy like Jay O’Callahan a stool and an audience and he’ll take you to places just as magical as any Avatar or Star Wars movie.

The first time I heard O’Callahan was 1974 in the newly constructed John Pierce Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts.  We wanted to create a positive buzz about the school’s unconventional design. The three-floor, open space floor plan incorporated the library at its core. Every classroom was visually connected to each other and to the library. What a cool space to present a fellow like O’Callahan.

O'Callahan's launch pad was a small 3-foot high stage erected in the middle of the first floor, surrounded by the library and six classrooms. Over 500 kids (including my class of 4th graders up there on the third floor) and staff filled in around the stage and perched along every inch of the railings around the two upper levels to watch O’Callahan, a 34 year old just launching his career, tell stories about growing up in Brookline. Any guy who can command the attention of an audience of kindergarteners to 8th graders for the better part of an hour is some kind of special.

He was on the right glide path. By now, he’s told stories to audiences all over the world. Two years ago, NASA commissioned O’Callahan to write a story that would celebrate its 50th anniversary. During his preface to re-telling the story at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge last night, O’Callahan recalled a moment in the middle of a planning meeting. Ed Hoffman, director of NASA’s Academy of Program, Project & Engineering Leadership, enthusiastically exclaimed, “Write a love letter to NASA!”
 
Mission statement in hand, O’Callahan steeped himself in NASA culture. He read over 30 books. He watched tapes of NASA’s historical achievements. He spent months interviewing scientists, astronauts, engineers, and computer specialists who’d worked with NASA since the beginning. “They were all engineers at heart, all numbers and theories," he said in mock exasperation during his opening remarks, “what kind of stories could they have?”
 
“What brings you to work?” he asked them in his visits to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The results floored him. Smart, driven, and inspired, many revealed they’d been hooked on space as children and that they were living out a dream of a lifetime.
 
“I ended up with 1000 pages of notes and facts,” he said.” When I talked to them about their work, they opened up like flowers.”
 
How will I ever tell this story, he wondered. One day, mowing the lawn at his home in Marshfield, MA, he got it. Invent characters and a story line that will synthesize everything he’d soaked up in his months of reading, viewing, questioning, and listening.

With that, O’Callahan blasted off - and took us with him. “It all begins on October 27, 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts,” he begins quietly.

Within minutes, he’s sketched out the four main characters, Kate Decordova, mechanical engineering student at Northeastern University; Jack Carver, son of a Maine lobsterman and now PhD candidate at MIT; Cynthia Moss of St. Paul, Minnesota, Kate’s eccentric roommate and music major at New England Conservatory; and Edith Whiteside, a clench-jawed but warm-hearted Boston Brahmin (“the empress of the streetcar,” O’Callahan calls her in Kate's first chance meeting with her).

The back story is that Kate and Jack have been engaged, then un-engaged, then at Jack’s request, join together to present a program about space exploration at a prestigious conference which he’s been invited to keynote. “You tell three stories twelve minutes long about NASA history and I’ll finish by citing the greatest moments of the Jet Propulsion Lab’s history,” he begs her.

They make a plan to meet on three successive Thursday nights during which Kate will tell Jack each of her three stories.
 
With that O’Callahan taps into the solid fuel of his story. Kate’s first NASA tale is about J. C. High Eagle, a Cherokee from Oklahoma who won't give in to discrimination and becomes an unlikely and successful NASA engineer in a career spanning 40 years.

By now, you can see O'Callahan's going to pull together the threads of data he’s gathered to weave a patchwork quilt telling the stories of the extraordinary cast of characters who made NASA a household name in the second half of the 20th century. “Forged In The Stars” is going to be about people, not algorithms.

Her second story is about Neil Armstrong being questioned about his 50,000 foot decent onto the moon in the lunar module by a fictitious somewhat dyspeptic admiral. I thought I pretty much knew that story. I watched the first moon landing happen on a TV set in Kalispell, Montana on July 20, 1969. Until tonight, I never knew that some scientists speculated the moon dust was a mile thick and the astronauts might sink in it. And I didn’t know the details of the human drama of the last 90 seconds of the lunar module landing.

“The work of 600,000 people went into this mission, the fire that lifted the rocket into space was boosted by the hopes of millions and the wonder of every child who ever imagined a world in space,” Armstrong says. "When we three astronauts toured the world after the mission, people kept greeting us not with 'You did it' but with 'We did it.'"
 
If you couldn’t tolerate risk and danger, you didn’t work at NASA. Kate's third story is about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher chosen to fly aboard the ill-fated Challenger that exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986. Her recounting of the failure of management at NASA and Morton-Thiokol to address the O-ring problems, poignant to this day, still evokes tears. So does the warm portrayal of McAuliffe, who contributed so much to her community, her school, and her students before being chosen as the first “Teacher In Space.”
 
The final section is Jack’s. O’Callahan delivers a surprising switcheroo as he has Carver abandon his fact heavy speech.  Instead, Jack tells the story of his father opening up the universe to him as they looked skyward when they were at sea when he was a boy. Jack finishes with the saga of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, still plunging past our known universe as he speaks.
 
O’Callahan’s construct melds massive amounts of factual material and invents fictional characters to frame NASA’s history. At every turn O’Callahan fills the story with anecdotes about the ways these scientists and engineers were influenced by personal fascination with space as children. Their work was their passion. O’Callahan inserted wry humor to punctuate the dialogue every time the going got heavy.

“What’s your dream?” Kate recalls Edith Whiteside asking her early in the first story.

O’Callahan probably never dreamed of being offered a $50,000 commission by NASA to create a story that underscored the passion of the men and women who took mankind to the moon. His enthralling "love letter" took us to the moon and beyond.

Photo courtesy of O'Callahan's web site

A Dark And Stormy Night

Thursday night, February 25, 2010, 9 PM

The walls of my 100-year-old house shuddered. That got me out of my chair in a heartbeat. Freight train gusts of wind were barreling up the hilltop on which I live. Branches flew from trees. Untethered items in neighbors' yards tumbled and clattered across lawns. Windows rattled. The velocity of the wind forced its way through the ancient window jambs, its cold breath on my face as I stared into the black of night.

Nothing good’s going to come of this, I said to self.

Twenty minutes later, a muffled clump from front of the house.  The ancient 60-foot fir tree that’s stood guard for the house since the early 20th century had been uprooted and toppled in a gust that teased 60 mph. The sprawling tree caught the wires of the utility pole across the street and pulled it down in a WWF smackdown.  Thick black cables twisted around the tree’s limbs. The Christmassy smell of fresh fir belied the scene of destruction in the front yard.

6:30 AM Friday - remains of the fir tree are bulldozed off the street. New utility pole had been replaced before dawn.

The blowy bullies from the northeast wracked the hill for three more hours. I stood transfixed at the windows watching stately cedar and fir trees genuflect to the wind. I prayed and held my breath. They weigh tons. They were under siege.

Those trees, which have been nothing if not kind purveyors of shade to neighborhood children and protective homes for all manner of wildlife, including squirrels, blue jays and other anti social types of winged and bushy tailed vertebrates, were fighting for their lives.

By midnight, the blasts relented. No more downed trees. My psyche, however, still trembled. I hadn’t felt safe within the boundaries of my own four walls, my own home.  I can relate to farmers in Kansas and residents of the gulf coast who’ve felt utterly helpless in the face of the elements.

It’s said that a man’s home is his castle. Nothing is said that it’s indestructible.

The Saints Go Marchin’ In, New Orleans Rejoices

Who Dat? Well, I’ll damn well tell you. The New Orleans Saints, dat’s who. But you’d have been living under a rock not to know that, wouldn’t you?

How much did we need the New Orleans Saints to come marchin’ in? About as much as we need to breathe.  We’ve been choking on disheartening news about health care, Haiti, the deficit, car bombs, floods, and senseless murders.

When CNN began covering the Saints Super Bowl victory parade in New Orleans around 5 pm Tuesday night, they got hooked. Sometime after the parade began to be televised, someone in CNN headquarters realized this was a national event. They surrendered to the Who Dat Nation. They went for the whole muffaletta.

There was non-stop coverage for more than two hours, the kind of coverage normally reserved for death, or tragedy- the kind that consumed the networks in this city in 2005. Someone at the controls realized this was the perfect bookend to that tragic story.

Wolf Blitzer was smiling. New Orleans native Donna Brazile brought her Saints parasol to the set and tried to coax Wolf into a little second line hoofing. Mary Matalin and James Carville. Louisianians both, interviewed celebrants from the governor down to Chef Paul Prudhomme from their spot on the parade route.

Carville said, “There are 1.7 million people who live in greater New Orleans. It feels like a million of them are here tonight.” Other CNN reporters tried to be heard over the joyous throng along the 3.7 mile parade route. They simply gave up and let their microphones relay the bon temps rolling down St. Charles Avenue.

Black, white, young, old, there they were, ten deep along the route, hanging from street lamps, screaming from balconies, tears of joy and laughter rising from the deepest part of their guts. Since 2005 and Katrina, they’ve know their share of pain. loss, uprootedness. Now it was time to say, ‘We’re back!” “We survived!” “We’re gonna make it!”

If you tuned in, you’d have witnessed an entire state whoop, holler, and cry with joy. Their team, a metaphor for a city trying to rebuild after being blitzed by Katrina, pulled one of its bootstraps up in its effort to overcome the devastation visited upon it in August 2005.

The New Orleans Saints had come from the “Aints” to the champions of the football world. How good did that feel? I’ve been to Louisiana twice in the past year. I can tell you there’s not a diner, eatery, bar, bistro, or family business that does not have Saints paraphernalia someplace visible on the premises. And it’s been there from the lean times to the now party times.

The parade celebrating the Saints winning the Super Bowl was gumbo for the soul. The Saints coach built up his team with the kind of players who want to be there, want to work together, and, you have to understand, feel like part of the New Orleans rebuilding process. Their city loves them for that.

New Orleans Saints, the underdog, the wonder team, the team whose foot fit perfectly into the glass slipper in the high couture closet of the National Football League was out to party with their people. Unlike Cinderella's, their party would last long after midnight.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Mona Lisa Mysteries: Embrace Them

 Dear Giorgio Gruppioni,

I understand that you, Silvano Vinceti, and a group of other Italian scientists want to dig up the remains of Leonardo da Vinci. You want to see if his skull is intact and create a reconstruction of his face and compare it to the face of his Mona Lisa.
 
You speculate Mona Lisa may be a self-portrait in disguise. Why would this be important?  It used to be enough to speculate about the reason for her koan of a smile. And who she was and why he painted her. Isn’t that enough?
 
I have as many theories as the next person about why Ms. Lisa is smiling. She said yes and drank a big glass of Valpolicella because she’d been nervous about sitting for you, Mr. Big Time Artist. Her tomatoes were the envy of the neighborhood. She was flirting with you. She had a fabulous bowel movement relieving her of constipation an hour before she sat for you.  She was amused that you kept dripping paint all over the place as you tried to get the flesh tone of her face just right. I could go on.
 
Why would it do the world a favor to determine that you were a narcissist and decided to paint your self-portrait while in drag? We’ve got reality up the wazoo. The world needs a rich ration of mystery.
 
Not the kind of mystery that impedes the discovery of cures for cancer or the common cold. But the mystery of that enigmatic smile. And what about Stonehenge? And did a UFO really land in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? And how did it occur to humans to use fire instead of fear it?
 
I know. You have your own list.
 
The French apparently have a more laid back attitude about the search for an answer. They nixed an Italian request in 2004 to unearth Leonardo’s tomb at the St. Hubert Chapel next to the Amboise Castle.  

The French get that sometimes the question is more interesting than the answer. Scientists from a country with a mysteriously leaning tower that should by any reasonable observation fall to the ground tomorrow ought to know better.

Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals

Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.

Don’t expect to see bags of Scott’s Turf Builder or spray bottles of Round Up on this tour. The Life Friendly Gardens Tour in Watertown today was a showcase of how to garden without using toxic chemicals (see sign at left surrounded by big red finger plants called Amaranthus).

The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.

Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”

A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”

Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).

Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.

These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.

They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.

One enthusiast on the tour lived in a large two family house that had been neatly divided into four compact condo units. Where you and I might use their shared, untended, shady back yard as an excuse to pave the whole thing and make a bigger driveway, this gardener saw as an opportunity. Armed with abundant enthusiasm and a vision of Versailles, she got the agreement of the other three owners to have at the bedraggled plot.

 The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.

The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.

The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals.  Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod.  Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”

Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

Homeowners like pt at large are shocked, perhaps enlightened, that many so-called 'weeds' can be part of a colorful little ecosystem in the same company with impatiens, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans and day lilies. All a true gardener needs is space.

Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch

The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.

Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

John's Tailoring: Thimble Tradition Thrives

Whether a mom and pop operation, a one-man/woman show, or a whole family, there’s something special about an owner operated business. Teeny little Watertown, weighing in at just 4.2 square miles and 32.000 people, is a hotbed of familial entrepreneurship.
This is the second installment in this series.

There are a few essentials to be stored in everyone’s contact list. You need a good plumber, a good electrician, and of course a good doctor. It may not be a life or death matter, but everyone occasionally needs a good tailor.

Nestled between several unassuming storefronts on a short block on Mount Auburn Street is John’s Tailoring. The small, pinkish neon “Alterations” sign that blinks in the front window is just enough to get your attention. In good weather, there’s a rack of clothing outside the door, enough of a hint so you notice the “John’s” sign over the door.

It registered enough so that when I tore a favorite but quite banged-up pair of shorts earlier this year, I brought them there with high hopes of getting them back for another season of yard work and painting.

The narrow space inside was a throwback to earlier era. Nothing fancy. Plainly painted and lit, it resembled the kind of unassuming watchmaker or tailor or small appliance repair place I visited as a kid.

Racks of women’s clothing line the walls all the way to the back of the store. The one nod to the 21st century is a small LCD TV mutely playing in the corner.

Toward the back stood a woman next to a sewing machine that looked strong enough to repair a tank tread. It’s festooned with a rainbow range of spools of thread. Pincushions seem to be everywhere.

The woman brushes back her short brown hair to inspect what I’ve brought in. “You will see where I fixed but it will do what you want,” she smiles reassuringly and hands me her card.

Here we have Ugur Eskici, owner of John’s Tailoring. Ugur’s road to Watertown is a classic immigrant story. Future father-in-law arrives in Watertown from Harput, Turkey and opens tailoring business. Son follows. Son returns to marry sweetheart in Turkey, brings her back to Watertown. All work in family business. Father dies. Tradition is carried on by family.

The original John of John’s Tailoring was Jan Eskici, Ugur's father-in-law, who operated a successful business on Pleasant Street for more than 25 years. His company specialized in stitching together pre-cut clothing supplied to them by Johnny Appleseed's (now known as Appleseed’s), a Beverly, MA company founded in 1946 that specialized in high quality women’s apparel.

When the building they rented was sold eight years ago, Jan and Ugur looked for a smaller place. “We saw the ‘For Rent’ sign, liked the location and the size, and here I am,” she said. It’s Ugur’s baby now, all on her own.

Women’s clothing, wedding dresses and prom dresses are a specialty but she’ll tackle anything she thinks she can do successfully.

Ugur is one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up.  She didn’t have to go farther than down the stairs to find her role model. “Every day when I woke up, my mother was sewing for her customers. I learned everything from her. She was the best tailor!” she beams.

Perfectionist tendencies and an ingrained work ethic are paired in this family like a needle and thread. “I don’t want to do it and make bad job,” she says in her new second language, “Better than money for me, you know, I don’t want to do it and just like get the money and bad job, I want to try to do good job.” Don’t you wish everyone felt that much pride in their work?

A darker side of immigration is that it’s often prompted by persecution. Ugur is Armenian, as is her husband. Many of her forbears were wiped out in the Armenian Genocide. It wasn’t pretty. Scars must still linger. She lives somewhere safe now.

 “I want to stay my whole life in Watertown,“ she gushes. “ I love it here. I don’t want to go anywhere else, just here. The people are good quality and they tell their friends about me.”

Right on cue, in walks customer Laurie Kahn. The two exchange warm greetings.

“I needed some alterations done and my teenage daughter Anna said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to this place I found. The lady’s great there!’ Anna’s best friend found this place and she told my daughter about it,” the Watertown film-maker explains.

This is the kind of small business that puts the meat on the bones of a small town. People seek services that are professional in quality and personal in spirit. We spend enough time in big-box stores. We write enough checks to NStar and Comcast. We like paying for an artisan’s quality work or an owner operated diner and thinking that our money will help support someone’s family.

Money is important but what really makes Ugur Eskici tick is looking at the job she’s finished and realizing she’s just the kind of tailor she dreamed of becoming back in Harput around the same time she learned to walk.

Bloomsday, 2009, Yes...

Today is Bloomsday... yes...

Wikipedia excerpt

Bloomsday—June 16th—is an annual celebration among Joyce fans throughout the world, from Fort Lauderdale to Melbourne. It is celebrated in at least sixty countries worldwide, but nowhere so imaginatively, of course, as in Dublin. There the events of Leopold Bloom's day are reenacted by anyone who cares to participate, and his itinerary is followed all across Dublin.

At lunchtime it's traditional to stop off for a glass of burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrne's Pub on Duke Street, just as Bloom did. In the afternoon the Ormond Hotel is the spot for an afternoon pint, where Bloom was tempted by the barmaids in the Sirens chapter.

The years since 1904 have made an exact replication of Bloom's route impossible—Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street no longer exists and the red-light district ("Nighttown"), in which the hallucinatory Circe chapter takes place, has been leveled; only the street pattern remains.

Bloomsday celebrations also feature readings of Ulysses, James Joyce lookalike contests, various other semi-literary activities, and a good excuse for hoisting a few Guinnesses. In the eyes of many, it's easier and a lot more fun than trying to work your way through Ulysses.

The novel recounts the hour-by-hour events of one day in Dublin—June 16, 1904—as an ordinary Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses.

Streets, shops, pubs, churches, bridges—something of Dublin pops up on nearly every page. The city is always in our peripheral vision no matter how notoriously impenetrable Joyce's prose becomes.

Photo of James Joyce by Bernice Abbott

=======================

I first read Ulysses, well, some of it anyway, while churning through my English major Liberal Arts education as Saint Michael's College in Winooski Park, Vermont. White topped Stowe Mountain was visible to the east, the broad expanse of Lake Champlain unfolded while driving west down University Avenue into Burlington.

"The Mill" in then down-at-the-heels Winooski, a shot and a beer hangout for degenerates of all ages, was the place where we could discuss literature, the idiosycrancies of our professors, and the assets of the girls who gloriously filled enrollment ranks at the University of Vermont, Trinity College for Women, and a crazy quilt of nursing schools.

The imagery and parallels to The Odyssey eluded me. Molly Bloom's soliliquy in the eighteenth, and final, chapter of James Joyce's novel Ulysses did not.

The spirit of Molly Bloom hovered over me in the blue haze of Marlboros and Lucky Strikes in the low ceiling quarters of The Mill. I would swim across the Atlantic to Dublin to meet a Molly, who would say...

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

Somewhere today, standing next to a Moorish wall, Molly whispers softly in my ear, presses her perfumed breasts against my chest, and yesly wraps her arms around me. Bloomsday. Yes.

Re-Build New Orleans with a wiggle and your wallet

You can take the girl out of Louisiana but not the Louisiana out of the girl. It’s been 27 years since Rebecca Wilson left behind the magnolias, festivals, and gumbo, but her soft Louisiana accent remains. Wilson grew up in a culture in which music and dancing were akin to eating and breathing.

For as long as she can remember, just about anything worth celebrating was done to music. Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, church events, births, and a few other things best left unmentioned. In New Orleans, tears were shed when someone died but the trip to the local cemetery might have been made with the assistance of a bumptious brass band. Nothing, not even death, could muffle the music or deter the spirit there.

That is until Katrina, an unwelcome guest that barged into New Orleans with mayhem in mind. The hurricane wreaked havoc on a city, a culture, and a musical heritage. We saw photos and video of the devastation, people holding on for dear life on their rooftops, then the aftermath of displacement and despair.

It was by far the costliest hurricane to strike the United States - at least 81 billion dollars in property damage. One in 25 people in New Orleans are homeless, double pre-Katrina statistics. FEMA still pops up in the news as do stories of inability, perhaps incompetence and indifference, in rebuilding the hardest hit wards of New Orleans.

The storm swallowed the most vulnerable parts of New Orleans then puked them out in a mass of fetid muck, wooden debris, and sodden dreams. Along with livelihoods, homes, and neighborhoods, Katrina tore at the heart of New Orleans - the music scene. Fats Domino lost his home in the ninth ward and everything in it, including his Steinway piano. Irma Thomas lost her home and her nightclub was a shambles. Marva Wright lost her wedding rings, her mother’s photographs, and the home which housed them. The list goes on.

Wilson’s a dancin’ girl. The sound of funky blues, zydeco, or Cajun music gets her looking for the closest piece of real estate she can find to dance to the music. She’s been known to pull off the road to haul her companion from the car, turn the car radio up to ten, and dance to her heart’s content.

The still-unsettled future of New Orleans gnaws at her. A Mardi Gras party at Ryles in February jolted her into action. “There were three different bands playing various types of music that originated in New Orleans. All that joie de vivre came from the love of all things New Orleans – the music, the outlandish celebration of Mardi Gras, the let-the-good-times-roll spirit, among others.  I felt a pang of sadness at what a treasure New Orleans is and how it’s struggling to fully recover and get its mojo back.”

“I’ve attended the benefits organized by New Orleans musicians. Their sadness is palpable,” she said. “Many shed tears as they performed. They told of losing prized instruments, music awards, and their sense of community.” Money, always tight for musicians, is scarce, and many have yet to rebuild. Their community, once close, is now spread over several states.

From her frequent visits to New Orleans, Wilson knows the devastation was widespread and that musicians and the poor weren’t the only ones to be displaced. “A couple of middle class neighborhoods were hit hard too.  My niece has friends who lost everything, because everything they had was tied up in their homes.  Some people have established lives for themselves in other parts of the country, but many simply can’t go home because there’s no home to go back to.  With no or not enough money from their insurance companies and in many cases no way to reinsure their homes, they’re stuck in limbo,” she says.

A successful interior design consultant, Wilson is a self-starter. She believes the plight of New Orleans has dropped off the radar screen. She intends to do something about that.

Wilson is the point person for an October fund-raiser “Help Re-Build New Orleans.” All money raised, after event expenses, will go directly to Common Ground Relief to be used specifically to repair and rebuild housing in the areas of New Orleans hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to capture the musical heritage of New Orleans for people who want to help and to remind people what’s at stake.” she says. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues and zydeco.

New Orleans has given the country much. If you've ever shuffled your feet, taken your love in your arms, and just felt the cares of the world lift momentarily from your shoulders as you've listened to The Big Easy’s music, it is time for you to give something back.

Here’s where to start: http://www.rebuildneworleans.net/

New Orleans photo credits:  Areas in New Orleans still suffering from the effects of Katrina
photographed in January, 2008 by Dr. N.C. Briggs and D. Brower

Mr. Samsung, meet Mr. Maytag

“What the heck is that buzzing sound in there,” I thought to myself as I started pulling clothes from the washing machine. “And what's that under my work pants? That black thing...that's  bleeping.  It can’t be a cell phone. Cell phones don’t belong in washing machines.“

For a second, reality does not compute. Cell phones, as any idiot knows, don’t belong under water so it can’t be a cell phone. My mind refuses the data.  But it IS a cell phone. MY cell phone.

I kept staring, hoping that if I looked long enough, the vagrant phone would disappear. Or at least stop that low moaning bleeeeping.  Neither happened.

There are many ways to feel stupid. Emergency Room stupid, Relationship stupid, Road Rage stupid. And now Cell Phone stupid.

More embarrassingly stupid than your cell phone ringing while you're in the theater, or ringing in the crucial first three minutes of a blind date. Worse than misplacing your cell phone or leaving it under your napkin in the restaurant. You may sheepishly recover from such faux pas.

It is not possible to say to your cell phone, “Gee, sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you in the pocket of my work pants when I threw them into the Maytag,  I'll make it up to you.”

You just stand over the white porcelain tub staring at the poor bleating piece of technology that has become more important to you than your opposable thumb. How the hell could you have been so careless?

In addition to the indignity of having to spend a pile of dough to replace something you already own, are you going to admit why you need to purchase a new cell phone? You know that in time this is going to be an amusing story you can serve up, with the help of two glasses of Shiraz, at some chatty cocktail party believing it will trump all comers.

But at this very moment, staring at the bubbly glass eye of your phone, you feel as dumb as you've felt in a long time.

The Shining City on Oxygen

The Shining City and the Respirator.

The Shining City
by Conor McPherson
Directed by Robert Falls
BU Theatre - Mainstage, Huntington Avenue, Boston,MA
March 7 - April 6, 2008
Running time 1 hr 30 min, no intermission

We had terrific seats. First row, mezzanine. Smack in the center of the row.

Before curtain time, my companion tugged at my sleeve. “Look, aren’t they adorable. That’s the happilyeverafter relationship I want,” she said, The woman to her right was holding her elderly man’s hand, perhaps as she did the first time they’d witnessed a play together fifty years ago.

Lights dimmed, the house quieted to a religious silence. Lights came up for the first scene of “The Shining City”, a quiet tableau showing a therapist arranging his office before a patient’s visit.

Pffffttt…pfffftt.

What was that? A sound from my right, then stillness for several seconds. A buzzer rings in the therapist’s office. He scrambles to put away an item on his desk.
Pffffttt…pfffftt from our right again.

The patient arrives up the stairs in a comically nervous entry scene.
Pffffttt…pfffftt. Like clockwork every several seconds.

Good Jaysus. Could this be what I think it could be?
Pffffttt…pfffftt.

Omigod.
Yes.
It is.

The man three seats to my right was using an oxygen tank. Loud pfffttting oxygen. And assuming the man was not going to die somewhere in scene one, the pfffftting was going to last the entire play. A play, I might add, in which there were zillions of pregnant pauses as, remember, this is taking place for the most part in a therapist’s office. And, you guessed it. No intermissions. Ninety minutes.

Pffffttt…pfffftt.

My companion’s initial delight in ideal mature matrimonial bliss was disappearing faster than ice from the Arctic pack.

“We paid $70.00 apiece for THIS?” she whispered in dismay.

Pffffttt…pfffftt.

We’ve all had experience with coughers, candy wrapper crinklers, cell phone boors, digital watch beepers, and the occasional snorer. But an oxygen tank?

How do you politely turn to a playgoer and whisper, "Say, would you mind turning off your life support for an hour or so while I and the rest of the people in your audio range can enjoy the play without that disconcerting Pffffttt pffffttting every few seconds?"

Righteous indignation was colliding fiercely with my customary tendency toward compassion. Indignation was in the lead. This was not one of my shining moments.

About forty-five minutes into the play, at the third of the five scene changes in which the lights dim for actors to scurry about to change scenery, we abandoned ship.

We scooped up our belongings and headed to the $25.00 seats in the nosebleed section of the Huntington Theater. The high five we gave each other after this guerilla move may have appeared unseemly to other patrons but never mind. The stage from there was like looking into a dollhouse but, ahhhhhhh, no more Pffffttt…pfffftting.

So here we are at the crux of the matter in our age of PC and everyone has the right to do what they please as long as it does not break the law. Rights can be defined by law but where is responsibility defined?

The man certainly had a right to be seated for the play. Did he have an obligation to forewarn his seatmates of the sound his oxygen canister emitted? Were he or his wife so inured of its sound that they didn’t hear it? Should he have asked the theater to place him where the sound would not disconcert his neighbors? Did I have an obligation to approach the couple after the play and tell them why we moved away in the middle of it?

Hindsight is always 20/20. I wish I had talked it out with them after the play. I don’t wish that they shut themselves off from culture or the community that produces it but engaging them about my experience of being jolted from the flow of the play by the sound of the oxygen tank while sitting next to them could have opened some avenues of solution.

I hope to be going to plays for years to come and lord knows what kind of medical gadgets I might need to do that. When I walk away from a performance, I want people to look at me with admiration for staying connected with the world, not wishing I’d stayed at home with a noisy machine that allows me to live.

Boys to men

In the back of your mind, you wonder what’s going to become of them. How will they fit in, what paths will they take, and what part of their experience of you having been their fourth grade teacher will they bring along for the ride. You take as an article of faith you’re having an impact on their lives. That’s why you go to work every day.
Once you get your game going, you realize the more you put into the job, the more reward you get from it. Navigating your students through the concreteness of long division, giving them a framework to grapple with moral ambiguities in themes of books you choose for them to read, and helping them cope with arguments on the playground or fallings out between friends, you’re laying the groundwork for the Jeffersonian ideal.  Informed citizens and human beings who can imagine walking in someone else’s shoes.

1989 - Jimmy looks over my shoulder. Ronald's dad (in yellow) with Ronald to his right, at a before school "breakfast" to show off student's Autobiography Project.

So when I got an email from Jimmy McCarthy’s mom that he was recently named assistant coach for the Northeastern University’s Men’s Basketball team  and had gotten engaged to a young teacher in a nearby town, that was good news. It got even better when she added that he’d love to have me come to one of his team’s home games.
(http://www.gonu.com/mbasketball/mccarthy.shtml)

On January 9, 2008, there I was, watching Coach McCarthy, pencil tucked behind his ear, taking notes and encouraging the young squad, when a young man with short dreds and an enormous smile sidled his way down the row, sat in the seat beside me and wrapped me up in a bear hug.

Ronald Carroll, Jimmy’s pal from my class of 1989, was in the house. Jimmy had called him that afternoon and there he was, a five foot nine bundle of energy. Jimmy and Ronald were genuine people persons as ten year olds. They’re young men now and they still know how to light up a room.

Jimmy has spent the last five years coaching at Williams College and Yale University. This is his first year at Northeastern University. Ronald works with at risk youth in the Roxbury site of The Boys Club of Boston. Married for three years, he and his wife are expecting a daughter in June. Ronald recalled conversations - small acts of trust, faith, and encouragement - between us during his fourth grade year with me. When a young man looks you straight in the eye and says, “You are one of the reasons I’ve turned out to be the man I’ve become today”- that’s a moment you treasure, savor and allow to roam free range in your memory for a long time.

The brief reunion with Jimmy and Ronald after the game revealed the zeal they have for their jobs. I sense their faith that they, too, feel they’re having an impact on young people’s lives. It wouldn’t hurt if twenty of thirty years from now one of their former charges shows up out of the blue to give them a big hug - and tell them how much they mattered.

Defining moments

When politicians resort to citing the dictionary to explain why their statements veer significantly from fact, you know they are in deep doo doo.

Bill Clinton’s explanation of his 1998 relationship with Monica Lewinsky comes to mind:

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

You’d roll your eyes if your teenage son came up with that one.

Now comes Mitt Romney in 2007 applying damage control to a nationally televised speech in which he claimed he ‘saw’ his father Governor George Romney march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

I see, Mitt. Really.

Outed while watching innings

A recent ad in Boston Globe featuring a full- page color crowd shot at Fenway Park reads: “Ray is 36 years old, works in health care, takes the commuter rail from Natick, and is a life long Red Sox fan.”

Imposed over the photo, with a tiny arrow pointing to a head in the crowd, a caption reads - ”Can  you  find him? We can.”

“Boston.com has over 2 million registered users just like Ray. We can put your ad in front of groups defined by age, gender, occupation, location and much more. We can also contextualize your  ad placement to match  pre-defined content when available, like sport events. So you can talk directly to the people that are most valuable to you."

Geez, guys, how did you know that?

“How do we do it? We know Boston, and Boston loves us…our 4 million unique visitors every month stay an average of 19 minutes each.”

“To advertise now or for more information, visit www.boston.com/weknowboston, or call Sean McDonnell at 617-929-7034.”

Ahem, Sean, what am I to make of the side banner ads that pop up today as I surf Boston.com - the ones advertising 'Weight Watchers', 'Watch Free Sexy Webcam Girls', 'Put Your message on M & Ms',  and 'Connect now with Blackberry''?

Am I sweet toothed, testosterone fueled, weight obsessed, connectivity-driven, white, semi retired, male living in a suburb less than ten miles from downtown Boston?

A few keystrokes to the Boston.com Member Center reveal that I did indeed sign up ages ago. Of the ten fields required, I filled in zip, gender and email address accurately and the rest creatively. My date of birth is listed as 1900 so it’s great to discover that my appetites will be vigorous for some time to come and I’ll be able to IM my girlfriends to hook up in the geriatric home when I'm 107. And send my nurses M & Ms imprinted with salacious anagrams.

Thanks, Sean.

Rising from the ashes

The air was still redolent with the smell of charred wood and melted plastic. It had been two days since Osprey Sea Kayak at the Head of Westport was torched at the end of June.

The entire inventory of fifty-two kayaks had been incinerated, melted or disfigured. Spring had arrived. There were paddling classes to teach, kayak programs contracted well into the summer, and the rental season was just underway. And no kayaks.

You couldn’t smell it but the atmosphere was also charged with incredulity, shock, and distress. That’s precisely when nineteen-year-old Osprey Sea Kayak guide Isabel Mattia started creating sparks of her own.

“Two days after the fire, Isabel marched up to me and said, ‘We’ve got to do something to recover. And I’ll take care of it.’” Sam Ladd said Sunday afternoon as she watched more than 200 people stream into the green and white tent pitched near their store at the Head of Westport.

“After the fire, tons of Sam and Carl’s friends kept coming into the store and saying, ‘What can we do to help?’ That’s the effect the Ladds have had on people around here, ” Ms  Mattia said. 

Within six short weeks, Ms. Mattia channeled the goodwill expressed by the Ladds’ friends and supporters into the August 12th  “Re-float the Osprey” fund raiser. With so much energy behind the idea, creating the fund raiser was like paddling downstream with the wind and tide at her back,

The Ladds met Isabel Mattia two years ago at an outdoor program they taught at Milton Academy when Ms. Mattia was a senior. Impressed by her spunk, Sam Ladd invited the Westport teenager to work at Osprey Sea Kayak for the summer.

‘Sam and Carl are like family to me. Sam treats me like a kid sister. They took me under their wings, trained me, and supported my learning. They helped me become the youngest kayak guide in the United States certified by the American Canoe Association last year when I turned 18,” Ms. Mattia said.

With the help of her mother and father and the Ladds’ friends, Mattia organized a Smoke and Pickles dinner, a raffle, live music by Zuma, and a silent auction. Items for the raffle and auction were donated by dozens of local artists, artisans, and businesses. Much of the Smoke and Pickles labor and food costs was donated.

“Tonight’s proceeds will help buy a new fleet of boats. Half of our current inventory is on loan from family, friends, and industry sources,” Sam Ladd said.

“Sam and Carl have brought an environmental consciousness to the Head of Westport. They make converts of many people who’ve never been here or kayaked before,” Ms. Mattia’s mother Rosanne Somerson said.

Her mother’s comment reminded Ms. Mattia of a story that reflects her fondness for the Ladds.

“Two years ago, a very overweight young man came into the store and half jokingly said 'I’ll bet you don’t have a kayak for me.' Without skipping a beat, Carl said ‘Well I think we can get you on the water,’ and he did," Ms. Mattia said, still slightly  in awe of the interchange.

"The next year the same fellow, much thinner, came back but no one recognized him until introduced himself.  He said that the way Carl nonchalantly took up the challenge to get him on the water motivated him to lose weight."

With stories like that, is it any wonder “Re-float the Osprey” was such a success?

Ms. Mattia enters Brown University this September. It’s a cinch that she won’t have to look far to find summer employment for the next few summers.

Tragedy to triumph: Dianne B. Snyder Tennis Complex, Westport, MA

July 7, 2007

Five years in the making, the Dianne B. Snyder Tennis Complex was officially opened at dusk last Saturday. Dianne perished on AA Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. She was a tennis lover and often took her husband John to Westport Middle School's crumbling tennis courts and "give him a pretty good whomping," John said.

Four smooth, resurfaced green courts and new nets transformed the crumbling tennis courts at Westport Middle School. The crowning achievement - the eight tall poles which brightly illuminate the courts from end to end.

John Snyder presented Westport electrician Paul Burke with a plaque acknowledging the many hours Burke spent designing and installing the electric components housed the box in the background.

Leland Snyder, John Snyder, Dianne’s sister Elizabeth Bullis-Wiese of Fairfield, CT and Dianne’s mother Marilyn Bullis of Madison, CT enjoy a moment after the ribbon cutting ceremony.

45th annual Westport Quaker Meeting Used Book Fair

Book lovers from near and far thronged to the 45th annual Westport Quaker Meeting Used Book Fair on Saturday July 14 in search of their annual book fix. Judging by the number of cartons and shopping bags being hauled away from  938 Main Road by noon, they got it.
Volunteers spent all year sorting, categorizing and pricing the donated hardcover and paperbacks that were piled on tables under  two yellow striped tents. The mountain of  20,000 books will remain on sale for the next two weeks, until it will more resemble a mole hill.

Harry Potter Bash at Partners' Village Store

Harry Potter fans of all ages flew in to Partner Village Store in Westport on Saturday morning to celebrate the highly anticipated arrival of the seventh book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.”

Under tents outside the store, kids engaged in several Potter themed activities, including “Fishing in the Dragon’s Lair” and “Potion Making.”

Costumed Harry Potter fans line up for awards

Jack Campbell makes a potion, assisted by Abigail and Phoebe Hayes, who’ve read each of the previous six books several times. Jack’s mom Jennifer of Westport Point, and Abigail and Phoebe’s dad of Little Compton look on.

First hay, Westport, MA

A field of hay swept into windrows is an iconic image that connects Westport with its agricultural past. The dry final week of June has been ideal for taking in the first mowing and a busy week for Jim Wood of Adamsville Road. After the mow, Wood’s tractor pulled a teddering machine through the field to fluff up the hay and hasten drying. Here he drags a hay-rake through the field making orderly windrows of hay.  A few hours later, Mr. Wood’s hay-baler compacted several hundred bales which were loaded into a barn for the cattle’s winter feed for a Drift Road farmer.