pt at large

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum

New Orleans is the most enigmatic of American cities, a city in which a stew of culture and cronyism, music and mayhem, racism and revelry, politics and populism, hang out on the city's laundry line for all to see.

The city and its residents are not malleable - but they are durable. Every strata of the population seems to possess a fierce loyalty to 'their own.' After Katrina, author Dan Baum was overcome by the stories of New Orleans residents of every level.

By the time he'd interviewed and drank beers with these people, Baum knew a series of stories in the New Yorker wouldn't be enough. He needed to write a book. Whether New Orleans can revive itself is an open question. By the time you finish this book, you'll care if it succeeds.

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans -
The Hidden History of a Beloved and Haunted City Told Through The Intersecting Lives Of Nine Remarkable Characters

by Dan Baum

We all know that hurricanes can swallow up New Orleans. What we don’t know, unless we’ve been there, is that New Orleans can swallow up reporters. The New Yorker sent Dan Baum to New Orleans to write about the effect Katrina had upon its residents.

In the course of interviewing scores of people, Baum got into the crosshairs of a benign Crescent City voodoo. He and his wife moved to New Orleans for several months in 2007 to complete interviewing, researching and breathing the air of the city as it began to put its lipstick back on and look for the next party.

Contradictions in New Orleans are as thick as shrimp in gumbo. Baum began to grasp how on earth New Orleanians can accept a culture in which corruption and bureaucracies filled with incompetents are the order of the day.

In the preface to Nine Lives, Death and Life in New Orleans, Baum writes,” Stop thinking about New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States and start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.”

While he doesn’t downplay the poverty, lethal crime, drugs, police brutality, he begins to see another face of the city, an attitude that is steeped in but transcends the food, architecture, and music. It’s a story of everyday people who ended up in extraordinary circumstances after Katrina - people including a millionaire Mardi Gras kingpin from the white Garden District, a retired streetcar repairman from the Ninth Ward, a transsexual from St. Claude Avenue, a trumpet playing coroner, a white policeman from Lakeview, a high school band leader who treats the kids as if they were his own, and a bad luck black ex-con from the Goose, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

They willingly, perhaps gratefully, sat with Baum while he collected bits and pieces of their lives that became part of the book.  As Baum found out, New Orleanians are not linear storytellers. The result is a kaleidoscopic tale, told through the eyes of nine characters, that covers the fifty years from hurricane Betsy to Hurricane Katrina. It takes an effort to keep all the characters straight, but over time they satisfyingly drifted into sharper focus.

It’s a tribute to Baum that he found enough specks of universal humanity in each of their stories to make us care about each of them and root for them to reconnect with their lives in the months after Katrina annihilated what they called home.

The nine main characters identified friends, relatives, and associates whom Baum and his wife interviewed for relevant background. They conducted nearly one hundred interviews and amassed over one million words that they boiled down to the final 120,000-word text. A four-page appendix lists every character interviewed and the dates of interviews. The book is massively authentic.

If you keep turning the barrel of a kaleidoscope long enough, similar patterns emerge. The thread that ties together all of the characters, regardless of race, social class, gender is that they all felt a connection, by blood, friendship, or profession, to “their people” - they didn’t always agree with them but they stood by them through thick and thin.

I spent two weeks in New Orleans and southwest Louisiana last August writing publicity material for an October “Help Re-Build New Orleans” Fund Raiser that was hosted in Boston.  Proceeds of the event were donated to Common Ground Relief, a non-profit group that organized volunteers to rebuild houses in the Lower Ninth Ward.

“The house we’re sitting in was covered in 18 feet of water for 3 weeks. Every single-story house around here was under water,” Thom Pepper, the Operations Director of Common Ground Relief said in his "office," a cramped storage room in a rebuilt house on Deslonde Street. You could count on one hand the original houses still standing on that street.

Looking two hundred yards behind Common Ground Relief’s headquarters, I saw where the barge pierced the levee in the Industrial canal, the gobbled up houses filled with vines and festooned with disgorged refrigerators and dinner plates, and blank slabs of concrete where houses had gone AWOL - floated away or obliterated by the surge from the breach. Eighty percent of the Ninth was under at least 6 feet of water. For months.

The divides in the city, cultural, racial, and geographic, are real. There are wards of the city in which I would have felt like an intruder. But I know that inside those neighborhoods were people like the people I "met" in Nine Lives, people whose stories are the fabric of this city.

Baum’s book is not a polemic or prescriptive. It is a close to the ground story of people who make the city what it is, a city acutely aware of its shortcomings and its past and one that prefers to live in the moment.

Photos

1. (Top) Screen saver in Common Ground Relief office on Deslonde Street, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, in August, 2008

2 and 3: by Paul Tamburello, Deslonde Street 2008, Lower Ninth Ward,  New Orleans

Captain Paul Cuffe: Westport's Most Illustrious Resident

The shadow of the Westport brig Traveler passed over the Quaker Meeting House on Main Road on Saturday, June 13. A gathering of descendants of Captain Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), state and local officials, students and teachers from the Paul Cuffee Charter School in Providence, and local residents packed the Meeting House to honor the 250th anniversary of Cuffe’s birth and witness the re-dedication of the Cuffe monument originally placed in front of the Meeting House in 1913.

The 3 P.M. program featured praise, poetry, and song. After introductory remarks by Jenny O’Neill, Director of the Westport Historical Society, and Lee Blake, President of the New Bedford Historical Society. Candida Rose sang a rousing version of  “Lift Every Voice,” written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson (titled by Weldon as ‘Negro National Anthem’ in the event’s beautifully designed program).

“The South coast has a rich history of people of color who worked hard to have this country live up to the ideals of liberty and justice for all. The members of the society endeavor to tell the story. Paul Cuffe placed this country on the road to civil rights and mutual respect, changing our society profoundly as we journey along that road, “ Ms. Blake said.

Citations honoring Cuffe were read by Chair of the Westport Board of Selectmen Steve Ouellette and State Representative Michael Rodrigues and presented to Cuffe descendant Susan (Su) Almeida.

The Westport citation reads that Cuffe “carved out a successful career as a farmer, mariner, whaling merchant, and ship builder, becoming one of the wealthiest African Americans of his time.”

“His entrepreneurial spirit and religious faith led Cuffe to struggle against racial discrimination everywhere, to challenge taxation without representation and to envision a dream to return slaves to Africa and to create an environment for economic independence and pride amongst Africans.”

After Ms. Almeida’s welcome to the assemblage, David Burnham, founder of The Paul Cuffee School  in Providence, told the gathering that the 440 student K - 8 charter school is so popular that “acceptances are by lottery rather than by choosing students by talent, ethnic or economic backgrounds. I believe Paul Cuffee (there are two variations of spelling of Cuffe’s name) would have approved of this.”

Dr. Stewart Kirkaldy, prominent former member of Westport Meeting who now lives in Vermont, spoke about Quaker History, Westport Meeting, and Paul Cuffe.

Dr. Kirkaldy recounted Cuffe’s introduction to Westport Meeting, his decision to build a school on his 140 acre property on Drift Road in 1790 to educate children, free, of any race, which may have been the first integrated school in America, and Cuffe’s vision to return freed slaves back to Africa and a life of economic independence.

Born of Kofi Slocum, an African American freed slave, and Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag, on Cuttyhunk Island, Cuffe made his way to New Bedford and eventually Westport. His entrepreneurial disposition and innate curiosity led him to learn to read, write, and navigate.

Dr. Kirkaldy cited Cuffe’s 1780 petition that the General Court of Dartmouth exempt him from paying taxes since he did not have the right to vote. The Commonwealth eventually provided equal rights in the new Massachusetts constitution in 1783. "He spoke truth to power to a degree that few others have done," Kirkaldy said.

Dr. Kirkaldy noted Cuffe’s vision to use his beloved brig Traveler to transport free slaves to relocate to Africa. As noted in the Paul Cuffe exhibit in the Macomber Community House next door, the “Back To Africa” movement, Cuffe “envisioned a triangular trade between Africa, Europe, and America, a dream that encompassed not simply the return of slaves back to Africa, but a dream for creating an environment for economic independence and pride among Africans.”

 Enthusiastic Paul Cuffee School second graders Federico Martinez and Anissa Rivera read first grader Ayanna Rowe’s poem about Paul Cuffe.

After a spirited singing of “The Old Ship of Zion,” by Candida Rose, Carl Cruz (a "collateral descendant" of Cuffe), Louise Parsons, George Salvador, and Albert Lees and Laurie Robertson- Lorant read excerpts from Captain Cuffe’s letters and logs.

The crowd of approximately 200 gathered outdoors to watch Cuffe’s great, great, great, great grandson Robert Kelley place a wreath at the Paul Cuffe monument next to the Meeting House, whose construction Mr. Cuffe substantially underwrote in 1813.

With Mr. Carl Cruz singing at the head of a procession, the entire group wound its way to the Cuffe gravesites behind the Meeting House. After a moment of silence, Mr. Cruz invited descendants and others to lay flowers at the markers and invited one and all to the Macomber Community House for refreshments and a look at the Cuffe Exhibit inside.

Ms. Blake noted that the event was one year in the making and acknowledged the committee of Westport and New Bedford Historical Society members for their labor of love in organizing it.

Photos: Paul Tamburello

Photo 1: Robert Kelley (at left), great, great, great, great grandson of Paul Cuffe, asks for a moment of silence during 250th anniversary of Captain Paul Cuffe's birth. Cuffe descendants and Paul Cuffee Charter School of Providence students prepare to lay flowers at the re-dedication of the monument originally placed at the Friends Meeting House on Main Road in 1913.

Photo 2: Second graders Federico Martinez and Anissa Rivera read first grader Ayanna Rowe’s poem about Paul Cuffe.

Photo 3: Carl Cruz of New Bedford, a collateral descendant of Captain Paul Cuffe and one of the organizers of the 250th anniversary of Captain Paul Cuffe's birth. leads the group in singing "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands" while students from the Paul Cuffee Charter School in Providence look on. After flowers were placed on the graves of Paul Cuffe and Alice Pequit,the crowd gathered in the Macomber Meeting House for refreshments and to view the Paul Cuffe exhibit set up by the Westport Historical Society.

David Mamet: Ducks and Sex

Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago
A Double Bill of two of David Mamet’s early comedies
Zero Arrow Theater
Cambridge, MA
June 11-28, 2009

It felt like David Mamet used both ends of a telescope to write these two short plays about friendship now playing at the Zero Arrow Theater in Cambridge. For Duck Variations he put the big end of the tube to his eye to look far into the distance of senior citizenship. For the other he used the spyglass to get a close up of two young men in all their callow, fragile, testosterone-addled, 1976 minds.

It’s one thing to grasp how completely Mamet nailed male insecurity in the night's second play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. After all, he authored it when he was 27 and living smack in the middle of the disco 1970s. The needle on the record album was stuck on SEX, at least as far as the two twenty-something men in the play are concerned. The two young women are less deeply etched in Mamet’s short play and seem to be foils for the men’s misogynistic feelings. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet plumbs the effect one alpha friend can have on a less dominant one. If you’re squeamish about coarse sexual language, rent a movie and stay home.

There isn’t a pair of knockers, excuse me, that Bernard doesn’t see without objectifying and sexualizing. His experience with them seems to be rooted in his imagination. And is the way he so aggressively berates homosexuals a sign of homophobia or of a self-loathing closeted young man? In any case, Bernard's effect on his pal Dan is toxic. How much of Dan's behavior with his love relationship with Deborah is influenced by a know-it-all (fear-it-all?) Bernard and how much of it is men’s genetic inability to relate intimately with women?

Bernard (Tim Eliot), Dan (Scott Lyman), Deborah (Susannah Hoffman), and Joan (Laura Parker) are members of the A.R.T. Institute For Advanced Theater Training.

It’s another thing to witness the evening’s first play, Duck Variations. How would a twenty five year old Mamet be able to convincingly grasp the worn-as-an-old-flannel-shirt interplay of two old timers sitting on a park bench within quacking distance of a pond.

This is Mamet the intellectual having fun with a witty conversation between two smart-alecky pals whose friendship can tolerate, even flourish in, disagreement. This feels like a sunny, funny, poetically dazzling version of Waiting For Godot.  Actors Thomas Derrah as Emil Varec and Wil Lebow as George S. Aronowitz have known each other for more than two decades. And (excuse me for saying so Tommy and Wil), they’re pretty close to the stage ages of the two characters. No need to artificially add gray to the hair or beard.

A conversation about the ducks - flying overhead, waddling on shore, paddling insouciantly on the pond - morphs into a conversation that alternates from bumper car aggressiveness to wing-men flying off into the wild blue yonder together.

The ideas boing around like the silver orb in a pinball machine. George’s observation of the duck formation overhead leads to a treatise on leadership, group energy, mortality, commitment and destiny. That's only the first scene. The two actors are a two-man formation. One takes the lead through the intellectual firmament and the other is right on his tail, ready to take the lead with a contradictory idea built on what the other has said.

From time immemorial, park benches have been launch pads of conversations from the ridiculous to the sublime. This little play oscillates between both and is it ever fun. The title of each segment, highlighted by giant cue cards illuminated stage left and right before each variation, is the first sentence either George or Emil iterates. Who knew a mallard could inspire contemplations about the order of the universe, the contents of the stratosphere, air pollution, life, death, human nature - and once in a while something gloriously bogus like Emil's theory about the flammability of the ocean, to which George asks, “Did you make that up?” -  they're not beyond embroidering on a toothpick of truth. Whether made up or not, you wonder what these guys are smoking and wouldn’t mind scoring some after the show.

Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity In Chicago suggest Mamet is working out some Jekyll and Hyde feelings about the fibers that weave together male friendship. In Sexual Perversity the friendship is a straightjacket that squeezes the life out of it. In Duck Variations it’s the warm cardigans in which two gray haired men fit comfortably.

We’re left to ourselves to figure out what the trajectory is between young men and older men but one message is clear. Choose your friends wisely.

April Hall: Late Better Than Never

April Hall
June 16, 2009
Arsenal Center For The Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA  02472
2009 Summer Pops Series First Concert
Tickets $15 Adults, $10 Children, Free Parking

April Hall put some serious energy into the concert at around 8:30 PM, which was unfortunate since the set began forty five minutes earlier. Hall and her trio were the opening concert for the Arsenal Center for the Arts 2009 Summer Pops Series.

The hour-long set featured many songs on Hall's recent album "Fun Out Of Life," the emphasis on ballads, with a handful of upbeat songs for balance. Ms. Hall sang the songs but didn’t seem to feel them. And when you’re singing songs like “How Deep Is The Ocean,” if you don’t feel them, they don’t fly.

Her chops tonight didn’t square with the reputation of this Berkelee graduate who has appeared on stage with the likes of Al Jarreau, Rosemary Clooney, Dinah Shore, and Livingston Taylor.

Lovely ballads were frequently marred by what seemed to be Hall’s skidding off pitch. It happened so often I began to wonder whether she purposely chooses to stretch her pitch as a signature style.

The audience in the partly filled Charles Mosesian Theater was appreciative enough. Perhaps I was missing something. One thing I didn’t miss was the enormous talent of her trio.

Marshall Wood, on upright bass, Les Harris, Jr. on percussion, and Ben Cook on Kursweil Roland electric piano, found the mood of each song with every solo they played - applause ringing from the audience, school-age kids to retirées, after each.

Then came the Count Basie/Jimmy Rushing song “I May Be Wrong But I Won’t Be Wrong Always.” Ms. Hall switched from cruise control to charge. The song shot right across the footlights and landed like a howitzer in the middle of the audience.  There had been hints of Hall’s gospel and blues background here and there during the concert. Where had  Miss Hall been hiding this all night?

Hall returned with a one song encore, “Please Send Me Someone To Love,” in which she and the trio jammed home. She had finally arrived.

Set List

“My Baby Just Cares For Me” Ballad
“The Face I Love” Samba tribute to Astrud Gilberto, Hall adding creditable scatting at end
“I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry” Ballad
“The Best Thing For You Would Be Me”  Peppy uptempo song
“Crazy In Love” Ballad
“Maybe I’m Right And Maybe I’m Wrong” Uptempo
“How Deep Is The Ocean” Ballad
“You’ve Changed” Ballad
“I May Be Wrong But I Won’t Be Wrong Always” Swing tempo, lively, with feeling
“Please Send Me Someone To Love” energetic finale

Next concert: Harlem Quartet, June 24, Summer Pops concerts begin at 7:30 PM

Top photo: April Hall web site
Bottom: pt at large

Bloomsday, 2009, Yes...

Today is Bloomsday... yes...

Wikipedia excerpt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo of James Joyce by Bernice Abbott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sixth Annual River Run: A Westport River Paddle

 

6th Annual Westport River Watershed Alliance River Run: Crawlers, Sweepers, Kayaks and Canoes Swirl to the Head of Westport on Saturday, June 13, 2009

Whether racing the 8.5 mile Challenge course or paddling the 3.5 mile Family Fun route, families and teams made up a huge chunk of the participants in the Sixth Annual Kayak Race and Family Fun Paddle organized by the Westport River Watershed Alliance and held on June 13.

There was a definite peanut butter and jelly feel to the event as the morning unfolded. Grandparents climbed into canoes with their children and their children’s children.  Mini-squadrons with familial bonds swelled the ranks. Lots of teenagers, their parents bobbing around somewhere nearby, traded in iPods for paddles.

Nine vessels of the colorful field of 78 kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards in the race paddled under the DeVeuve banner. Three generations of the family, ages from 15 to 74 (we promised not to reveal this Westport paddler’s identity), accounted for eleven of the approximately 100 paddlers that assembled at the Hix Bridge boat landing.

Bright yellow T-shirts identified Team SMS. The WRWA happens to be a customer of SMS Plumbing and Heating owner Stephen Soares, who happens to be engaged to Corey Gifford, grand-daughter of Norma Judson, who happens to be a big supporter of the WRWA, whose President Gay Gillespie happened to ask Soares if he’d like to enter this year’s race. Mr. Soares fielded a team of nine, if you include two six year olds, who added enthusiasm but not much paddle power to Soares’ and Gifford’s canoe on Saturday. A canoe and three kayaks held the other five members of the SMS  team.

Argh, matey, what were those five strange looking vessels lining up for the 10 A.M. Challenge Race? Paddleboards, the latest rage in recreational craft on the west coast, had made their first appearance in the River Run.

“Paddleboards are long surfboards but more buoyant,” Sam Ladd, Co Owner of Osprey Sea Kayaks, said.  “Their design has roots in ancient Polynesia, There are two types of paddle boards. First, there are Stand Ups called Sups (stand up paddle boards) or Sweepers, which you paddle with one oar. Next are Prone types, called Crawlers, on which you lie prone or kneel and propel with your hands. “

Photo: Crawler and Sweeper

The Casey clan of Newport and Little Compton entered three exotic “crawlers” and added to the family feel of the event.

At precisely 10 A.M., Sam Ladd shouted, “Go!” The 16 Challenge Class entrants - crawlers, kayaks, canoes, and one sweeper, headed south to curl around Great Island before turning back north to the Head of Westport.

The real fun began a few minutes later when Ms. Ladd ordered the 63 boats in the Family Fun to push out to the water for the required safety instructions. An eclectic assortment of rented and custom-made kayaks and canoes with an equally eclectic group of paddlers shoved off into the water just south of Hix Bridge. Looking down at the colorful swarming mass from the bridge was like peering through a kaleidoscope.

Ms. Ladd then sent them to the start line just north of the bridge. At 10:30 - Whoosh! Paddles began to windmill furiously. The whole mass of plastic lurched forward, visions of medals or sandwiches, depending upon how strongly the competitive juices were flowing, propelled the paddlers.

About an hour later, cheered on by friends and organizers, the first boats began squeezing through the narrow passage leading into the Head.

Spread out along the emerald green grassy bank at the Head, paddlers grazed on sandwiches and watermelon, kids played toss games, little kids colored and had their faces painted, and medals were given out for every conceivable category (see list below). The sun made a guest appearance after days and days of being AWOL. All was right with the world.

 “I liked being neck and neck with people on other boats,” Brian Cormier, 16, said as he and Adam Doerr, 14, both Westporters, finished first in the Family Fun tandem kayak division.

The Casey clan, Phil from Little Compton, his brother Marty and his son Justin, both of Newport, brought their “crawlers.”

 "This is a good course with interesting sights. It's challenging without being overwhelming, " Justin Casey said.

“We were in the Aquidneck Island Paddle last year, a 38 mile relay race around Aquidneck Island to raise money for the Aquidneck Land Trust and Lucy’s Hearth,” Phil Casey said. They plan to return next year. Who knows how much more competition they’ll have then.

No matter how many boats enter the race next year, volunteer organizers Anne Fitzgerald and Larry Hookey will make it smooth paddling for the whole fleet. With their committee of volunteers and Westport River Watershed Alliance staff, they begin planning the race each January. The duo has tweaked the event to improve it each year since they began in 2004. Sponsorships from 43 local businesses show that the community is behind this event, which showcases the unique beauty of the Westport River.

Some day, teenagers like Brian Cormier and Adam Doerr may become stewards of the river. They’ll know it from the waterline up.

SIDEBAR 1
Family Fun River Run Results

Single Kayak Overall
1. Chris Barnes
2. Mike Spadea

Under 18 Single Kayak
1. Nicholas Gonsalves
2. Jan Costanza

“AARP” Kayaks
1. Robert Barnes
2. Deb Crossley

Double Overall - kayak or canoe
1. Brendan Cormier and Adam Doerr
2. Hilary and Curt Carlson

Double Under 18 - kayak or  canoe
1. Joe and Noah Doerr
2. Grace and Asa Sweetser

Double “AARP” kayak or canoe
1. Barbara and Jim Carlin
2. Joan Hodgson and Susan Miller

Challenge Class Results
Challenge Single kayak
1. Bill Starz
2. Murray Lord

Challenge Single “AARP” kayak
1. Phillip Sherman
2. Alex Voikas

Challenge Double kayak
1. John Poulton and Janet Sheridan
2. Cathleen Dionne and Mike Lawrence

Outrigger
1. Wally Houghton and Paula Flint

Clan Awards
1. SMS Plumbing
2. DeVeuve Families
3. Mayer Families

Paddleboards
1. David Fitzgerald
2. Phil Casey

Clan Award for Paddleboards
The Casey Family
Family Fun Totals: 41 single kayaks  or canoes, 21 single kayaks  or canoes
Challenge Totals:  8 single kayaks, 3 double kayaks, 5 paddleboards

PHOTOS
1. Team SMS ready to rock: Ron Isidore, Connie Isidore of New Bedford (one canoe), Stephen Soares, Corey Gifford of Westport (canoe with the Stephen’s daughter Morgan Millhomme and Jacob Darosa, both 6  years old), kayakers Kate Goodwin,Tiverton, Danny Darosa, New Bedford “South End,” and Julian Gamache.

2. Marty Casey of Newport aboard his “crawler” paddleboard and Mike Simpson of Little Compton aboard his standup paddleboard, a ‘sweeper.”

3. Three generations cross the finish line: Catherine Williams of Westport, grand-daughter Anya, Laura Senes, and William’s son Owen Dodge.

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

Sponsors of the 2009 WRWA River Run (not published in the Shorelines edition)

A.J. Potter Jr. & Sons Inc.
BankFive
Bittersweet Farm
Branco Landscaping
Country Woolens
Dartmouth Building Supply, Inc.
Dennis Talbot Builder
Dr. Joseph Boivin, Optometrist
Doug Brown - Durfee Buffington Insurance Agency
Fernandes & Charest P.C.
Graphix Plus
Handy Hill Creamery
JOALS Garage Inc.
Lapointe Insurance
Lawton Builders
Lees Market
Lees Oil Service, Inc.
M & R Feed Store, Inc.
MA Cultural Council
Marguerite's Restaurant
Mattie Imports
Mid-City Scrap
N.A.C. Security & Stereo Systems, Inc.
Ocean's Catch
Partners Village Store
Rent-a-Jon
Sage Environmental
Sakonnet Bay Manor
Sakonnet Vineyards
SMS Plumbing & Heating LLC
State Representative Michael J. Rodrigues
Sylvia Group of Insurance Agencies
The Bayside Restaurant
Tim's Lawn Care
TMJ Orthopedics
Village Bicycle
Village Pizza
Walden Forest Conservation
Westport Apothecary
Westport Bait & Tackle
Westport Chiropractic
Westport Federal Credit Union
Westporthappenings.com

The White Owls: Blues With Bite

The White Owls
Toad
Live Music 7 Nights a Week, Never a cover!
1912 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02140

With a name like “The White Owls” you might expect this band to be playing oldies in the recreation room of senior citizen centers. Nope.

Last night they played their bi-weekly gig at Toad, the mighty, mini, bandbox of a saloon in Porter Square, Cambridge, MA.

There was Dennis Brennan, singing his heart out with the “stormy, husky, brawling, city of big shoulders” Chicago style that Carl Sandburg would have loved. Brennan's catalog of blues songs is prodigious. His all-out style can pin your ears back.

Brennan’s crew tonight, Steve Sadler (laptop steel), Milt Friedman  (guitar), Dean Cassel (bass), and Andy Plaisted (drums), are no pretenders. They are intense.

Brennan sets up most songs with a growl and riff of his harmonica, lights into the lyrics, and nods at Sadler, who gives the song the sonic treatment of a jet melodically breaking the sound barrier. Friedman captures Sadler’s licks and bends them into his own. Cassel’s steady bass lines and Plaisted’s precise percussion wrap like a vise around Brennan’s slinky, sexy, or rollicking blues.

In the hands of singers and players who feel it, blues has no expiration date. The group of five college-aged girls perched on barstools and Gen Xers, Yers, and who knows what-ers are as plugged into this band as the sizeable group of Boomers scattered about. A few of the Boomer Fems standing in back are grooving as unselfconsciously - and provocatively - as they might have before receiving their AARP memberships in the mail.

The White Owls rip through a bluesy Willie Dixon song, a slow tempo "Blues With A Feeling" by Little Walter, and a growling version of "Don’t Lie To Me," which Sadler, the Alpha Dog of Laptop Steel Artists, plays like a freight train fueled by grits.

Brennan’s quite a sight, sort of a less craggy Keith Richard face, a porkpie hat cocked atop an explosion of curly brown hair. The music comes from some steaming pit in his guts. No stage posturing or engagement with the crowd on this night. Just fabulous covers of traditional blues, sung like he meant it and felt it. No way his sidemen can do anything but bring their own A game to the party - and they do.

Brennan’s been playing around Boston since 1992.  His Dennis Brennan Band plays roots and indie rock, much written by Brennan, at The Lizard Lounge on Wednesday nights. Different style and musicality but the same intensity. His most recent album, “Engagement,” studio and live tracks, met with critical acclaim. He’s already a local legend. He deserves more.

If you’ve never heard him before, check out the Toad calendar for the White Owls next show.  It’s a great way to get your first dose of Brennan washed down with a heaping platter of Blues.

Partial Set list - First Set
 (Dennis didn’t introduce any songs. I could only figure out three of seven !)

I Love The Life I Live by Willie Dixon
Blues With A Feeling by Little Walter (Marion Walter Jacobs)
Don’t Lie To Me by Chris Bell, Alex Chilton

Photo courtesy of Brennan's website

Mother G Rights A Wrong: A Robert Johnson, Jr. Play

"MOTHER G"
A play by Robert Johnson, Jr.
Directed by: Jacqui Parker. Set, Peter Colao. Lights, Jonathan Bonner.
Part of the 9th African-American Theatre Festival, presented by Our Place Theatre Project
At: Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre, through Friday. Tickets $15-$35, 617-933-8600
May 27 - June 6
www.bostontheatrescene.com

The Ninth Annual African-American Theater Festival kicks off this week with "Mother G", a play penned by local playwright Robert Johnson, Jr.

The play documents a tumultuous week in a specific Dorchester, MA church community in 1963. All is not well in the New Beacon Baptist Church. An agitated young singer in the church’s choir comes to Mother G, the spiritual leader of the church, to disclose that she’s pregnant and that the father is none other than the charismatic pastor of their church.

A ‘he said/she said’ conflict ensues in which the male church council votes to retain the pastor. The fault lines aren’t exclusively along gender lines as people take sides and blame the girl or condemn the preacher. Incensed and having more than enough evidence of the pastor’s guilt, the women, led by Mother G, refuse to return to the flock and successfully petition to form their own church.

Eventually, they are joined by some of the men, who have sufficient doubt in the pastor and are stung, and perhaps shamed, by Mother G’s fearless conviction that a wrong must be righted.

The whole drama takes place at a time of political and cultural upheaval in the mid sixties. Fluent in the verses of the Bible, Mother G did more than work tirelessly to organize the women in the church to sing, provide food, and support the men in authority. When it became clear that a man trusted to shepherd them spiritually had breached trust and tarnished the church, she took action. Feminism was in its infancy but Mother G was way ahead of her time.

Singing the music of the gospel has been a source of comfort, conviction, and cohesion in many Christian denominations, perhaps no more emotionally important than in black churches, where song was one of the only sources of comfort since the years of slavery. Playwright Johnson uses the church’s choir, mostly women, to link the scenes of the play.

Jason Cross as Reverend James Mercy and Linda Starks-Walker as Mother G’s sister transformed the theater seats into pews. You didn't just listen to his words or her songs -  you felt them in your guts. You saw the sweat form on their brows and their bodies become animated by a religious conviction that bordered on ferocity. The divided world outside disappeared in the thunderclap of their visceral performances.

Linda Starks-Walker brought down the house with several full-bore body and soul gospel songs that resonate with you long after the two and a half hour play at The Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre. Singing didn’t change laws or right injustices but it certainly dissipated some of the sting and helped one to keep on keeping on in the face of it.

Jason Cross’s portrayal of the charismatic pastor hit the stage like a lightning bolt. With soaring rhetoric and theatrical mannerisms, Cross nailed the effect a preacher can have on a congregation. It's easy to see how he's increased the membership, which fills the church's coffers. That a man who was in charge of shepherding his flock took advantage of one of its most vulnerable made his fall from grace so much more unforgivable.

Latonya Gregg as Mother G, initially incredulous that her pastor could violate his position as moral leader, gathers evidence then plays her role with quiet determination. She stands up, alone at first, and won’t back down.

There are places where the pace drags and where important dialogue isn’t explored. When young Al Burgan (Garry Bates) complains that the women should be taking their message to the streets instead of sealing themselves up in the church, an audible affirmative response ripples through the audience. Perhaps that’s grist for Mr. Johnson’s next play.

As a fifteen-year-old boy, the playwright watched his mother organize opposition to the corrupt pastor of their own church. Her courage and persistence were a moral beacon to Mr. Johnson, who never forgot her willingness to take a stand in a time when it was nearly unthinkable to do so.

I’m used to being in the racial majority for the plays I write about. Not so tonight. Of the 200 people in attendance, you could have fit the number of white people in a freight elevator.  I wondered whether I’d laugh or be moved at the same things or whether I’d feel like an outsider.  It turned out the same way it does for most theater- sometimes I laughed or responded when others did and sometimes I didn’t.

Peering over the racial divide, I’ve wondered how much are we alike and how much are we different. As our president has said, there’s more that unites us than divides us. That rang true as I witnessed this play.

Photo by Robert Johnson: The choir - (from left) Garry Bates, Lakeisha Gilliard, David J. Curtis (back), Marvelyn McFarlane (front, as Hazel), Linda Starks-Walker, Alphonzo Moultrie, and Latonya Gregg, as Mother G.

Romance: Mamet's Politically Incorrect Courtroom Farce

"Romance"
A play by David Mamet
Directed by: Scott Zigler
Set, J. Michael Griggs.
Costumes, Miranda Hoffman. Lights, D.M. Wood. Sound, David Remidios
At: Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through June 7.
Tickets, $25-79, 617-547-8300, www.americanrepertorytheater.org

The only romance in “Romance,” David Mamet’s courtroom farce playing its last week at the American Repertory Theater, is Mamet’s love of language and the way he delights in making us squirm with his use of it. 

Prominently displayed in the theater lobby on a video screen crawl is “WARNING: this performance may offend lawyers, Arabs, judges, politicians, cats, Jews, historians, Arab-Americans, Catholics, rabbits, rabbit lovers, pedophiles, chiropractors, chiropodists, courtroom prosecutors, gays, liberals, Republicans, Episcopalians…” and that’s just the beginning.

 “If you’re here with your mom,” says an actor who introduces the play and touts the Mamet Festival in progress here, “good luck to you.” Yep. Two acts and two hours later you’ll have heard every kind of racist, homophobic, stereotypical, and ethnic slur in the book delivered in gleeful over the top performances by every man on the stage.

For the most part the play transpires in an urban courtroom presided over by an allergy stricken judge addled by enough antihistamines to kill a horse. He takes jurisprudence down lanes with absurd asides that become strangely relevant and show the all too human side of what we politely call human nature.

The first act contains three scenes. First, a courtroom in which a man is being interrogated by a prosecutor for an act we’re never quite sure of, officiated by a judge whose attention is hilariously drained by his gulping pills for his allergies, a bailiff who’s counting and supplying them, and a defense attorney who’s trying to keep his client out of jail.

The next two scenes, one in which the prosecutor and his gay lover engage in a lover’s quarrel and another in which the defense attorney meets with his client to advise him on a courtroom strategy, follow. This scene is as politically incorrect as anything you’ll ever witness. You will laugh - and wonder whether you should feel guilty about it - and squirm, even in the darkened theater, at the stereotypes and slurs that are being hurled around like cultural hand grenades.

Admit it, these are things that have run through your mind in some of your less than charitable moments. At least for me. And David Mamet knows it and aims at it with a sawed-off shotgun sense of humor.

Have you ever wondered whether Shakespeare was a Jew? Or gay? Or whether a chiropractor could hatch a plan for peace between the Arabs and the Jews? Thoughts like this ricochet off the second act and take off in a circus of non-sequitur absurdity. By the time the play is over, Mamet has reduced the reasons for conflict to absurdity and found a kinder gentler layer underneath it. The chiropractor’s plan for peace in the Mid-East, a theme that has been lofted into the play’s firmament since the opening minutes when a parade/demonstration noisily passes under the court’s window, is wacky but it acts as an undercurrent that fits right in with the contesting that’s going on in the courtroom.

At the center of all this is Will Lebow as the judge. Lebow might be the most gifted comic actor in town. His rich and malleable voice, impeccable timing, and zany characterization are at the play’s core and the foil for the other actors. Thomas Derrah (Prosecutor), Jim True-Frost (Defense Attorney), and Remo Airaldi (Defendant) are wonderfully realized but Lebow gobbles up the stage with his presence in a way that fuels his acting partners to push their own envelopes.

Mamet pens the churlishness with glee. Nearly lost in the hilarity is Mamet's deeper message. At one point, the judge muses, “How can you have world peace when you cant even have it in your own house?” 

The courtroom chaos is resolved in a way that would make Shakespeare grin, no matter what his religious affiliation. You’ve laughed, you've been touched, and you wonder whether we’ll ever get it right when it comes to live and let live.

Photo: Will LeBow (center) presides over his courtroom and (from left) Carl Foreman, Jim Senti, and Jim True-Frost. (Michael J. Lutch)

Note: “Romance” is part of  a Mamet celebration, "Sex, Satire, Romance, and Ducks," at the ART. Mamet’s "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" and "Duck Variations", two of his early comedies, will play at the Zero Arrow Theater from June 11 to June 28.

Billy Novick and Guy Van Duser: The Two-Man Big Band

Billy Novick and Guy Van Duser
The Amazing Things Arts Center
160 Hollis Street
Framingham, MA
May 23, 2009

You wonder how two guys, one with clarinet, the other with acoustic guitar, can make such a joyful racket. They’ve been playing together in one form or another, for over twenty-five years, about three times longer than most marriages last. Like a married pair, these two can finish each others sentences - on a music scale - and can crack each other up with a fresh take on a song they’ve played a hundred times.

That’s what it sounded like at the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham last week. Billy Novick is the genial chief of patter, announcing the pedigree of a song and anecdotes that connect with the tune in some offbeat way. He’s as at home improvising between songs as he is playing them. Intense as Novick is loose, Guy Van Duser is the occasional straight man for Novick’s set-ups. He lets his fingers to the talking, which holds up his side of the act eloquently.

Their music is steeped in swing-oriented jazz from the twenties to the forties and they can play the daylights out of it. From their first romp through “Wolverine Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton, the great transitional figure between jazz and swing, their musical mastery was on full display.

The grins and nods while they plug away solo or in tandem show they’re paying attention to each other. They seem in their own world yet connected by the special affinity musicians have in leapfrogging off each other’s ideas. They’re having a good time up there. We in the audience get in the act by cheering their solos and chuckling at their inventiveness.

“Let’s take it down a notch,” says Billy, as they launch into the evening’s second number, Fats Waller’s “Spring Cleaning.” Surprise, Billy sings!

This kind of music doesn’t demand a pitch-perfect voice, just one that can locate the heart of the song, Novick leans into the mike, stage lights reflecting off his shiny pate, and delivers with an impish grin.

The set rolls on with a slow sweet Gershwin tune then a 1928 cover of “Ready for the River,” in which Guy joins Billy on vocals and vigorous finger picking.  A New Orleans spiritual from the 1920s features Billy covering the brass line and Guy filling in as the second line. In keeping with the jaunty New Orleans feel, they play a Scott Joplin rag. “We know two Joplin rags,” Billy says, "you might hear them both tonight.” (We did.)

Van Duser proceeded to make his fingers fly and his face lit up as he hit every single note as his right thumb, index finger and middle finger blurred over the strings and the fingers on his left hand danced up and down the frets on the neck of his guitar, hitting every note of the Joplin rag. Impressive.

In one of his rare conversations with the audience, Van Duser tells of being wowed as a young man by hearing Chet Atkins guitar playing on the radio. “I got his records and kept playing them again and again so I could make the same sounds,” he recollected. By now Van Duser has a style that has been influenced by the likes of players from Atkins to Django Reinhardt but is gloriously all his own.

“How much improvising is involved in your playing?” ptatlarge asks Novick during intermission.

“I’d say about 25% of our songs are set arrangements and the rest is improvised. We don’t have a huge repertoire so the improvising is what keeps it fresh,” says Billy. Their set tonight intimates they know an impressive range of music from the WWI to WWII and play it with the spirit of improvisation that was that era’s calling card.

These guys seem like an unlikely pair. Novick the extrovert tells stories, jokes around with ease, and is a natural bridge into the audience. The show gains from Billy’s effortless patter - “Mr. Footnote,” Guy cracks during one of Novick’s stories about a song’s background. Novick wants us to listen of course but he wants us to know what we’re listening to.

Van Duser seldom makes eye contact with the audience and is immersed in the music, almost remote. “My sister keeps telling me that I don’t look like I’m having fun and to smile once in a while,” he says during intermission to ptatlarge. “I need to focus on my hands and my head is totally into the music.”

During the second set, in one of his few talks to the audience, he told of playing for a dance with Billy. “I looked up in the middle of playing and saw over a hundred people dancing away and thought, ‘if I stop playing, the whole thing stops!' I ducked my eyes back to the strings and my hands and never looked up again.”

Tonight’s show covered music from Fats Waller, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Bierderbecke, and Benny Goodman. It hit the home stretch with a Novick and Van Duser original, "New Orleans Farewell", a drop dead gorgeous ballad in which Billy’s wistful clarinet is the diamond to Van Duser’s guitar setting, and is followed by the most improbable number of the night, Van Duser playing John Phillips Sousa’s "Star Spangled Banner" - in honor of Memorial Day. 

The set ends with their cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” the most recorded song of all time (according to “Mr. Footnote”) in which Guy’s quietly inspired solo has the feel of a whole orchestra.

These two have appeared on Prairie Home Companion and been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered. And here they are in this quirkily wonderful performance space, a renovated 1890 Fire Station in Framingham, MA. Imagine a stage set up where Ladder 10 used to park and the audience sitting where Engine 3 used to berth. And the risers for the 180 chairs set up on a few hundred Polar Seltzer crates and you have a formula for an offbeat and intimate venue.

No matter where these two guys show up next, mark it in your calendar. They’re the best “Two Man Big Band” you’re ever going to hear.

Set List

"Wolverine Blues", Jelly Roll Morton
"Spring Cleaning", Fats Waller
"I Know That You Know", Benny Goodman
Gershwin song, slow sweet swing song
1928 "Ready for the River" (lyrics: Gus Kahn)
New Orleans spiritual from the 1920s
"Easy Winner",  Scott Joplin rag
"I'm Coming Virginia", Bix Biederbecke
INTERMISSION
“Ain’t Misbehavin’", Fats Waller
a Sol Romberg fox trot
"The Jitterbug Waltz", (Fats Waller’s only waltz)
"Stompin’ At The Savoy", Benny Goodman,
"New Orleans Farewell", from the album Lovely Sunday Afternoon by Guy Van Duser And Billy Novick 

Photos courtesy Amazing Things Arts Center