Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

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.

London Travelogue Part Two May 17-20, 2011 - Whitstable, Turner, Tate

Complaints have flooded in about the first Travelogue installment being much too long, so I have broken it in half and sworn on my collected works of Mao that subsequent installments will be bite-sized. Apologies to my over-taxed readers and here's the second half of what used to be the first installment, if you catch my drift.

May 17 Tuesday
Sue and I are off to Whitstable to stay with her very close friends Jean Fraser, the photographer and mixed media artist, and Rita O'Brien, the English historian. As I pictured this trip to the UK in my head, this three-day interlude featured as the pudding, the delight, the true vacation interval. My fantasies come true and more.

Sue and I take the train to Faversham where the girls pick us up and give us a talking tour – passing stone Norman churches from 1066 – home to their awesome Whistable house and garden. They moved down here a decade ago when Jean’s breathing problems, exacerbated by London pollution, demanded fresh air. Jean has remodeled the house extensively and it is now a model of comfort and beauty. I am given the Mistress Bedroom, while the others sleep on pull-out and blow-up beds. It doesn’t seem right or fair, but it is a balm and an aid to my recovery.

Because retail is failing, the main street is dotted with charity shops and we pop into a few as we stroll. The tiny alleys are protected by a vigilant conservation group. We cut through shockingly narrow Squeeze Gut Alley and I marvel at the precision of the nomenclature.

We continue our walk to the harbour, which occasions an explanation of the economic problems of the oyster trade for which Whitstable, once a summer resort for London’s working class East Enders, is famous. They point out the groynes – pronounced the way any punster would hope; these breakwaters protect against storm tides. The whole area is below sea level and the evidence that Rita and Jean’s house was flooded in the 1950s is that salt still leeches out from the walls.

May 18 Wednesday
This is probably the most touristic day I will have during my visit to England and I’m awarded the shotgun view in the car. We start by driving to Margate to the new Turner Contemporary Museum that only opened a month ago. Margate is an historically working-class town that has become the “dumping ground” for asylum seekers, they tell me, creating a lot of tension. Turner was a life-long visitor. This Museum is revitalizing the town, drawing in artistic types and hiring local young people to be museum guides, a role that just might, Rita suggests, change their lives. Margate is the home of the well-known artist Tracey Emin, who has been a big supporter. How gratifying to see how “used” it is by the community: groups of folks with disabilities, local elders, gangs of teens.

The exhibition is fascinating, based on the single actual Turner on view. Contemporary artists play off of this 1815 painting of a volcanic eruption in the Caribbean, based on eye-witness accounts. It is all pretty amazing, not the least an installation called ARCADIA in which Ellen Harvey recreates Turner’s own private gallery. She engraves mesmerizing contemporary street views of Margate on mirrors in light boxes. There are a half-dozen other artists represented, making this Museum perfectly-sized for a visit. I wish it all the luck in the world.

We lunch at a very posh Indian restaurant that Jean and Rita learned about during the opening of the Museum, when all the local eateries set up tents to introduce themselves to the attendees. The cuisine is scrumptious and afterwards the waiter approaches us mumbling apologies and hesitations about something on his mind. Do we, he stutters in fear, have bus passes? This is his way of finding out if we are over 60. When we laugh, he gives us restaurant cards that will get us grand discounts from now on. He is so fearful because he recently approached a woman to ask if she were over 60 and she was a very insulted 43.

Next stop is Botany Bay, an exquisite beach marked by the white chalk cliffs better known in Dover. I pick up beautiful little pieces of the cliffs in which a particular worm has drilled holes. The local kids have carved their names and slogans on the cliff walls, but when Jean sees a swastika engraved high up on the cliff, she climbs up a treacherous cliff wall and uses a big shell to erase it.

We continue around the coast to Broadstairs, home of the house on which Dickens modeled David Cooperfield’s Aunt Betsy Trotwood’s home. Next is a big Dickens pub and then a building where all the side windows were bricked up to avoid the window tax. A spit out from the beach has a big square sea pool constructed in it; the waves continuously refresh the water. We pass under an arch built in the days of Henry VIII. It is gratifying to be traveling with an historian – Rita – who can contextualize all we see.

Morelli’s Ice Cream shop calls to us and we notice that there are lots of old Italian eateries. We stroll past a home where Dickens wrote part of “Barnaby Rudge” in 1841. Back in the car we pass through Herne Bay, enjoying the sight of an old entertainment pier stranded in the sea after the pier itself was destroyed.

Finally before we return home Jean insists on making one more detour through a delightful 1950s-built residential area called Studd Hill. Two things are interesting here. First the houses are all bungalows that might have been awful had the residents – artists, craftspeople, hippies, etc – not individualized them and their gardens with all sorts of eccentric decorations. And second, every single street in this extensive development is named after a car, some of them long obsolete: Hillman Ave, Vauxhall St, Daytona Way, Ford Close and every other one you can think of, from Morris to Sunbeam to Bentley to Daimler.

The three others put together an evening meal and we chatter until the wee hours and creep off to bed, tired in that very best of ways. Suddenly there is a ruckus outside one does not anticipate in such a village. It is a few young adult men who, after imbibing an amount of intoxicant that clearly was beyond their capacity, have occasioned the summoning of a some law enforcement fellows. One small bobby wrestles one of the large belligerent drunk chaps to the ground in front of Rita and Jean’s house. Once face-down on the pavement, he whines and cries that his Nana is going to kill him if she finds out. When Sue steps on a slug in the dark, we decide to leave village scandal to the players and go inside. Rita has managed to sleep through it all.

May 19 Thursday
Jean shares some of her online photo albums with me, not the least parts of the virtual and live breathing project she created, based on her bike ride all over Kent (this area of England). You can see some of her unique work here: www.DrawingBreath.org. Her health activism is impressively energetic and creative. (The previous 4 pics are from Jean Fraser.)

We are sad to leave Whitstable and our friends. We take a small train to Faversham to pick up our “high-speed” back to Kings Cross London. On it we meet a crazed and emaciated passenger who is ranting about the fact that he doesn’t have a ticket because he doesn’t get his giro [government check] until May 26th. “If they ask me, I’ll tell them to ask Mr. Cameron [the prime minister] for my ticket. They won’t let me take my dog into the shelter,” he says cuddling the beast, “so I sleep in a tent at the back of my mate’s.”

I move into the extremely comfortable, beautiful flat of a friend of Sue's who is away and for the first time I have a “room of my own.” It even has a desk for my laptop and a magnificent office chair. Now if only this expensive organic mango I picked up from the local hippy store wasn’t black with rot inside, I’d be set. The only odd thing about it is that when I step out on the little balcony, I think I am hallucinating: in the distance I see in huge red neon letters: EMERATES. In fact, it it turns out to be the Arsenel football team's new stadium and new sponsor.

May 20 Friday
It’s a shame I hadn’t figured out last night that these many skylights have blinds on them, I wouldn’t have woken at 5:00am, ready to  start the day. On each trip to London, I meet up with former colleagues from my more than eight years with a volunteer agency. Sarah can not make it in from Dublin this time. Christine descends from Sheffield. Jo comes in from her coastal houseboat and Julia takes the train up from Suffolk. We gather at the Tate Modern museum, plant ourselves in first one cafeteria and then the next, and share plates of chips, sandwiches and scones all day long.

While we have gone in different directions and maintain varying levels of contact in between meetings, once we’re together there is no such thing as a lull, and scarcely anyone can get through a story to the end without other anecdotes or queries piling on top. We are an animated and affectionate posse and this is always a major highlight in my London social calendar.

Today we even take the time to see a couple of exhibits. The Diane Arbus photos (left) are riveting – some so familiar, some not – but the second exhibit of surrealism based on dreams is, well, obtuse and requires too much work for us. We return to a caf for more coffee.

In the 1990s, Christine was my right-hand woman at work, miraculously organized and focused, and a natural athlete to boot. She has had a year off of full-time organizational work and now is rethinking how life can be lived. Jo – a former punk-rocker – commutes between her houseboat and her office in London – she’s an executive in the drug rehab sector, and is one of the warmest friends imaginable. Julia is living in rural suburbia with her partner and two boys, volunteering in a relationship support agency among others and working for the family business. She has a beauty and an honesty that never falters or degrades. It is hard to part and we talk about doing a road trip amongst their homes next time I come in.

Further London postings to come…

London Travelogue Part One, May 11-16, 2011 Arriving, Party of Resistance

May 11

[Due to popular outcry about my Travelogue installment being too long, I have broken it in half. It starts here.]
I have blown my own mind. My checked-in bag weighs only 32 pounds and my carry on piece is so lightly packed that I can fit my laptop into it. Perhaps it helps that I am, for the first time, traveling with my Kindle and not with books – well other than a few copies of my own as gifts. Why so parsimonious for a three week trip? I have shoulder troubles and I’m following my physical therapist’s advice. I am counting on Sue O’Sullivan’s washing machine.

As I go through security, the TSA woman asks me to turn sideways, put my feet in the green boxes and hold my arms above my head. It is the dreaded body X-ray.

I lean towards her intimately and ask in a hushed voice, “Have you checked this with your doctor? You’re standing so close but without protection.”

She looks around and whispers back, “They say it’s just like watching TV.”

“Yes, sure” I shake my head, “Can your TV see right through your clothes?” I cluck and see with some satisfaction that I have ruined this woman’s day. Perhaps she’ll organize her colleagues around health and safety and demand to join a union.

I am taken aback by how cramped the BA airplane is, but time passes quickly as I read Just Kids by Patti Smith about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. I’m interested in the lives of these people who considered themselves part of the artistic upheavals of the 60s and 70s (Mapplethorpe longed to be part of the dodgy Warhol’s posse), but who were relentlessly apolitical despite all the political turmoil and activism that defined the daily lives of many of us.

I have my own artistic question: will I have the time or space to write in London? Now that I have eight jobs in Boston, several of them editing jobs with recurring deadlines, I have had to devote two solid months to getting ahead on the work in order to clear these three weeks for actual vacation.

My travel from Boston to London goes smoothly until I get up on the bus at Kings Cross that is supposed to take me directly to the front of my friend Nicky’s estate where I am staying, but detours in such a way that I must now negotiate several stone-paved blocks with my two bags and a back-pack. I am painfully – literally – aware of protecting my shoulder and of not lifting with my right hand.

Once there, Nicky bounds down her stairs to grab both bags, hoisting them up to the third floor (or fourth in USA terms). I am “home” to one of my favorite London spots. Her minimalist white flat with the balcony doors opening above a little church park is truly a calming and comforting environment. And she is an expert at pampering friends.

May 12, 2011
The melotonin works and I sleep through the night, waking at 8:00. Brilliant. Sue O’Sullivan comes to fetch me at 10:00 and we take a mini-cab to the Thames River where we are to meet Joan Nestle (the American writer) and Di Otto (the Australian professor of international law) at the London Eye. No, it is not a Ferris wheel. It is similar, but we ride a pod that holds a couple of dozen people, like a big glass egg-shaped room. We are celebrating Joan’s 71st birthday.

Next, we take the Thames River boat to the Tate Modern where we lunch in the pricey, noisy and cold 7th floor restaurant. Nicky works nearby, so she drops over to join us. We bus it back to Islington and I stop to exchange my old British currency from my previous trip for up-to-date bills, accidentally find a present for my Boston dance partner Lucky and walk back to Nicky’s via the scone bakery and the local grocery.

I’m numb and nodding out in the early evening but perk up when my ex-fave evening soap opera “Eastenders” comes on. Phil hasn’t changed a bit, has he? Still can’t talk about his feelings, still violent. This is followed to my delightful anticipation by the semi-finals of the cheesy Eurovision Song Contest. When I lived abroad, I had an annual wild and wonderful Eurovision party. What I discover tonight is that without friends or intoxicants, Eurovision is not even slightly entertaining. I only watch long enough to note how old the contestants seem compared to a dozen+ years ago, but of course that is probably a reflection of the aging audience who, like me, attempt to see it as a grand camp event.

All my friends avoid the price of cable and only have free television channels. To my disappointment, they are overburdened with American programming, just a couple of weeks behind. From “The Good Wife” to “American Idol” to “Judge Judy.”


May 13, 2011
It’s Friday the 13th. I’m staying home preparing to MC this enormous high-stakes fundraiser for Southall Black Sisters (SBS) that Sue is holding tomorrow in honor of her 70th birthday. (When I lived in London I also did fundraisers for this group active around women's rights and immigration issues.) It is called "The Party of Resistance" and I am the Dominatrix of Ceremonies. A group of volunteers has been working very hard with Sue for a year preparing this event, with its 500+ donors, and top British talents have agreed to appear. Most of these impressive entertainers don’t know me, so I feel a bit awkward stumbling into the very heart of this desirable (waiting listed) event. I hope I do this right!

I’m still gathering info for introductions. I finally get an emailed bio from my old friend Pragna Patel, the Director of SBS. After 6 or 7 tries, I get the publicist from Picador on the phone. I ask for the pronunciation of the Scottish title Fiere of Jackie Kay’s (left) latest book, but the publicist hasn’t a clue. When I ask her what the word means, she runs over to a colleague, borrows a copy of the book, and reads to me from the intro.

I go to the local library, renew Nicky's very out of date card and use their printer to print off the final version of my speeches.

On the way back I look in at a pound (like dollar) store for a plug adaptor, the fruit & veg (lemons) and the 2nd hand store (lovely note cards). I do love this neighborhood - at least the Essex Rd side of it.

I've practiced my pieces, especially the introductions, a few more times, although I had more or less committed the speech about Sue to memory in Boston. I'm going to relax by working on a short story I'm writing.

May 14 Saturday
I take the bus over to Town Hall in the afternoon to see the set-up and try to connect with the techies and talent. The hall is humongous and the stage intimidatingly high. My plexiglass podium has been placed at stage right. These production women are consummate professionals and have blocked out equipment usage for each of the subsequent acts. The decorators have micro-planned each bauble and the food people are already in gear. I hang around meeting as many folks as possible, then bus it back to dress in my sparkly new designer jacket, just $30 at my favorite Boston charity shop, and to apply my shiny hair goop.

I bus back at 7:00 – doors open at 7:30 – to find that “we don’t have a stage.” That’s theater talk. In plain speech, it means that the sound equipment is not operative. The women have all done their jobs scrupulously, but the venue subcontracts the sound engineering to a company which has sent along two guys they must’ve found smoking funny stuff down the pub. To the horror of the party tech crew and the venue managers, these two clowns simply have no idea what they are doing. (Spot the typo in this original mock-up of the party volunteer badge.)

Our expert women could splice together a working sound system with chewing gum and old wire – they have been pros in the performance world for decades – but the venue is contracted to work with these blokes. The guys spend the evening crawling around the stage floor, plugging and unplugging, a look of startled confusion being replaced by desperation as the hours pass, but they are generally unable to get any two things working at the same time (like a mic and a keyboard).

Thankfully, the DJs Ann Day and Nikki Lucas (left) get their sound board working and are spontaneously filling in all the gaps, so the guests are happy to dance and meet up with old friends, utterly unaware that the four or five of us onstage are in the midst of the mother of all disasters.

My night is spent standing expectantly with a mic in my hand onstage, ready to use one of my carefully constructed introductions for the amazing stars who have volunteered their time (from the charming Scottish poet Jackie Kay to the world’s best ska singer Pauline Black - at left), while two little men scurry around unable to get any amplification.

Our timetable is down the drain and in the end, when we do have juice, I just have to scrap my lovely prose and yell, “Laka Daisacal is in the house!” – binning all my anecdotes and funny facts. There’s no time.

On top of the stress of this colossal screw-up, it unexpectedly falls to me to make sure Performer B is ready to go before Performer A finishes. Talk about added anxiety. After each introduction, I have to race around the hall trying to ferret out the location of the next talent from amongst 500 celebrants. Sweating and rushing, I sprint by friends I haven’t seen for years, sometimes a decade, but I cannot stop to greet them, as I must locate my prey and return up a flight of stairs to the stage.

I watch these professional performers, no matter how annoyed they are by the long delays, switch themselves on once onstage and carry the crowd with a joy and a skill that astounds me. In fact, my friend Campbell Ex the filmmaker and I get to be go-go girls during Pauline Black's triumphant set. I know that I’m not pulling that "switch" off at all and recognize the difference between pros and amateurs like myself. Despite positive feedback later, I feel far less entertaining than usual in such a role. I am disappointed in myself. At the end I am also profoundly exhausted after being upright, quite literally, from 7:00pm – 1:00am in a state of frustration. My feet will still be aching many days later.

Thankfully Sue (at left with me at my 60th) has had a great time and has raised much more money for Southall Black Sisters than we anticipated. Most people adored the evening and were never conscious of the hassle in the wings.


May 15 Sunday
I have brunch with Sue O’S, who has been filled in this morning on what was actually going on, and with several of the folks involved in planning the party. I’m almost too tired to socialize. In the evening, we have dinner with Sue’s husband, her son Tom who spoke so impressively at the party and looked so cool, and her son Dan, his partner and their two fab children, who joined in the celebration. Chinese take-out, debriefing from the party and reminiscing (them) about the family all help me claw my way out of my weariness.

May 16 Monday
I do not remember a thing about Monday, not a thing, except that I began this piece and that I moved from Nicky’s to Sue’s via minicab.

Further London postings to come…

May Day 2011 in Vermont

Friday, April 29, 2011
Although I do not have the time for this, what with trying to get all my work done before my trip abroad, I am unable to deprive myself of my annual trip to Vermont for May Day. The event is held at The Farm, founded by my college posse in 1968, and overseen to this day by my poet darling Verandah Porche. (That's use on the left. She's in the red blouse and long skirt in the photos.)

I arrive on Friday afternoon in time to help unravel the silk streamers still wound tight around our May Pole since last year. We sit outside under the welcome sun hoping for a good day tomorrow, when people will come from all over the surrounding countryside and others, like us, from Boston.

Our main task completed, I take a temporary departure from Verandah to go just down the road to the 1840 home of my book binder friend Susan and my antiques expert friend Gilbert. They are putting me up and feeding and watering me. “Feeding” is too pale a term for what goes on. We’re talking about delicious cheeses and dips to get the juices going and then a dinner of onion-stuffed roasted moist chicken, rich mashed potatoes for which Gilbert is famous, asparagus that have been kept on ice until it is time to be cooked to an uncanny perfection, eggplant wraps smothered in tomato (from the garden) sauce, all followed by an exquisite apple pie (with ice cream), the top of which is swollen with crispy deliciousness.

Susan stands up to start to clear the table and freezes. “Everyone,” she says to us in a low voice, “stand up and be still.” We obey, looking out the windows overlooking the rear deck. They keep a bird feeder there, feeding it to the tune of 10 pounds of black oil sunflower seeds per week, attracting an ornithologist’s wet dream’s array of birds.

But tonight that is not all the feeder is attracting. On its hind legs, a 300-pound black bear is sucking its dinner from one of the feeders. It sits on the deck on its fat butt, a luxurious fall of shimmery long fur cascading around its back, satiating a big case of the munchies. I am frozen. What do I know? I’m from Pittsburgh, for gawd’s sake. “Camera!” I yell, “someone get a camera.”

Gilbert meanwhile runs outside to have words with the bear, who does not seem to welcome confrontation. The bear returns to four well-padded feet and reluctantly, having been shoo’d loudly a few more times, ambles around the back to the side of the house and then up the lawn to cross the road. No one gets a photo in time (but it looked like this).

Susan is unhappy that this beautiful creature has been chased away, while inside the house we follow our precious sighting of the bear by switching from window to window, circling the walls for the best view as the animal gracefully distances itself from us.

We sit outside on the deck around a fire pit on steel legs into which Gilbert feeds board after board to warm us up. Susan cannot get over the bulky beauty of the glorious animal and she and Gil reminisce about the time another black bear came right into their living room. Or was it this same one when it was younger? If so, she is so glad it has survived hunting season.

We turn in around 10:00pm and sleep in the intense darkness that one only gets in deeply rural settings – and maybe dungeon cells. In the middle of the night there is a screaming crash of glass. I am startled awake and think that it must be a kerosene lamp and perhaps kerosene is all over the floor.

Within seconds the light comes on. It is Susan. I have figured out that some tossing and turning has shifted one of the four pillows sideways, knocking over what used to be a kerosene lamp and what is now an electric lamp, as I know so well, having turned it off when it was sleep-time. In bare feet, Susan tiptoes through the hunks of frosted glass, lifting what is left of the shade to a sideboard. She says that she and Gil were afraid that it was the bear, making its way back in.

We leave the glass with the intention of cleaning it up in the morning light.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

I wake early and sweep up the glass with a hand brush and dust pan. Gilbert is already preparing a scrumptious breakfast of eggs, sausage, sautéed potatoes and challah. Susan is dressing for her morning climb up the mountain with Verandah and I am checking my email.

Just before 1:00 we make our way to The Farm bearing contributions to the pot luck that precedes the annual May Day ceremony. Happily I meet up with my dear niece, nephew and grand-niece Sadie (otherwise known as Verandah’s daughter, son-in-law and grand-daughter). Out of my little bag of treats, the beach ball is the biggest hit – once poor Matt depletes himself of oxygen blowing it up, and I actually get to play with Sadie, a rare treat for me.

The morning had started foggy but the sun clearly wants to participate in this day of joy and is now burning down on flesh made vulnerable by an endless winter. It is a glorious day – sunny but not scorching. As I explain to one new guest, a young guy, this particular May Day celebration combines three themes: the international day of worker solidarity; the pagan festival of Spring; and the celebration of the end of a harsh Vermont winter that can cause isolation as folks hunker down around their stoves.

I see old friends (like from the 60s) and newish ones and once the many dozens of guests have cleaned their plates it is time to mount the mountain overlooking our once-and-future commune.  One friend hoists the May Pole and many others grab one of the colorful streamers and up we go, followed by music makers and stragglers. At the top, the May Pole is inserted into its usual hole and propped up until stable, so that the rest of us can wind around and around, weaving in and out, both clockwise and counter, to the tunes of Peter Gould’s hand accordion.

Once done, we stand and sit in a circle while the singing commences. The scope of talents and the range of union, worker and sentimental tunes is startling, and the support of the amateurs by the professionals – like Patty Carpenter, Melissa Shetler and Verandah Porche – is emblematic of the kind of supportive, collaborative community these folks have constructed. As always, Verandah asks us to invite in those who have died – and people around the circle call out names of mutual friends and then individual loved ones. One guy calls out, “My parents!” – and dozens of echoes of “And mine!” reverberate from around the circle. We are orphaned, but we have each other and the generations behind us.

Most photos courtesy of Barry Hock.