Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

TRAVELOGUE: To Maine with Tomer

Although Tomer has been living in the States for a couple of years, we have only met a few times briefly and not alone. So we decided to use the long weekend to see a part of the country he hasn’t before seen: the southern coast of Maine.

I have known Tomer since he was my Tae Kwon Do student in Israel at age 8, but at 17 he insisted that we convert our relationship from teacher/student to friends and that’s how it has been ever since. Now he is doing a prestigious post-doc at the National Institute of Health in D.C. and in a year he will be taking up a professorship at Haifa University.

He flies in on Friday and we set out on Saturday, driving up 95 until the first tourist info rest-stop, where we switch to Route 1 to drive along the shore, making my obligatory stop at Leeward Landing Thrift Store where I only find a good book and a couple of greeting cards. Last time I was there was in the summer with my London friend Sue O’Sullivan. Then I bought a stunning but stained pink silk jacket because Sue knew how to eradicate the stain. Tomer stayed in the car playing with his iPhone. He does not lust after objects. He used up all his shopping hormone when much younger.

This is such a strangely mild winter with the trees in an uncharac-

teristically long period of nakedness – wearing neither their leaves nor their snow couture. So when we thought about destinations, I opposed the mountains. Everything flora looks emaciated and brittle, washed out and weak.

But the coast of Maine is gorgeous no matter what the weather with its lumbering black rocks, blue water, and mix of pebbly or sandy beaches. We are aiming for Ogunquit via the coastal route, but stop at Stonewall Kitchens (photo on left), on the recommendation of my friend Stephanie, for coffee and a scone. Known for their jams, we spend a bit too much time at their tasting tables trying to choose among the sour cherry, the seedless raspberry, and their classic blueberry preserves.

We stop at none of the wonderful historic sites of York, like the old Gaol, because it is winter and most tourist sites are shut. It is the coast we long for and by following the Shore Road we are treated to some rocky delights. Our longest stop is at the Nubble Lighthouse, reputed to be the most photographed lighthouse in Maine (photo at left). There is something about the tumble of huge, dark Maine rocks that reminds me of the Irish coast. The seas are calm throughout our weekend so instead of the thrilling white water of stormy days we have the bluest, placid calm. It is an acceptable trade-off.

We climb around the rocks at Nubble to ensure some dramatic photographs, and stop on our way out to get a shot together at a Christmas tree (photo on left) constructed from lobster traps, teddy bears and red ribbons. I’ve never seen a xmas tree I admired more.

In Ogunquit we stay in a spacious double-queen room at The Admiral’s Inn. Other than a glitch in their wireless provision and some young people partying in the halls at all hours, it is a clean, friendly and reasonable accommodation. Many Ogunquit restaurants are closed, but a 10-minute stroll through town leads us to one with a triple menu: bar food, restaurant food, and a bistro menu which seems to be a cheaper alternative with smaller portions – i.e. the kind of portions you would get elsewhere in the world, and quite appropriate for travelers who don’t want doggie bags.

The morning is clear and cold and we pull down coats over our sweatshirts and set off to the Marginal Way, as people have been doing for 85 years. Is there a more splendid walk? The sun is so strong we could’ve come out with a layer or two less. Not a single cloud dulls the perfection of the sea. It is high tide so the water-covered rocks below add a shadow effect to the blue while the wet rough black rocks lining the shore shine with particular drama. There are 39 benches along the way with bronze plaques representing a loving memorial gesture and we stop to see the especially precious views at rest.

It’s a magic mile from Ogunquit to Perkins Cove, where we are planning to have a coffee, but the usual, immediate establishments are closed for the season and we walk deep into the Cove to find the one café open in winter. While it costs us $13 for two hot drinks and a croissant, we get to use the bathroom – a privilege not to be treated lightly during winter in this area. At first we sit outside (photo at left) over the Cove, but that becomes too chilly so we huddle inside in the warmth.

Back at the hotel the well-meaning clerk spends an inordinate amount of our time wrestling with Google maps to give us an insider’s little-known seaside route between Ogunquit and Portland, our next Maine destination. At a certain point, surely well past the 30-minute mark, I have an ominous feeling that I’m going to be standing here so long that I miss signing up for Medicare next year and I say, “I’m going to the car,” and do so. Eventually Tomer joins me with a print-out, but the route turns out to be a torturous exploration of ranch-home suburbs that are closer to the sea than, say, Rt. 95, but not close enough to actually see water. Another hour or so of my life down the drain and I insist that we just get on a road that will actually take us to Portland.

Tomer got us a great deal at the waterfront Hilton, but they don’t let you into the room until 4:00 and they make you pay $15 to park your car, not to mention tips to the person who parks it and the person who returns it to you – from the lot about three feet away from the door. We go for a walk in the historic district, but my feet are mounting a severe rebellion. We already did the whole Marginal Way and back, they complain, what’s with pounding these city streets just hours later? It might not be so painful if, in fact, we actually find the supposedly exciting exhibition we are looking for, but alas, we don’t.

The brightest moment of the afternoon is running into very dear Boston friends of mine Gail and Donna. (I was best man at their wedding.) They are, it transpires, on their annual winter getaway to Portland. However, they are in a rush to catch the three-hour ferry around the islands and we promise to meet up for dinner.

Once we all assemble in the lobby, we stroll to a massive ship restaurant that is a further walk than my feet consent to, only to be told that we have a 75 minute wait to get seated. Gail and Tomer volunteer to return back up the street to see if what turns out to be a seafood greasy spoon has a free table and they do. So Donna and I make our way back towards the hotel to join them at Gilbert’s Chowder House where we are served on flimsy paper plates and given the cheapest plastic cutlery to deal with our food. Tomer’s lobster is decidedly insulted by its paper setting (photo at left). The waitress is sweet, the company unparalleled, and the antacid plentiful.

Monday morning Tomer, Gail, and Donna are as one about having the $12 breakfast at the Hilton. (Of course it’s over $15 what with the taxes and whatnot.) I personally want a scone from the lovely bakery next door, but the majority rules. To ensure that we get our money’s worth, the first thing I do is secret a couple of bagels in my bag for lunch, along with butter, cream cheese, a couple of fruits, and a muffin. Then I get started on eating a pig-farm’s worth of bacon, piles of fruit salad, pancakes, toast, scrambled eggs and hot water, into which I drop my own tea bags.

My stomach and I spend the rest of the morning in the room while Tomer walks and swims. We check out, hide our bags in their baggage room, and tootle over for a lovely 45-minute Casco Bay ferry ride to and from Peaks Island (above), the closest one to Portland. It is a utilitarian vessel into the middle of which vehicles are loaded (photo at left), while we people sit in two tatty long side-rooms above. Tomer and I spend the trip to the island out on the deck. It’s a cool diversion for just $4.30 for him and half that for senior fare.

Our last tourist moment is a side trip to Fort Williams Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, also the most photographed lighthouse in Maine, we are told. Apparently the lighthouses in Maine attract the cameras. This lighthouse is, in fact, astoundingly beautiful and in a setting to rival the Marginal Way. It was built in 1787 and is surrounded by 90 acres of park. We arrive during the last hour of light and so the cold is prohibitive, but the former Keepers' Quarters – now a museum that is closed for winter – is an architectural pearl and the lighthouse itself a perfect specimen. It is just the visual to wrap up our trip to the southern Maine coast.

All photos by Tomer Shechner

Cape Cod Canal and Hyannis September 2011

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 17
My first stop is at the Cape Cod Canal that connects mainland Massachusetts to Cape Cod. I have many times passed over the Sagamore Bridge, one of three bridges that were part of the same canal construction project, on my way to Provincetown on the tip of the Cape, but I have neglected to understand the history of the canal underneath.

The day is exquisite, although its beauty is painfully more like the start of autumn than the end of summer. My big writing plans for this summer have remained largely unfulfilled, so this final four-day escape is important. Nothing better than to begin it strolling on the scenic bike path along this broad canal, with the electric blue sky reflected in the deep turquoise water.

Like the bike path I ride on at home from Cambridge to Bedford, there are walkers, riders, skaters and joggers, passing those who are fishing and those who are sitting at the picnic tables. The friendliness among strangers that I thought was particular to my bike path is apparently universal. I am watching a bird with a long beak floating on the water when it takes an unexpected, dramatic dive down deep, rising up to fly in a great arc just a foot or so above the water. A grey-haired woman walker stops to explain that it is a cormorant, a bird that has no oil on its wings, necessitating a wide spread to dry off its feathers after a dive.

Although just such a canal had been a twinkle in the eye of Captain Miles Standish of the Plimoth Colony in 1623 and although Massachusetts had passed repeated proposals to build it after that, no one could really figure out how to tackle such a massive job. The first attempt by the private sector at the start of the 20th Century produced a narrow, shallow version in 1916, but because of its limitations they could not make it profitable. Eventually the government took it over. “The purchase price was $11,400,000, and $21,000,000 was spent between 1935 to 1940 increasing the canal's width to 480 feet, and its depth to 32 feet. As a result, the canal became the widest sea level canal in the world.” Three bridges high above the canal were also constructed.

There is a visitor center with amazing information at the side of the canal. There I learn that the bike paths along both sides were derived from the utility roads used during construction. The canal has a long history – and as I read of its final triumph, I can’t help but get depressed.

The project was part of Roosevelt’s public works vision – a Depression-era effort that changed America with its roads and bridges and parks and poems and photos. The hazards of sailing around the Cape had limited commerce. This single project employed 1,400 men (sic) who brought money back into the economy, improved trade, upgraded local security and created a recreational and commercial waterway now used by 20,000 boats each year.

Why did all of this get me down? Because as I read in the visitor center about the amazing amounts of investment by the government in job creation, infrastructure and cultural improvement projects during the Depression, I realize that with Roosevelt’s New Deal, at least there was hope. Hope that one could qualify for a government job, even for writers and artists. I find myself thinking the irrational thought that I would’ve been better off during the Great Depression than now when we have no leader or actual governing party, only an opposition being dominated by its most repulsive flank.

For those who say, but look what Obama is up against with all those crazed Republicans trying to stop him, check out what Roosevelt faced:

“Alarmed by Roosevelt's plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, a group of millionaire businessmen, led by the Du Pont and J.P. Morgan empires, plans to overthrow Roosevelt with a military coup and install a fascist government. The businessmen try to recruit General Smedley Butler, promising him an army of 500,000, unlimited financial backing and generous media spin control. The plot is foiled when Butler reports it to Congress.”

I return to the hotel where my request for a quiet room has been granted, but where the chair at the desk is some wonky vanity seat that when I sit down brings me about clavicle-height to my laptop. I ask at the front desk for a real desk chair and, to my astonishment, I get a marvelous specimen. Life is sweet.

I go exploring this “family” hotel whose claim to fame is a “wave pool” – yes, it really waves, with an accompanying hot tub and nearby slides (“Yes,” the 15 year old lifeguard assures me, “we even had a 400-pound old man go down them once.)

For dinner, I drive with my companion into Hyannis center to take up the recommendation of my writer friend Jeannette de Beauvoir to eat at the Brazilian Grill on Main Street. Unfortunately, we are told on arrival, the first available table is at 9:00pm – three hours hence. “I am,” I tell the hostess, “a journalist from Boston writing a travel piece on Hyannis and you were so highly recommended to us.” As we assure her we don’t mind, she immediately seats us at one end of a long table where a small party is dining at the opposite end.

The food is impossibly plentiful and delicious. There is an endless buffet of salads and side dishes of every sort, although my focus is on the fried plantains. If you keep your green “Yes” card up near your plate, the solicitous wait staff – or gauchos – bring you endless rounds of meat on a skewer – from divine beef ribs to filet mignon with bacon; from chicken wings to linguica sausage – in all, 16 different choices. When you need to take a break, you turn the card to a red “No.”

I happen to meet the owner Maximiliano – the only casually dressed member of the staff – at the buffet table and he tells me that the restaurant has been going strong for 11 years and that while the economic atmosphere has definitely had an impact, summer is still a very strong season. The buffet – without drinks or dessert – is a reasonable $28, reasonable that is if you happen to have an extra $28. We have desserts too, brought on a cart piled with abundant choices. When we leave, there is still a line out the door and it is clearly not only a tourist fave, but a local stop as well.

We saunter down Main Street, ducking into a Joke/Sex/Head Shop where I pick up some sexy greeting cards and a bumper sticker that says: “Since I Gave Up Hope I Feel Much Better.” Of course, that’s a lie. Paying for it is torture. Literally. The cashier hands me a pen to sign my credit card receipt which, when I pull off the cap, explodes. I nearly lose my cardiac ability, although the customers standing around find it hilarious. He apologizes and hands me another pen which, when I click it, gives me an electric shock. They like that too.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 18
Again on Jeannette’s recommendation we head for the Cape Cod Central Railroad which asks riders to “Step Back in Time for a Never-Forget Experience!” I wonder why they don’t just use the ready-made word Unforgettable, but climb aboard nonetheless. The train was saved from erasure in 1999 by a private entrepreneur. The majority of the people involved seem to be retired women.

There are brunch or dinner rides to choose from, although we take the non-food scenic train with the edifying commentary by a guide named Madonna. She talks us through the 40 mile route from Hyannis to Buzzards Bay and back at 15-30 miles per hour. A retired kindergarten teacher, Madonna (left) tells me that this job is no different: give them some useful information in an entertaining way so that they will stay in their seats and behave.

We learn about the 365 kettle ponds on the Cape, dug out in the glacier age by ice; about the beautiful golf course we pass early in our journey that is the oldest on the Cape and has an intimidating waiting list; about how the early white settlers depleted the original forests, leaving the area with almost no maples and too many ugly scrub pines; and about the fascinating process of growing and harvesting cranberries as we pass numerous bogs. She explains the ecology of the copious marshlands we pass. Madonna also tells us of so many tempting attractions in Sandwich, where she now lives, that I put it right on top of my must-see list: from a church designed by Christopher Wren to a glass museum to the Dunbar Tea Room.

I chat with the conductor Kay, a life-long pilot, who is spiffy in her handsome uniform. She’s been involved since the 1999 save of the railroad, apprenticing as brakeman and conductor. An air force brat, she started flying with her father in 1945 after WWII and after finishing her education (MBA), she began buying into planes. The role of conductor, she explains, is like that of the captain of a ship: She is responsible for whatever goes on. The brakeman, on the other hand, is like a co-pilot, responsible for switching couplings when the train reverses direction on the way home.

When the ride finishes, I set out to see the JFK Museum in Hyannis, but once inside I find myself less than motivated and satisfy myself with the lovely bronze statue outside of a young JFK strolling barefoot through the dunes.

I lunch at the execrable Spanky’s Clam Shack down at the harbor where I have, late in life, my first face-to-face confrontation with a non-Kosher hot dog, paler than beige and too gross to bite. The reconstituted french fries can only go down on a stream of ketchup and even the view of the harbor is less than impressive. The much-publicized “artists shanties” turn out to be pre-fab boxes where commercial artists try to make a living serving tourists. I ask one what happened during Hurricane Irene. “They made us remove every last thing from inside,” she explains in some disgust, “and they lifted up the shanties and stored them in a parking lot away from the water. And nothing much happened. Just some wind and rain, nothing out of the ordinary.”

For dinner with friends, I take the safe route of a salad at the hotel, and back in my room I catch the end of the Emmy’s where everything seems bland and tame, other than Jane Lynch’s great line (paraphrased): People ask me why I am a lesbian… And now, the cast of Entourage.

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19
Finally, after lunch on the hotel’s porch with friends consisting of untastey wraps bought at Traders Joe’s in one of the many strip malls in the neighborhood of the hotel, my dream comes true. This Cape Codder Hotel, at the blighted corner of two busy box-store roads, bills itself as a “family” destination with all sorts of entertaining extras. I have been dying to try out the wave pool and the water slides – two experiences my rich life has been lacking. Unfortunately, the wave pool is a bit underwhelming, although perhaps if I were 6 years old and a slip of a girl I’d feel like the waves were significant. But I do like those water slides – both the curvy one and the straight-down faster one. Ten minutes in the hot tub settles me down and I return to the hotel room to dine on an apple and pistachios while watching the season premiere of Dancing With the Stars. Go Chaz!

The evening is bittersweet as I know that tomorrow morning I need to pack and return to the real world of selling my labor for far too cheap a wage.

Thanks to Barry Hock for all photos (except Depression-era and wave pool)

Newport Mansions: Squinting at The Gilded Age

Entering Newport, I’m surprised by how old and beautiful it is. Founded in 1639, the town is full of tourists, twee shops and handsome 18th century houses. Down many side roads are views of the yacht-laden harbor and always-nearby shore. There are renowned attractions we won’t get to – from the popular Cliff Walk to the peculiar collection of 800+ living sculptures in the Victorian Green Animals Topiary Garden.

No, we’re keeping our eye on the prize. We stop at the Preservation Society – the owners and care-takers of 11 ornate mansions that the descendants of the Gilded Age residents can no longer afford to maintain. And no wonder. These extravaganzas, now deemed National Historical Landmarks, were constructed in an age without income tax, so the Robber Barons had nothing to do with their looted millions but compete with each other by building their imitation European follies on Bellevue Avenue. Mark Twain coined the phrases “conspicuous consumption” and the “Gilded Age” (the interiors are all drenched in gold) with a sneer. My companion observes:

“The income tax of 1913 stopped their avarice and it’s taken them less than 100 years to get it all back.”

The personable woman at the Preservation Society’s desk, Lila, has my press pack all ready. Through the day I am to meet a stream of well-coiffed, well-dressed white women who have chosen Newport as their retirement destination because it is small enough to walk and there are lots of activities. Lila sends us to the crown jewel The Breakers first, and there we receive the first of the audio tours that are included with the rather expensive ticket of $24.50 (each). I am to find these tours uniformly insipid, lacking much inside gossip, social critique or the substantive analysis one often gets at good museum exhibits. I am to be disappointed too, that none of the three houses we visit (too many – stick to two per day is my advice) includes a single staff bedroom on their tour.

THE BREAKERS
The Breakers was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, one of the richest of a total of 25 NYC millionaires. He was the grandson of Cornelius, son of William, and inheritor of railroads. The Breakers combined opulence with the latest technological advances, like central heating and lots of bathrooms. It has 70 rooms including 33 on the top floors for the help, 750 doorknobs, an unheard-of 20 bathrooms, and it cost $12 million ($310 million today, according to Wikipedia) to build. It required 20 servants to keep it going. In fact, 2,000 servants worked the big houses of Newport each summer, many of them immigrants. Some things never change.

For just a little contrast, I found some annual salary figures for working class people in City Journal:

“To understand what a million dollars was in 1892, consider that a factory worker earned about $446 a year, a railroader $563, and a miner $393. Clerks took home about $885 annually, schoolteachers a paltry $270. A family could live in middle-class comfort with servants on $2,000 a year.”

Between the European marble, the rare woods, the Tiffany wall sconces and the amazing massive crystal chandeliers, a visitor is hard-pressed to take in the details of the different rooms, not the least the 500 year old French stone fireplace in the library, the walls of which are made of gilded wood that looks like aged leather book covers. Now why didn’t I think of that for my “library” – i.e., my twin Ikea pine bookcases.

And then there is the bathtub, carved from a single block of marble and so thick that it had to be filled up several times in a row in order to warm the stone. It also has four taps – two each for fresh and salt water, thought to be a healthy bath medium.

When you’ve got 70 rooms, you break down activities so that each (music, reading, eating breakfast, eating dinner, etc) has a room of its own. The servants too were specialists. Footmen were on their feet all day for their job was to deliver messages. To look impressive, they were required to be over 6 feet tall. Male servants like butlers and footmen were visible, a sign of the wealth of the household.

Chambermaids were generally invisible, traveling along the back corridors and staircases and slipping into rooms by hidden doors. They spent their days dusting, plumping up pillows, changing bed sheets twice a day and switching towels after every use.

MARBLE HOUSE
It is time to move to our next destination, a perfect cube named the Marble House and famous as the home of Alva Vanderbilt, a suffragette. In fact it was the first of the over-the-top “cottages” (i.e. predates The Breakers et al) and changed the lazy summer resting spot of the rich into a hyper-competitive struggle between old and new money. The old money cottages were wooden structures, impressive on their own but nothing like these new palaces. The new money people raised the bar so high that those still holding their noses, like the Astors, were forced to socialize with such riff-raff as the  Vanderbilts. This house started it all. Marble House cost $11 million ($260 million in 2009 dollars says Wikipedia), much of which went for the marble. Alva oversaw its construction on the understanding that her husband would give it to her outright, which he did on her 39th birthday.

The Grand Salon is covered entirely in 22 karat gold, a la Versailles. Every doorknob is a unique dolphin design. The art gallery’s light is dimmed by the astounding stained glass windows liberated from a European church. The house is a mix of French rococo style (library), medieval French doors (art chamber) and fluffy fantasy ruffles for her own princess-like bedroom.

Alva felt herself excluded from the rights and privileges of the wealthy because of her gender and she had raged against such restrictions since childhood. She was a tomboy – riding bareback, punching boys and considering herself, she said, “a law unto myself.” A couple of years after Marble House was completed and turned over to her, she got fed up with her husband William’s philandering. She decided to divorce him, which was considered scandalous. William and everyone in their circle pressured her to just effect a separation, but she insisted on a complete break. “I longed to be a pioneer in my class,” she said.

She further shocked her peers by marrying her ex-husband’s buddy Oliver Belmont shortly after her divorce kicked in, moving a couple of doors down the road to live with him until his death in 1908. She kept Marble House simmering – it was known as her very expensive extra closet, but after being widowed she moved back and began using Marble House as a center for suffragette meetings, supposedly open to women of all classes. But she charged $1 for women to sit on the grass listening to speeches and $5 for a tour of the house (excepting her own bedroom) – a sum that surely was beyond the reach of shop girls and servants. One wonders what her own laundresses and housemaids thought about the extra work these movement gatherings caused. She was certainly a problem for progressive suffragettes who needed Alva’s wallet but could have done without her extravagance and arrogance. And racism

Wikipedia notes:
“By this time, organized suffrage activity was centered on educated, middle-class white women, who were often reluctant to accept immigrants, blacks, and the working class into their ranks. Belmont's Political Equality League only partially broke with this tradition. She established its first "suffrage settlement house" in Harlem, and she included black women and immigrants in weekend retreats at Beacon Towers, her Châteauesque style castle in Sands Point, New York. However, she also contributed to the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference, which refused to admit blacks.”

The relationship between Alva and her adored daughter Consuela gives some insight into Alva’s deep conflicts. She decided very early to marry Consuela off to a European aristocrat, even decorating her daughter’s Marble House room like a muted English castle chamber. Playing on Consuela’s obedience but against the younger woman’s better judgment, the wedding to Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough took place the same year of the divorce. In fact, it was a huge party for the visiting royal suitor that manipulated the snobby old-money Astor family to finally see Alva socially. Luckily, the marriage was later annulled by joint agreement and Consuelo married a second time for love, finding for herself real meaning in social work.

I’m curious: Where do Anderson Cooper and his mother Gloria Vanderbilt fit into the family tree?

THE ELMS
We concluded our visits with a spin around The Elms, built in 1901 for the Pennsylvania coal baron Edward Julius Berwind – thus of particular interest to a Pittsburgh girl like myself. A copy of a French château, it cost $1.2 million (or $22 million today) and was meant both as an art gallery for Berwind’s growing collection and a place to entertain befitting the captain of an industry that was then the number one producer in the world. Being one of the most powerful men of America meant that he had buddies like Teddy Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Berwind was big on new technologies and The Elms the first of the houses to be fully electrified.

When Berwind’s wife, Sarah, died some 20 years later, he moved in his sister Julia as hostess. After all, he was busy making millions and only visited The Elms on occasional weekends till his death in 1936, so Julia happily held down the fort until her death in 1961, probably the last of the old school Gilded Agers. For example, she hosted a bridge game each afternoon, but if she was lacking a player, she would draft in her butler to make up the fourth. He, however, would have to stand throughout the game. Julia conducted her social events according to the most traditional rules of etiquette, such as the dictate in one of her reference books, “Do not use a classical saying in front of a lady without apologizing or explaining.”

When guide books (and the audio tours) tout Newport as a woman’s town where women ruled, the evidence is an odd assortment of points, focusing on their hosting duties while their husbands stayed back in NY to do business. The steps of the grand staircase at The Breakers, for instance, were shortened by two inches so that women descending into the Ballroom appeared to be gliding. Women were the social definers, delineating with their visits which households belonged to which lofty social spheres. But they had time for little else as they changed clothes at least a half dozen times per day, with separate outfits for breakfast, day dress, luncheon, an outing, dinner and evening activity.

The grounds of The Elms include some the most beautiful gardens in town, all very 18th century French, but despite the name, no elms are to be found, having succumbed to disease. For compensation there are the most glorious, enormous weeping beech trees, like giant tents dotting the lawns.

As we finish our tour with a stroll through these grounds, I am reminded of perhaps the most telling, if enraging, comment on the audio tour. The melodious voice, without even a hint of irony, tells tourists from around the country and the world that Edward Berwind successfully guided his business through three cataclysmic events: World War I, the Unions, and the Great Depression.

Nuff said.

Thanks to Barry Hock for all the outside photos of buildings and grounds.

Vermont August 2011, Left on Pearl

Friday August 5, 2011
There is a dangerous stretch of road, beginning around Athol, passing right through Erving, home to Erving Industries with its bales of paper and mounds of toilet rolls, over the hill to Bernardston. What’s dangerous is that I sometimes cannot keep awake. Even though Route 2 between Athol and Erving is at its most treacherous, I start to nod out. Luckily, the rattle strip has woken me more than once. Then after the turn to the right, I mount and descend the mountain on a highly curvy two-lane road that is a white knuckle experience without taking a snooze only to awaken and find oneself where one should not be, but still lucky enough not to have met up with anyone coming from the other direction. If you get my drift (pardon the pun).

Once up the mountain in Guilford, I stop by to see Verandah (the poet) and we have just minutes together before I must run to the log cabin (on left) to settle my foodstuffs into the fridge and my belongings in the cozy bedroom that is mine for the weekend. Kopkind is having a camp for filmmakers. I’m too late for tonight’s showing, but the filmmaker and his partner have the big bedroom beside me and the filmmaker Susie Rivo, who made the documentary "Left at Pearl” about a feminist action in 1971 that I was involved with, will bed down in the living room from Saturday. This is a log cabin that I have rented more often than any vacation spot in my life, but have never had to share it with anyone other than the person of my choice.

I store the freezer logs from my cooler in the freezer door and stuff the bits and pieces I brought with me from home – salami, a bagel, etc - into one of the little fruit & vegetable drawers in the totally empty fridge. This is the act of a woman, I realize as I write this. A man would use a shelf. Or two. Feel entitled to a main shelf. A man would probably not have packed picnic makings, assuming that someone would feed him.

Everyone else is already gathered on the sumptuous pond-side deck of my friends Susan (the bookmaker) and Gil (antiques guru), sipping cocktails and nibbling appetizers, when I arrive. Dinner is soon laid out – a delicious ham, cukes in a salad and tasty beans – all fresh from the garden that hour, potato salad rich with the day’s garden treats. The neighborhood musicians set up (Susan on bass – a sexy sight indeed; Jeremy on violin and guitar and vocals; and the incomparable Patty Carpenter on keyboards and vocals.

Gilbert has constructed a ring of flame-burning tiki torches that establish a no-fly zone right in the middle of bug season. It is astoundingly effective and when he builds a fire later in the evening in his big iron fire pot, the smoke is yet another deterrent. I sit in shirt-sleeves and do not suffer – an unprecedented experience.

Finally they take a break for dessert: a fluffy banana cream pie from Patty and a still-warm-from-the-over blueberry and blackberry pie Jeremy and Heidi made from their own garden fruit. My taste buds win any potential negotiation with my thighs. I eat and am merry.

No dark is darker than country dark and so I make my way back to the log cabin deep in the woods with more fear than danger – but get there with no real issue. Flashlights rule!

Saturday August 6, 2011
I spend the day between the home of Susan and Gil and The Farm where I have lunch with Verandah. Both places have wireless – an essential disruptor in my effort to write, plus the only way to keep up with Barry’s campaign efforts in Wisconsin where he has gone to help the re-call elections.

Yesterday the local paper had a photo of me from 1971 – me in my black leather motorcycle jacket and my lace up leather boots leaning all, well, lean and butch against a fence. Today they have a feature article entitled “Witness to a great revolutionary moment,” based on an interview I did yesterday by phone.

I join the “campers” – grassroots film makers spending a week in the country with mentors, getting rare support – for a barbeque at the Kopkind Colony (photo below left) and then the guests begin arriving. It is the first time that the annual grassroots session has ended with a women’s film and not all of the organizers know what to expect.

But then the punters start pouring in – many women and some men from near and far. The standing-room-only audience laughs and cries and responds very strongly throughout this wonderful film, “Left on Pearl,” about our takeover and 10-day occupation of a Harvard building in 1971. When it ends, Susie Rivo gets a standing ovation for the film and she and I conduct a Q&A that is warm and fuzzy and sobering (when people ask about all the losses in recent years for women’s rights in this country), including the inevitable question from a man about why men aren’t better represented. Duh. An exclusively women’s action. But surely, he insists, some man must’ve been actively involved, supporting us or behind the scenes. Sigh.

Sunday, August 7, 2011
By 8:15, my bags are in my car and I’m ready for breakfast before heading back to Boston. But breakfast at Kopkind has been rescheduled for 10:00 on account of a highly celebratory late night party that I missed. I’ve had a very interrupted night’s sleep due to rashes and bites and itchiness, especially on my right ankle, so I search out my friends for some sustenance.

I go to Susan and Gil’s for a cup of tea and some toast with homemade fruit jam and run into the women on their way down from their daily joint climb of Belden Hill. The last time I joined them was when Tomer, my strapping young lad, was visiting and he put his hands on my ass and pushed me up the hill.

I show them my red, inflamed, itchy swollen right ankle and people try to decide if it is poison ivy or stinging nettles or several other scary things (tics!) that can happen to you when you trot around the countryside – which I didn’t do, except to get from car to homes across more-or-less mowed grass and one visit to Verandah’s food gardens. Susan puts on some calodryl lotion. Then Verandah has me wash it all with “technu.” We make a stop at Lana’s place for juice, and she lends me a few novels for the summer. On the way down the hill I run into my friend Heidi out in her yard. She cuts some “jewel weed” and shows me how to slice open the stalk and rub the inside sap on it. Soothing. Plus she gives me a stick of “AfterBite” to run on all my many mosquito and other bug bites.

It is always a balm to see these friends of mine – some friendships reaching back to 1968 - and always a treat to be able to promote this inspiring historical documentary “Left on Pearl,” a decade-long labor of love for a small group of devoted women. Today and tomorrow, though, my focus is on the Wisconsin recall elections which, if successful, would be a taste of optimism long missing from my life.

Cousins Island, Maine: Life in a Living Museum

Do you remember my friend Sue who visits me often from London and whose massive 70th birthday fund-raising gala I attended in London this spring? She was actually born and raised in the States, although she’s been living in London for some 50 years. Her parents bought a summer home named Avalon near friends in Maine on Cousins Island in the 1940s and Sue has visited it virtually every summer since. The rambling house, built in 1912, is perched above the sea. Part of its inestimable charm is that when Sue’s folks took over the house, the purchase included all the contents: furniture, kitchen utensils, horsehair beds, porch furniture, clothes – even the family dictionary. From the start, Sue’s parents did not consider these inherited household items precious: they were to be used, and used they have been.

I spent the weekend there with Sue and her London family (ex-husband John, son Dan and his partner Jo, and two grandchildren; Sue’s older son, Tom, is to arrive later) and it’s like being in another world, one that bridges centuries.

So I don’t hesitate to sit down at the no-longer-tune-able Square Grand piano from Vose & Sons, established in 1851 in Boston. The discordant notes are more than compensated for by the piano’s exquisite carvings, the unusual antique shape, and the pile of disintegrating sheet music, nearly a century old, that Sue encourages me to rifle through.

The house is a living museum, where nothing is sacred but many things are irreplaceable. While nothing has been taken away, plenty has been added – electricity, two bathrooms and a wonderful outdoor shower. There are comfortable couches and new mattresses to replace the horsehairs; a sunroom added when Sue and her brothers were kids; and now there is even a wireless Internet connection, although even an addict like me is able to resist in favor of relaxation.

For after all, just outside the door, over the spacious veranda and down the grassy mound is the sea (photo: view from porch). The ocean. The Atlantic. Every day Sue takes her confident, enthusiastic, affable grandchildren – Lois (5) and Henry (3) – down to lovely beaches that are found on the island. They think it is normal to follow Sue into the frigid Atlantic waters – but then again, they are products of Britain and know nothing but cold oceans.

You used to be able to access Cousins Island by ferry only and the old-timers, Sue’s neighbor, a fifth generation resident tells me, were none too happy when Wyman Energy Center established a huge electricity plant at one end of the island, bringing with them the bridge from Yarmouth, Maine, and the dreaded traffic. I’m sure when John Cousins bought the island in 1645 – before which it was known to the Abenaki Indians as Susquesong – he didn’t imagine it would become so crowded with, well, other white people.

It takes a while to adjust to being on a quickie vacation in this heavenly setting. The first night we all dine together and hang out a bit. I go to my room, shutting the fragile paper-thin old pull-down blinds and the curtains to keep the sunrise out of my eyes come the morning, and sleep in utter darkness. I have the oddest nightmare. It is very rare for me to remember dreaming or to recall the dream, but here it is in brief.

I am in a hotel and become enamored of a little girl who is being mistreated (not abused) by her father and another man, or so it seems to me. I get to know her and am increasingly disturbed by her situation. I snatch her and take her to my room, but she is filthy. I put her in a big pan in the sink and run some water. When there is a pounding on the door, I leave her, close the bathroom door and play innocent with the hotel detectives. When I shut the room door behind them a few minutes later and race back to the bathroom, the little girl is very dead. Her clothes have disappeared and she is trussed up like a skinned and headless chicken. I don’t know what to do. Various impossible plans flash through my mind. She is repulsive. I can’t hold her – she’s rather slimy. I don’t want to go to the police in case they do me for kidnap and murder.

I leave it to those who feel they are able to make sense of dreams to play with that hideous story, but to me it is all about how life feels now – to so many of us in the country who are struggling to survive in what is a spiraling descent into, if not fascism, something akin to a feudal distribution of wealth and rights. You turn your back for a second, and everything is ruined. Too many people reading this will identify, empathize.

This makes it hard to be on vacation. It is hard to shed the feeling that every email, phone call and, gawd forbid, snail mail is going to be yet another threat to life. I don’t want to receive the results of my medical tests, my investment statement or my job application response. Out here on the island, I have about 36 hours to forget all that and take advantage of a different world, an incomparable view, lovely company and an uncommonly interesting house.

I am myself very lazy, declining invites to the beach or walks to the harbor. Instead I welcome this rare opportunity to read books in a rocking chair set on a seaside porch, a breeze cutting through the 90 degree heat wave. By Saturday afternoon, I am approaching a vacation sensibility, shedding my stress very temporarily, in the rapture of holiday.

We decide to go see the Double-A minor league baseball team the Portland Sea Dogs, where the players are being trained and sorted out for the Boston Red Sox. Unlike major league games, the tickets are affordable and available. We are four seniors ($4 each), two adults ($8) and two children ($4). We sit in general admission seating in the shade, load up on hot dogs and fries and fried fish and sodas, and enjoy what is a really nice stadium. The Sea Dogs are playing the Altoona Curve, who feed the Pittsburgh Pirates (my home town team), so I’m afraid that I’m cheering for the visiting team. Or I would if there were enough of a game to provoke a cheer. Instead, the Sea Dogs seem disinterested and lazy, while the Altoona Curve pull ahead and do only what is necessary to stay there.

It is enormous fun, though, and full of local people. The ads are a hoot – the sound of shattering glass when a foul ball goes out of the park followed by a recording, “Uh oh, better call Portland Glass.” Many of the guys have gloves to catch balls that might make it up to our benches on the third base side of the field, which is reassuring for those of us who prefer the batters hit in another direction, thank you very much. Sue’s neighbor on the bench is happy to explain the finer points of the game to her, although at least once she has to swallow deeply to keep from scalding him after his comment about immigrants.

Saturday night Sue gives me a tour of the 1889 Webster’s Dictionary, almost a cube in shape, covered by disintegrating leather which rubs off on my black cotton pants. We thumb through the pages, onion-skin covering those with illustrations, and it is simply astounding to think that this served Sue and her brothers as their Scrabble dictionary as kids. We didn’t have a dictionary in my house growing up. The information that precedes the actual word listings is copious and the definition of each word is a generous slab of background, examples and synonyms. It so far surpasses any dictionary I have ever actually touched that I feel like a time-traveler.

Sunday morning I find a 1967 paperback of a 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh I have never read The Loved One. Sue immediately lends it to me and I see that it is dedicated to his friend, the writer Nancy Mitford. Sue gets everyone around the table in the sunroom. We feast on blueberry pancakes and then reluctantly say our goodbyes and set out for the home stretch. We have neither researched nor planned our return itinerary but manage to luck into a woman who recommends a terrific restaurant in Kennebunkport. We tootle around this seaside tourist town and then take a drive out towards its very farthest point at the end of a peninsula where the George Bushes summer.

There are lots of people parking at the side of the road and looking over the rocks, the water and then the rocky side of their mansion with the many out-buildings. “For the servants,” I mutter to the guy next to me. “For the Secret Service,” he adds. “We’re paying for them,” someone else says, “for them and for that,” waving across to the huge edifice and its various security structures. “They should go back to Texas,” the first guy sneers, shaking his head and returning to his SUV where a woman sits waiting impatiently.

We get back in the car and head home. Traffic is a bitch. Several days of my mail is stuffed into my little mailbox with apparent venom. I have unpleasant messages on my home voicemail, things that require almost immediate attention. I miss my friend Sue and her peeps. I want to go back where only the mosquitoes are trying to suck my blood.

Photos by Barry Hock, with thanks.

My Toe? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Because I work in a senior center and am over 60, I get to go to the most marvelous podiatrist who we’ll call John. Because that’s his name, actually. I went for his usual treatment (nails, dead skin, once-over) prior to my departure to London so that I’d be confident in the state of my feet.

Towards the end of my trip, the big toe on my right foot started sending out unpleasant signals. I scooped my fingers around the inside of my sneaker and thought that just maybe I detected a wrinkle in the lining and in fear of the princess and the pea syndrome, switched shoes.

It got increasingly worse, to the point where I was slopping around the streets of London in clogs that usually serve me as slippers. I worried that the source of the irritation was that I had borrowed and worn handsome leather dance shoes (my size) one evening. Dance shoes do have pointier toes than anything else I wear.

By the time I got on to the plane home, my toe was not speaking to any of my shoes. By the time I got off the plane, my toe was infected, red and full of – scuze my language – pus. The next morning I left messages for John at several different places and he called me back to beg me to stop inundating him. By then I was pretty sure that we’re talking ingrown toenail. John prescribed antibiotics (a rare ingest for me), Epsom salt soaks several times per day and antibiotic ointment. As a side dish, and against yeast infection, he suggested I have a probiotic yogurt daily.

The toe was waking me up at night. It was screaming for relief. I approached my treatment rigorously. Because I’m not in work mode yet, just in my reentry period, I was able to devote my most concentrated attention on my poor digit.

Long before my departure to London, I had planned on two dance events for this weekend: the swing evening with the women’s big band, The Mood Swings, on Saturday; and the annual LGBT Senior Pride Tea-Dance, which I never miss. I could not fit a single shoe of any sort on my foot by Saturday, although the toe was already improving, and a sandal was too dangerous for this particular venue, where the dancers know zilch about floor craft and stomp on each other’s feet with abandon.

By Sunday there still wasn’t a shoe I could stand, but I felt that I could take the chance of wearing sports sandals, especially by restricting myself to dancing with Lucky and Stephanie. However, I just couldn’t score a break.

And here’s what I really wanted to tell you about. I was all dressed up for the Tea-Dance and I was sitting in my office chair, closing up my laptop. I bent over to remove the plug from a floor extension cord and somehow the chair toppled over. I landed on my right arm (the one with the bad shoulder) and on my right toe (yes, that one). The chair landed on my back. I didn’t move for several minutes and then backed up in a crawl, causing the chair to tumble off of me so that I could get up. I was dazed but okay.

I made my way to my elevator, as the little incident had held me up. One floor down and the elevator stopped to let on a couple. She came towards me and suddenly spilled a hot cup of coffee on my foot. That foot.

My pants leg was splattered and my sock, sandal lining and gauze bandage were all soaked in hot milky liquid. I stared down at my foot. The woman was chattering – apologizing? – but I simply could not look up from my foot. The elevator door closed and I realized that the couple had fled and I was alone with this puddle.

Today I visited the podiatrist and he cut out a hunk of my nail, slathered it with iodine and said that by tomorrow it should be fine. So we ought to have a happy ending to this saga. However, he also told me something interesting. When you are on a long flight your feet swell. That means that the swollen flesh of the toe can press itself again the nail and produce a kind of ingrown toenail that is really a grown-in toe. It’s nice to learn new facts.

London Review: Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography

The Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London has magnificent collections of objects housed in an extraordinary building, but I go there rarely, as so much of their permanent collection is, in fact, colonial plunder. Too often I have left enraged at the flaunting of stolen goods or disturbed by what must have been a lifetime of work identified with its owner and not for the unrecognized craftspeople who created it.

I could not, however, forego a look at the exciting “Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography,” having seen bits and pieces of reviews and images from the collection. Using of the last decade’s work of 17 photographers – many very young, a few middle aged and perhaps just one pre-freedom veteran David Goldblatt (b. 1930) – this is a profoundly political look through lenses that are engaged and committed.

The first featured photographer is so powerful that every subsequent image I see – 150 of them by 17 photographers – has to stand in comparison. Zanele Muholi (b. 1972) has two sections. The first is a series of black and white images of lesbians, from femmes to cross-dressers, from sweet to swagger (see above). Her second set (on left), in bright colors, features gay men in costumes that transgress traditional masculinity. Although S. Africa was the first country to enshrine gay rights in its constitution, there is still tremendous, threatening bias, making the super-confidence of her subjects all that more absorbing.

Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980) also looks at gender rebels in his “Country Girls” (on left) series of rural male cross-dressers who pose awkwardly in the outfits they have managed to cobble together, high-heels here and ill-fitting skirt there. In the backgrounds, their settings are often painfully poor. In fact, costumes play a surprisingly large role in a number of the works in this exhibit. Mlangeni’s other series “Men Only” follows the residents of a shabby workers’ hostel in Johannesburg. It is an intimate introduction to an environment I knew less than nothing about.

The impact of poverty and tragedy on S. Africans is a recurring visual in this show. Santu Mofokeng’s (b. 1956) series “Child-Headed Households” captures the life of siblings who, having lost their parents to AIDs, are holding their families together around the vacuum.

In “Terreno Ocupado,”Jo Ractliffe (b. 1961) documents life on the border between S. Africa and Angola where the 1970s and 80s war was fought. The title of one large image  highlights the 'Woman on the footpath from Boa Vista to Roque Santeiro Market' (above left) at the bottom of the frame, but above her looms two massive mountains of garbage in the valley of which is a flimsy shanty town. The horror of it is seared into my mind’s eye and I have been unable to shake a sense of desperation that such conditions exist. Guy Tillim (b. 1962) spent a week in central Malawi photographing portraits of villagers (at left). His quiet, off-center images-in-motion seep with dusty poverty.

The body is the canvas of several of the women photographers – who are, unusually enough, probably in the majority in this group exhibition. Bernie Searle (b. 1964) is a multi-media artist who uses her own body to develop sophisticated narratives around gender, race and identity (at left).

Jodi Bieber’s (b.1966) subjects pose in their own homes, their own underwear and their own attitude. An old white woman leans against her kitchen counter, one black bra strap slipping down her shoulder, holding a cigarette to her lips, while a full-bodied young black woman struts her stuff (at left).

I believe I learned more about actual life today in S. Africa through these photographers and their contemporary visual lessons than in all the reading I have done. Kudos to the two curators Tamar Garb (Prof of Art History, University College) and Martin Barnes (V&A’s Senior Curator of Photographs). The written material accompanying each artist’s displays is comprehensive if brief, intimately detailed and quite political. The show is hung beautifully. The emphasis on these activist, young photographers makes for an emotional slap across the consciousness, an occasional giggle and a frequent sharp intake of breath.

The exhibition is open until 17 July 2011
Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL

London Travelogue May 25-29, 2011 – Dancing and Cherries

May 25 Wednesday

I have a drink (juice) with a friend, a garden designer, and then succumb to a restaurant called “Diner” that brags about its (actually mediocre) hamburgers. A part of the Sunday Times is lying around and I pick up an article about Schwarzenegger and Shriver and suddenly it occurs to me that I have yet to comment, as I have wanted to do, about something no one is screaming about: If he got the other woman pregnant, he was not practicing safer sex. Cheating + risky behavior is really criminal.

I pick up some groceries and head home to write. The exquisite luxury of having this wonderful flat to myself makes all the difference. I cannot imagine being a guest for three weeks, even if the time is broken up among varied friends – not the least because the first thing I want to do when I come home is take off my bra and my shoes. When visting a country where one once lived, there are so many people who are must-see and so many to speak to. My smile and conversational capacity wear out – not because I’m not thrilled to catch up with friends, but because I am. It’s exhausting to concentrate so repeatedly. I have no idea how to express my soul-felt gratitude to the friend of Sue’s who allowed me to stay here, but I am going to try.

I head back out at 8:00 to the dance studio - Studio LaDanza -  of Heather Gladding (on left), one of my former ballroom and latin dance teachers, and her partner Hadass Armon. Nicola is already there having a waltz lesson and I am struck once again at the high level of instruction to the LGBT community in London, compared to the tiny scene in Boston. The venues, too, are something to admire. This one is a converted shoe factory – somehow poetically appropriate – and it is gorgeous, spacious and comfortable.

Following the lesson is some social dancing so I not only get to have a few dances with my dear Nicola, but some too with Heather – one of the most graceful of dancers. We have a cha-cha and a West Coast Swing and then a couple of very heavenly rumbas – my favorite. It’s hard to keep dancing when I’m leading someone of Heather’s professional and artistic level – I just want to stare.

I’m so ridiculously weak and tired that I become the butt of jokes between Nicola and Heather. Feet sore and strangely weary, I drag myself home to fall into bed.

May 26 Thursday
Even as I awake I’m lacking energy. But I’m motivated to get out at a reasonable hour to meet up with Jo, my former colleague who has carved out time for a morning coffee. She lives a double life – a non-profit executive during the week in London and a houseboat dweller on the Suffolk coast for long weekends. She brings me a present – a handsome little notebook (just as mine is running out) with a pretty gel pen.

I decide to go to the Angel Market to pass the hour until my next date, but just as I arrive the clouds open and a drenching blustery rain starts, one that has no intention of ceasing. Even the umbrella Sue lent me is not very useful in this high wind. I kill the hour going from doorstep to awning until I hook up with Rayah at the Afghan Kitchen.

I met Rayah in Women Against Fundamentalism , the organization that was at the heart of my political activism during my decade in London. It was founded by strongly secular women of all faiths who believed that all religious fundamentalisms share, at the heart of their agenda, the control of women and reproduction. The founders were from the Asian subcontinent, Arab countries, Israel, Ireland and lots of other places. Debates were mature, action was fearless, and commitment was intense. I miss WAF something fierce.

Rayah is now an activist around immigration issues. She is taking care of a frail elderly parent – like so many of my generation who are not yet orphans. She is funny, adorable and one of those London friends I know I can depend on. But I am less lively and responsive than I’d like to be and after I leave her, it dawns on me that, in fact, I am unwell.

I take the bus home, drooping and nodding out several times on the short ride, and call Sue to consult, to “get permission” to be sick. I have long-standing, highly anticipated plans to meet up with Wonnita and then with Campbell Ex tonight and it’s unbearable to consider giving that up. But my stomach is so upset that I don’t want to be far from my bathroom and I’m simply knackered. I have no option and apologize to each of them before collapsing and uncharacteristically sleeping for over four hours.


I wake at 9:00pm, still not feeling right, and after writing a couple of hours return to bed to sleep through the night. Meanwhile I have pathetically asked for sympathy from my Facebook friends (who haven’t heard much from me during my vacation) and receive a highly consoling rush of good wishes.

May 27, Friday
I rest in the early morning but decide I need a good hot meal and go out to the parade of shops that have been my retail anchor while staying here. I discover wonderful little stores and cafes I somehow missed altogether and in the end settle on a place that offers a full English breakfast. It is a disastrous decision, much too much food for a stomach in turmoil.

My main agenda is cleaning, which I do with a good spirit out of my gratitude for this haven of privacy. I call for a taxi and ask him to send me someone who does not mind bringing down my bags. The driver arrives but has been told nothing about carrying bags and comes up to lower them three stories with great irritation which does not abate until we arrive at Sue’s place and I give him a massive tip. Then he is all cooperation and solicitousness and I don’t blame him for that at all.

I am rather listless but Sue feeds me. She is rushing to get things together for her trip away. I meet the neighbors upstairs and with shameless chutzpah ask them for the use of their wireless system. They give me their password and I’m set to rumble.

May 28, Saturday
In the morning, there is a lot of activity. I am awoken by the doorbell and it is the phone technician coming to deal with Sue’s landline which has not worked for several days. Her house is a showcase of books and beautiful objects and antique housewares and exotic knick-knacks, but he shows model patience as he moves this thing and that to find plugs and wires. In the end, the problem is with the system inside the house – which means Sue should be charged for his visit.

We’ve tottered after him the whole time playing two eccentric oldies and he promises, “I’ll tell them it was outside.”

“It’s the truth,” I say, looking at Sue, “outside our expertise!”

He makes reference to his Gran several times, refuses Sue’s offer of a cup of tea, and leaves us to our preparations.

The doorbell rings again and it is Jaya, arriving by taxi from Italy via Stanstead Airport. She has come to spend 3+ days with me, since I decided adding a visit to her beautiful stone home atop a Tuscan mountain was too much to squeeze in this trip. Good thing, too, considering my messy health.

She comes bearing gifts (as always), saying, “This time I want to teach you a lesson about life.” Out of her carry-on luggage (!) she pulls a giant bowl of cherries. How she managed to fit it in, how she got them over the border and how they came to be so indescribably tasty are mysteries that remain unsolved. The cherries come from a tree she planted some years ago at the magnificent sculpture studio she owns in Italy and this is its first totally bountiful year. She used her forklift to climb to the very top of the tree to bring me these many pounds of cherries, full of Italian sunlight. Sue takes some on the train with her as she leaves and I give some to the neighbors who blessed me with their wireless connection.

Jaya needs her coffee and breakfast so we stroll to the Blue Legume – the café that is the original anchor for the retail street of this area, where I have a delicious BLT that does not sit well with me and Jaya has Welsh rarebit.

We are off to search for shoes for Jaya but when neither of the two shoe stores in the Angel area coughs up an appropriate pair, Jaya is done shopping, an activity she so dislikes that she saves it for vacations. Instead she buys a blueberry cupcake with inches of icing that is beyond description and we make our way back to Sue’s. (The photo is of one of Jaya's sculptures.)

Jaya is very hungry, because she has been up since an early hour to catch her flight, and we head for an Indian meal at the restaurant recommended by Sue. Jaya and I go to sleep very early, and alas I awaken at 3:30am, an experience that has nothing to recommend it other than my chance to catch up on this travelogue.

May 29, Sunday
We wander around the neighborhood, taking a shortcut through the incomparable 1840 Abney Park Cemetery, which describes itself like this:

“Abney Park in Stoke Newington, London, formerly one of the ‘magnificent seven’ garden cemeteries of London, is now a woodland memorial park and Local Nature Reserve managed by the Abney Park Trust.”

In fact, unlike some of the well-manicured garden cemeteries of London, it is an overrun jumble of falling statuary and untended garden-gone-wild that is an absolute delight. It is well-used by local walkers, with dogs and without. We always stay on the many paths because Abney also serves as a popular cruising area for gay men, who get to know each other better off in the brush, behind the ancient headstones and sculptures. The Chapel is decrepit, unfortunately, as it “was deigned to be a landmark to religious toleration, being open to all.” Our local Borough of Hackney can’t afford to keep the cemetery pristine and we wouldn’t sacrifice the fabulous green chaos anyway.

Jaya and I meet Nicky for lunch at the award-winning Rasa Indian restaurant – and everything we get is excruciatingly delicious. However, I am fading, fading, fading – my lack of sleep catching up with me, so I head off home for an essential nap.

In the evening, we are off to the White Swan gay pub in the East End which is holding a celebration of 30 years of Sunday Tea Dances. We have the incredible luck of Nicola offering to pick us up, saving us from a complicated series of buses - or an expensive taxi ride. Mike meets us there. Both Mary and Wonnita have bowed out due to feeling poorly. The ether of London seems to be full of cooties.

The pub is absolutely packed with queer dancers spanning the rainbow: elders and youth, cross-dressers and muscle boys, middle-aged dykes and slender young lasses, dancing with each other without barriers and with a shared elation that must rarely be seen in the queer world. Teachers line dance next to their students and strangers smile at you. The atmosphere is joyous as the endorphins build up through a mix of line dances, traditional English dances, polkas, cha-chas, quicksteps, Viennese waltzes and sexy bossanovas.

While I don’t do the line dances, I have always respected their place in the ballroom and latin scene. They allow everyone to join in – partner or not – advanced or not – and it is a whole other area in which to shine. Line dances are truly democratic.

Emotions cascade over me. In the 11 years since I was at the center of this scene, everyone has improved amazingly, due in no little part to the world class teachers and to the motivation of competition. In Europe, there is a robust schedule of same-sex dance contests leading up to the Gay Games, where partner dancing is by far the largest event.

I feel proud of everyone, and remember with love the days in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was on the ground floor of this movement. How gratifying to see leading and following across gender, style, age and height. I remember the splash when I was the first woman to perform an official Showcase leading a man, my teacher Ralf. Tonight the crowd danced two of the line dances – the Wild Wild West and the Tush Push – that I originally brought to England from the LGBT country and western dance group in Boston I used to visit with my friend Gail.

I feel a great sense of continuity – especially when all sorts of people come up to greet me with a big “Hi Spike!” (my London nickname). But I also feel sad at the poor level of dance in Boston and at my lack of opportunities to improve, practice and perform. Most of all, I miss this atmosphere of healthy exuberance (it’s an amazing workout), focus and commitment. All these varied bodies, working so hard and happily over the years, are experiencing the zen of achievement. They so obviously feel glorious in their movements.

I mainly dance with Mike, an impressively versatile dancer who was also one of the earliest pioneers in this scene, and with Nicola, who adores the dance floor and glows as she moves. It is such a treat to be reunited. Uncharacteristically, I also sit out quite a bit (talking down my inflamed ankle tendons and churning stomach) and watch as a short, lithe lad in a clinging undershirt leads a towering drag queen twice his size in a flowing white gown, or a chunky girl flashes a twirling smile as she is spun by an elderly, bent-over gentleman in a tie.

Heather and her partner Hadass are here – the people who run the studio I was at Wednesday evening. Over 20 years ago, Heather ran a straight studio with her then dance partner Glenn and I was one of the people who broke through the traditions of genderized dance roles there. Later, when my own dance partner and I were rehearsing for our performances, we had years of private lessons with Heather.

One of the greatest epiphanies of my life was seeing Heather and Glenn perform a rumba at a ball I had organized in the very early 90s as they were coming into the queer dance scene. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I longed to be Glenn/Fred leading Heather/Ginger. I cannot see Heather move without recalling that experience, one which changed my life forever. But reality intervenes: tonight is coming to a close. After hugging what seems like the entire dancing population of London, we pile into Nicola’s car to go home to collapse into bed.

London Theatre Review: Mike Leigh's "Ecstasy"

May 24, Tuesday
It’s not really right to skip the theatre when in London, so out of all the possible shows, I choose to see the revival of Mike Leigh’s “Ecstasy,” now in its last week.

Mike Leigh is a director I often admire; he is frequently called “a darling of the Left.” He is not a big campaigner, but when asked if he feels he is a political director has said, “You can't not be political. It's like asking if I consider myself a human being.”

His methodology is unique in film and theatre: the process of rehearsals is full of improvisation and exploration among the actors, but once he settles on a final script before the last rehearsals, there is no element of further improv. He directed two of my favorite films: Secrets and Lies (families and adoption) and Vera Drake (abortions and the law). “Ecstasy” was a great stage hit when it appeared in 1979, the year before Thatcher’s election. And no wonder. It had an extraordinary cast, including Julie Walters, Stephen Rea and Jim Broadbent.

This is the first time Leigh has ever revived a play and it has been so popular that it had to move from the small progressive Hamstead Theatre to the Dutchess in the West End. This week ends its run, so I was lucky have a chance to review it. My friend Nicola came in on the train to join me.

The story goes like this: Jean (Sian Brooke) lives alone in a bedsit (a tatty studio apartment) in the Kilburn area of London. She’s monosyllabic and seems quite depressed. Her best friend Dawn (Sinead Matthews) is a live wire, married to Mick (Allen Leech), mother to three girls. Jean has secret affairs with unavailable men, the most recent a rough and thoughtless neighbor whose wife comes into Jean’s bedsit to beat on him, breaking Jean’s bed in the mayhem. Dawn and Mick come back from the pub with an old friend Len (played the night we saw it by James Bennett) to fix the bed. This turns into a party of drinking and smoking themselves into oblivion until the wee hours.

Scene One opens with some ironic if desultory wit. Jean and the neighbor guy are naked in bed and the air is filled with disinterest if not hostility. “Wanna fag?” he offers her his pack. They never actually make eye contact.
“Yeah,” she mumbles.
“Good, wudn’it?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she replies.

From there, however, the pace slows once it focuses on Jean, who is depressed and distant.

Scene Two is motored by the melodrama and hysteria and maudlin emotions of four drunk friends on their mad dash to alcoholic unconsciousness. Funny enough, the more juiced the characters get and the more the play relies on slapstick (falling down, etc), the more amused and animated the audience’s response. I myself feel a bit ill just watching four humans consume so damned much booze and nicotine, but that’s not my main concern.

The emotional center of the play is meant to be Jean, but the actress is unconvincing in the role and her accent is a problem, bigtime. She seems to have the typical garble of a posh private schoolgirl doing her tin-ear version of a working class accent. She sounds as if she has stuffed her cheeks with cotton balls, only muddier. When late in the drinking party she is called upon to sing, she starts hesitantly and in her odd accent, but then she continues in a crystal clear voice with elocution that allows us to understand the lyrics. While it is a relief, it is also discordant in the context, especially when she reverts back to her mumbling. When she’s not singing or making hot drinks, she slumps in a chair, her head lolling on her chest, and her conversation almost non-existent.

The relationship between Dawn, who fills in all the lulls with her effervescence, and her husband Mick has some real meat to it, but sad-sack Len is so consistently a nice guy that my companion felt his character was too much of a stereotype.

One wonders why Mike Leigh chose this play to revive, but it has clearly been very popular. As always, he tries to inject a little politics into the script, although the choice of Len as a racist against the “Pakis” and Jean as their defender felt a bit upside down. Their discussion of what they’d do if they won £1 million on the Lottery was revealing: Jean would run off to America; Len would buy a nice fishing boat; Mick would own a pub; and the ever-realistic Dawn would get a full-time babysitter for her three kids.

In the wee hours, Dawn and Mick straggle home and something bursts in Jean, leading to confessions and revelations and weeping, all in that same garbled delivery. Suddenly we have explicit themes of betrayal, dishonesty, friendship, motherhood and abortion, tumbling out in the final minutes at a level of distress and disclosure at complete odds with her established persona.

The applause is mildly enthusiastic and anything but prolonged and I am left with a sense that despite having once lived in London for a decade, I am missing a chunk of cultural references that may have allowed me to enjoy “Ecstasy” more than I did.

London Travelogue May 21 - 23, 2011 Dancing, Hoppé, Meals

May 21 Saturday
I get to catch up on this blog in the morning and talk to a few friends when, once again, this mobile (or cell, in the US) phone announces that I’ve only got £1.22 remaining. I have made a friend at the news agents shop where I got my weekly travel card and where I can top up the pay-as-you-go phone. I add £20, making it a full and outrageous £60 in just over a week. At this rate, I could’ve bought the Virgin company outright. The woman at the shop gives me the customer service number and I prove that once again, if you don’t ask you don’t get. The conversation is long and I have to pull out the truthful baseball bat: I’m a journalist from the States doing a piece on my trip to London and I’m afraid that Virgin is not up to snuff. In the end, I get a refund of £23, because of a “technical” problem (called in plain talk “overcharging” or plainer still “rip off”) plus 50 free minutes and a couple of other adjustments. This has cost me about 40 minutes of manipulation – or should that be persuasion.

I take the bus to the Tube to meet up with my dear friend and former salsa partner Nicola who, since I left London, has had a baby with her partner Mitch. The three of them have moved way out to a commuter town. Nicola is as deceptively delicate and young looking as always. She is 38 years old – and I note once again that all my dearest young people – Tomer and Oona included – seem to be born in the early 1970s. We natter over salads about how the government budget cuts are affecting the health system in which Nicola works as an Occupational Therapist and how they’re limiting everyday life, like the local council that is going to charge £2.50 per child to use their playground! Built, I might add, with local tax funds.

Soon we join up with other close friends Mike and Mary and Carmen at Toto's, the dance evening run by my first-ever dance partner, the exquisite Wonnita (at left), and her partner Wendy.

Mary and I write back and forth over the years, complaining about how the Atlantic Ocean prevents us from continuing to dance together. She is one of those amazingly generous people. She not only has brought me dance shoes to use, she offers to give them to me. Her partner Carmen has a special wit and great taste. The two of them not only have come to this place to meet me, they insist on driving me home to my door at the end.

Mike and I have never lost touch over all these years. He is one of the few London friends who keeps up with my blog, bless him, and he made time to come to Sue O’Sullivan’s big party, too, even though he is soon having an exhibition of his pots and pictures in Kent. He’s a man of multiple talents: dancing, pottery, software development.

My feet cooperate, retrieving hidden memories of steps I used to know, but once I’m at home they throb and whine – or whinge, as we say here. (Pic: Mike, Nicola, Mary, Carmen, me)


May 22 Sunday
Today is the day I meet up with Kaz, my friend of many years, who is taking the train in from Bristol. She was a student of mine in the martial arts when I taught a self-defense course in my early London days and she even came to work out in my Tae Kwon Do gym in Israel. Today we meet up at First Out, the gay café/bar that has been my downtown hang-out of choice since the late 1980s.


She brings me two presents: a collection of short stories – a number of them previously unpublished – of Daphne DuMaurier called “The Doll” and an adorable dish scrubber knitted by the mother of Kaz’s partner Yokiko. Could there be any two more appropriate gifts?

We are never at a loss for words and hours pass as we talk personal and political matters. Kaz’s work with at-risk youth has been strongly affected by both the cuts to services and the reorganization of provision towards privatization. So this is what the “special relationship” between the UK and the US is all about: collaborating in the upward redistribution of wealth and in the impoverishment of the majority of the people. Gross.

After an orgy of words and victuals, Kaz and I dash (well, not counting getting totally lost in Soho and running into the comedian Dawn French on her way into the sexy lingerie store Ann Sommers) to the National Portrait Gallery with a vague sense of having heard something positive about the show “Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio & Street.” It turns out to be unexpectedly powerful, beautiful and political in the best sense.

E. O. Hoppé  (1878-1972) defined what Modernist photographic portraiture was, establishing himself in the process as the high-flier among society photographers. The rich, powerful and famous sat for him – especially writers, dancers and royalty. He shot them without their professional or personal context, without their tools or possessions. He concentrated on their naked personalities. He seemed to particularly admire men in make-up – like the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, cross-dressing women – like the painter Gluck, and writers with ambivalent sexuality – such as Henry James and George Bernard Shaw.

The studio became constrictive and so he went out in the streets to find models amongst regular people too. His book “Fair Women” embraced a concept of beauty that was diverse and inclusive, staid and eccentric, and full of variety in race, class and profession. There was pushback: “One New York reviewer expressed his indignation at the scope of Hoppé’s approach when he wrote, ‘How can Mr. Hoppé possibly think that women of dusky skin can be considered beautiful.’”


He got involved with his models when he admired them. For example, he gave Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein) her first exhibition at his own home. He struck up a friendship with Black intellectuals like Paul Robeson, of whom he produced a mesmerizing shirtless portrait full of sweet beauty. The portrait he did of Margot Fonteyn at 16 shows an amazing round, soft young face.

Hoppé seemed especially drawn towards sexual outlaws, from Vita Sackville West who was lovers with Virginia Woolf, to Havelock Ellis who did pioneering research into sex and sexual variety. He was a hoot, too, playing visual games. In one iconic 1935 photo, he shot a woman hugging, if not humping, a humongous pipe from the pipe organ of the Royal Albert Hall.

It was hard to pull ourselves away to cross over to the other exhibit: Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer 1908-1974. She was a contemporary of Hoppé, but took the opposite approach of totally contextualizing her subjects in their rooms, among their objects, surrounded by their art, their books, their lives. It seemed a fascinating exhibit, but we simply couldn’t shake Hoppé out of our heads.

Kaz had to make a train so I rushed back to my old neighborhood to meet up with Sue, John and son Tom for dinner at one of the best Turkish restaurants in Dalston. We had fabulous lamb cubes on a spit – Sue had quails – before they drove me home to my door.

May 23 Monday
One of the wittiest of writers I know, Elizabeth Woodcraft, has kept her day job as a Barrister. Although we are meeting for lunch, she is in court in the morning and I must sit by my phone like a giddy girl awaiting a call from her first date until I am summoned to her side. We discuss the publishing options no longer available and those newly available to writers with books awaiting birth. She’s got an unpublished book that I’m dying to read. We agree that our old connection – as the entire Lesbian Fan Club of Richard Gere – is really moribund, as is his career, apparently. We mourn, eat and part – always too soon for my taste.


I leap on a bus to the Cochrane Theatre, part of the University of the Arts, to have a coffee with the head of it, Deirdre Malynn. I met her on the phone during the preparations for Sue O’Sullivan’s big fundraiser and really appreciated her drollness and her class consciousness. It was great to transform our connection into a four-eyes real-time coffee break.

It has not rained since I’ve been here, a blessing to me that the rest of the country is calling a drought.  But now it gets a bit blustery. Sue hikes over to my area so that we can try out my local Turkish restaurant. The food is good and the portions are, to my mind, really small. I’m too tired to work, afterwards, and so watch an hour of the British television academy awards. I recognize few of the shows and fewer of the folks, but that doesn’t hinder the pleasure of literally putting my feet up.