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Saturday, July 31, 2021

Vamp 'Til Ready

Current draft:


 


The Artist

His paintings grew darker every year

The filled the walls, they filled the room;

eventually they filled his world -

all but the ravishment.

When voices faded, he would rush to hear

the scratched soul of Mozart

endlessly in gyre.

Back and forth, back and forth,

he paced the paint-smeared floor,

diminishing in size each time he turned,

trapped in his monumental void, 

ravings against his adversaries.

At last he took a knife in his hand

and slashed an exit for himself

between the frames of his tall scenery.

Through the holes of his tattered universe

the first innocence and the light

came pouring in.     —- by Stanley Kunitz




Preface


Turn off here. I should have given more notice. We’ll get back on in a bit but this just hit me. I’ve been down this road in every one of four seasons except this one. Always looking for speed traps and reading the names of the branch trails to places with old family cemeteries. And I mean old.


On that smooth mountain highway we were just on, it goes straight to the century of Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face.” Its congested two-lane allows all manner of inflated rubber insults not to mention jet-skis, tracked vehicles, and things higher than they are long.

 

Back behind its piney shoulders (of the state road), and then behind wild groves of maple and beech, down smaller roads, lay little towns, dotted with buildings on old streets. Sorta like an intracoastal waterway of time. They’re in various stages of repair, tucked along the valley’s drumlins and streams and gradually ascending shale, granite, hills and mountains. Cabins cozy and imposing homesteads, with tiger brick chimneys and fireplaces, plunked down in the mast length primeval forest, ready to secure its treasures to pay the cost of the French and Indian wars.


Fast forward to around 1922, paint peeling on the towns and their edifices. When local trains and streetcars had peaked their passenger growth, not counting the growth pangs brought by gently flowing rivers and rhythmic pounding industry replaced by a spurt of sisyphus-like government road building rackets. With all their construction gear and dollars to spread around, the new road stayed on the edges, flirted with the edge of this town, that town, in town after town. It pile-drove a business boom from its construction and development along its rights of way, destined to languish as the road was finished. The old revolutionary war villages had a short-lived respite as this new thunder road highway promoted a prosperous new angle on New England. Not just a place you go west from, but also come back to. 


With car, bus and train doors slamming, luggage noisily born, meals cooked and beds made, families of all income strata learned how to feel rich for a week or more every summer, so as to make working in factories and bunking down in balloon-construction tenement firetraps seem more tolerable the rest of the time. This former outdated history landscape lesson of rocky farms and zealous business and religion alike, New Hampshire now had on offer, a cog railway, mechanical ski lifts and tow ropes, decorous lakes and falls and luxury resorts for lodging and play time.


As the colonial charm wore down like bark peeling off an old tree, the family automobile gassed its way to the Mt. Washington Valley, disgorging passengers to ride the high wire up the side of the mountains and then ski down. The flivvers and Model A’s and new sedans never actually kicked dust directly at the 17th, 18th, and 19th century communities still standing, because the new road was hundreds of feet away from the ancient courthouses, farm houses, main drags with their smithies, ice houses, stables, glass making shops, traders in oxen and cattle. But the dust blew and settled on the by-pass roads like one memory layering itself like sediment on top of the other.


As that 1920’s vintage highway 16 approaches the Mt. Washington Valley, it carves Conway Village like a cake or pie in two, bypassing/leaving behind the old Main Street, to pave on the fat side a more direct route to the hiking and skiing and scene-making for folks escaping southern New England for a weekend or a month in the coasts and forests of Maine or the Lakes Country or the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts all had urban dwellers employed in factories getting unionized. We ourselves were a product of when our parents' pay included group health insurance. All the while drawn here on paid vacation time, drawn to northern New England’s Europe-type settings of hills, valleys, forests and coasts so beautiful in summer.


This village of Conway, with the construction dust settling on its original main street of old car repair places, junkyards, and government offices, took on its new road racket with model citizens jockeying in place to benefit from it. Conway Village’s new main street, was roughly parallel to the old one. A high school, restaurants, movie theater, medical offices, shops for hardware, car parts, a post office, all took up commercial reside. The tavern town is gone. 8 hours driving will get you far today, further tomorrow.  Having a hideaway close to ski trails in Kearsarge or Jackson attracted everyone from Argentine mob bosses and ranchers to chanteuses retired from Broadway long runs or the dinner theatre circuit.

The century about to have a year 2000 problem was used to looking in the rear view mirror, at least from here. Of the 1922 Conway Village downtown, some buildings remained but business shifted to the massive retail development just up the road in North Conway. At Main and Washington of Conway Village, a brick storefront stood as one of the few remnants of the old downtown. Center door, display windows both sides. As if it had escaped a meteor, or the wrecking ball, or a recent town inspector visit. Purchased by investors, its empty shell cried out for a retail tenant.


Harlan Wolfe was a service industry itinerant, arrived from Texas via Cape Cod, who saw the building and him in it. He had come from a  youth hostel in Orleans MA to this White Mountains Hostel, around the corner on Washington St., itself an old farmhouse now boarding (at hostel rates!) skiers, snowboarders, rock climbers, hobby hikers, many from Europe, eager to explore some of the northernmost Appalachian Trail around the corner hence. It was a straight-ahead operation like Harlan was used to running, almost always in a forlorn building struggling to keep up with 19th century building codes, let alone since then.


The empty storefront caught Harlan’s eye, maybe matched his temperament even. It had large glass shop windows facing the street, at high noon reflecting him clearly to himself.  The faded “for rent” sign was a universal symbol of age-ing out commercial center districts, long ago drained of customers by suburban strip centers, then malls. Tourists had long time ago discovered that all New England basically looks alike. Lots of English influence, or something. Climate, building materials. And for good reason the sameness—once you get 200 years old variety is no longer the spice of life.


Harlan in his 50s by now, had spent parts of his life in thrall to another past: vinyl records, the artifact which since its German invention by Emil Berliner in the late 1800s had brought music and speech, news and entertainment to where there were no performers.

 

Leaving home at 17, leaving behind endless "pay now or else" demands from the Columbia Record Club and the RCA Record Club,  Harlan’s first full time job was assistant manager at a chain outlet, Discount Records, in Burlington, Vt.   He next landed at independent record stores in two southern states, and then a vinyl record “one-stop” distributor. Then vinyl 33s and 45s gave way to tapes; tapes gave way to CDs; and CDs became dispensable, disposable, and a downright nuisance.  Harlan bought and sold records all these times. His Texas mentor was a first rank in-store DJ who sold records by play-testing promo copies for customers who dropped in to hear something new, and ordering straight out of the monthly Schwann catalog picks. Harlan could always needle-drop behind the counter and turn an album with one or two good tracks into a whole album sale.


The building which attracted Harlan had been subdivided in front and back. In front was an office space and a retail space; Harlan took the retail space, assuming, as with most dreamers, that it came supplied with customer traffic. An affordable anachronism from the start, an old fashioned record store, with mostly used records, a steady stream of which had followed Harlan around for decades at a time. Even with all this good luck, and the hostel owners’ forbearance, keeping the doors open was a daily struggle. 


All the traffic was headed past Conway Village to North Conway.


Outside the door, long lines of stalled-at-the-4-way-intersection-signal-light-traffic could peer from their cars into the windows of Harlan Wolfe’s Record Shop while waiting for the light to change. Always there was hope, that thousands of eyeballs of traffic count may spot the three southbound parallel parking spaces in front of Harlan’s, and drop into the record store for a look see.


They would have seen his plodding acceptance of shipping records around the planet, only to see no local interest at all. Except at the office supplies store around the corner, where he became a prized customer overpaying for shipping materials, tape, etc., until he figured out the best online suppliers.


A rotating display of vintage vinyl LPs, organized by genre and alpha by artist, took on the look of a shipping back room. Another backroom completed the look— a small bookstore, and t-shirts, instruments, audio equipment: it was a veritable museum of records and books from the 1960s to the present. “Too much past all at once,” one would-be customer winced. Everyone feels differently in a cemetery or museum.

So many walk-ins were luck-downed denizens of this poor county with only a seasonal tourist economy.  They rang through the door to sell their late parents’ stuff, implore for funds, or ask for something Harlan didn’t have. Harlan had to put on a happy face while thinking of what to do. Even advertising in the area newspaper and radio station did not help.


Foot traffic on the busy Main and Washington intersection, despite its legacy 1920s sidewalks, and friendly pedestrian cross walks, was light. Some buildings had been torn down for gas stations in the 1960s and now they were convenience stores for gas, beer, wine, cigarettes, and everything which gives you gas. If this pass-through town’s name had been False Hope, it would have better described its destiny.

Every day Harlan sprayed and washed his display windows, tweaked the window display, built up his online presence, and waited for customers. An occasional collector would get wind of the store, drive 50 miles or and spend a couple hundred dollars. It didn’t take long to tap out that market while more boxes of records from estates kept rolling in, many destined for the dumpster out back.


He finally gave up his lease and moved out, and I helped pack and shoulder the boxes and furniture. He paid me with a box of sheet music. “A lady left it here,” he said. She was looking for someplace to dump it other than recycling.


I can make a u-turn up here and we can go back to the boat I think I was telling you about when this exit creeped up on us so fast. That box of sheet music led me to the rest of this story.


















Chapter 1


The opening day of “More Sinned Against Than Sinning: An Original Irish Drama. In a Prologue and Three Acts” was festive enough, on the last day of July 1974. From the early 19th century book of De Witt’s Acting Plays, it was meant to be produced by amateurs with little access to set materials and certainly no budget. Much enthusiasm was called for.

The show emeritus director, MaryAnn Dentler, was a bewitching actor director, adept at convincing anyone they could act. She started her career touring with ‘Peg o’ my heart’ across the South in 1915, starring once in a film, ‘The Clarion,’ in 1916, in demand for stock performances in San Francisco and Oklahoma City in fall 1917, and then somehow fading from the scene about age 26. She came back on the scene for the Federal Theater Project portion of FDR’s WPA, circa 1936, producing hat box theater productions on various local shoestrings buttressed with federal New Deal dollars. Dentler would spend the last fourteen years of her life living in a cabin of this Floating Theater, in the vein of so many performers left behind by radio and films and TV, now exchanging acting for room and board and a few dollars, re-branding their occupation from anyone-can-do-it to Equity pro.


She had a niece, a talent agent named Ruth Webb. At this moment, the first day of the first season here in Kingston, Ruth was up visiting and had agreed to work the ticket booth.


“This show is a proven draw from Seattle to Albany and there’s always somebody who knows the lines by heart,” MaryAnn said to no one in particular.


“‘Joe’s Garage’ on the tickets,” said Ruth, scrutinizing the roll of tickets she had just been handed. “Nothing like a high class sponsor printed on the tickets.”


“They already had the type set so I got a huge discount. And Joe’s agreed to put up a poster.”


“I might be able to get Richard Holbrook up here for a guest shot,” said Ruth. “Who would I talk to?”


There had been some advance ticket sales.  The Furbush kids were not keenly drawn to the family business. Most successful showboats were crewed by the captain’s family. Since the Furbush kids went on to their adult lives, Ed and Shirley and MaryAnn and Fred and Cap’n Tip had collected a ragtag group of local volunteers and part-time help. Ed had searched up and down the Hudson River, to encounter short-term moorings of dubious value to a Floating Theatre. Kingston? Remained to be seen.


Ed Furbush saw the past light to be cherished and remembered. Sometimes people call this "dreamy." Vision of a bygone era,  with determined enthusiasm for the last tugs of showboats. With their mirth, melody, minstrelsy, humorous readings, acrobatics, and short plays—- showboats were towed or pushed up America’s rivers from the 1830s onward, staging melodrama, vaudeville, and other divertissements up and down. Even during the Civil War, productions were staged on battle ships to keep soldiers engaged and amused between battles. All this water-bound brouhaha while the rail roads were still being connived into place across the continent, and hosting their own grand events aboard, such as whistle stop tours in luxury cabins.


Ed had a college friend in New York, Fred Hall. As the benefits director of the Boys’ Club, Fred Hall had become expert at sponsoring charity events with upper Eastside New York matrons, who were as eager to support the Boys’ Club as they were to be seen doing so. At the same time, Fred roomed with his sister in an apartment in St. Mark’s Place which became a haven for theater people employed and unemployed, backstage and front. In line with his earliest instincts, Fred had naturally befriended and mentored many theater people since his Federal Theater Project days, when he and Ed Furbush signed up for the subsidized work.

 

At the Boys’ Club he met the promising young Thomas P. McGuire, who would become Cap’n Tip McGuire of Floating Theater fame. The next generation of showboat entrepreneur, a kid of the 1960s was Tip. A dreamer as well, like Fred and Ed had been in the 1930s.  Tip could line up an audience by doing magic tricks on the curb. He conned the Hayden Planetarium into letting him give guest lectures, as the Boy Who Sees The Past Light of Stars. Upon being discovered by Fred, Tip became a natural for afternoon teas in Fred Hall’s high-rise fundraisers. His magic act for the ladies was so polished he brought it to his Navy duty in the Mediterranean, entertaining diplomatic corps from the Azores to Tripoli in the late 1960s. His skills were well applied to card tricks, juggling, and ventriloquy.


All three men, Ed, Fred and Tip knew wicked much about chopping old boats into barge boards. Oyster beds, land fill, scrap yard, one old ancient hull after another. Natural resources of Richmond S.I.


Dialing back the clock to 1936, Fred and Ed had met while singing in the Boston College Men’s Chorus. They saw the flyer on the bulletin board outside of the rehearsal hall. “Federal Theater Project.”  The government was recruiting performers for churches, tents, mission schools, old soldiers’ homes, hospitals, public parks, university halls–even showboats. Out-of-work vaudevillians would stage variety shows.  Circuses would set up in armories, and marionette plays would delight children and adults. (The FTP’s most successful project by far was the Swing Mikado, a jazzed-up version of the Gilbert and Sullivan warhorse which had premiered in Chicago in September 1938.) For a few short years, until it was shut down in June 1939, the Federal Theater Project brought arts to society, a unique government agency supporting the arts, during a period of economic tragedies. Propping up these performers led to the entertainment industry which dominated popular attention through the 20th century and into the next.


Showboats were just another vessel on then-busy waterways 100 years prior to that, ever since performers hitched rides on canal boats in the 1820s. Barge and passenger traffic kept New York harbor bustling and more polluting by the day. Steamboats had plied passengers up to Poughkeepsie or Providence or Boston or Montauk since the 1840s, and anything that could be hidden on a boat was, on the spectrum from stolen goods to freed slaves. Law enforcement or bounty hunters might clamber aboard at any stop looking for escaped slaves or contraband.

 

Fred saw the advertisement hanging drably on the bulletin board wall, but promising excitement from beyond.  Fred thought mythically.  Like a Queensland cowboy touring the outback looking for chance-takers, he would plunge himself into the performing world (and its paycheck!) with government backing.


Ed had had similar thoughts, matriculating up from Lewiston off the Androscoggin River, between there and Sabattus Pond, with several steamboat landings, plenty of river drives and logging activity. It was a town of smithies, a grist mill, blacksmiths, coopers, makers of snowshoes, axe handles and moccasins. An old world. The new world of 1936? Being lifted out of Depression and into a government paycheck and life in theater. It wasn’t the least preposterous that FDR would propel the arts into a new social status with funding to match.

“I’m reading the fine print…”


Fred’s words echoed down the voluminous hall where Ed had already trotted away, application in hand.


“It’s government supporting the arts. Show up, sign up. Just grab it and let’s go.”


Armed with purpose, the two young students sat drinking coffee in the cafeteria, filling out the applications, until it closed.


“My father always said, you can not only learn a trade right here at home, you can practice the trade too and probably get my job when i die.”


“Yeah, well,” he pointed to the destroyer models on the wall, “they never thought the USS Drayton or Lamson would ever be finished. Then what?”


“Yachts, more destroyers, whatever. I think his point was, a steady paycheck and a union contract is worth doing almost anything that’s available.”


“From the looks of this Federal Theater Project, that courtesy is about to be extended to singers, playwrights, actors, set designers, techs…”


“It’s just charity from the radio and film people for putting so many live performers out of work. Even the dance bands are scaling down. Dancers are being told they have to learn to sing too. Just like when actors had to suddenly learn to speak for movies. Vaudeville is on the skids. Magicians are learning how to do radio sound effects.”


The two students talked into the night about each other’s prospects, one a language major and the other political science. After four years of good Irish Catholic college education, Fred knew he was more the mentor than the teacher type, with a full plate of enthusiasm which would knock any syllabus to the ground in hand-to-hand combat. Education professional was a good game for a Boston College graduate but something else beckoned, what it was, Fred not sure.


Neither had Ed’s same four years pushed him into any certainty about the future beyond 1936. He liked working with his hands. He saw things in wood.


With the Federal Theatre Project, some 19th century fossils of showboating were revived, included ones on the Ohio River System and the Mississippi. Ed got a berth appropriately with his one-man dramatization of Moby Dick, which he had seen as a child on the Androscoggin. He met his wife Shirley doing Moby Dick on the Hollywood, where she tap-danced. And just like he found this job, he answered a bulletin on a wall calling for submarine builders at the Portsmouth Naval Yard in Kittery, Maine. And from there, down to New York Harbor, spanning a decade and a half of war and cold war.


As a tug hand around Port Richmond in the 1950s, Ed plunged into harbor life, buying an old retired Lackawanna Railroad coal barge for $350 from the lumber yard where it was scrapped, and doing the typical work of marine salvage in Mariners Harbor.  It became the 111-foot hull of his showboat dream.


“The timbers are going for practically nothing,” the husky 42-year old deck hand told Shirley, who wasn’t sure about tap dancing on a boat again. “We can get enough to build a deck on top of the barge storage deck.” Between 1954 and 1962, the hard work resulted in six staterooms, a galley, and the shell of a theater, even while Furbush worked part time as a deck hand on other boats. Every spare minute, Ed was heaving ponderous beams into place, sawing out gingerbread decorations for the railings, installing period lighting fixtures. He moved aboard into stern living quarters, leaving Shirley and their daughter Kristin in an apartment on shore. By fall 1961 they moved aboard with the new sibling Keith, to save on rent among other things. Called the boat Driftwood Floating Theatre.


By 1972 the Driftwood was funded for NYC Parks Day, towed from borough to borough, city piers and waterside parks. Tip McGuire came aboard one day having met Fred Hall at the Boys’ Club. His showboat repertoire fit the project well.


I’m going to give you a chance to buy some candy while you learn how to be a ventriloquist. Do I have any takers?

“This one throws his voice just fine” he hears from a ringer.

“Thank you but I need a real dummy,” says Tom.

The winner will receive a special scholarship made out of candy, for only a nickel. What do you kids think?

“How about you, Gladiator,” Tom asks his dummy, a chimpanzee puppet named Gladiator.

Hi Cap’n Tom. What is ventriloquism?

It’s the art of being able to talk without moving your lips.

The position of the mouth is important. Close your mouth, bring your teeth together and hold them together. Don’t clench them, just close them so they barely touch.

Now part your lips slightly, not like a big smile. Just slightly.

Now you have mouth closed, your lips together, and your teeth parted slightly. Now the jaw must be relaxed, the lips parted slightly, and the tongue must be free to move around in the mouth.

Now practice the alphabet in front of a mirror and pronounce each letter without moving your lips.

There has to be practice, practice, and more practice.


OK, kids? Now get your nickels out and the first one to see me move my lips gets to buy some candy.

Gladiator, where did you ever get a name like that. You couldn’t hurt a flea.

My mother gave me the name, she was glad to see me.

Oh, gladiator for glad to see you (Cap’n Tom rolls his eyes)

 Especially since my father disappeared the morning after she got pregnant.

Why did he disappear?

He saw my mother in the daylight.

That’s not very nice, gladiator. Why don’t we talk about my family?

Don’t get me started.

What do you know about my family?

I’m a chimp, ain’t I?

Aren’t I, gladiator. You come from a whole family of dummies?


Hey, you moved your lips.


OK kiddo, what’s your name, and what’s your nickel gonna get you? I got Sugar Babies, Charms, Paydays, even Tums for your mom over there. They’re a dime.


Hey, I saw you move your lips too!


I did too!


Me, too!

















Chapter 2


I am my audience. A free brown people toiling in brown furrows, winter time on the boss' plantation, or levee, where we work for money. Bales of cotton, sacks of sugar and corn, hogsheads of tobacco weigh down the steamboats headed down the river. Trees survive the winter down here. Winter red roses bloom. Inside the plantation house everybody’s cracking pecans for pralines. The wind seems to howl outside along the Mississippi coast.


Then there’s the boat freighted with mystery and entertainment. Inside and out, everyone throws down their work.

“Calliope! Calliope!”


The calliope is playing “Bicycle Built For Two” while everyone drops what they’re doing and scramble up the levee and over to the town wharf.


There it is. “Floating Theater.” Everybody knows and they can gasp it in unison “Floating Theater!” And “Big Show tonight, whole plantation’s coming!” In the next few hours, buggies and surreys come from as far away as ten miles and other plantations and freeman’s farms.


There was a play with a murder. Applause. Magic tricks, knife throwing act, song singing and candy selling. At the end of the night, we climbed the levee, turned around to look one more time at the Floating Theater, even if it meant turning into pillars of salt like Lot in the Old Testament. The joy on a cold night down by the riverside made for sound sleep and we couldn’t wait til morning to jump out of bed and climb up the levee and then down again to the town wharf to see the Floating Theater in the morning sun.


But the river lay quiet at dawn. The dock was empty and the boat long gone. Again and again, over and over, the dock was all excitement one night and empty at dawn. From the dawn of steam to World War II, ticking off the weeks, months, years. Depending on the river or the latitude, farm, hamlet, plantation…


Those brief Federal Theater Project days lingered in Ed Furbush’s memory, hard to push aside. As if he had lived history when it happened, a recurring dream under the silt of the day. Tugging barges ashore to be scrapped here in Mariners Harbor, the movie played over in his mind.


Thirteen railroads. 40,000 miles of tracks. Terminals at Port of New York. Canal barges loaded and unloaded. Since the sinking of the Andrea Doria, wood barges no longer fit for water hitting the scrap yard for salvage lumber.


1920s coal strike. Now the soft coal was loaded at Hampton Roads Virginia, tugged upriver, and craned at Hoboken onto open top railroad cars of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. Inland via canal to heat upstate New York in the winter, to smoke-darken the skies all the way to Buffalo.


The war years working at Portsmouth Naval Yard had not dimmed Ed’s memory of his last showboat years. He remembered his Moby Dick reading like some actors can recite Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” faultlessly year after year.  In fact the job he took as a tugboat hand made him see, feel, hear and touch all the experiences when he learned to tow along the Androscoggin and then magnifying the setting into larger scale thoughts. The wood still looked good. The side job was creepy but secure. As the preacher would say of Jesus over at Mariner’s Temple on Oliver Street, “still fit to float.”


Oily old planks and beams which must explain why they are burning down there so much. Shirley doesn’t remember exactly how Ed would be spending more and more time in the scrap yard, and missing out on some plum tug assignments which might have paid better. It seemed to her they would never get out of buying store brands which indulged only the thrifty. It seemed to her that him heating a can of Ann Page stew on a camp lantern to spend extra hours in the scrap yard, was worth a thousand words at least. Of explanation… she knew he was building his dream, but didn’t know what else.


Was it a showboat planked together in a history dream? Was it a replica of a showboat destined to ride one of the world's great rivers? Was it a boondoggle which should have been scrapped or stayed scrapped? Just another thing barely noticed in the big passing of time. 

                         


This story had improbably began from a box of junk gifted to me by Harlan Wolfe, a box of sheet music, and the program for a show called “Vamp ’Til Ready,” to be staged as a benefit for the Driftwood Floating Theatre. In return for helping him clean out that storage building.

So, we have covered 200 years preceding about 1956, bounced around talking about Ed, Harlan, the theatre, the boat, the record store, etc. etc.fast forwarded (for one paragraph) about 50 years, and now here we are, back or forward, whichever way you look at it, in the late 1980s, on a creek down from the Hudson.

The town folks were having none of it, the city council was mortified after hearing from the building inspector. A 70-something woman was living in a condemned building. Or, a condemned boat. Actually barely a boat at all. A slowly sinking boat.

To some the whole thing smelled of rotting fish. Way upriver, one of the nation’s most revered industrial giants, General Electric, seemed to be polluting the river bottom from Schenectady on a timeline of years and unknown cost. Everybody got to know about it through Pete Seeger.

And this boat, incepted to recall a simpler time, was not an industrial giant. More like a haven, a refuge. Doing no one any particular harm. Locals could make fun of the shows they put on at the boat. TV had long ago surpassed this type of recreation.

The woman was its sole permanent resident.

Maryann Dentler berthed in an upper cabin of the Driftwood Floating Theater as it took on ice and water, very slowly we should add, near Eddyville on the Rondout Creek back in the late last century.

Maryann had an interesting skill which involved mind reading. Presumed to be blessed with enhanced hippocampus triggers, her pattern completion abilities extended to almost anyone within reach of her crystal ball. She could help you decide whether to get involved in the card game after the show tonight. War veterans came for hypnosis treatment therapy. She could lead a kid to puppy love or a husband to anger.

She’d used this ability since November 15, 1914, when she first starred in Peg O’ My Heart in Everett, Washington. She could simply turn anyone into an actor capable of performing in any number of DeWitt’s published plays.

All of this is not much when you’re 70-something stooping on a gangplank with your bags packed waiting for a ride.

Phones were ringing in New York.

“She has no savings?”

“Her pension goes to the boat maintenance.”

“You have to make an exception this time. Bend the rules.”

“The venue was reported by a member. The committee had to meet on it. Mrs. Dentler cannot participate in a non-Equity theater and keep her pension too.”

“You know as well as me that’s one committee, making a wrong decision which there is always a probability of making, not knowing Maryann’s history with the union. Besides, this ship doesn’t need your help to sink. The bucket had a hole in it already.”

“Ruth Ann, she’s your aunt, right?”

You can almost hear the nod.

“You’re a great agent for some of our members too. It’s the town, not us. They’re bearing down on the Driftwood because it’s sinking. They found out your fortune-teller aunt is homesteading there. Her bank closed her checking account so we have no one to send checks too. We can restore the pension when she has a new address.”

“Well, send it to me.”

“Next time the committee meets we’ll put that to them.”

Ruth Ann hung up. What a strange business. And she’s in it.

For an Army Corps of Engineers guy, he was uncomfortable on muddy shifting ground. You might think the opposite, but as the officer drove into the Driftwood Floating Theatre parking lot, he thought he might get stuck. Most of it was mud and weeds. There had been various fund-raising campaigns to pave it, and the local paving contractor sat on the theatre’s advisory board, but the weather and the Rondout Creek extension never seemed to co-operate. The property was once envisioned as an extension lot for the fish restaurant next door, but the maintenance cost proved uneconomical.

So he opened the driver door and pivoted his legs enough to get them into some galoshes, turned off his pager and headed gingerly for the hulk on the edge of the lot. A gas generator was running over in the bushes and a long cord seemed to lead into the boat. A light was on in an upper cabin.

Hello, it’s the Army Corps of Engineers, he shouted up. He tramped over the weeds to the stern and shouted again. Maryann Dentler heard him from inside.

“I’m not the owner,” she shouted through the window.

When will you see the owner, said the Army Corps of Engineers. We need to make sure this letter is delivered to the owner.

“I don’t know, I’m moving out today. The town condemned me for living.”

Yes I see the condemnation notice.

I’ll leave the letter with you because we don’t know who else will see the owner. We’re not sure of the ownership at all.

“It’s all spelled out in Captain Furbush’s will,” Maryann was coming down with her earthly possessions. Tip McGuire had promised he would find a safe place for her costume collection.

Mrs. Furbush sold it but the bill of sale is not notarized, said the Army Corps of Engineers. If we have to get the boat, we’ll have to send the owner a bill.

Maryann was sure her ride wouldn’t come until the Army Corps of Engineers person was gone. So she took the letter and said she’d send it where she sent her rent which was a post office box. It was only a little white lie.

Meanwhile Tip had been driving around several different blocks until he saw the government car gone. He probably made Maryann Dentler wait a little bit longer than she should have. She was sitting on a duffel bag holding what looked like a letter and, of course, reading minds.

What does a mind reader do with the memories of the past half century or so, not just hers but everyone else’s? She even knew everything Tip will say if he sees the letter.

It’s not sinking. Just a little bailing now and then. It’s not blocking anything. They’re just papering files that’s how they get paid. We have a season to cast and book. We’re not going anywhere. We have a couple who are actor/playwrights and they’re helping to fund the season.

Yes, “fund the season” rang a bell with Maryann. Most of her life had been whistle stop tours to start amateur theater troupes in various small towns from Washington to Maine. If a Barrymore or a Le Gallienne or Lunt-Fontaine or a jazz or vaudeville show were touring in a vicinity, she would elbow the press to announce a new local theater and begin fund raising for it by holding mind reading entertainments at potential patrons’ homes. The touring theater held out the promise that Maryann’s hatbox theater delivered — a way to roar in the 20s or dodge the depressing realities of the 30s.

Then the Federal Theatre Project came along, with the chance to go “pro” without going to Manhattan or Los Angeles. Whether entranced with the stage, backstage, lights, sound, romance, ego, drink, remorse or gambling, the local theatre was a gateway beyond the local fraternal, veteran or polite social society.

She heard him turn the corner into the old parking lot. She shoved the letter in one of her bags. Maybe the new couple might work out.

“Maryann! I got us an office with an apartment for you in it. It’s in Kingston. It’s a commercial district and when the landlord finds out you’re living there we may have to move again. But it will be fine for now.”

“Cap’n Tom, are you going down with the ship?” She meant this to sound jocular but Tom had a worried mind.











 



Tuesday, December 1, 2020

It's fun to make a list of influential musicians and moments, throughout life:

Vincent Mercadante
Dorothy Santora
Liz Nkonoki
Joe D'Agostino
Leroy Anderson
Dad singing, harmonica, records, and radio at home and in car
Beatles
WDRC, WPOP, WEXT, Hawaii Calls, Wheeling Jamboree
transistor radio
CYO dances (Detroit Soul, Duchess and the Paramounts, Downbeats, Wildweeds)
45s and LPs
Dad's Magnavox FM stereo console
guitar from Zak's Pawn shop, early garage bands
high school band Donald Santora, Conrad Gozzo
college band, Richard Powell
Bluebird Night Club
Nick (Daddio) Kithas
Tom Turicchi
Stoney Burns
Asleep At The Wheel
Noah Knepper
Freddie Cisneros
Sumpter Bruton
Robert Ealey
Mike Buck
Jackie Newhouse
Lou Ann Barton
Record Town, Sumter, Sally, Stephen, Sumter Jr. Bruton
Dave Pellecchia
Jefferson Dalby, TCU Modern Dance Dept.
Gracey Tune
Joey Carter
Tudi Taddi
Delbert McClinton
Glen Clark
The HOP (House of Pizza), Fort Worth
Salt Lick Foundation
Louis "Buddy" Hale
Clive Davis
Richard Stolzman
Steven deGroote
Pete Fountain
Slim Richey
Dave Lincoln
Mike Bodycomb
Michael H. Price
Greg Jackson
Hip Pocket Theater
Paul Verrette
Jay Patten


This article tells a little about a former employer of mine,
Dr. Tom Turicchi.


This video details the techniques he actually used.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

50 Years Ago, Seems Like Yesterday

The Happy Birthday Cake

Mike Pellecchia




When I went to college I packed everything I needed in 2 suitcases

because that was the limit on the plane

4 months later, end of freshman semester, went home for Christmas.

I planned on opening the closet in my bedroom and re-visiting all the stuff I had carefully packed and stacked in my side of the closet in the former bedroom of me and my brother. Years of MAD Magazines, baseball cards, record collection, board games, gizmos and gadgets of a kid growing up.

August had been my first time leaving home and December was my first time going back. I was hitch hiking along the interstate; a big semi-truck trailer let me out near an off-ramp in Knoxville. Couple minutes later I was in the back of a warm police car pulling into the Knoxville jail loading dock. I was waiting on a bench to be processed along with a bunch of people who had been busted, possibly for smelling bad, having long hair, or something worse. When they asked what I was in for, and I told them, they all moved away from me on the bench. Busted for thumbing a ride was not cool to anybody. With my one phone call, I reached my father who sent bail money and bus fare. Somebody from the jail knew someone at Western Union so they could go get the money dad had wired while I was still locked up. Seemed like a routine situation for the KPD.

As if that wasn't exciting, when I got home to my former bed room, my stuff was gone from my side of the closet. Pretty much my life to that point, except for the two suitcases that went to college with me.

I asked my younger brother, who was in high school, where my stuff was.

“Mom threw it out,” he said rather matter of factly and in a defeated tone. “She needed space for her clothes.”

He was right. Mom had been on a serious clothing binge since that summer when I went away to college in Texas.

Fashion had been changing, pant suits had been coming out, and she was trying out all the different colors that the new fabrics were coming in.

Christmas eve, she had visions of seeing or being the Virgin Mary, and they were not pleasant. My father and three brothers encircled her as she became increasingly unconsolable. Family Christmas, enveloped in the commercial cheer and churchgoing of the 1950s and 1960s, unraveled from that point.

My friend Joe was gonna pick me up. We’d be working Christmas Eve in his dad’s bakery, so that when his dad opened at 7 a.m. there would be plenty of donuts, cakes, cookies at Richard’s Bake Shop on Christmas Day.  On a main street in the picturesque town of Wethersfield, it felt like a Christmas movie all around. The town was populated by doctors and lawyers mostly, in their big old colonial houses, but there was also a clock-punching population working shifts at the state prison there.

While I was squirting jelly into the donuts, Joe set a cake over to the side. I iced it with the words “Happy Birthday Jesus.”

We went over to the big city up the road, Hartford, where the Christmas lighting spectacular was in Constitution Plaza. It brought people from all over the state. We brought a folding card table and offered free slices of Happy Birthday Jesus Cake.

We stood out there in the rather bitter cold for awhile doing this. Offering slices of cake to the gaily dressed families who wouldn't take it and wouldn't let their kids take it.

We could hardly believe it. No one wanted any Happy Birthday Jesus Cake.

We felt like bearers of bad news. We felt like thieves. It was just a white frosted cake, but Joe's dad Abe, back at the bakery, could have sold it, and we couldn’t give it away.

On the way back to the bakery I sat in the passenger side with the cake on my lap, some slices cut and placed in napkins, the rest of the cake frowning back at the two boys who still had a whole night of work to do.

There wasn’t much to say.

Samuel Clemens had already said all there was to say about stuff like this. His old house on Farmington Avenue was dressed to the nines this time every year, and his writings live on for their sharp humanity.

Just before he sold the aforementioned house and moved to Europe, he wrote this letter to the editor of the New York World:

“It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us-- the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage-- may eventually be gathered together in heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss-- except the inventor of the telephone.”

It was  Christmas 1890 and Samuel Clemens was flat broke. He had invested all his money in the Paige Typesetter instead of the telephone. Just about a dozen years earlier, Alexander Graham Bell had offered him all the Bell Telephone stock he wanted for $500 and he turned it down. The "Happy Birthday Jesus" cake was not that, but people find something in saying no, which they often don't find in saying yes.

I rolled down the passenger window as we crossed the bridge over the Connecticut River, on the way back from Hartford to Wethersfield. A gust of cold wind made me reach for the zipper on my windbreaker but it was already pulled all the way up because we were in a Rambler American with a dodgy heater fan. I mentally gauged the space between the rails on the bridge versus how fast we were going on this icy Christmas Eve road mess in Connecticut. The snow tires were slipping on the icy bridge as I craned my head out the passenger window with the heft of a Happy Birthday Jesus cake swaddling between my elbows trying to squeeze them out the window as the wind blew across the river. I didn’t want pieces of cake to catch on the bridge and freeze. I hung out of the car and aimed it like a basketball. I wanted the whole thing to go into the river.

Richard Harris singing "MacArthur Park" was on the AM radio in the car. That big orchestration sounded great on AM radio.

When it said "I'll never have that recipe aga....a...a...ain!" I made the shot. Thought I heard it land on a chunk of ice in the river.



Sunday, September 16, 2018

Formerly the Shrine To Music Museum,
Vermillion, South Dakota
A car trip across the Rust Belt drew us to four different music museums. The first one is in Vermillion South Dakota, in a former Carnegie library on the campus of the University of South Dakota. I had been here about 25 years ago, when it was called the Shrine To Music Museum. It was basically a collection of instruments owned by Arne Larson and his family. The museum has since expanded to include everything from Johnny Cash guitars to Stradivarius and Amati stringed instruments to folk instruments from around the world, as well as keyboards going back hundreds of years.
We got here "just in time," so to speak. The museum is about to close for two years to allow for a $9 million expansion of its facility. It's a pleasantly overwhelming display which shows a lot of attention to curatorial detail.


It's basically on two floors currently. One highlight was the re-creation of a shop where guitars are made; another was the vast display of harmonicas, more than one could almost ever imagine. The craft of instrument making is highlighted throughout this museum, as well as the histories of various eras of society which called for mass production and marketing of instruments.


Downriver from the National Music Museum was a "museum" of extremely modest proportions, dedicated to one performer of historical note and largely seeming to be an outgrowth of a personal collection. This facility is in a downtown building near the Davenport, Iowa waterfront. It looks to be a typical arrangement where someone renovating a building is hosting the collection until a paying renter comes along. In the case of this town, that could be awhile, but you never know.

As per below, I was excited to see Pee Wee Russell's last set of clarinets, which appeared to be Buffet R-13s. Of particular note was the "made in France" mouthpiece with the number "5" on it. Couldn't get too close, but I am assuming that was the facing number, which would make it quite open. It never would have occurred to me that a clarinetist with such a distinctive vibrato would be using an orchestral clarinet!


With its one major subject, this collection was diligent and vivid in telling the story of a hometown boy who went on fame with Paul Whiteman and Jean Goldkette with his best buddy Frankie Trumbauer. Parts of the display were very moving in an emotional way, such a letter from Louis Armstrong, who knew Bix, and the piano from the apartment he took in New York, months before he died in his late twenties.

Eastbound from there we found ourselves at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland.

 

 

One tends to hear about this Hall of Fame mostly via the media, through the choices made to add someone or not. It's unabashedly over the top, with instruments, videos, displays that, before a couple of hours were done, had my stomach churning and tear ducts flowing with emotion. Like the Top 40 radio which started it all, this place is in a constant state of re-creation to accommodate the next generation coming up. I was blown away to see Louis Jordan's sax and his set list (40's-50's), and equally knocked out to see the awning from a club I used to go to in the 70's. It's a major kick to watch the Beatles first Ed Sullivan appearance with the screen set up right next to the Rickenbacker John Lennon was playing that night. Ditto for the Animals' drum set, logo on the bass and all, exactly the same one you see in their first Ed Sullivan appearance. This "Hall of Fame" really covers the waterfront, so to speak. It was a little nutty to see only 2 saxophones in the whole place, considering they had dozens of guitars from so many groups. The other saxophone which made me choke up a bit was Jerome "Doc" Pomus'. And I had to take a deep breath while reading the scribbles this polio victim made on the invitation to his wedding day. They were the draft lyrics to one of his many, many hit songs, "Save The Last Dance for Me."

The 4th museum on this tour was The National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame. One may assume that this facility does not exactly pick up the overflow crowds from the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, though it's not far from there. It shares a former city hall building with the Softball Hall of Fame. You're probably wondering what is Cleveland-Style polka. The answer is simple: it was made by Slovenian immigrants to Cleveland. When you think of polka popularity, the first name which comes to mind is Lawrence Welk.


Welk's parents were German immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine. You learn something new every day, and on this day I learned the origins of perhaps the second most popular polka star of the 1950s-60s, Frankie Yankovic. As an aside, my wife and I have been merchants of used vinyl records for many years, and some records you see so much at garage sales they make your head spin. Well, Columbia Recording Artist Frankie Yankovic's was one of those. Little did we know he is the exemplar of Slovenian polka in the Cleveland style. You may ask, what is a Hall of Fame with only one superstar? Well, this might not be an appropriate question for someone of Slovenian ancestry, for there are more Cleveland-style accordion families in this Hall of Fame than you could shake a bell stick at.

The revelation here, as at the Bix museum, was that with good signage and a decent number of artifacts, history can be amplified and exemplified any way the assemblers might choose. By focusing on the Slovenian community of Cleveland, this interesting Hall of Fame provides a backdrop to the American myth of the "melting pot."

In closing, I'm reminded of a museum I visited which no longer exists in its present form. The "Bob Wills Museum" (the current one is in Wills' home town of Turkey, Texas) opened during "Pioneer Days" in Fort Worth in September 1985. Upon its opening at 2404 North Main, personal tours were given by Wills' widow, Betty Anderson Wills. There was a closed, lighted room containing the desk where Betty Wills did the bookkeeping for the Texas Playboys from 1950 to 1969. On the wall were several needlepoint violins fashioned by Mrs. Wills. The desk also held a Bible. A plaque on the viewing window read, "Bob always carried a Bible."

Quite a bit of miscellaneous stuff was on display. One of Bob's fiddles from the original Wills museum in Turkey, Texas. A Steinberg upright piano, bought by Texas Playboy Al Stricklin's father in 1910 for $85.

Several videos showed Wills' on film and TV. Before the days of Youtube they re-lived the excitement of Wills' personality, and his estimable contributions to Western Swing music, including the genre's decline during the 1960s.

The Fort Worth Stockyards, with its nostalgia for the days of meat packing and trail riding, was a good location, and one of the initial backers, David Stallings, had provided the impetus for the Wills family to rent a space there. The Bob Wills Museum in Fort Worth is long gone but that hasn't affected the popularity of Bob Wills and Western Swing music. The classic sounds, derived from the confluence of big band and country fiddle music in the 1930s,survive in many musical groups today, and in the hearts of the myriad former Texas Playboys who came and went from the band, many now in their 90's, who are still performing as I write this.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

It's been about 1 1/2 years since I self published my first studio album, Boston Nashville. Since I have all the material ready for a second album, I can sum up the experience with the first one.
It started with one song, Cannabis. I approached a highly respected Nashville saxophone artist, Jay Patten. We shared the same Italian surname, and the same ancestral town in Italy, Avellino. Other than that, we had no common relatives that we could trace. I knew I loved his work for his album "Impressions of Christmas."
We started the album at his home studio. He cast the artists for the song "Cannabis." They are some of Nashville's greats. One phrase in the song, "stoners pride," puzzled the singers a bit. It's one of those phrases that makes people call my songs "weird." To me it was natural. Stoners obtained their supplies at risks not known to a legal generation. Their risks were also not known to a consumer generation. People used to government endorsement, regulation, and protection would not understand "stoners pride." Stoners paved the way.
But all my songs are weird in different ways.
Several session in Nashville, at Jay's home studio, helped me shape the album. Jay himself was a big influence. He is very busy with his own material so I was imposing on him. But it seemed to work out.
When I got home to New England I made a cold call to record the rest of the material. I subbed for Billy Novick on a gig once and met some Boston musicians. One of them said he had a studio. I contacted him and recorded the rest of the material at his studio.
I called the album Boston Nashville because the city names reflect the styles. The Boston material was arrangements I wrote out. The Nashville material was arrangements worked out on the spot.
When it was finished I hired a company to promote Boston Nashville to college radio. They had me send them 300 CDs. Most of them are now available on amazon.com. That's what happens to promotional CDs. They charged a lot of money for shipping these CDs out to college radio stations. The reaction from college DJs was insignificant. Except for one station. There was a college radio station in New Britain CT which played Boston Nashville very aggressively. I never learned why. They kept various tracks from the album on the air for an entire semester. The only college station in the USA to really adopt Boston Nashville upon its release. To this day it's a mystery to me. No one in that city remembers me, even though it's my home town. The college that played the album was an influence on me. I saw the Four Seasons, my favorite band, at Welte Hall there. I got high for the first time with a college DJ there. But this was a long time ago.
Other than that, I've sold and given away my album at gigs where I've played. I have heard a few polite comments in return. Perhaps a half dozen people have taken the effort to say how the album affected them.
I'm so grateful, because I know that the songs, the arrangements, everything about the album is as unique as I could make it, and I'm amazed with the musicians and engineers who put up with me to record it the way I wanted it.
After all this effort, I can be a confident that a couple dozen listeners have really enjoyed Boston Nashville. Thousands of people have heard me play covers, and thousands of dancers, listeners, club patrons, etc. have heard me support bands, piano players, accordion players, etc., over many years, with my horn playing. But this has not translated to any fans for my original music.
Now that I have another album's worth of material, already posted on soundcloud, reverbnation, etc., it becomes apparent that I'm an "outsider artist." I think that's code for someone who has no popularity.
I think the effort I put in must have been based on the "merit system," that good stuff will get attention. There was a mistake with this idea. It needed fans. It needed people who heard "Boston Nashville" to pass along their enthusiasm to friends, who would pass it along to others. And gradually, one song or another would go viral.
No sign of that happening.
I'm not disappointed. I'm my own biggest fan. From the minute I started writing stuff in 7th or 8th grade, I've been thrilled by what I do. It keeps getting better, just like I planned. The new songs are as good or better than anything on Boston Nashville. When I run out of ideas, I'll post to that effect.

Friday, September 1, 2017

For about 15 years, I helped feed my family by writing a stream of freelance articles for newspapers and magazines. A few books in there too.

They are not waterlogged, like some peoples' lifelong mementos at the moment, but I am confronted with boxes and boxes of bylined clippings as a result of doing what freelancers do.

Namely, you save your clippings, make copies of the best ones, in the event that a potential future editor wants to read samples. That's your lifeline to future stories--- your reputation for past ones.
That was the era of print.

And this is the era of boxes and boxes of bylined clippings, safely preserved for.....?

If I listed some of the places I wrote for, this would start to look like a resumé. I'm proud of that list, but I'm not looking for work.

I was just wondering what to do with the boxes of clippings.

As I carefully prepared them for destruction, I read some of them. Feature stories on a teenager's first cigarette, a teenager's first car. My annual review of the most reliable tax filing guides. Stories about the emergence of audio books. Interviews with best selling authors. Reviews of films, books, performances and CDs by the hundreds. Lengthy features on subjects of then-notoriety. On and on.

I recalled the care that had been put into these works, and the paltry sums they contributed to our checking account. Did I sell myself cheap? Yes.  Did I like seeing my name in print? Yes.

Did I think these pieces might lead to better work? They did, up to a point. I was good but not that good.

In the course of dumping this stuff, a penny for my thoughts.  Not much of the writing was actually worth saving. Much of it was not worth writing. There was always a deadline followed by a check. It put things into a kind of routine. Kept me from being attached to any one employer.

The bulk is amazing. It's going out the door. The term "by Michael Pellecchia" is completely outdated. Now I mostly say it to myself when I put care into things.