pt at large

Willie Nelson singing for his supper...

WHAAATT!?

C'mon, Willie...

I was startled then downright dismayed...two seconds into a commercial break on CNN, here you come singing "You Were Always On My Mind." for a Fed Ex commercial…."Willie Nelson x FedEx | Delivering for Earth"

What are  you thinking?

Your voice belongs in lots of places, from Farm Aid that you founded in 1985 to Honky Tonk road houses, but this Fed Ex business is a bridge too far.

The only damn thing that will make me feel at all better is if every penny Fed Ex pays you goes straight to the United States Revenuers to pay for your federal taxes this year. We all remember what happened in 1990 when the IRS raided your home, seized your  possessions and auctioned them off to pay a $16.7 million dollar tax debt.

You've never been short on telling us what's on your mind. I'm not entitled to do anything but listen to your vast and adventurous catalog of songs but I sure would like to know why oh why you agreed to hitch your wagon to Fed Ex.

You support environment causes and farmers who depend on a stable environment.

The Fed Ex commercial touts its commitment to reducing its carbon imprint  but hey, FedEx had more than 200,000 motorized vehicles in its fleet in 2019. To its credit it added 2944 electric vehicles that included delivery trucks, forklifts and airport ground service equipment.

Fine and dandy, but FedEx's airline cargo division boasts a huge fleet of 691 aircraft, twice as many as Ryanair, Europe's largest airline, and nearly three times as many as British Airways.as of 2017. In 2018, it's estimated that global aviation – which includes both passenger and freight – emitted 1.04 billion tonnes of CO2. This represented 2.5% of total CO2 emissions in 2018. Aviation emissions have doubled since the mid-1980s. That ain't hay.

As my dear readers have figured out after watching tons of hours of TV since March 2020, the songs pitched to sell product aim for our hearts then make a break our our wallets or try to improve our opinion of the aspirations of the corporation.

Hearing a song by Willie or Smokey Robinson transports us to the first time we heard it, who we were with, what we were doing, and the world in which we were living at the time... a cagey strategy to co-opt our buying choices by playing on my emotions.                       

Corporations began to capitalize it in 1926 when they knew most of America was tuned into their radios. Since March 2020 most of us have been glued to our TVs. Branding by using songs deeply embedded in our consciousness is a sneaky, powerful soft sell. Not fair. But effective on TV.

Willie, maybe Fed Ex delivers your monthly supply of weed.

For god's sake, grow your own.

PS

Amanpour & Company interview shows Willie's amazing memory

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/legendary-musician-willie-nelson-his-letters-america-nie80g/

 

 

 

 

 

Mother’s Day with Irma Thomas, WWOZ, May 10, 2020

May 10, 2020

Mother’s Day with Irma Thomas, WWOZ, 12 PM - 2 PM

Today would have been Irma's 37th (yes, 37th) annual Mother's Day performance at the Audubon Zoo.  New Orleans does not give up its sense of tradition for anything, a pandemic included.

The two-hour program that Thomas usually performs is being broadcast on flagship radio station WWOZ....a virtual feat that uses a fabulously curated collection of her songs over the years. 

Just as WWOZ did with Jazz Festing in Place, the radio station today is one giant PSA sending love to moms and thousands of listeners sheltering in place. I have watched Irma light a place on fire.

Sadly, my internet is down until 1:15 PM… then

...finally Thomas's still poignant “Cold Cold Rain” (Katrina) pours down from the ionosphere and here’s the Mother’s Day Salute by Irma Thomas, The Soul Queen of New Orleans. If New Orleans has an earth mother, it has to be Miss Irma.

 "You Can Have My Husband but Please Don’t Mess With My Man” 2011 continues the set that spans from resilience to rejoicing. “Can’t Break Away From You,” 2011, “Time On My Side,” a proclamation of female resilience charged with comeuppance for an inattentive lover, I am listening to one in-charge woman. #metoo, meet Ms. Irma Thomas.

Listen to that cackle at the end of “I Wish Someone Would Care About Me.” Right about now I am throwing bouquets to the engineers and producers who integrated pace and style of this salute as mightily as the Mississippi River threads its way around the city.

Here comes “I Done Got Over It.” When the Queen says, “This is the audience participation part, we’re gonna have an indoor second line. We celebrate everything in New Orleans with a second line, births, deaths, weddings, funerals, when a pregnancy test comes back negative! Get out your hankies, shake your tail feathers (cackles)” the audience needs no encouragement.

“Iko Iko,” another New Orleans anthem.

I can’t stand it. I’m bounding down the stairs, JBL Flip speaker blaring in hand. Out the front door to dance in the sunlight on my front porch. Someone in the audience shouts, “We love you, Irma!”

“So do I! Happy Mother’s Day Miss Irma!”

Photo top PT, bottom courtesy of WWOZ

Irma Thomas at the Regatta Bar, Cambridge, MA April 9, 2009

Midnight Ramble Series - May 7, 2020 - Photos

May 7, 2020 Midnight Ramble

Walking from residential neighborhoods to the middle of a ghost town to post a letter.

The Flower Moon , the last supermoon of 2020, begins to bloom...

A sign of the times...

Mount Auburn Street 100 yards from Watertown Square heading east...would get arrested if tried this BP (before Pandemic)

Walking the line...

Empty bus on midnight run...

A verified midnight ramble!

Amazing colors at midnight...

Luminous golden glows pour like rivers from mute homes that stare at me as I walk past in the silence.

Photos by  Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Midnight Ramble Series - May 7, 2020

May 7, 2020

In response to Governor Baker's updated public gathering ban, my health club closed on March 16. A gym rat for decades, I needed to feel the burn. Or at least a simmer.  On March 20, I began walking. Which heretofore I have hated. Pound out a steady rhythm on an elliptical machine till I break a sweat. Love it.

Walk around the quarter mile track a quarter mile from my home? No way. Until March 20. The state is in a shelter in place mandate. If you're not an essential worker, stay home. Markets, pharmacies, liquor stores are open. Everything else closed. No cars moving on the streets. The skies hushed with no air traffic.

Around midnight March 20, my will to exercise told my ideas about walking to...well, take a walk. I donned a parka, headed out for parts unknown. That first midnight ramble has become a habit as steady as my commitment to show up at my health club.

Mitigation at that date: wash hands, do not congregate in groups of more than 10. No mention of masks yet.

The idea to walk at midnight wasn't a plan, a strategy to keep away from contact with others. I was wide awake. I  really wanted to stay in shape.  I actually thought that there was a possibility that I could resume dancing before too long (a delusion no doubt, we all have ways of dealing with a crisis) and I was going to be up for it physically.

What happened stunned me. I could not hear a thing. Anywhere. Not a single car. Not a single person on the streets. Nothing moved. Lights glowed from living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms. I stopped in my tracks several times trying to arrange this in my head. Many homes were dark, inhabitants asleep. Clearly there was activity in others but not even muffled sounds from the TVs flickering inside. I was walking through the set of a science fiction movie.

The total silence, sounds of human activity, of any kind, totally inaudible. The deep silence unnerved me.

After six weeks now, I still choose to ramble at midnight. In a way I haven't yet grasped, the silence comforts me.

The part of the ramble I like most - I walk straight down the middle of the street right on the yellow line not a car to impede me. Sort of a heady disregard for normal rule of law in a time so much has changed. Walk in the middle of the road? Every step I take reminds me I'm living in a global moment in history in which the outcome is unknown. For me, too.

Luminous golden glows pour like rivers from mute homes that stare at me as I walk past in the silence. In an hour, I'll be back in my own living room, the warm glow one of many pouring onto my steely silent street.

PHOTO ESSAY NEXT PAGE

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Social Distancing At Close Quarters

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!

Social Distancing At Close Quarters

Dr. Wendy Walsh psychologist Saturday, April 25 on CNN at about 2:45 PM In a weekly segment hosted by CNN anchor Frederica Whitfield.

Whitfield asks Walsh to respond to a viewer question. "We are a couple living in a small apartment. How can we maintain distance and avoid conflict in our small space?"

Dr. Wendy Walsh’s Answer

“There are two kinds of distance,” she says,”physical distance and emotional distance.”

“When emotions are running high we should not judge our partners by their coping ability. With this kind of stress, everyone has a certain neuro-chemistry that wires them to respond in a certain way when dealing with stress. So don’t go into this thinking I’m going to leave this person because they cannot endure the stress. Instead focus on forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.”

“Ask yourself every day what can I do to catch them doing something good and verbalize that. Because you want to water what you want to grow. Otherwise it inspires criticism and when you complement your partner it reminds your brain of why you fell in love with him/her in the first place.”

“Regarding physical distance, you need to talk about this especially in a small apartment. This is your corner, this is my corner, during these hours. Let’s make a game strategy for this team. Always think about it In times of conflict. If this relationship wins, then you both win.”

Walsh's advice about emotional distance can apply to everyone in the house/apartment. Making a team effort could quite possibly keep the team in the winning column by the time the period of isolation is over.

PS April 8, 2020 Corona Disease Guidance from City of Boston

"March the Ninth Twenty Twenty" : A Poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, Italy

March 23, 2020

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

A day in the midst of a pandemic...
A Poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, trans. by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford

From Edizione Black Coffee written in Italian *
https://lithub.com/march-the-ninth-twenty-twenty/

Published on March 23, the poem

The poet's sentiment resonated with me. I spent time in Rome in June 2018 and in Rome, Castelfiorentino, Florence, Siena, and Bologna in 2019. I've walked the streets, been seduced by the architecture, colors, cobbled streets, sounds the expressive Italian language, a linguistic Tarantella echoing in my ears. I swear I've been on the same street as the photo accompanying Mariangela's poem. I worry about the health of the people I met in my hotel, restaurants  and shops I visited.

The poem speaks truth across continents and oceans. It was true for Mariangela Gualtieri the day she wrote it. It is true for me as I read it.

The poet's two words "I think" in the final stanza, are aspirational. It remains to be seen if, in the words of the poet, "Our hand will be more delicate in the doing of life now that we know how sad it is to stand one meter apart."

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

I’m telling you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt it
that it was too furious,
our frenzy. Being inside of things.
Outside of our selves.
Squeeze every hour – make it yield.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
We needed to do it together.
Slow down the race.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human force
that could hold us back.

And since this
was for all of us a tacit wish
like an unconscious will –
perhaps our species has obeyed
loosened the bonds that protect
our seed. Opened
the innermost cracks
and let it in.
Perhaps this is why there was a leap
in the species – from the bat to us.
Something in us wanted to be opened.
Perhaps, I don’t know.

Now we are at home.

It is extraordinary what is happening.
And there is gold, I believe, in this strange time.
Perhaps there are gifts.
Nuggets of gold for us. If we help one another.
There is a very strong call
of the species now and as a species
we must each see ourselves. A common fate
holds us here. We knew it. But not well enough.
Either all of us, or no one.

The earth is powerful. Truly alive
I feel it thinking a thought
that we do not know.
And with what’s happening now? Let us consider
whether the earth is not what’s moving.
Whether the law that rules
the entire universe, whether what’s happening, I wonder,
isn’t the full expression of that law
that governs us too – just like
every star – every particle of the cosmos.

Whether the dark matter was this
being bound together in an ardor
for life, with the sweep of death that comes
to rebalance every species.
Keep it within its dimensions, in its place,
going in the right direction. It is not us
who made heaven.

An imposing voice, without words
tells us to stay home now, like children
who are in trouble and don’t know why,
and won’t get kisses, won’t be hugged.
Each within a suspension
that takes us back, perhaps to the slowness
of ancient ancestors, of mothers.

Look more at the sky,
daub a dead man ochre. Bake bread
for the first time. Look intently at a face. Sing
a child softly to sleep. For the first time
hold someone else’s hand tight
feel the strength of the agreement. That we are together.
A single organism. The whole species
we carry within us. We are saving it inside us.

To that grasp of a palm
in another person’s palm
to that simple act that we are now forbidden –
we will return with expanded awareness.
We’ll be here, more attentive, I think. Our hand
will be more delicate in the doing of life.
Now that we know how sad it is
to stand one meter apart.

My friends at La Dispenza del Podere in Rome

Bologna - Centro Storico

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

 

 

 

What Day Is It?

It's taken me three weeks to get used to feeling unmoored to daily schedule. I have to check my iPhone to figure out what day of the week it is. I can tell if it's day or night, refine that to morning or afternoon by looking outside. I need a schedule or I feel like I'm trying to hold water in my hands. I tune into Governor Andrew "FDR" Cuomo every morning for a dose of facts from a man with command of them, a sense of empathy aimed at New Yorkers, the elderly, the entire medical community, neighboring Governors of New Jersey and Connecticut,  the Federal government when applicable, and clearly separates the facts from his opinion. The whole country tunes in for his daily fireside chat.

I need a sense of structure and routine each day to counter a world out of control just outside my door...so, I ...

• play whatever appeals to me from a pile of CDs I haven't listened to in ages... classical (Claude Debussy's "Images 1894, Series I, II),Glenn Gould's "Back Goldberg Variations" recorded in 1955); Jazz (The Modern Jazz Quartet (Lonely Woman 1987), Bill Evans "Conversations With Myself" 1963); Django Reinhart (Jazz Masters 38); Opera (Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheoghiu "Duets and Arias").

• reconcile months and months of my checkbook

• finish at least one household task on my long to do list

• look out the window

• let a day go by doing not much of anything

• improvise the day's meals with an ever diminishing supply of food in cupboard, fridge and freezer

• learn how to order groceries online (still feels so strange)

• get lost in youtube rabbit holes

• download Zoom to talk with a bunch of friends, make sure i shave and have a decent backdrop for the session

• wash my hands

• worry about running out of toilet paper

• get over feeling like a Martian on the rare times I go to the market and wear my mask

• steer clear of others in the one way aisles in the market

• obsessively worry about how to wipe down every damn thing from the grocery store

• have a staging area just inside the door before taking anything inside

• appreciate silence

• take a walk every night around midnight

MIDNIGHT RAMBLES: Not a sound outside, nothing, no cars, no people, the silence is unsettling and eerie.

 

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Pandemic: You Gotta Have Heart

April 5, 2020

As far back as The Plague of 1348, art was created in some form or another to counter grim reality.  Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, with ten stories that ranged from witty to bawdy,during the plague in Italy. Any way to keep the plague at bay. Today we're emailing friends, long lost or near and dear. It's diversion, but more important, it's gathering our friends around a figurative communal campfire.

In the Art vs Virus department, my neighbors are putting up a fight. As the song goes, "You Gotta Have Heart."

They're displaying teddy bears and rainbows in their windows. We need to be amused, consoled, but more than anything, feel a sense of community.  Just the search for something to display made me feel good...ended up hanging Mardi Gras beads on my front porch and displaying a goofy puppet of Santa Claus in the front window. I was in my '"we're all in this together" mode.

Taking a page from Boston's Sidewalk Sam of yore, my neighbor ordered a bucket of chalk and drew radiant rainbow hearts on every section. Aside from a trip to the grocery or drug store, a walk around the neighborhood is one of our only options in the Stay Home reality. That sidewalk was the show for several days. It took two days of rain to erase the chalk. The joy I felt after seeing of those knockout colors and the memory of watching her create the mini masterpiece with her son? It's still there.

Break out the chalk...

   

With a little help from her son...

   

and teaching moments..."I need the yellow chalk now, can you find a piece?"
 

my neighbor lights up the sidewalk...

Use what makes you feel good...for me, Mardi Gras beads I've collected from numerous Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans and Lafayette and a "throw" from (Krewe de Vieux) 2019 Mardi Gras parade on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans; and a goofy puppet of Santa Claus!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Venus and Trump

During my midnight rambles up the hills in my neighborhood, I walk right up the middle of Palfrey Street.  The Stay at home mandate = no cars = less pollution overhead. Watertown is right under jet flyway routes leaving Logan Airport. Not now.

I have never seen Venus this bright in the evening sky.

Why such a clear sky?

The Editorial Board of the Boston Globe shed light on the subject.  Virus or no virus, we’re all in it together as far as the environment is concerned.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Boston Globe Editorial: April 8, 2020

Trump’s team finds new ways to harm our health

Polluters already were enjoying a reduction in enforcement, but the administration keeps on giving. Lawmakers should keep pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency.

Even as the White House bungles its response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration is endangering public health in other ways — by eliminating or undermining protection of our air and water.

It’s bad enough that this is happening during a pandemic outbreak of a respiratory illness, given that air pollution worsens lung disease in general and appears to be having the same effect with COVID-19. But the effects of various rollbacks in pollution standards could linger long after this crisis subsides.

During his time in office, Trump has ransacked the environment so vigorously that advisory boards appointed by his own administration have criticized the administration’s disregard for scientific evidence in its approach to regulating pollution. Last week, the White House finalized a plan to cut vehicle gas-mileage requirements to a degree that was even more extreme than the deregulation sought by several automakers. And yet Trump and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, keep finding new ways to give industry a pass when it comes to contaminating the environment.

On March 26, the EPA announced that it will refrain from requiring companies, including oil refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities, to monitor and report their discharges of hazardous material if those companies can show that the coronavirus got in the way of such work. As a result, companies that were already enjoying a reduction in the enforcement of pollution rules under Trump now have a new excuse for avoiding responsible stewardship of the air and water. The public is left to hope and pray that companies don’t exploit this moment and instead continue to uphold their obligations to avoid poisoning communities.

Companies that release hazardous pollutants may be keeping many employees home to slow the spread of the virus. But if the facilities are still staffed enough to operate as normal with employees on production lines — as many power plants and petrochemical facilities are — they should be able to keep looking for leaks, testing emissions, and reporting discharges, says Eric Schaeffer, who formerly directed civil enforcement at the EPA and now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.

Schaeffer argues that the EPA didn’t have to deviate so far from the process it usually follows when natural disasters or pipeline breaks force companies out of compliance with environmental rules: The agency writes specific, short-term waivers. But this EPA didn’t put a time limit on its COVID-19 policy. Companies are instead urged to “return to compliance as quickly as possible.”

Perhaps it seems there’s some margin for environmental error now, with overall air pollution way down as stay-at-home advisories keep people out of their cars. But that’s not true for the employees and neighbors of big industrial facilities. “If you’re living next to a smelter, or a metal-finishing operation, or a refinery, it’s business as usual for them. They could be putting out stuff that’s pretty nasty,” Schaeffer says. And those toxins are very likely to go undetected if the companies stop monitoring what they’re putting into the air and water. “The problem with most pollutants is that they don’t have color, they don’t have taste, they don’t have sound,” he says.

To put it another way: If industrial facilities can’t say whether they’re operating safely, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to operate at all.

RELATED: Editorial: Don't let Trump poison the air

Overturning some of Trump’s most damaging environmental policies, especially ones related to global warming, will require voters to throw him out of office. But it’s still worth trying to persuade the administration to rethink the pollution-monitoring holiday and other unhealthy policies it’s formulating. Six senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, asked the EPA last week to halt “several proposals that would likely have a negative impact on air quality and public health.” These proposals cover, among other things, the allowable amounts of mercury, methane, and coal ash in the environment.

Such requests could make a difference, even now.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, the EPA was in a hurry to sharply reduce the influence of public-health studies on environmental regulations. Wheeler has been claiming, disingenuously, that epidemiological research is insufficiently transparent unless its raw data, including individual medical records, are publicly released. Wheeler and his Republican allies know full well that releasing such data could be unethical or illegal, and their real goal is to discredit the studies.

In March, the EPA opened up a relatively brief 30-day window for public comment on this insidious proposal; nearly 24,000 comments have come in. But in light of the disruption caused by COVID-19, critics asked for more time to respond and the EPA extended the comment period to May. Anyone concerned about the intimate connection between the environment and our health should be sure to weigh in.

In the meantime, Congress should keep the heat on the EPA to continue enforcing the nation’s pollution rules amid the pandemic. Public health depends on it.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. /iPhone 11 Pro

Hilary Sallick Poetry: Asking The Form

 Hilary Sallick’s web site is one of the cleanest, most seamless, easily navigated, and transparently spirited that I have seen in a long time. Then there’s the matter of content, graphic and literary, and how it is demonstrated.  In her new collection, Asking The Form, her concept of using audio clips to read her poems embedded in the site is brilliant. How often do you get a sense of content and the author in the same moment? The result makes an indelible impression that, like the puffy parachutes of a milkweed pod, can float in your memory for a languorously long time.

The photographs of her on the site evoke an image, a notion, of the woman behind the stanzas, from whom the words were created, formed, rewritten, reformed and finally hammered into print. A friend recommended her previous collection, Winter Roses, a collection of poems and  vignettes that capture mystery and wonder. Most are constructed like an artist's still life, a moment in time to be savored. It's unusual for vignettes to be included in a work of poetry but Sallick's vignettes have the same balance of opacity and specificity as her poems.

The three poems from her new collection, Asking The Form, are reproduced on her web site, with the benefit of her reading them aloud. Her poetry is more about flow, mood, and reflective observation than meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure.

Writers like Sallick elevate events so ordinary in our own lives that we don't register them. After reading Winter Roses, I was more conscious of the mini dramas occurring all around me, in the street, cafés, and subways. For Sallick, they are her palette. The colors she chooses give us a glimmer of the woman forging the words.

The book cover, Paul Cézanne's portrait of Gustave Geffroy, a subject of one of her poems, is a metaphor for her own style. As in Cézanne's portrait, the viewer/reader is left to fill in unfinished or suggested elements with their own experience.

As a teacher, artist, poet, woman, human being with the antennae to absorb her surroundings, she transforms uniquely personal experience into moments that readers can relate to, and feel resonate internally like a tuning fork, with moments we’ve experienced ourselves.

Such is poetry, the compact art form that, in a few stanzas, can illuminate, resonate, uplift, affirm, and manage to be mysterious and comprehensible all in the same layered moment.

 

Andrew Cuomo: Let’s ‘Kick Coronavirus’s Ass’

Andrew Cuomo: Let’s ‘Kick Coronavirus’s Ass’

There's a reason Maureen Dowd had won a Pulitzer Prize: Here she is writing in the New York Times about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/sunday/cuomo-new-york-coronavirus.html?smid=em-share

My unedited response a minute after reading it.

I laughed, i cried. Since the first time I saw him do a briefing in early March, I tune into TV around noon every day to watch, to listen to him minister to the country with FACTS, a command of numbers and what they mean and portend, pride for his state and its willingness to take on his proposals to collectively manage the unthinkable and flashes of humor that defuse tension.

His personal stories about mother or his “Cara is that true?” questions to his 22 yo daughter sitting at the rear of the room show a mix of paternal pride and his ability to have a big tent mind-set to collect facts from all quarters and put them to work in policies. I guess what that’s the kind of positive bullying that Maureen Dowd talks about.

Her reporting on Cuomo, mixing anecdotes, quotes, reporting about his bullying ways, with references to his father who he sounds and talks so much like, made her comparisons to Trump factual and not polemic. No question that the governor is a driven man but I like the road he’s driving down.

Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “There is no road…walking makes the road.”  That’s Cuomo. He’s walking the walk.

NOTE

You can watch his press briefings on youtube

Louisiana: New Orleans to Lafayette in Crisis

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic

March 29, 2020

Louisiana, especially New Orleans, is getting crushed by  COVID-19. I was introduced to New Orleans and southwest Louisiana in 2009. The experience changed my life. Check the "Louisiana" archives on this page.

My born-and-bred Baton Rouge guide loved knew just about every good place to eat, dance, and see some history every mile down I-10 from New Orleans to Lafayette. She taught me how to pronounce words a Yankee would never ever get right if he said them like they were spelled (or could pronounce in the first place). I learned how to dance to Cajun and zydeco music, tasted exotic (to me) foods boudin, gumbo, jambalaya, alligator, shrimp grits and gravy,po'boys (dressed!), andouille, crawfish étoufée, muffuletta for starters.

From 2009 till last February, I've met some of the friendliest, most welcoming people on the planet. I've visited Lafayette scores of times since my first visit in 2009. It was named the happiest city in the USA in 2014. Based on my most recent visit with dear friends in February, that hasn't changed much.

Last Saturday, I sat in front of my computer and tuned into a Zoom party organized to give all of us required to stay indoors a lift and put some money in a tip jar for the Lafayette musicians whose performance fans from southwest Louisiana, both coasts and lord knows where else watched.

Like everyone else, I've been watching the COVID-19 numbers in Louisiana getting larger and larger. I am praying all my friends are safe and stay healthy.

A few days ago, I sent this image with the note, "To all my Louisiana friends...sending positive energy and luminous love your way..."

We can't have dinners or dance together but there's comfort in staying connected with Zoom and Skype and text until we get to the other side of this.

 

 

Robin Redbreast Chirps..."Play Ball!"

Robin Redbreast Chirps..."Play Ball!"

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic

March 28, 2020

Chirrup, chirrup...

The gate to the track was locked. I headed for home.

I stopped in my tracks when I heard that familiar chirp. A flood of memories ensued. Since I was a kid, seeing, and especially hearing, robins had been a sure sign that Spring had arrived.

Time to take my trusty leather Rawlings baseball glove out of the closet, oil it up, put a baseball in the glove's 'pocket' and stuff it under the mattress to form the shape I wanted. No matter that playing in the field across the street a couple of weeks after the snow finally melted meant wear an extra layer of sweater and sacrifice a pair of sneakers for the next couple of weeks, mud season. The field was still squishy, the grass hadn't even begun to green up. The leather baseball we agreed to sacrifice felt like a shotput by the time a game was finished. Nevermind that in early Saturday morning games you could see your breath. We were playing baseball!

As the years passed, the field appeared to get smaller as we got bigger. Hitting a homer was no longer a prodigious feat but watching the ball carry across the street and into the woods was still a major satisfaction

Standing in front of that locked gate, it was comforting to let the childhood memory envelop me. I felt the contours of the glove on my hand, the camaraderie of boys immersed in play, the smell of the soaked grass underfoot…a wonderful time travel moment, consoling and momentarily freeing from the exigencies of life in this moment in time.

Today, the threat of COVID-19 has closed every park in town. The robins thank god are not under order to stay in their nests. A few chirps was all it took to take me back to a simpler time, when all I had to worry about was being on time for dinner and keeping my beloved baseball glove oiled and ready.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/baseballs-glove-man-77865726/

Sign Of The Times

March 24, 2020

State and local lockdown...unprecedented measures, themes of science fiction become reality.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Puccini in a Tshirt

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic

March 24, 2020

One of my favorite tenors, Roberto Alagna, in jeans and T shirt,in rehearsal with with wife Aleksandra Kurzak, sing "Vogliatemi bene" for Puccini's Madam Butterfly..totally blew me away, watching the singers and orchestra, dressed more like Saturday afternoon in the back yard, sing and play some serious stuff.Their was nothing held back in the singing or orchestra and an occasional outburst of playfulness, some mugging by the two stars, that was amazingly refreshing.

I'm playing the chorus...opera in a T shirt and jeans...a mind boggling way to see how art is created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tpVBbZtak8

and in concert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvCx9dMn6pE

LitHub: A Literary Lifeline In A Time of Pandemic

Dispatches In A Time Of A Keep Your Distance Stay Home Pandemic :LitHub - A Literary Lifeline In A Time of Pandemic

March 22, 2020

State of mind...

Desperate is not the right word but it's in the ballpark playing left field with pandemic in center and stay at home in right. Reminds me of Abbot and Costello's Who's On First. For me, a sense of humor these days is a necessity to balance anxiety, fear, and walking in the dark. So is music, subject for another day.

Today's life ring for the waters I'm bobbing around in...literature. If reading is one of your things, LitHub is a godsend. Sign up and you  get an email with links to several stories a day. You can cherry pick ones that look appealing or just click into unknown territory.

Another cool thing. Every email starts with an image captioned TODAY and a piece of literary trivia.

I need information and balance. A dose of fear, anxiety, and social responsibility keeps me 6 feet away from anyone else on my daily walks. To be honest, I wouldn't have latched on so appreciatively to this literary link in non pandemic times. I embrace this link and literature today more than I probably should have in my years at St. Michael's college.

If you're of a certain age, required to grasp the cultural references, here's a start that might perk you up.

Go to https://lithub.com/  , scroll down right side column to SUBSCRIBE TO THE LITHUB DAILY, ENTER YOUR EMAIL

I spent two weeks in Rome,Tuscany, Milan in July, before the contagion. When I saw this photo for the poem on the March 23 Lit Hub, I knew where it was from.

 

Arianna Huffington's Time to Thrive

Ten minutes well worth your time... it made me late to pick up dinner as I listened to the last few minutes of the radio program.

 

I recognized the sound of the woman's voice, the accent, and couldn't identify who it belonged to. Next day, I found a link to the program on the internet thanks to a helpful woman at WGBH radio.

 

https://mastersofscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mos-episode-transcript_-arianna-huffington.pdf

 

The topic is entrepreneurship. As a retired elementary school teacher, it would seem to have little to do with me...except it turns out to it have everything to do with how I organize my life, manage time, and sensibly carve out a sense of well being on a daily basis.

 

Reid Hoffman’s questions and Arianna Huffington’s responses in the transcript are fascinating. It took a life crisis to inspire Huffington to leave Huffington Post and launch Thrive Global in 2016. A research wonk, she found that 75% of healthcare causes and healthcare problems are stress-related and preventable. 

 

Wellness, enough sleep, corporate culture...would never appear in the same sentence before Thrive came along.

 

"Thrive is about only one thing (this Forbes interview explains Huffington's philosophy of managing performance using micro-steps): How do we build our best lives? How do we achieve everything we want without burnout and stress, bringing together ancient wisdom, the latest science, and new role models? " And all do-able since they're micro steps to build habits to reduce stress, improve well-being and maximize productivity." Her own bout with burn-out inspired the vision.

 

I’ve taken her last comment (below) to heart. It has changed my life (ok, a little hyperbole but not far from the truth). Her earlier comment about “prioritize” is a close second.

HUFFINGTON:​​ And wake up in the morning and have a minute, that's another micro step. Take a minute to remember what you are grateful for, set your intention for the day before you go to your phone. Over 70% of people sleep with their phones. The first thing they do is go to their phone. If you think of it, our phone is everybody else's agenda for us. Our bodies are flooded with the cortisol stress hormone before we have even gotten out of bed. These are small changes, small microscopic changes that can have a huge impact. That's what is so wonderful. That's why I'm so optimistic. These are not huge changes. We are not asking people to leave their jobs or move to a Caribbean island."

I guess the last sentence is optional.

The Statue of Liberty: A Closer Look

December 12, 2019

The torch, the crown, the Greco-Roman stylized robe flowing gracefully from Lady Liberty's broad shoulders to her perfectly formed feet, we all know what she represents.  Her powerful arms bearing the torch seem to illuminate the path to a land of possibilities. For over 100 years, the popular narrative is that the Lady is welcoming the "poor huddled masses." Wrong.

Those immigrants may have been immigrating from countries with monarchies, iron clad social strata, and bleak penniless futures. Surely, their eyes were on the Lady, regal, resolute, representing the end and the beginning of their journey...but what about those chains and broken shackles around her beautifully formed toes.

...a Washington Post May, 2019 story  upended just about every idea I had about the The Statue of Liberty. The purpose of the monument, originally developed in France, was to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States, not, as I have believed for years, to welcome the arrival of immigrants.

What happened? Why? Will the original purpose be restored?

The monument was imagined in 1865 by Édouard de Laboulaye , a Frenchman passionate about the cause of freedom. He was an abolitionist, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, and a scholar of the U.S. Constitution. The French Revolution had torn through his country 65 years before that. The emancipation of slaves in America and freedom as a universal right rang a bell for him. He gave epic speeches about freedom and by 1867 floated the idea of creating a commemorative gift that would celebrate importance of the liberation of slaves in America.

The French artist Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi  had proposed a statue resembling Lady Liberty for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. His idea was rejected.  Bartholdi recalled that Édouard de Laboulaye had proposed in 1865 that a monument representing freedom and democracy be created for the United States. Thus began a 16-year campaign of fund-raising and politicking by these two enterprising Frenchmen.

By 1884 Bartholdi had completed the statue in France. In 1886 he oversaw the statue's reassembly on Bedloe's Island, an outcropping in New York harbor that he saw on one of his fund raising trips to America and immediately envisioned as its placement (6 years before the nearby Ellis Island became a gateway to America).

Immediately after the statue's dedication, the Black Press pushed back. Racism, discrimination, and segregation persisted.  The two Frenchmen's ideal was heartfelt, perhaps propelled by projected wishes for an end of the monarchy in their own country. For African-Americans, it was a bitter pill to swallow. Still is.

The new Statue of Liberty Museum in New York harbor will surprise, shock is not too strong a word, most visitors. Forget the plaque with the Emma Lazarus poem — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — added until 17 years later, in 1903.

The 305-foot statue's original purpose was to celebrate the end of slavery.

In an early model of the statue by the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi from 1870, Lady Liberty is depicted holding broken chains in her left hand, a clear reference to emancipation. Bartholdi based the statue on the Roman goddess Libertas, who is usually depicted wearing a Phrygian cap, traditionally worn by freed Roman slaves.

In Bartholdi’s final model, the broken chains in the statue’s hand were replaced with a tablet that represented the rule of law. Bartholdi placed the broken shackle and chains beneath Lady Liberty’s feet, making it nearly impossible for visitors to see at most angles.

Above and below: pull-quotes in italics from a May, 2019  New York Times story:

The museum doesn’t shy away from the fact that this symbol of “universal liberty” was far from a reality for people of color and women during the late 19th century and for decades afterward.

That point is highlighted by a quote taken from the African-American-owned Cleveland Gazette, which wrote one month after the statue’s opening, “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.” It also quotes a suffragist pointing out the inconsistency of using a female figure as the face.

The Statue of Liberty...The American Myth or The American Dream?

I had to revise the narrative I've believed for years.

How about you? Pass the story along, the timing is perfect.

xxxxxxx

Photo courtesy of Statue of Liberty Museum

https://libertyellisfoundation.org/statueoflibertymuseum/gallery.html

 

Mr. Rogers: A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

July 24, 2019

Stop what you're doing. Set aside ten minutes to read a story about Fred Rogers that will change your life for a few minutes or maybe forever. The stop and set aside ten minutes is not negotiable. You might start skimming the story. Sorry. Not possible. By the fourth paragraph you'll be hooked by a story that grabs you by the lapels and lets go only after the final word. Stories like this just don't come around that often.

The story about Fred Rogers made me laugh out loud, cry, sob, think of life in ways in which I've forgotten register it. A tour of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood from its birth to its place in heaven...the story  will remind you of all that is important in life.

The innate ability of this man to connect deeply, intuitively, intentionally, with men, women, children, strangers, his TV audience... a rare gift - that's Mr. Rogers. Never overt, the power of prayer, simple, unadorned, unaffected, and a well of empathy deeper than the ocean, motivated him. So did grace, found in every corner of the man's life and neighborhood.

Mr. Rogers' story unearthed the entrance to my own rabbit hole of memories, over time buried with the turf of life, illuminated nooks and touched chords, like the ones Mr. Rogers played on his piano, and practically ordered me, with a need that took me by surprise and fullness of heart, to sing along.

The story by Tom Junod, a journalist who slowly, with an initial bit of skepticism, found his way into Mr. Rogers Neighborhood as he shadowed the man over time in 1998 and updated in 2017 is the most deeply realized story you'll read in a long, long, time.

Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in a "A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood", a film based on Tom Junod's story, will be released in late 2019...Hanks, who can convey the natural grace of Fred Rogers with the ease of, well, Mr. Rogers himself, and right around Thanksgiving...how perfect.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

 

Block Party: THE VIDEOS: A Touch of New Orleans on Pearl Street

Saturday, May 18, 2019

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/05/block-party-a-touch-of-new-orleans-on-pearl-street.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2019/05/block-party-a-touch-of-new-orleans-on-pearl-street.html

 

Block Party: A Touch of New Orleans on Pearl Street

Saturday, May 18, 2019, Watertown, MA

4:30 PM – 8:30 PM

The Hawthorne/Oliver/Palfrey/Pearl Street Neighborhood Block Party was a Saturday afternoon blockbuster in all the right ways.

This was the great grandmother of all block parties. All the right stuff: high-grade potluck food, both sweet and savory, covered the tables set up on Pearl Street (closed to traffic between Fayette and Palfrey). The desserts donated by resident Nobuko Maruyama from her bakery Koko were a big hit.

Little kids were playing games and drawing on the pavement with huge stubby pieces of chalk, while their parents were chilling alongside them. And neighbors cheerfully chatted on this, the most gloriously sunny and warm spring day of the year after a brutally cold, rainy,  blustery stretch of days since Spring officially began on March 20.

I had no idea what was in store for us later in the afternoon when it rolled from a sedate gathering to a rollicking Second Line street dance to the hot-as-boiled-crawfish sounds of The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Club of Somerville, MA… but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

On the social side of things…

Libby Shaw, President of “Trees for Watertown,” the thriving, green, non-profit organization founded by my Oliver Street neighbor, the late Adelaide Sproul, delivered an update of the organization's work. Another neighbor, David Meshoulam, Director of Teens for Trees, recognized teens who volunteer for the program. I don’t have to tell you what an investment it is for the kids of Watertown to become stakeholders in the organization.

The organizers asked us to bring non-perishable items for the Watertown Food Pantry…we did.

 At 5:15 PM Neighbor Richard Herman stepped up to the mic, banjo in hand, playing sing-alongs for the kids, joined by Carole Tierney on the accordion.

At 6:00 PM  The Great Hawthorne/Oliver/Palfrey/Pearl Street block party is cruising right along. A bunch of festively dressed men and women walk up the street. Is that a tuba? No, two tubas! And they’re breaking out trombones, saxophones, and a big ‘ol bass drum emblazoned with “Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Club” on its side.

Whoa, Mama! Am I dreaming? A brass band...on Pearl Street?

They bolt out of the gate with a New Orleans rolling thunder brass band classic “Do Whatcha Wanna” and are airborne for the next hour. My neighbors do what any self-respecting New Orleaneans would do...they break out their second line moves.  

If I close my eyes, I could be standing in front St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square where brass bands play with joyful abandon from morn till night. This band is out of the same mold. They got swagger! Directed by the spirited sax player, trombone, saxophones and trumpets blast full-tilt funky brass band solos. Bass and snare drums pound out rhythms that translate immediately to the feet of everyone within earshot. 

Swingin', swayin' and occasionally singin', the band is having fun. I am in a delicious near out-of-body experience,  reveling in the midst of authentic, honest-to-goodness brass band playing and second-line style dancing I usually travel thousands of miles to New Orleans to savor. I AM A FIVE-MINUTE WALK FROM MY HOUSE!!! 

My neighbors - people I see walking their dogs, pushing their kids up the street in carriages, gardening - become transformed and are stylin’ with improvised moves I see in the Tremé or the Marigny or at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. I REPEAT…FIVE MINUTES FROM MY HOUSE!

New Orleans music, brass bands and all, is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic gumbo that combines music played and sung by slaves in Congo Square in the late 1800s with European military band music, rhythms from Cuba and the Caribbean, and music made by black and white musicians from way before Louis Armstrong till today. There is no music on earth quite like it.

Music, second-line dancing, and food are the H the 2 and the O of New Orleans culture. When you hear a brass band, you know there’s a funeral, a wedding, or a spontaneous ignition of joy coming down the street.

As of today, I'll have to add a Watertown neighborhood block party to that list.

Big props to the Watertown Community Foundation for covering some of the costs and to our block party hosts: Eileen Ryan, Heather Caldwell, Lisa Cole, and David Meshoulam. Their brilliant idea to invite The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Club Brass Band helped us reconnect after a long winter and listen and dance to the uplifting music of a brass band…social aid and pleasure indeed!

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

Video above by Dan Usher

 

Hawthorne/Oliver/Palfrey/Pearl Street Neighborhood Block Party

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

 

Hawthorne/Oliver/Palfrey/Pearl Street Neighborhood Block Party

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

 

“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.

pt

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.

+++++++++

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.

+++++++++++

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.

++++++

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.