Forward!

In keeping with our family’s Movable Feast Tradition, we wrapped up most of Father’s Day last night in the bleachers of a small stadium in Madison.

Lauren said she would take me to see Forward Madison, the local US League 1 soccer team, which was a lovely thing to do. Kim paid for her own ticket to join us, and we were happy to have her along. Oliver wished us well, as he had just returned from several weeks of wrangling middle schoolers and high schoolers at various Mother Ship Campus events and was mostly interested in sitting very still in a quiet space for a while, which was understandable.

Forward Madison is an interesting club. Their colors are blue and pink, their mascot is a flamingo (a call-back to one of the great student pranks in UW Madison history), and in true Madison style they go out of their way to annoy the American right wing whenever possible, which only makes me want to support them even more.

It’s a very small stadium, located on a busy street just north of the Capitol. There’s exactly enough room for a soccer pitch, seating along three sides, concessions at both ends, and a cow. Because it is Wisconsin, and there is always a cow.

We got there early so we could have a leisurely dinner, there being many options to choose from and an assortment of tables where you could eat without having to balance your food on your lap. And then we made our way over to our seats, which were not far from the midfield line.

There was a pretty good crowd for a USL1 game. It’s nice to see the team supported like that. They were playing something called a Jaegermeister Cup game, which – in the grand soccer tradition of putting multiple schedules on top of one another – is a separate series of games from the regular season ones. The opposing side, Lexington, was above Forward Madison in the Jaegermeister Cup standings but below them in the regular season standings, so it was a fairly evenly matched game if rather chippy at times.

The lower tier leagues are always a lot of fun. We have a minor league baseball team in the next town over from us and I enjoy their games more than the major league ones I’ve been to, for example. In the lower tiers you can get right up to the action – only one ball ended up being kicked over the wall and into the street last night, but it was returned fairly quickly once someone caught up to it – and there’s a fairly informal atmosphere where the fans are allowed to enjoy themselves in a way that seems frowned upon in the big leagues.

For example, every time the opposing side got a free kick from any range where it would have been reasonable to try for goal the fans all started making this little WHOOOP WHOOP noise, which I suppose could be the Call Of The Flamingo except that I don’t really know what flamingoes sound like. Nor, I suspect, do they. It did seem to throw the opponents off a bit, so there’s that. Also, the stadium folks quarantine the fanatic home fans – “The Flock,” as they seem to be called – off into the bleachers at one end of the pitch and let them bang on their drums and blow their trumpets and chant all game long the way you find in most soccer stadiums around the world. It’s festive.

At halftime Lauren and I wandered around the stadium a bit, checking out the cow (and the two pigs in the neighboring stall) and the souvenir stands. We wandered over to visit The Flock and view some of the signage. There was a tracker for the last time Forward Madison was awarded a penalty kick (31 days and counting), but my favorite was the Pink Panther sign.

Madison sits in the 608 area code, if you’re wondering about the Roman numerals at the bottom.

In the end the home team won 1-0 on a booming second half goal that crossed from the top right corner of the penalty box to hit the netting on the inside left of the goal, and really what more can you ask than a mild summer evening with your family and a home win.

Forward!

This Guy? For Real?

And so, for the first time in American history, a major political party has nominated a convicted felon for the highest office in the land.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been tried and found guilty by a jury of American citizens of 34 counts relating to election interference and financial crimes and is still awaiting sentencing. These are crimes that have resulted in jail sentences for past offenders.

He remains indicted on 57 other felony charges in three different jurisdictions on charges ranging from stealing top-secret documents to insurrection, crimes that have resulted in executions for past offenders. “The classified documents described in the indictment are some of the most sensitive information we possess,” said Mick Mulroy, a senior Pentagon official during Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration. “This type of information should never be removed from a secured facility.” His pet judge has dismissed the documents case in violation of both law and precedent, a rogue decision that will be appealed and probably result in disciplinary action against her but will achieve Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s larger goal of delaying the trial past the election. You will note that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s main legal strategy is not to proclaim his innocence but simply to declare that he can’t be prosecuted for any of these crimes.

He slithered into office in January 2017 after losing the popular election by over two million votes because we don’t elect presidents democratically. We elect them using Electoral College, which gives depopulated rural areas (overwhelmingly white and disproportionately evangelical) far more influence in the presidential election than their actual numbers would warrant. He lost the popular vote in a landslide in 2020 by over seven million votes, and he lost the Electoral College by roughly the same margin as he won it by in 2016. His response has been to deny reality, undermine the fabric of the American republic, and encourage his minions to threaten anyone who opposes him, which they have done in numbers.

He achieved this victory through Russian interference, something that the Mueller Report conclusively demonstrated even if the Justice Department declined to indict a sitting president for it. Even if you limit yourself to the publicly available sections (and if this is what they were willing to release, imagine what is in the parts they censored) the report noted “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference with the 2016 election and roughly 150 contacts between Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign and Russian agents during that time. Six of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s advisors were charged with crimes based on the Mueller Report, and five pleaded guilty. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson testified under oath before Congress that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump “is effectively compromised and being blackmailed” by Russian agents.

He was impeached twice during his disastrous term in office, something no American president had ever done before. On both occasions a bipartisan vote nearly convicted him, but Republican party discipline defeated patriotic loyalty to the nation and he remained in power.

The first impeachment was for trying to blackmail the sovereign nation of Ukraine into manufacturing false allegations against the son of his main political rival by threatening to withhold military assistance approved by Congress until they did so. It is worth noting that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has steadfastly supported Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has promised not only to cut Ukraine loose to be devoured by his patron but also to sabotage NATO so that Putin can take the rest of Europe should he choose to do so.

The second impeachment was for inciting insurrection and attempting to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States. It is further worth noting that during the January 6 Insurrection Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump saw no need to move to safety as he knew very well that this was his movement, nor did he have any particular moral qualms about threatening the sitting Vice President of the United States with death should that Vice President not overturn the 2020 election.

He is an adjudicated rapist and a proudly self-confessed sexual predator who has openly lusted after his daughter. He’s a serial adulterer who cheated on at least one wife while she was giving birth to his child.

He is a racist who ripped families apart at the border and tried to set up detention camps for asylum seekers there, in violation of both American and international law. He has openly campaigned on using the US military to carry out mass deportations without due process should he seize power again. His cult waved signs demanding this at this week’s GOP nominating convention, in fact. He has a track record of lawsuits filed against him for his racist activities that goes back to the 1970s or earlier.

He so willfully and grievously mismanaged the US response to COVID19 that peer-reviewed scientific studies estimate that he is solely responsible for over a quarter of a million extra American deaths. He used pandemic aid as a political weapon, denying it to his political opponents. He went on national television to endorse injecting bleach up your ass as a preventative and horse dewormer as a cure.

He has gone bankrupt multiple times trying to sell alcohol, red meat, and gambling to the American public, something that by rights should be physically impossible but that’s what happens when your business skills are just that bad.

He is an open authoritarian who has declared that he will be a “dictator on day one” and his thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court has now granted him that authority. He does not appear to have ever read the Constitution and he certainly has demonstrated no interest or ability in complying with it.

He spent four years actively courting the world’s dictators and alienating America’s staunchest allies. US intelligence agencies regarded him as such a security threat that they refused to share information with him and advised allies not to do so either. In this they were fully justified because on several occasions Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump divulged secret and sensitive information to our enemies and weakened US national security. His abject groveling before Vladimir Putin in Finland during his term was so morally repellant that even Republican officials sharply criticized him. The American Conservative magazine flat out called him “Putin’s prison bride.”

He declared that Nazis were “fine people” after one of them killed a woman protesting his policies. I am sure that the Americans who gave their lives fighting against Nazis in WWII would have a different perspective on that, but then what does Corporal Bone Spurs know about fighting, after all. You can’t be a good Nazi and a good American at the same time. We had a war about that. The whole world was there. This did not stop him from hiring actual out-and-proud Nazis for his administration in his first administration, and it won’t in the next.

The fact that some idiot took a potshot at Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump recently doesn’t change the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is manifestly unfit for any office, let alone the presidency, and should not be allowed near the White House even as a tourist.

This is the guy the Republican Party wants to install into power in January 2025.

And I say to hell with him.

One Fucking Idiot and Things Get Ugly

So apparently some fucking idiot took a potshot at Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump today.

I suppose it says something that my first thought was to question whether it was a false flag operation designed to make a twice-impeached self-admitted sexual predator and serial deadbeat campaigning on a platform that openly calls for the destruction of the American republic somehow more sympathetic.

But there is no shortages of fucking idiots with guns in this country, and the GOP has gone to great lengths to make sure that nothing whatsoever can be done about this fact. There is no need for a false flag operation for this to happen. We slaughter our own children with a demented glee that you simply don’t find in civilized portions of the world, so the idea that someone with inappropriate but unfettered access to firearms decided to impose himself (I’ll put money on the fact that the shooter was a man) on the election should come as no surprise.

My second thought was that the last thing this country needs is for that two-bit neo-Fascist grifter to become a martyr.

I bow to nobody in my contempt for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and those who seek to use him to impose dictatorship on the United States (hello, there, Heritage Foundation!). He’s 77 years old, morbidly obese, and held together mostly by rage and high blood pressure so if demographics were to take its natural course I wouldn’t mourn.

But I do not condone political violence.

Not even for candidates who call for violence against others.

To go down that path is madness. Once people start down that path nobody has any idea where it will end except that it will be worse than anyone imagines.

That’s the nature of political violence. It just makes everything worse.

All that will happen now is that the vast neo-Nazi support mechanism that props up Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s candidacy will feel unleashed to begin their reign of terror on the American people earlier than they had planned.

The Republican Party in its modern Trumpian mode have brought this on themselves with their open solicitation of “Second Amendment Solutions,” their continued support for violent insurrection, and their absolute refusal to do anything about the rising tide of gun violence in this country in general, and the only surprise to me today is that it backfired on them instead of the people they usually direct those threats toward.

The coming fallout will damage everyone, even the vast majority of us who understand why that sort of violence can never be allowed or defended.

I grieve for my country.

Hang onto your hats, folks. We could end up miles from here.

Wrapping up the Holiday Weekend

1. So Independence Day has technically come and gone but the War for Darwin’s Basement continues in full swing as guys named Lefty, Claw, and Stump spend their next few mortgage payments on fireworks to try to outdo the official city display. Tonight, for example, someone to the southeast of us put on a show that lasted at least fifteen minutes and probably cost them over five thousand dollars. It was, admittedly, quite a show.

2. Our Little Town, like most towns around here, held their official fireworks on the last Saturday in June for some reason, and since Grandma and Grandpa’s town also held their fireworks that day we ended up driving up there for our cookout and show. We had the full ‘MURCA experience – burgers, dogs, hanging out, a few fireworks of our own, and then the official ones which their town set off over the lake to the north but which were clearly visible from their house so we piled into the boat parked on the side of the house and watched from there. A good time was had by all!

3. For the actual Independence Day we were planning to have a small grill out, just me, Kim, and Oliver, as Lauren had plans with friends, but our friends Heidi and Travis joined us as well and … wait for it … ANOTHER good time was had by all. I KNOW! I didn't take pictures, so you will just have to trust me on this one. Hey – just because the world is on fire doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice evening now and then.

4. I’m actually surprised Lefty, Claw, and Stump had anything left for tonight, as Thursday night the entire city reverted to its usual post-fireworks condition – the air was grey and smelled of cordite and the whole town sounded like the inside of a popcorn machine. Things have been slowly calming down over the last few days, with only the occasional barrage until the show really started an hour ago.

5. Why people insist on shooting off fireworks in broad daylight I do not know. Wait until it gets dark, people!

6. Our holiday weekend has been pretty quiet, all told, although we did prevail upon Oliver to use his Tech-Fu to pirate some of the Euros. We got to watch Spain beat Germany in a match that got better as it went along, and England somehow beat Switzerland in a match that nobody really seemed interested in playing as far as I could tell. But it was enjoyable to watch, for those of us who enjoy watching that sort of thing. The Olympics start soon, and my won’t that be an adventure for all sorts of reasons.

7. I also mowed the lawn today, which normally isn’t anything I care to mark here except that it is the first time I’ve been able to do that since early May. My wrist felt fine, and the usual dismay I have about undertaking that particular task was at least softened by the fact that I could in fact undertake that task.

8. Technically we still have another 26 hours of the holiday weekend, so who knows what else will happen. Even as I type, there are still fireworks going off, if not at the frenetic pace they were an hour ago. Usually the War for Darwin’s Basement doesn’t really peter out until Bastille Day or so.

9. No word on whether we hit the over/under on garage fires this year. This is the down side to not subscribing to the local newspaper anymore.

10. Watching the UK throw off the shackles of abusive right-wing misrule this week does give me some small hope that perhaps we here in the former colonies can learn from that for November and prevent our own abusive right-wing former rulers from coming back like the plague they are. You never know. Could happen.

A Revolution Betrayed

George Washington didn’t want to be king.

He was the hero of the American Revolution, the rock-steady leader who kept the Continental Army together and in the field long enough to exhaust the world’s strongest military power into surrendering, despite intense political pressures to replace him and often dire material conditions. He understood, as most people on either side didn’t, that he didn’t have to win the war – all he had to do was not lose it, and eventually the British would tire of it. He was the man who turned back the Newburgh Conspiracy, which would have seen the unpaid men of the Continental Army march on Congress and overthrow it, simply by taking out his reading glasses to read a letter to those men. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown grey but almost blind in the service of my country.”

They wanted him to be king. They didn’t know any better. The idea of a republic – a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln later said, though who counted as one of “the people” was and remains a matter of fierce debate – was largely untested, and few at the time thought a country could survive without a king. Most such experiments had ended quickly and badly.

But the American Revolution had been fought to restore the balanced republican government that King George III had thrown out of order with his – to the colonial mind, at least – arbitrary and lawless conduct.

The Declaration of Independence is mostly remembered for that one jewel of a sentence near the beginning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the bulk of that document is an indictment of George III for his crimes against the colonies. The most common first word of every paragraph is “he” and that “he” is the king who had refused his assent to necessary laws, dissolved legislatures, made judges dependent on his will alone, kept standing armies in times of peace, cut off trade between the colonies and the wider world, and so on.

Also, George III had restricted immigration into the colonies – a serious crime according to the Founding Fathers.

The entire point of the American Revolution was to rid what would become the United States of a ruler who was above the law and replace him with a ruler who was not.

When the Revolution was over, Washington steadfastly rejected calls to replace George III with a new George I. He supported the Articles of Confederation until it became clear that states’ rights was a foolhardy way to try to run a country, and then he supported the Constitution when it was written to replace the Articles with a more centralized government.

Washington served two terms as president. He could easily have served more, but he walked away from power to demonstrate that this was how proper American leaders acted. They were not all powerful. They existed within the framework of the Federal Constitution of 1787 and of the laws, subject to all of them.

This bedrock foundation of the American republic lasted for 237 years, which, admittedly, is longer than the Founding Fathers thought it would. They understood that republics were fragile things, that such governments depended on the virtue of the citizenry – “virtue” being defined in the 18th century fashion as the willingness to sacrifice your petty, private interests for the sake of the public good. They knew that the greatest threat to the survival of the American republic would be an unvirtuous citizenry led by a tyrant – a demagogue who would stir up the vulgar passions of the mob and declare himself above the law and beyond restraints.

For more than two centuries we survived as a republic.

And last week the Supreme Court betrayed all of that in order to shield a twice-impeached convicted felon who is on public record calling for the weaponization of the federal government to persecute his personal enemies, an unrepentant insurrectionist, an admitted sexual predator and adjudicated rapist, a man facing 57 further criminal indictments in three separate jurisdictions, indictments which include crimes the United States has in the past executed people for, from the consequences of his crimes.

The decision in Trump v US, handed down by the Roberts Court, ranks among the most catastrophic ever handed down – right up there with the Dred Scott v Sandford decision of the Taney Court in 1858. It renders the president a figure entirely above the law and beyond restraints, and it returns the United States to the rule of kings.

It is a betrayal of the American Revolution and the ideals of the American republic, and if allowed to stand it will destroy this country in ways we haven’t even begun to contemplate.

This, apparently, is the plan. The president of the Heritage Foundation – one of the most radical right-wing organizations in America – celebrated this betrayal by declaring “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Leaving aside the explicit threat here that only if Americans stand by and allow the extremists on the right to destroy the American republic will we be allowed to live, and also the issue of what they think the “left” is in this country, there is the simple fact that the only reason to have a second American Revolution is to get rid of the first one.

My fellow Americans, on this Independence Day we face a crisis. The far right has mobilized to claim this country as their own private inheritance, in defiance of the will of the majority and the intent of the Founding Fathers. They are not even bothering to hide it anymore. They intend to rule, absolutely and as arbitrarily and lawlessly as the colonists accused George III of ruling.

But we do not suffer kings or their minions in America.

And to those who say otherwise, remember that we outnumber you.

You are on the wrong side of history, morality, and American patriotism.

We will see you fail.

We will see you forgotten to the seventh generation, your works erased, and the follies of your pride held up to ridicule and shame.

George Washington understood what American monarchists wanted and he rejected them. We as Americans can do no less.

A Pen for Your Thoughts

Someone on my dad’s side of the family had money way back when. Probably around 1900. None of this money found its way to us and I suspect it evaporated in the Great Depression, though that’s pure conjecture on my part. Maybe they lost it all buying war bonds in 1917. Or maybe they just lost it the usual way, slowly, almost unnoticeably, with bad business decisions and poor financial planning, at a wholly unremarkable point in history. Who knows.

But every once in a while I run across something that reminds me these people were fairly well off for the time.

When my dad passed away in 2016 we did a sort through the house in preparation for my mom’s move to the senior apartment where she spent the rest of her life. A lot of things in the basement went out the door, but we saved a bunch of stuff too.

One thing that sticks in my memory was an entire box of piano rolls – paper scrolls about a foot wide with holes punched in them. You put them inside your player piano and started it up and it would play the song for you. Each of these rolls cost between $2 and $4 in the early 1920s, which was a good chunk of a day’s wages – or more – for a lot of people.

These days they’re worth nothing. I couldn’t even give them away. I tried. Nobody wanted them – not university music programs, not museums, not antique stores. I saved one and tossed the rest. I’m still sad about that, but so it goes. But back then you had to have some coin to afford that many of these rolls, not to mention the player piano to slot them into.

Every now and then I go into the basement and bring up another box that I took out of my mother’s apartment after she died. My brother didn’t want most of it – he lives in a small apartment and is working on downsizing from that – and we have a big basement, so much of it ended up here. Last week, while trying not to pay attention to what I suspect will be an oncoming train wreck (no, not the political one – that one I’m kind of resigned to), I pulled out a box and went through it.

There were some photos I hadn’t seen before and some interesting papers, all of which I need to scan and add to the genealogical folders I have online. Honestly, I could spend the next year just organizing the genealogical information I already have without searching for any new stuff, and that’s kind of a nice project to have out there. Maybe when I retire.

I also found this:

It’s a dipping pen, the kind you’d use with an inkwell. It’s about seven inches long, from tip to nib. Most of it is solid mother of pearl and it still has the original velvet case. It probably dates to about 1890, plus or minus a decade or so.

It’s not worth a whole lot now. I looked online for auctions of similar (and occasionally identical) items and most of them were in the $20-70 range depending on condition though there were a couple of wildly optimistic sellers who clearly had not done a comparable search before listing their asking price. Most things aren’t worth what people want them to be.

But once upon a time this would have been an expensive item for a middle-to-upper-middle class household, the sort of aspirational purchase someone like that would make as a statement of moving up in society.

If I had to guess, I’d say the purchaser was my great-great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran who, toward the end of his life, would occasionally turn up in the Philadelphia papers in the social notes section. He wasn’t the subject of a whole lot of column inches – mostly the odd one-or-two sentence announcement – but that’s more than most people got for their activities. That sort of social prominence began and ended with him, as far as I can tell.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this pen. It’s lovely and I’m not going to sell it because it has that family connection, but I don’t know what I would use a dipping pen for. My handwriting isn’t that great to begin with. Oliver says there are special tools you need to clear out the nib – a razor blade would be too thick – so I can look into that as well. Perhaps I will learn copperplate style.

I keep acquiring small projects.

Happy Father's Day!

We celebrated Father’s Day on Friday because that’s when we could all get together for it.

The joy of having a Movable Feast Tradition for all holidays is that it takes a lot of the stress out of planning. Can’t make the officially designated day? Well, when can you make it? Because the whole point of a holiday is to celebrate it with the people you love, and what is a calendar compared to that?

So Friday it was.

Oliver was back from his visit with Dustin, Lauren came down from Main Campus University, and we had a lovely time together. I ended up making General Tso Chicken, which is a newfound family favorite we stumbled into recently. It takes 90 minutes, isn’t remotely healthy, and uses every dish in the kitchen but it is really, really good and there are never any leftovers.

We watched some of the Stanley Cup Final game afterward while Digestion happened, and we were all glad that Edmonton forced a Game 7.

And then it was time for cards, both of the greeting and playing varieties. There was a rather spirited game of Phase 10, which we decided to play Yahtzee-style as Kim has been lobbying us to do forever, and it was a good time hanging out together. Phase 10 is a wonderful game because it hits that absolute sweet spot for any game – interesting enough to hold your attention but not so much that you can’t talk and eat and drink while you’re doing it. There were chips and dip. For some reason Supertramp’s Breakfast in America has become our go-to card-playing music and we had that in the background. We decided that a) they should go on a reunion tour and call themselves Seniortramp, b) they really should be from Australia instead of England, and c) they should sell stamps because the marketing for them is right there. Band members, take note.

I got some lovely gifts and I am grateful for all of them, but the best part of the whole thing was simply having all four of us together, hanging out and enjoying our time with each other. Those times get more spread out as people get older, as lives and responsibilities change and take us in different directions, and that is just how the world works these days.

But for an evening we were sitting at a table, sharing a meal and a game and the time we have together, and you can’t ask for more than that.

News and Updates

1. It’s the first day of summer and already I am looking forward to October when the weather starts to get civilized again. It used to be September, but the corporate types have to keep those third quarter profits rising and the right-wing types think science is a conspiracy so now the planet is burning down and October it is. Soon it will be November.

2. I’m mostly out of my various wrist braces and whatnot. They cut off my nice purple cast after only a week or so – not two days after Lauren and her friends signed it, sadly enough – and gave me a heavy-duty splint that I could take off to shower. I kept it for two weeks, and then last week they gave me a light one and told me to start taking it off “as tolerated.” They also gave me PT exercises to be done “as tolerated” as well, which is a great thing because it fits so neatly with my overall philosophy of life: “No pain, no pain.” So I do my PT exercises and mostly go without the splint except to drive (which requires more than is comfortable without the brace) and sleep (since I have no idea what I will be doing asleep and would rather not reinjure anything). Progress!

3. The PT person in Madison was impressed that my left (broken) wrist has about as much flexibility as my right one and I wasn’t sure if I should tell her that some of that is because I’ve just never really been that flexible to begin with.

4. One of the joys of having fully adult children is that they recommend good liquor stores. Lauren told me about this place not far from the clinic up in Madison that I should check out if I wanted good wines so I went and sweet dancing monkeys on a stick but this place is the size of an ferry boat terminal. I spent a happy time just wandering the aisles and picking out some interesting looking things. Naturally Kim wanted to go so we went back a few days later when we had to be in Madison for a different purpose and we found a few more things. It was a good time. Also, you know you’re in Wisconsin when the liquor store gives you free samples.

5. I may slowly be turning into That Guy when it comes to wine. A while back some friends came over for dinner and brought a bottle of wine with them – a perfectly lovely wine that I have myself purchased on occasion, though not for a while now – but I have been experimenting with Italian wines for long enough that it just didn’t seem right. I’m not sure this is a good development, but then the half dozen or so bottles we bought at the Giant Liquor Store are probably going to last us well into 2025 so I don’t think it is a terribly pressing budgetary or dietary concern. But it is a strange thought.

6. We were up near the Giant Wine Store for two reasons, the first of which was that we had an appointment with a Finance Guy to try to get a handle on the various accounts that we have scattered all over the Financialsphere. We are reaching that age where we should have a Finance Guy and need to be thinking about that sort of thing, and speaking as someone whose grasp of Finance begins and ends with “try not to spend more than you have” the whole thing just gives me hives. But it has to be done, and it seems to be progressing along the path we want it to progress along. First, rationalization. Then, sorting. Then something something something something retirement something something at some point. Weren’t we in our early 30s not six weeks ago? No? No. Sigh.

7. The other reason was to meet our friends Heidi and Travis for dinner so we could hear all about their recent vacation and get suggestions for when we plan to be in the same place, and it went quite well. It is always good to share meals with friends.

8. On that note, our friend Eli was in Madison this past weekend playing at a jazz festival and Kim and I managed to catch him for coffee on his way back home, which was lovely.

9. I am in the process of reading Red Side Story, Jasper Fforde’s long delayed sequel to Shades of Grey, and once again I am reminded that Fforde’s head must be an interesting place to live. I’m happy that I get to enjoy what comes out of it, though.

10. I’ve spent much of this week on a Family Project that has been much more rewarding than the other projects that I should have been spending much of this week on, and you know? I’m okay with that.

Welcome to the Grand Cathedral

One of the nice things about having Maria visit is that she is a theater person. I spent a significant percentage of my life backstage, and if there is anything a theater person loves it is another theater person with whom to trade stories.

Because there are always stories, especially if both theater people are techies. The audience sees the stuff that happens onstage but the best stories happen behind the scenes and are often invisible to the audience thanks to the strenuous efforts of the tired, stressed, black-clad crew who are the line between total failure and a good story.

It is, admittedly, sometimes a very thin and porous line.

The audience never catches the good stuff, and if you ever look over and see the lighting board operator trying to stifle a laugh or – worse – rapidly paging through the script in search of something that seems deeply concerning to them you will understand that this is a tale the crew is going to be telling for at least the run of the show and possibly the rest of their lives.

Not all of these stories involve mishaps.

Most of them. But not all of them.

Somewhere in our conversations a story that I hadn’t thought about in years resurfaced, one that taught me what theatrical lighting could be and made me understand why people do this sort of thing to themselves, and that is something worth putting down here.

I got started backstage in high school when my buddy Art, sensing that there was little future for either of us on the track team, shanghaied me into the theater and handed me over to the set construction crew, and that’s pretty much where I stayed until I graduated. There are a few stories that I still tell from that time – the fabled Laurie’s House Debacle being my favorite – but when I got to college I switched over to lighting.

Lighting is more intense because unless you’re the designer you don’t really have to do anything until load-in (when everything gets set up) but once that happens that’s pretty much all you do until strike (when everything gets taken down). You’re there for the duration, but then you get to go.

I ended up working on dozens of shows in college to one degree or another, maybe 30 or so all told. Maybe more depending on how you counted – sometimes the full crew experience, sometimes just pitching in for load-in or strike or something in between. I learned to keep an adjustable wrench in my backpack because you never knew who would catch you coming back from class and drag you onto some catwalk to hang and focus lighting instruments. I forgot the wrench was there the first time I tried to fly internationally with that backpack as my carryon but in a pre-9/11 age the security guys let me through anyway. What was I going to do, unbolt the wings?

There was no Theater Department at Penn at the time – you couldn’t major in it except as a text-based concentration within the English Department – so they left the theater to the student groups, of which there were usually anywhere from 6-10 big ones putting on a show each semester plus assorted one-offs. We were largely unsupervised and free to learn from each other and our mistakes. There were maybe a dozen of us who did lighting, and we moved from show to show feeding on cast parties like locusts. Each show took a solid week from load-in to strike (unless there was a second weekend, which was rare) and my record was six in a semester, which it turned out was a) one more than I really could handle, and b) the impetus for the only A+ I ever received for a course in college.

I didn’t even know they gave those out.

Early on in my college career, one of the groups put on King of Hearts – an “inmates take over the asylum” sort of comedy based on an anti-war film from the 1960s. I didn’t work on the crew for this one – I just saw it and helped with strike.

They put this on in Houston Hall, which was the old student union building. The theater was upstairs on the second floor and had originally been designed as a chapel. It seated about 120 people, as I recall. There was a small thrust stage at one end and a few windows at the back that we’d cover over during shows to keep stray light out, and it had the high peaked ceiling that you’d expect in a chapel.

The lighting designer was a guy named Jess or Jamie or something like that. He was a couple of years ahead of me and I never really got to know him but he was an acknowledged master among us techies. He was a phenomenal lighting designer. He was the best set designer we had. He could do sound. The running joke was that if you threw him onstage he’d probably turn out to be an excellent actor and then one day someone did and he was. Some people are just like that.

You use theatrical lighting to create three things.

First, you create visibility. This is the most basic thing about lighting – it lets you see things. You point the lights where you want people to be able to see what’s happening, and if that’s all you do then at least you’ve got the fundamentals covered. Sometimes you’re lucky to be able to get that far.

Second, you create mood. Somewhere in a science class you took in middle school you probably learned that light comes in colors. Back in the Jurassic period where this story is set we had halogen lamps inside each of the lighting instruments so if you wanted color you had to put gels – thin translucent plastic sheets in various colors – in front of the lens to shade the light how you wanted. These days you just program the LEDs inside the instrument and it does it on its own. LEDs are also a lot less hot than halogens, so win all around. The thing is, though, that color creates mood. The most basic is the difference between cold lighting (blues, whites) and warm lighting (yellows, reds), and you can have a lot of fun playing with that. If you have a long scene, for example, and it starts out warmly lit and then you slowly transition it over to cold lighting, even if nothing else changes the audience will notice – not consciously, perhaps, unless you’ve got lighting techs in the crowd, but the mood will shift.

And third, you create space. Sometimes this is as simple as bringing up light over here and bringing it down over there, so the audience knows that the action has shifted from one part of the stage to another, but sometimes it gets more artistic than that. Just by varying the light you can turn a single space from one thing into another even the light never moves from that location. You can add a light from a new direction, change a color, or just rearrange the levels, and suddenly it’s a different place. Also, there are gobos, which are used to cast shadows. When I was in college these were sheets of high-quality steel that could withstand being an inch away from a 750-watt halogen lamp for an hour at a time without melting, and they had cutouts where the light could get through. The patterns of the shadows could make a bare stage into a forest or a subway or whatever space you wanted it to be.

The set for King of Hearts had a long platform that came off the thrust stage, level with it, that bisected the house all the way to the back. The audience sat facing inward on either side of the platform.

At one point in the play there is a character who is convinced that he is a bishop and the scene called for him to walk down that platform about a quarter of the way and then give a brief sermon.

The lighting designer had taken maybe half a dozen 3” lekos – small lighting instruments with a fairly narrow and intense beam – and put rose window gobos in them, and then pointed them not at the actor but at the outside walls. When the bishop started his sermon those came up and all the other lights except one focused on the bishop himself went dark, and suddenly the entire theater with its peaked ceiling and its rose windowed walls was a cathedral and we, the audience, were not on the outside of the fourth wall but instead were right there in the middle of it all.

It was breathtaking.

I’d never before seen an entire space created so quickly and so immersively out of nothing but light, and forty years and however many shows later, from community theater up to Broadway, I don’t think I have since.

For one brief moment – a three-minute monologue on a grey night in Philadelphia – there was a bishop in a cathedral and we were inside of that world and all it took to make that happen was light.

Theater is an art form where things often go wrong and those are the stories we love to tell because they’re fun. But sometimes in the midst of it all something goes grandly, gloriously right and all you can do is sit there and take it all in.

A Look Toward November

Can we just take a moment and consider the fact that the guy being put forward by one of the only two major political parties we have as their candidate for the highest office in the land is scheduled to have a meeting with his parole officer today?

This is the so-called “party of law and order,” by the way. I suppose it makes sense to have a convicted felon still facing more than four dozen other felony charges in three different jurisdictions – including several that the United States has, in the past, executed people for – as your candidate if you define “law and order” to include “criminals,” but I’m not sure I would do that if it were up to me.

But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump would like you to know that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is deeply offended by this whole thing, or at least those parts of it that he remembers when not falling asleep during his own criminal trial and those parts of it that he can recall through the haze of an increasingly obvious mental decline.

He spent a good few minutes shouting about sharks and electricity yesterday at a campaign stop in 110F/43C temperatures in Nevada, which likely went over well with his cult. But as for the rest of us, I’m not sure the nation would really be in good hands with a guy who thinks this counts as a campaign speech:

"...and it must be because of MIT my relationship to MIT very smart because I say what would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you're in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now under water and there's a shark that's approximately ten yards over there by the way lot of shark attacks lately notice that lot of shark attacks I watched some guys justifying it today WELL THEY WEREN'T REALLY THAT ANGRY THEY BIT OFF THE THE YOUNG LADY'S LEG BECAUSE of the fact that they were they were not hungry but they misunderstood what sushi was these people are great he said there's no problem with sharks they just didn't really understand a young woman's tsswimming (sic) now we really got decimated in other people too a lotta sharks so I said THERE'S A SHARK TEN YARDS AWAY from the boat TEN YARDS over here do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking water goes over the battery the boat is sinking do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted because I will tell you he didn't know the answer he said you know nobody has ever asked me that question I said I think it's a good question I think there's a lot of electric current coming through that water but you know what I'd do if there's a shark or you get electrocuted I'll take electrocution every single time I'M NOT GETTING NEAR THE SHARK so we can end that we can end it for boats we're gonna end it for trucks..."

Yes, that’s an actual transcription of his remarks. Go look it up yourself if you don’t believe me.

This is what happens with a cult, though. The Dear Leader – Convicted Felon though he is – can say whatever he wants and the minions just eat it up and tell you how brilliant he is.

The other thing about cults, though, is that they rarely have a succession plan for when the Dear Leader departs. The simple fact is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is in his late 70s, morbidly obese, incontinent (did you see his minions selling t-shirts that said “Real Men Wear Diapers”? You can’t make this stuff up), and – all snark aside – obviously mentally ill. There is only one direction this goes, and the only question now is how much damage will Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump cause on the way down.

Because it can be a lot.

The election in November will be a one-issue event. Do you care about the survival of the American republic?

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump wants you to answer no to that.

And that is all you need to know.

A Very Sociable Week

Have you ever sat down on a Sunday and thought, “This week is going to be a pretty normal sort of week” and then sat down on the following Sunday and thought, “No, no that was not” but in a very pleased sort of way? That was this week. It was nothing like I thought it would be, but it was a lovely week in the end, mostly because it was a week full of good people and you need those kinds of weeks now and then.

Monday I had lunch with Ashley, a former student and now friend, and we had a lovely time catching up on our lives before heading off to our respective errands and appointments.

Wednesday Kim invited some old friends from Home Campus for dinner. Linda, Nancy, and Marty came by and we made pizzas and sat out back and mostly talked of our various travels and the stories those inevitably provide until a gentle rain started and we had to go inside.

And on Thursday, our Swedish friend Maria came over for a couple of days. She’d been bouncing around the midwest for a bit – first to her former exchange host family in Indiana, then to a wedding in Minnesota, then to her sister’s former host family in Wisconsin, and then to us. We found out about this a couple of days in advance and of course you can come and stay with us why would you even worry about that!

Carter brought her here on Thursday night and we had a lovely evening hanging out in the back, grilling out, and catching up on old stories. Carter is Paul’s son. Maria is Mats’ daughter. Kim, Mats, and Paul were friends back in high school in northern Wisconsin in the early 80s and while Kim and Mats have stayed in touch they had both lost track of Paul a long time ago. It is just one of those stories how everyone reconnected a couple of years back when Helena, Maria’s sister, was randomly placed as an exchange student into the high school where Paul and Carter were teachers. It even made the national newsletter for the exchange program.

Kim has been grading AP exams all week, so on Friday Maria and I went to visit Lauren and Aleksia in Madison, where we had a lovely Peruvian lunch (they’ll skip the cilantro if you ask, but they’ll look at you like you’re defective for asking and maybe they’re right but I just don’t like cilantro) and then had ice cream on the terrace of the student union.

Later that night we were discussing a Swedish book I’d read recently on the recommendation of a friend (yes, I read it in translation, don’t be silly) called Anxious People by Fredrik Backman – a truly wonderful book which you should run out and read as soon as possible – and it turned out that not only has Netflix made a miniseries out of it but Maria was one of the extras! Of course we had to find her, and there she was on the far left in her red coat. Win!

After a quick visit to the local farmer’s market yesterday, where we ran into our friend Lois and learned all about what is happening at her barn now that we no longer have chickens there, I took Maria to the airport and off she went back to Sweden.

Some weeks are good weeks, and if there is a pile of grading staring at me right now that I didn’t get to when perhaps I should have, well, that’s just the price you pay for having friends.

Northeast Road Trip, Part 3

We left Albany the next morning and headed south toward New York City, stopping off at the next town south to purchase a new gas cap to replace the one that we left somewhere in northeastern Pennsylvania.

There was an auto parts store right there on the main road out of town, which would have been convenient except that the old guys in the parts department refused to acknowledge us – or any other customer – in any way for a good fifteen minutes while they finished up whatever phone call and/or computer search they were on. Some people just left. But since we had nowhere else to go, we stayed and eventually succeeded in liberating a gas cap for a nominal fee.

It works fine.

We have a great many people to see in New York, and we always enjoy it when we do. Our plan was to get to as many of them as we could fit in before heading off to northern New Jersey for the night. It’s good to have friends, and if you can’t get to all of them in one trip that’s a pretty high-class problem to have.

As a native Philadelphian I’m not really supposed to say anything nice about New York but I’ve never had a bad experience there. There’s a lot to see and do, and the people are friendly once you understand the rules of the place. You just have to accept the culture for what it is and go from there. For example, when driving in New York City you get eight nanoseconds to merge lanes before someone takes the space but you do get those eight nanoseconds free and clear, unlike other places I’ve been where you either get nothing (hello Boston!) or some random amount of time that cannot be predicted or, for that reason, used (hello, Madison!).

We bludgeoned our way through traffic and across the George Washington Bridge without incident, and after a few misadventures with GPS and parking garages we deposited the minivan in a safe place and wandered over to our friends Joshua and Abby, who live in an apartment stuffed with books and theater memorabilia and whom we haven’t seen since before the pandemic. It’s always fascinating to explore the place and we got the grand tour of all the things that have been added since our last visit, including the bright new tiles on the kitchen walls which added a flair to the place that we enjoyed. Our goals were lunch and conversation and we had a lovely time achieving both of them.

We then liberated the car from the parking garage, got better directions from the attendant than GoogleMaps was giving us, and headed north up the Henry Hudson to see Ellen and Rob, whom we also haven’t seen since before the pandemic, where we hung out for a while and largely repeated those same goals, though with dessert instead of lunch. They’ve recently redone their kitchen – a surprising number of people in our lives have done that or are thinking of doing that, and you can see plans being formulated for us to do that and I am curious as to how that would turn out. For the better, I’m sure, as our kitchen is big but inefficiently laid out and there is room for improvement, but it is no small thing to redo a kitchen and that is an energy barrier. We spent the afternoon catching up and marveling at how someone managed to crash their car into Ellen and Rob’s porch a while back. The physics just don’t work out easily, is what I’m saying here.

From there we headed south, back across the George Washington Bridge, to stay the night with Trish and Joel in Maplewood. We found their house with no problems and spent a lovely evening of conversation and Chinese food (yeah, it’s kind of a theme). I had a fascinating discussion of American history with their daughter Bella, who is getting ready to take her AP exam and will likely get a 5 on it based on what I heard. It is good to see good people and the day was full of such things.

The next morning Trish and I walked over to get bagels before the rain hit, and we all sat in the kitchen happily eating real bagels (vs the steamed version you find in the midwest) and watching the deluge come down. But eventually the rain tailed off, Trish had to work, and we had to move on, so we got back in the van and headed off to Hoboken to see Keith, Lori, and Sara.

Eventually we also saw their cat Mila, who was not impressed.

I’d been to visit before back in 2021 but thanks to schedules and the pandemic Kim had not, so the first thing we did after dropping off our bags and resting for a bit was head out to Fiore’s for roast beef and mozzarella sandwiches. Hoboken is a very competitive place when it comes to mozzarella, it turns out – they have a festival every year and award medals to the best mozzarella in the city, and Fiore’s has won that now and then. Their sandwiches are worth the effort and the mozzarella is indeed very good, though I learned the last time to skip the hot peppers as they are seriously hot even for me. That’s half of a sandwich below, by the way.

After lunch Lori had to work and Sara was off doing her own thing so Keith, Kim, and I went off to explore Hoboken. Mila remained uninterested. Hoboken is a really nice place from my experiences there – it feels like someone took a chunk of one of the New York City boroughs (Brooklyn, say) from around 1900 and thoroughly renovated it. We cruised the main street, and Kim took the opportunity to get her hair cut while Keith and I found a used-book store to explore.

Afterward we met up with Lori and Sara at a barbecue place on the waterfront where there was a Trivia Night. The food was really good though the trivia was odd – there were four rounds, each with five fairly easy questions plus a multi-part bonus question that was basically impossible. Somehow we came in fourth out of the twenty or so groups, just out of the running for prizes, which I thought was impressive nonetheless.

The next day we went to Ellis Island.

For all the times that I’ve been to the New York City area and for all that I am both a professional historian and an amateur genealogist (it’s a fine line – humor me here) I had never actually been there before. I have at least four ancestors who came through it in the early 1900s, and Kim took Oliver, Lauren, Fran, and Aleksia there in 2018 but I arrived later and missed that day.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Ellis Island sits between New York and New Jersey (both states own parts of it) and from the 1880s through the mid-1950s it was the main entry port for immigrants entering the US from across the Atlantic. Some twelve million immigrants passed through it, and according to the tour guide we had that day about 40% of Americans can trace their ancestry back to at least one person who arrived there. The place was abandoned in 1954 and sat there for about thirty years before anyone thought to do anything with it, but now it’s been fixed up in parts and is a museum. It’s free to get in but you have to pay for the ferry ride to get there, so if you have a rowboat and strong arms it won’t cost you anything. In our case, we decided to take the “hard hat tour” (our second one this trip!) to see the hospital buildings that haven’t quite been renovated.

The ferry ride from New Jersey was pleasant and scenic, and a great deal less crowded than the one coming over from New York. You drive to what was once a combination train station and ferry station (the train part is abandoned and grown over, but interesting in its own right), go through security, and then hop onto the ferry for the five-minute ride over to Ellis Island. The ferry then proceeds on to Liberty Island where the Statue of Liberty is, but we saved that trip for another day. We’ve all been there – Kim, Oliver, and Lauren in 2018 and me way back in 1979 on a school trip when you could walk up all the stairs to the crown.

The first thing you do when you get to Ellis Island is go into the big central building – the only one on the original 3-acre island and thus the only one that belongs to New York – and look around. We made a beeline to the information desk to ask about our tour and they told us to wait right there and eventually off we went.

The hospital area was a place you didn’t want to go if you were an immigrant because it meant you might not get admitted to the country. You hadn’t been immediately deported – the steamship lines were required to pay for private (i.e. quarantined) cabins for anyone sent home so they did a lot of screening for that in advance – but you either had to wait for a bit in the regular hospital or wait for what might be a very long time in the contagious disease hospital. Some people never made it out. That’s how diseases work.

The hospitals are on the expanded part of the island (27 acres), which means they belong to New Jersey. NJ owns the water off the original island, and the landfill was considered part of that.

Our tour guide took us through buildings and grassy areas, explaining it all as she went. We got to see the morgue and the laundry room, for example, and on the first picture below you can see the white marks on the bricks which marks the high-water line from the flooding from Hurricane Sandy. The place was abandoned for decades and left alone, and a lot of things are just still sitting there in various states of disrepair. Apparently it would take billions of dollars to restore it fully, so they’re just hoping to maintain a state of “arrested decay,” which makes it more poignant, I think.

A few years ago a French artist did a project there where he enlarged photos from the immigration years and put them on the walls and windows. They give a ghostly feeling to the place, and you have to love that.

One thing that really impressed me about the hospital buildings was how much thought went into passive airflow as a way to keep diseases from spreading. Wards branch off the long hallway known as The Spine but never directly across from one another. The contagious hospital hallway narrows at one end to maintain positive airflow. It was surprisingly well thought out.

The last stop on the tour was the hospice room. They made sure that these patients had the best view, which was thoughtful of them.

Eventually we got outside and headed back to the main building.

After a quick lunch we continued our explorations. The highlight for me was the big processing hall, which is actually on the second floor. You have to imagine the throngs of people who would crowd this room, all hoping and fearing for what came next.

There’s also some really nice museum displays, and if you go outside there’s a low circular stainless steel wall with about a million names engraved in it. We found Kim’s grandfather, who came through Ellis Island in the early 1950s with Kim’s grandmother and mom, and depending on how loose you are with spelling quite possibly some of my Italian ancestors as well. We also found some of Lori’s ancestors, so it was time well spent.

We got the last ferry off the island, made a short stop at Liberty Island to pick up more people (including one guy who had a tattoos in Tengwar on each forearm and if he hadn’t been on his phone the entire time I would have asked him who Beatriz Martinez was to him), and headed back to the car. As we got back to dry land Kim said that the only thing that would have made the experience more complete was if there was an ice cream truck in the parking lot and – as if by magic – there was!

Dinner that night was at an Italian place called Il Tavola, which I recommend fully. We loved our waitress for her honesty – when we asked what the difference was between the Stuffed Ravioli and the Cheese Ravioli she said “Well, it’s kind of embarrassing but they’re really the same thing except one has burrata on top and only comes with vodka sauce” and you have to appreciate that kind of transparency. I got one and Keith got the other and they were both good.

We spent the remainder of the night watching standup on television and chatting with Sara and her friend Nicola as they came and went.

For our final full day of our trip we drove south to Pennington to see Jenny for lunch. I’ve known Jenny since high school and it is good to have friends who have that kind of history and who have shared your story for so long. We got to meet her kitties and her neighbor Rob (all very nice!) and had a tasty meal at The Peasant Grill along with – wait for it! – some lovely conversation as well. Jenny also took us on a brief tour of Hopewell afterward. It’s such a pretty area!

After that it was a long drive home, though rain storms and interstates and a night in North Lima, Ohio where James the Quality Inn guy took good care of us. The next day we saw bald eagles standing in field in central Ohio and survived the tangled web that is Greater Chicago before arriving back home.

It was good to see everyone, and we’ll look forward to the next visits, either here or there.