pt at large

Boston Marathon Bomber: Last Stand In My Home Town?

Friday, April 26, 2012

 

 

Watertown, MA
Friday, April 19, 2013
3:00 PM

2:33 AM.  Who the hell is calling at this hour?

"This is Detective Connors of the Watertown Police Department. There is an active incident in Watertown right now. Chief Deveaux is asking all East Watertown residents to remain in their houses. If you see or hear anything suspicious please call 617-972-6500."

Now it's personal. One of the Boston Marathon bombers is apparently holed up in a house a mile and half from my home in Watertown. Near one of my favorite restaurants. Near the place I get my car washed. Right off Arsenal Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Watertown.

Governor Deval Patrick asked people who live in the entire city of Boston, as well as the nearby communities of Watertown, Waltham, Newton, Belmont, Cambridge, to “shelter in place” — stay inside and not open their doors to anyone, except police with proper identification. That’s over a million people.

Now it's personal. I set my home alarm. For the first time in my life I do not feel secure in my own home. An act of terror rocked the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15, Patriots' Day. Improbably, the younger of the two bombers identified by the FBI may be making his last stand in an area I drive by everyday. At this moment, he could be on foot in the shadows, like a cornered rat, looking for another refuge. In the semi consciousness of sleep, I register every noise. If I cannot automatically classify it, I wheel out of bed and peek through the shade. I am on edge.

Late last night, the two bombers highjacked an SUV at a 7-Eleven, shot and killed an MIT police officer as he sat in his car,  and led police on a bloody shootout as the SUV raced down a local streets. Hundreds of rounds were fired. One of the bombers, the older brother, was killed in the chase. His younger brother is in hiding in Watertown, my hometown for over 40 years. I recognize every landmark in the background as CNN engages in nonstop coverage. My hometown is a giant televised crime scene. This is surreal.

Hundreds if not thousands of state, local, and federal law enforcement agents of every stripe are forming a thick collar around that neighborhood a mile away. The street outside my door, normally buzzing with UPS trucks, neighbors driving or walking to and fro, and teenagers heading for Victory Field, is empty. Businesses, schools, the public transportation system of buses and subways – closed.  A “Shelter in place” advisory to all. Unprecedented.

Now it's personal. Since about 2:45 PM on Monday, I realized the Boston Marathon would never be the same. As of 2:33 AM, my tiny, under the radar, unassuming, adopted hometown is in the shadow of that horrible act.

Terror used to be abstract. It happened somewhere else. New York City on September 11, Oklahoma City in 1995, and now Boston. The scene of Patriot’s Day carnage will not disappear. We will still fill Fenway Park and the TD Garden and Gillette Stadium and cheer for our hometown teams. Yes, and run in the marathon.

After Monday, it will be more than a city crazy about its sports teams and traditions. It will be an act of defiance.

Susan Huppe: Dancer With A New Orleans Cause

When Sue Huppe learned to speak French, it didn’t occur to her that it was the first step on a winding road that would lead her to help organize a fundraiser to rebuild New Orleans.

A Watertown resident for the past 9 years, she’s been dancing since not long after her first wobbly steps out of her playpen in Delaware. Her day job as a Certified Holistic Nutritionist and Herbalist pays the rent but dancing feeds her soul. One of her first thoughts after listening to a few bars of music is, “What kind of dance can I do to this?”

Twenty years ago, Ms. Huppe drove down to the Cajun and Bluegrass Festival (now called the Rhythm and Roots Festival) in Charlestown, RI. To her delight, much of the music was buoyant, infectiously happy, and sung in the Acadian brand of French spoken in southwestern Louisiana. She was hooked.

In time, she traveled to New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country, to absorb the culture, learn Cajun and Zydeco dance styles, and listen to music that just about everyone in southwest Louisiana knows how to dance to. When she returned, she was eager to keep on dancing. Believing that Cajun Two Step would find an audience in the snowy North, Huppe decided to make it happen by teaching it to others.

The world of dance began to unfold for her. While teaching her specialties of Cajun and Zydeco, she branched out to learn and teach ballroom, latin, and east and west coast swing at Adult Ed classes in Newton, Cambridge, and Boston and at Springstep in Medford. She taught several of these styles at Dancing Feats for 14 years.

“Each kind of dance has its own flavor and allows you to express yourself in different ways. The most important things are to have a feel for the music and feel the connection between you and your partner,” she said.

When Baton Rouge native and Needham resident Rebecca Wilson decided to create a fundraiser to help the post-Katrina rebuilding programs in New Orleans, she knew who to ask for support.

“I took my first zydeco lesson from Sue four years ago. We connected right away because of our shared appreciation of all things Louisiana,” Wilson said.

Wilson knew that Ms. Huppe was acquainted with the organizers of large events since Huppe had taught at the Williamstown Jazz Festival, Swingin’ New England, and Strawberry Park’s Blast From the Bayou. Ms. Huppe is now one of the core group planning an event to raise $10,000.

 “The great contacts she’s made as a dance teacher helped us put this event together,” Wilson said. “She knew which venues would suit our purposes. Some of the organizers she knew offered tickets to their events for our raffle and linked our web site to theirs.”

The “Help ReBuild New Orleans” fund raiser will be held at Springstep in Medford on Sunday, October 5, from 5 - 9 pm. Proceeds will be donated to Common Ground Relief, a small volunteer based non-profit organization whose office is in the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

The non-profit group partnered with a licensed general contractor and is rebuilding homes destroyed in Katrina’s wake, and offers legal assistance to homeowners who do their own work to cut through red tape involved in applying for building permits and inspections.

Common Ground Relief has also begun a job training program, placing locals with professional carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who are volunteering their time. One of the members of Wilson’s planning group volunteered his plumbing and carpentry skills to the organization several times in the past two years.

The fundraiser will feature the same vibrant music that first attracted Ms Huppe. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues, Cajun, and zydeco. The bands and vendors offered discount rates since they realize every penny will go toward building houses in the Lower 9th Ward. Tickets are $25.00 in advance and may be purchased through the Help ReBuild New Orleans web site www.rebuildneworleans.net.

“What is fun about teaching dance? Everything!” Sue Huppe said. “Remembering what it is like to be a beginner and seeing the joy it brings to people, in fact, seeing how it can change people's lives!”

The "Help ReBuild New Orleans" fundraiser is a testament to that.

The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band

The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band
Performance at First Parish of Watertown, 35 Church Street, Watertown, MA
Sunday, October 30, 2006, 3 P.M.
Printed November 18, 2005

These women have brass and they know how to use it. The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band hailing from Boston, played to an appreciative audience that filled the pews of the First Parish Church in Watertown on Sunday. The seventeen piece group is a classic big band, with the brass line of trumpets and trombones standing in the back row and the golden tenor, alto, and baritone saxophones seated in the front. Piano, bass and percussion make themselves at home on the side, supplying the rhythm that’s the backbone of a good band.

Photo:Ryles Jazz Club, February, 2005 (from moodswings web site)

The band’s repertoire reaches back to the thirties and forties. Their two full sets had the silver haired listeners who comprised most of the afternoon’s audience bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to familiar standards. After band leader Kathleen Hepburn’s second invitation to come on up and dance in front of the bandstand, several pairs of dancers answered the call. It may have been the writer’s imagination but the dancers seemed to shed a few decades as their muscle memories took over and they smoothly navigated swing dance passes and tuck turns. The hearty applause at the end of these tunes could as easily have been a salute to their by-gone youth as well as appreciation for the music.

The acoustics in this little church are heavenly for musicians. When the band amped up, its richly textured sound filled the room with sonorous harmonies that were the signatures of the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey bands. The solo turns were a bit uneven, often a little brittle or underpowered, with an occasional errant note heading into the choir loft. But what unites the members of this not-for-profit group founded in 2003 is a love of music. No formal auditions are required. While the level of skill varies, they’re clearly having fun, the veterans paving the way for the newcomers.

Several renditions stood out in each set. Neal Hefti’s down tempo arrangement of “Little Darlin’” was very sweet, a lilting invitation to polish fox trot skills and appreciate the unique way a big band merges the smooth-as-butter reed and brass sounds. “Night Train” featured the front and back lines playfully swinging back and forth, arching their instruments during glissandos, camping it up in the best big band style. Hogie Carmichael’s “Stardust” featured a classic introduction and the audience unabashedly singing along after bandleader Hepburn’s invitation.

Second set treats included another Neal Hefti arrangement, “Why Not” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Shiny Stockings”. The audience, no longer needing invitations, continued to dance in the small area in front of the bandstand. “Splanky”, named for Count Basie’s patented four note ending to many of his arrangements, was elevated by a rousing solo from a fleet fingered trumpeter who blew with power and command.

Each set might have benefited from re-sequencing to avoid too many similar tempos in a row. The Andrews Sisters “Pennsylvania Polka” gave the program a needed change of tempo near the close of the second set. Their encore number, “Bandstand Boogie”, featured a blistering solo from the leather lunged trumpeter in the back row and sent the happy crowd home with a little extra swing in their steps.

For more information about this band’s next stops, click on their web site, www.themoodswings.org

A country illuminated, one street at at time

A COUNTRY ILLUMINATED, ONE STREET AT A TIME
Guest commentary by Paul Tamburello
September 20, 2001

Halfway down my street, I started to cry. The primitive emotion uncoiled right from my gut, rose through my throat and out my mouth. Tears, runny nose, contorted face, all within seconds. A well of emotion that had been forming since Tuesday morning had been tapped and rushed to the surface like a geyser. I was relieved that it was dark, but knew that if any of my neighbors had witnessed these Friday night tears they’d have understood at once.

Let me start at the beginning, which was Tuesday September 11, 2001, a day America was changed forever. No need to go into the details, you know them all.

Friday, after days of assessing whether my fourth graders had been traumatized by the extraordinary pictures of death and destruction, and after holding an elementary classroom version of a Day of Remembrance and Mourning, I just wanted to sit down in familiar comfort of home, and let the metaphorical dust of the past days settle without my watching it or listening to it. I needed to unplug. There had been nowhere to be free of the images of destruction or the conversations, so surreal in content.

The school day had been book ended with our morning meeting and a minute of silence at the end of the day. I welcomed the hours in the middle as a pilgrim welcomes an oasis. I poured myself into having my fourth graders learn the names of the chambers of the heart, find prime numbers in their multiplication charts. practice cursive writing, and see how to write a declarative paragraph. Even indoor recess due to rainy weather was a respite.

Elsewhere else reality had been bent out of shape and I had been bent with it.

There was no where to avoid the topic. The endless loop of videotaped carnage I had been seeing since Tuesday had slowly crossed the border in my brain from nightmare to reality, a nightmare come to life. After school, at a physical therapy appointment, I was asked how the kids were taking the scenes of death. At my health club, a fellow member recounted the previous evening’s memorial service for his friend who was on Flight 11. At my local gas station, the Libyan attendant, with whom I’ve had friendly chats for two years, railed about the ruthlessness of the terrorists. In the back of my mind I prayed that this kind man from North Africa wouldn’t be targeted by hateful citizens seeking retribution for the barbarity in New York.

By the time I walked up to my porch, I was in desperate need of refuge. Stuck in my front door was a small note reading
Dear (Oliver Street) Neighbors,
Tonight at 7 PM, please join our neighbors on Oliver Street by lighting a candle on your porch or outside your door. to grieve for those who lost their lives and for all of us whose lives have been forever changed by the sad events of September 11.
Others all over America will also be lighting candles. We are all a community of Oliver Street, of America, and of the world, even with people in the Arab nations.

I walked into my kitchen, too drained to participate. Then I recalled that just that morning I’d told my students how citizens derive strength in times of duress by using symbols, the country’s flag for instance, to provide comfort and resolve in times of sorrow and grief. Wearily, I got up, found a candle, lit it, and put my own little symbol in the front window.

An hour later, rejuvenated by curiosity, I decided to walk down my street to see whether anyone else had complied with the note.

Halfway down the hill I realized that my little street had indeed connected with other communities in America, in some kind of nocturnal communion. Every house but one had candles in sight. Large candles, small votives, solitary candles, massed candles.

The emotional dam I’d built to contain uncertainty, loss, and grief, burst. I cried for me, for the country, for the families of the dead and missing, and for our assumptions about life in America which were blown up with the World Trade Center. But my tears were redemptive as well. I could see that my little neighborhood was surviving on its own, in its own little way, and was part of other little streets across this great and flawed country surviving and regenerating in the same way.

I never thought I’d see anything as powerful as the fireball I saw on Tuesday. Somehow, in time, the small glow of those candles on my neighbor's porches is going to outshine that horrible sight.

Paul Tamburello is a teacher and writer who’s taught fourth grade in Brookline since 1970.