pt at large

“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.

 

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

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.

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.

 

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!

Good News Again

What you see is what you get...

Good News Network Stories. Usually uplifting and reaffirming the goodness of human (and occasionally animal) nature, sometimes a little treacly but in a moderate dose. Then there are stories like this that blew my mind a minute ago. I have my own fantasies about rocking out on stage. Trumpet, accordion, harmonica, drums, guitar...I've done them all in my dreams.

"The Kiss Guy" holds up a sign saying “Let Me Play Monkeywrench” at a Foo Fighters concert and rips his dream from cloud land to the stage of one of the most bad-ass band around. On a whim, they invite him on stage. The guy startles the band with unabashed out-of-his-mind energy and you-gotta-see-it-to believe-it talent that matches the caliber of the world class arena exploding Foo Fighters.

Bookmark the site for a dose. If there's anything 'fake' about it, it sure fooled me.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/foo-fighters-see-kiss-guy-with-a-sign-in-audience-and-pulls-him-on-stage-and-he-nails-it/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_medium=weekly_mailout&utm_source=27-04-2018

My Mr. Durkee: Handyman With A Heart

April 11, 2018

My Pittsfield accountant sent me the Berkshire Eagle “This Story In History” article (below) this morning. He forwarded it, with a big yellow highlight on my late father’s name, knowing I’d be interested. As happy as I was to see that my dad was on local boards as he made his name as an attorney in my hometown, I was even happier to see the Eagle’s headline, “Bike repairman James M. Durkee keeps right on rollin’ along”.

The April 11, 1947 story ignited a fully formed memory of a long ago time and a kind man who found joy helping every rag-tag kid who found his little shop.

I used to ride my bike up to Mr. Durkee's shop, dark and cluttered with tools and parts, beside his house when anything went wrong with my trusty two wheeler, no fenders, no basket, a bare bones indestructible second hand model that suffered plenty of mechanical failures from my robust dare-devil stunt riding. 

To a little kid, Mr. Durkee used to look formidable, the gray stubble of a day or two beard growth, his large hands caked with grease, and a stub of a cigar, lit or not, ever-present in his mouth. Actually, that’s the first thing I remembered, the aroma of that cigar that permeated his whole shop. If I were blind, I could probably have found his house by sniffing my way down to 47 Third Street. 

I don’t remember ever being charged for a repair, although it may have cost me a nickel. I don’t remember he ever asked my name and do remember the aura of kindness I felt in his presence. The man was happy doing what he did. 

As quoted in the story, "Well," observed the veteran mechanic, "it’s the kids who keep me young. All these years now in the bicycle business, I’ve dealt mostly with the kids. To some people, they can be a bother. But I like ‘em. They’re always in and out of the place to have this or that done and I like to take care of them."

A member of the Zoning Board of Appeals (on which my father was Secretary) recalled that Mr. Durkee had appeared before the board in the past to renew his five-year permit.

“Yes, I certainly have," Mr. Durkee answered. "I’ve been coming in for the past 15 years and I hope I’ll be in here five years from now. I’ll be 75 by that time."

He never made it to age 75.

My mother, who knew how much I liked the man and how often I’d visit his shop, sometimes for no reason except to say hello, told me he had died when I was about 13 years old. I had never been to a wake or funeral my life. I remember feeling really sad but was too scared to ask to go. That’s one of the first “do over”s I recall having in my life. I’ll bet I wasn’t the only kid who showed up for his wake in spirit. 

Mr. Durkee and my dad served the residents of Pittsfield in ways that suited their talents and ambitions. They both made a mark for themselves in their city and they both made a difference in the lives of those people who needed them. And they both kept right on rollin’ along until they passed away.

FROM THE APRIL 11, 1947, EAGLE Bike repairman James M. Durkee keeps right on rollin’ along  FROM THE APRIL 11, 1947, EAGLE Bike repairman James M. Durkee keeps right on rollin’ along  James M. Durkee of 47 Third St., who probably is known by more Pittsfield youngsters ranging in age from 6 to 60 than any other man in the city, was before the Zoning Board of Appeals last night for a fourth variation in zoning. Mr. Durkee’s bicycle shop in the rear of his home is in a residential zone and he therefore must come before the board to get a special permit to operate. The zoning board can give only five-year variations. This is Mr. Durkee’s fourth application for a five-year permit. There was no one, of course, last night to object to his petition. As a matter of fact, in all the 15 years or more that Mr. Durkee has operated his shop at home, no one in the Third Street section has objected. Mr. Durkee never has done anything but bicycle sales and repair work. He has been at it for 53 of his 70 years. "It seems to me," said Board Chairman Adolph J.Kohlhofer, when the board came to the Durkee petition, "that I have seen you here before." (Mr. Kohlhofer has been on the board almost ever since the zoning law went into effect 20 years ago.) "Yes, I certainly have," Mr. Durkee answered. "I’ve been coming in for the past 15 years and I hope I’ll be in here five years from now. I’ll be 75 by that time." "I hope we’re here to see you," Secretary Paul A. Tamburello said. "Well, we can’t say that we don’t know anything about Mr. Durkee’s reputation," said Board Member Sydney Benedict. "I can remember he used to sharpen my skates when I was a kid." "Well," observed the veteran mechanic, "it’s the kids who keep me young. All these years now in the bicycle business, I’ve dealt mostly with the kids. To some people, they can be a bother. But I like ‘em. They’re always in and out of the place to have this or that done and I like to take care of them." Mr. Durkee’s experience, of course, goes back to the 54-inch wheel. He’s seen the business go up and down through the years. He was one of the few men, probably, who actually benefited from wartime gasoline rationing. "People," he said, "got their old relics out of the attic and brought them down to the shop for repairs. We had a tough time because of shortage of parts but we got most of them rolling." Gasoline rationing did a good job in reviving wheeling, he says. They resorted to bikes because of necessity and then found that it did them a lot of good physically. — Selected by Jeannie Maschino THIS STORY IN HISTORY

 

New Orleans: Lee Circle Without General Robert E. Lee - Mayor Landrieu’s Stand

New Orleans: Lee Circle Without General Robert E. Lee - Mayor Landrieu’s Stand

May 24, 2017

I had heard rumblings about symbols of the Confederacy that remain in plain sight in New Orleans. The tipping point, fueled by unease after high profile police killings of black men across the country and Dylann Roof's murdering of nine black men and women in a Charleston church, raised the ante to make changes.

To me, a frequent visitor, the statue of General Robert E. Lee, was a sort of civic wallpaper, a vague reminder of southern history and as recognizable a site of New Orleans geography as Bourbon Street. To African-Americans and a growing number of white citizens, it was an offensive symbol of the Civil War's racial overtones.

Right thing to do or not, I never thought anyone would have the gumption to remove General Lee from Lee Circle.

On May 19, 2017, Mayor Mitch Landrieu did just that. The words he uttered to describe his decision were more powerful than the cranes that lifted the statue. 

Landrieu's mix of facts, aspiration, history, and personal anecdotes quoting conversations with some of the city's best known African Americans, was broad and inclusive, at times reaching lyrical and poetic heights. It should be required reading for every civic leader and every high school student in the land. It was not a calculated sound byte to be easily digested.

It was the kind of speech you wish politicians and leaders of every stripe would have the nerve to make. My guess is that, like me, you'll read it more than once because it is refreshingly American in the best sense of the term.

History drapes around New Orleans like the Spanish Moss hanging from its live oak trees. It's impossible to disentangle the moss from the trees. But words that Mayor Landrieu used in his declaration to the city that elected him go a long way to disentangle antebellum attitudes from modern day realities. Disappearing Robert E. Lee isn't going to disappear racial attitudes overnight but it's a powerful start.

New Orleans is not your typical southern city. There's nothing remotely typical about New Orleans. From its gumbo history of being owned by France then Spain then France again before being bought in the Louisiana Purchase, and the loads of Italian, Irish, German, and Haitian immigrants that co-existed with descendants of Spanish, French,  and Creole (free people of color) culture in the early 1900s, New Orleans was hard to categorize. It still is.

Shock waves created by Mayor Landrieu's act of civic courage have reached my home town of Boston. Ty Burr, a Boston Globe columnist and film critic, asks, "Are Boston's statues honoring all the right men?" 

Henry Cabot Lodge, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Christopher Columbus have prominent statues in their honor. Burr's profiles about the men's intolerance and views were embarrassing eye-openers. And are timely conversation starters. Should the statues remain? Should they be removed? Should their plaques be rewritten?

The fact that they were deemed worthy of a statue in the past speaks volumes about what the attitudes of the general public were at the time. How we manage their presence today represents who we are now.

What happened in New Orleans is likely to create a domino effect. Our assumptions about our local histories and heroes are about to be questioned. The answers, as in the case of Boston, are going to be hard to reconcile.

The biggest question: will the answers bring us closer together.

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Mount Auburn Cemetery: A Bouquet of Factoids

After chatting about the "Monuments of Mount Auburn Cemetery" post with Meg Winslow, she offered this trove of information. Meg is the Curator of Historical Collections, Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge MA 02138-5517. She also informed me that The Mount Auburn Cemetery is currently the number one tourist destination in Cambridge on Trip Advisor.

The Nation’s First Rural Cemetery

• A National Historic Landmark founded in 1831.
• Designed by Henry A.S. Dearborn, Jacob Bigelow, & members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.
• The first designed landscape open to the public in North America.
• The model for the America’s rural cemetery movement, public parks, and suburbs.
• Open to all. Non-denominational and non-sectarian.

A Cultural Landscape

• Open 365 days of the year, free of charge.
• #1-ranked tourist destination in Cambridge on TripAdvisor.
• More than 200,000 visitors annually from around the world.
• A Visitors Center in Story Chapel is staffed by docents and offers maps and a wide array of interpretive materials.
• Over 75 unique programs annually including walking tours, talks, and special events; 150 annual group tours ranging from elementary to graduate students, garden clubs to community and historical associations.
• New free Mobile App for mobile phones provides interpretive and GPS directions to any lot location within the Cemetery.

Accredited Arboretum and Internationally-Renowned Botanical Garden

• First Cemetery in America to be accredited an arboretum
• 175 acres of landscaped hills and dells, 3 ponds, and 1 vernal pool.
• Nationally significant collection of woody and herbaceous plants. 5,000 trees (640 different species and cultivars), 13,000 shrubs and groundcovers (1362 taxa).
• Ecologically sustainable practices, the introduction of new plantings for the improvement of wildlife habitat, and the creation of garden spaces associated with the development of new burial space.

An Urban Wildlife Refuge

• Massachusetts Audubon Important Bird Area.
• One of the premier birding destinations in Massachusetts.
• Home to rare spotted salamander, amphibian reintroductions, apiary, and pollinator habitats.

Mount Auburn’s Historical Collections were researched by David Russo over a three year period

• The first of its kind in the nation, open by appointment.
• More than 3,000 linear feet of institutional records that chronicle the Cemetery from its founding to the present. Holdings include Archives, Library, Photographs, and Fine and Decorative Art. The collection actively grows through gifts and acquisitions.
• Researchers include historians, biographers, landscape designers, architects, filmmakers, and individuals with family buried at the Cemetery.
• Staff and volunteers respond to more than 150 genealogical requests per year.

++++++++++++++

As you see, David Russo's presentation about the Monuments of Mount Auburn Cemetery is an entry point to a parcel of Americana that's been going strong for 186 years.

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The Mount Auburn Cemetery: An Under-the-Radar National Treasure in Watertown, MA

The moment you enter, the elegant monuments and pedestals, interspersed with ordinary gravestones signal that you’re in a cemetery. Cognitive dissonance sets in as you realize the rolling landscape wrapped around an utter sense of serenity signals you’re in one of the most gorgeous parks you’ve ever seen. You’re in the most uncemetery-ish cemetery in the country, the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Although 93% of the cemetery is in Watertown, it is currently the number one destination in Cambridge, MA (the cemetery’s mailing address) on Trip Advisor.

 

 

 

“Monuments of Mount Auburn Cemetery”
Presented by David Russo
Sponsored by the Historical Society of Watertown, MA
Watertown Free Public Library
Watertown, MA
May 24, 2017

An arboretum, a botanical garden, a template for the American rural cemetery movement…with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown, MA, it’s all of the above.

Given the grace of the many of the memorials, it could double as a museum as well.

The May 24 slideshow presentation by David Russo, Chairperson of the Watertown Historical Commission, was a select tour of nearly three-dozen of the cemetery’s notable monuments. The range of memorial designs– Canopy, Cenotaph, Column, Ledger Stone, Obelisk, Sarcophagus, and Pedestal - is from intimate to bold, modest to commanding.

Founded in 1831, the cemetery, Watertown’s largest contiguous open space, is the most under-the-radar world attraction in Massachusetts, maybe the country. Its perimeters are lined with an ordinary looking assortment of trees, fencing and tall bushes that offer no vistas to the interior.

Inside is a world-class cemetery that happens to be the first rural landscaped cemetery in the nation, a template for other big-time American cemeteries, and, thirty years later, inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park to boot. The top three tourist destinations in America in the 1840s were Niagara Falls, Mount Vernon, and The Mount Auburn Cemetery (60,000 visitors in 1848). Despite its Cambridge address, 167.5 of the cemetery's 175 acres are in good 'ol Watertown.

Before the 1830s, burial grounds and graveyards were pretty barren places, skeletons occasionally poking up from the earth, and evoked a dark ‘Grim Reaper’ demeanor. After the design of Mount Auburn Cemetery, inspired by the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the public park and garden movement, a place to celebrate life while mourning the departed, was off and running.

In 2013, David Russo, was tasked by the Massachusetts Historical Commission to update an old inventory of the cemetery's structures and landscapes done in the 1970s.

The task was ideal for an individual with an appreciation for detail, exactitude, and research. Russo was a perfect fit. He used the  Massachusetts Historical Commission’s Object Inventory Form that requires photographs, maps, a design assessment, a historical narrative, the inscription, a bibliography and/or references to document his findings. The same form requires identifying the type of object, date of construction, designer/sculptor, materials, alterations, condition, and setting. It took Russo three years to complete the inventory and was the basis for his presentation.

He identified a whopping 225 individual resources including monuments, mausoleums, and even a bridge in the cemetery. Russo described the meaning of the symbols inscribed on the monuments selected for the presentation. Commonly understood shorthand in the 1800s, most of them need the commentary by historians like Russo to be understood today. Russo credited Meg Winslow, curator of the  Mount Auburn Cemetery, for her support in his endeavor.

“The founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery wanted to inspire, using the landscape and the monuments to transform the space into a place for quiet contemplation and reflection,” Russo said. His slides displayed a landscape with varied topography and monuments of varying size, aesthetic impact, and purpose. From the get go, the founders wanted to extol the lives of the dead as aspirational models for the living.

Boy oh boy, did they succeed. Abolitionists, philanthropists, sculptors, actors, authors, social reformers, mathematicians, with names were familiar to locals and the nation, found their final resting place there, as do 98,000 lesser known citizens.

We know about Boston, but who knew that little Watertown and its big brother Cambridge were also home base for such a rich host of luminaries. Mary Baker Eddy, Fannie Farmer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Winslow Homer, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Abraham Maslow…no matter what part of America you live in, you’ll recognize many of these names.

Russo’s slides highlighted the aspects that made Mount Auburn Cemetery a model for some of the most impressive cemeteries in the country and, in essence, transformed the way we honor our dead. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2003.

Anyone who can present an hour-long slide show and keep an audience engaged with a topic necessarily heavy on names and dates deserves praise.

Russo’s success was in large measure due to his ability to keep the pace brisk, the underlying facts tied together with a consistent frame work that highlighted the designers and architects of the monuments, the accomplishments of the men and women for whom they were built, and perfectly timed interjections of humor.

“This was a cultural landscape, the first of its kind,” he said.

It remains an irony that a place in which we bury our dead and shed our tears rises above our grief to become a place in which we find solace, accept the finite nature of life, and count our own blessings.

"Mount Auburn has and always will be a sacred place of remembrance, a place to mourn those we have loved, a place to seek inspiration and solace, and a place to celebrate life." mountauburn.org

Mount Auburn Cemetery Factoids

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

World's Apart? Not So Fast...

4 and 1/2 minutes just changed my mind about whether commercial advertising could actually send a message to an audience. It's a beer commercial, no less.

We've all seen the usual beer-makes-the-world-go-round commercials, upbeat music, quick takes as upbeat images of winsome looking twenty-somethings laughing, partying in sand and surf, not a care in the world, and the beer of choice making life appear to be just grand.

This one? I 'm not sure whether I watched a stealth beer commercial or a most definitely un-saccharine  "We Are The World" moment.

Ok, there’s beer and Heineken is still trying to sell it but the starkly composed "World's Apart" ad, with no music, no fake joie-de-vivre, got my attention from the get-go. The three pairs of people involved looked like regular blokes, different ages and races, whose differing opinions about the state of the world are posited (and not known to the others) in the first one minute of the video. 

The three pairs, filmed separately, are given a task to work together on. I never saw the beer ad, and the message, coming until the last ninety seconds, which I'm not going to spoil for you, when whole thing is turned on its foamy head.

I know damn well that beverage commercials are supposed to make me feel like I’m a member of the ‘in crowd’ when I hoist one. Heineken just re-identified the crowd and the message and slyly demonstrated the possibility of dialogue between vastly differing points of view once a bridge of commonality is forged. And if that bridge comes in a familiar green bottle, so be it.

 It was a pause that refreshed.

 Cheers...

https://www.good.is/articles/heineken-ad-worlds-apart

https://www.fastcompany.com/40412848/heineken-just-put-out-the-antidote-to-that-pepsi-kendall-jenner-ad

Judge Paul A. Tamburello, aka "Dad"

4 PM, Tuesday, April 4, 2017

The tale begins when my dear friends Mark and Shelley unsuccessfully attempted to find the portrait of my dad in the Berkshire Superior Court at 76 East Street as they passed through Pittsfield en route to visit with son Ross at Williams College recently.

The entry to the courthouse is now on the side of the building that faces Wendell Avenue and a chip shot from my dad’s former law office at 29 Wendell Avenue, Pittsfield, MA. And a few doors down from the office of my long time accountant to whom I deliver my tax documents at the beginning of April every year. After meeting with my accountant, I headed up the street to check out the portrait myself.

A sign of the times: upon entering a small foyer, I was asked by a court officer my reason for entering and to put everything made of metal in a box that passed through a scanner, then had to pass through an airport style metal detector, and then explain my knee replacement when it bleeped. Not unlike airport security but way faster.

When I find my way up to the second floor courtroom it is locked. As I walk back to the first floor to exit, I pass an office with a glass paneled door that reads Deborah Capeless, Clerk of Courts. Capeless, that name rings a bell.

Robert T. Capeless was an attorney who at age 29 became mayor of Pittsfield in 1947 and was re-elected four times. He and his wife Anita were friends with my parents and lived on Broad Street, less than a mile from our house at 15 Coltland Drive. I recall visiting them when they lived in Newton after Bob had been named State Tax Commissioner by two governors then joined a law practice there until he returned to the Berkshires to be near his children, most of whom lived in and around Pittsfield. Bob died in 2003 at age 91.

I enter the Clerk’s office.

Three secretaries working at large desks inside a spacious office look up from their computer screens.
“May we help you?”
“I’d like to speak with Deborah if she’s available.”
“Who shall we say is inquiring?”
“Paul Tamburello Jr.”

"You look so much like your father!” Ms. Capeless exclaims with a bright smile as she walks out of her office at the end of the room. For a moment, it feels like I never left Pittsfield years ago.

During the next twenty minutes, we have a chance to connect as she walks me back up to the Superior Court room, unlocks the door and turns on the lights.

"From around 1976 to 1978 your father would come to court on Saturdays after he had been hearing cases in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston during the week and hear cases that were back logged here. He was generous with his time and taught me so much about the foundations of the law."

The portrait of my father in his judge's robe still hangs with those of other judicial luminaries on the wall of the Berkshire Superior Court. Deborah names them all. She also has memories of my mother’s sister, Claire Rocca, who was a fixture and somewhat of a character for decades in the County Commissioner’s office on first floor.

Deborah married the son of former Mayor Bob Capeless. She's been the clerk of courts since 1981.

36 years. That’s quite a run. From her energy level, vivacious manner, and physical presence, she appears to be just as engaged in her work today as she was in 1981.
“How does it feel to have such history here?” says I.
“I love my job!” she replies.

My dad would have loved hearing that.



Superior Court Judge Paul A. Tamburello (1908-1992), aka, “Dad"


The portrait behind the judge’s bench is of Francis J. Quirico (1911-1999), late member of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and friend of my fathers.

Back in the late 1970s, when my dad was hearing cases in Suffolk Superior Court, he and Judge Quirico often walked to Hanover Street in the North End for dinner. When I accompanied them one night, I was astonished when many men greeted them on the street, "Buona Serra, Giudici.” ("Good evening, Judges"). The North End was still largely an Italian enclave. They welcomed a chance to greet two of their own and show respect, both of them sons of parents who immigrated from Italy.

"I felt like I was walking with royalty," I say to Deborah.

"You were," she replies.

My dad’s portrait just left of the doorway.


Clerk of Courts Deborah Capeless comments about the portraits surrounding the courtroom. She knew the names of every judge.


The Silvio O. Conte Berkshire County Courthouse, 76 East Street, Pittsfield, MA

PARTIAL TIME LINE

1908 - Paul Antonio Tamburello born to parents Salvatore and Sara (Sottile) Tamburello who had immigrated to Pittsfield from Sicily.

circa 1926 - graduates from Pittsfield High School.

circa 1926-1930 - hired as personal secretary to Giuseppe Faccioli, inventor and Chief Electrical Engineer of the General Electric Company at Pittsfield, because he is fluent in Italian. It doesn’t hurt that he had learned how to take shorthand in high school.

1931 - enters Brown University as a pre-law student (I have no idea how he afforded the tuition).

1933 - transfers to Boston University Law School, named Editor-in-Chief of the Boston University Law Review.

1935 - awarded LL.B. with honors (cum laude) from Boston University Law School, elected president of his class. Begins practicing law in Pittsfield, MA.

1940 - marries Elena Rocca of Pittsfield, MA.

1947 - 1951 - named President of The Pittsfield Professional Baseball Corporation, affiliated with the Pittsfield Electrics, a Cleveland Indians minor league baseball team and later the Philadelphia Phillies. I remember one night being star-struck as future Indians third baseman Al Rosen is a dinner guest. I also remember where Dad kept a box of major league baseballs used in the games and liberating  one to use for the whole summer. To a kid who loved to play baseball, the smooth white leather, red stitching, official lettering on the baseballs, and powerful smell of leather were like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Late 1940s, mid 1950s -  Often asked to MC stag parties for young Italian men ( I can hardly imagine what he said). Frequently invited to Sunday dinner to the homes of clients like the Blefari family in the Italian section of Pittsfield, now demolished, just above where the old train depot (also demolished) at the bottom of West Street was located. My sister Judi and I were captivated by the ‘pet’ rabbits the Blefari’s kept in their back yard. It never occurred to us that one of them might have added to the flavor of the pasta sauce we ate at lunch!

1952 - named City Solicitor of Pittsfield.

1956 - resigns as City Solicitor.

Berkshire Eagle story: "Mr. Tamburello was appointed city solicitor April 2, 1952 by then Mayor Capeless. He succeeded Francis J. Quirico who was recently named to the state Superior Court.

Tamburello has practiced law in Pittsfield since 1934, when he was president of the graduating class of Boston University Law School. He has been active in numerous civic and charitable organizations and has served on the Airport Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals. In 1947 he headed the unsuccessful drive for a Plan E city charter in Pittsfield."

1966 - elected president of the Massachusetts Bar Association.

1967 -  From Massachusetts Bar Association publication: "Tamburello leads a delegation of doctors and dignitaries on a tour of Bridgewater State Hospital, the state's only institution for the criminally insane. The deplorable conditions witnessed by journalists and a {Fredrick Wiseman} documentary crew receive national attention. Tamburello pledges the assistance of the 6,000 members of the bar association to those confined because they lacked legal aid. He personally took on the case of the first inmate represented by the bar, who had been unlawfully detained for 53 years."

1970 - From Massachusetts Bar Association publication: "After Tamburello's discovery at Bridgewater and the subsequent work by Massachusetts Bar Association members and the attorney general's office, a complete revision and reform of the state's laws regarding mental illness is completed. The new code is heralded as one of the most comprehensive statutory overhauls in modern history and as a national model of how to humanely protect the interests of the mentally ill."

Dad must have identified Bridgewater as the opportunity to make his mark on the Mass Bar Association. It’s one of many things I’d  love to talk to him about but in those days, he was one dimensional to me, just “Dad”, someone I knew loved me unconditionally.

1974 - appointed at age 66 to the Superior Court by Republican Gov. Francis Sargent.

1978 – subject to mandatory retirement from the Massachusetts Superior Court but is "recalled" immediately because of the backlog of cases needed to be heard.

1981 - officially retires as Superior Court judge.

1992 - dies at a nursing home with me by his side.

I never realized the depth of my father’s ambition and how hard he worked to make it happen. I remember having dinner - mom, dad, sister Judi and me -  dad taking a brief nap on the living room floor and returning to his office to work a few more hours. I am amazed at his capacity for being involved in so many civic and professional organizations, don’t think he said “no” to many invitations, and do think he took his reputation in the community, Italian and beyond, seriously.

It never occurred to me how much drive he had to succeed, to be one of the best at what he did, the time and effort he invested in it, and the odds he overcame - son of an immigrant father who worked as a custodian at General Electric - with no leverage until around  age 26, when he was hired as a personal secretary for a chief inventor of electric transformers, Giuseppi Faccioli, to become a lawyer let alone a judge in the Superior Court of Massachusetts. I still have no idea how he was accepted at Brown as a pre-law student, what gave him the idea to enroll, how he afforded tuition, what it was like to be away from home for first time in an environment that must have been so different from what he was accustomed to, and how he adapted. How does a guy with limited social status aspire to reach for the stars?

He certainly was not the only Pittsfield resident to realize his dream but certainly the most special to me... Judge Paul A. Tamburello, aka "Dad".

A country illuminated, one street at at time...reposted on 15th anniversary of 9/11

Upon re-reading this post from September 2001, I am stuck on the last sentence, feeling that the hopeful glow of those little candles has been snuffed out by the turning tides of national and global events.
Where are we now? Who are we now? How do we become whole? This is going to be decided by the way each of us re-lights those candles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Westport, MA July 4 Parade: Small Town, Big Pride in Tradition

July 4, 2016
Westport, MA

Immense flag in Lees Market parking lot in Westport Central Village

Westport’s annual July 4 parade was on the move. You could hear the deep resonant blare of fire truck sirens as the parade approached Westport Central Village from Hix Bridge Road. Then you could hear them fade in the distance as the parade headed for Westport High School.

The stretch from Beech Grove Cemetery to Village Pizza was lined with residents in camp chairs. Festive was the operative word of the day.

Every home along the rest of the route became a viewing stand, lawns filled with friends and neighbors and lots of red, white, and blue flags and balloons.

Want to get a feel for what a small New England town is all about? Watch its parades. Everyone in this rural town in southeast Massachusetts knows someone in the parade. Pockets of spectators sound off with cheers every time they see someone they recognize.

The sun is shining, not a cloud in the robin’s egg blue sky, and cares of the day seem to have evaporated as completely as the morning dew.  This is a town giving itself a big hug while celebrating the birthday of its nation.

“Stay behind the white line!” parents warn their kids. Lollipops and penny candy will rain from floats, fire trucks, even tractors. The most experienced kids bring bags to collect their booty. Lord knows how long it will last once they get home.

Due to the length of the 3 ½ mile route down Main Road, everyone rides – drawn along by trucks and tractors, interspersed with antique cars, convertibles, scooters, even motorized lawn mowers.  And of course, shiny red fire engines from Westport and Dartmouth.

Creatively designed floats sponsored by local businesses and organizations from landscapers to bakeries haul groups ranging from Boy and Girl Scout troops, to a contingent of veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, to health clubs, soccer leagues, Babe Ruth teams, and Westport County Fair participants among others.

There will be prizes for the best floats and antique cars but I’ll bet the farm that no one will be disappointed. Just to be in the limelight for a few hours is a prize of its own.

There are similar parades in small towns across this land. The national mood may be uncertain, contentious, and anxious.  But for the past two hours, this little town took a deep cleansing breath and celebrated civic connection that spanned generations and political affiliation. For this moment in time, I say God bless America.

Awaiting the parade...the lady in photo at R has been coming to this parade since 1951!


The lawn in front of Town Hall was an excellent shady spot to cheer on the marchers and floats.

Veterans, Westport United Youth Soccer, State Senator Mike Rodrigues.

State Representative Paul Schmid walked in front of his float; Westport Pack 100; an enthusiastic spectator.

Antique cars revved up along the route; Cub Scout Pack 100.

 
Girl Scout Troop 1045; TKO Fitness and Nutrition; "Hillbilly Picnic" float.

Westport Ladder 7; Uncle Sam wishes everyone "Happy Birthday!"

Perry's Bakery (L) and South Coast Power Equipment (R) make quite a splash.

The last of the parade passes Lees Market.


"I can't wait for the next parade!"

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. Text published as Letter to the Editor July 15, 2016

James Cordon's Carpool Karaoke Mood Enhancer

I dare you to watch this video and 1), not lighten up, laugh, and feel like you’ve just ingested a feel-good mushroom and 2), not click on the invites guests like Adele link (a total HOOT, if you only have time to sneak in one video, do this one...Adele can rap!!) and keep right on being entertained in what seems to be an unscripted bit of happy-happy frothy music therapy.

The world is a pretty grim place right now.  The news is an unending and incessant reinforcement of that notion.  After reading it, I need more than a cute kitty video to recalibrate.

This James Cordon Carpool Karaoke series does it for me.  Cordon seems as mad as a hatter.  He clearly connects with his guests.  The carpool bit is an inspired piece of comedy, entertainment, and leavening agent.  I’m not awake at 12:37 AM, had never heard of The Late Late Show with James Cardon before seeing this video.

Which brings me to The Top 10 Good News of the Week on the GoodNewsNetwork.

Subscribe and find a basket of various shades of sunshine sent to your mailbox once a week.  Most are short bits.  Some, like the Cordon Carpool Karaoke will probably derail your workday for longer but look at it this way.  Your productivity rate will spike after a mood elevating experience.

You’ll get a weekly antidote to the toxic effects of incessant downer news stories of every stripe.  And read stories affirming the goodness of human nature or how good it feels to laugh out loud.

+++++++++

Go to http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/author/geri/ and scroll to bottom of the page to sign up for Top Ten Best Stories Emailed Weekly.

Meaningful Matters: Reflections on Joy, Loss and Our Changing World by Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

I've known Jeff Kelly Lowenstein since he was an energetic kid my fourth grade class in 1974. We’ve been carrying on conversations ever since. Jeff wrote about our connection, including his two year stint co-teaching with me, now going on 42 years, in his first book,"On My Teacher's Shoulders" which was launched in November, 2012. I can't wait to be in the audience for this one.

His bio (below) at Columbia College in Chicago contains the basics. If it included his world-wide network of journalists, forums which he has launched or been part of, awards for deep investigative reporting, it would be several pages long. The invitation to the book launch reads....

Join Us For Jeff Kelly Lowenstein's Launch Event
28th * April  * 2016

33 E. Congress Parkway, Columbia College Chicago

Meaningful Matters: Reflections on Joy, Loss and Our Changing World


When
6:00PM - 8:00PM
April 28, 2016

Where
Columbia College Chicago-Public Narrative
33 E. Congress Parkway-Room 610H
Chicago, IL 60605

Hello Friends and Family!
I am so excited to share the launch of my new book, Meaningful Matters: Reflections on Joy, Loss and Our Changing World, with all of you. To help celebrate this moment, Dunreith and I, along with the help of Public Narrative, will be hosting a book launch event at Columbia College Chicago on April 28th. We hope to see you there! Be sure to RSVP! And as always, thank you for you continued support.
Jeff

To RSVP:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/celebrate-jeff-dunreith-kelly-lowenstein-and-jeffs-new-book-tickets-24662377836

To Check Out Meaningful Matters:
http://amzn.to/1NjS3Bw

Jeff at a glance: M.S.J., Medill, Northwestern University; M.Ed., Northeastern University; Master's Certificate, Harvard University; B.A., History, Stanford University. Former database and investigative reporter, Hoy newspaper. Former staff reporter for The Chicago Reporter and South Shore Community News, and immediate past president of the Ochberg Society for Trauma Journalism. Freelance writer whose work has been published by The New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune. Fulbright Scholar, 2013, Fulbright Teacher, 1995. Author of two books. Received awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Society for News Design, National Association of Black Journalists and Chicago Headline Club. (Not noted: an informal Post-Graduate degree in Fourth Grade for co-teaching with Paul Tamburello 1987-1989 after graduating from Stanford University, Magna Cum Laude).

Prince: Watertown TAB April 29, 2016

Commentary paired with Dave Granlund illustration in Watertown TAB April 29, 2016

Prince: RIP in an eternal Purple Haze

 

Published in Watertown TAB April 29, 2016

Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958 – April 21, 2016)
RIP in an eternal Purple Haze

Some listeners lost their virginity listening to Prince. I lost my hearing.

The Internet is jammed with eloquent hosannas praising the artist, dead at 57 years old.
 
His sixth album, “Purple Rain,” is the reason I am hard of hearing today.

In my car, at full volume, I played the nine songs on that 1984 cassette over and over and over. It was a majestic ride from funk to R&B, pop, rock and a dash of heavy metal – I don’t think Prince ever got it any better. I cranked it so loud it occasionally made me dizzy.

A 250-watt amplifier powered the two ADS speakers mounted on the kick panels a few feet away. I wasn’t satisfied listening. I wanted to feel it ricochet through my bones. The whole Alfa Romeo GTV vibrated like a Boeing 737 MAX lumbering down the takeoff runway. I didn’t care that in the afterglow my ears would ring after the downpour of dazzling guitar licks and Prince's shimmering falsetto radiating sexually provocative lyrics. .

Tinnitus is the daily soundtrack for me today. You only lose your virginity once. It takes repetition and reckless abandon to lose your sense of hearing. Prince was my pied piper, his mesmerizing marching songs begged to be played at stadium audio levels. I still get a rush listening to Prince's "Purple Rain" album (earplugs firmly in place). I have a few regrets over the loss of my hearing. I have mighty regrets over the loss of Prince.

Fifty-seven is too young to die. In Prince’s case, out of the blue. Did he have any idea how much his music affected and influenced others? Or how much we admired him?

He can’t hear it now. But the people around you who make up your own constellation of friends, family, lovers, co-workers, they can hear. Say the words to them today that might be too late to say tomorrow.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y

Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others perform "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the 2004 Hall of Fame Inductions. The video is about six minutes long. Tune in at the 2:40 mark to see how it's going before Prince takes over at the 3:25 mark.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/super-bowl-halftime-shows-ranked-from-worst-to-best-20140128/4-prince-2007-0718626

Superbowl 2007 Prince sings "Purple Rain" in a rainstorm...and has the Miami stadium singing along with his epic anthem.

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Purple Rain, 1984
Side One
“Let’s Go Crazy”
“Take Me With You”
“The Beautiful Ones”
“Computer Blue”
“Darling Nikki”

Side Two
“When Doves Cry”
“I Would Die For You”
“Baby I’m A Star”
“Purple Rain”

Beverly Cleary Turns 100

April 11, 2016

Beverly Cleary turns 100 today. The Oregon housewife wrote some of the most popular children’s books of the twentieth century. Amazingly, the books still have standing…and popularity today.

For years, books like “Ramona The Pest” and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” were a feature of my reading/writing program at the John Pierce School in Brookline. Cleary’s books were great read-aloud stories. The author had a canny sense of how to portray children navigating bumps that are part of the process of growing up.

I often chose “Ramona The Pest” as a first class read-aloud. From my point of view, the lively discussions and writing responses were a first step in establishing a bond, a shared experience, that shaped a class identity that fostered empathy, cooperation, teamwork and a positive work ethic .

My fourth graders, at nine years old, were old enough to be able to look at Ramona Quimby’s questions and actions in the rear view mirror. They were several years older than Ramona in her first few months of kindergarten, could feel quite a bit more grown up and empathize with her behavior. They really got it when Ramona was told on her first day of kindergarten to "sit here for the present" and she does, waiting for her present.

Cleary kept it simple but Ramona’s questions and dilemmas were universal and her character indelibly drawn. Cleary’s cast of characters usually involved Ramona’s older sister Beezus (Beatrice), her parents, especially her mother, and her friend Henry Huggins, but Ramona was the axis around which the stories were told.

Beverly Cleary captured a child’s universe with a charming economy of style and keen observation. Ramona was no angel. She had trouble paying attention sometimes, and once was sent home for gently pulling the hair of the girl sitting in front of her because it looked so much like a spring and out of curiosity she wanted to see if it worked like one.  My fourth graders chuckled when Ramona called herself a “kindergarten drop out”. And they reveled in their blooming maturity when Ramona talked about singing the "Dawnser song" in her first days of kindergarten, her interpretation of "The Star Spangled Banner.

I liked Beverly Cleary’s books because, in a non-preachy format, her books offered a platform to talk about values, character, and issues like sibling rivalry, being picked on, a father losing his job, unfairness in life... described by the author with a forthright but tender touch. Some of the discussions we had about what made Ramona tick resurfaced later in the year as we read other books or dealt with real life situations.

Peel back the personas of many teachers and you’ll find an entertainer… that certainly applied to me from 1974 to 2004. Sitting in the chair next to my cluttered desk, with twenty nine-year-olds sitting on the carpet in front of me, adopting voices for each character, pausing for effect in dramatic moments, using a little body English to embellish, making eye contact with my audience, I wanted the stories to come alive. If it involved theatrics, all the better. And I loved it.

Cleary published her first book, “Henry Huggins,” in 1950. Between 1955 and 1999 Ramona was featured in eight books and published in 20 different languages. The fact that she still has adoring fans, and still has a wry sense of humor, is remarkable. Her response to the question about the secret of living to be 100 sounds like it could have come from the mouth of Ramona Quimby.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Photo of Cleary and fans by VERN FISHER/MONTEREY HERALD VIA AP/ FILE

Merle Haggard: An American Master, RIP

Merle Haggard died of pneumonia today, April 6, 2016, his 79th birthday. This reprint of a story from January 13, 2014 is a goodbye to a favorite musician.

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There are more lines on Merle Haggard's face than in lifetime of songs he's written. That would include 38 Number One Country hits. The PBS documentary Merle Haggard: Learning To Live With Myself shows by turn a country charmer, a bad boy, each with a love me or leave me attitude. Once the man figured out what he wanted, he got it. More often than not, he's not all that comfortable about it.

The film focuses on two defining moments in the man's life. His short stay in San Quentin, "the joint," as he refers to it in song and conversation, and getting diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009. The American Masters movie that rides the rails of his life tells the story of a man who lost his rock of a father when he was a boy, broke his mother's heart when he got into scrapes with the law, rode the rails (really), lived life from boxcar to boxcar, and spent time in the penitentiary.

San Quentin woke him up but not before he tried butting heads with his jailors. The road he took to end up there damaged him in ways he's been coming to grips with since the day he walked out. He was paroled early because of his work ethic running the prison laundry. He was never more alone, or vulnerable, than he was in prison. He openly sings about the shame he felt for the messes he made and the people he hurt.

To my ears, his voice is better than it's ever  been -  a range from gravel to honey, with a sweet upper register that reveals the man inside the rough shell -  all of it from some deep place searching for the light of redemption or forgiveness.

To this day, he's most comfortable on the 10x12 foot space on his windowless tour bus. "It's the same size as my cell in San Quentin," he says. His ornery nature has softened with good fortune, a career that's made him rich, not comfortable, and allows him to live his life on his terms.

Haggard has always written his own material. He doesn't just sing the songs, he's lived them, felt them. They haunt him. You'd never find him in a therapist's office but the stage and studio are his shrink's couch, the place where he'll tell you what he's feeling. Haggard's songs aren't generic. He doesn't sing about pickup trucks, hound dogs, and the freedom of the road. He knows damn well life is more than that. He's a red state singer, thinks "we probably peaked in 1975," and is uncomfortable in an America with franchises on every block.

Being diagnosed with lung cancer gave Haggard a sense of urgency. Look into his eyes as he talks and sings and you're looking into Haggard's heart of darkness. The American Masters movie weaves photo montages from his childhood, clips from his early shows when he was finding his way, a concert a few years ago that is a valedictory speech and confessional and an interview to tell the story. The close ups of Haggard's face and guarded eyes speak volumes. There are more songs to write,feelings to resolve.

If you view those minutes with the sound turned off, you see a man who is still a prisoner - tormented by his own failings, his losses, and his knowledge that he's on his last boxcar. "Hell, I'm 70 years old. If they give me life without parole, I'm only going to serve two years…so…." and here he raises his middle finger. A man can only mellow so much.

Watching the clips of a youthful Haggard and today's interview is jolting. The result is not lost on him. He’s lived hard. He wants to die with a clear conscience.  Watching this film makes painfully clear this will be the hardest road he’s ever traveled.

Bud Collins: Ace of Ambassadors to the World of Tennis: RIP

Bud Collins 1929-2016

Bud Collins was one of the most colorful sports writers of all time. I looked forward to reading his columns in the Boston Globe, not because I’m a big tennis fan but because I love to read a Prose Prima Donna. No one could consistently write more engaging hooks then sustain them through the whole story.

Cases in point: first paragraphs of four of my favorites.

NEW YORK – "Through one of his characters, Marcellus, a scribbler named Shakespeare said there was “something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
But if the Bard had been among 20,000-or-so ticket-holders at an open-air theatre called Arthur Ashe Stadium yesterday, he might have reconsidered that line from his ancient soap, “Hamlet.”"
and a few paragraphs later...
"To be or not to be a tennis player didn’t seem to come into play.  Caroline, from a family of jocks, gravitated to a racket right away.  If Shakespeare could have imagined a sweet young thing making more than $ 4 million in prize money for playing a simple game, he might have given Hamlet this line to Ophelia: “Get thee to a tennis court!” rather than a nunnery."

http://budcollinstennis.com/nothing-rotten-in-the-state-of-denmark/


EN ROUTE TO PARIS -" the year’s second major, looms, along with a guy who may be more monumental than the Eiffel Tower. That would be Rafa Nadal of course, and here’s my advice to Messrs Federer, Murray, Djokovic, Roddick and anyone else who would hope to flatten him: Show up in a tank equipped with flame throwers."

"Rafa has become such a striking landmark in Paris, where he has won the last four French Opens, that he rivals one of Rodin’s statues – and is as tough to dislodge. They ought to give him a gold key to the city, and a rent-free apartment at the top of Notre Dame alongside Quasimodo. If Quasi is the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Roundhouse Rafa is the Punchback with those big, powerful swings."
http://budcollinstennis.com/beware-the-spaniard-who-owns-the-town-its-roundhouse-rafa/


NEW YORK – "Ever wonder how Billy the Kid would have done with a tennis racket instead of a shotgun? The Kid, known as a withdrawal artist to the bankers of Lincoln County, New Mexico, showed his quick, greedy hands to advantage in practicing his craft in the neighborhood of the Tombstone’s infamous OK Corral."

"Who knows?  Maybe the Kid might have preferred serving aces through the rich folks on their plush grass courts at Newport, Rhode Island.  Those well-coiffed lawns were easier on the feet than prairies, the food was better and the Kid could have been an earlier-day Bobby Riggs, hustling the robber barons for millions…"
http://budcollinstennis.com/flushing-meadows-a-latter-day-ok-corral/


LONDON – "Why does Sister Serena remind me of the Statue of Liberty?  Well, both of them are famous Americans, recognizable heroines just about everywhere.
They stand out in their occupations, symbols of the fact that anything is possible in the USA.  Lady Liberty is a one-woman welcoming committee in New York. Sister Serena travels the world as the best female tennis player in creation."

"Of course they have different ideas about fashion, the Lady in a somber robe, while Serena is somewhat more daring in her raiment, on and off the job.
Did I say somewhat? Do you think Liberty would be comfortable in the fire-engine-red drawers that accompany Serena’s pristine white ensemble? Or the silver fingernails speckled with tiny sparklers and seeming like claws?"

"Probably not.  Still the thought of their similarities came to me yesterday during a soft summer afternoon at Wimbledon, glorious for everyone in the forest green ball park but the hustling though helpless Russian, Vera Zvonareva."

"Serena had just about completed her demolition derby, but one point remained. A lob rose above Serena, and she raised her racket to deal with it.  It was just like Lady Liberty’s pose with her celebrated torch lifted to the sky."

"Serena’s racket was as fiery as the torch, scorching the tennis ball with a bang…."

read the rest at
http://budcollinstennis.com/sister-serena-slams-shut-the-door-taking-her-fourth-wimbledon-title/

I love this stuff, old-fashioned sports writing with flair, style and humor. You got the results of the match and a wonderful topspin lob of a story.

RIP, Mr. Collins.

Photo courtesy of AP

Aretha at 73: Owns Stages from Harvard University to The Kennedy Center

Kennedy Center Honors Program

America Celebrates Honorees' Lifetime Artistic Achievements
Sunday, December 6, 2015

People at the Kennedy Center Honors programs are used to cheering wildly. When Aretha swept onto the stage wearing a floor length fur coat and strode to the  piano, they held their collective breath. Aretha is royalty. The King being honored tonight was the one named Carole.

I don't have to tell you that Aretha owns Carole King's "Natural Woman." As you see from their faces, you don't have to tell Ms. King or President Barack Obama and his wife, or any others in the packed hall. Aretha rose from the piano bench, shrugged off her fur coat and powered through the last few notes of the song. The response by the audience was probably felt on the Richter scale. Be prepared to be cheer. http://www.justjared.com/2015/12/29/aretha-franklin-brings-house-down-with-natural-woman-at-kennedy-center-honors-video/

At 73 years of age Aretha Franklin is also a Natural Wonder: God Save the Queen...

In 2014, The Queen of Soul inspired nearly two thousand students and faculty at Harvard University's commencement exercises to jettison formality and to cheer as if they were at Fenway Park. Attendees memories may become hazy over the years but they'll never forget that Aretha Franklin's thank you speech for the honorary degree bestowed upon her was to sing "Amazing Grace." I doubt there's been such a spontaneous eruption of adulation in the 363 years before this.

Aretha's at Harvard rendition of "Amazing Grace" reposted here.

May 29, 2014

A friend of mine on the Harvard faculty was sitting on the the huge stage on which Aretha Franklin, The Queen of Soul, delivered this rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Commencement Exercises in the outdoor Tercentenary Theatre, Harvard University. She sent me this video (courtesy of Harvard University)...you've got to see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kC59qNwt3A#t=11

 

I've heard the National Anthem sung a thousand times but not a single one of them this indelibly wrought. Ten seconds after Aretha began, her piano riffs transformed the feel of the celebration from a huge outdoor event celebrating the 2014 Harvard University Commencement to that of a small white-framed Baptist church on a Sunday morning. She got it all... the cadences, intonations and rhythms of her singing, the chords hammered home by her piano stylings right out of music that's been heard in the gospel tradition for well over a century.

Aretha Franklin was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree today. This was her dissertation. Accepted unanimously.

++++++++++

The conferring of honorary degrees at Harvard's 363rd Commencement on May 29, 2014 at Tercentenary Theatre.VIDEO

This year's recipients include: Michael Bloomberg, Isabel Allende, President George H.W. Bush, Aretha Franklin, Patricia King, Peter H. Raven, Seymour Slive, and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Past honorary degrees conferred http://www.harvard.edu/honorary-degrees

 

 

 

The Sixth Cousin of Miss Universe Basks in the Glow of Olivia Culpo...again!

December 21, 2015

Glory days again…yours truly, SCOMU, the sixth cousin of Miss Universe 2012, basks in the refracted glow of his 23 year-old relative’s fame. Sitting in one of the judge’s chairs on Sunday night December 20 with Perez Hilton, Niece Nash, and Emmitt Smith, Olivia Culpo witnessed one of the most unfortunate incidents in Miss Universe history.  

Steve Harvey, popular TV host, announced the winner of the contest to be Miss Colombia - less than a minute later he discovered he made a colossal mistake. Moments later, an agonized look on his face, Harvey announced the winner was actually Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach of the Philippines. His immediate correction, with a huge heartfelt mea culpa, won him back some respect but geez, think of the Niagara Falls of emotional turbulence on stage during that announcement and Harvey's correction.

Cousin Olivia’s support of Steve Harvey after the gaffe was reported in the Boston Globe, confirming the young lady has class to go along with beauty.

My lineage to the Miss Universe? Olivia Culpo is my great grandfather’s sister’s daughter’s son’s son’s daughter. I remember listening to her musician grandfather John Culpo playing the accordion when I was a kid. I think of him every time I see Olivia's smile, so much like her grandfather's.

Details about the FOMU and more? Get your scorecard out and visit http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2013/01/six-degrees-of-miss-universe.html

Photo of Smith, Culpo, and Hilton courtesy of Getty Images

"Golytely": Colonic Fast Lane Pass...Again

I sit here contemplating the jug of 'Golytely' i’ve just taken out of the fridge. The next several hours will be spent not more than a quick march distance to the toilet.
A reprise of the column I wrote in May five years ago puts a new spin on ‘the joy of giving” in December 2015.
 

December 17, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do have someone drive you home after the procedure, which you won’t remember, since a friendly nurse will lace the IV she inserts into your arm with a very dandy drip of versed and fentanyl. You won’t have been that buzzed since you left college.

You’ll walk out of the hospital with a goofy grin and walk the corridor like it was a giant slalom. You will sleep like a baby for several hours after returning home.
You will have, for the briefest of time, the cleanest colon in town.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2010/05/golytely-colonic-fast-lane-pass.html

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein celebrates 50th In Style

Evanston Ecology Center
2024 McCormick Boulevard
Evanston, IL
December 5, 2015

Forty years and counting. That would be the number of years Jeff Kelly Lowenstein and I have been talking to each other. I suppose in other contexts this would not be unusual. Well, this one began when Jeff was a nine-year-old kid in my fourth grade classroom at the John Pierce School in Brookline, MA in 1974. I’d say that qualifies as unusual. 

During the next eight years until he finished at Brookline High School, and the next four when he graduated from Stanford University (magna cum laude), he’d stop in to say hello. I was never surprised to hear a voice booming, “Hey, Mr. Tamburello, how's it going?” as he rounded the corner and into my classroom. It didn’t hurt that Jeff remembered exactly where we’d left off the last time.  I know that teachers can have lasting impacts on our students. Getting direct feedback about it made me feel like I'd earned an Oscar.

In 1986, Jeff’s mother Alice was critically injured in a car crash as she and her husband Dr. Ed Lowenstein, who was not seriously injured, negotiated an icy road in New Hampshire. Jeff returned to Brookline to care for his mother as she began an arduous recovery, assisted by Jeff and his two brothers.

Needing a breather and another purposeful way to spend his time, Jeff walked over to the Pierce School, and met with school principal Alvin Fortune, a big man with a bigger heart, a Papa Bear who used gentle authority and wisdom to lead a diverse population of students, teachers and parents.

Mr. Fortune asked Jeff to run the recess program and help out in the library. One day, Jeff walked up to “4T” and asked if he could spend time in my classroom. As a teacher, how amazingly cool is it to have a former student want to return to the same classroom he’s last spent time in as a nine year old, this time as a co-teacher.

Jeff was, and is, a natural in the classroom. He led terrific history lessons, got every kid engaged in the learning process. And we had fun. Jeff organized a "You Can Do Anything (if you work at it) Series". Guest speakers included his friends who were writers and cartoonists. Those two years, 1987-1989, were easily the most unique and exciting years of my career. There are stories we reminisce about to this day.

“Hey, PT, I just want you to know I was standing on your shoulders again today!”  That’s often the way our conversations have started over the years - from Stanford University; to his middle and high school teaching days; work with Facing History and Ourselves; volunteer work at the Cranks Creek Survival Center in Kentucky; Harvard University’s Masters Certificate Program; Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism; The Chicago Reporter as staff reporter; Chicago Tribune’s Spanish language Hoy newspaper as database and investigative reporter; and Columbia College in Chicago where he teaches journalism these days. And in between there were Fulbright programs in Kentucky, South Africa, New Zealand and a stint as President of the Ochberg Society for Trauma Journalism.

I’ve called Jeff my “Walking Talking Lifetime Achievement Award” since I990 when I received Brookline’s Ernest Caverly Award for Excellence in Teaching. Acknowledging colleagues who'd helped me grow from a rookie to a veteran, I said, “There is a Chinese proverb that states that the students shall stand upon the shoulders of their teacher.”

Twenty-two years later, Jeff published “On My Teacher’s Shoulders.” He introduced it as “The book I wrote about learning from fourth grade teacher Paul Tamburello at three different points over the course of 30 years, and just keeps on going.”

It kept on going in Evanston, IL, on Saturday, December 5, when Jeff’s wife Dunreith threw party to celebrate Jeff’s 50th birthday. 

Sixty-five guests from just about every niche in Jeff’s life came together to sing praises and occasionally roast the guest of honor. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to describe the testimonial interlude at the end of the evening as a love fest. Often when it comes time for people to step up to a microphone and speak spontaneously, there’s an uncomfortable silence. Not tonight. One after another, a friend, colleague, relative, former co-worker, stepped up. Laughter and nods of agreement rippled through the gathering as one after another told stories that illustrated Jeff’s personality and the ways he’s enriched their lives.

Staying in touch with me over the past 40 years, sharing his personal and professional growth, and connecting it with his time spent with me as a fourth grader and a young adult, is a continuing source of joy to me. I might be the only teacher in America who's had a student return to his elementary school to teach with his former teacher then write a book about it. And we're not going to stop talking together anytime soon.

Testimonials like the ones shared tonight usually flow at your funeral. Opening the spigot at your fiftieth birthday is way more satisfying.

Relaxing after a scrumptious buffet dinner

 

One of two photo boards; a fabulous birthday cake the size of a city block!

Jeff's brother Jon Lowenstein , an alumnus of "4T", clicking away; Jeff and Dunreith's friends from Cambridge, MA (that's Dunreith peeking over Jeff's shoulder).

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Doctors and Empathy: An Uneven Balance

Can empathy be taught?

I’ll bet every one of you has walked out of a doctor’s office and wondered whether you connected with your doctor, especially if he/she’s a surgeon.

With way too many surgeons, I’ve felt that they’re busy devising a plan of action while I’m talking to them rather than listening through the answers I give to their questions. They show interest in a solution but not necessarily in me. I registered with them as a problem to be solved. The doctors I feel connected to offer me options.

We’ve all had experience with the ones who actually listen and the ones who register what we say while we’re saying it, devise a plan of action then send us on our way. We leave with hope but not satisfaction.

My kind of doctor might lean toward me, keep eye contact, repeat something I’ve said, ask more questions and use what I say to develop a plan. My PCP usually ends our appointments with, “We’re here for you. Call us if you need to.”  That doesn’t guarantee how things are going to work out but it sure makes me feel better.

There are some very qualified doctors that I just won’t revisit because they seem to be arrogant answer-givers and deal with me as a case, not a person.

The idea of showing empathy to demonstrate to patients that their doctor is connecting with them at a human transactional level seems like a no brainer. At most hospitals, it ain’t.

Psychologist Dr. Helen Reiss directs Mass General Hospitals Empathy and Relational Science Program. The program is based on several years of research and data from measured micro-perspiration of the skin, heart rate, and skin temperature of both doctor and patient during appointments.

As a psychologist, she knows that empathy doesn’t come naturally to all of us but has empirical evidence that it can be taught. In 2013, she developed Empathetics, an online, interactive course that trains health care professionals worldwide. Being a people person is not a requisite for being a good surgeon or PCP but it damn well helps.

Empathy comes naturally to many of us. You know when you’re in the presence of anyone who seems to “get you”.  Whether it can be taught is an open question. The fact that it’s on the radar screen opens the window to the brave new world for some doctors.

July 4: Declarations of Inter-Dependence

July 4, 2015

July 10, 2015 edition

Somewhere down the line, celebrating our country’s independence morphed into ways we celebrate our inter-dependence with each other. As much as we look to the heavens for blooms of aerial pyrotechnics, we connect with each other on terra firma in long standing traditions of our own. I’ll bet many of you have versions of the one I just celebrated with the same gang with whom I’ve marked the occasion with for thirty years.

The recreation of the late afternoon party is as reliably predictable as the cadences of a John Philips Sousa march…from the little things like reprises of some of the same great appetizers adorned with teensy American flags, the grilled hot dogs and burgers, chips and dips, cold drinks of every construction, followed by the reliably tasty chocolate chip cookies, homemade brownies, and the massive fruit compote, to the big things like the people around the table (now two tables!) and the years we've spent reconnecting for hours before fireworks and watching the 'kids' grow up and begin families of their own.

This day’s presence of an 18 month old and a two year old certainly made a hit with all and reminded me of what seems like not so long ago that the “kids” who are now their parents had the same effect on us.  And now we talk to them as grown ups. We’ve graduated from a two-generation party to a four-generation party, many of us now grand parents. How did that happen? Permanence and a sense of the fleeting of time mingle like the smoke from the grill and the clouds of exploded fireworks overhead.

The sense of conviviality and instant connection between us bursts out much the same as one of those lovely cascading firework displays that colorfully bloom overhead and shower down in slow motion fading in luminosity as they cascade to earth...much like the party itself, burns brightly, illuminating us all for moments of traditional festivity then dissipates, ready to bloom again when we reconvene next July 4.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. iPhone5

Rachel from Card Holder Services...flim flam and F bombs

Trying to remain civil when on the phone with a rude telemarketer is a challenge. I did my best but, as you see, it did not work. This call was unparalleled in the annals of telemarketing calls. Warning: lots of F bombs...none of them mine.

Friday, May 15, 2015: 3 PM

Ring…ring…ring…my  home phone rings.

"Hello, this is Rachel at cardholder services, calling in reference to your current credit card account. There are no problems currently with your account. It is urgent that you contact us concerning your eligibility for lowering your interest rates to as little as 6.9%. Your eligibility expires shortly, so please consider this your final notice. Press the number one on your telephone now, to speak with a live operator and lower your interest rates. Thank you."

This was my umpteenth call from Rachel in the past year. Instead of hanging up, I pressed the number one.

Agent, not identifying himself, answers.

“Hello, would you please do me a favor and remove me from your call list?” says I.

“No, I won’t remove you from the list.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, I won’t remove you from the list.”

“Did you just say you would not remove me from the call list?

“I won’t remove you from the list.”

“Thank you. Will you please remove me from your call list?

“No, I won’t remove you from the call list.”

“Thank you. Will you please remove me from your call list?

“No, I won’t remove you from the list.”

“There’s a law about these calls, I can ask to be taken off the list.”

“I won’t take you off the list.”

“Please take me off the list.

“Fuck you.”

“Excuse me…?”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“I see. Will you take me off the call list now.”

““Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“Do you have a supervisor?”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“Please connect me with your supervisor.”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“Now that you made yourself clear, please remove me from the call list.”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“You have quit a range of vocabulary.”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“Is this the way you respond to everyone asking to be removed from the list?”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“You must get rewards for customer service.”

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

“Is that the mouth you kiss your mother with?”

And I hung up. Steamed. But unaccountably amused by the trajectory of the insane smutty Kafka-esque dialogue. And that I got the last word.

Robocalls are a plague. Representatives of every company I’ve asked to move my number to the “Do Not Call” list oblige.

Rachel apparently flies above the FCC radar. This link from Marketplace in April 2013 is the most helpful information I found about how to deal with Rachel and Mr. Fuck You.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/hi-rachel-avoiding-robocall-scams

 The last paragraph in the link reads:

"When you hear a prerecorded message and it's a sales pitch, just hang up the phone. Do not press 1, do not press 2 to get yourself removed from the list. These calls are illegal in the first place, so it's unlikely that somebody will actually be creating a list and not calling you back the second time. In fact we suspect that a lot of times they're just trying to identify which numbers are working telephone numbers and you might be added to lists and get more robocalls," says Daffan. "The one thing that consumers can do and that we really encourage is report these calls to the Federal Trade Commission at https://www.donotcall.gov .Those reports are really crucial to us in our targeting and law enforcement efforts."

 I’m reporting the call to the FCC. I’m fairly certain no one will reply with an F bomb. And in case the NSA was tapping the call I hope they RSVP to Rachel ASAP.

PS

more from FCC   https://www.fcc.gov/guides/robocalls

Greening and Beaming

May 1, 2015

One day it was brown, dull, dormant at best, killed off at worst, by the most brutal winter in memory, and the next day, out of the blue, the grass flashed a lopsided green grin from its long winter slumber. The change was sudden, a welcome hallelujah.

Not only grass was sprouting. So too was my attitude, crushed to slush by week after week, month after month, of freezing weather and more snow than on the caps of the Sierra Madres. Grass? Until a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t seen the actual ground since about January 23.

If you live around here, I don’t have to tell you this. The signs of spring and the evaporation of winter’s icy shackles have been all anyone in my neighborhood talks about when we see each other outside.

Just being outside, without hat, mittens, snow shovel, shoulders scrunched up to retain warmth as the marrow congealing blasts of wind make fun of my layers of clothing, feels like a transformative event.

How our ancestors in northern climes survived winters like this without central heating is beyond me. Not beyond me is why they invented holidays, festivals, and embraced merrymaking to mark the renewal.

In the coming weeks, all this profusion of green will become old hat, a ho-hum part of nature’s wallpaper.

Today, just the sight of it makes me smile.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

++++++

"Ooh,Ooh, Ooh, What a little green grass can do to you..." sung to the tune of Billie Holiday's "Ooh, Ooh, Ooh, What  a little moonlight can do to you..."

http://www.billieholiday.com/portfolio/what-a-little-moonlight-can-do/
 

Are you a patter or a rubber?

“Are you a rubber or a patter?” he says.

“Excuse me?” says I.

“When you dry off, do you rub the towel over yourself or pat yourself dry?” the Bloomingdale’s sales associate named C.J. asks me.

“Well then, I’m a rubber!”

Thus began my brief tutorial in Bath Towel Purchasing 101.

Bloomingdale's Bed and Bath department has about a million towels on display.  Visually, it looks like someone detonated a soft cotton rainbow and crammed the colorful fragments into cubbies along the walls and piled others on tables spread across the retail space. It turns out you need a guiding philosophy to end up with a towel that not only matches your bathroom décor but your technique for drying off.

“Towels may be made with the same kind of cotton, long staple Pima or Supima or other kinds of cotton, but the weave and loops are different,” says C.J.

“How do I know whether it’s a towel for a patter or a rubber?” Now I'm really confused.

C. J. holds out his hands. “Sometimes you can tell by looking at the weave but mostly it’s by touch,” he says, and shows me a towel with each kind of weave.  

Show time. I walk around feeling up about a dozen towels, with C.J. as my sidekick and scorekeeper, declaring “Rubber” or “Patter” after each visual and tactile inspection. I graduate with distinction.

I’d always wondered why the soft fluffy towels at my late mother’s house never seemed to absorb water but kept it on the surface when I dried off after showering.    

My mother Elena was a patter. What type are you?

Zig like a butterfly, Zag like a Bee

April 1, 2015

BAM! Thunderous shudder as my poor car recovers from a tire suffering a direct hit from a pothole camouflaged in the rainy street. Again.

SHEIT!

How many more of these assaults can my poor car take before a tie rod snaps, a rim gets bent or a tire gets flattened?

I feel like a soldier in enemy terrain. Eyes are peeled for potholes, some an annoyance, others large enough to damage tank treads. Thousands of these road zits have broken out in the last month, result of an historic and brutal winter, tons of road salt, water penetrating every little crack in the pavement, then freezing, expanding, breaking down the macadam into what looks like a street in downtown Tikrit. What’s worse - every time one of us ka-bams into one, we make it bigger.

Police must think the entire driving population has just left a Super Bowl celebration, swerving around like piña colada-loaded tourists doing a conga line on their first night of a Caribbean vacation. The car in front of me does a quick zig to the left, I maneuver my car into a quick swivel and follow the leader.

The city of Boston has a website dedicated exclusively to potholes. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (DOT) has a hotline for them. Virtually every town around Boston has a way to report them. Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone says that some 90 percent of the Commonwealth’s roads are the responsibility of individual municipalities, and that each one handles them differently. Proof? It takes 100 yards of road travel to discover you’ve entered a different municipality. The zig and zag quotient often rises or falls  precipitously.

Repairs are attempted. Cold patches, hot patches… neither makes a difference. Filling the potholes with frozen jello might have the same long-term effect. They’ll get chewed up and return to menace us like chain saw killers in a couple of days.

The most treacherous are the ones that look like puddles.  They could substitute for wading pools for small children. They could cost you a week’s pay in damages. Reaction time in heavy traffic is about two nanoseconds. You just hope the car in front of you is paying attention to the road. If it looks like it’s been hit with a rocket, you’ll ride over the same crater before you can react.

Remedies: develop the equivalent of muscle memory to avoid the most weapons-grade potholes, or drive at the speed of a tortoise and suffer the wrath of cars behind you (this is Boston, after all, where cautious driving habits are taken as a personal affront on one’s ability to get from here to there without delay).

Or take the T (a very distant last resort if you don't mind spending time waiting for Godot in order to save your car’s suspension). 

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Inching Along

Inching Along
March 7, 2015

This story about penises trended on top of news aggregators all last week. After seeing the story picked up in The Huffington Post, CNN, The Guardian, and many other reputable outlets, I, with some trepidation, decided, with tongue in cheek, to weigh in.

Rulers and tape measures got an extraordinary work out this week. Home construction project? Nope. The story published on the internet titled  "‘Am I Normal?’ Check Biggest Study Yet Of Penis Size, Among 15,000 Men". Source: BJU International

Kim Kardashian thought she could break the Internet with a photo of her silky- smooth abnormally? big butt. Her megalomaniacal aspiration got topped by the posting of the story of another body part, the only one of more interest to men than Kim’s ass. Their penises.

There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t considered the size of his penis. And compared it to others he sees in locker rooms or porn sites. It must be noted that every porn site I checked (of course done for research purposes of writing this post) has sidebars telling men how to get bigger penises. The bigger your penis, the bigger your masculinity quotient, the thinking goes. And by extension, the bigger thrill you’ll give the woman you sleep with.

With a touch of envy, I see that I don’t measure up to the mega-penises on display in porn sites. I’ve showered in men's locker rooms from my high school football days to the health club days of the present. I’ve seen the range of equipment from pretty big to pretty small. According to the story data and my own eyes, I’m in the normal range. And of course I pulled out a ruler to see how I measured up. The fact that I fit along the graph in the normal curve doesn’t mean I wouldn't still like to sport an extra inch or so.

Freud thought penis envy (this version of “Penis Envy” was published in February 2012 on PsychologyToday.com and removed two weeks later after public controversy!) was a woman’s envy that she didn’t have a penis.

Hell no, Siggy. It’s all about OUR penises. We are walking, talking penises. We parade them around. We play with them. We do everything but put them in puppet shows, but now that I think of it, some guys undoubtedly have.

We love it when a woman shows delight in contact with them. It’s a good thing that libido is so potent that when we’re in its full grasp, the only thing we think about is having our penises in her somewhere. We think the size of our penises is a big deal. What women think is a mystery.

The best outcome for small penis anxiety is to use the old Avis car rental slogan - “We Try Harder.” Pun intended.

Marshawn the Martian? Think again...

February 1, 2015

One of the biggest stories all Super Bowl week long has been about a guy who won’t talk to the media. He’s been portrayed as rude, off-putting, and surly.  Uh uhhh.

Watch this video, dubbed the “Yeah” video, after his team the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Arizona Cardinals on November 23, 2014. Running back Marshawn Lynch is surrounded by media who lob questions at him one after the other. His  responses are hilarious…”Yeah”, “Maybe|” and “I don’t know” while he appears to be texting.

At the 1:00 mark he says he’s speaking in Oakland he has “a foundation meeting at the Edgewater on December 14, to help benefit the inner city youth  to try and build a youth center, so yeah…” No one asks him a follow up question.

At the 1:35 mark, the guy actually smiles and his eyes light up. He’s having a good time parrying the media, a few of them chuckle along with him. The same thing happens on this video where a team mate adds to the fun.

So, yeah…

Voice Recognition

January 6, 2015

I’m a radio guy. I have no idea what some of my favorite “on the air” voices look like in person. Just the way I want it. I don’t want to know. It is an unnecessary layer, a subliminal distraction between me and the news, sports, and commentary.

Unlike TV personalities, I associate these reporters, anchors and commentators with a voice, not a face. I could be riding an elevator with one of these men or women and I wouldn’t be tempted to whip out my phone and ask for a photo. In this age of ubiquitous digital imagery, these voices emanate from radio, the last bastions of non-visual media.

Recently, I came across a photo of WBUR newsman Bob Oakes. Since then, I can’t shake the image of is face every time I hear his voice on the air. Of course, I associate lots of radio names with faces. I just don’t go out of my way to discover the ones I don’t connect that way.

I love Siri. She’s got a great voice plus a sense of humor. I’d be disappointed if all of a sudden, Apple gave her a face. I like the mystery. She’s faceless but not characterless. So are the voices on my Garmin GPS system. They get the job done.

Way back in the first days of radio, most listeners had no idea what the entertainers and announcers looked like. There was comfort listening to familiar voices. I love listening to The Moth Radio Hour, a throwback to the old days of radio when stories were king. Who knows what those storytellers look like, who cares?

Here’s a list of some of my favorite faceless voices: Peter Sagal (and all his spirited panelists) of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Ira Glass, Sylvia  Poggioli, Bill Littlefield, Joe Pesca, Andre Codresceau, all of NPR, and Bob Edwards of Bob Edwards Weekend.

Sooner or later, one of their faces will pop up unexpectedly on the internet and the genie will be out of the bottle. Until then, I happily know them only by their voice print.  Maybe I’ll ask my therapist if there’s some dark meaning behind my wish to enjoy listening to faceless voices.

Joe Cocker 1944-2014 : British Rocker, Soul Survivor,Diamond in the Rough

Joe Cocker May 20, 1944 - December 22, 2014 : British Rocker, Soul Survivor, Diamond In The Rough

Who says white guy singers don’t have soul? Joe Cocker never got the memo. If only for one epic moment, at Woodstock in 1969, he crushed the notion. That afternoon, the man sang from a deep place way down in the most raw corner of his hypothalamus, the part of the brain’s limbic system that controls emotions. Most of us learn to filter what’s boiling down there or we’d be living in perpetual chaos. Performing artists are an exception.

Watch the video in this link. The first few minutes might be described as singing. From after the three minute mark, we’re way beyond that. This is raw incantation, prayer, and supplication. “I’ll Get By With A Little Help From My Friends” becomes an anthem for a generation, or at least for the half a million kids in the pastures of Max Yasgur’s farm rural in New York. To me, this is the ultimate expression of the Peace and Love summer of 1969.

We believed in ourselves. We didn’t trust anyone over the age of thirty. We were going to change the world and dammit it was cool if we took a break to have the biggest party of the twentieth century while we were at it.

Change and limitless possibility were in the air. We could smell it. Joe Cocker sang what we knew to be true  – we were changing the world and if we stumbled we could count on getting by with the help of our friends.

Listen again. We, the children of the Age of Aquarius, are in our sixties and beyond. The world looks different. We look different. Joe Cocker just passed away at 70, the miraculous survivor of a life lived pushing the limits. His friends mourn him. So do I.

From here on out, we’re back where we started….and we’re going to need to get by with a little help from our friends.

Men in Black, Men in Orange

November 6, 2014

Today's headline:
Navy SEAL whose shots killed bin Laden goes public

I don’t need to know the identity of the Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden. I’ve just gotten over feeling sick to my stomach from seeing the photos that were plastered over the internet and TV of masked men in orange suits towering over men kneeling beside them, knowing full well what was about to happen. I cannot imagine watching a video of the event. What’s next? A video of the killing of bin Laden?

The ISIS people are masters of manipulating social media. Do we need to match them by giving hero status to the SEAL who took out bin Laden? The media is awash every day with images and videos of violence commited in the name of country or religion or family honor. The grotesque is becoming the commonplace

Secret missions need to be kept secret. A team of Navy SEALS did their job, performed a dangerous mission with valor. A clear and present danger was eliminated. Fine.

Valor becomes tabloid when the alleged shooter of bin Laden tells us the grisly details.  For people from certain other countries, the shooter becomes the man in the orange suit. Would that there was an end in sight.

"On My Teacher's Shoulders" - Book Tour Hits The Road Part2

"On My Teacher’s Shoulders" by Jeff Kelly Lowenstein: Book Tour Hits The Road
Bay Path University
Longmeadow, MA
October 23, 2014

“Hey, you two need to get to the book table, there’s a line of people with books in their hands!” organizer Briana Sitler says to us.

This, my friends, was a moment. I don’t know about you but I never thought I’d ever be on the other side of the table asking people I’d never met, “How do you spell your name?” before scrawling my name and a comment inside the book’s cover.

And here I am, with goofy grin, signing books at the rear of the Mills Theater at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, MA, basking in the glow of the first presentation on the road of “On My Teacher’s Shoulders,” written by former fourth grade student Jeff Kelly Lowenstein.

All of us have had at least one teacher who stands out in our memories. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime gift, if you’re a very lucky teacher, that a former student writes a book that features you as a prominent character.

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, professor, journalist, former teacher and newspaper reporter, is a very accomplished man – and I’ve written plenty of posts elaborating on that.  We had just finished our one-hour program in which Jeff described three major intersections in his life that involve me – and I got to add a few minutes giving my perspective about each intersection.

From the outset, Jeff’s had the idea that the story would resonate with an audience of teachers, student teachers, and students majoring in education.  Heck, he’s even thought about Oprah. He spent years shaping the book, often rising at 5:00 AM to write and revise drafts, all while keeping a heavy work load as an investigative reporter. And here we are on stage, spotlights trained upon us and an audience in front of us.

Tonight, he is living a dream and bringing me along for the ride. The Bay Path University theme this year is “Own Your Story.” Jeff not only owns the story, he’s written a book about it.

Jeff is introduced by Virginia "Ginna" Freed, emeritus professor of English.

Having fun telling stories; watching video of Boston TV Channel 5 story of Jeff running 1999 Boston Marathon in my honor.

Jeff introducing me to sing the "Captain Hook" song; signing books at the end of the program!

Photos courtesy of Paul Bloomfield

VIDEO COURTESY OF BAY PATH UNIVERSITY!

"On My Teacher's Shoulders" Hits The Road

"On My Teacher’s Shoulders" by Jeff Kelly Lowenstein: Book Tour Hits The Road
Bay Path University
Longmeadow, MA
October 23, 2014

Bay Path University, an innovative, career-focused institution founded in 1897, invited Jeff Kelly Lowenstein and me to be the lead-off program for their 2014 “Kaleidoscope Series: Perspectives On Culture, Life, and Learning”. It was a great fit since the Longmeadow, MA school has a robust undergraduate and graduate program in Education.

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
To enlarge the scope of the program, Dr. Karen DeAngelis, Chair of the Education Department, invited Jeff, my former fourth grade student, author of "On My Teacher's Shoulders" and a journalism professor at Columbia College in Chicago, to moderate a panel titled "Top Three Tips for Beginning Teachers."

6:00 - 6:30 PM
Networking session and light hors d'oeuvres

Panelists included:
·  Leah Cook, '13, BPU Alumnae, Special Education Teacher, Ludlow High School, MA
·  Dr. Neil Gile, Principal, Wolf Swamp Elementary School, Longmeadow, MA
·  Melissa Tharau, '12, BPU Alumnae, Kindergarten Teacher, Harwinton Consolidated Elementary School, Harwinton, CT
·  Dr. Joanne Welch, Director of Special Education, East Longmeadow, MA
• Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, moderator, Columbia College, Chicago, IL

The panelists were terrific. Leah Cook and Melissa Tharau offered practical, do-able advice specifically aimed at young teachers like themselves but applicable to veterans as well. Dr. Gile spoke about the importance of creating a sense of culture and community within a school and how he does it.  Dr. Joanne Welch offered advice from her unique point of view from thirty years of experience as teacher and administrator.

I’ve been out of the education business for ten years. Considering the sea changes in education, I wondered whether my own take on the subject would be antiquated. Boy, was I surprised. Pedagogy has changed over the years but the tips from these panelists would have met with nods from the veterans I taught with in my first year at The  Pierce School in Brookline, MA in 1970.

The Breck Suite in Wright Hall was filled with the perfect audience: undergraduate education majors, student teachers, Bay Path graduates now in their first years of teaching and several members of the Bay Path staff.

Jeff's style of moderating was impressive: listening, summarizing, making insightful segues from one speaker to the next, then asking thoughtful follow-up questions that built on what panel members contributed. It gave me a first-hand view of how he teaches at Columbia College, using insight, perceptive listening, and levity to keep the topics deep and focused.

I've got to tell you, I've seen Jeff use those people skills since he was nine years old!

7:00 PM Kaliedoscope Series Program organized by Director of Special Programs Briana Sitler

Mills Theater in Carr Hall on the Bay Path University campus for our first presentation of “On  My Teacher’s Shoulders” on the road since our premier presentation in Brookline,MA.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

On My Teacher's Shoulders: Book Tour Begins~

What a rich story...Yours truly and Jeff Kelly Lowenstein: 40 years of connection from teacher to mentor to friend, chronicled in book form by my former fourth grade student Jeff Kelly Lowenstein.

As a teacher and a man, I feel totally honored by Jeff's writing. Every man or woman who's ever taught has made an impact on students. Few of them are lucky enough to have it wrapped in a former student's biography.

Todays Book Tour: begins at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, MA

Backstories:

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2012/05/jeff-kelly-lowenstein-my-walking-talking-lifetime-achievement-award.html

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2012/11/on-my-teachers-shoulders-from-teacher-to-mentor-to-friend.html

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2012/11/on-my-teachers-shoulders-a-magical-evening.html

Updates to follow!

 

 

Obama Care? Nope. Obama Wear!

August 30, 2014

A new frontier. The President has crossed into Sartorial No Person’s Land, formerly known as Sartorial No Man’s Land. And is getting a tsk-tsk judgement usually reserved for female politicians.

Last Thursday, the President addressed the threat of ISIS and possible US military action in Syria, one of the most pressing political issues of 2014. How did major news outlets, the Twitterverse and blogosphere respond?

They went TMZ over the color of the Commander-in-Chief’s suit...TAUPE!  You’d think he abused the dignity of the office by wearing a Mickey Mouse Disneyland costume or T-shirt and shorts. I can see it now at the next televised political debate. Commentary swirling around male senators’ dyed hair, hair style, designer suits, trouser length, weight, and how well they look “for their age”.

When he said, “Yes we can,” Mr. Obama apparently wasn’t talking about wearing a taupe-colored suit.

I leave it to you, dear readers, to consider the fact that we've officially entered the TMZ age of news coverage, when taupe trumps turmoil in the Middle East.

Photo courtesy The Telegraph,one of whose readers tweeted, "I'm praying someone in the press corp will yell out 'who are you wearing?'" during the coverage.

A Birthday Salute To My Editors

A reprise from a 2011 post...still true today!

August is a big month for me and my two editors. Just think...three Leos sharing a stage! On this occasion, I gladly step to the footlights and have the spotlight cast a bright beam on them.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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

Rx for News Fatigue

I'm done with "news" for a few days. The buzz about beheading is the straw that broke my camel's back. It's gruesome. It's scary. It's barbaric. And it has swamped the news in radio and television. The fact that it's disseminated via video is sickening.

A steady diet of stories about Israel and Hamas, ISIS, Syria, Ebola, the Ukraine and domestic stories about Michael Brown are too much for me. I'll scan the headlines in the Boston Globe, read about The Red Sox and, god help me, maybe even Kim Kardashian, but I'm not tuning into NPR or network news content.

Doom and gloom are settling around me like thick coast of Maine fog. I've signed online petitions, contributed to humanitarian causes, emailed senators and congresspeople.  I feel like I’m pissing in the wind and that the wind is picking up speed.  Enough already. When I have begun to feel that the world is a bad place, it's time to turn off the news. I need salve.

Bring on the sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Well, at least a big hit of music and dancing. When I'm listening to a great CD or dancing to live music, I am free, on a natural high, and happy. A part of my psyche is getting fed and fortified. I'll return to a daily quotient of news in a few days. I'll keep contributing to causes I believe in and sign petitions to the men and women who represent me in Congress.

The beat will go on. It will include a big helping of music and dance.

What keeps you balanced in times like this?

Robin Williams RIP

Robin Williams (1951-2014) RIP

He made me laugh. The kind of laugh that erased my own travails of the moment, made them go poof for a while, a nearly out-of-body experience to be taken for such a joyful, crazy-assed ride, windows rolled down, hair flying, exhilarating, free association, semi-demented and bent in a good way, the kind of humor that Williams manufactured in nano-seconds in a waterfall of images, with voices, mime-like body and face dynamics so fast and sustained that I could barely keep up, never mind connect, the dots as fast as he was laying them down or spraying them out scattershot from his sawed off shotgun of a mind.

His antic and manic humor still makes me laugh, ache now added to awe, in the days after his death. Laughter is a rich commodity Robin Williams owned with a Midas touch. The irony that it didn’t erase his own travails is the unkindest cut of all.

Crystal Myths

Back in the day, there used to be a goofy song we sang on road trips as college kids, went like this:

Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes,

Long as I have my plastic Jesus,

Riding on the dashboard of my car,
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

Times have changed some but replace the plastic Jesus with plastic discs with stories embedded in them and you have Audio Books. These days, if I have more than four hours of road time looming, I head to my library for an audio fix.  I load my car’s CD player with disc 1 of an audio book and I’m ready for anything the road fates throw my way.

My first fix happened innocently enough a few years ago. My neighbor tossed an audio book, titled “Little Green Men,” written by Christopher Buckley into the front seat as I was about to make several round trips to Westport, MA. “It’s a little quirky, give it some time and I think you’ll love it,” he said.

I was a little dubious. My usual company in the car is NPR or a music CD. Before pulling out of my garage, I sift through a pile of CDs piled behind the driver’s seat, pick two or three that match my mood, and head for the open road.

I can tell what my emotional state is by looking at my choices. Is it going to be a reflective hour or two in which I just let my mind loose to ruminate – the soundtrack being the muffled sound of air over-cresting the Mercedes’s hood at 70 mph, or a rowdy romp with honky-tonk, zydeco, rock ‘n roll, or classic Tony or Frank. No matter what the choice, it is restorative. Now, if I’m going to be on the road for a long ride, Audio Books rule.

“Little Green Men” appeared to be an outlandish, a not so subtle science fiction sending up Washington politics. Before long, it turned into a really funny satire that laid into beltway politics, the media, the Space Program, UFO maniacs and the Establishment. By the end of the story, I was hooked on audio books.
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Green-Men-A-Novel/dp/0060955570

These days, I don’t even think about beginning a long road trip before making a short one to the library. Those CDs can take between 8 and 10 hours to complete. It would take about a month of trips to the market, health club, music clubs and diners to finish a story. I need to settle in for a few hours at a clip.

With a book in the CD bay, my outlook on travel has been altered. Traffic jams? No problem. I get to listen to a few more chapters. Siri sends me down the wrong road? Same. When I really get into a story, I get an urge to visit my friends in Pennsylvania.

Downsides? Getting back home with an hour or two left when the story is really popping is exasperating. I make up errands lists and take the long way to the destination. I actually slow down and stop when a traffic light turns yellow (a tactic unknown to Boston drivers).  I sit in my garage an extra few minutes waiting for a chapter to complete. A mysterious code of conduct overrides any thought of bringing the CD inside. The car and the CDs are peanut butter and jam, natural partners in pleasure. Listening on board is a fabulous use of time. There are no distractions, no refrigerator to raid, no emails to send, no laundry to put in the dryer. Just pay outward attention to the road and let my inner mind loose as the scenery whizzes by.

A good reader can make a good story great. His voice (and the books I’ve listened to are 95% read by men) is usually an eerie match for the book’s main character. He can subtly vary his tone/accent/pitch to portray other characters. I begin to get a physical concept of the characters by the way the reader casts them. When I read a series by a particular author, I look forward to hearing that familiar voice again.

Crime mystery/adventure stories are my current faves. I’ve led an alternate life as LA defense attorney Mickey Haller or LAPD detective Hieronymus Bosch in Michael Connelly’s series; as Alex Cross, Washington, D.C. psychiatrist, detective, sometimes FBI special agent in the James Patterson series; and Jack Reacher in Lee Childs series Reacher series. Dick Hill is the perfect gravelly voiced reader for this series. He embodies the essence of Reacher’s center of gravity.

Revealed book by book, all these guys have back-stories - and flaws - fragile family connections, romantic interests past and present, and opinions about life, the way is and the way it ought to be. They are men I’d like to know, hell, they're men I’d like to BE.

A two-hour trip still takes two hours but the time seems to pass faster, in another dimension, fiction-enabled warp speed. But fair warning... once you find an audio book that tickles your fancy, you may not want to head for the open road without one sitting on the dashboard of your car.

http://watertown.wickedlocal.com/article/20140822/NEWS/140828680/12455/OPINION

http://watertown.wickedlocal.com/article/20140822/NEWS/140828680/12455/OPINION/?Start=2

Westport Friends (Quaker) 53rd Used Book Fair: Video Gallery

Waiting for the opening whistle... Welcome by Greg Marcello, Steering Committee Clerk for the bookfair. Gail Nixdorf, a birthright member of Westport Meeting of Friends (Quaker) from Little Compton, RI, has the honor of blowing the opening whistle. "Gail was present at the first book fair!," Greg says.

 

Part1: Veteran volunteer Tristan Peirce explains the sorting process for books donated to the book fair.

  

Part2: Tristan Peirce explains how books stored after being sorted and priced.

 

Two men talk about the book fair experience. Books have an afterlife with Shane Sher's wife who sets up a lending library in a laundromat near their home in Fairhaven.

Videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.