pt at large

The Tamburello Curve

The Tamburello Curve

A reference to my biceps or calf muscles as I stroll the beach? Alas, no, something darker.

“”You have a very important name,” the American Airlines agent says to me as I check my baggage to return to Boston from Santiago.

What does he know that I don’t? My name might well ring bells in Brookline, MA, where I taught ten year olds for 34 years. It might cause a ripple in fund raising circles because of my successful ten-year career in raising over $300,000 for the ALS Association MA Chapter.

But here? In Santiago?"

"Ayrton Senna was the greatest Formula One driver in the world,” the agent said. “He died when he crashed on the Tamburello Curve in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.”

The Tamburello Curve was one of the most dangerous curves on the Formula One circuit. Senna had premonitions not to drive the day of the race. He suppressed them.

I’d rather have my name associated with an opera singer, maybe Luciano Tamburello, than a spot on a race course that snuffed the life of a world class Grand Prix driver from Brazil.

Could be worse. My Sicilian surname could be associated with an awful Mafia rubout.

No matter. Ayrton Senna will continue to be known for his unmatched accomplishments during his ten years at the top of the Formula One circuit rather than the name of the curve that killed him.

We never knew the name of the man who shot Liberty Valence, did we?

From Farm to Market: A Lesson

The ghost of Cesar Chavez tapped me on the shoulder at about 4 pm this afternoon. He’d been lurking in the shadows of the eucalyptus trees, waiting for the right moment to give me a message from the beyond.

After walking the farm perimeter to find the exact spot where an irrigation channel entered one side of the farm, I saw Señora Teresa busy over in the melon fields. 

“Que pasa?” I ask.

“Maleza,” she answers, pointing to the giant weeds she was pulling from the earth.

Their lush foliage was blocking sunlight to the vine-bound melons below them. They had to go. Senora Teresa was working her way row by row through the two acre field yanking them out by their roots.

 How hard can this be, I thought. How about showing some solidarity here for the field hand and pitching in. After twenty minutes I was dripping. 

"Cuanto maleza?" I asked in my basic Spanish. The melon field was feeling larger and larger as I got sweatier and felt muscle fatigue setting in. 

Teresa laughed as if I’d just told her a joke. She made sweeping gesture with her small hands that encompassed the whole overgrown field. My jaw dropped. She laughed some more.

 Many of the weed clusters had deep tubular roots. One of us would routinely be sent reeling backwards in an indecorous attempt not to land on our rear ends after a weed cluster gave in to a sustained tug. Pulling weeds felt like trying to pull a bucket of cement out of a deep well with a small rope.

 After two hours, my back was aching. We had cleared about six of the at least sixty rows. I had no idea how she kept plugging away so vigorously. Neither of us is a spring chicken. The señora is a tough one.

The ghost of Chavez - farm worker, labor leader, civil rights activist - smiled benignly as I slowly walked from the field in the fading light. Working conditions for farm workers that he fought for in the USA during a big chunk of the mid 1900s are in place here.

"If they need medical care, they go to the health insurance place (or send a relative with their ID card (carnet) to get a "bono" that entitles them to a free or very low cost visit to a local clinic or doctor and/or prescription.  They get lab tests the same way," says farm co-owner Susaan Straus.

"We pay payroll taxes in to the Chilean system monthly ahead of each paycheck for each employee in 3 categories - health care, accident/employment insurance  and retirement," she adds.

The next day, Don Pedro, 68 going on 40, and another field hand used poles with a type of sickle taped to the end to cut the heads off the weeds and effectively kill them. Teresa worked a few rows away, yanking and yanking and yanking.

If the weeds aren’t destroyed now, their seed pods will mature and create more havoc next growing season. And they’re so tough that the tractor’s furrowing blades can’t turn them under the earth. They’ll remain tangled atop the soil making a next planting of this field in about two weeks nearly impossible.

The next afternoon I spotted Ricardo pruning orange trees. More back breaking work. If oranges touch the ground they will not be saleable since they’ll ‘crease.’ The taste and texture will be fine but they won’t look perfect. And fruit that touches the ground is susceptible to invasion by spiders or other insects that harm the tree.

Ricardo has heard about my trial in the field the day before. In the spirit of giving me a full farm experience, he says, “There’s another pruning tool over here.“

Every limb that is two feet or less from the ground or is so heavy with immature fruit that it touches the ground must be pruned. I discover that orange trees have thorns. I bleed. I find out that thorns can puncture gloves.

By 9 pm the sun begins to set. I am grateful. My knees ache. My back is stiff. I'm starved. I wonder how many days I could do this before my gringo back, shoulders, arms, and hands would surrender.

My visits to the fruit section of the market will never be the same. The rainbows of artfully arranged fruit now have a history. Field workers continents away have cultivated and harvested much of it. This is the only life Teresa and Don Pedro have ever known.

A simple life. A physical life. A life totally unknown to the shoppers squeezing the oranges and tapping the melons in the Star Market.

Birthday, Chilean-Style

Sunday, January 18, 2009

I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. It is a dozen degrees below freezing in my hometown of Watertown, MA, U.S.A. I, however, am settled for a couple of weeks at a small farm in Nogales, Chile. It is Sunday, January 18, 2009, the equivalent of a late June day in the southern hemisphere, So yes, I’d be happy if all I did today was watch the sun arc from foothills of the Andes and set behind the Coastal Range that shoulders into the Pacific Ocean.

My hostess Susaan has more ambitious plans. She’s delayed the annual family birthday party she holds for her husband Ricardo, who was born ten miles away in Quillota, so I could participate in the event. I am in for a festividado grande. 

A bi-hemipsheric couple, they spend spring and summer in Boston then spring and summer in Nogales.They're ambitious, too. They've put sweat and dinero into a plan deliver an income stream from the orange trees, melons, corn, and vegetables they've been assiduously planting here for the past several years.

The farm is smack in the heart of what is called Chile’s breadbasket. You can practically hear food ripening on vines or popping out of the rich soil. Fruits and vegetables and flowers you buy at your local market might have come from within a few miles of this little farm situated on a cerrillo overlooking fifty acres of orange grove and melon and corn fields. The gentle breeze cools, the sun dazzles.

People begin arriving at noon … the party ends when it ends. Believe me, the guests are not here out of obligation. They’ve driven here to Nogales from Santiago, from Viña del Mar, Quillota, and Valparaiso. You don’t drive hours to a birthday party of a gregarious favorite father/uncle/cousin and then sit around like a wallflower. You pitch in with your presence, whether with the occasional wry remark or an outlandish story or to toast Ricardo German Ceriani Inostroza.

The invitees are young marrieds, some couples married longer than the age of the trees surrounding the farmhouse, some couples on a second marriage or having ridden a rocky road and survived, and children from assorted marriages. They have one thing in common today. They are going to have a grand time.

The adults gather under the farmhouse’s wrap around porch, the backyard swimming pool beckons the younger generation with a call as mighty as the Sirens drew Ulysses.

Add plenty of good Chilean wine, assorted liquors that match the tastes of certain aunts or uncles, limes from the trees on the farm for gin and pisco sours, soft drinks for the kids, bottled water, and you have enough for the entire entourage to relax.

It may be a universal phenomenon but for the first hour the place looks like a Shaker meeting.

The men find the makeshift bar and talk man stuff… the stock market, cost of living, politics, and tell jokes. The women congregate and confab about their children, their husbands, and things I probably couldn’t have understood even if I were fluent in Spanish.

This was a time for stories, a little gossip, and for the live wires in the family to shower some sparks with their comic routines. I laughed heartily at one comedienne’s story that brought the house down and drew the men into the audience. I was clueless about content but had no doubt about her exquisite timing, mimicry, and total control of the audience. I didn’t need to understand the language to feel a part of the goings on.

Ricardo, naturally gregarious and fun-loving, was holding his own. He’s a master at teasing people in a charmingly disarming way.

He was indeed the life of his own party, horsing around with Susaan and including everyone in his joking around. It’s easy to see why people would drive hours to be here today

Elders doted on the assorted children in the crowd and, gasp, the teenagers actually seem to enjoy being a part of the party. Kids and young teens were in the line of fire of adoration. A walk past an aunt or uncle routinely resulted in a tender pat on the head, a bear hug that lifted them off their feet, or a giant smack of a kiss on the cheek.

This was the kind of intergenerational festivity you’ve seen in foreign movies, al fresco with blue skies, ripe sunshine, gentle breeze, and filled with people who need no instruction on how to have a good time. I have dreamed of experiencing a party like this. Today is a dream come true.

 

After a couple hours of splashing and laughing and eating olives from local trees and cheese from local goats, guests are enlisted to assemble a long table along an entire side of the porch. It is heaped with huge bowls of pastas, salads, vegetables brought by the guests.

The dinner’s last course is the presentation of el torte, the birthday cake made by Ricardo’s sister Uka, Instead of the Happy Birthday song, a vigorous meringue of a chant and response is hollered, the exclamation mark being everyone raising their arms straight up to the sky. The energy from this is nearly enough to blow out every candle on the cake.

Traditions are born here for the youngest and reinforced for the oldest as they listen to the new or the well-worn stories, oral history passed on down the line, In twenty or thirty or forty years the younger ones here will be telling the stories and kissing a future generation of children on the heads or wrapping them in hugs when they pass by.

Parties like this are the glue that binds families together. Way better than weddings and funerals. All there is to do is to soak up the warmth and love and add a few drops of your own.

Snapshots of some of those drops...

swim with your sister's son...

 

sing...

hang out with your cousin...

 

share with your dog...

 

enjoy the outlandish stories...

 

that are being told...

 

relax...

 

hug your uncle, Tio Raul...

 

be wished Happy Birthday from an old friend...

 

and a nephew who can't wait for the cake...

Nogales, Chile, Part 1

ptatlarge in the southern hemisphere...again...

Chilefarms, the farm of my dear friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus, will be the center of my universe from January 15th to the 28th, my fourth annual visit (click photos to enlarge).

The sun rises over the foothills of the Andes, oversees life in rural Nogales, Chile...

and sets behind the Coastal Range that plunges into the Pacific Ocean about thirty miles to the east.

At first, it appears this is country life in the slow lane. Not so, amigo. It is like stepping into a bright room from the shadows of winter in New England. It takes time for your eyes, ears, and nose to adjust to new stimuli.

Listen. A tractor rumbles in the distance, workers call to one another across fields that grow much of what you buy in your own supermarket, bees buzz all over the clover and fruit trees. Lapwings and blackbirds hover raucously over the fields. Horses snuffle in their corrals.

Look. Wheelbarrows full of cantaloupe  and honeydew melons and corn are trucked from the fields, cows and horses fed. Hawks soar overhead. Hummingbirds zip atop the laurel and morning glories.

Sniff. The farm is in the orange and produce business but hosts  horses, chickens, dogs, one cat, and a few bulls. The pungent smells of hay, oats and manure waft from the barn. By noon everything the sun is baking emits its own subtle scent.

Something is being planted...

irrigated...

 

weeded...

replanted...

taken apart, rebuilt... 

polished, or repaired...

every minute of the day - although visitors get a pass until jet lag is overcome.

ptatlarge,with camera, is by now a fixture around the farm. His lame Spanish makes the locals laugh. At a meal when he asks for el burro, por favor, thinking he's asking for butter for his batido, people laugh and say we'd love to see you try to put a donkey on that little piece of bread! But I am welcome here. That makes all the difference in the world.

COMING NEXT... a Chilean birthday party and more goings on in Nogales, Chile, Part 2

The Year Of Magical Thinking: Didion's Play at Lyric Stage Company

The Year of Magical Thinking

Play by Joan Didion
Directed by: Eric C. Engel. Set, Matthew Whiton. Costume, Mallory Frers. Lights, Shawn E. Boyle.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through Jan. 31. Tickets, $25-$50, 617-585-5678, www.lyricstage.com

 

Joan Didion is a celebrated author. The power of her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking was through Didion’s dissection of her reaction to her husband’s death of a massive heart attack as they ate dinner together on December 30, 2003.

Didion’s a journalist, a cognitive internist. She hits the keyboard to deal with loss and grief she’s not ready to acknowledge. She writes The Year of Magical Thinking in a few months at the end of 2004, recreating the death scene, the aftermath, and her reaction to it as if gathering information for the kind of fact driven work for which she’s famous. For her, information has shamanistic powers. If she learns enough, she is convinced she can bring her husband back, make him un-dead.

Twenty months after her husband’s death, Didion’s 39-year-old daughter Quintana died of complications of pancreatitis, the last in a line of medical problems that began plaguing her a few months before her father died.

Didion was persuaded to write a play about these devastating losses.  A Broadway production starring Vanessa Redgrave ran in New York in early 2007. Entitled The Year Of Magical Thinking, it launched with chunks of text from her memoir and new work describing her daughter Quintana’s unsuccessful struggle to survive massive assaults to her system.

We should note here that Didion is an avowed control freak. She makes sense and order out of the world by observing it shrewdly, with a curious detachment that has a point of view. There’s righteousness, underlying anger, and glacial denial involved in her initial behavior after her husband’s death. Others notice. She does not.

The Lyric Stage Company’s production of the play began its run January 3, 2009.

Photo: Lyric Stage Company

Nancy E. Carroll is a craftswoman of an actress, as careful with her gesture and emotional dialing as Didion is with her written words. I looked forward to see her chomp into this role as Didion in the stage version of The Year Of Magical Thinking.

The transition from page to stage is rough passage. The production just doesn’t hum with an emotional core. Didion’s brain is a gatekeeper to her gut. Even when trying to be confessional, she is the detached observer. Didion’s surgical writing doesn’t give Carroll enough purchase to engage us with the experience of loss and grief.

The play’s opening lines, “This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it wont when it happens to you. And it will happen. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you,” fling wide the door of dramatic possibilities. But the ensuing ninety minutes feel more like a treatise than a theatrical experience.

Carroll’s delivery, like Didion’s book, is detached. Didion/Carroll observes her emotional response at arm’s length, a safe distance for her but too great for us in the audience to empathize with the woman telling the story. We know it will happen to us. It has happened to us. A theatrical production on this subject begs to be told with emotional transparency. Although Didion says she wrote it while her feelings were still raw, it doesn’t feel that way.

One of the play’s refrains, her husband’s oft-used words, “Why must you always be right,” and “Why must you always have the last word,” reveal something about the writer’s disposition. Aside from that People Magazine tidbit, there is nothing revealed in the play we don’t already know. We know we will all need to cope with the death of people we love and let them go.

We will all go through our own versions of magical thinking. Death is a visceral experience. As fine a writer as Joan Didion is, and as solid a performer Nancy E. Carroll, this production of The Year Of Magical Thinking was too much sleight of heart to be rewarding.

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade: Atwood's Tavern

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade
Monday, December 29, 2008
Atwood's Tavern
877 Cambridge Street  Cambridge, MA

ptatlarge pulled open the door at Atwood's Tavern on a chilly January night at 9 pm and walked into a wall of sound with about the same decibel level as the right field stands at Fenway Park in the seventh inning.

Everyone in the narrow space leading from the packed long bar down toward the tiny stage at the far end of the tavern had to shout to be heard over everyone else. Midway between Christmas and New Year, everybody had something to shout about.

No way, I say to myself, are Miss Tess and the Bon Ton Parade going to claw their way through this din.  During the next hour, I decide that Tess could have attracted a crowd on the heeling deck of the Titanic.

If you’ve played in places like the Dogfish Head Brewery in Rehoboth Beach DE, or Callaghan's Irish Social Club in Mobile AL, or Lee’s Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis MN, or the Town Pump Tavern in Black Mountain NC, you’re probably used to having to earn attention from the audience.

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade bust out of the gate with a groove that will last nearly an hour.  The saxophone wails, and Tess belts out a swinging  “Baby Wontcha Please Come Home.” Hell, this little parade is gonna do some shouting of its own. The thirty or so people in the scattering of tables and long wooden banquette applaud. By the end of the first set, patrons halfway to the front door have noticed there’s something special going on back here.

The first set is filled with vintage Tess, a mix of jazz standards and original songs. Her style is rooted in the past without a whiff of sentimentality. This woman can sing the daylights out of a song.

Miss Tess embellishes one chorus of the swing tempo “Saving All My Love For My Baby” by pursing her lips and producing what for all the world sounds like a muted trumpet solo.  The growing slice of audience cheers lustily.

She sings Hoagy Carmichael’s lyrics to Johnny Mercer’s  tune “Skylark” with a take that is as fresh as when the song was first recorded in 1942. The Bon Ton mix of saxophone/clarinet, upright bass, drums, and tonight's guest guitarist Bruce Millard lights the place up with their solos. Miss Tess scats a verse or two with a voice as silky as a young Ella. 

Tess follows up with Duke Ellington’s "Sophisticated Lady," the sax grooving and upright bass thumping along with her playful timing and exquisite alto voice.

By this time you realize what an appetite there is for Miss Tess's interpretations of jazz standards from the 30s and 40s. She then launches into her original compositions, many of them from her 2nd CD “Modern Vintage,” an apt description of her repertoire and style.

“This Affair” is a sly little rumba tempo and the thought is to stick around a minute, pull up a deck chair, and look for the lifeboats later. By the time the band dives into “I Don’t Need That Man,” a few intrepid members of the audience find tiny islands of floor space to dance to the groove. The rest of the crowd is tapping feet and swaying in their seats.

Tess’s musical sensibilities and her band’s versatility are a combustible mix. You’ll hear everything from Django Reinhardt gypsy riffs to ragtime rhythms to country swing to some low down Besse Smith blues.

None of it would mean a thing without the anchor of Miss Tess’s voice - “Stormy Baby” satin, or “I Only Really Miss You When I’m Stoned” sassy, or  “Child Of The Devil” earthy - Miss Tess crosses genres with exquisite  pitch and respect for the music.

So who is this woman?

Miss Tess’s childhood lullabies were the sounds of her father’s big band rehearsing in the family’s cellar right under her bedroom. After studying classical piano as a kid in Maryland, she started on the guitar as a teenager.

To our lasting benefit, she discovered Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaugh and something clicked. She moved to Boston, and formed The Bon Ton Parade - Miss Tess, guitar and vocals; Alec Spiegelman, sax/clarinet; Paul Dilley, upright bass; Gillian DeLear, drums (Rob Rudin tonight) - in 2005. Spiegelman covers an impressive range - Clarence Clemmons growl, Benny Goodman bop, and isn't afraid to go free-form Charlie Parker once in a while.

Miss Tess at 27 is on an upward trajectory. Her music is unique, her talent rich, and her hunger for success great. When’s the last time you saw an artist work the room with a sign-up sheet for her email list, talk up the patrons during a break, then attend to a problem with the sound system before the next set ?

Take my word for it, she won’t have to do this much longer. She was named a "Local on the Verge" for 2008 by the Boston Globe and recently received a 2008 Boston Music Award for "Outstanding Folk Artist of the Year.”

Whether you call her folk, roots, or jazz stylist, you’ve got to call her talented and ambitious. Check out Miss Tess's tour date schedule for proof. You wont be seeing her have to fiddle with the sound system or see her in the back room of Atwood’s Tavern for much longer.

First Set (partial  list)
"Baby Wontcha Please Come Home" - swing standard mid tempo
"Saving All My Love For My Baby" - swing standard mid tempo
"Skylark" Hoagy Carmichael lyrics, Johnny Mercer music - ballad
“Sophisticated Lady” - Duke Ellington standard
"Train' Ride to Caroline" - original uptempo
"I Dont Care If The Sun Don't Shine" - cover of Elvis Presley first Sun record, uptempo swing
"Stormy Baby" - original ballad

Second set (first five songs)
"Bye Baby" - midtempo swing standard
"What they call the Door"- original
 "Drink My Whiskey With A Straw" - original mid tempo swing
Pokey McMumbles, - original
 "Child Of The Devil" - blues standard, down ‘n gritty