pt at large

Pizza Roma: Pizza Parlor, Mood Elevator

A first time visit for a slice of pizza on the day before Easter inspired this story…local owner-operated places like this and people like Tony are getting scarce, if you’ve got ones around you, give them some love.

 

Pizza Roma

212 Waverly Avenue

Watertown, MA

April 20, 2019...the day before Easter Sunday

 

Fabulous pizza but the floorshow is da bomb. No sooner do you walk into the shoebox size pizza parlor and the chatter begins.
 
Joe is happy doing two things: making pizza and regaling customers with stories, boasts, and wise cracks. We’re in a chapel in which soft dough is communion and a huge steel oven is the chalice that will consecrate it before serving it to us.  Father Tony is our pastor on this day before Easter.
 
It’s not on a scale with the miracle of the loaves and fishes but Father Joe can replicate making a perfect pizza all day long. He cuts a rectangular hunk from a mound of dough on his podium and within minutes a transformation on the order of water into wine transpires right in front of my eyes. He knows the tactile geography of a round of dough like a man knows the contours of his lover’s body. His palms and stubby fingers shape, smooth, stretch, and pat the yielding dough into a perfect thin circle with pride, self-satisfaction, and well, a with the devotion of a man of the cloth forming a sacrament from flour, water and eggs.
 
He’s standing just inside the entrance in front of the window on Waverly Avenue in Watertown, MA, piled high with pizza boxes soon to be filled and handed to customers who call ahead or come to sit down and enjoy the show while they wait. He notices everything and everybody.
 
“I used to live nearby and moved to Waltham,” says the young woman sitting on one of the six stools arranged against the wall of the place with a wingspan of about ten feet. “I miss the place and I brought my boyfriend here to taste this wonderful pepperoni pizza we’re taking home.”
 
On the left as soon as you walk in is Joe with every topping for a pizza in trays an arms length in front of him. The huge oven and the trusty wooden paddle to insert and remove perfectly cooked thin crust pizzas is right behind him. I would bet money that Joe could make a margarita pizza blindfolded.
 
Every move he makes is done with the economy of movement of a man who’s done it thousands of times. The bonus is that he can sing, joke, tell a story, pose for a photo, and talk to the customers without missing a beat while making a perfect pizza in the process.
 
The man is a born showman. Proud of his artisan-ship, he has more anecdotes than boxes of pizza piled up in the window, and is waiting for the perfect time to regale you with some inspired antic. He was born to do this. You walk out of Roma Pizza feeling better, in a better mood, than when you walked in. Aside from the guy the woman from Waltham brought in, I appear to be the only first-time customer.
 
It is impossible to be here without him engaging you.  This is his stage. We are the paying audience. But we’re getting way more than we’re paying for. I would pay a cover charge to just sit down for half an hour and witness the zany unpredictable interactions that are bound to happen.
 
Aside from everything else this might be the safest store in Watertown. It’s not unusual to see one of Watertown’s finest pop in for a slice or a sub or a good laugh on a day when he could use Tony’s banter to ease a day of tension from being with people who are a light year away from knowing what it’s like to be in Tony’s open-hearted universe.

Irrepressible Joe...

Spaghetti and Meatball..."He calls me Meatball, I'm short and round. I call him Spaghetti, he's like a piece of linguini!" says Joe.

what a team

In a matter of minutes one of the orbs of dough in the pan at Joe's left is transformed into a smooth thin perfect circle of dough waiting to be topped with fresh ingredients...

 

for example, this pepperoni pizza these customers came all the way from Waltham to take home.

212 Waverley Avenue, Watertown, MA...Pizza Roma!


The tiniest of all seven storefronts along a short block of stores at the corner of Orchard and Waverly Streets in Watertown.

 

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Notre Dame In Tears

April 15, 2019

Gone..."the forest" of oak timbers that framed the  east end of the 850-year-old cathedral, the spire, the conical lead-lined roof, and lord knows how much of the interior paintings, relics, statuary, stained glass, in a fire that brought Paris and much of the world to its knees in sorrow.

Notre Dame...is it necessary to add "of Paris"? There is only one. If you've seen it, felt its history drape over your shoulders as you entered its cavernous Gothic interior, smelled the pungent aroma of incense and burning wax candles, often visible in the haze of a technicolor shaft of daylight slanting through the nave, you never forget it.  And how, you wondered, is it possible to feel so close to an almighty spirit in a church that can hold 6000...and learn that what are called flying buttresses along its exterior walls were necessary architectural devices to keep them from collapsing from the weight above. Where to look? At the vaulted ceiling a mile overhead? At the enormous pillars the size of sequoia trees that shoulder the weight. At the fierce faced gargoyles? And be overcome by a sense of serenity in the midst of the thousands of others who are in the massive cocoon with you. The tops of the two towers on the west end are barely visible behind the transept and the spire in the photo above.

The Notre Dame east end on the Isle de la Cité...April in Paris 2007...grace and symmetry, gravitas and grandeur, artistic architecture with the dual pulls of gravity and the celestial.

The most iconic view of Notre Dame are the massive twin Gothic towers (pictured in photos at bottom) that front the west end facade on the Isle de la Cité, a small island on The Seine River in the middle of Paris. The the apse at the east end (above) behind the two towers with its conical roof, intricate carvings and graceful flying buttresses steal the show. So impressive is the intricate stone work, statuary, graceful curves coaxed from limestone by the chisels of artisans for over nearly 200 years (1163-1345). The top of one the twin Gothic bell towers is barely visible behind the spire.

Prayers echo through the cathedral, rise like the wafts of incense drifting heavenward toward the vaulted ceiling.

Towering marble columns...

Ancient wooden pews worn smooth by constant use over centuries, with small chapels at each side of the center nave.

The radiating spokes of the South Rose Stained Glass Window, installed around 1260, 12.9 meters in diameter, 84 panes of  glass. One of the best examples of European stained glass construction ...the smoke of incense that day is benign, yesterday's conflagration, a savage accident. What has survived?

Has she survived?

A place of solace and individual contemplation, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of votive candles burn day and night, each one symbolizing a prayer...reports are that many of the votive candles were still burning after the fire in the cathedral was extinguished...think about that.

Entering the cathedral, I immediately felt safe and removed from the hubub of the outside world. If I had x-ray vision, surely I could see Heaven hovering just over the vaulted ceiling.

Alone, if not with God then with your spiritual core, and in the arms of a universal embrace in which religious affiliation is second to affiliation with your fellow human beings. An overwhelming sense of tranquility settles over my conscious state, a sense of peace beyond understanding.

Notre Dame, considered to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture, is the jewel of Paris, rising majestically on the Isle de la Cité, the Seine River the aqueous ring in which it is set. Its innovative use of the rib vault and flying buttress, enormous radiating stained glass windows and carved limestone has the stature of one of the architectural wonders of the world. 

The iconic view of one of the most famous Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

Notre Dame on the Isle de la Cité in the heart of Paris. The two 69 meter towers are visible behind the apse and 750-ton  295 foot-tall spire which sat over the transept and altar of the cathedral. Pont Saint Louis Bridge. The Palais de Justice, the French Supreme Court, is to the right.

Pont de la Tournelle with Notre Dame in background. 13 million visitors a year to this medieval cathedral...averaging 30,000 visitors a day!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. April in Paris 2007. https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2007/04/pt_in_pareean_a.html This sad news may bring more posts from Paris before this rueful day.

Unbearable loss...a test for Parisians and for all who have memories of "Our Lady".

Getty Images

 

Hemingway, Cuba, and Boston Connections In The News

April 12, 2019

San Francisco de Paula

Finca Vigía in the news...

The $1.2 million dollar conservation center built by the Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation intended to preserve the legacy of Ernest Hemingway opened last week on the grounds of Finca Vigía, the Cuban villa on the outskirts of Havana where the novelist lived from 1939 to 1960.

https://www.wpi.edu/news/restoring-finca-vigia-hemingway-s-home-havana

The Finca Vigía Foundation was founded in 2002 by Jenny and Frank Phillips and Congressman James McGovern (MA). The late Jenny Phillips is the grandaugher of Ernest Hemingway's editor and longtime friend Maxwell Perkings. Board of Directors member Bob Vila, a Cuban-American, is well known as host of the home improvement TV program "This Old House."

https://fincafoundation.org/preservation-effort-makes-hemingways-cuba-home-look-like-he-never-left/

May 1960, only time the men met, Fidel scored first prize and won a silver trophy at Hemingway's annual marlin fishing contest.

http://www.cuba-hemingway.net/en/ernestfidel.asp

 

 

Hemingway, Cuba, Boston, and The Old Man and The Sea

Hemingway, Cuba, Boston and The Old Man and The Sea
Hemingway Museum, "Finca Vigía"
San Francisco de Paula
12 miles from Havana
April 7, 2019

Cuba and Ernest Hemingway. Just about everyone knows the names and has opinions about them. Few know about Finca Vigía, one of the man’s favorite refuges 12 miles outside Havana. 

It had everything that mattered to Papa…it was close to the sea, far enough from Havana for him to relax on his own terms, large enough to host parties with literati and movie stars with names like Ava Gardner, located on a rise that offered a panoramic view of Havana, and close enough to El Floridita , his favorite watering hole in Havana, where Constantino Ribalaigua would be waiting, shaker in hand, ready to mix a "Papa Doble." 

The main home, guest quarters, outdoor pool, his dry-docked yacht “Pilar,” have been an international tourist attraction for years.  Although Hemingway’s home on twelve-acre site is called a museum it’s the only museum I’ve ever been to that you can’t get inside. 

Along with other tourists piling out of tour buses on my visit in 2015, I walked around the back of the sprawling house gawking into windows and felt like an extra on the set of the TV series called  “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”  I don’t know why a bathroom or living room once occupied by a larger than life character becomes a tourist attraction but there I was getting in position to photograph the orderly interior through the windows, closed to keep the interior climate controlled and the public from rummaging through the man's library, closets, and desk drawers.

Ernest Hemingway was a brand way before the term became fashionable. His handsome mustachioed face was on a black and white cover of the September 1, 1952 Life Magazine, the gold standard of the American Dream in the 1940s and 1950s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He often wintered at Finca Vigía (Lookout Farm). Between 1939 and 1961, Hemingway spent more time in Cuba than in any other place on earth. 

Peering inside those windows, walking around the Pilar and the empty pool, I conjure the magic and mystique of the man whose books I read as a college student. I imagine the musty scent of those books that line the shelves and the hands that leafed through them. The artifacts in the house, all in a state as if he’d just left for an afternoon of banging down his favorite daiquiris at El Floridita, are vaguely connecting with an experience that began after my youthful reading of 'A Farewell To Arms' then later 'The Old Man And The Sea'.

The lookout tower, a few steps from Hemingway’s house, is open to the public. The one room at the top is a perfect Hemingway scene…ancient Corona typewriter, a telescope, bookshelves, and portrait of Hemingway on safari in Africa are juice enough to imagine the man, cigar clenched between teeth, clattering away on the vintage typewriter and taking occasional breaks to peer through that telescope to see the weather in Havana. I'm standing in a tourist attraction that feels more like a shrine. A sense of reverence seems to float over the site like the smoke from one of Papa’s cigars.

Cuba is changing and by Cuban standards, changing fast. The economic reforms begun in 2012 ended the days of everyone being equally poor and have begun an inevitable era in which people with capital can become a class of unequally rich. Tourism, an undeniable change agent, generated over 4.5 million arrivals in 2017, and is one of the main sources of revenue for the island.

I signed onto a Road Scholars trip to Cuba in 2015. Like others on the trip, I wanted to see Cuba before it might end up being gobbled up by Starbucks, Wal-Mart, become a consumer economy, and, for better or worse, lose what we thought to be its unspoiled Buena Vista Social Club ethos. 
(NOTE: as of January 15, 2015, “Educational Activities” is one of the 12 categories in which Americans can visit Cuba without prior permission of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control)

Cuba has a rich cultural history but is not overly sentimental about it. Over the years, the architectural splendor of the homes along Havana’s north facing Malecón have been allowed to slide into elegant decay, unoccupied and crumbling from the effects of the Atlantic Ocean. Time, benign neglect, and tropical conditions took a similar toll on the buildings and grounds that comprise the Hemingway Museum. A recently found letter confirms that Mary Hemingway intended Finca Vigía, which became the property of the Cuban government after the revolution, to be a gift to the people of Cuba in memory of her husband.

In 2001, a near miraculous set of circumstances led to a collaboration between the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation and the Cuban group Consejo Nacional de Patrimnio Cultura. Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern, who forged a positive relationship with Fidel Castro in 2002, facilitated the inter-government restoration that saved the property from ruin. The Finca Vigia Foundation painstakingly and respectfully restored the interior and its contents, and intends to open a paper conservation center on the property to preserve Hemingway’s personal papers, manuscripts, and his 9000 book library. It helped that Fidel was a Hemingway fan, especially after reading 'For Whom The Bell Tolls,' with its sympathy for the loyalists’ failed resistance to Francisco Franco’s fascist Spanish regime. 

Cuban and American preservation specialists, architects, engineers, restored Finca Vigia to look exactly like it did the day Hemingway walked away from it in 1960…and that’s the attraction I saw that day in 2015, totally unaware of its transformation.

Cuba’s history in the 2000s, the revolution that unseated a brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista and the U.S. embargo that followed the Castro years, is complex. Whether the socialist state of the Castro years was a sociological net plus or minus is going to be debated as the future unfolds. Nevertheless, with its mix of Spanish and African roots, Cuba is still the least commercialized island in the Caribbean. 

Hemingway wrote “The Old Man And The Sea” at Finca Vigia. Many believe that Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate on Hemingway’s boat Pilar that was moored in nearby Cojimar was an inspiration for the Old Man. 

World photographer Keith Cardwell’s photo of Gregorio Fuentes was recently gifted to me by a friend of Cardwell’s.  Cardwell’s book Cuba, The Buena Vista Years, 15 years in the making, shows the island, its everyday people, leaders, and way of life in poignant black and white photographs. His photo of Gregorio Fuentes is one of them. Perhaps my parlor is now the northernmost outpost of the Hemingway Museum.

Photo essay...

The main house at Finca Vigía, "Lookout Farm," built on a hill in San Francisco de Paula in 1886 . Hemingway spent time there between 1939 and 1960. The twelve acre property contains a guest house, a lookout tower, swimming pool that Hemingway used daily, and his dry-docked boat Pilar.

The master bedrooom and guest room. Evidence of Hemingway's pride in his hunting is in nearly every room in the  house. With its cream-colored walls, buffed floors, and handsome wood furniture, the low profile, single floor home has an aura of spare elegance and modernity.

 

Hemingway's study and library. The home has 9000 books crammed in shelves in every room including the bathroom...

along with works of art and trophies from his safaris in Africa and the American west.

Hemingway obsessively recorded his weight and blood pressure on the bathroom wall...

and that inspired this photo of me and our extraordinarily knowledgeable Cuban guide, Yohandra (“Jo”) imagining adding our heights to Hemingway's bathroom wall.

A former garage, then guest house and now office; the in-ground pool in which Ava Gardner is said to have skinny-dipped; Hemingway's boat "Pilar" now refurbished, sits in a cradle next to the pool. Pilar is the name of a heroic character in "For Whom The Bell Tolls" ; also the nickname of Pauline, one of Hemingway's four wives.

Here the elegant yacht sits, with varnished brightwork and meticulous detailing, its finely chiseled prow pointing toward the sea, as if waiting for Papa to come aboard for a day of fishing for marlins.Were it not for the Finca Vigía Foundation, Pilar may have been lost to dry rot and decay. Pilar was restored with technical advice from a consultant from Mystic Seaport and lovingly rebuilt by Cuban boat builders who removed plants and termite nests before restoring and added temperature and humidity gauges in the galley to monitor data when they finished.

 

The captain's chair in which Papa fished for marlin. Even when officials arrive for a viewing, NO ONE is allowed to sit in Papa's chair.

The lookout tower was built by Hemingway's fourth wife. On the third top level sits a typewriter, desk, a chaise-lounge, a painting of Hemingway posing cheerfully next to a kill on safari, a telescope, and of course, more  books. It is said that the man had a hard time throwing things away, certainly was the case with books.

He and his guests certainly enjoyed the glorious vista from the top of the "Lookout," with Havana on the horizon.

Tourists of all ages have reasons to visit and arrive by taxi and tour buses ...

and can relax in the shade of banyans, bamboo and celiba trees outside the house.

Next to the entry gate, remnants of a  small baseball diamond on which Papa, his sons, and neighborhood boys played the sport that has captivated Cuban boys for nearly a century...stay tuned for a story about Hemingway pitching to neighborhood kids on this lawn just inside the gate.

Keith Cardwell's photo of Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate on El Pilar, who is said to be the man who inspired Hemingway's "Old Man And The Sea." When Hemingway left, he entrusted Pilar to Gregorio. When Gregorio Fuentes died he left the boat to the people of Cuba. The vessel was lovingly restored as part of the Finca Vigía Foundation.

Photos,with the exception of the photo of the three-story lookout, by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2015/11/cuba-chronicles-cigars-and-rum.html

 

Singer/Songwriter Hannah Bethel: On The Verge

Hannah Bethel
Holiday Express Hotel Lobby
920 Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee
January 12, 2019 

For a singer/songwriter, Nashville is the first stop toward recognition, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the last stop before you press the dream like a rose between the pages of the Nashville phone book. A nameless busker, you sing everywhere…anywhere in search of the possible…airport terminals, street corners, taverns, bars, restaurants, hotel lobbies. 

 

You want to breathe the air of Music City USA, uncork the bottle that will release the genie and spin your straw into gold. If you’re not driven and don’t have the long view, stay home.

 

You’re singing to an audience of two or two-dozen, unfazed by an audience with faces in their phones or watching the plasma TV blaring in the corner. You’re singing from the deep uncharted place in your psyche, following your North Star, singing from a manger and hoping that the three wisemen, one of whom who’ll tell a cousin in the industry about the fabulous singer he just heard, will pass your name along.

 

Right now you’re the only person in Nashville who believes in you. 

 

Setting foot in Nashville is the secular version of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage that you have to take, one foot in front of the other, on the road heading for stardom. Singing on that chair in the corner is the moment that counts. You’re singing from your guts, grateful for a smile, a tip jar filled with folding money, a smile of acknowledgement, any small tokens of appreciation until lightning strikes.

 

Willie Nelson couldn’t break through the Nashville ceiling in the early 60s. In a few hours, at the galactic “Willie: Tribute To An American Outlaw” show, 18,000 fans will fill every seat of the Bridgestone Arena. How’s that for inspiration?

 

That’s why Hannah Bethel is perched on a high backed chair in the corner of the Holiday Express Hotel at 5:30 PM. Guests are grazing appetizers in the lobby. To most of them, she’s acoustic wallpaper. In her mind, and to my ears, she’s singing for a full house. 

 

A request from the audience… Kris Kristofferson's “Help Me Make It Through The Night.”

 

The atmosphere in the room turns on a dime. The guitar chords are bare bones. But the voice… supremely supple, original pacing and phrasing, emotive cry breaks, tenderly evocative, focuses an imaginary spotlight to her corner of the lobby. By the time she hits the final chords, people have stopped chatting mid fork. I swear that some nights she must sing herself to sleep with the lyrics. She kills the song. VIDEO

 

Most guests are passing time in the lobby before heading to the Bridgestone Arena for the “Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw” tribute show. Kristofferson, one of the original  Highwaymen back in the day with Willie and Waylon and Merle, can’t sing that song with more genuine soulful depth than Hannah Bethel.

 

“I moved here from Michigan ten years ago,” Hannah says as I put folding money in the tip jar and ask for her web site address. She’s been paying her dues for years, dove headlong into climbing the ladder, trying to gain altitude at roadhouses around the country. 

 

Bethel's web site notes her recent successes but I was surprised by the two songs on it. In that little hotel lobby she was a woman with a voice and style that set her apart from the crowd. For me, "Train" and "Witchy Woman" are too much Nashville and too little Hannah. The purity of her supple voice gets lost in a Nashville-ized version of  her best feature...just sayin'.

 

This song of Kristofferson's? Bethel’s voice lilted, skimmed, and caressed the lyrics with a style all her own. Conversations stop in mid-sentence. Her range, depth and tonal purity, it’s all right here, in one tender, evocative, emotive, vulnerable song, with sub-strata of conviction, not desperation. Anyone who can sing with such conviction can survive. 

 

She’s got the goods.  Will she thrive?  If one of her pared down originals leads off the samples on her web page, she’s got a running start. 

 

 

Hannah Bethel, Holiday Express Hotel, Nashville, TN

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Sing with conviction, hold nothing back, no matter where, no matter when...you were born to be here right now

Photos, videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Berkshire Athenaeum: Morphing from the 19th to the 21st Century

The Berkshire Athenaeum
Pittsfield’s Public Library
1 Wendell Avenue
Pittsfield, MA
March 14, 2019

The Berkshire Athenaeum on 1 Wendell Avenue…

A place for scholarly endeavors, a community center, a nexus for social interaction, a drop-in center, a quiet oasis of tranquility thankfully without a plasma TV in sight, rooms dedicated to local history…that’s a start to describe the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Not a drop of stuffiness here. The modern two story building wraps its arms around you as you walk inside, a spacious atrium, airy and well-lit, offers a silent handshake of greeting to the visitor. Surrounded by the usual stacks of books arranged with the Dewey Decimal, navigation is aided and abetted by signage, an efficient self-explanatory guide to the first time visitor.

Before you’ve even begun to take in the contents, your eyes are drawn to a powerful black and white photographic montage that plants you square in the historic and cultural ethos of Berkshire county.

Those large photos, printed on cloth and draped over the perimeter of the second level, give a visitors and locals a very specific sense of time, place, and people that are the fabric of Berkshire County. "Facing Berkshires Heritage" photographs by Nicholas Candida capture the spirit of the county.

I was born and raised in Pittsfield. Those photos hit a chord for me. I can smell the new mown hay, feel the chill air around Mt. Greylock, hear the lowing of cows and the voices of farmers in Savoy as I explored what was down the road as a 16 year-old with his first drivers license.

Facing Berkshires Heritage photographs by Nicholas Candida VIDEO

The staff keeps it real with displays as fresh as today's news. You’d have to have been living under a rock not to know that “The Green Book” was named the 2019 Oscar Best Film. A glass case just past the circulation desk contains an original copy of “The Green Book” with photos and details of how “Negro” visitors could find gas stations, hotels, and restaurants where they could be served and not shunned right here in Pittsfield.

Pockets of reading rooms and a food and drink room are tucked around the first floor perimeter. Two areas with banks of computers, being used by three generations of residents, are nestled toward the end of the first level. Spacious, well-lit areas to work or research or read whatever you need to read on the internet are arranged around the stairs to the second level. The Auditorium, located in the basement seats 175 people, and is often used to host meetings involving town matters.

An early definition of Athenaeum is “a place in the temple of Athena in Athens where writers and scholars met.”

Back in 1876, the city’s elite wanted to upgrade Pittsfield’s cultural standing by erecting a building with such erudite purpose. If they were to stroll through today’s athenaeum I’ll bet they’d be proud by the egalitarian way the pursuit of knowledge and social connectivity has evolved.

 

Berkshire Athenaeum Exhibit: The Green Book

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The Berkshire Athenaeum signage makes navigation easy for visitors

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•  
• 

 

 

Berkshire Athenaeum: A community destination

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Berkshire Athenaeum exterior on Wendell Avenue

• 
• 

At noontime the library hosts a crowd composed mostly of senior citizens. After 2 PM, a younger generation will show up as students from Pittsfield High School, a five minute walk away, show up.

Original library, 1876 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Athenaeum

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

The Harvard Art Museums: Three Museums in One Luminous Cloud of Culture and Scholarship

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 
March 5, 2019

A museum brazenly steals the show from it’s world class contents…

Wow…I stopped in my tracks. My feet were on the ground. I felt like I just walked into a transparent cumulous cloud.

That’s a likely universal reaction to a first timer’s foray into the Quincy Street entrance to the Harvard Art Museums. Every visitor I watched enter did the same thing – stood transfixed a few feet inside, eyes involuntarily trained upward, gazing to the glass vaulted ceiling five stories above.

A sunny day, blue sky looking like a freshly painted fresco visible through the pyramid of glass atop the five story structure, this moment is an affirmation of brilliant design. Rapture is not too strong a word to describe what I felt. When’s the last time you could say that upon entering a museum?

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/mission

The Harvard Art Museums are what happens when an institution thinks big, has the dough to shoot for the stars, and hires rpbw architect Renzo Piano, whose bloodlines channel Leonardo de Vinci, to imagine the form and function of a museum of the 21st century. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/history-and-the-three-museums

Beginning in 2008, the university closed the ancient Fogg Museum (1895) and the staid Busch-Reisinger Museum behind it and took a bold step that reinterpreted what a museum's purpose could be. For the next 6 years, a chunk of the block between Quincy Street and Prescott Street was a construction site; entire walls were removed, cranes resembling prehistoric birds hovered and built a glass nest three stories high high over the Fogg Museum. The 1991 building that had housed the Busch-Reisinger Museum, located right behind the Fogg, was demolished. The Quincy Street exterior facade remains untouched. The Prescott Street entrance looks as different as the two sides of a coin. The inside…well, it was reassembled with the inter-connectedness of a Rubik's cube.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/01/with-opening-expanded-harvard-art-museums-complex-patience-rewarded/DGhCKlNLxmBqwlvB3ZatMK/story.html

The Harvard Art Museums are the equivalent of a world-class teaching hospital. Its patients are historic artifacts and priceless art from a millennium or so. Its doctors are directors, curators, and faculty. Its interns are students and scholars from around the world who preserve and document and study the collection in their care.

Areas for study, preservation, scholarly work and teaching surround the atrium on the top three floors - all visible through glass doors with huge glass panes admitting from outside. On any given day, the space looks like an inside out beehive, students, scholars and conservators visible as they work in offices on the perimeter of the glorious atrium. The building has loads of 21st century green technology but none of it can match the generative smack of natural light that imbues the glass bubble with the sense that its floating in an architectural amniotic fluid filled with creative ions that charge the animate and inanimate forms inside.

The Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, Sackler) each have their own philosophies and guiding principles. Miraculously, they retain their identities, bonded together by the diffusion of natural light and visitor friendly flow design and signage.

One of my favorite museums, the Fogg fell off my radar when it closed in 2008. Eleven years later, I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I strolled inside after such a long hiatus. I came to the museum to see the Bauhaus Show that my architect friends and scholars wanted to see. The Bauhaus Show was mesmerizing but honest to goodness, in this first visit, the design and architecture of the Harvard Art Museums were the stars of the show.

Photos...

The original brick exterior structure of The Fogg Museum remains intact. The glass pyramid centered across the top of the structure is visible in the first photograph.

Toggle through the photos...

Harvard Museums Quincy Street Entrance

• 
• 
• 
• 

Natural Light controlled by shades, blinds

• 
• 
• 

The blinds and shades are in a constant state of flux according to the needs of the researchers, students, scholars in the offices that surround the atrium on the third and fourth floors.

Luminous multi-purpose interior

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Harvard Art Museums Prescott Street Entrance

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The old Busch-Reisinger Museum was demolished and replaced by the addition to the museum with an entrance on Prescott Street. Note the brick exterior to the Fogg Museum behind the newer cement and steel addition.

No detail left without natural light, even the Gift Shop...

Harvard Art Museums Gift Shop

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Terrific guide to help plan your visit...

Visit the tiny Jenny's Cafe, eat in a  cozy seating area or saunter out find a table in the original atrium under the pyramid of glass five stories above.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Carnival Time in New Orleans: Marching Krewes and Inspired Madness

Krewe du Vieux Mardi Gras Parade
Marigny and French Quarter Neighborhoods in New Orleans
February 16, 2019

Oh, my…The Krewe du Vieux (pronounce Voo) is about as New Orleansy as a Mardi Gras Krewe can get. Wildly politically incorrect, satirically magnificent, it is more like a no holds barred SNL propelled by brass bands. Like most of the parades in New Orleans weeks before Mardi Gras day, this is a walking/marching krewe. 

The floats are pushed or pulled along by the marchers themselves (link to parade route). A few are drawn along by mules, paying respect to the parade tradition before mega krewes got the idea to build floats the size of The Queen Mary, transported aboard 18 wheelers, and so mammoth that they can’t navigate the narrow streets of the French Quarter. 

Fearless lunacy abounds. Sacred Cows? The 17 sub-krewes of Krewe du Vieux gore them all with their interpretations of this year's theme, "Yes,Yes, Oh God, Yes," (a vaguely tongue-in-cheek reference to Mayor LaToya Cantrell's positivity campaign to brand New Orleans as "The City of Yes.")  Yes, indeed...but best to leave the kids home when you head for this one. The list of sub-krewes speaks for itself.

SUB-KREWES
SEEDS OF DECLINE
Theme: Let us Prey (Priests)
KREWE DU MISHIGAS
Theme: Red, White and Jew (RBG)
KREWE OF SPANK
Theme: Bead Busters
KREWE OF THE MYSTIC INANE
Theme: RoadwerkNOLA.gov
KREWE OF UNDERWEAR
Theme: Hop On, Get Off
KREWE OF K.A.O.S.
Theme: Objection Overruled (Gender Equality)
KNIGHTS OF MONDU
Theme: Robbin' Goods: Irvin Mayfield
KREWE RUE BOURBON
Theme: Domino PotHo
KREWE OF L.E.W.D.
Theme: Submission Control: In Space No One Hears Your Safe World
MYSTIC KREWE OF SPERMES
Theme: Entergize the Pussy
T.O.K.I.N.
Theme: Bong Voyage
KREWE OF DRIPS AND DISCHARGES
Theme: Screw Dat
KREWE OF C.R.U.D.E.
Theme: The Lyin' King
KREWE OF SPACE AGE LOVE
Theme: Pot for Potholes
KREWE DE C.R.A.P.S.
Theme: City of No No oh God No (Priest Abuse)
MYSTIK KREWE OF COMATOSE
Theme: Kills the Story (Kashoggi)
KREWE OF MAMA ROUX
Theme: Mama Roux Sees You

Gotta love the names of the krewes and the spirit of satire - international, local, political, zany, and gleefully delivered by the costumed marchers. Their floats are hand-made, also a throwback from the earliest Mardi Gras parades.

Krewe du Vieux's purposeful goof ball sub-krewes are the most unfettered, unflustered, uninhibited gang of merry makers…the only thing they take seriously is maintaining the spirit of satire and organic homemade theatricality and pointed humor that was an ingredient of many original New Orleans Mardi Gras parades.  

Mardi Gras spectators are the Laurel to the parade’s Hardy. They play their roles to perfection, often decked out in wild, absurd, outfits, lustily cheering the goings-on in the street, and an instant flash mob of convivial bon vivants. In these smaller parades with spectators three or four deep for blocks along the parade route, bonhomie rules.

“Sure, come on up!” is the response every time I want to get a photo and I’m at the back of the pack. 

No “Throw me something, Mister!” beseeching from the crowd….no plastic beads flying to the crowd. Tiny paper handmade something-or-others, cards or pamphlets with scurrilous drawings are handed out to us on the parade route. 

One of my favorites. “Do you like beer?” a krewe marcher asks. “Have one,” and he hands me an Abita Beer bottle cap with a tiny color cameo of Brett Kavanaugh pasted inside the cap. They must have been putting these together for months.

In the closing days of Carnival, the parades are huge and attract visitors from all over the country. In the earlier weeks like this, it’s a local party that began on January 6 (The Epiphany) and gains steam steadily until Ash Wednesday (about 58 days this year). If you want a taste of time tested traditional New Orleans Mardi Gras Carnival Season, book a flight right now. 

The whole parade season in New Orleans...may as well be in another galaxy, a good one...http://www.mardigrasparadeschedule.com

Krewe du Vieux "throws", no beads, no plastic, small bits of fierce satire handed out to spectators along the parade route. There were a few political hand-outs so scurrilous I declined to include them...not because I'm a prude, just don't want to scandalize readers who may not share Mardi Gras' wild west humor as much as I do.

Krewe du Vieux Throws

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

PHOTOS - Krewe du Vieux, krewedelusion
https://www.neworleans.com/event/krewe-du-vieux-parade/3242/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krewe

 

The Long Road to Mardi Gras 2019 New Orleans

The Long Road to Mardi Gras 2019 New Orleans

Mardi Gras in southwest Louisiana… it’s a whole dang season, called “Carnival Season.”

Mardi Gras Catechism: Carnival Season always begins on January 6, (The Feast of the Epiphany). Mardi Gras day (French meaning “Fat Tuesday”, also known as Shrove Tuesday) is always on the day before Ash Wednesday. The date for Ash Wednesday changes every year because Easter Sunday is never on the same Sunday each year. Easter can fall on any Sunday between March 23 and April 25. Mardi Gras day always takes place 47 days before Easter. Got that?

In my Yankee thinking, I thought the Mardi Gras parades always happened on Fat Tuesday. Mais non.

Not in this part of the world. There are 50 parades in New Orleans that roll between January 6 (Feast of The Epiphany) and March 5 (Fat Tuesday). Back in the day, the parades used to wind their way through the French Quarter. Then came along Super Krewes that hired tractor-trailers with enough muscle power to haul the Queen Mary, and say goodbye to big parades in the French Quarter.

These big rigs that resemble floating islands roll through the wider streets in Uptown and Mid town. Smaller parades and floats still roll through the narrow streets of the French Quarter.

The level of frivolity, creativity, unconventionality, political lampoon and/or social commentary is evident in just about any parade in the season.

The krewes often adopt a theme for the year. Being New Orleans, there are no sacred cows…the more sacred the cow, the larger the lampoon.

The rest of SW Louisiana is no slouch. There will be hundreds of parades from Slidell to Lafayette to Lake Charles and in every small town in between. There’s a parade in Iota whose population is about the same number of the seating capacity of the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette.

For research pt at large is going to investigate a few parades in New Orleans this weekend.

On tap Saturday, February 16, Krewe de Vieux, Krewe Delusion

Sunday, February 17, 'tit Rex  hint...floats are made out shoeboxes that look like full size floats.

2019 Carnival Madness in full...http://www.mardigrasparadeschedule.com

 

Jesse Lége and Bayou Brew Cajunize The Burren

The Burren
Back Room at The Burren
https://www.burren.com
247 Elm Street, Davis Square
Somerville, MA 02144
February 7, 2019

You could be blindfolded but when you hear that voice you know damn well that’s Jesse Lége singing. He’s in rarified territory in the voice department. Deeply sonorous, freighted with emotion that channels the pains and joys of his Cajun forebears, Jesse projects his music like an old soul, all the way back to the enormously emotive Améde Ardoin.

His piercing singing register comes physically from his voice box and his diaphragm but psychically from DNA rooted in a rural upbringing, no electricity, in a one room house deep in the prairie. The week’s entertainment – tuning in the Grand Ole Opry or The Louisiana Hayride if the batteries for the family’s transistor radio had enough juice.

This is not a pretend act. He was born at home near Gueydan, LA, was suckled on the sounds of music heard on the porch on Saturday nights under skies so black you could see all the way to the Milky Way, back in the days when electricity hadn’t reached the prairies of Louisiana.

Tonight he’s playing with his trusty band mates The Bayou Brew who bring their own Cajun sensibilities to the stage. Jesse’s as much a story teller as a singer. He’s an ambassador to Cajun culture, especially in places far flung from Louisiana, where his audience knows such history.In an accent as thick as a good roux,he’s likely to introduce a song with an anecdote, background about the song, and who first sang it. A good one tonight was his explanation of the subjects of many Cajun songs. "The Rayne Bounce" - getting the title since Rayne, LA, is called the "Frog Capital of the World".

Usually, to hear music like this you have to be at the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, LA, or the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette. Not tonight.

What a gift.

Photo, videos  by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Band L to R

Darren Wallace, fiddle; Missy Roser, fiddle; Jesse Lége, Accordion; Erica Weiss, rhythm guitar; Evelyn Schneider, bass

Kudos to the manager of The Back Room, who cleared away enough tables for the roomful of dancers to whirl the night away while Jesse and Bayou Brew played from the stage.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o22q1cHuboE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=P9YxiHNg1Ro

MORE VIDEOS COMING AFTER FEBRUARY 21

 

 

Willie Nelson: The 2015 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize

Let’s hear it for serendipity doo dah. On the previous post, a reader commented she had seen part of the “Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw” on public TV. I still can’t find it but did stumble upon this video recording of Nelson being honored as recipient of the 2015 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

The all-star tribute to singer and songwriter Willie Nelson, 2015 recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, features performances by Nelson, Edie Brickell, Leon Bridges, Rosanne Cash, Ana Gabriel, Jamey Johnson, Alison Krauss, Raul Malo of The Mavericks, Neil Young, Promise of the Real (Young, Lukas and Micah Nelson), Buckwheat Zydeco (Stanley Dural, Jr.) and past Gershwin Prize honoree Paul Simon.

I had no idea Willie was the recipient of the 2015 Library of Congress Award that “honors the enduring legacy of George and Ira Gershwin and the continuing legacy of this year’s honoree, Willie Nelson.”

http://www.pbs.org/gershwin-prize/shows/gershwin-prize-willie-nelson/

And I had no idea of the award when I wrote the last paragraph,
https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/01/willie-life-and-songs-of-an-american-outlaw-the-setting.html

“Look at the range of songs the man’s written and sung. Willie’s sort of a one-man Rogers and Hammerstein or a singer with the range and sensibility of George Gershwin who wears cowboy boots and a red bandana. With his country lyricism, jazz influenced phrasing, and soulful sensibility, Willie doesn’t even fit into the category of Americana. “One of a kind” sounds about right.

The Gershwin Prize event had the feel of a pre-quel to the January 2019 tribute “Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw” and definitively connects to a man who has made a Gershwin sized mark on American music. The tribute is more polished but to a way more buttoned up audience than the one in Nashville on January 12, 2019.
~~~
Holy Cow. I spent last few hours watching this 2015 video, taking notes on the fly, and remembering similar moments from the tribute to Nelson  on January 12, 2019.

Don Was, the same guy who directed the tribute in Nashville, directs the house band. It showed. Spontaneous notes I banged out while viewing the one hour twenty five minute video appear below…

Oh boy, I warn you if you have any Willie Nelson bones in your body you’re gonna have to put your life on hold, actually you’ll tumble down the Willie Nelson rabbit hole without consent and get in touch with how much of Nelson’s songbook filtered through our music DNA and has a way of making us laugh, cry, comfort us, or nod our heads in absolute agreement with those lyrics of Willie’s.

Another cast of luminaries here, one of whom, Buckwheat Zydeco (Stanley Dural, Jr.), never made it to 2019.

The Library of Congress our nation’s oldest federal cultural institution presents the 2015 Prize for Popular Song with an all-star salute to this year’s recipient Willie Nelson.

1st minute
Promise of The Real, upbeat light-hearted “Stay All Night” Lukas and Micah Nelson and Neil Young, get the show off the ground then host Don Johnson takes over to celebrate the 2015 Gershwin Prize For Popular Music tonight honoring the remarkable American songbook of Willie Nelson,

6 minutes
Leon Bridges "Time Slips Away," soulful take on the song that breathes fresh life into the phrasing and shows how many ways there are to sing a truly classic song. Leon keeps it going with this soulful take with longtime harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael’s phrasings, swings sweet evocatively sweet. Orchestration is toned down, lets Bridges take the lead.

10 minutes
Raul Malo of The Mavericks sings “Crazy” backed by the Don Was top-tier band and the soft croons of the female chorus. Funny how these classic songs, all written in one week, repeat, ONE WEEK, are trademark Willie lyrics.

14 minutes
Vignettes of Nelson’s daughter Paula and Amy Nelson-Niccore, photos of growing up and being on stage with their dad, cool that he involved them, that they had no idea how unique it was till they began formal schooling and learned that’s not the way other kids grew up early. Warm, loving.

15 minutes
Annie D’Angelo, current and fourth wife, video tells how they met 23 years ago, two “surprise” sons Lukas and Micah… “him I like,” she says after first meeting Nelson.

16 minutes
Gershwin recipient Paul Simon and Edie Brickell, “Remember Me” from 1975 “Red Headed Stranger” album. Good lord, all these songs, the lyrics, the melodies, and a little totally Willie and Trigger riff by Edie in the middle, not just so listener friendly, but heart friendly. I can’t help thinking that these early songs, maybe certain others, are rooted in Willie’s own history, he was just about 30 years old at the time, had no real prospects for success, but was willing to put it all on the line, and in the grooves of those 45 or 33 rpm records, sort of a diary set to music, of what he was thinking about, of what came to mind as he was living day to day, allowing his thoughts to bubble to his conscious level, spinning his thoughts, dreams, realizations into words and melodies. His songwriting wasn’t a fit for Nashville and his life experience certainly wasn’t conventional, raised by loving grandparents in Abbott TX at the tail end of the depression in 1933, grand parents were music minded, from country to church choir, music was probably what kept him grounded, surrounded him with a comfort zone, and he had the uncommon ability or the uncommon drive, to stay with it, let it stay with him, through his youth way down in Texas, where, actually, people take music pretty seriously.

21  minutes
Rose Ann Cash sings Pancho and Lefty, a Townes Van Zant song someone sent to Willie. The more you get to understand Willie, the more you get an idea why that song appealed to him, get a sense of Willie’s sensibility. What are we talking about? Friendship? Relationships? Loyalty? Taking Risks? Loss? Good Times? Adventure? Longing? Sustaining Love? The mystery fits perfectly.

26 minutes
No one can better describe the way Willie thinks about music than he can in this video. “I was always around music, I cant remember any time when I wasn’t hearing music or trying to play music or trying to write music and it was just a language that i grew up with, I found out through the years that its a universal language, the same music that affected me in my early days in Abbott Texas." Powerful close ups of Willie talking, vintage photos of 1930s Texas, you almost have to brush the dust off your coat after watching.

27 minutes still can't identify the speaker who nails the essence of Willie down to a few paragraphs
“America is an idea and America is one of the few countries on earth that was built around an idea… the singing cowboy was a very important element in the culture….” who is the guy with these great comments at 27 min mark and says that "Willie is a magic messenger who appeals across the spectrum to young and old and he is one of the few who has sustained a long time and appealed to a spectrum young and old and he did it through wandering through the raw poetry of time” wow other great observations too. who is this man? a wonderful video follows this

29 minutes
video, great close ups, Woody Harrelson tells story about being invited by Annie to join the crowd in the bus, through a haze of smoke, Willie shouts “Hey, come on down…”; other guys listening to the story add their own comments they call “Willie-isms”

29:35 minutes
Kris Kristofferson nails how to describe Willie’s songwriting, “I wouldn’t call him country or soul or exclusively anything, he’s had some of the most popular songs that have ever come out of country music…he’s one of a kind.”

31:00 minutes
Don Johnson reads a letter from Jimmy Carter a long time fan, saluting Willie.

32 minutes
Jamie Johnson, “Georgia On My Mind” with backup singers, organ and band, slow, not much electricity, church organ and harmonica solo by Mickey Raphael gains traction in last 32 bars. The song would have fizzed without the vivacious 3 female singers soulful chorusing from the back row of the set.

37 minutes
Michael Feinstein says that " in 1978 Willie recorded an album called Stardust, includint a standard (Feinstein sings a few bars of “Someone T Watch Over Me, ” that album has sold over 5 million copies, so that ain’t hay.  In 1985 the US Congress posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to one of  America’s most beloved songwriting teams, George and Ira Gershwin, for 'outstanding and invaluable contributions to America music and theater and culture.' In commemoration of the Gershwin brothers, the Library of Congress named its prize for popular song, which is the nations highest honor for popular song, after these two extraordinary and prolific recording artists. Ladies and gentleman please join me in honoring the enduring legacy of George and Ira Gershwin and the continuing legacy of this year’s honoree, Willie Nelson.”

38 minutes
clips of Willie introducing Farm Aid Festivals along the years with other great performers including Johm Mellencamp, Dave Matthews; Willie, wearing his Farm Aid cap running the show, tens of thousands audiences, raises millions for farmers of the USA. The man’s instincts are generous, his heart open. Other than Bono, can you name a world class artist who’s waded in to highlight a humanitarian cause year after year? And those musicians on stage are bringing it for real.

41 minute, first truly show stopping moments
Alison Krauss "Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground" and she kills it just like she did in the Nashville 2019 tribute, great atmospheric pedal steel solo this song burrows into your heart kindling any memory of a lover whose memory clings into your heart this song brought tears to eyes of Willie’s wife Annie and to be honest mine too such a richly evocative in melody and words, a marriage made in heaven for the angel flying too close to the ground oh my
the sweet, high keening, emotionally pitched sound of her voice and perfect timing of her phrasing stirs up memories from some deep place in my heart that I hadn’t realized were there, the words being the conduit into a tender inner space in my heart.  This is one song that in the right hands rises like early morning dew into the clouds this is one of those die and go to heaven songs for your playlist. I guarantee you’ll play this song again and again.

46 minutes
Alison Krauss is joined by raspy voiced Jamie Johnson, perfect for this song, for a version of Willie and Ray' Charles “Seven Spanish Angels” a song reminiscent of Marty Robbins' “El Paso” that I had never heard until Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express played it at La Poussiere in Breaux Bridge, LA. Jamie sings the words but Allyson sings them with feeling; the band backup  with Mickey Raphael, spare, with great trio chorus a romantic western song story with the greatest title of any western song ever written.

50: 00 minutes
Don Johnson salutes Don Was and the band and ‘the 3 beautiful sisters’ back there in the chorus’

51 minutes
Johnson introduces “I Never Cared For You,” a curious title, mid-60's, one of Willie’s most beloved songs sung by 4  time Grammy nominee, one of the most acclaimed Mexican singers in the history of Mexican popular music, Anna Gabriel. Willie’s neighbors in Abbot, Texas, were Mexican. Willie remembers listening to the music; distinctly Mexican flourishes in his guitar riffs pop up all over the place as he channels memory, culture, and personal history, his fingers deftly finger picking with flourishes instantly recognizable as his own…no one, absolutely no one, including his hero Django Rhinehart, sounds like Willie.

51:51 minutes, another show stopper
Anna Gabriel “I Never Cared For You,” sings in Spanish oh boy this is just the jolt this show needed, the band in overdrive to the passionate singing from the inside out from Anna, powerful passionately driven, animated body language, arms outspread to encompass the whole theater, gets the audience clapping along, Anna is killing it. This song captures the unapologetic romanticism, Spanish rhythms, emotive, country operatic then veers into pounding salsa rhythms that course through your veins then she changes up slows down to finish with a grand operatic flourish. Oh boy. Absolutely lit a fuse. Whoever put the set list together is a genius.

54 minutes
Video clips from Austin City Limits 40th anniversary, Willie was one of the originators of the event! video medley of Willie songs of course leading off with his trademark opener “Whiskey River” with various artists including Lyle Lovett and Emmylou Harris, what company!

55:15 minutes
Graybeard Neil Young and the band Promise of the Real in a vaguely rumba-ish version of ‘Whiskey River,’ a slow rolling train with Lukas Nelson and the band Promise of the Real with other son Micah rocking it along and jamming gleefully with Neil Young, you gotta see this one, two generations voluntarily drowning in Whiskey River with the band in full pursuit, or descent, take your pick. You ain’t gonna see Neil Young rock out as gleefully as this.
Lukas Nelson sings lyrics with entirely fresh phrasing and a voice eerily reminiscent of his dad’s. If Lukas picks up the torch, he’s not going to be afraid to put his own stamp on his old man’s songs. Check out Willie nodding to the timing. That’s one proud daddy. 

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=who+sings+whiskey+river+with+neil+young+at+gershwin+award+2015&view=detail&mid=30C6D39599761264E0AC30C6D39599761264E0AC&FORM=VIRE
a bunch of other songs from the award program here too

1:00 hour
 “Man With The Blues” Paul Simon, Buckwheat Zydeco (Stanley Duran, Jr. RIP), whoa a rumba-ish zydeco mash-up that rocks. The show is lifting off, baby, fasten your seat belt. The un-emotive Paul Simon shows signs of life even if he doesn't seem to pay attention to Dural right beside him. Buckwheat’s accordion is a joyful instrument with his rubboard sidekick recognizable in any Louisiana dance hall. This is the most upbeat song about A man with the blues you’re ever gonna hear. I woulda loved to hear Buckwheat sing this one.

1:02:38 Willie in a nutshell...
Don Johnson recalls the kinship between Ray Charles and Willlie and says, “Ray Charles said it best, “Willie has the sincerity, the soul, the wit, and the wisdom …when I hear Willie, I hear the voice of America."

Don Johnson, with a photo montage rolling on the huge screen, reads…
"Born in 1933 depression years, raised by loving grandparents, nurtured by western swing of Bob Wills and the honky tonk of Ernest Tubbs, he picked cotton, pulled corn. Even as a boy he wrote songs, songs of loneliness, songs of faith, songs of despair, songs of  hope. As a young man, he scraped and scrabbled his way across the country, played with whatever band would have him, even worked as a disc jockey in radio station in the far northwest."

"In the 60’s our hillbilly hero drove his broken down Buick to Nashville where his songs like the enduring classics like “Hello Walls” and “Crazy” “Nightlife” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” were covered by superstars yet Willie fell short of becoming a super star. His quirky style did not conform to the Nashville norms."

"Well all that changed in the 70’s when he moved to Austin and embraced the gap between hillbillies and hippies, rednecks, and rascals.  His music and his irrepressibly generous spirit embodies all the opposing factions, from then till now he has maintained a zen-like presence as a peace loving music-maker for all generations."

"His surprising 1978 album “ Stardust,“ for example, helped revive interest in the great American songbook and stayed on the pop charts for no less than 10 years. In the mid-80’s his impassioned concern for the lives of marginalized  and struggling small farmers led him to help establish Farm Aid. Three decades later with $50 million raised for a great cause is still stronger than ever. Now as he roars into his 80s, Willie is stronger than ever. He continues to live his life as he loves to say, on the road again, playing over 100 one-nighters a year."

"This past year alone  (2015) he has cut three new albums. A duet session with Merle Haggard, A tribute to his mentor Ray Price, and in honor of this august occasion an album of the songs of George and Ira Gershwin."

"Willie Nelson has earned his heroic status. In doing so, and this is the beautiful part, he has sustained a spirit of deep humility and common decency. His songs like his singing and guitar playing reflect a simple decency that warms the heart and informs the mind. With 11 Grammy awards, 68 studio albums, more than 40 million records sold in the United States, and for his remarkable contribution to American Music, and to the cultural life of this nation, the Library of Congress is proud to present The 2015 Gershwin prize for popular song to Willie Nelson.”

1:07
Seven congresspeople including Nancy Pelosi appear on stage, Acting Library of Congress Director David Mao presents the award.
Willie’s acceptance thank you speech is short, direct, and that’s all it needed to be. We know we love him and why. He doesn’t need to add a damn thing.

1:08
Willie thanks Don Was and his crack band then settles in to sing “Night Life.”
Perfect. Willie’s spent most of his life on stage at night, “the night life ain’t no good life but it’s my life…” say the lyrics but we know better. It’s the kind of life that’s made ours, at least mine, all the richer for  Willie's songs, singing, styles that cover just about every spectrum of the American songbook.

1:10 – 1:14
Willie can still play the blazes out of that battered guitar, appears creatively inspired every time he gets his fingers on it. This is his acceptance speech. His guitar Trigger was his speech writer.

1:14
Willie just cut album of Gershwin songs, invites Cyndy Lauper, flaming pink hair glowing in the spotlight, to the stage and they have spirited fun with “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off” in the midst of which Willie takes a guitar solo that reminds you why he’s here. Have you ever seen two people dueting have any more fun and chemistry with this Gershwin classic? The audience is giddy…this is the way to land the show.

1:17
Willie invites Lukas and Micah, says he wrote this a long time ago, says “I think this is the most appropriate songs we could do in this period in America.”
http://www.songlyrics.com/willie-nelson/living-in-the-promised-land-lyrics/

“Living In The Promised Land” The song hit like a thunderbolt from Austin... Lukas Nelson, the timbre of the voice, the subtle timing and phrasing, that are his alone have the stamp of living and listening to his dad since the boy was in a crib. You’ll be pardoned when your jaw drops in wonder and awe. Then pardoned again when Lukas takes a solo…guess who his licks remind you of. The final licks are fierce. The sisters in the choir charge the song the ways they’ve been adding all night long. That was all back in 2015. Good lord we need those sentiments of that song now more than ever.

1:21
Finale - Willie and sons sing "On The Road Again" what else did you expect... “Feel free to sing along if you want to” says Willie and every one in the audience is on their feet singing and clapping! …. then the whole cast rolls onstage for one big time finale. I am still  floating along in Willie Nelson ecstasy...enjoy the ride yourself. https://www.pbs.org/video/gershwin-prize-willie-nelson-library-congress-gershwin-prize-full/

WHOA NELLIE ! 

 

Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw, The Setting

Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw

PART 2; THE SETTING
Bridgestone Arena
Nashville, TN
January 12, 2019

There’s Red State America, Blue State America…and Willie Nelson America. 18,000 members of WNA crammed into every seat in the cavernous Bridgestone Arena to pay homage to the man who has been writing songs since 1962. If the event would have been on pay per view, Willie could have bought the state of Texas with the proceeds. The level of anticipation in the arena was as thick as those two long pigtails hanging from under Willie’s cowboy hat. 

Anyone who owned Willie merchandise was wearing it. The forty-ish woman wearing a light blue Levi jacket with a Willie Nelson portrait on the back was walking to her seat in the hallway ahead of us. “I had it painted especially for me last year,” she said. “The same artist painted that one of Johnny Cash on my husband’s.”  For the rest of us, our devotion to Willie and what he stands for is painted indelibly on a small cameo in an invisible locket hanging on a delicate chain around our necks. 

 

Listen and you’d hear people telling Willie anecdotes. The couple sitting next to us had driven two hours from eastern Tennessee for the show. Judging by the conversation with Willie as the fulcrum you’d think we’d known each other for years. 

 

WNA comes in all ages and income levels and is mostly white. They have their favorite songs, can tell you the first time they remember hearing it and can recite the verses. They are here to honor the man whose songs have been on their playlists for years. The fact that the man is 85 years old is another driving force for reasons that need no explanation.

 

The Tennessee accents I hear around me would be perfect for making a Jack Daniels Black Label Bourbon radio commercial. As the arena fills up, a good ol’ boy with a bushy beard and grey streaked pony tail poking through the back of his baseball cap is belting out a George Jones song much to the amusement of his neighbors. “I drove up to his house one day, knocked on the door and he answered it. I asked if he’d sign my fiddle and damn, he did.” 

 

Read the lyrics to Nelson's songs, listen to his own renditions. The man’s a philosopher, a poet, a seer, a romantic sometimes of the hopeless kind but has the sensibility to avoid the saccharine and write the core truths. If you’ve loved, loved and lost, or just plain lived, he’ll be singing your song.

 

His songwriting phrasing and timing can croon or swing or muse whether balladeering or country two stepping. The man’s not just a songwriter, he’s a storyteller. To say that he’s country… well you haven’t listened to what he’s written or co-written since 1962. Those 367 songs are not about pickup trucks. They’re steeped in his own life experiences. Can you name another Texas songwriter who covers Hogie Carmichael and, hold your breath, his next project will cover ol’ Blue Eyes himself. To think Willie is country misses the point. 

 

I’m thinking that Willie is the Buddha of American music, toking on weed instead of drinking tea. That unmistakable Willie voice, slightly nasal bourbon baritone, is best listened to neat, just the voice and his trademark guitar ‘Trigger.”

 

Check out the man’s catalogue. Chances are you’ve heard his songs covered by artists way better known, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” for example, more than you’ve heard Willie singing them himself. Look at this list of 367 songs and categories.

 

Look at the range of songs the man’s written and sung. Willie’s sort of a one-man Rogers and Hammerstein or a singer with the range and sensibility of George Gershwin who wears cowboy boots and a red bandana. With his country lyricism, jazz influenced phrasing, and soulful sensibility, Willie doesn’t even fit into the category of Americana. “One of a kind” sounds about right.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/2018/10/30/willie-nelson-recording-academy-grammy-2019/1817954002/

Farewell Alligator Man: A Tribute to Jimmy C. Newman: Photos, Video2

Farewell Alligator Man: A Tribute To Jimmy C. Newman
Acadiana Center For The Arts
Lafayette, LA
Louisiana Crossroads Series Presented by Downtown Lafayette
Friday, January 18, 2019

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/01/farewell-alligator-man-a-tribute-to-jimmy-c-newman.html

Farewell, Alligator Man2

• Doug Kershaw, PT, Marty Stuart
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Farewell Alligator Man: A Tribute to Jimmy C. Newman: Photos, Video

Farewell Alligator Man: A Tribute To Jimmy C. Newman
Acadiana Center For The Arts
Lafayette, LA
Louisiana Crossroads Series Presented by Downtown Lafayette
Friday, January 18, 2019

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/01/farewell-alligator-man-a-tribute-to-jimmy-c-newman.html

Farewell Alligator Man: Jimmy C. Newman

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• This was one special night of music. It had superstars Marty Stuart and Doug Kershaw who played Newman’s music with sparkling energy but the night belonged to local musicians Kelli Jones (Fiddle, Guitar and Vocal), Joel Savoy (fiddle, vocals), Gary Newman (Bass and the son of Jimmy Newman), and Chris Stafford (Piano and Guitar), who were joined by Caleb Klauder (Mandolin, Guitar, and Vocals), Reeb Willms (Guitar and Vocals, half of the Klauder/Willms Duo), Rusty Blake (Pedal Steel and Guitar), Matt Meyer (Drums), and Jesse Lége (Accordion) all of whom played Newman’s music and sang his lyrics with utter affection and supremely original takes on old time music.

Reeb Willms takes the lead on "Cry, Cry Darling", Jimmy's song that reached #4 on the Country Charts in 1954.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9nQNsvBJio

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/01/farewell-alligator-man-a-tribute-to-jimmy-c-newman-photos-video2.html

Photos, video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

"Farewell, Alligator Man": A Tribute To Jimmy C. Newman

Farewell, Alligator Man: A Tribute To Jimmy C. Newman
Acadiana Center For The Arts
Lafayette, LA
Louisiana Crossroads Series Presented by Downtown Lafayette
Friday, January 18, 2019

The Blood Red Moon expected to illuminate the firmament on Sunday was preceded by a blazing comet streaking over the skies of Lafayette on Friday, January 18. The comet had its own virtual soundtrack, familiar to local residents, the songbook of Jimmy C. Newman, born in a small Louisiana town far from the bright lights of Nashville. His songwriting output of American country music, later infused with songs influenced by his Cajun upbringing, covered as much territory as the comet that streaked over Lafayette.

I can’t read the notes I scribbled in the dark interior of the Acadiana Center for the Arts but I can tell you that I witnessed a night of dazzling music sung and played with cohesion, presence, expertise, and genuine love that swirled between spontaneity and synchronized beauty.

“Farewell, Alligator Man” was a tribute to Jimmy C. Newman (August 29, 1927 – June 21, 2014) a man whose type of rootsy music is never going to go out of style. I was surprised at the solid country sound and feel of his songs. I expected to hear music that sounded like the iconic Cajun singer Dewey Balfa and here I got a night reminiscent of Hank Williams. What else would you expect from a man who listened to Gene Autry when he was growing up in the small town of Mamou, LA.

This was one special night of music. It had superstars Marty Stuart and Doug Kershaw who played Newman’s music with sparkling energy but the night belonged to local musicians Kelli Jones (Fiddle, Guitar and Vocal), Joel Savoy (fiddle, vocals), Gary Newman (Bass and the son of Jimmy Newman), and Chris Stafford (Piano and Guitar), who were joined by Caleb Klauder (Mandolin, Guitar, and Vocals), Reeb Willms (Guitar and Vocals, half of the Klauder/Willms Duo), Rusty Blake (Pedal Steel and Guitar), Matt Meyer (Drums), and Jesse Lége (Accordion) all of whom played Newman’s music and sang his lyrics with utter affection and supremely original takes on old time music.

The carousel of Newman’s songs was played at what felt like rehearsal level and that’s a compliment. Every musician was in the moment, waiting to cover a song, add a lick, take a solo, or just beam a wide smile as they listened to a band mate interpret a Newman song with breathtaking freshness. This was way more than a concert, more like a piece of in-the-moment performance art for voice and instruments.

There is something universally appealing about Newman’s pure, direct singing and writing from half a century ago. Savoy, Jones, Klauder and Willms discovered Newman’s music independently, fortuitously met at venues across the country, and bonded over their mutual admiration.

Joel Savoy, fiddle player extraordinaire, and founder of the Louisiana-based label Valcour Records in Eunice, LA, promotes music and musicians with similar sensibilities. One of his first grand ideas after being named curator for the esteemed Louisiana Crossroads concert series at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Downtown Lafayette was to put together “Farewell Alligator Man, A Tribute To Jimmy C. Newman.”

Valcour Records had last year just recorded “Farewell, Alligator Man: A Tribute to the Music of Jimmy C. Newman” with Savoy, Caleb Klauder, Reeb Willms, and Kelli Jones. Savoy asked heavy hitters Jesse Legé, Marty Stuart, and Doug Kershaw, who had known Newman over the years, to come along for tonight’s ride. They were honored for the invitation and had a blast playing alongside the whippersnappers.

Newman got his start playing on the radio program Louisiana Hayride out of Shreveport. You might know the names of a couple other young singers who launched from the hayride, George Jones and Elvis Presley. In an astonishing 50 year run at the Grand Ole Opry, Jimmy C. Newman had a big run of country songs. The song that launched his career was “Cry, Cry Darling’” in 1956.

From 1954 to 1970, he hit it out of the park and charted 33 songs on the Billboard Country Chart. He began to integrate Cajun influences into hit songs like the 1961 release of "Alligator Man" and a year later, "Bayou Talk." He claimed that the C in his name stood for “Cajun” and the man never forgot his roots and never stopped including Cajun songs in his shows.

Tonight’s “Farewell, Alligator Man” might have been more aptly titled, “Hello, Cajun Country Man.”

A loping rendition of “You Didn’t Have To Go,” opened the show firing on all cylinders, Savoy, Jones, Klauder, Willms trading lyrics and virtuoso solos. As they would do all night, Rusty Blake’s eloquently mood setting pedal steel, Gary Newman’s rhythmically thumping standup bass, Matt Meyer’s steady subtle drumming, Chris Stafford’s solid work on keyboard/electric bass, provided the musical roux, the perfect atmospherics for Newman’s songbook.

Kelli Jones, with her soaring Appalachian tonality that must have come from listening to music in her hometown of Raleigh, NC, mesmerized us with “I Wanna Tell All the World.”

This short sweet song was as country it comes. The dye was cast. We were in for a night of pure, heart on your sleeve, inspirationaLly delivered music played by musicians who have found what, for them, is the Holy Grail.

Swapping vocals and playing jaw dropping solos on mandolin, fiddle, accordion, guitar, and keyboard, they covered just about every song on the Alligator Man CD and several chosen by the performers. SET LIST BELOW

Hall of Fame musicians Marty Stuart (whose elegant black tour bus was parked in front of the ACA for two days) and Cajun legend Doug Kershaw knew that tonight they were part of the show, not THE show. They knew they were part of this campfire evening in which musicians took turns shaking new life into old songs or recreating them with the same purity Newman wrote them. "I've Got You On My Mind"...exhibit A.

Most of the songs were about three minutes long, just the way they were played on the A and B sides of the 78-rpm records back in the day.

Willms can swing sweet or sassy depending on Newman’s lyrics. Klauder and Savoy match Newman’s intent with vocal range and back it up with their crafty playing. Savoy and Jones fiddle playing was crisp, spritely or plaintive depending on the song. Part of the fun for me was watching their eye contact as they played duets standing close together as one unit on stage. Caleb Klauder’s mandolin playing was melodic or insanely flying fingers picked.

Marty Stuart and Doug Kershaw were inspired choices. There was Stuart representing Newman’s country side, wearing his white suit with black piping around lapels, black shirt, and flowing gray and black scarf, and 83 year-old Kershaw representing Newman’s Cajun side wearing a bright yellow open collared shirt with crawfish embroidered above the black pockets.

Then there was Jesse Lége. Lége is the Caruso of Cajun singers, his voice at once raw, sonorous, plaintive, and richly evocative. When he sings Jimmy C. Newman waltz, I feel like I’m embedded in amber listening to a house party on a porch down in Gueydan, LA. Descended from the tradition of Dewey Balfa, the man is the most senior balladeer carrying the flag of Cajun music still touring around the world.

My belief that SW Louisiana is Cajun and Creole music territory into which country sounds were imports from honky tonks across the state line in Texas has taken a serious revision. Jimmy C. Newman was an authentic country star, not as luminous as Hank Williams, but bright enough to light up the Grand Ole Opry and the sky over Lafayette tonight.

The evening’s last two roof- raising songs saluted Jimmy C. Newman with hits that celebrated his Cajun roots. “Alligator Man”…do I have to tell you how a title like that resonated with this crowd?

Doug Kershaw put a foot stomping charge in the evening’s final song, Newman’s spirited Cajun anthem, "Diggy Liggy Lo", that featured the entire cast singing and playing the daylights out of the song, and the audience standing, cheering, and singing along.

People from these parts revere music that celebrates their roots and musicians that proudly call Louisiana home. The Alligator Man crossed over country and Cajun genres. His star still shines bright in the Louisiana night.

Set 1 (courtesy of Joel Savoy)

You Didn’t Have to Go- Key of G
I Wanna Tell all the World- Key of D
I thought I’d never fall in love again- C
Let’s Stay together- Key of E
Got You on my Mind- Key of E
Jolie Blonde Ayou Toi T’es- Key of A
Great Big Fais Do-Do- Key of D
Cry Cry Darlin- Key of Bb
If you Tried as Hard to Love Me- Key of G
Cajun Baby- Key of D

Set 2 (courtesy of Joel Savoy)

Louisiana Man- Key of D
Colinda- Key of A
Day Dreamin- Key of A
Let the Whole World Talk- Key of D
Blue Darlin- Key of G
H Brown Shuffle - Key of F
Hole in my Heart- C/G after 2nd Chorus
Again in your Arms- Key of C
Alligator Man- Key of A
ENCORE: Diggy Diggy Lo Key of A

VIDEOS, PHOTOS

Tim's Kitchen: Down Home Blue Plate Louisiana

Tim’s Kitchen
1000 Albertson Parkway
Broussard, LA

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

I can always count on my friends Bernard and Mark to take me to good ol’ classic restaurants when I visit Lafayette. Today’s excursion, Tim’s Kitchen at 1000 Albertson Parkway in nearby Broussard.

“This is one of our favorite ‘Plate Lunch’ places”, says Mark as we drive by barren sugar cane fields and new condo developments springing up as older cane fields disappear around the outskirts of Lafayette.

The interior of Tim’s Kitchen is fresh and new since it’s been in business since early November 2018. What’s on the menu however are staples of down home SW Louisiana food for decades.

The first thing you see after entering the well lit place featuring a counter and about a dozen tables is the list of Plate Lunch Specials detailed in beautiful colored chalk writing on the wall at the back of the room. Monday – Friday. Today, Wednesday, Chicken and Sausage Gumbo, Smothered Liver, Hamburger Steak, Baked Chicken and Chicken Fried Steak.

“I had the Chicken and Sausage Gumbo the day Beverly and I found the place,” says Mark, a devotee of Plate Lunch restaurants. That’s all I needed to know – Gumbo for me today.

Four women enjoying their food are animatedly chattering at a nearby table. Since Tim’s Kitchen closes in half an hour, we’re the only customers.

Our waitress Maggie, born and raised in Lafayette, recites other items on the menu with an accent as distinct as the aroma of home made food wafting from the kitchen.

Five minutes later, Maggie cheerfully delivers Bernard’s Hamburger Steak, Mark’s Stuffed Cabbage, and my Gumbo.

I spoon the side of rice into the tasty bowl of gumbo filled with generous helpings of chicken and sausage, start chewing on the fresh roll and every so often take a bite from the cup holding potato salad. This is where my Yankee knowledge of traditional Louisiana food gets an upgrade.

“Down here, people put the whole lump of potato salad into the gumbo, “ says Mark with a grin. One minute later, potato salad floating in gumbo, I’m eating like a regular.

Plate Lunches have been part of SW Louisiana culture for decades. They feature staples of Cajun and Creole home cooked basics. Since they’re cooked ahead of time, they’re served quickly, are affordable and fill your belly with satisfying comfort food. And of course, they’re served on a single plate.

Crystal, our personable hostess, who found her way to Lafayette 10 years ago from Jacksonville, FL, fills me in on Tim’s history.

“His mother owned three restaurants in Lafayette, all named Ruby’s, and closed them all a few years ago. Tim, born in nearby Church Point, was head chef at the most popular Ruby’s.”

The business is in his blood. It’s hard work but there’s no vaccination to make you immune from wanting the rush of creating good food for an appreciative audience.

Opening Tim’s Kitchen hit the sweet spot for this man who’s been in the business for decades. It's open five days a week from 10:30 AM to 2 PM. Tim, trim and friendly, is as comfortable talking to customers as he is whipping up food in his kitchen. “Want some gravy to cover the gumbo you’re taking home with you?” he says as he eyes the cup of gumbo I couldn’t finish.

“Come back on your next visit to Lafayette,” says Crystal.

I’m a Plate Dish kind of guy. Next time, I’m going to leave enough room to sample the home made Banana Split Cake.

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

Tim's Kitchen, Broussard, LA

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

 

Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw...A Not To Be Missed Tribute in Nashville

January 12, 2019

"Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw": do you even need a last name?

Saturday, January 12, 2019, 7 PM CT, Bridgestone Arena, Nashville, TN, the event honors 85 year-old country music legend Willie Nelson...and a cast of luminaries are gonna testify at the altar of Willie, probably much to his embarrassment.

Let's start with this 1997 video, Willie, his guitar, and a small audience. To me, this is the definitive Willie Nelson, the inimitable sound of that guitar, the flawless picking, the honeyed sandpaper slightly nasal voice, the Django Reinhart chord changes, the vaguely Mexicali riffs. Country? Nope, the man can sing anything in the American Song Book, standards to country, and can cross over genres as easy as you can walk out your front door. Trust me. He hasn't lost a lick since 1997.

MORE to come...I'll be in the audience

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/willie-nelson-funny-how-time-slips-away-austin-738679/

Man In The Ring: Emile Griffith's Title Match with Life

"Man In The Ring", Emile Griffith's Title Match with Life
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
Tremont Street, 
Boston, MA
December 16, 2018

"Man In The Ring" is a poignantly sad, strangely sweet story of a man whose hands could make a beautiful hat for a show room and deliver thunderous haymakers in the boxing ring. It will stay riveted in your memory long after you've left the theater.

It’s the story of two Emile Griffiths told in parallel, opening with scenes of the 70 year old mentally demolished (pugilistic dementia) older Emile searching for a shoe then ping ponging back and forth to the younger Emile, the kid filled with dreams who immigrated to New York from St. Thomas, V.I.

It’s painful to watch young off-the-boat Griffith enter the world of boxing when his employer in the hat making district discovers how strong and muscular he is and brings him to the gym to become a fighter. He had fast hands and could box - a natural.

We know where the play is heading and can’t close our eyes as we know how those dreams of fame on the baseball diamond or as a designer on the floor of a hat making business give way to a life of boxing that will give him the fame then crush him for being open about the kind of man he is. This is the 1950s and 60s. Homosexuality was taboo. Bisexuality was unthinkable. Combine that with the fact we're talking about a world champion boxer and it strains credulity. And it's true.

The characterizations of Griffith (1938-2013) lean on liltingly accented island English, poetic and filled with colorful local colloquialisms that eerily underscore what happens in Griffith’s life. The recurring rhymes of childhood songs that Griffith faintly remembers, songs that teach them how to behave in male/female relationships, hold the both the play and the older Griffith together as his brain struggles to focus on where he put his shoes, and wracks him with nightmares about a 1962 prize fight for the welterweight championship in which he killed Benny Paret with a brutal onslaught of punches. Paret had made fun of Griffith's sexuality at the public weigh in before the title fight. We are left to decide whether or not Griffith intentionally savagely beat the man senseless.

The six time world champion made and lost a fortune. A scene as he sells the belts he won as a world champion in the welterweight and middleweight classes to make ends meet breaks your heart. The champion is an emotional wreck, relentlessly remorseful for the fatal night in the boxing ring and deeply yearning for forgiveness and understanding for the life he chose to live.

'I killed a man, and the world forgave me, yet I loved a man, and the world wants to kill me," Griffith says uncomprehendingly.

He never tried to hide his sexuality and hardly seemed to understand his bisexual nature himself. Considering the era in which he lived, his openness, naive or intentional, was as brave as his valor in the ring. The result tormented him.

From the very first moments on stage, John Douglas Thompson and Kyle Vincent Terry inhabit the roles of the elder and younger Griffith with the magnetism of the man’s personality and the irreconcilable contradictions of his lifestyle. Luis (Victor Almanzar) as the elder Griffith’s lover and caretaker is tender, gentle, and the only link Griffith has with the real world. The portrayal of Griffith''s mother, who emigrated to the United States years before Griffith and prostituted herself to make a living is two dimensional.  She clearly has no idea how to nurture her son but is happy take his money as he rises to fame. The cruel aunt in St. Thomas she asked to care for him was cruel and devoid of any love. For nurturing and any kind of parental love (his father was long gone after he was born), Griffith began life with a mandatory eight count. Luis is the only constant source of love Griffith may have known his whole life.

How is it possible to make the life of an immigrant bisexual boxer a compelling piece of theater? Director Michael Grief, playwright Michael Cristofer, and music director Michael McElroy know exactly how they want the play to unfold - using imaginatively staged and illuminated vignettes that gradually fit together the people and the pieces of the puzzle that was Griffith's life.

The boxing scenes, strobe lights popping to show in freeze frame scenes of his knockout punches in his fights are starkly effective as are scenes of the champion patronizing gay bars. Even in 2018, the bar scenes contradict every notion we have of men in the prize fighting business, let alone world champions prize fighters.

The clever two-tier stage setting features a place for musicians to play the melodies of children’s songs as the boxer brings them into focus and a huge screen backdrop that shows crawls of headlines from Griffith's career and brief black and white video clips of Griffith during arc of his brilliant ring career from 1958 to 1977 (85 Wins [23 Knockouts], 24 Defeats [2 Knockouts, 2 Draws).

The man was either way ahead of his time or recklessly self-destructive. In his boxing career, he was willing to take punches to wait for an opening to knock out an opponent. In the ring of life, he absorbed the pain of being battered for who he was. Years after his death, this powerful, deeply realized portrayal of the most complex world champion boxer the world has ever known awards him a TKO over the misery he suffered in life.

Griffith's bisexuality may have been an open secret to the closely knit world of boxing but was never a story newspapers would run at the time. A meeting with Benny Paret's son when Griffith struggles for the words to ask for forgiveness at the closing moments of the play puts the entire audience into a sob mode. This is not a theatrical device. It happened.

The single bed on the set is a metaphor for the island on which Griffith finds himself stranded with only memories to keep him company.

 

Dan Gabel and The Abletones: Swing With Class

Dan Gabel and The Abletones
Swing City at The Cambridge Youth Center
680 Huron Avenue, Cambridge, MA
December 8, 2018

http://www.theabletones.com/Dan_Gabel_and_The_Abletones/About_Us.html

Swing City, Saturday, December 8, 2018, Swing City advertises that Dan Gabel and the Abletones is the feature band. I’d never heard of ‘em so I checked out a few clips on youtube. The sound of the full orchestra was a little bright for my taste, but am I ever glad I decided to take a chance and show up anyway.

The Abletones come in two varieties, a compact ten-piece band (dectet) featuring music of the 1930s - 1950s that's playing tonight and a full eighteen-piece orchestra.

From the proscenium stage of the new Cambridge Youth Center, Gabel is fronting a versatile, effortlessly smooth bunch of musicians. The guy plays a mean trombone but his gift is his love of the music of the swing era that translates to a supremely glorious evening of dance music – swing, fox trot, cha cha, a sprinkle of rumba and waltz tempos – all of them with solid back beats and rhythms that make dancers deliriously happy.

The band leader introduces every song with a brief synopsis of title, band that made it famous, the band that made a rendition he’s about to play, the date of recording, and a bit of trivia that connects it to the zeitgeist of the era. He’s not showing off or professorial. He’s just wearing his devotion to the music on his sleeve.

By the time he’s finished, we’ve learned something and are ready to do justice with our feet to the music he’s described. In the hands of a pedant, this approach could be stultifying. With Gabel, it’s satisfying and lights a short fuse leading to a wondrous few minutes of Fred and Ginger inspired moves on the smooth, polished oak floor.

Every swing band needs a vocalist whose crooning can transport us in an invisible time machine to a bygone era. Elise Roth, in a tailored deep ruby dress and black pumps, nails tone and style in the few songs she sings every set. Close your eyes and you’re tripping the light fantastic in a cloud of nostalgia on a dance floor in the 1930s and 1950s.

“I really love the sound of your band, and the way you’re curating the music you’re playing tonight,” says I to him at the break. And joke with him about a comment he made to his band a moment before they launched into a song. “Chart 10A, guys, not 10B.”

Dan points to a rumpled stack of sheet music a few inches high on his bandstand. “We’ve got a pretty deep repertoire,” says he with a grin. He’s had a hand in arranging most of it. And that sound? I learn later that he has toured with the World Famous Glenn Miller Band and has been collecting and documenting vintage big band recordings for years. If Gabel’s parents paid for his education at the New England Conservatory (Masters Degree, 2014), they must be pretty proud of their son.

Tonight’s ten-piece band is nimble and smooth. The honeyed sound is a perfect blend of reeds and brass that swings like the old time bands and has a trademark groove masterminded by Gabel. Result? Dan’s dectet swang and swayed with class and style at the Swing City tonight.

Courtesy of Abletones web site

Courtesy of centersandsquares.com

“Miracles and Other Deceptions”: Sleightly Wonder-ful Show at the Omni Parker House

“Miracles and Other Deceptions"

Omni Parker House, 60 School Street, Boston, MA, 02106
Fridays, 7 PM and 9PM
November 16, 2018

I’m rolling up my sleeves to show I have nothing to hide as I tell you this is one of the best evening’s entertainments in Boston right now.

“Miracles and Other Deceptions,” a 75-minute program of theatrical sleight of hand magic is all of that. Paul Gertner was smitten with the idea of magic when he was a kid. He’s so good at it, he presents all over the world. He’s fooled Penn and Teller. Three times. Fooling me was a lot easier and I loved every minute.

No grand stage illusions by levitating a woman, or having her climb into a small box, driving swords into the closed box, and then opening it up to discover only air inside. This is the best kind of magic. Small scale, a few props, and big surprises with playing cards, coins, and cups and balls.

The set up is perfect. A small room on the Omni Parker House mezzanine level, a large round table covered in black velvet seating 12 people, plus one for Paul Gertner. Risers accommodating a dozen others are set behind the table close enough to see the goings on. I was two seats away from Gertner; my pal Myke who invited me to join him for the show sat right next to him.

"The closer you look, the less you'll see!" Gertner says in the first few minutes. Giving into glee is much easier.

Telling you what happened would spoil the fun. I can tell you that with playing cards, coins and a few cups and balls he will bedazzle you with magic and patter that makes the show feel like a musical that hums along just fine without the music. Back stories, anecdotes about his father, children, Johnny Carson, and wife seamlessly connect with the sleight of hand he performs. It is utterly mesmerizing for the ears as well as the eyes.

“Does anyone have a $20 bill?” he asks. I quickly reach into my pocket. What happened next had something to do with a lemon and was stupefying.

I haven’t had so much fun since my mother, her mother, and all her sisters were playing Peekaboo with me when I was an infant. OK, that’s an assumption. A fact is I haven’t done as much oooo-ing and ahhhh-ing in a long time.

“The sense of wide-eyed wonder you had as a kid still lurks in your psyche,” he tells you upfront. No small part of his show is that he makes that re-appear too.

SIDEBAR
Pricing; VIP “At The Table” $60, 12 people; General Admission: $45 in second and third row and close to the magic, 12 people, seats not assigned. Definitely recommend VIP seating.

Seating: Arrive 30 minutes early, wait in the hallway on the mezzanine level till Gertner’s wife Kathy opens the door 15 minutes before showtime. The 12 seats around the VIP table are first come, first served, as are second and third row. Myke was the first ticket holder for the table who entered the room and got those fabulous seats right next to Paul Gertner.

A Happy Thanksgiving message that magically turns into a personal timeline/mini biography from Paul

“Miracles and Other Deceptions" program covers.

 
Myke, Paul Gertner, PT

The residual memories of the joy of seeing magic being performed a few feet from my chair at the table in synch with an evening of personal anecdotes that scaffold the illusions has kept me beaming days and days after witnessing it.

https://gertner.com/developing-new-magic-trick/

https://gertner.com/upside-down-thinking/

Thanksgiving: Alternate Takes About What You Learned In School (UPDATED NOV. 21, 2018)

November 18, 2018

UPDATE FROM JESSIE LITTLE DOE BAIRD, A LEADER OF THE MASHPEE WAMPANOAG TRIBAL NATION,  ON NOVEMBER 21, 2018 (The true story of the first Thanksgiving and what it meant)...deep context for information and links that follow.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/11/21/the-true-story-first-thanksgiving-and-what-meant/fZFrN9YZQhVLZF6fLel5PJ/story.html

The New York Times weighed in. So did Readers Digest, not everyone's cup of tea, but as far as I know, it has no driving political motivation to fake us out. To this day, there are contradictory references of how English and Native Americans gathered on that first occasion. A mix of myths and facts surrounds the holiday. To steer clear of complicated history, best to look at it with a small lens focused on friends and family and the ties that bind us together. Politics is the third rail, don't even think about it unless you are completely certain you're with kindred spirits.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html

• A few factoids asserted in this story...

• Squanto - complicated: He was captured by the English in 1614 and later sold into slavery in Spain. He spent several years in England, where he learned English. He returned to New England 1619, only to find his entire Patuxet tribe dead from smallpox. He met the Pilgrims in March 1621. Extraordinary story.

• Native Americans (approximately 90) did participate in a three day feast of food, games and prayer; there is no written record of how they were invited.

• First feast day of Thanksgiving in 1621? Nope, a day of Thanksgiving had been celebrated for centuries by Europeans and Native Americans after successful harvests.

• No turkey, no pie (no butter, no wheat flour) at first feast... sorry.

• 1863 Abe Lincoln declares a day of thanksgiving for Union victories.

• First boatloads called themselves were Separatists looking to establish a theocracy, which they did.

• The company that sponsored them was a business looking for profits, first settlers shipped them animal skins, fur, lumber.

https://www.rd.com/culture/thanksgiving-facts-that-actually-arent-true/

• A few factoids asserted in this story...

• First arrivals called themselves “Saints”; the term “Pilgrims” not applied generally until around 1880.

• When took place? Likely late September/ mid October after harvest brought in.

• Turkey? Nope; the big dish was venison, something new to the newcomers. “Back in England, deer were on estates and people would be arrested for poaching if they killed these deer … The colonists mentioned venison over and over again in their letters back home.”

• No buckles, tall hats, black clothing; 19th-century artists painted them that way and we've been stuck with that image ever since.

•1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise,” the culmination of a 36-year campaign started by so-called “mother” or “godmother” of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale—a magazine editor and writer.

• 1939 Franklin D.Roosevelt declared Thanksgiving to be a federal holiday. The exact date? Into the weeds with this timeline here.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill officially establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as “Lecture Day,” a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. A famous Thanksgiving observance occurred in the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth governor William Bradford invited local Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day festival held in gratitude for the bounty of the season.

Thanksgiving became an annual custom throughout New England in the 17th century, and in 1777 the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the Patriot victory at Saratoga. In 1789, President George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday, when, at the request of Congress, he proclaimed November 26, a Tuesday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution. However, it was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated nationally.

With a few deviations, Lincoln’s precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president–until 1939. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving Day. Considerable controversy surrounded this deviation, and some Americans refused to honor Roosevelt’s declaration.
For the next two years, Roosevelt repeated the unpopular proclamation, but on November 26, 1941, he admitted his mistake and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day.

https://www.pilgrimhall.org/pdf/TG_What_Happened_in_1621.pdf

• Primary source contradicting information on one source above, identifies who was present, what happened on first day (actually three days) of what we celebrate now as Thanksgiving.

Edward Winslow's Journal, September 6, 1621 to March 22, 1621

• The most detailed documentation of the settlers early days, worthy of a docu-drama.

• Thanksgiving is considered a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans since the event marks the negative influence of white settlers on their culture and livelihood.

UPDATE FROM WAMPANOAG NATION NOVEMBER 21, 2018

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/11/21/the-true-story-first-thanksgiving-and-what-meant/fZFrN9YZQhVLZF6fLel5PJ/story.html

https://plymouth400inc.org/OurStory
Squanto: brought to England as slave; returns to Plymouth and aids survival; this site dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing in Plymouth; time will tell if they get the story of the Wampanoags right.

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/thanksgiving
All things Thanksgiving

The whole story about the Separatists, Saints, Pilgrims, Wampanoags, is intriguing and complex. Google Squanto, Separatists in the Netherlands, William Bradford and his two volume "Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647" for starters. His appalling account of a massacre of 300 Pequot when the English burned their village gives credence to why Native Americans label our day of Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning.

Happy Thanksgiving...

 

To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults

To Survive On This Shore

Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and
 Gender Nonconforming Older Adults

A Project by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre

A presentation and book signing at the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
November 13, 2018

Part 1 Impressions

Where to start?
I’m in an audience of gay, straight, transsexual, transgender, transfluid, bisexual, gender non-conforming adults - quite possibly the most non-judgemental group of people I’ve ever gathered with. After a few minutes. I stop trying to use personal pronouns to describe my fellow attendees, millennials to septuagenarians. Downshifting to put my stereotypical mind into neutral gear, I stop worrying about it.

 

Welcome to the world of “On This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults,” A Project by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre, who are presenting tonight.

For the next hour, I’m taken on a passage to that shore, about as foreign to me as Madagascar.

Sitting in the Harvard Bookstore before the presentation I think about the title, “On This Shore,” the perfect metaphor for this project. To reach a shore, you have to make a voyage, often without a reliable map, over rough seas, and an uncertain timetable. Landing on shore isn’t the end of your voyage, it’s the beginning. What lies beyond the shore? Allies? Adversaries? A place you can call home?

Dugan and Fabbre have made their own voyages. This is the night to present their project, the story of men and women in their fifties to seventies, forerunners, who, often at great risk and sacrifice, transited to the other shore.

Part 2 The Project

One mission, two vocabularies, one using a lens, the other using a pen, Dugan and Fabbre created “On This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults.” The photos won’t work without the subjects. The words would have no context without the photographs. Look for yourself.
https://www.tosurviveonthisshore.com/interviews/
https://www.tosurviveonthisshore.com/portraits/

Dugan and Fabbre, accomplished photographer and writer, respectively, tell the story as well as they danced together at a country line dance when they met at a gay cowboy country bar in 2012.

Over time and a developing relationship, they found they had overlapping interests in the LGBT community, the subject of aging, and the expertise to tell that story.

You’re probably saying, what the heck are the prospects for a project that tells the stories of subjects in their 50s all the way to their 90s…they’re old and trans-something and we’re in a youth oriented heterosexual culture. It took a generation for gay culture to become normalized through TV, films, and celebrity personalities. If transgender society follows the same path, this project will be one of the tipping points.

Part 3 The Harvard Bookstore event

As brilliant and perceptive as they may be, photographers and writers are not always reliably the best presenters for their own material. Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre are an exception to the rule. Over the next 45 minutes they carefully assemble the pieces of their story and the story of this book with clarity, warmth, and empathy. The bookstore is filled to capacity, 90 people crammed together on folding chairs, standing around the perimeter, and sitting on the counters.

This pair was way ahead of a cultural curve that now talks out loud about transgender matters. Referendum question 3 on the Massachusetts ballot this year was about transgender rights. This week, President Trump has been lobbying to refuse transgender men and women the right to serve in the military.

This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For a long time, the way out of the mainstream subject generated fear and loathing in heterosexual society. But, for their subjects in the shadows of misunderstood sexuality, tonight is an affirmation.

The creators tell us upfront that the project is a conscious and intentional vehicle to pay tribute to the generations who paved the way for transgender identities and to give younger trans people a sense of their past and their future. This can be scary stuff for people in the midst of it. I think of this book as a gift to them.

The project took shape between 2012 and 2017. One of the first subjects was Grace Sterling Stowell, whom Jess, describing herself tonight as a “baby queer” teenager scouring the bookshelves for stories about sex change surgeries, had met while she was working at this very bookstore. Grace is the executive director of the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth.

“We started the project with people we knew, others found out by word-of-mouth. We called LGBT centers to ask who are your trans elders,” says Vanessa.

“I think 2015 was a trans tipping point. We did not want to do Hollywood or celebrity stories. We wanted to do relatable stories of real and complicated people,” says Jess.  Dugan’s photos are character studies in black, white and infinite shades of gray. Fabbre’s text mirrors the subtleties of the photos.

Others got wind of the project after The New York Times wrote about it. “Many of our subjects wanted to have their stories recorded. They had a conscious wish to give something to the next generation, “ says Jess, who holds a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University, and an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.

“Their motivation was clearly intentional,” says Vanessa. Most had ‘come ashore’ during an era when it had no precedent in everyday culture and was, frankly, dangerous. They were survivors. With the rise of the transgender population becoming a mainstream topic (Caitlin Jenner), having the opportunity to tell their stories to understanding artists, without fear, must have felt liberating.

“We would meet in the home of a subject, or an LGBT center, or a park, that allowed people to be where they wanted to be situated and that felt like home for them,” says Jess.

They knew from the start they wanted a diverse range in age between 50 and 90 years old. Diversity was key. Trust me, it’s as wide as the Mississippi River…age, race, ethnicity, social status, gender identification and categories - and uses terms like binary, non-binary  that I had to look up to understand their meaning.

By the time they finished, they had profiles and photographs of 65 people for the book although they interviewed and photographed 86 people. The subjects they profiled, from small towns to metropolises across America, had made a transition between 1970 and 2016. The book was published in Germany in May 2018 and in America in August 2018. It has sold out. A second printing is being considered.

“We consciously wanted to balance struggle and joy to tell a complex story and not sugarcoat it. We asked a question to one subject who’d experienced poverty and discrimination and he spoke for one and a half hours straight, then said, ‘We’re done,” says Jess.

Vanessa, PhD, LCSW, an Assistant Professor at the Brown School of Social Work and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, uses that story in her classes. Her research explores the conditions under which LGBT people age well.

“By agreement we used subjects first real name. This was a big emotional deal for us and for our subject. After parents of a subject read the story, they apologized for all the years of using the wrong pronoun for their child,” says Vanessa suppressing tears.

Comment from the audience: “As an older person, I feel we have lost a sense of community and I sense a divide between the younger and older generation. As young people, we were aping heterosexual models. I see this book as a cry for community.”

Jess responds. “The subject of community came up from our interview subjects. We want people to use the book to manage the gap. Organizations like SAGE bring younger and older people together at inter-generational meals to build community and break down misunderstandings that still divide younger and older trans people.”

SAGE Advocacy and Services for LGBT Elders reports that the U.S. census has never measured how many LGBT people live in America and estimates that there are currently around 3 million LGBT adults over age 50. That number is expected to grow to around 7 million by 2030.

They will have the elders in this book to thank for paving the way.

“There is no road. Walking makes the road,” says the poet Antonio Machado. The subjects of this book have made their own roads where there were none. Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre show us the maps.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello,Jr.

 

David Bromberg and His Band: Americana Tour de Force

David Bromberg Big Band
Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
November 8, 2018

David Bromberg and His Big Band is a dazzling three-ring circus. For sheer musicianship, you’d be hard pressed to find a tighter, more accomplished group of players on any stage.

Bromberg is the ring master holding it all together center stage with his collection of guitars and stage presence; the quintet of saxophone/clarinet, French horn, trumpet, slide trombone and bass guitar lines up on his right; lead guitar, violin/fiddle to his left; timekeeper and drummer barely visible sits atop a platform behind; another platform to accommodates three Bromberg-ette singers.  Several band members add vocals, and boy do they ever get into it.

The whole stage becomes is a marvelous kaleidoscopic performance - Bromberg soloing, playing with the quintet, playing with lead guitar and fiddle/violin, playing with the force of the his entire band.

Bromberg is having fun, singing with gusto in his slightly nasal baritone, with a good deal of body English to punctuate the lyrics. Gusto is good. His devotion to the spirit of the music and the sentiments from which it was born is better. 

A student of American musical heritage and genres, Bromberg’s repertoire is wide and deep.  In his fifty-year and counting career, he’s played with Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Emmylou Harris, and inspiring bluesman and mentor Reverend Gary Davis. Blues is Bromberg’s home territory.

Blues is story-telling set to music. Bromberg is channeling the emotions that created them with an easy going controlled vibrato, some downright righteous gospel inflected testifying he probably learned from his days of leading his blind mentor Reverend Gary Davis to the Sunday church services where he preached and sang, or crooning that perfectly projects the sentiment he wants to convey. I feel his energy all the way back in the second row of the mezzanine of the Wilbur Theatre.

For him, blues is like an ice cream parlor filled with equally delicious but different flavors. Classic songs by iconic Robert Johnson, or country blues (Kentucky Blues) or gospel infused blues (Yield Not) are from the same parlor but have their own distinct musical flavor. Bromberg loves them all.  

Over the years Bromberg has played it all - Americana, Appalachian folk, bluegrass, jazz, pop, funk, gospel, and a ton of blues. All of it seeps into the band’s set tonight. If you detect an occasional nod to New Orleans style playing amongst the brass and clarinet and saxophone, you’d be right. The trumpet has plenty of lip, the slide trombone plenty of invention, the saxophone/clarinet flashes of Pete fountain. The French horn never had a chance to solo but softened the edges of everything the band played.

David Bromberg is clearly in command. Lots of eye contact with us in the audience and that big smile on his face is because he’s doing what he was born to do, play with feeling, mastery of his instrument, and deep knowledge of the origins of every song he sings.

In the business of live shows, attitude, engagement with the audience, pacing of the show, song selection, and a perceptive ability to read the audience to synchronize what you feel like playing with what your audience might want to hear requires confidence, not a small amount of ego, and abundant ESP.

Set list?  

A moment after the first song, a fan in the audience shouts out a request. 

“Thanks, you but you don’t know shit about how to construct a set list.” Can you think of any other top tier musician who’d have the chutzpah for that riposte to a die-hard fan? Most chuckle. They know the man.

The set is a totally organic version of the child’s game of Telephone. A moment after each song finishes, Bromberg turns to his right, says something to the bass player who passes it along to the rest of the quintet. Bromberg turns left, says a title to lead guitar who passes it on to violin/fiddle player.

The trumpet player riffs through his charts. Everyone else knows it cold. Bromberg plays a flawless intro, the ensemble gets in gear. He strides toward a musician, nods, and a spontaneous fresh solo floats, careens off or caresses the walls of the theater. Bromberg smiles like a proud papa after they play the daylights out of their solo. He’s a genius with the guitar, dobro, and mandolin resting on stands behind him. Endlessly inventive, he appears lost in the moment. I’ll bet he never plays a song the same way twice.

Bromberg sings “Walking Blues,” “Kaatskill Serenade,” “Why Are People Like That,” “This Month,” and "The Blues The Whole Blues and Nothing But the Blues"from his 2016 “The Blues and Nothing But The Blues” album. He uses the stops (the rests) in his singing and playing as effectively and demonstratively as any musician I’ve ever heard.

In the middle of “Kaatskill Serenade,” a lyrical song that begins with “Where are the men that I used to sport with, what has become of my beautiful town…”Bromberg pauses, says, “This isn’t the same country I was raised in.” He gets pretty specific about his dim view about current politics. He’s not concerned whether you agree or not, but needs to say what’s on his mind. The applause shows that a bunch of his fans know what he’s talking about. 

His rendition of “The Tennessee Waltz”, sung solo, is the purest, most affecting version I’ve ever heard.  By the time I thought Bromberg had delivered as many surprises as he had up his sleeve, along came a slightly rumba-ish version of Sam Cooke’s “What A Wonderful World.” Awesome, dude!
 
I might have been the only first timer in the house. The crowd often applauded when they figured out what Bromberg was about to play. Favorites like the encore “Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair” have fans singing the choruses.  Showman and musical shaman, Bromberg is the best musician I’ve barely heard of.

Tonight is living proof that he’s earned the title of godfather of Americana music.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Video and links about Bromberg

https://store.compassrecords.com/products/the-blues-the-whole-blues-and-nothing-but-the-blues

includes audio clips of each song

https://www.pbs.org/video/-canvas-david-bromberg/

Wonderful World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jgk_p3kMmw

Kaatskill Serenade

David Bromberg concept album "Use Me"

Biography, Discography from AllMusic

 

 

 

The Bottlecap Cafe - The Cheers of Key West

COMPUTER MELTDOWN. PHOTOS WILL REAPPEAR AS SOON AS THE CLOUD RELEASES ITS GRIP

The Bottlecap Cafe
1128 Simonton Street
Key West, FL
October 26, 2018
http://bottlecapkeywest.com

An off-the-beaten-path cozy, utterly unpretentious Key West neighborhood bar that a tourist like me would never find without being invited by locals who hang out here.

The inviting warm glow of the Bottlecap Cafe isn’t coming from the lights. It’s coming from the other folks at the bar, like Samantha Tarracino Gonzalez and her husband Tony who invited us to join them as the Masquerade March ended around 7:30 PM.

This is an honest-to-goodness Cheers type bar where everybody, including Erin the bartender, knows not just each other's names, but their stories. Erin pours Samantha a glass of Prosecco and pineapple juice as soon as she walks in the door, no words necessary.

Any friend of Samantha and Tony’s is bestowed an informal membership to the Bottlecap Society. Within minutes, we’re yakking it up with Samantha, her friends, Tony and Tony’s cousin.

There are a dozen bars on Duval and Green Streets smack in the middle of the tourist zone. They’ve earned their stars, have good wait staffs, good food and what the heck, places like the Hog’s Breath Saloon, Fogarty’s, Captain Tony’s Saloon, and of course, Jimmy Buffett’s Margarittaville are part of Key West lore. They’re all worth visiting as long as you don’t figure that your bar crawl ends there.

Google 'bars in Key West'. NINE PAGES of them! Ask around. You just might find one like The Bottlecap Cafe that will wrap itself around you like a warm hug from a long lost friend.

The Bottlecap Cafe - where everybody knows your name

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

OF NOTE
One of Key West’s less recognized features it its strong sense of community.

In early 2007, when the owner of The Bottlecap Café began working the Friday Happy Hour (5 PM-8 PM) shift, she was not comfortable taking tips from her customers. Check this heart warming story to see how she solved the situation by donating her tips to local charities - and giving her staff a cut of the proceeds from the Happy Hour sales. "Non-Profit Fridays" recipients are booked for about one year out! http://bottlecapkeywest.com/non-profit-fridays.htm

Several events during Fantasy Fest donate proceeds to area non-profits. Money raised by men and women vying to be named King and Queen of the annual Fantasy Fest is donated to A.H. Monroe that provides case managed healthcare; food programs; counseling; housing; clinical, and other supportive and volunteer services; increases affordable housing by acquiring, developing, and maintaining low income housing for persons in need; and conducting health education and linkage to care. This year's total raised by aspiring candidates - $275,000!

http://www.ahmonroe.org/about-aids-help/

Fantasy Fest 2018: The Masquerade March - Conchs On Parade

Fantasy Fest, Key West, Florida, Friday, October 26, 2018

March route: Key West Cemetery on Frances Street winding through Old Town

TEXT TO BE COMPLETED SOON!

What's a parade without music? Members of Fantasy Fest  King and Queen's court disembark for some rummy refreshments.https://fantasyfest.com/ah-monroe/

 

 

Refreshment stop at Eden House, Fleming Street

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Parading down Fleming Street till dusk

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Masquerade March is the Rose Bowl Parade in Key West. Residents along Frances, Fleming and Simonton Streets and hundreds from Key West and others from the keys to the north drive down, set themselves up along the streets and cheer their spirited friends. For the previous eight days,tourists and veteran Fantasy Fest fans have been cavorting up and down Duval and Green Street. This is their turn. Trust me, they're making  the most of it. This is a pretty over the top festival. I cannot think of anywhere else on the planet Fantasy Fest could or would succeed. I mean, look at this. Grown adults playing like mischievous children when the adults aren't watching.

 

 

Spectators are loving this...some of their neighbors are showing off!

• 
• 
•  
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•  
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•  
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Fantasy Fest 2018: Togas, Paint, and Do It Yourself Costumerie

Fantasy Fest 2018: Thursday, October 25, 2018

Just another day at Fantasy Fest: A Naughty Bike Ride (you figure it out) down Duval Street; Karaoke at Two Friends Bar; Dante’s 12th annual Halos & Horns Pool Party; local musicians playing at the Customs House; The History, Culture, and Politics of Bondage/Domination/Sadomasochism at the Customs House; Annual Headdress Ball at the new Key West Amphitheater at Truman Waterfront Park; Rockabily “Shake, Rattle & Roll Party at Sunset Pier; 3rd Annual White Party; Sandbar Sports Grill Annual Body Paint Competition; Sloppy Joe’s Annual Toga Party; Fat Tuesday Pink Party; Cowboy Bill’s annual wet T shirt contest; Pajama and Lingerie Party at the Bottle Cap Lounge; Irish Kevin’s 80s Party; plus all the fun you can have strolling up and down Duval Street. 

These goings on began on and around Duval Street after 8 PM, but trust me, dahling, the fun has been going on since Friday October 19. The grand finale will be the Grand Parade on Saturday October 27, attended by tens of thousands of your BFFs.

Oh, and Sunday October 28, for those who want to squeeze the very last drop out of this juicy piece of low hanging fruit, an 8 AM tailgate party to watch the Philadelphia Eagles play Jacksonville Jaguars in England (yes), dress in your best team pajamas, and a Children's Day at Bayview Park from 12 Noon to 5 PM and then.... TA DAAAA... "The Fat Lady Sings" Tea Dance at La Te Da Hotel,Restaurant, Cabaret and Bars way out on 1125 Duval Street from Noon to 5 PM.

Then start planning for next year. But I digress.

Three of a kind?

 
Poker? A pair of queens? A Royal flush? All kinds of costumes and participants of every inclination... spectators, revelers, plus a whole bunch of people who just got off the cruise ship in the harbor ("We aren't in Kansas anymore!). You are about to see the most incongruous collection of people you'll see until this time next year. People in t shirts and flip flops mingle with people in body paint, sequins, pasties and elaborate and inspired "Games People Play" costumes. Honest to goodness, it's sort of like a zoo without bars, spectators and participants checking each other out with curiously and a smile. Cameras and iPhones click and flash away, including mine.

Counter-intuitive? You betcha. What would be your normal reaction when a perfect stranger takes a picture of you in your birthday suit. Toss that out the window. Here, you flash a smile to go along with an acre of your exposed flesh - and pose. You got someone's attention! You certainly didn't come here to hide your light under a basket. You came ready for kleig lights. Flash away! Everybody is clicking photos of everybody else. The chances that someone back home in the plumbing, education, dentistry etc businesses back home will see you playing like a kid in a sandbox before you were taught that being nearly naked in public is inappropriate are slim to none.

Time to promenade...this couple packed real light for this stroll.

Silent slow rolling by golf cart on part of Duval Street above Caroline where the street is still open to vehicles...

  
where you can pose with Beetle...or Amazon Prime....

Here's the theme...the grand theme is to have a good time whether in costume or not.

And the TWAT Team is on patrol...dispensing verification stickers.

Kings, queens, clowns, emperors...

 
Rock n rollers, onlookers...

Way cool body paint and paraphernalia...

 

Indian Princesses and Key West Muff Divers!

Pretty much captures the jovial vibe on Duval Street.

Around Sloppy Joe's

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Duval Street between Caroline and Front Street is one moveable fantastical feast. The stretch of Duval from Caroline Street to Front Street is closed to vehicular traffic.

Caroline's

• 
• 
• 

Got the idea for Masquerade March from this guy.

 

• 

Caroline's on Duval Street, great place to join the party, fellow celebrants, good service, good food, good prices. How often can you dine while sitting with body painted, festively dressed and undressed other diners.

 

Duval Street jammed with celebrants and spectators

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•  
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Deep "C" Diving

• 
• 
• 
• 

A much photographed pair of divers, probably hauled the equipment from their boat or rented from the local dive shop...big points for creativity!

 

Smile for the camera...

 

Around Captain Tony's

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Two Cousins: Accidental Tourists!

• 
• 
• 

  Two cousins visit Key West, had NO IDEA Fantasy Fest was going on. It didn't take long for them to get with the program!

Elsewhere on Duval Street

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• Getting into the spirit...and her blouse!
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Finish the night with a shot at Kelly's and a scoop from Mattheessen's
 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Fantasy Fest 2018: Fogarty's Red Party Rocks

 Fantasy Fest 2018: Wednesday, October 23, 2018

A few of today's events: Disco at Duval Central, Tarzan 'n Jane at the Green Room, Pet Masquerade (furry, feathery or slithery pets, proceeds to the Lower Keys Friends of Animals) at Truman Waterfront Park, Cheraoke (yes, THAT Cher) at The Gates Hotel, Performance Art by local talents at  The Customs House, Dance Party at the Sunset Pier Mallory Square, Blue Party at Lucy's Retired Surfers Bar , Homemade Bikini Contest at Smokin' Tuna Saloon, Fogarty's Red Party, Sex Bull Riding Contest (at Cowboy Bill's of course), ABC Party at Sandbar Sports Grill for starters.

Every event has a theme. If you think there's a tsunami of crimson at an Alabama home game, check out the Red Tide at Fogarty's Red Party. A cocktail of techno/disco music gives partiers a reason to shake their booties. The bar is packed, shots of rum vie with cups of cold beer to put a flush on our cheeks on a gloriously warm Key West night. Wearing red is not required, wearing a smile will do just fine.

It's nigh unto impossible to walk by the street-side patio without being drawn into the energy field called Fogarty's Red Party.

You might even be greeted by princesses!

Wearing red is not required to enter the party, wearing a smile will do just fine.

The sedentary are in a distinct minority; dancing, solo or with a like-minded celebrant, spontaneously breaks out often...

Sometimes on the floor, sometimes on a table top.

Red, white, and blue, the doctor is in...and the crowd soaks in the vibe.

Hugh and his bunny; did i say dancing is breaking out?

Well, you get the idea...over the top (or bottom) costumes get guffaws; satisfaction reigns.

A disco king and his court; this guy had all the moves to act out lyrics of the songs, was happy to teach then pose with everyone.

 
The usual vast array of costumes and people wearing them; other parties on Duval Street are inside the pubs. The Red Party at the edge of the sidewalk, is wide open...and not many can resist the beckon to step through the gate.

Little Red Riding Hoods, no wolves, only admirers in attendance.

The Riviera without the sand...

No doubt about it, music sets a mood.

 

Yes, ma'am that calls for a photo - the guy attaches a string to his ding and bobs it around like a yoyo.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Fantasy Fest 2018: Red Parties, Green Parties, Cheraoke, Street Strolling

Fantasy Fest, Wednesday, October 24, 2018, Key West, FL

A few of today's events: Disco at Duval Central, Tarzan 'n Jane at the Green Room, Pet Masquerade (furry, feathery or slithery pets, proceeds to the Lower Keys Friends of Animals) at Truman Waterfront Park , Cheraoke (yes, THAT Cher) at the Gates Hotel, Performance Art by local talents at The Customs House, Dance Party at the Sunset Pier Mallory Square, Blue Party at Lucy's Retired Surfers Bar, Homemade Bikini Contest at  Smokin' Tuna Saloon, Fogarty's Red Party, Sex Bull Riding Contest (at Cowboy Bill's of course), ABC Party at Sandbar Sports Bar.

No way anyone can defy Newton's Laws of Physics and take in all of these. Park yourself on a good observation post and chances are you'll see people coming or going to most of these events.

 

Red Party, Green Party, Blue Party?  They've got it covered...well,mostly covered.

Promenading up and down Duval Street is a must do - and a must see!

 

Fun for spectators, fun for strollers in the limelight.
 
Whether you quietly observe or wear out your phone, it's all good.


The unofficial costume? A smile.

Everyone in a festive mood...

to pose for anyone who asks.

Amigos across from Captain Tony's Saloon is one of the best places to watch the goings on.

Rick's, Angelina's, Dirty Harry's... busy places.

Chilling and spectating; several blocks between Eaton Street and Front Street near Mallory Square are closed to traffic...a hot rod gets attention on Duval Street.

Pow wows and photo opps

 

YES...Cher!

A photographer all the way from Las Vegas and I have been wandering up Duval Street taking some of the same scenes of the same people. "Check out these folks who just walked by, you don’t want to miss that!" His smiling, good-natured companion? “We have been together since 1975 but she doesn’t think she knows me well enough yet to get official!“

 

Where to go next? Business in the miniscule sunglasses boutique is slow.

 

Ahoy there! The Captain Morgan float makes a nightly cruise up Duval Street.

 

Smile for the camera? Sure!

Spectating from Fogarty's

Caroline's, one of the best spots for food on Duval Street; How often do your fellow diners not dress for dinner?

 
Don't worry, the parades of people will still be there when you return to stroll down the street.

  
If you have a red Ts-hirt and some makeup, you're good to go. Whether you costume or get body painted or just wear your T-shirt and tennies, this is all about having an intention to have a good time; even an Easter Bunny makes the scene.
 
 
Pause to reorganize; then get rolling again.

 

Bazoombas on parade!

The games people play, checking  our the scene.

Top hatted and topless,,,

Heading home?

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Fantasy Fest 2018: TuTu Tuesday, What the heck, Plaid too

Fantasy Fest, Key West, Oh Yes, Florida, Tuesday October 23...
 

Fantasy fest is like the French Riviera without the sand. People are comfortable in their own skin, and I mean every-day people like your mailman or your kid’s teacher or for that matter your grandparents. Perfect 10 bodies are not necessary or required. Forget the ideals of classic Greek and Roman statuary. This is a celebration of the every-day anatomy of the 99% of the rest of us who vastly outnumber the mightily toned or endowed.

Attitude counts. Big time. And so does group mentality. This is why we are all here. And have permission to toss the norms of everyday street life out the window.

“My husband made me this chain link bodice for me,“ a radiant 60-something woman says proudly as she stands next to him obliging for a photo, radiant smile to complement lovely mature tatas.

I’ll bet they have been planning to come here for months. And that her husband, with gold Mardi Gras beads draped around his neck, was happy to indulge her to show off her beautiful features. A sense of playfulness has descended over Duval Street, transforming it into a Magic Kingdom for adults.

It is so wonderfully out-of-whack that when a perfect stranger asks to take your photo when you’re wearing next to nothing and you oblige. Heck, you take it as a compliment. Complimentary exclamations ring out from store front to store front in as heuristic an environment as there ever was.

With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning…Why Do I Love Fantasy Fest, Let Me Count The Ways.

In these troubled times, it is a healthy temporary escape valve from the torrents of divisive political intolerance, murderous rampages, fragmented social media, and unsettling news every hour of the day. I didn’t read a newspaper or watch the news for 96 hours. My citizen self went on vacation with me. My psyche felt like a dolphin swimming in a sea of endorphins.

It is a most welcome antidote for our brains that have been branded with images of populating fashion runways and the pages of People and Vanity Fair magazines. With one stroke of a Key West magical wand we feel that our own images are cool enough to be splashed on glossy magazine covers, and boy oh boy are we proud of it.

I got in touch with my childish sense of play, felt like I was frolicking around in a huge Caribbean sand box, kissed by the sun, with a bunch of fun-loving new best friends.

The scenes around Captain Tony's Saloon...a necessary digression...

The spirit of the late great Captain Tony Tarracino is alive and well. It's not often that someone declared "the man, the myth, the legend" lived up to all of it. Fleeing to Key West to escape the Mob in New Jersey (not a good idea to cheat the mob by using a telephone to get early race results), Tony re-invented himself to become a shrimper, a charter boat captain, gun runner, became owner of Captain Tony’s Saloon on 428 Green Street in 1958 and one-time mayor of Key West. Not bad for a kid born to Italian immigrants.

In a small town known for its colorful characters, Tony was and is its most endearingly memorable. Tony's love life, also legendary, included four wives, 13 children and enough grandchildren to form a couple of soccer teams. His last child was born when he was 70. His most enduring legacy: the warmth, generosity, empathy for one and all, and uncanny ability to fully live every moment of his life, that exuded from every pore in his skinny body.

Of all the encomiums bestowed upon him, I’ll bet he was most proud of “the conscience of Key West." If you want to be transported into the life and times of a very human legend, a born raconteur with a big heart and an appetite for living in the moment, read "Life Lessons of a Legend," as told to tourist then friend Brad Manard in 2008.  The essence of that man's spirit still animates the personality of his beloved island.

No surprise. Many of the festival’s Queen Bees are hanging out in front of Captain Tony's Saloon. They're followed by a swarm of adoring worker bees eager to bask in the iconic aura of the saloon and take selfies to prove that this week hasn’t been a dream.

Could this happen anywhere else on the planet? What do you think? Personally I doubt it.

Photo section below...

A few of Tuesday's events: Tutu Tuesday Bar Crawl, Captain Tony's Party in Plaid, Green Parrot Green Party (It's Not Easy Being Green),  'Cocktails for Animal Tails' with proceeds to Florida Keys SPCA and a bunch more. Every day and night is filled with themed event, oh my... more

Tutus, plaid, green...Duval Street is a scene


Captain Tony's Saloon on Green Street is a magnet. Tony Tarracino (1916-2008) A legend in his own time, Tony's shadow still looms over his saloon and his spirit animates the goings on here. Captain Tony's Plaid Night at Captain Tony's is at a full boil.

Are we having fun yet? And how does that plaid stay put?

This pair of plaid partiers were deluged with asks for photo opps. 

My favorite pair of photos of the week...represents the range of people, the level of affection, and unaffectedness, displayed by people who come here to play and be free, not free from morality, because this is about fun, not debauchery.


Showing up with the right attitude is what counts. Captain Tony would second that idea.

 

The counter at Amigos, across the street from Captain Tony's Saloon, offers a fabulous people watching perch.The Masquerade March on Friday afternoon, the local's parade,will feature hilarious statements about the political opinions of residents of Key West. It will be the only manifestation of politics during the whole week. See Thursday's post when published.

  

The Smallest Bar in Key West lives up to its reputation, the most colorful closet-sized bar anywhere.

 

Rums like Sailor Jerry's are best sellers...sip is as you promenade up Duval Street...this is Key West, what do you expect?

 

Yes, we were here!

 

Sloppy Joe's on Duval Street; a proud plaid-ster.

Every bar along Duval Street is on the pub crawl list.

  

You gotta love the range of attire; NFL fans got a kick out of this metaphorical statement about referees.

People line up for a photo opp with this celebrant ; those tatas are the bomb!

Sure you can take our photo! Love the guy's smile walking behind the red tutu.

Spontaneous photo opp, fore and aft.


Clowning around for fun; doncha love the matching green suspenders and tutus:)

 

Everyone wants a photo opp with this pair of partiers; that extra pair of hands is hilarious.

 

"Kiss End of the Road Farewell Tour" will happen soon but there will be no farewells for anyone dressing up as Gene Simmons anytime soon; plaid paradise.
 
Pectorals and paint, a fine combination; a fast way to cruise Duval Street.

 
Spectacular people watching day and night.

 
The Bull and Whistle on Duval Street; of course we'll pose for a photo!

The body paint artists were busy; one of the many great people watching seats, the street side tables at Caroline's.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
 

Fantasy Fest 2018: Tutu Tuesday Gets Rolling

Fantasy Fest 2018: TuTu Tuesday
https://fantasyfest.com
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Key West, Florida

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic

Passengers sitting in the window seats are laughing out loud. The ground crew marshal waving the orange baton to guide the pilot to the line where the jet will power down is wearing a lovely accessory… a pink tutu!

Whaaaat?

Fantasy Fest 2018 is in full swing. It's Tutu Tuesday...read on...

Way back in 1979, four business owners sat down around a kitchen table and did what business owners do, tossed around ideas how to put a charge in the island during a big lull before the snow birds arrived, as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano.

The idea they hatched is Fantasy Fest, a you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it ten day street party. Thousands of those young at heart, young in spirit, will be parading around Duval Street by the time we arrive an hour later.

This year’s theme, “The Games People Play,” will dictate what thousands will wear …or not. Oh, and along with that there are annual events like Tu Tu Tuesday, Red Parties,  Green Parties celebrated all around Duval Street. It got a head start right here at the airport and it’s been rolling since October 19, the first day of Fantasy Fest 2018.

This seed of the idea did not come out of nowhere. Maybe it was blown onto the island on a soft Caribbean breeze with the faint scent of pineapples, coconuts and lush fields of cane sugar. More likely it was inevitable, created by the residents of Key West who once declared an intention to secede from the United States (1982), celebrates its own Independence Day every April 23rd, and named itself and the keys to its north The Conch Republic.

The most endearing part of the first Independence Day (1982) The platform of the founding organization, “A Sovereign State of Mind,”as to bring more “Humor, Warmth, and Respect” to the world. That’s a living creed...I’ve felt that spirit every one of my four trips to Key West since 2009.

It’s not a reach to see the roots of Fantasy Fest, watered by love, rum, and a streak of independent and wholesomely eccentric spirit. Key West is the southernmost part of the United States. It’s not just the miles that separate it from the rest of us.

Walk around the island. Talk with people, the ones who were born here and the ones who came here and never left. They connect with the world on their own terms. Sure they have opinions and political affiliations. But their first allegiance is to the well being of their island and the others who share it with them.

They are geographically and culturally far enough away from the rest of us to be splendidly unaffected, perhaps defiantly unaffected, by life as the rest of us know it. Sure they depend on us tourists to float their economy but that doesn’t mean that they bow to our dollars. It’s more like we bow to the Conch Republic when we spend them there.

The photos and stories on the following pages give you a faint idea of what the festival is all about. There is no way that pixels can transmit the humor, warmth, respect generated on Duval Street. If you could attach a chip reader to your cerebral cortex as you view a photo you might be able to feel the utter sense of play amongst the thousands of people along Duval Street during the 10-day festival. There is a Code of Conduct. Everyone abides by it.

People you would never think in 1000 years would doff clothing and wear wildly creative costumes,  mingle with each other as if they were at an annual Shriners convention. Tourists in Jimmy Buffett T-shirts and flip-flops are having a blast with their free spirited doppelgängers.

Key West is 160 road miles southwest of Miami by air. It might as well be on Mars.

 

 Welcome to Key West...

 

  
and in case you weren't aware of the island's live and let live philosophy, there it is over the airport portal into Key West...

 

Playful ground crew poses; a sign in men's room, R/x for over-indulgers...in fact, I didn't see one person in need of the services during my stay.
I

The theme of this years Fantasy  Fest: "The Games People Play"

The games people play...I was invited to spin the arrows...you'll have to guess what the results were!

 

Tutus on parade; "My husband made this golden necklace for me,"says this proud Tuesday afternoon stroller on Duval Street

 

Duval Street is abuzz...tourists, celebrants, locals; spectators love it.

The smiles say it all.

Get ready...the next stories will have scores of photos to go along with the text.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

4T Alumnus' Parents in Watertown

October 19, 2018

"Let's visit the Watertown Senior Center. I helped my sister arrange the tables for their annual party and want to  see how it worked out," says my neighbor Gerard.

His sister Rae is one of the managers. The party and dance is held in what was the gym of the Phillips School, the school he attended as a kid, now repurposed as part of the Senior Center.That brought some memories back for him.

The party is winding down. A fellow playing the keyboard, keeping it lively, hits a number and a dozen women begin a line dance. I can't resist. Halfway through the dance. a tug on my sleeve.

"Mr. Tamburello? You were my son's fourth grade teacher!"

I'm about to have a blast from the past moment myself. A few minutes of catching up ensues. Greg is 42, lives in Arlington with his young family, is a mechanical engineer. Su Wong and her husband still live in the Brookline neighborhood near the John Pierce School where I taught 4th grade for 34 years. Su loves to dance. They are regulars.

A retired ESL teacher in Boston, this is one of the fun parts of her retirement.

"We come here for line dancing every Tuesday!" she says.

Greg would have graduated from 4T in 1986! I love this.

2018 Post Spin Spin

October 3, 2018

The 24th Positive Spin for ALS, now named Ride To Defeat ALS, was held in Wayland, MA, on September 23, 2018. https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/ride-to-defeat-als-24-years-until-a-cure.html

Every year since 2001, Myke Farricker and I have made a ceremonial ride after our official fund raising rides have been completed. For the past ten years, we've driven to Truro, hopped on our bikes and made an eight mile jaunt to First Landing Park next to the breakwater at the end of Route 6A in Provincetown, MA, where we stand and honor the men and women whose lives have been changed by a diagnosis of ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. This is personal. Myke's brother Pete, and my dear friend Janet Speers were lost to ALS.

We are usually joined by Susan Lyman of Provincetown, whose husband, Doug Trumbo, was a popular member of the Provincetown EMS team and died of the disease in 1996. Susan read about my Positive Spin in the Provincetown Banner. She a and her kids Sam and Hannah met me at the Pilgrim Landing Park when I completed my "Spin" in 1998.

While on the breakwater this year, we met Moffat, the world traveling bunny rabbit, with his globe trotting owner Christy Howard and her husband Jim, who were on a tour of New England from their home in Colorado. The chance meeting was amazing for several reasons. One of Jim's mentors succumbed to ALS. What are the chances our paths would cross at the moment Myke and I rode to First Landing Park in Provincetown?

We're proud of our work to raise money for the ALS Association MA Chapter and to support men and women and their families who are coping with the disease. What...you've never heard of the Zarb Corporation? Myke will tell you about it!

 
I mean, how can you not start a conversation with two people carrying a well-loved stuffed rabbit?

Christy and Jim Howard celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary with a two week jam-packed tour of New England. Of course, Moffat was along for the ride. Moffat is the perfect intermediary for teaching history to her primary grade students. She's pretty good at it.

Christy was named 2017 State History Teacher of the year in Colorado by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was nominated for National History Teacher of 2019, pretty rarefied territory.

 

Christy takes photos of Moffat, brings them back to her classroom and viola, uses photos of the peripatetic rabbit as teaching tools. Even Susan, Myke, and I got a photo opp on the jetty.

 

After we met on the jetty, we walked through First Landing Park.

She'll undoubtedly use the photo of Moffat on the plaque to talk about the Pilgrim's first landing and teach history,  geography and maybe squeeze in some math.

One of the reasons they chose Provincetown? They're Teddy Roosevelt fans. President Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the 252 foot granite Pilgrim Monument in 1907.  And of course Moffat had to include that you-can-see-it-from-10-miles-at -sea tallest granite monument int the United States in his travels. (Photo by Christy Howard)

To complete the TR connection, they dined at the historic Red Inn where President Roosevelt and his wife dined on their visit.

Moffat is now part of the lore of our ride!

Sam participated in the ride in Wayland in his senior high school year in 2006. In 2007, his freshman and sophomore years in college, he  joined me and Myke for three Post Spins Spins from the Outer Reach Motel in Truro to the First Landing Park. The whole family raised funds through 2009.

Sam hasn't ridden with us since moving to Baltimore but...thanks to Moffat, he's thinking about rejoining us next year!

"So this year is the 21st year of my family knowing you and sharing in your mission to ride to defeat ALS! What a ride and joy it has been!" says Susan.

Who knows, our ride and why we do it might even show up in Moffat's adventures some day.

 

Ride To Defeat ALS: 24 Years Until a Cure - The Videos

Story...

 

 Can I Get A Witness?... DJ Mr. Jonathan hits it on the head when he plays "Some Kind of Wonderful" by Grand Funk Railroad. We all got some kind of wonderful today when over 200 riders raised over $236,500. Note the burly bikers (at 22 second mark) who roared into the parking lot on their Harleys then stood along the finish line to cheer for one of their buddies who rode a much quieter (and slower!) bike for his his boss who has ALS.

 Friends and family cheered every returning rider...

The WAKE UP CALL!
Grand finale at the Longfellow Tennis and Health Club, Wayland Massachusetts: it took 4 takes and lots of laughter for WCVB Channel 5's Cindy Fitzgibbon to organize this "Good Morning!" video for her show!
http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/ride-to-defeat-als-24-years-until-a-cure.html

Videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Ride To Defeat ALS: 24 Years Until a Cure

Sunday September 23, 2018

24th Annual Fund Raiser for ALS...from Positive Spin for ALS to Ride To Defeat ALS

The Longfellow Tennis and Health Club, 524 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778

11 AM

Ashley Corbin, Special Events Manager Extraordinaire for the ALS Association MA Chapter, does the count down for the 25 mile Pete's Ride. Pete Farricker was a member of the 1982 World Champion Rude Boys Frisbee Team. Pete's joyous sense of team, community, competition and fierce but overwhelmingly fair demeanor was the embodiment of Ultimate Frisbee's Spirit of the Game. https://www.usaultimate.org/about/ultimate/spirit_of_the_game.aspx  and https://www.usaultimate.org/spiritawards/#farricker

His teammates rallied around him when he was diagnosed with ALS in 1999. Pete died from the disease. His spirit did not. Their dedication lives on every year through the Spirit Rides held around the country http://www.spiritride.org/index.cfm  The Spirit Ride is now also in memory of another Ultimate Frisbee legend, Kathy Pufhal. The Spirit Rides raise serious money for the ALS Association MA Chapter and for Cancer Research.

The most successful ride yet, staged from The Longfellow Tennis and Health Club in Wayland ...raised over $230,000 with 270 riders on the 25, 50, and 75 mile routes in and around the Wayland, MA area. A radio operator spent the entire day monitoring communications between water stops and SAG wagons along each route. Every rider was accounted for!

 

Six men and women coping with ALS were present (more than at any previous ride), two of them with huge retinues of riders and supporters...

Welchie's Team (John Welch in green cap) was a rolling green wave of support on the road and on the ground. "Some of my riders didn't know how to adjust the valve so they could pump up their tires!" John said cheerfully. Good for showing them how, John!

 Riders, teams and patients relax...

and wait to cheer team members as they finish the ride...

Hot and cold food, fruit, ice cream, snacks for all, donated by local businesses. Even a cold beer at the end of a long ride!

Executive Director of MA Chapter ALS Association Lyn Aronson and Channel 5 TV personality Cindy Fitzgibbin get ready for final announcements.

 
Apple employee Steve gave stirring and uplifting remarks as hundreds gathered after riders had finished. "Apple not only matches donations made by employees, but right now they are doing a double match – for example, Steve made a $1000 donation to his team, and Apple sent a matching gift of $2000. In addition, they donate money per hour for any employee who volunteers at an event, and with the amount of employees that were there volunteering and riding, they are getting $1500 donated to the ride!" said Ashley Corbin, the Special Events Manager.

 

Steve Mooney, alumnus of the 1982 World Champion Rude Boys Ultimate Frisbee Team, MA Chapter ALS Association Executive Director Lyn Aronson with Myke Farricker, co-owner of the Longfellow Tennis & Health Club. Members of the Rude Boys team show up every year to support the event, sort of a mini reunion, and donate thousands of dollars to the ride.

PT, Myke and photo bomber Ashley Corbin

This was one of the most seamlessly coordinated rides I've ever witnessed. Individual riders, teams of riders, and people who showed up to support the ride were met by volunteers who welcomed and checked in riders, answered questions, handed out T-shirts, served food and beverages. There was an air of certainty surrounding the event. As Patriots coach Bill Belichick would say, "Everyone did their job."

I organized my solo Plymouth Rock to Provincetown "Positive Spin for ALS" from 1995 - 2004 for ONE rider, myself. I spent months preparing for it every year. I cannot imagine the time and skill it takes to pull off something like the Ride To Defeat ALS. It took me ten years to raise $300,000. Today's riders raised almost that much in eight hours!

Organizing for over 200 riders is the tip of the iceberg. Planning meetings, recruiting reliable volunteers, assigning them to jobs, printing road signs, buying supplies for water stops, printing route maps or making Apps for riders to use on the road, asking vendors to supply food and drink, hiring a DJ, enlisting a TV personality to put the ride on the media map...I could go on. Event coordinator Ashley Corbin was the coolest cucumber at Longfellow all day long. Unflappable.  As a former member the Board of Directors of the MA Chapter ALS Association, I fully realize the value, in terms of fund raising, positive infectious spirit, and creative thinking, Ashley brings to bear. She's a gem of an asset to the MA Chapter ALS Association. 

Events like this are bittersweet. ALS has no cure. That's why we are here...with resolve in the face of daunting odds, to control what we can, fight grief with with action, and keep moving forward. Having the event work so sure-footedly is a blessing.

  

Speaking of photo bombers, there's Mr. Jonathan, the fabulous DJ who skillfully read the crowd and provided songs to fit every mood of the day, behind us. And the Elite Wheels Team T shirts, sponsored by the Zarb Corporation...to be explained in a later  post.

Photos mostly by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

VIDEOS http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2018/09/ride-to-defeat-als-24-years-until-a-cure-the-videos.html

 

Joan Baez: Fare Thee Well

Joan Baez "Fare Thee Well Tour"
Boch Center - Wang Theatre
September 15, 2018

I was in an alternate universe the moment she walked onto the stage. 

Let’s start out with how is it possible that a voice that began electrifying people nearly 60 years ago is still a thing of beauty, fully capable of moving an audience to tears and laughter washed with diamonds and rust. She may be a relic but she sure can still rock the house.

Thirty seconds. That’s all it took for me to fall in love with the contralto of her new old voice, with its gravelly edge softening the angelic soprano of yore. She’s not shy about being 77 years old. Hell that’s the point, that’s why she’s here. With dark humor and personal anecdotes, with the songs she chooses and ease of talking to us as if we were at the kitchen table, she’s pointing a light down the tunnel of mortality. Hers. Ours. Mine.

To have that gift of a once in a lifetime voice is wonder enough. And the sound is enough to pitch you into another time zone.  The woman is in the rare company of singers who defined a generation of activists.

The vibrato and tone of that voice is recognizable within seconds. She freely talks about sliding her voice down a range to a still supple contralto with that familiar trademark vibrato that makes me shudder with delight when I hear it. 

Just as I’ve come to terms with Joan’s new normal, she reaches up to the stars and down into a small sweet spot still residing in her vocal chords to nail those soprano notes that put her in her own universe. I would have been able to hear 3500 jaws drop if not for the reflexive collective roar that came from our own throats.

Collusion is a huge buzz word these days and there’s Joanie up there colluding with age to downshift, without losing speed, to share that voice with us in the home stretch of her journey, burning every last drop of fuel left in the tank. A drop in octave doesn’t mean a drop in octane.

I love her for the way she makes me feel. A huge a la carte carousel serving joy, pain, indignation, sorrow, laughter, social justice, camaraderie with people on the margins, evoked with a voice of compassion, forgiveness all the way to in-your-face righteousness. For ninety minutes I am a tuning fork, resonating deeply with thoughts and feelings that flow like currents in the subsurface of the aquifer of my psyche. 

Who melds wistful and hopeful better than this woman? Tonight in easy patter from the stage, she recounts loves, losses, causes, and her sense of social justice and the way she has bridged them all from the past to the present – universal and personal, poignant and powerful, with a palpable generosity of spirit.

Leaning forward, elbows on her knees and hands cupping her face, the woman next to me is in a world of her own with Joan. Her husband in the next seat is mouthing the words to every song.

Joan doesn’t call this a Fare-Thee-Well Tour for nothing. It feels like she’s picked songs to be sung at her own wake.  And don’t think for one skinny minute that we aren’t thinking the same thing since so many of our heroes are dying. And don’t think for one skinny minute that we don’t know that we are closer to our own end lines, just as she is. My head is spinning. Halfway through the 90 minute set, I can feel the deep hum of that tuning fork vibrating in my seat in the mezzanine.

Love lost and found, hits and misses in life, sadness for what hasn’t worked out, Baez has concocted an alchemy of gratitude and acceptance for the vicissitudes of the life she’s lived.

This could easily descend into a morbid valedictory to life’s dissonant chords. That’s not what the troubadour has in mind. This is not a revival. Her songs haven’t disappeared down the drain of popular culture. From socially conscious to just plain beautiful ballads, the songs meant something when she first sang them. They have the power to elevate our spirits today.

She looks fabulous. Close cropped grey-streaked silver hair, tailored black jacket, form fitting jeans, comfortable black flats, she doesn’t look like any grandmother I’ve ever seen.   

I’m channeling two concerts, one from the stage, another playing out in my psyche and heart. 

A strange stew of triumph and elegy begin roiling around inside my guts and this woman is making them feel like the perfect elixir paving the way for me to consider my own fare-thee-well from this good earth. Honest to goodness this has the rich atmosphere of a wake when warm reminiscences are shared by friends of a lifetime with way more laughter than tears. I actually begin thinking about a playlist for my own wake.

Her voice has always been her gift and still is. In accommodation to age, she’s tuning it down to a lower range but it’s still THAT voice, one that gives me the chills as if I can feel her breath and her body temperature all the way back to my seat in the mezzanine

So here she is, the daring young woman on the flying trapeze, once invincible, now vulnerable.

Which is not to say irrelevant. “Goodbye Rosalita” that she will sing later is still utterly topical and touches on her lifelong themes of social justice, dignity of the marginalized (immigrants today, she will tell you flat out) delivered with the power of a sledgehammer wrapped in velvet. 

Fare Thee Well, Joan…but not just yet.

Louisiana Flood of 2016: August 25 - Our Savior's Church Volunteer Crew Finishes Thursday Job

This post may be updated within 48 hours

Friday August 26, 2016

Bald Eagle Drive, Lafayette, LA

9:00 AM

A pastor opens meeting with a prayer asking the Almighty help us to find those in need and give us energy to do today’s work. The prayers are one part Jesus and three parts encouragement,  statistics that show what a difference we're making, and at least one anecdote that brings it all home.

Pastor Jacob Aranza brightens our spirits (already pretty high in my opinion); he reports that last week we did 25 houses...as of this morning we’ve done 42!...calls us heroes, says it is likely that we are the only organization that is giving direct relief to so many people right now.

PT from Boston gets a shout out...Ken Myers, one of the prime movers of the Our Savior's Church recovery effort says,  "I walked in here this morning and one of my favorite teams is the Boston Red Sox because I played semi-pro baseball up there. I introduced myself to a guy with a Boston Red Sox hat, he says I’m PT from Boston. I say I used to live in Wareham, MA, what are you doing down here? He says I came down here once, fell in love with the people and when I saw what happened I had to come down and help…You hear in church about  the five gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John… and you!"

"I guess you could call me St Paul now!” says I, a lovely moment which I savored.

Crew chief Rob Babineaux talks over today's work with Bryan Rhinehart

 
Our Savior's Church is organized...all we have to do is show up ready to work...everything we need to get the job of mucking out flooded homes. The equipment is here. We've got the spirit pitch in and make a bunch of people's lives brighter.

Rob reviews today's assignment with the crew. Really specific details are printed on our work sheets, name of owner, address, jobs to be done, equipment needed, likely obstacles to deal with, length of time estimated for the job.

This house is a bear to clean up. Looking at it from outside, you wouldn't know it had taken on several inches of water since it is quite elevated from the road and there are no streams or creeks or rivers nearby. The drainage ditches that run along Bald Eagle Drive and every house in Lafayette were overwhelmed with a surge of water that started in Denham Springs from the north and like an enormous tsunami rolled into neighboring parishes.

 
Stealth mold: at casual glance, house looks intact. Close inspection shows that standing water inside for a period of days meant that anything that had been soaked had to be removed.

Sheetrock and insulation, all of it; time for lunch.

Homeowner and mom; crew before we leave first house on Breton Road in Lafayette.

The garage was holding area for salvageable items: when a moisture meter detected water behind this kitchen cabinet it had to be removed, a task that took several hours.

 

 

same thing in the bathroom...

and a bedroom...

and parts of the garage...

 

determining the most efficient way to remove kitchen cabinets took most of the day

so the cabinets are now piled in the street

and the debris needs to be cleaned up

standard procedure: cut away sheetrock at the 4 foot seams and remove insulation if its an outer wall

Fast effective method to remove wet sheetrock...

 

There's satisfaction of getting the job done but still...it's such a huge stress on everyone in Lafayette and the parishes surrounding it.

Many say there were plans to mitigate such flooding. Cities and towns got the message now. One hopes that late is better than normal. Deep down, everyone wonders if this is the new  normal.

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Louisiana Trail Riders: Jeremiah Ariaz

"Louisiana Trail Riders" by Jeremiah Ariaz

Loads of people, especially out of town visitors like me, know about the courir du Mardi Gras of rural French Louisiana, sometimes referred to as the Cajun Mardi Gras. Few know about the African American Trail Rides that take place during Mardi Gras and weekends during the year.

I just finished viewing the link a friend of mine sent me about an upcoming show in his hometown of Breaux Bridge, LA, titled “Louisiana Trail Riders,” photographs by his friend Jeremiah Ariaz. LINK https://www.louisianatrailriders.com/photographs/

This guy really gets it - the culture, the history, the pride in a tradition he calls “a sub culture” in southwest Louisiana.

His black and white photos, sharp and velvety at the same time, don’t just show or tell but have an ineffable sense of ‘feel’ to them. The artist’s choice to shoot and print in black and white achieves a delicate balance to show a tradition that is generations old and very contemporary at the same time.

A sense of quiet unassuming dignity is riding easily in those saddles. I feel the pleasure they enjoy from each other’s company, hear the laughter, and I’ll bet the music that might be playing from speakers in a rider’s saddlebag.

Finish looking at the gorgeous prints and I come away with a sense of family, community connections, bonds between fathers and sons, and yes, importantly, women, in the generations old tradition of trail riding. What is so impressive is how Ariaz’s sly documentarian's eye makes the ordinary so extraordinary. A few of these photos could stand alone as remarkable. As an aggregate, they knock you off your feet.

Every group has traditions that define it, keep it alive, show a quiet sense of pride and belonging. You could say this is a celebratory story about race and culture. What I feel after looking at these photos is a strange sense of kinship. I am an outsider looking in, but I am reminded of traditions in my own family that keep us together in the same way that the Louisiana Trail Riders connect in their rides.

The fact that a man not of that culture can see and be trusted and produce such exquisite photographs is a testament to his sense of mission, his deep respect for the people he’s documenting, and the friendly openness of the men who welcomed him along for the rides. Powerful stuff.

 

Darryl "Demo" Demourelle: The Kilroy of Breaux Bridge, LA

There wouldn’t be as much joy in the Joie de Vivre Café without the bigger-than-life paintings that give the place a special sense of identity…you can thank Darryl Demourelle for that.

Joie de Vivre Café
August 18, 2018

The first thing I think of when a guy tells me his nickname is 'Demo' is that his closet if full of blasting caps and his idea of a good time is blowing something up.

Partly correct...but certainly not dangerous.

When Darryl Demourelle talks enthusiastically about blowing things up, he’s talking about his paintings you can see clear across the Joie de Vivre Café, which is where I met him.

“There are two types of paintings I do here, ‘up close’ and ‘at a distance’,” says the artist.

He points out two paintings that have become the visual calling card of the café “They're ‘at a distance’ paintings, usually one big portrait or subject in the frame.  You get the idea all the way across the room.”

He leads me over to the small bar area in an adjoining room. “For the ‘up close paintings’, you need to walk up to them to see the details and they are in smaller frames.” Right now he is busy working on three portrait commissions and a razzle-dazzle painting he wants to airbrush onto his truck. “The work is never boring!“ 

Demo is the Kilroy of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  His signature style is all over town - murals splashed across the sides of buildings, wild looking trucks and automobiles, T-shirts, boats, RVs, oh, and an airplane and a bridge.

His career started by accident. In the Air Force, he began to paint his boots and service T-shirts with big bold colors. Guys in his outfit admired them so he offered to sell them, “I sold my stuff so fast I never needed to change my clothes!“

Self taught, he’s been painting since he was a kid.  After his stint in the Air Force, he was hired to make signs to advertise Tupperware parties they were popping up all over in the 1980s. He opened his own company. He hasn’t been lacking for business since. 

Demo sort of likes the idea of being an outlier. His Facebook page proclaims him to be “the best unknown artist in Breaux Bridge”. Unknown maybe. But good, oh yes. 

He started working in Lafayette but moved to Breaux Bridge which, like himself, has a personality all its own. The little outpost of about 8000 is sprinkled with a surprising share of entrepreneurs, musicians, and artists along with farmers, fishermen and Cajun and Creole families that have lived there for generations. 

He will paint anything. “I’m about to airbrush my truck so it looks like it has tractor treads running along the sides.”  That should make a splash around town. Anyone with a lick of sense will give him the right of way at every intersection along Rees Street.

“Everybody needs signs!” Demo did the lettering for the Jim Bowie Museum in the Vieux Village in his hometown of Opelousas, 24 miles north of Breaux Bridge.

“Younger artists come to me when they are having trouble with their work and I show them tricks that I know. I’m not going to lose any business. Sooner or later everybody comes to me.” 

Spoken by a man comfortable in his own boots, even though he doesn’t paint them any more. 

May as well say Coffee & Culture & Art Café

"At a distance" ...you can almost get a whiff of that huge cigar.

and one "up close" lower left

What do you do with former truck transmission cartons? Make outlandishly colorful guitars that would steal the show from a musician brave enough to compete with it.

Papier mâché fish from Demo's studio, not the Bayou Teche!

Walk out the door of the café...you won't see that bemused fellow but you will see those buildings right across the street!

Walk inside the café on a Saturday morning...you just might find Darryl Demourelle sitting under one of his fabulous paintings.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Yvette Landry and The Jukes Take Off At The Whirlybird

Yvette Landry and The Jukes' CD release party at The Whirlybird
August 18, 2018

Louisiana Lovin’

Yvette Landry had a coming out party last night. The Yvette that’s been on slow boil for about eight years, creating her singing voice, her stage persona, her style, got stoked to a full rolling boil tonight. She has sung with lots of really great musicians and been part of shows with lots of other fine voices.

She’s always sung with whatever the song called for, tender Cajun ballads and frisky two steps, classic country, Americana, dyed in the wool rock ‘n roll, a touch of rockabilly, and classic swamp pop.

A couple of years ago, Yvette’s teaming up with Roddie Romero and his band to create The Jukes sparked a transformation. Roddie Romero, guitar; Eric Adcock, keyboards; Chris French, standup bass; Beau Thomas, fiddle; Derek Huston, saxophone; and Gary Usie, drums, can light up any stage with the best of them.

When they play together as The Jukes, the stage all but ignites….and they are decidedly Yvette’s band.

“This group met at 4 PM for a sound check. We've played together at different times but not on the same stage. What ever you hear tonight is going to be the first time we’ve done it together,” she says.

You could’ve fooled us. What ensued was full-bore heavenly music that traversed genres from one end of the rainbow to the other, swamp pop in one pot of gold and southwest Louisiana rock 'n roll dating from the 1950's and 60's in the other.

The sense of occasion is not lost on the band. Born and raised in Breaux Bridge, Yvette has an ardent following. Playing to this particular audience, they were damn well going to pull out all the stops. The solos from Roddie Romero, Eric Adcock, Chris French, Beau Thomas, Derek Huston, and Gary Usie, can always mesmerize with sheer talent. Tonight they dug in to deliver inventive, inspired musicianship that all but levitated the Whirlybird and at its peak sprinkled us with rapturous fairy dust.

The Jukes sang every song from their new album and a bunch of rock and country classics, including Yvette's rowdy rock 'n roll-y “Do Anything But Stay Offa My Cowboy Boots.” When Yvette and Roddie launched into Swamp Pop, Louisiana’s gift to the American songbook, the thermal capacity pegged the meter on the compact Whirlybird's dance floor.

If the seven stars of the Pleiades were to form a band, Yvette Landry would be its most luminous. Tonight, in the hothouse August atmosphere inside The Whirlybird, she sang from a deep place in her core that I’ve never heard before.

I said as much as I talked with her as she signed the cover of “Louisiana Lovin’” after the show.

“I didn’t have to play guitar that much, it gave me time to let it all come through my voice,” she says after the show. Oh, yes.

Yvette has always had a streak of Loretta Lynn in her. Tonight she unleashed her inner Wanda Jackson. She went from singin’ pretty to singin’ gritty.

Roddie and tonight’s band were the gasoline. Yvette was the match. To my ears, this was a defining career moment, a voice and a presence whose depth that quite possibly took her by surprise, a new benchmark from raw, to raucous, to lyrical, to lonesome and back again. She’s never gonna’ be the same. And that’s a good thing.

 

The Whirlybird...the lull before the Jukes Storm...that tiny dance floor was mighty packed with deliriously happy dancers all night long.

The Jukes on stage...oh, my… and I haven’t even begun to talk about special guest, godfather of Swamp Pop Warren Storm…stay tuned...

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Cajun ingenuity in Lafayette, LA: Practical Rain Gear for 2 Cents

August 17, 2018

I’m ready to leave after my visiting my friend Doug, who is recovering from a hospital stay.
The sky has opened, it looks like Niagara Falls outside with occasional thunder rumbles to boot.

“I’ll make you a Cajun raincoat,” says Doug. Born and raised in the bayou, he knows a thing or two about improvising.

He pulls a 30-gallon trash bag from the cupboard. “Poke a hole in the bottom to put your head through,” says he.

“Hold still,” he says as he cuts holes in the corners. ”Put your arms through here.”

“Now for a hat,” and he rummages through the recycle bin for a plastic WalMart bag.

Trying to match my style with his sense of ingenuity, the bag I tie looks like a chef’s toque with a fashionable tilt.

“You’re ready to go for it!” says he.

I bolt through the deluge, into the car just as dry as you please. My outfit cost about 2 cents and kept me as dry as any expansive creation from REI.

Let’s hear it for Cajun ingenuity. Thank you, Doug!

Two Musicians Provide the Two-Steppin' at the Joie de Vivre

Friday night at the Joie de Vivre Café

August 17, 2018

A fiddle and an accordion are all you need for a night of entertainment around here. The people in the audience will partner with the musicians to fill the place with energy. Dancing, not required, certainly adds a layer of oomph, not unappreciated by tonight's duo, Forest Huval and Jonno Frishberg..

“The name of that song was ‘Reel de Coquin’, it means Dance of the Thieves,” Forest Huval says. It was the last dance of the evening at Joie de Vivre Café in Breaux Bridge, and he and Jonno Frishberg got into it.

“It was a tune originated back in the day by Dennis McGee (January 26, 1893 - October 3, 1989) and has been played by fiddlers ever since,'” says Forest. McGee was one of the first Cajun musicians to record music on 78 rpm disks. His influence is felt by every musician who wants to feel the span and breadth of Cajun music from the time it was recorded.

The first time i heard Forest play December 31, 2012, when he was playing accordion with the late great and dearly missed Al Berard at a house party in Breaux Bridge. Since then he's taken up the fiddle. Al would be impressed.

Link below to 2011 story and video

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2012/01/a-start-your-new-years-early-party-party-in-breaux-bridge-louisiana.html

VIDEO

Photos and video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Group Therapy at the Joie de Vivre Café

Group Therapy at the Joie de Vivre Café
Joie de Vivre Café
107 N Main Street
Breaux Bridge, LA 70517
August 4, 2018

Happens every Saturday morning at the Joie de Vivre Café in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. No need to lie down on a therapist’s couch, just pull up a chair, and breathe easy. The pharmacology here is music.

A big circle of music makers is sitting on a small dais. A Cajun jam is in full swing. By tradition, all are welcome to join. By all, I mean men or women who’ve been playing for a few weeks, accomplished players who know the lyrics and chords of the songs, and pros like Gina Forsyth or Christine Balfa who live nearby and show up once in a while. No one bows or curtsies to the pros, who just sit down with everyone else and play.

By custom, the jam is led by a fiddler or an accordion player who sings the ballads and two steps as everyone else plays along ensemble style. It’s a bundle of egalitarian energy.

Whether you understand French or not, you grasp that the high-pitched mournful keening voice has got to be a response to hardship, dislocation and gritty survival after "The Grand Derangement" forced the Acadians to flee British ruled Canada in the mid 1700s. The frisky two-step tunes show that they knew how to let loose and let joy seep into their lives before they headed home to tend to the uncertainties of weather and life.

There's a mountain of research that listening to music makes us feel better.
.
That’s what’s happening at a table where Elaine and Jim are sitting. Elaine takes turns strumming her guitar with the group on the dais. Her husband Jim, in a wheel chair, isn’t moving a muscle. “He was diagnosed with ALS five years ago,” Elaine says, “recently he’s had trouble speaking.”

Jim, who has the lean frame of a man who has run 43 marathons, is having no trouble taking in the music. Jim is dancing with his bright blue eyes.

“Jim looks for the gifts in life, “ Elaine says, “coming to this café and listening to the music is one of them.”

The joyous sound echoing through the Joie de Vivre is a gift to all of us. For Jim, it’s a therapy to stay in the moment, moments that get more precious each day.

ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” is a neuromuscular disease. Muscles waste away. Total immobility ensues. There is, as yet, no cure. Ability to speak goes. When the diaphragm can’t keep up, breathing stops. All of our days are numbered. Jim’s number is smaller than ours.

The music, camaraderie, and cozy confines of the Joie de Vivre Café are an uplifting mood enhancer, nourishment for soul and body. The world and its cares will be there when we walk out the door. We’ll walk into them with a lighter step.

John Armstrong, a Scotish inventor (1709-1779), wrote, ‘Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.’

Today’s Cajun jam will not expel Jim’s ALS. But nothing will keep him from looking for the gifts in life, a soaring example of the will to endure. Jim is living life in C major…C for courage.

PHOTOS and VIDEOS

Fiddles and guitars make up the majority of the instruments played in the Cajun jam.

Today's jam led by Joel Breaux (fiddle), Ryan Simon (accordion, also drummer for Pine Leaf Boys and plays with T’Monde), Lester Gautier (washtub bass)...leading ballads and waltzes. If you close your eyes, you can imagine neighbors trekking to a friend's home on a Saturday for a night of music of bygone days in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Every skill level is welcome...

From 8 AM till about noon, people gather for food, dancing, and old time music, in what Cajuns call, "Passing a good time."

Glen Fields (drummer for The Revelers and T'Monde) and Russell Ducote, both play the "T-fer", the Louisiana French name for a triangle, originally made from tines of a hay fork and used to provide rhythm in a Cajun band. "He's one of the best," says Russell,who is pretty darn good himself.

Conversations between songs...

Antoine Melancon...

an institution all by himself on the dance floor...leaves the building.

Cheerful decor, cheerful atmosphere...

The music is good medicine for all of us, the smiles say it all...

Jim and Elaine...Jim looks for the gifts in life. This is a big one for him. So is his presence for the rest of us.  

Cajun jam video 1 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_wGnPgf1-s

 

Cajun jam video 2
"The Bosco Stomp"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv9oZfQZ1Zo 
By custom. only one T'fer is played at a time in a Cajun jam.

Alan Crochet interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWj0LfjCOXA

No better example of the range and depth of the pervasiveness of music in the lives of a chunk of people in southwest Louisiana...Alan Crochet. Alan Crochet has been playing harmonica "off and on" for most of his 80 years. "I was born and raised in Loreauville, about 30 miles from Breaux Bridge." He’s been coming to the jam for ten years. " i drive here by myself," he says with quiet dignity.

He explains how to use the tongue to block some holes while blowing through others in the harmonica. To give an example, a moment before, he played "Begin the Beguine."  In this video he plays what sounds like "It's The Loveliest Time of the Year" but Alan says its title is "Over the Waves." He shows me his German made Hohner Big River Harp. "Most players use the key of C harmonica; it has ten holes. This harmonica cost $35, my first one  cost about 35  cents!," he says.

Today’s fiddle player and one of the jam leaders Joel Breaux is his cousin. "Joel’s grandfather and I are first cousins, my mother was a Breaux.” 

"Who's your Mama?” or “Who are your people?” are the ways people connect the dots around here. The concept Six Degrees of Separation operates robustly in southwest Louisiana. When it comes to musicians, it’s more like Three Degrees of Separation.

Fellow musician Russel Ducote says that Alan spoke no English for a long time. "Do you speak French?" Alan asks as we part. "Oui," says I and we have a brief conversation. "I can understand you," says he, encouraging me, then, as he walks to his car, "Au revoir"and in case i didn't get it, adds "It means I’ll see you again." I look forward to that.

Music, mood, well-being

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-consciousness-question/201703/what-is-the-effect-music-the-listener
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170412181341.htm
https://www.verywellmind.com/surprising-psychological-benefits-of-music-4126866

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Lafayette ArtWalk: Monthly Evening Culture and Commerce

November 11, 2017

The Wall Street Journal declared Lafayette to be the country’s Happiest City in 2014.
https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/local/2014/07/21/lafayette-happiest-city-in-the-country/12941529/

Take a stroll down Jefferson Street on a Saturday evening ArtWalk and you get an idea why. The city feels lit up and it’s not just the lights pouring out from galleries, restaurants, bars, and storefronts like Sola Violins on East Vermilion. Doors open wide, art galleries give a come hither vibe that makes you want to walk in. Even if the art isn’t your cup of tea, the smiles on the faces of the hosts whose goal seems to be hospitality first, business second, make it easy to sashay inside. In case you hesitate, nothing says, “Come on in” like tables filled with tasty appetizers.

The appetizers are floating atop an ocean of civic pride, something on the endangered species list in some cities …I’m sure you have your own list.

Lafayette is not one of them. The Acadiana Center for the Arts is a magnet tonight. Have a cocktail. Nibble on appetizers, take in art and sculpture in the main gallery, check out a modern dance in the state of the art theater, admire the creations hanging in the hallway, schmooze with your friends.

 

Lafayette is a certifiable hotbed of music. Tradition runs deep. Cajun and zydeco bands play the old stuff and plow into new ways of presenting it. If Hank Williams, or Roy Orbison, or Ed Wills, Willie Nelson, the late Professor Longhair or Allen Toussaint were to pass by, they’d find someplace in town that would be music to their ears.

Whoa! On the corner of East Vermilion Street and Jefferson I stop in my tracks. That’s live music.

Inside Sola Violins, there’s Luke Huval, deep in the moment, pumping that accordion and totally locked in to the emotional charge of the times in which they were first sung in the late 1700s. Cajun ballads sound more like a plaintive keening expression put to music of fiddles, accordions, and guitars that describes dislocation, loneliness, heartbreak, hard times on one hand and explosive playful joy at others.

Back in time, all of it was played at a Saturday night fais do do in which families trekked to a neighbor’s house, put the furniture on the porch, put the kids to bed, and sang and danced away their shared cares and trials.

Voices have stamps. There aren’t a ton of singers that you can recognize after a few phrasings. The last time I heard that voice was in 2012 at McGee’s Landing in Henderson, LA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8tZDaDmA8k&list=UUpO59RlFb0TWCXQLKYfisdA&index=1&feature=plcp

Along side of Luke is the same kid who played accordion in 2012, Zack Fusilier, with the same drive that keeps this music alive. And Megan Brown, a contemporary who has grown up with the music and has the same feel for the emotional territory from which it sprang. You have to feel this music to sing it. They feel it.

Sola Violins is owned and operated by Anya Burgess, fiddle player on two Grammy nominated Cajun bands, Bonsoir Catin and The Magnolia Sisters, and a formally trained violin maker. Her shop, originally in her home outside Lafayette and now in Lafayette, has been a destination for musicians since 2002. It's is the perfect place to showcase Cajun music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up51PqW0d3Q SLIDE SHOW

VIDEOS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O53A4hXTsLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=4YEjQyH_yAs

Darlene and her young son are sitting next to me on a line of chairs against the store wall. A woman slowly twirls her young daughter to the beat of the music. "I’ve seen little kids dancing on the feet of their father or mother to learn how to dance,” says I.

 “I’m teaching my little boy the same way,” says Darlene, from a Creole family in Lafayette, “that’s the way I learned from my grandfather," another way culture is prized and passed along here in southwest Louisiana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LGse297_TQ

My pal Bernard and I head down the street for some food until something way better happens. Music from Rêve, a coffee shop. Gotta check it out. The Cedar Crest Ramblers are playing fine music. No one on the dance floor. We change that. First time I’ve ever danced with a belly dancer!

Andrea...the belly dancer

Good night Irene... and Bernard... at Réve Coffee Roasters

Kylie, PT Réve Coffee Roasters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=aqnk0tsdepI

Grand Finale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=1Dml1S7pK0o

Such is life in the happy city of Lafayette, LA.

"The King": The Comet Named Elvis and The American Dream

July 30, 2018

I only knew that the film was about Elvis Presley, had read no reviews. it turned out to an ambitious, churning, probing, deep dive into Americana that gathers steam then rolls you over in the final minutes. I woke up at 3 AM the morning after seeing the film… still all shook up, headed for my computer. I needed to process what I’d just experienced, an enormous portrait of a man, a myth, a country.

From impossibly beautiful man to one impossibly bloated, the story of Elvis Presley is an allegory about the cultural history of America from the 1950s to today. “The King” has all the subtlety of car crash. It poses questions, it offers answers. Some are not pretty. It puts a serious hurt on the notion that if you work hard you can achieve what you want….aka The American Dream.

It’s poignant. It’s revelatory. It’s complicated. It digs into the taproot of the divide in America: race. At times, I squirmed in my seat as the dots were connected between race, music, commerce, and the myths and platitudes we tell ourselves to this day.

Twenty minutes into the film, I realize this is a documentary whose ambition is to connect the zeitgeist between the 1950s and America of 2017, forty years after Elvis dies at 42 of a heart attack caused by abuse of painkillers. This is no gauzy portrait encased in amber. As one reviewer comments, “We go from Graceland to Trumpland.”

How did Elvis happen? How did he become The King? Whose King? Why did we love him? Who were his people? What made him tick? How did he become packaged and merchandised to within an inch of his life? Why did he never take the reins and become himself? Did he ever comprehend his power and the possibility of using it for social or racial betterment? Was he simply the most successful cultural appropriator in history? (David Simon’s comment about that is probably as close as you can get to an answer).

Somewhere under the popular image was a country boy whose ambition, noted in archival footage, was to sing the music he loved. It all started in 1954 while 19 year-old Elvis was trying to make an impression on Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis.

After he sang some unimpressive country-ish popular songs, the demo tapes stop rolling. Elvis loosens up, probably to decompress, and begins singing with the unbuckled energy and style of the blues, gospel, and rhythm ‘n blues he’d been listening to on black music stations and in his neighborhood churches since he was a kid.

With irrepressible abandon, he begins to sing his version of Big Mama Thornton’s “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog”, a white boy covering a decidedly black influenced song with all the unbound juice it called for. Philips runs in from his office and tells Elvis to keep singing. He had finally found what he’d been looking for. A white kid whose sound could bring the music of black America to a wider audience. The legend was born.

The film’s brilliant conceit is Elvis’s 1963 Rolls Royce. Director and co-writer Jarecki gathers a collection of celebrities, including Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Alec Baldwin, Ethan Hawke, Van Jones, James Carville, Mike Myers to sit in that car and paint a multi dimensional, occasionally contrarian portrait of The King, much like the country he ruled (and that ruled him).

Jerecki tricks out that dream car with state of the art audio and video equipment and takes it on a road trip from Memphis to New York to Las Vegas and down the rural lanes of Tupelo, Mississippi. The real time segments shot in the Rolls Royce are quilted with archived black and white and color footage that contrasts reality with myth. That car is a rolling sound stage. It feels like part of the cast. Its occasional breakdowns may be the exotic car’s commentary on its owner’s life.

Rapper Chuck D and Van Jones speak the truths about race and culture I reckon were true. They sting. The most jarring observations about America are made by a truck driver and several residents of Tupelo, Mississippi, the King’s sleepy hometown.

One minute, people like me who grew up when Elvis turned the country upside down, relive the liberating youthful moments he changed our worlds. The next moment, in news clips of the time, we feel extraordinary pain to confront an America that, like Camelot, was never what we believed it was.

A giant qualifier: That “we” is a huge chunk of white men and women of a certain age. The larger lens includes comments from today’s black community and a younger generation that never saw the arc of popular American music change with the comet named Elvis. The conversation about cultural appropriation? Relevant then, relevant now.

The film is brutally honest and complex. Director Jarecki shines light on history found not in books but in newspaper accounts around the country. Black and white photos of lynched black men with a bunch of white people standing around are a bone chilling collision between race, music, history and culture.

The 1 hour 47 minute film’s clips weave Elvis's early career, first recordings 1953-1956, his commercial breakout 1956 –1958, his mother’s death and military service 1958-1960, film career 1960-1967, his comeback to the stage 1968-1973, with archival footage and hit you upside the head contemporary comments by those passengers rolling along in that Rolls Royce.

“There are three kings, BB King, Elvis, and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” says one commentator connecting the dots as we see vintage footage of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis and hear the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering the “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” speech in April 1968.

Jarecki exposes the self-promoting role Colonel Parker took in commanding Elvis’s career choices before Presley’s ignominious self-destruction in Las Vegas. Elvis doesn’t get off the hook, choosing the most lucrative next step for his career, no matter what the cost to his soul or his art. 

How is Jarecki going to end this, I wonder as the film hits 140 minutes. The footage of Elvis five minutes before the film ends (spoiler alert here) will keep you transfixed in your seat long after the credits roll. Jarecki lets you draw your own conclusions.

This film is a reality check. Jarecki takes us on a trip showing us how we got here. The question we're left with...where do we go from here.

Elvis Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977)

http://www.theking.film/thekingscountry

 

Saint Martin's Day: Lafayette, LA Style

November 11, 2017
Lafayette, LA
The Feast of Saint Martin

My generous host, Bernard Ussher, a Dublin lad now ensconced with his wife in Lafayette, Louisiana, is Irish to the core. Storyteller, merrymaker, prankster, bon vivant, chef sans portfolio, the gregarious fellow is always on the lookout to host some craic (a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland.)

The November 11 Feast of Saint Martin (if I hadn’t googled it I would have sworn he was making it up) was all he needed to call together a crew of pals for a Men’s Feast. The fact that none of us had ever heard of the good saint? Never mind. He’d tell us while we sat down to devour a table creaking, craicing?, with enough food to feed a band of starving crusaders.

The morning of the feast every surface in the kitchen is piled with fixings that depleted at least one market’s vegetable section. Yours truly is relegated to slice, peel, or dice heaps of red and yellow peppers, green and yellow zucchini, sweet potatoes, Yukon gold potatoes, asparagus, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and corn.

The chef is busy trussing up a chicken to be fried upside down in a propane fired gizmo that people around here use for that purpose and to anyone north of the Mason Dixon line looks like a fryialater invention gone awry. Fry chickens? Upside down? Really?

Oh, and slabs of steaks and large links of Andouille sausage, all bound for the gas grill. Alongside one whole pineapple and a handful of peaches.

Without apparent forethought, the man empties cupboards and assembles a prodigious array of spices, seasonings and marinades. With the inspiration of Julia Child after her third glass of Chateauneuf de Pap, he begins to dust, dab and drench. Not a measuring device in sight.

“How much do you add?” says I.

The chef chortles and glug-glug-glugs or shake-shake-shakes bottles, jars, and containers, seemingly upon a whim, fearlessly, with a master plan known only to himself.

”About this much ought to do,” says he.

Combinations unknown to the faint of heart are thrown together. Through the eyes of this Yankee, the spirited scene feels somewhere between a Monte Python's Flying Circus skit and the madcap glee of a Johnny Carson skit of Carnac the Magnificent - high culinary theater in the kitchen!

Men arrive, ready to do justice to the memory of the good saint. Aromas of fried chicken, steaks, simmering vegetables marinated and seasoned liberally, tease our now fully engaged appetites. Spirits are quaffed. Stories are told.

Every platter and bowl in the kitchen is liberated and piled onto tables on the patio. Men on a mission, we heap our plates with aromatic, exotically spiced food. Julia would have been impressed. Our plates empty, we dig into the grilled peaches and pineapple. Temporary torpor sets in. Then more stories and huzzahs for the host.

Saint Martin, a patron saint of France, got around. His day is celebrated around the world. One researcher claims he was the uncle of Saint Patrick. More gist for stories. Today he was, in absentia, the beatific host of Bernard Ussher’s Saint Martin’s Day Men's Feast, a day to be remembered and put on the calendar for 2019.

 

 Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

2018 Dominican World Series: Drama and Obsession

February 25, 2018


Quisqueya Stadium Juan Marichal
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Baseball in the Dominican Republic isn’t a national sport. It’s a national obsession. Combine sport, soap opera, zealous conviction, tribal membership, and you begin to understand how embedded the game is in the national psyche.

January marks the end of the regular baseball season and the beginning of the playoffs to determine which of island’s 6 teams will represent the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean World Series. The rivalries are intense. The fault lines in allegiances are known to fracture family gatherings.

Teams from Santo Domingo (Tigres del Licey/Tigers) and Santiago (the Águilas/Eagles), the second largest city in the Dominican Republic are duking it out in a best of seven series. The winning team will head to Mexico to joust with winning teams from Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. This is a heavyweight bout. Pride, loyalty, family honor, bragging rights, ride on the results.

Our host, Alex Martinez, used every connection he has to get great tickets to the fourth game in the best of seven series. The Santiago Eagles (Áigules) are up two games to one.

Walking up the ramp into the stadium feels like entering an alternate universe. Yes, I see lush green grass, the clay colored base paths and the pitchers mound and coaches boxes and dugouts and players in different uniforms so it’s a baseball game but, if I close my eyes, I would swear I was at a World Cup soccer match. The energy, cheering, and singing are awesome and unrelenting.

A run scores! Fans from the Tigers or the Eagles are on their feet. The stands become an open-air discotheque as 15,000 partisans stand up and joyously dance, hip-shaking Latin moves that look more at home on a sweat-filled dance club than a baseball park. I am smack in the middle of a sublime cultural experience.

Vendors selling hats, pennants and flags lined the streets on the way to the ballpark. Our host buys us hats and pennants, blue for the hometown team Tigers and, since his wife is from Santiago, yellow for the Santiago Eagles. We have become partisans. The stadium is jammed with them, a sea of blue with dots of yellow, like buoys floating on the Caribbean Sea’s surface, in perpetual motion.

Fervent energy in every row from top to bottom, joy on faces one moment then disappointment and heartbreak on the next. The game is a virtual roller caster ride with emotions rising and plummeting, people living and dying with each pitch and each hit.

Spectators rooting for opposing teams sometime sit side-by-side. The banter is non-stop after a hit, a walk, an error, a disputed call by the home plate umpire.The fans sitting in front of us are perfect examples. When a good play is made they leap up, wave their pennants and shoot "We're gonna win!" looks at their friends.

A sporting event creates instant kinships between strangers. Rooting for the same team, we are comrades in arms. Frank has brought his own sign that he unfurls at every moment of glory for the hometown team Licey Tigers.

“Please show me your sign,”says I.

“Boston, “I reply after he asks me where I’m from.

“Pedro Martinez!” Frank shouts after extending his hand to greet me.

“Just elected to the Hall of Fame,” says I.

“And Vladimir Guerrero, too!” says he.

 

Don’t think for a minute that everyone in the stadium does not know the names of every Dominican player in the big leagues.

A team makes a good play? Sections of the park look like scenes from Sir Walter Scott novel. Yellow or blue pennants are boisterously hoisted as if readying for battle.

You remember the word fanatic? Well, the word fan is in there somewhere and inside this ballpark we are in a world of fans and fanatics. The announcer introduces each player to come to bat in the same sonorous tones in which you would hear a prizefighter introduced a boxing match. Drama. Relentless. Drama. I love this!

This is the fourth game of the championship series. The Eagles from Santiago have won two games. The Tigers have won one in a seven game series.

The series rotates back-and-forth between the cities of Santiago and Santo Domingo. It is hard to estimate how much alcohol will be consumed, how many yellow and blue flags and baseball caps and other paraphernalia will be sold, how many friendly conversations and arguments will take place, how many newspaper stories will be written, and how many hearts will be broken.

Fathers and mothers bring their kids. Games like this germinate bonding experiences that could last a lifetime.

 
The Eagles hold onto a lead for the first part of the game and to the delirium of their fans, the Tigers tie the game in the ninth-inning. Extra innings. Fans are at the edge of their seats with every pitch, every play, every out. I can practically hear their hearts beating. At the end of the 10th inning the Tigers break through and score the winning run

Bedlam in the stands. Players from the Tigers swarm onto the field, a conga line of victors.

We say goodbye to Frank and our fellow baseball fans and head for the car. The Dugout and First Base (of course), two open-air bars on opposite corners are rockin’ with fans who watched on TV. The scene feels more like New Year’s Eve.

To define this as a baseball game would do no justice to what we just experienced: a cultural event of seismic proportions. History, heritage and honor on a baseball diamond.

PS

Edwin Encanation, Bartolo Colon, Dellin Betances, Melky Cabrera, Yoenis Cespedes, Cleveland manager Terry Francona are former Santiago Eagles players. There are dozens more who play in the American and National Leagues.

The Quisqueya Stadium Juan Marichal was re-named in 2014 after the Dominican pitcher, one of the first Dominican players to play in the big leagues in the US and the first elected to the Hall of Fame in 1983.

Oh, also cheerleaders who vault onto the field between innings. And karaoke at the seventh inning when a fan is invited to take the mic and, to the delight of thousands, belt out a popular song. I had to see this to believe it.

Photos and videos by Paul A.Tamburello,Jr.

 

The Dominican Republic: La Playita de Las Galeras

June 16, 2018

 text to follow...

 

The Dominican Republic: La Samaná, Off The Tourist Trail

La Samaná Peninsula, Dominican Republic
June 15-17, 2018

La Samaná is not on the A list of tourist wish lists.

The first location sun-starved tourists think about when considering the Dominican Republic is Punta Cana.

Most tourists gobble up the features of Punta Cana and it’s hard to argue with that. It’s easily accessible from Santo Domingo, has all-inclusive resorts, scores of hotels, 20 miles of white sand beaches, and the allure of the azure ocean at the eastern tip of the island. Tourist agencies tout Punta Cana vigorously as a world-class attraction. Many fly directly to Punta Cana, never see anything else of the island.

The Dominican Republic is the most popular tourist destination in the Caribbean region, and ranks 6th overall in the Americas. Tourism, through hotels, taxi services, gift shops, independent vendors, employs well over 100,000 people, more than a tenth of the country's population. When tourists leave the Punta Cana region, tanned and relaxed, they depart feeling that they’ve had a Dominican experience. Not quite.

Then there’s the under the radar La Samaná province and the little towns and beaches hidden away there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaná_(town)
http://www.godominicanrepublic.com/samana/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaná_Province

The province, the only peninsula on the Dominican Republic, juts out like a geologic afterthought from the northeastern shore of the island, Samaná Bay on its south coast, the Atlantic on its north coast. It’s a three-hour haul to its main city, Santa Barbara de Samaná, from Santo Domingo, 207 km drive on a recently improved well paved highway. Once you arrive, choices abound from active exploring to laid back touring. It has been called "a paradise of the Dominican Republic", justified even if the source is a tour agency. The scale of tourist development in Santa Barbara de Samaná, Las Galeras, and Las Terrenas is puny compared to the Punta Cana area. For now.

The trek gives you a geography lesson in the topical variety of the island - pastures, palm tree plantations, coconut forests, rice fields, sugar cane fields, a stubby mountain range formed from volcanic activity eons ago, intractable uneven landscape dominated by rocky outcroppings and a handful of blink and you missed them small towns. The steep terrain in the Sierra de Samaná is high enough to have its own micro-climate. It’s not unusual to enter in sunlight, drive through a thunderstorm in the highest elevation of 1000 feet, and return down to planet sunlight several miles later.

The capital city of Santa Barbara de Samaná is smoothed out around the edges, doesn’t have much local flavor but its bay, the second largest in the DR, is reputed to be one of its most beautiful (I have no idea how anyone can rate dozens of beaches on the DR without exhausting scores of synonyms for ‘beautiful’).

For eco-tourists, it’s a point of departure for a daily boat trip to Los Haitises National Park, a spectacular and limited access landscape of geology, flora, and fauna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Haitises_National_Park

Santa Barbara de Samaná comes to life once a year. From January to March, the waters off the small city are on the migration route of humpback whales. Thousands of tourists take boat rides to witness the whales during mating and calving season. Most whale watchers return home without exploring the coastline that leads east along the coast to the north shore of the peninsula. Too bad for them because that’s where the island culture takes a bow. Considering its beach assets and unassuming rural beauty, it’s the most unspoiled area in the Dominican Republic.

The lay of the land:

http://ontheworldmap.com/dominican-republic/large-detailed-tourist-map-of-dominican-republic.jpg
https://www.google.com/maps/@19.2069664,-70.5750546,346134m/data=!3m1!1e3
http://samanacollege.org/samanaimages/samanapdf/lgsamanastar.pdf

I would never have known about or seen any of this fabulous peninsula without connections my travel companion has in the Dominican Republic. Her Dominican friends seem to know every inch of the island they love and are proud to share it. Oh boy, El Cabito, La Palapa, Playita des Las Galeras, Playa de Rincón, Caño Frio River, D’Víejá Pan, here we come.

To be continued….photos in a day or so!

Freddy G's Dress Rehearsal for his 80th

June 2, 2018

Dear Gail and Fred,
This started out as a short thank you note for inviting me to such a warmly celebrated birthday party, a so called decade birthday for a man who celebrates them as if they’re try outs for the real ones. Like a performance of Fandango or The Natural Wonders, the short note started to lift off on its own.

When Fred exclaimed “It’s a lie!” when urged to say a few words after being serenaded, twice, in the birthday song, under a deep cobalt blue sky behind their house in Somerville. We all knew that the 80th part was a lie, one that a guy like Fred can get away with. After all, he was 70 years old for about five years a while back.

What is the gospel truth is that the glue that holds this crowd of celebrants together is music, not any kind of music, but the kind of music that draws as disparate a group of people as you’ll find at any party I’ve ever been to.

Geez, look around. Millennials to old time hippies and boomers. I’m damn certain the party is full of democrats, republicans, atheists, heretics, religious practitioners, every sexual preference, business driven to layabout characters, and all of that is checked at the door. Who comes through the door tonight is a parade of lifetime friends of Fred’s and Gail’s and patrons of their bands from saloons in Cambridge and Somerville to celebrate, the house becoming a benign gospel tent with birthday balloons hanging at the entrance.

Music from Fred-led Fandango and from Gail-led Natural Wonders is life affirming, get up and holler, dance in the aisle, groove in your seat music but that’s only the surface. Underneath, we attend their “church" for an aural salve that feeds our hungry souls, hungry for salvation and relief from an ever escalating parade of toxic media, senseless violence and politics gone awry. I walk into Toad or Sally O'Brien’s dragging the news of the day like lead shackles around my ankles. I leave in a state of euphoria that if it were alcohol would have me arrested for DUI.

“Music calls down the spirit,” Fred says. Oh, brother, does it ever.
“Everything we play is upbeat. There’s not a sad song in our catalogue, “ Gail says.
Can I have an Amen on that?

“So many people have told us over the years that listening to our music makes them feel like they’ve gone to church,” says Gail. Well, if the experience results in feeling uplifted, absolved, bonded together in a universal cloud of non-judgemental acceptance and the earth moving under our feet, what the heck else can you call it?

Forget the pulpit. Naturally wondrous sermons sing out from a bandstand that uplift and offer us the chance to go forth and be better selves, neighbors, partners…to start down the road again.

And every week Prez Susan Sullivan reminds us in an email blast the when and the where of Fandango and The Natural Wonders, when we can get right back on that road.

The location of Fred’s supposed 80th birthday party is not just a lovely home. How about a temple, a shrine to Fred and Gail's beliefs, travels, and lifetime together. When’s the last time you went to a house where they transformed a one-car garage into a “Spirit Room” filled with artifacts inspired by a trip to Cambodia where Gail and Fred found a temple acknowledging and giving equal value to Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and every religion in between. You know darn well why that rang a bell for them.

Just inside the entrance to "The Spirit Room,” right at eye level so you can’t miss it, is a photo Gail took at the temple.
“The truth is one. The paths are many.” Are you getting the idea here?

"Whatever you believe in, you can feel at home inside there,” Gail says. Does that not sound like what it feels like to be Toad or Sally O’Briens during their shows?

Perfect. Fred’s birthday party brings us right back to the source of the river, a metaphor for what’s so special about the music Gail and Fred intentionally create for us. It indeed calls down the spirit and the better natures in all of us.

And don’t think for a minute that these two are in it only as musical evangelists for our benefit.
Look at them on stage. If you can’t see that they’re deep into the spirit themselves, you ain’t paying attention.

Happy Birthday, Fred! I look forward to your next few 80th birthday parties!

Rome...28 Centuries and counting

May 15, 2018

A visit to Rome… 8 days….octo dierum in Latin. Might rhyme with tourist delirium in English

Google Rome. Over 300 entries and 27 pages before I stop scrolling. The phrase drinking water from a fire hose comes to mind.

Scrolling through the Wikipedia page for Rome is heavy lifting – history, local, regional, metropolitan and national government, geography, climate, demographics, religion, architecture, parks, gardens, fountains, aqueducts, statues, obelisks and columns, bridges, catacombs, economy, education, culture, entertainment and performing arts, tourism, fashion, cuisine, cinema, langiage, sports, transportation, the Vatican is like drinking a reservoir with a straw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome

 

The tip of the iceberg:
From about 753 BC, five periods , 28 centuries of history, any one of which make America seem like a pipsqueak of an epoch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Earliest_history

Battered over the ages by Visigoths, Vandals, a slave rebellion by Spartacus, Muslim Arabs, contests between Ghibellines and Guelphs and intra mural feudal familial bickering .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guelphs_and_Ghibellines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacus

Populations of 2,873,874 residents in 496.1 square miles as of 2017

Rome constitutes a comune speciale, is the largest both in terms of land area and population among the 8,101 comuni of Italy. It is governed by a mayor and a city council. 

Current mayor 39 year old Virginia Raggi, first woman ever elected mayor, a member of the Five Star Party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Raggi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comune

 6 political parties from Right to Left running for office in the 2018 election, the divisions of loyalty largely regional (think of USA red/blue states) with robust partisanship. Imagine a dinner conversation in an Italian family around election time!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2018/mar/05/italian-elections-2018-full-results-renzi-berlusconi

Rome ranked as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, and the most popular tourist attraction in Italy.[15] Its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Walls around Rome. Throughout its from 3 BC to 1800 AD, Rome has the longest standing set of ancient walls still partly standing. Techniques and reasons varied as the weapons to breach them evolved. They’re all named after Kings, emperors or popes.
http://roma.andreapollett.com/S4/walls.htm

Rome, like arrondissements in Paris (20), is divided into municipi (19), the Seine River dividing Paris, the Tiber River dividing the municipi in Rome. The Tiber is the 3rd longest river in Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_subdivision_of_Rome#List_of_historic_Rioni_in_Rome's_centre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber

Regions of Italy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Italy

Rome is one of 20 regions of Italy, Lazio
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/521010250622309038
Each region has its own flag!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Italy#Macroregions

Provinces of Italy
In Italy, a province (provincia) is an administrative division of intermediate level between a municipality (comune) and a region (regione). There are currently 107 provinces in Italy.

A province of the Italian Republic is composed of many municipalities (comune).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Italy

States in America are divided into counties (parishes in LA, boroughs in AL)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties_and_county_equivalents

What type of government does Italy have?
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-type-of-government-does-italy-have.html

Political parties in Italy…mind boggling!
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_Italy

Italy’s political shift to the Right: Unemployment and anti-immigration sentiment

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/01/italy-election-darker-side-politics-far-right.html

The Tiber River: 252 miles long, flows through Rome on the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea
https://www.britannica.com/place/Tiber-River

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber

Places you might have heard of - the Coliseum, St Peter’s Basilica, The Roman Forum, The Vatican,

My upcoming visit for 8 days seems preposterously short.

How big is Italy?
https://www.wanderingitaly.com/blog/article/1063/how-big-is-italy

 

The area of the US is 9,826,675 square kilometers by comparison. Thus the US is about 32.5 times the size of Italy. 
By population, Italy is the 23rd largest country in the world with 61,680,122 people living within its borders.
If Italy were a US state, it would lie between New Mexico and Arizona to be the 5th largest state by area.

Currency as of May 10, 1 Euro was $1.19 USD
https://x-rates.com/calculator/?from=EUR&to=USD&amount=1

Major cities of Italy
https://www.wanderingitaly.com/maps/italy-cities-map.html

Want to travel by train? Here are major train routes and types of rail lines.
https://www.wanderingitaly.com/transportation/italy-train-map.htm

I baven't even started on architecture, cathedrals, fountains, music...Dio mio!