Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Dance Review: Savion Glover: SoLo in Time

Don’t think soft shoe when you think of Savion Glover, the premier contemporary tap dancer. Don’t think Fred Astaire, although Glover has that same otherworldly grasp of rhythm. Don’t think Gene Kelly, although Glover is just as fit and strong. Glover is like a Picasso of dance, moving from one innovation to the next. His breathtaking one-night performance on Saturday of “SoLo in Time” at the Opera House – a co-presentation of Celebrity Series of Boston and World Music/CRASHarts – combined one part Flamenco, one part tap and many parts joyous collaboration.

Working with his present band, a trio of brilliance he calls Bare Soundz, Glover uses his percussive “Hooferz” technique to integrate the passion of flamenco – a term that references both a music and a solo dance style – with the intensity of those amazing feet of his.

The show opens with Glover, SoLo, soon to be supported by the muted background beat of Carmen Estevez’ cajón box drum. She is a Spanish singer/musician, now living in New York, known for having taken traditional flamenco to new, exploratory places.

Next, another New Yorker, Francesco Beccaro comes to perch near Estevez on a bar stool with his electric bass. On the other side of the amplified (as in microphone) wooden tap platform where Glover dances, sits the Argentinean guitarist Gabriel Hermida, bending over his instrument, his inexhaustibly fast hands a match for Glover’s feet. For some of the show, they are joined by the award-winning Floridian hoofer Marshall Davis Jr.

The chemistry among them all is as much an element of the night’s magic as the pulsing music or the mesmerizingly complex percussion of Glover’s feet. A house crowded with excited fans adds to the buzz. The bursts of applause in all the right places shows them to be aficionados of this unique genre Savion Glover is creating.

Estevez’s delicate voice adds a melodic lyricism to a number of the program’s pieces, many of which morph and flow together in a single show with no intermission. Glover doesn’t relate directly to the audience much, except to twice take the mic to introduce and praise his colleagues, artists and backstage folks alike, and to dedicate the evening to his dance heroes – from Gregory Hines to Jimmy Slyde – who have gone before. One of Glover’s many charms is his explicit love and respect for talent in others.

If there is anything to criticize in “SoLo in Time,” it is that the pounding excitement is so relentless that when he does lay down a carefree and light-hearted riff, one realizes that mellow moments seem too few and far between.

Savion Glover is crafting an experimental development of the possibilities of tap, moving from innovation to innovation: in 2006, for example, he worked with classical music. At the heart of Saturday’s performance was a precision of communication between Glover and his team that felt as much like a jazz group as a flamenco band – the musicians sharing the spotlight with him in turn. One outstanding moment is a duet between Estevez’s voice and Glover’s tapping, with only her hand-clapping as accompaniment. Glover’s performance generosity is in apparent glory when he uses his tapping to provide the percussion bottom line in support of Marshall Davis Jr.’s dancing.

Savion Glover’s ability to tease out rhythms within rhythms is discombobulating to the audience in the very best sense – it is often mind-blowing. It is an honor, though, to be a witness of someone who is reshaping a genre, expanding human perception of rhythm and doing it all with a sweet, warm smile.

This review appeared on EdgeBoston.com.

Film Review: Blue Valentine

The centerpiece of Blue Valentine is not, as the “buzz” has it, Ryan Gosling as Dean nor Michelle Williams as Cindy (the couple); it is filmmaker Derek Cianfrance’s precious cinematic affectation of moving back and forth among the time periods of their disintegrating relationship. If you’re going to put a filmic methodology at the absolute center of your movie, you really ought to do it well. Unfortunately in this case we are left with a sense that, as one reviewer put it, Blue Valentine has been “over-workshopped.”

Viewers ought to be able to recognize whether we’re in “now” or in “then” by more than the thinness of Dean’s hair. There also ought to be a smidge more motivation than life generally getting them down and Dean drinking too much.

Cindy is emotionally inarticulate: we never do understand her agitation – is it excitement or simple surprise? – when she runs into her ex. Dean is only about emotion: he’s neither professionally ambitious nor ambiguous about love-at-first-sight for Cindy.

I did stay awake throughout, a sign that I remained interested. But I have a shopping list of niggles about a movie that never engaged me. Even American Idol’s second day of auditions last week managed to make me cry, while this tear-soaked film did not.

The whole hand-held camera device – in a big-star Hollywood movie, no less – wears thin after the first hour. Steady, I wanted to advise, steady.

When close-ups become such a technical fetish, the viewer misses the action and context. I saw a lot more of 20-feet-high trembling snotty nostrils than I was ready for and would have preferred to see the surroundings and action a bit more.

The intermittent sound quality combined with the confusing time shifts made my companion and me feel we were missing crucial dialogue. “What? What?” we whispered too often. Switching endlessly back and forth between then and now came to feel like budget restrictions prevented them from hiring a good editor.

In the main, the narrative felt plausible and the working class couple fit their environment seamlessly (it seems to be taking place in Scranton, Pa.). There is a realistic scene in an abortion clinic, but the script steps back from the procedure, like most American films.

Only one aspect of the plot really discomforted me, although it was not difficult to imagine such goings-on. The first time Cindy takes Dean home for dinner with her family, her father acts up in an abusive, violent way at the table towards her mother and the reactions of both women make it clear that this is far from the first time. Jump to the present and that same nasty-assed bully is the main baby-sitter for Cindy and Dean’s wonderfully adorable daughter Frankie (played by Faith Wladyka with a lot of charm). It is hard to swallow, following our introduction to this sullen, threatening character, that he is to be trusted with this sweet girl-child.

Finally, while I never seriously connected to these young marrieds, I still want to know what the title “Blue Valentine” means. (No, there’s no reference in the credits to the Tom Waits song about lost love.) Once again I feel like I missed a crucial clue.

The trailer:
 

Sixth Breast Enlargement Proves Fatal

Twenty-three years old and 106 pounds, "reality TV star Carolin 'Sexy Cora' Berger" died after her 6th breast enlargement - attempting to go from 34F to 34G. She is in the news because last year she appeared in the German version of Big Brother. According to BBC News:

"She had wanted to increase the size of her silicone breast enhancements from 500g (18oz) to 800g (28oz) each, Bild newspaper reported."

Of course there's going to be a post mortem and "Prosecutors in Hamburg announced they were investigating the anaesthesiologist and the surgeon," but what about the producers of the TV show? What about the culture in which such self-mutilation is sufficient to make her career, to introduce her story - at least that of her death - to a blogger in Massachusetts who doesn't watch the local version of Big Brother, let alone German TV? To me this story has to be read with an explicitly gendered lens since plastic surgery is not a boy-route to the tabloids.

Berger - also known by the name Woznitza - seems to have built her short-lived career on her chest. An award-winning amateur porn star, she gained attention on Germany's Big brother "when she stripped off in the showers and sprayed soap suds all over other female contestants," according to an Australian rag.

I wondered about her and what made her tick. Search as I did, I could find nothing else about her (in English), other than the fact that she and her husband Tim had just been on a cruise and her last tweet was "a cute photo of her dog sleeping in a laundry basket."

Where did she grow up? How much did she study? What was her dream? What did she think about global warming or the war in Iraq or the erosion of European workers' benefits? At what age did she begin volunteering for the knife?

A bit of naughty behavior for the cameras draws a young woman the attention she apparently seeks; medical professionals collaborate with her surgical strategy for sustaining that attention; and someone over at Big Brother is pulling in the Deutsche Marks, okay the Euros.

Is this a “Grandma” Fetish? Dropping Acid and Doing Good

Attention headline writers: Quit calling every older woman who appears in a news story “Grandma.” It is incredibly annoying. Even after menopause, women continue to be defined as incubators – or as incubators of incubators of grandkids. It doesn’t matter if they have offspring or not: if they’re of a certain age then they simply must be grannies, apparently. This brings back unpleasant memories.

When I used to live in Israel, there came a moment – perhaps in my late 30s or early 40s –when children – strangers on the street – started addressing me as “Auntie” at the urging of their very young mothers. I cannot begin to describe how irritating I found that. These young reproducers thought they were being ever so respectful and it was all I could do to restrain myself from squatting down to Jr’s height and hissing, “I’m not your Aunt.”

This little rant was prompted by two articles committing this crime that I ran into on the same day. The first of them mentioned  a “Grandmother” in their headline.

The “grandmother” in question is Suzanne, who herself has a blog. While she starts her self-description with “wife, mother, grandmother,” she continues by describing her copious professional qualifications and social justice activities.

But with all those achievements, how does the headline for the piece about her read?

“Grandmother from South Dakota, USA documents Tulkarm Checkpoints.” They could have referred to her as a “licensed clinical social worker.” They might have said, “Social Justice Activist from South Dakota.” But no, out of her whole list of descriptive terms, they decided to sum her up as “Grandmother.” Her uterus, it is important for us to know, was once active and now the children of her children, who she probably sees rarely as she seems to be working in Palestine, define her.

But let’s look at the article that really infuriated me. In this one, the UK tabloid Daily Mail gives us this headline: “Grandma on acid! Researcher finds rare footage of 1950s housewife in LSD experiment.” The video clip is a very peculiar “scientific” experiment that sought “normal” people to be filmed and studied as they drank LSD. It’s a rather disturbing set-up as you can see for yourself below, but that’s not our topic today.

The woman in question is a young housewife. So why does the title call her “Grandma?” Because the unnamed writer fantasizes that “By now, of course, she's likely to be somebody's grandmother.” She was not then a grandmother; she engaged in no discussion of a future of grand-mothering; and her reproductive state was utterly unconnected to the experiment she was participating in. Nevertheless, the anonymous writer imposed his (sic) own fantasies of her options and her future role in the world, made up the idea that she is now “likely” to be somebody’s grannie and then opened the entire article with “Granny.” This is obsessive, fetishistic and the flailings of a promoter of the sorry idea that for women, biology is destiny.

I object.

You can see the creepy LSD experiment here:

 

My Review of Barbara Beckwith's book on "Word Love"

My review of Barbara Beckwith's essay collection What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism has today appeared as a guest post on "Word Love," the wonderful book blog of Randy Susan Meyers.

I mention this here in case you don't know about this cool blog (bad), missed my review (badder) or haven't yet read What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism (baddest)!

 

Book Review: What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism by Barbara Beckwith

I was watching the World Series with a few guys, who were as into the commercials as the sport. About half-way through the game, one ad came on that included a variety of people of different races. One of the guys laughed, “Oh, look at this ridiculously PC commercial.” Another nodded smug agreement.

It was unusual for me to watch any non-Olympic match, and with a bunch of people of the male persuasion, besides. I was already waaaaay out of my comfort zone, but I couldn’t let it pass.

“How come you didn’t notice that all the previous ads were just white men? You only object when you see Black people on your screen?”

Silence fell. Till the next play. I was disappointed with my effort.

It’s hard to confront racism when it’s coming from people who believe that they’re as committed to social justice as the next person. Intentional racists are easy to shout down or disparage – and I for one have no energy for dealing with the nasty. But friends and acquaintances whose self-image is all about being cool and on the right side of things may not understand that there is a lot of homework to do in order to understand how racism impacts all of us. And even more in order to change things.

Barbara Beckwith knows this very well. She has collected ten of her frank, honest and well-written essays and named the booklet, What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism. Although she’s a highly published essayist (in the big, glossy magazines I only dream of publishing in), no mainstream publisher would touch these revelatory pieces of work.

Full disclosure: I first met Barbara Beckwith when she recruited me into the National Writers Union (NWU, part of the UAW). First she slid me right onto the Diversity Committee and the next thing I knew, I was co-chair of the Boston chapter. Years later we are both still activists on the local and national levels of the union. And we are friends.

The first essay describes her own initial introduction to the course she has since helped spread around the country: “White People Challenging Racism.” She started with skepticism and grew into an activism that has never wavered; this collection is an additional way for her to get the word out.

In other essays Beckwith uses her personal history and consciousness to address fellow “white” people – she’s learned to question the construction of race as so many of us question the binary construction of gender. She looks back at her youthful and college diaries and exposes her own dodgy assumptions and stereotypes. She examines racial jokes, concluding that source, context, tone and audience can affect the meaning of jokes and whether they are funny or insulting.

For example, this joke could be taken as an ironic if insightful observation of what racists do to mitigate the entry of non-whites into their families…

“When does a Mexican become Spanish?”
“When he marries your daughter.”

Whereas this one is blatant “bigotry disguised only thinly,” as Beckwith says…

“Who was the best Jewish cook?
“Hitler.”

She talks about two levels of personal activism: taking personal responsibility for looking at and changing one’s own attitudes towards race and difference; then figuring out how to stand up to both offhand racism (unintentional and intentional alike) and institutional racism.

So if you hear the above joke at a dinner party, what should you do? Beckwith looks at it this way:

I can simply state the problem as I see it: “That joke’s not funny – it’s racist” and get ready for the probable counter-charge of political correctness that may follow. I can try joking back: “Know any white guy jokes?” Or I can stay silent, since joke-tellers need laughter to make their jokes “work.”

She recommends none of the above. Instead, she says,

Or I can engage the joke-teller in a serious, preferably one-on-one, discussion of racial stereotypes – right then, or the next day, or the next week. Whatever I say makes less difference, I suspect, than that I say something. Every time. No kidding.

In a country like ours where wealth was built on racially-based slavery and where institutional racism has never been eradicated, most white people enjoy what we used to call in the 60s “white skin privilege.” It is hard for white people to incorporate into their self-portrait any measure of racism – conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional. Beckwith is able to translate that everyday reality into the kinds of concrete examples each of us can understand and relate to.

Beckwith does not shy away from revealing the privilege with which she was raised. In fact, she begins her quest by asking her father about the Black nanny who took care of her as an infant. She reveals her own anti-Semitism, as a college student, when writing to her mother about her first visit to her future husband’s Jewish family. She looks at unconscious reactions she has had on the streets. In short, she employs that kind of starkly honest self-criticism that I used to fancy was practiced in Chinese villages during Community Party meetings after the revolution.

Privileged people often seem to assume that their kind of experience is the only real kind; if their infant fails to get into the pre-school with the highest Harvard end-rate, they are devastated by their own deprivation. Yeah, yeah, they know how the parallel private school system depletes the public schools they support, in their hearts, for everyone else’s kids, but since they can send their kids to Touchie-Feelie Play School, they will.

Too often on Jon Stewart or Saturday Night Live I see cringe-worthy routines that aren’t even slightly amusing lampooning non-white races and minority ethnicities. There is a dominant culture arrogance that says: I can ridicule people of color (or women or queers) because I’m so cool, I’m like part of this community, and what’s the matter with them anyway: don’t they know irony when they see it? Where’s their sense of humor? Too many privileged individuals with good intentions, though, have few people different from themselves deep in their lives (except as employees, perhaps) and in fact, they have no idea what they are talking about.

Beckwith’s piece called “Nosy Questions” tackles those often well-meaning probes that are in fact dripping with stereotyped assumptions. Tacoma? “No, where are you really from?” Or, “What do Asians think of…?” Beckwith’s last chapter , On Being an Ally, describes her own approach to looking at everyday racism.

The penultimate chapter, however, is the key to the activity closest to Beckwith’s writer/reader heart: it is chock full of her brief descriptions of recommended books we can read about race, ethnicity, privilege in general and how to confront these scourges. It is through reading, Beckwith promises, that we can explore lives very different from our own without being intrusive. She titles this essay “Reading to Understand and as a Spur to Anti-racist Action.” It is a wonderful resource – for a person taking their first step towards active anti-racism or for the activist who wants to further expand their world.

You can order What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism for $8.95 from Crandall, Dostie and Douglass Books www.cddbooks.com, publisher of books on white privilege and anti-racism.

TV Review: Live to Dance

I watch all the dance shows on TV. A couple of them are not blockbusters, such as PBS’s welcome broadcast of legit national Ballroom and Latin American dancing competitions, and probably my favorite competition show, the under-heralded America’s Best Dance Crew. The two mainstream shows - Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance – are better known and together with their non-dance kissing cousins – American Idol and the excruciating America’s Got Talent – they have established an atmosphere of arrogant judges, eccentric and desperate competitors, hard-luck tear-jerking backstories, and homogenizing over-production.

Paula Abdul’s new show Live To Dance, which premiered last night on CBS, seemed to counter much of the excessive negatives from those other shows. Abdul knows all about it. She was a long-time judge on Simon Cowell’s American Idol, where she was the butt of Cowell’s disdain for being ditsy, mushy, tearful and repetitive in her assessments.

Tonight she took a different tack. She teetered on the brink of over-emotionalism, but didn’t fall in. She was minimally critical and often gave dancers a pass where her fellow judges did not. The competition’s age limits were seriously wider (kiddies and elders - see the two clips below) than the other shows and without the same degree of offensive condescension. We weren’t subjected to freak, no-talent contestants as the butts of ridicule for the judges – just serious dancers. And the judging was as positive and constructive as we regularly see on America’s Best Dance Crew and only rarely see on the other shows.

The two other judges were mildly interesting: Travis Payne is a choreographer best known for working with Michael Jackson. Kimberly Wyatt was one of the founders of Pussycat Dolls and best known, according to Wikipedia, for her standing oversplit. They were polite, they were enthusiastic, they were encouraging and they’re all eye candy.

Funny enough, I never really felt like I saw the dancing in a proper way. Were the performances very short? The cameras cut away to the judges’ reactions to a disruptive degree. I couldn’t really get a handle on who was fabulous and who was not. Tonight is already the semi-final round, so it seems this is a trial-run for Live To Dance, a very abbreviated season. Perhaps we’ll get a closer look at the dancing itself. If not, all the improvements in direction will be beside the point. Toes crossed.

Bev (83) and Hap (68)

 

Jalen (9)

 

True Grit: Neither True Nor Grit

  I don’t enjoy writing reviews for things I didn’t particularly like, so I’m glad I didn’t have to review True Grit professionally. It’s not that I found it offensive in any way. It’s just that I didn’t quite get the point, and the ending was more than strange.

The big buzz is about how brilliantly this 14-year-old actor Hailee Steinfeld plays the main character Mattie Ross of the same age. I missed the brilliance. She is cute, precocious and mastered the 19^th century English without biting her tongue, but her range of emotional response is a tad limited. Sleep in the room with three still-warm corpses of hanged men? Not a problem. Stand just a foot or two from one guy chopping off another guy’s fingers with an ax? Doesn’t bother her. Watch gun-fights, fist-fights, threats to her life? She can deal with it. But shoot a dying horse? Now that brings on the tears and feet-kicking. (This film will probably do well in Britain, if you get my drift.)

Jeff Bridges as Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, the gruff U.S. Marshall with true grit, was pretty fabulous. It was hard to take my eyes off of him, and if I could only have understood his garbled dialogue, I would have loved his work even more. I applaud him for his willingness to get all dirty and grungy.

I didn’t even realize until the credits that Texas Ranger LaBoeuf was played by Matt Damon, so perhaps that means he did a good job or perhaps that means that I’m not keeping up. And as for Josh Brolin playing the bad guy (we know he’s the bad guy cause he has a big dark birthmark on his cheek), well does he play anything else? I wonder when he’s going to get a bit annoyed by this typecasting he’s fallen into. It wasn’t much of a part – he was only required to have lanky hair and to be a bit menacing from time to time.

You know you’re watching a fairy tale as this pretty pigtailed girl gallivants around the wild West among cowboys and bandits and law enforcers without a single moment of sexual menace.

The plot is to find and arrest or kill the guy who murdered Mattie Ross’ nice, generous ole dad. When that does finally happen, it’s almost a postscript, an afterthought, with little emotional content or cinematic highlighting. In fact, there’s little emotion in the film at all – other than drunken rantings, and those don’t count – leaving the viewer sadly disengaged. And then the ending – taking place years later – sets up a whole new subplot with a hopeful expectation leading the viewer to yet another dissatisfying anti-climax.

In short, nothing much wrong with the film except that it didn’t have the hoped-for oomph, the excitement or the climax one expects from a movie with the two words “true” and “grit” in the title.

Bringing in the New Year – Times Five

My rural Vermont friends know how to throw a party. Take a large dollop of collaboration (of the good kind: with each other, not with the forces of evil); add talents that keep the dark away; mix-up victuals of indescribable delight; season with one’s intoxicants of choice; and then, multiply by five.

The peerless party on the Hill is progressive: five homesteads, five menus, five worlds of entertainment and genius, and many dozens of people who no matter how many decades they pass together in this land of trees and snow and hot-tubs and fighting the Vermont Yankee nuclear blight, continue to converse with passion born of commitment.

I missed the first party at the Heckers, an afternoon of chamber music. I made it to the second party at the home of my friends Susan and Gilbert, whom I have mentioned many times. She is the paper-maker and book-maker whose Otter Pond Bindery workshops are the zen of binding (no not that kind – the paper journal kind); he is the pre-eminent expert on American antiques who finds and fixes them, including a very old once-derelict schoolhouse that is now a palace you can rent for a vacation (living room in photo). I watched their daughter Anna grow up, for we had an interest in each other early on, and now she is the definition of a cool music-and-moves-literate pre-med student living with her girlfriend in D.C.

This cocktail party offers appetizers and cocktails, and in past years the margaritas ran with such a munificent rush, like a gushing Spring mountain-run-off, that the evening threatened to end right then and there in a heap of dizziness and gibberish. This year the assorted alcoholic choices are simply drunk as measured mood and nibbles enhancers. The table is adorned with knee-clenching culinary concoctions: a spread of Susan’s homemade chutney and cream cheese; an artichoke spread; mushroom triangles with the most delicate puff pastry, and cheese pepper biscotti.

After 90 minutes of congeniality and social warming-up in this setting of splendid antiques – even to each historic Xmas ornament – it was time to walk a bit down the road to The Farm. This was the original 1968 Commune started by my college crowd which has long anchored the growth of what has become this community of homesteads, a community that has sustained its members, its neighbors and its connected, if urban, siblings like myself in all the subsequent decades. It is the home of Verandah Porche, the poet and poetry guide, my oldest constant friend and the social glue of this stable ever-evolving world of mutual aid and feeding.

The potluck array is more than a little sumptuous and the cucumber salad I’ve schlepped from Boston is much better received than the tuna fish stroganoff that used to be my only dish. Everyone dives into dinner, despite having stuffed ourselves at Susan and Gil’s, and we crank up the Motown to move the party up a gear. Soon everyone – well, the women mostly – are ecstatically screaming the lyrics of “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

The mix of ages is gratifying, although the mumbles of the folks my age disturb me. Many folks over 60 seem to really be feeling their years and use the word “old” to describe themselves. As someone who teaches senior and elder fitness, I try to tell each of them that we have decades of being old to face in our future and there’s no point in getting into it now when we are patently not old. We will be old in 15 or 20 years and by then we won’t want to waste time kvetching. But I get the feeling that the physical demands of country living – and they are relentless – make the threat of decline that we all fear at this point in our lives that much more stark.

Nothing amplifies a party more than fascinating young people and the generation of those in their 20s and 30s – the children of my friends and the kids’ posses – is as appetizing as the gourmet potluck spread. Hanging out with Nan, a woman of magnetic charms and disconcerting smarts, is only matched by having the sexiest, most heart-churning dance with lithe Anna, our future neurosurgeon. Emily turns out to be a master expert on Bob Dylan and Ian brings along a gang of chums.

Unfortunately, though, many of our young people smoke cigarettes. I perch with them outside on breaks, still loving the scent of burning tobacco, but easily able to resist the lure of wasted cash on nasty tar.

Back inside, Richard Wizansky, one of the founders of the Farm and my friend since 1965 when I was a wide-eyed freshman (sic) at Boston University just waiting to be picked up by a gang of artists and freaks and radicals, well, Richard calls everyone to attention as is his wont and introduces Verandah. She reads three poems, the last one - as is tradition, for this New Year’s Eve occasion - and we all fall into the silence of an audience which has for more than 40 years recognized this gentle generous genius among us.

I am staying with Richard and his husband Todd (at their wedding on left), both quite senior executives, this weekend in their spacious modern white-themed home down the road from the Farm. Throughout the evening Todd demonstrates his staggering skills at backing up vehicles on slick country roads, although he is not a professional driver, but rather a psychiatrist. Competence in all forms is such a turn-on.

A couple of hours at the Farm pass so quickly. It’s time, we’re told, to go down to the house of Jeremy and Heidi, a splendiferous edifice I watched being built, stage by stage, some years ago. This fourth party combines unthinkably lush desserts with the exciting opera singing of Tony, their son the New York City opera star, and his partner. The sugar gives everyone a momentary boost, but I see a lot of people flagging as they settle a bit too comfortably into Heidi and Jeremy’s warm surroundings and I worry how many will actually make it to the final party.

I go around trying to beef up the energy of those I see melting, and we give a rat-tat-tat call to move on to the house of Patty Carpenter, the chanteuse, and Chuck Light, the documentary film-maker. A huge pot of the richest chili ever cooked simmers on the stove, surrounded by bowls of sour cream and guacamole. Patty’s keyboards and mic are set up in the front room, and she is joined by Susan the bookmaker who doubles as the Belden Hill Boogie Band’s acoustic bass player (at left). When she stands cuddling her ¾ size string bass, Susan’s mood is always transformed into a contagious angelic happiness. Jeremy brings out an electric fiddle and produces from it sounds that reach in and caress one’s intimates, they’re so sensuous. Arthur sits in on acoustic guitar and Michael, Jeremy’s son-in-law, adds his harmonica.

The opportunity to listen to Patty Carpenter (okay, I’m a groupie, what can I say) in her own home, is a treat that can only be interrupted by the massive, but quick-burning bonfire that Arthur builds us. I watch from the picture windows looking down into the field. A little later Nan and some of her peeps reassemble the bonfire as backdrop to a display of fireworks Jeremy has somehow concocted which, when watched from the deck, face turned towards the clear star-speckled sky, effortlessly rivals the Boston displays over the Charles River. We’re in the countryside surrounded by tress and ponds and friendly neighbors so I have the rare chance, with everyone else on the deck, to scream at the top of my lungs, “Ooo! Ahhh!”, wordless cathartic cries of bedazzlement. (Patty and Verandah in photo on a warmer day.)

Somewhere in the midst of all that light and magic midnight occurs and although it may not be right on the temporal dime, we spend the next half hour clinking glasses and rubbing lips in a cascade of Happy New Years.

We are by far not the first to leave. Back home, the accommodations at chez Todd and Richard are spacious and luxurious and so I sleep well and much longer than usual and wake to a breakfast of delicacies – home-cooked breads, ephemerally light scrambled eggs, bacon and the sight of my friends in their fetching nightwear.

I spend an inconsiderable amount of time with their bidet, with its well-aimed spurts and drying function and then it is time to make the rounds of the Hill properties to wish goodbye to my rural nearests and dearests and to return to town to miss them.