Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Confronting a Bit of Smoke, Fire, and Rain in the Berkshires

SATURDAY Oct 7, 2017

We’re staying at an Airbnb “suite” – not a full apartment. This suite has a private bathroom down the hall and a small alcove (formerly a closet, maybe) off the bedroom where there’s a half fridge and a microwave and an electric kettle that sits on a small desk. Soon after we arrive, as I unpack some food from my freezer bag into the fridge, I complain to my bestie B that there is an acrid smoke smell. I set up my computer on that desk and then go into the bedroom to unpack my clothes.

The house was built in 1810 with an addition that was built much later – and the seam between the two is a rather awkward connection of uneven stairs and sudden low ceilings. We’re in the old part of the house. It’s tasteful, but there is the usual tangle of extension cords that ageing houses with one outlet per room sport.

Eventually I want a cup of tea and put some water in the kettle in the alcove. When I click on the kettle there is a startling huge burst of stinky dark smoke that envelopes the alcove and nearly overwhelms me. I yell for B who drops to his knees and starts pulling out all the plugs that are in the jumble of extension cords and multipliers under the desk. As he is down there, he sees that the extension cord with the smoking plastic power strip has ignited the carpet and the flames are trying to crawl up the wall.

I grab the kettle and dump water directly onto the flame and extinguish it. Later B says that it’s a good thing that my aim is so clean because if I had doused the power strip we would have had even more trouble. The host is not around and I leave him several messages. Soon he calls back and is freaked out, knowing that we’ve saved his massive 1810 home. He was very lucky that we were around. We were unlucky that no smoke alarm warned us.

We go off to see the Shakespeare & Company’s season-closing play, God of Carnage, and it too is a disappointment. It is a rather dated play about two sets of parents who meet and argue over the fact that their young sons have been in a brawl. The gender roles are old-fashioned; fueled by alcohol, the disagreements too often get hysterical; but worst of all, at one point, out of the blue, with no context or reason, one mother screams at the other: Your son is a faggot! No, that’s not the worst. What bothers me most is that the audience laughs at this jarring slur. A lot.

We are starving after the play, having been unable to eat as planned when the fire intervened, so we stop at an open pizza joint and order. They’re closing so we can’t dine inside, but we find a picnic table in the rear and eat under the stunning autumn moon.

The Airbnb host is waiting up for us, having rushed home. He has removed the faulty power strip, but understands that we can’t sleep in that hideous smell. He offers us his own bedroom or a guest room, and we accept the latter. Unfortunately, it is tiny and airless, with no TV, no cotton sheets (I do hate those slippery microfibre sheets), no chairs and tables like the original room, and a couple of dangerous steps to access the bathroom. Our food is still in the fridge in the reeking alcove way down the hall. The host is generous about our using the rest of the house freely, but the rest of the house is down a rickety set of stairs and our stuff is increasingly scattered everywhere.

SUNDAY

The night is difficult as the tiny room has an exaggerated level of humidity and for some reason there are flies buzzing around. In the morning we must go up and down in order to eat at the host’s table. He has insisted that we can use any part of this not inconsiderable home, but we would’ve preferred to be self-contained, as we contracted for.

We take off for a drive to Bash Bish Falls which is set in an ice age gorge in the Taconic Mountains, the highest single-drop waterfall in Massachusetts. It sits on the border between New York and Massachusetts, with a hiking path from each state. We’ve been warned to take the New York path and avoid the treacherous, slippery one on the Massachusetts side. The day is incredibly warm and humid and the walk is about a mile on a muddy path – it had rained all morning – full of rocks and other obstacles. I’m not a walker, but this is just why one goes leafing: to be immersed in foliage. Once we arrive at the waterfall, we view the Falls from a platform before deciding to descend the irregular stone steps that bring one much closer to the gorgeous Falls. I sit my sweaty ass down on a big rock that has been generously placed there for me by a glacier and relax.We have dinner reservations at Chez Nous Bistro on Main St. in Lee. I like this restaurant because they offer half portions of their entrées, which not only makes them affordable, but suits tourists who really don’t want to deal with leftovers. I have the yummy lamb ribs. B has the sirloin, anointed with a flavorsome sauce.

MONDAY
It is going to pour all day, so we decide to pig out on breakfast and then beat the crowd on the way back to Boston after the long weekend. The Starving Artist Gallery and Café in Lee specializes in crepes, but I have an egg and bacon sandwich on a croissant. There is some wonderful art on display including a triple piece about the women’s march and the pussy hats. The elder using a walker on the left and the ecstatic little girl on the right are separated by kittens knitting the hats in the middle. I push my way into the image like this. [photo]

We stop on the way back to Boston at Tafts Farms in Great Barrington – we had already shopped there before going to our lodgings – in the hopes of finding their scrumptious biscuits, but they only bake them during high summer. Their scones are nothing to snort at, so I pick up a couple of those and somehow manage to resist their incomparable frozen mac & cheese. A mile down the road, my quick glance around the local Goodwill is a total disappointment – where are the discards of the fancy people?

In the end, our annual leafing trip has brought us lots of lovely yellows, but virtually no reds or deep oranges. The Berkshires, though, are exquisite all year round and we are satisfied with the foliage. We can’t help but notice a rash of homes on the market. I am struck by the waves of For Sale signs and wonder what the hell is going on.

Back in Boston we are in touch with the Airbnb host who is going to return our money. The missing smoke alarm turned up in a drawer in the guest room where we stayed and he explains that the previous guest had apparently taken it down to stop it from chirping. I turn on the TV back in town and am horrified by the news of the fires in California. We escaped unharmed from this individual spark, and I can only think what a nasty autumn so many around the world are having – the floods, fires, and machine guns. I’m so grateful to have had this time in beauty, but feel for the millions without such privilege.

Gay and Not-so-Gay at London’s Portrait Gallery

I was disappointed in the Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait Contest which I never ever miss if I’m in London for the summer. This year the five prizes were all awarded – every single one of them – to men painters. The subjects of those paintings were one boy and four women, two of whom had their breasts exposed. Fifty-some paintings were selected from 2,580 entries – and as far as I could tell, of those only three subjects were people of color. Of course the Portrait Gallery used the portraits of people of color in their publicity materials, raising false expectations.

The show this year was homogenized with rather moribund subject matter, lacking passion or excitement or surprising insights into the souls of the subjects. There were few attempts at creating new kinds of images, with the impressive exceptions of the mirrored Archipelago (above) by Brian Shields and the black/white/grey Another Fine Day On Elysian Fields Avenue, Nola (left) by Éva Csányi-Hurskin. There was almost no movement to be seen, everyone just sitting and staring, except for the wonderful portrait of lefty director Ken Loach by Richard Twose. You can see all of the exhibited portraits here.

I was gratified by a small exhibit on the same floor with photos by David Gwinnutt called Before We Were Men. These shots were taken in the early 1980s of young artistic gay men who were later to do astounding work. They were all part of the London underground scene, comrades in the experimental and outsider life. I was so glad to see two photos that included the filmmaker Derek Jarman. I met him several times through his partner who was the artistic director of an amazing magazine called Square Peg for which I wrote as part (briefly) of its collective. Derek was one of the first men I knew who became more and more ill until he died from AIDs. The visuals and my emotions of that experience have always stayed with me.

There’s a splendidly dramatic photo of Leigh Bowery (left) and other black and white shots of these guys as they gender-bended in their squats and cheap lodgings. It was a raucous anti-Thatcher sub-culture of gender rebellion, and I only wish the word “gay” had appeared in any of the copious copy accompanying the exhibition.

The Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square (entrance is free) is always worth a visit, not the least for its permanent collection of portraits over the generations –528 portraits of Queen Victoria; Jane Austen painted several times by her sister Cassandra; four images of Amy Winehouse, one of which is by Marlene Dumas; and Henry James by John Singer Sargent. The most prominently displayed portrait right now is a brand-new larger-than-life image by Belfast-based artist Colin Davidson of Ed Sheeran.

August 2017

Plum Island (June 2017)

I just spent a few days on Plum Island, accessed by a bridge from Newbury, MA. I have a few, fairly mundane observations to go with my photos. Why the name? Because wild plums grow on the beach dunes – which themselves are the subject of a preservation effort.

The beaches are white sand and beautiful, although the whole island is swamped with a plethora of unwelcoming bugs. Along one side of the 11-mile-long island are rich green, dense marshes – absolutely gorgeous – and along the other side beaches and harbors and a big sky. A large chunk of the island holds a Wildlife Sanctuary. Inside the restaurants it looks like a Blondes Convention – enough so that I felt that even as Jew I must stand out. I saw no person of color in three days. Nor openly gay people acting openly gay.

Because the island is a narrow strip, no house is more than a couple of blocks from the sea or the marshes or the Basin. To avoid the bugs, I took a ride in my car up and down the narrow little streets – many on a number grid, and some neighborhoods in a mish-mash of streets with descriptive names.

For example, I found one little section where all the street names were academic institutions – like Annapolis Street. Then I came to this sign. A local was just walking by as I was taking this photo and we got into a chat. I asked facetiously if only academics could live in the area and he said that he had sneaked in as a writer for a PR firm. The three signs relate to the cul-de-sac: each strip of the horseshoe was named for a different elite school.

Many of the Plum Island homes were draped in American flags and at least one place had “Don’t Tread on Me” and “POW-MIA” flags too. Did I spy a cultural divide among the house names on plaques over most doors? “Plum Perfection” vs “Plum Strong.” Some names smelled of a certain entitlement “Plum Manor” and some were super-celebratory of having achieved a place on the Island: “Dream Come True” and – as pictured here – “This is It.” Some were beautiful old cottages: one called Salt Box was built in 1898, if I recall. Others were extravagant McMansions, built on stilts with three tall stories, yearning for a view of the water no matter how many other views they might be obstructing.

In one spot, everyone mixes happily, and that’s for breakfast at Mad Martha’s Café where the Portuguese bread is sweet, the scrambles are fluffy, and the tables are shared. Oh, and the air-conditioning is non-existent.

 

Travelogue: Memorial Day Weekend in the Berkshires

Friday May 26, 2017

The traffic-ridden, rainy drive only made me stop to pee more often, but the Airbnb to which we arrived shone like a newly washed antique jewel. The house was built in 1840 and has an opulent splash of colorful flowers across the front and a majestic sloping back lawn down to the Housatonic River. The views of the hills across the water and the vista down the river are full of light, glassy greens. My companion suggests that the Berkshires advertise a Spring Foliage season as well as the traditional New England Fall Foliage delight. Talk to Elisa if you want to rent this dreamy two-story apartment here.

My first stop in the Berkshires is always Taft Farms for their inimitable mac & cheese, their mouth-teasing French baguette, and their profound rhubarb and strawberry pie. I quite literally gained five pounds on this trip and I blame it on Taft Farms.

I always go to see whatever is being featured at Shakespeare & Co., because their work is reliably well-done. The play 4000 Miles centers on a grandmother who is increasingly feeling her age and her privileged new-agey grandson who has biked across the country. Smartly written by Amy Herzog and beautifully acted, it is wonderful to be back at this large theatre complex.

Saturday May 27

At the recommendation of friends, we breakfast at Roses Restaurant, set on an unfortunate strip of road full of fast-food chains. I am not in the mood for eggs and am allowed to substitute a giant pancake to accompany my bacon, toast, and wonderfully salt-encrusted hash browns. If you like a good diner, as I do, then this is a good destination.

I visit Naumkeag, a Gilded Age country estate set on 46 acres, much of it landscaped lusciously. The house tour is a satisfactory mix of architectural interest and rich people gossip. Joseph Hodges Choate was a big NYC lawyer who served as Ambassador to the UK and this was his family’s summer “hut.” It’s a pleasant enough afternoon if you like that kind of thing.

We try to get reservations for our evening meal at the much-recommended French establishment Chez Nous Bistro, but the only bookings still available are 5:00 and 8:45. We take our luck and aim to dine at their bar, but when we get there it is also crowded. A woman arrives who has a reservation for one, but sees that there is a single seat left at the bar and says she prefers that. The hostess immediately offers us her table and, voila, we are seated. I adore the fact that all entrees can be ordered as a half-serving or full-serving – and the prices suit the size. The half-meal is of good European proportions and a tourist is not left with a useless doggy bag that will just be tossed anyway. I have the rack of lamb and my companion has the filet mignon – all very tasty.

Sunday May 28

St. Francis Gallery is a special place indeed. Check out their Facebook page here. Opened in 2012 by Dr. Philip Pryjma in a church that had been closed some years, it is a beautiful space he has filled with the work of dozens of local artists, plus “handmade Kenyan jewelry as well as other women’s cooperative generated goods,” as the FB page says. The gifted local artists display paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and so much more. The experience is heightened by the fact that all the proceeds go to Pryjma’s charity through which he does admirable artistic work with Kenyan children. Add St. Francis Gallery to your must-see list: as a non-profit gallery I don’t think they get sufficient attention. And Philip Pryjma is happy to talk you through the back-stories of the artists and their works, making art a more intimate, accessible experience.

Then it is up the mountain from Lee to Beartown State Forest. Armed with a $10 senior pass that gives free entrance to State parks, we drive along the dense, delicious, deciduous tree-lined road to the pleasing 35-acre Benedict Pond. There is a flat walking path around the whole pond – just 1.7 miles. People bring their kayaks or their picnics and, even this early in the year, it is full of folks taking advantage of the lack of rain and the splendor of the setting.

We descend to Great Barrington and rush to the Bistro Box, a shack famous for its hot dogs and hamburgers and flavorsome onion rings. It closes at 4:00, but luckily we arrive at 3:20. We are told, however, by the last guy in the line, that the line is shut. Behind him is a “Closed!” sandwich sign. I speak to a woman at the restaurant window who is rude, abrupt, and unilluminating. I find a worker behind the restaurant – where there are a ton of picnic tables – who is more willing to slip us into the end of the line, although the window woman later gives him a dressing down for his good deed. The requirement, though, is that we tell the many, many subsequent late-comers that they are out of luck. In the line we are told that this shack derives its reputation from the owners, both of whom are trained chefs. Whether or not that is the case, every employee (other than the nice chap) is as rude as they can muster, complains about being worked off their feet, and won’t answer questions. “What’s in the sauce?” I ask three times before the guy at the window stops bitching about his job long enough to answer briefly. Why publicize 4:00 when you don’t mean it? This only builds up resentment among potential customers. And why is staff so hostile and unhappy?

Monday May 29

We wrap up our stay by dashing through the rain to the Schantz Galleries Contemporary Glass Art, a gallery with very expensive, very amazing glass work, including the requisite small pieces and the paintings by Chihuly. Fine art glass is a sight to behold. Here is just one of the works: it’s called Synergy2 by K. William Lequier.

I am punished by hard rain almost the whole drive back to Boston, reminding me that while vacations are a welcome relief, they have the very bad manners to end.

My Drastic Personality Change

This summer I experienced a change to my character and behavior so fundamental that I’m surprised my friends recognized me. Let me first lay out the context:

Having lived in London for 10 years, I have maintained my bank account there and in that bank account are all of my pounds sterling. Because of Brexit, those sterlings are less sterling, and have lost a generous chunk of their value as punishment for the stupidity of the vote – 13% on just the day after.

When I arrived and started to understand what that meant – that a good deal of my very hard-earned money had evaporated without my consent – I remembered all the other times throughout my adult life that burst bubbles, stock crashes, and government perfidy erased the savings I am a chump to have worked towards all my life. And now the uncertainly of Brexit.

I could’ve succumbed to depression if I hadn’t decided to make lemonade out of lemons. Since I had just been ripped off of years of effort and modest living, I decided to live as if I weren’t Sue Katz, She Who Saves and Worries About Every Penny (only to be sucker-punched.) I decided instead that I should spend my money, not just surrender it without choice to sleazy financial and governmental bodies. I should add that I’m about to turn 69 and since I have saved and saved for old age, and since old age seems to be arriving for a visit of unknown duration, it is time to switch around and spend.

All of which is to explain why, contrary to a life’s habit, I ate where I wanted and what I wanted. As one friend said, I read the menu from the left instead of, as has always been my habit, from the right. I had eggplant stuffed with minced pork at an amazing Vietnamese restaurant and then went back twice for succulent cubed beef. I established myself as a regular at a neighborhood restaurant which, while the menu could only be called that unfortunate term Nouveau Cuisine, served the most scrumptious vegetable crepe and a damned good hamburger. I brought so many guests to this restaurant over the month that Kevin the gay proprietor squealed my name whenever I came in the door and seated me at the hidden back garden table for VIPs. And it’s no wonder: I was single-handedly paying off his mortgage.

Not pinching pennies – which can take both hands and half a brain – means I was able to luxuriously pass the time with one friend after another – at least one or two per day over a month – without a gnawing concern in the back of my head about whether this particular meal would mean that I’d have to die a week earlier in my dotage. Friends came to see me from Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Tunbridge, Whitstable, Bristol, and Brighton – not to forget south London – and I broke bread with each one without reserve. It meant that I could go to my favorite Turkish restaurant where “greasy grilled lamb ribs” does not begin to describe the orgasmic delight, and pick up the check without it giving me indigestion. It meant that I could go to My Old Dutch Pancake House and split not one but two confections with my buddy.

I broke down on my resolve to be a bigger spender many times, slinking off to the Pound Stores and the cut-rate supermarket, but then I’d shake myself out and saunter down to the – she says spitting over her shoulder – Whole Foods, which has followed the wave of gentrification into the neighborhood. There I bought the most delectable elite tea without bothering about the price at all – enough tea to sustain me during the month and to secret back into the States where a cuppa is sitting next to my computer as we speak.

Sitting, in fact, next to the pile of mail I have received from my London bank – surely credit and debit card accounts that I am unable to bring myself to open, now that I have returned to my scrimping real life. Perhaps one more cup of tea and I will buck up, stiffen my upper lip, and settle my arrears, putting that life of unfettered indulgence to rest.

Shakespeare, Vagina Flowers, and a Gay Man

The British Library and the Tate Modern:

Shakespeare, Vagina Flowers, and a Gay Man

These two institutions are worthy to be on the shortlist of any visitor’s London destinations.

The British Library has six miles of shelves filled with more items than any other library in the world. I remember only too well all the kerfuffle when the library was separated out from the British Museum (and various venues around the city) and pulled together under a new roof in 1997, after taking longer and costing more than intended. The British do not like their institutions messed about with, but in fact, this high-tech, temperature-controlled new location has been a very successful move.

The free exhibitions that the British Library mounts for the public are often tantalizing. I made it to “Shakespeare in Ten Acts,” a multi-media tracing of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare – over and over again through the years. He has undergone a rainbow of reinventions and reinterpretations – and it’s not over yet.

Most fascinating to me were the rooms on racism and sexism – looking at the reluctant inclusion of people of color and women on Shakespearean stages. Using their own vast resources, the exhibition offers a peek at such rare items as the last surviving manuscript hand-written by the man himself. (Check out the video intro to the exhibition at the bottom of this piece if you're interested.)

Speaking of precious papers, no visit should skip the displays of British Library treasures. It’s truly sobering to read Michelangelo’s handwriting from letters he sent in 1550 or to view the pages of Da Vinci’s 1508 notebook. The Magna Carta (1215), written in Latin on sheepskin parchment, is right there behind glass, with its teeny-tiny left-leaning font. I loved the dual letter – half by Anne Boleyn and half by Henry VIII – pressuring Cardinal Wolsey in 1528 to expedite the papal annulment. Wasn’t Boleyn holding out on Hank until they were married?

A bit more modern, but personally arousing to me, was the original binding of 15-year-old Jane Austen’s “The History of England” – a parody illustrated by her older sister Cassandra, who, if I remember correctly, burned many of Jane Austen’s letter in an act of family reputation management, thereby robbing the rest of us of the inside story.

Tate Modern: Georgia O’Keeffe and Bhupen Khakhas

The best way to approach the magnificent Tate Modern museum is by walking over the Thames from the glorious St. Paul’s Cathedral via the Millennium Bridge – opened for pedestrians as a kind of Tony Blair vanity project in June 2000 only to be immediately closed for two years to deal with a disconcerting wobble. It’s beautiful and affords exceptional views.

The Tate Modern is part of a series of Tate museums in Britain. It opened in 2000 in the building that housed from 1947-81 a giant power station. They’ve done an impressive transformation and re-purposing. Recently they added another wing, making the navigation inside a bit complex.

This summer a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe was mounted including rooms with the range of her works. We know her best by her painted vagina-flowers, but she did many other kinds of work. I was impressed by her New York cityscapes, where she mostly lived from 1918-29 with her partner, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose work is generously included throughout this exhibition. I was disconcerted, during my visit, by a number of quotes from O’Keeffe and comments by the curators on the explanatory plaques rejecting any sexual interpretation of any of her work. She seemed to fully repudiate feminist admiration and it all smacked of a kind of repression that diminished rather than defended her art.

I was much more excited by “Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All.”  Khakhar (1934-2003) was a gay Indian man whose figurative work uses vibrant color and multiple images to tell profound stories. In this first international retrospective, we see his kind of public coming-out period – after a stint in the West and contact with open gay society. He paints men fondling each other’s penises. His early portraits of workers and tradespeople on Indian streets were affectionate and energetic. His late work, when he was dying of cancer, was brutal and honest – in that same way that Frida Kahlo depicted her spinal problems without flinching.

Khakhar’s painting and his commentaries are sometimes hilarious. About winter in the UK, he said, “You are not allowed to smile during this season which lasts for ten months of the year. If you are sensible then try to look as grumpy as possible. English people appreciate grump.”

Despite the throbbing in my feet, I took a quick run through the Media Networks exhibit, where there were copious varied treasures. First I ran into one of my favorite painters, Fernand Leger, a peacenik at the height of the Cold War whose work often commented on industrialization. Here I saw the 1948 “The Acrobat and His Partner,” a huge colorful thrill.

Cildo Meireles’ “Babel” (2001) is a massive tower of radios playing all at once. Instead of achieving communication, we get only info overload and incomprehension. It stands by itself in a tall room and is a sobering reminder of how we live today.

My final mention goes to the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective from 1985-90 that pointed out the wretched gender bias in the art world. One, showing a sliced dollar bill, said, “Women in American make 2/3 of what men do. Women artists earn only 1/3 of what men artists do.” I cannot imagine that too much has changed.

Video intro to the Shakespeare exhibition:

 

I Went to Buckingham Palace and All I Got was Annoyed

In the 10 years I lived in London, the only time I was near Buckingham Palace was when we had a Lesbian Avengers demonstration around the big statue installation of Queen Victoria.

In 1992 there was a fire at Windsor Castle (owned by the same family, of course), so in 1993 for the first time they opened the Buckingham State Rooms to mere mortals for a handsome fee (today it is £37.00 / $50.00) to help with the Windsor repairs. (Irrelevant postscript: A half dozen years later I spoke at a European Conference on volunteerism at Windsor Castle. Yes, you may kiss my hand. If you buy me a ring, you can kiss my ring.)

Now they open it to the masses for about two summer months and, as far as I can tell, put the takings towards their significant, inherited art collection. Of course the Queen and those who share her aristocratic DNA are staying at one of their other domiciles during the onslaught, probably Balmoral, Scotland.

There is a great deal of walking involved with this visit, which each year consists of two sections: first there is a special exhibition of some sort, and second is the tour of the State Rooms, that is to say, the rooms people are allowed in anyway, not the family bathroom or kitchen or tv room. The State Rooms are where the Queen meets diplomats and ambassadors and other worthies.

This summer’s special exhibition, Fashioning a Reign, starts off with a four panel Andy Warhol portrait of Queen Elizabeth that is sprinkled with diamond dust. Even though he comes from my hometown, Pittsburgh, I’m not a fan of Warhol, but frankly this portrait is a high point. We are led through endless displays of Elizabeth’s couture, from her christening gown, used by 62 royals before it fell apart and was reproduced for subsequent generations, to all the clothes she wore at this and that coronation, anniversary, national celebration, and bar mitzvah. It is a boxy collection, all monochrome (so that she can be easily found in the crowd), leaving at least one journalist wondering why, with infinite (unearned) wealth, she chose the dowdiest items on the rack. There is also a very extensive line of hats, which, when hung as they were without a head, make for a strangely post-modern tableau.

I rushed past the mesmerized millions of visitors to escape this exhibition. What I really wanted to see were the State rooms. The original building was enlarged by John Nash when King George III bought it. The two of them were Masons, so there are secret man-symbols interwoven in the designs. These rooms are full of the expected domed roofs and gilded everything; the newer wings seem a bit less ornate. Somehow the overall impression is pale, restrained, at least when compared to many of the ornate European palaces.

I did love the chandeliers, in particular the four in the Blue Drawing Room with the doubly high ceiling. But then when you realize that George IV kept 30 people employed just to keep the candles in good order (on, off, changed, etc.), you understand why Queen Victoria converted them to electricity. I hated the Table of the Great Commanders (1806-12), a spindle shaped round-topped thing made entirely of gilded porcelain. Napoleon commissioned it to be decorated with the profile head of Alexander the Great circled by heads of the less worthy commanders and philosophers from ancient days. To name a few of these minor figures: Pericles, Pompey, Augustus, Caesar, and Hannibal.

Here’s what the Royal Collection website has to say about this tribute to testosterone: “The table was the most prestigious and conspicuous present given to George IV by a grateful Louis XVIII, two years after the defeat of Napoleon. So highly did George IV regard this gift, and such was its status in his eyes, that it became part of the ceremonial backdrop for all his state portraits.”

Then we get to the royal gallery – a long expanse made from knocking down the walls of four rooms in a row. These people (I’m trying to be generous to the Royals) own the biggest intact art collection of any of the world’s royals. I could run down the copious invaluable paintings, but one will serve: the exquisite, inviting 1638 portrait of Agatha Bas by Rembrandt (my favorite painter). Why, I ask myself, should this family inherit such a treasure when it should be in a museum that does not cost a soul $50 to see two months of the year? If I weren’t an anarcho-socialist already, I would have been converted quicker than Victoria switched to electric.

An evening in London: Pissing in the Train

It is a lazy day, although my evening is over-booked. Despite days in a car during my road trip to Ireland, my feet have still not recovered from the day that I went overboard, touring everywhere with Tomer early in my visit to London. This osteoarthritis bothers me more here in London than back in Boston where I have a car. Just striding a few blocks to the bus stop provokes my feet at the start of each outing.

Today I have cut things close. I’m racing to a West End theatre to meet the author Elizabeth Woodcraft, who is accompanying me to see the comedian Daphna Baram. I met Daphna on Facebook. She’s an Israeli who’s been living in London for 14 years and openly calls herself an anti-Zionist, leftist atheist – all descriptors that warm my heart. Her show is fearless and funny.

It lasts an hour and then I part from Liz at Leicester Square tube and head to Hammersmith for a group West Coast Swing lesson and social dancing with Catriona Wiles. Three of my favorite teachers back in Boston are very fond of her. It’s a long ride on the tube and from there I ask a transportation worker where to get the bus and he sends me upstairs, but they tell me up there that, no, the bus I want is downstairs at the end of the station. It’s a shitload of walking for foot bones that hate contact with hard surfaces only slightly less than they hate stairs.

I arrive for the second lesson, which is fun and well-taught (whip variations, no less). People are welcoming; no one makes much of an issue out of my leading; I dance happily for two hours. The teacher arranges for a young man who has just graduated from college to walk me to the station, which she assures me is quicker by foot via the shortcut than via bus.

Unfortunately, it turns out that said lad doesn’t know the shortcut. We’re walking the very long time. We arrive at the mall where the station is and he guides me to its far side where the station entrance is to be, but there we encounter metal gates. The entrance to the Tube is closed. “I guess it closes earlier than I thought,” says Recent Graduate.

I see a worker and yell through the fence: “How can we get on the Tube?” I am picturing myself stranded alone so far from my bed that it takes 95 minutes on public transportation. “The front entrance,” he yells back, waving vaguely. We hike back the full length of the mall and find the entrance. The main entrance. The one we apparently passed on our long way to the far entrance. I’m limping visibly by now. We get on the same train. He’s going three stops. I’m going triple that. We have the lower end of our car to ourselves and we sit opposite each other.

At the next stop about eight or nine very drunk, very large, ruffians stumble into our car. They sprawl on the seats all around us, legs claiming all the public space. Recent Graduate and I lock eyes. These men all have cans or bottles of beer in their hands and they are loud and loutish, tussling with each other. I tuck my feet as far under my body as possible as no toe I own could withstand their trampling. I remember back to the first time in about 1989 that I was on the subway at pub closing time and the vomit that plastered men splashed all over my shoes.

Then one particularly loathsome loud-mouth struggles out of his seat, stumbles to the corner closest to me, pulls out his dick, and pisses.

When we pull into my Recent Graduate’s stop, I get up too. We stand at the glass doors, very anxious to get the hell out of there, but the doors don’t open. We can see the other people leaving their cars further up the train but our doors don’t open for some reason. The legless wonders are hollering “Where you going? What’s up?” Finally the doors open and I run out on the platform and up the full length of the car to the next car and, despite the tooting sound warning of closing doors, I throw myself through the door, but not fast enough. The doors close on my backpack. I’m inside; it’s outside. My back is pulled tight against the concave glass door.

“Shit!” I scream, fighting against my sturdy backpack, knowing my bones will give before these tried and tested straps will, and trying without success to wedge my foot against the body of the car. I believe I will be killed or maimed if I fail to keep the door open.

A handsome young man with bright eyes – his name is Mark; I asked him later – leaps over the large suitcase he is holding between his knees where he is seated opposite the doors. He manages to stop the door from closing all the way and then wrenches it back far enough for me to fall into the car. Another man – who himself turns out to be drunk and will lean intimately on me mumbling something – pats the only empty seat – it’s next to him and across from Mark – and I fall into it. In the struggle I’ve done something to my ass muscle and something worse to one ankle. My feet are throbbing. I’m grateful, so very grateful, to Mark.

Then I realize that in fact he was the only one who jumped up to help me. Sobering.

I get off at King’s Cross and it is a very long hike along corridors and platforms out to my busstop. As I am walking across the concrete plaza, my bus pulls up, so I do a doleful version of a sprint. It’s now well past midnight.

On the way home I stop at the 24/7 grocery store, on the suspicion that despite allocating tomorrow for shopping for household needs, I will not in fact want to walk another step on concrete, and will stay home.

Inside the house, I check Facebook. A friend of mine who is an accomplished Black professional writes of being on a crowded subway train in DC (about the same time as I was surrounded by sloshed white men on mine), when a cop entered his car with his gun out! How vulnerable both Black people and women of all colors are on public transportation.

LONDON: The Portrait Gallery and the Thames

LONDON August 4, 2016

Tomer and I started the day (the photo is in front of a wall tree in my neighborhood) with a meal called “English Breakfast.” I tell you this as a warning. A stomach of my age, even with its generous girth, is hard put to deal with bacon, sausage, kelp potato pancake, grilled tomato, giant grilled mushroom, two poached eggs on brown bread, all on a bed of baked beans, and a cup of coffee. When we finished we waddled off to the bus-stop to Kings X to catch the Tube, with a detour to the old lefty bookstore Housman’s which is not only surviving but thriving and expanding. I bought a button: Brexshit. Stuart Hall, a beloved lefty intellect, donated his entire library to them when he died, after having signed each one to increase the value for sale. What a great idea for all of us to do.

We met Jaya and Madeleine at the Portrait Gallery where my favorite annual exhibition – the Portrait Award – is on display free of charge. None of us agreed with the decisions of the judges and so chose our own winners. Mine is on the left. We also caught a rather astonishing exhibition called Black Chronicles (photo below)with recently discovered photos of Blacks in Britain before 1948. I ducked into the Bronte room as well.

We all had a cold drink at a café, talking, acting up, and then Jaya and Madeleine had to leave to catch a plane back to Zurich. Tomer and I walked down to the river and over the footbridge near the London Eye and along the river to the South Bank. London is exquisite, it really is. The river is at the heart of that beauty. We eventually returned over the bridge and walked up to Leicester Square. He went off shopping on Oxford St and I came home and took a pill to deal with these throbbing feet.

Osteo-arthritis of the feet is an improper affliction for a traveler like me. Even my 840 old-folks shoes from New Balance don’t allow me to walk more than an hour or two, and today we tootled for many hours. I will remain seated for the rest of the night and through the morning tomorrow. But what’s a bit of an ache in light of the chance to be with very dear friends from hither and yon?

Assumptions on the Runway

There was an unavoidable delay on my flight from Boston to London. Virgin Atlantic handled it with their usual aplomb and good communication. We were on the runway about to take off. The Captain spoke: “I’m sorry but we must return to the gate due to the sudden illness of a passenger.” Flight personnel moved to the rear of the plane as we slowly headed to the gate. Very slowly. Once there we were boarded by a hoard of emergency and rescue people (that’s what their uniforms said on the back). They flooded down the aisles to the end and attended to the person who had become ill.

After quite a bit of time, during which it was very quiet, they came up my aisle accompanying that person, who walked on her own. She was in her 20s, long straight light hair, followed up the aisle by a similar young person wearing one backpack and hauling another. It was not what I had pictured.

I had pictured an elder. I had imagined a stretcher. I had assumed unconsciousness or terrible pain. It turned out to be some sort of extreme reaction to a new medication. There was mention of sudden blindness.

The flight attendants were nearly jubilant that this had occurred while we were still on the ground. They told me stories over the long flight of emergencies in the air, where peoples’ lives were in their untrained, reluctant hands.

The rescue people de-planed with their patient and the Captain announced that due to the delays we needed to get in line to refuel. It took a long time. Once that was done, we had to get in line to be slotted in for departure. Eventually we took off. I wasn’t bothered by the two-hour delay at any point for two reasons:

One: I wasn’t in a hurry. No one was awaiting me at a specific moment on the other side. I didn’t have a meeting to make. And cheers to that!

Two: We were kept well-informed and not in platitudes. We were simply told what was going on and what was going to go on.

The only thing that bothered me was my own assumptions, not the least that it must be an older person in a medical crisis. Was it ageism on my part, or fear that next it might be me?