Mary of the Fishes, and Family Vacations: Part I

Mary of the Fishes
Eastport, ME 1955

My maternal grandmother Marie Elizabeth Urban Endrich -- known to all as Mary, to me as the Gram who taught me how to read and write when I was three years old -- was born in 1898 on the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of NYC.

It wasn't the hip village of the musical "Rent" then -- the one in which I came of age as a young adult working at the #Village Voice from 1985 - 1998.

Yet it WAS "La Vie Boheme" quite literally in regard to my great grandparents, Frantisek Urban and Aloisie Herel, who landed (separately, before meeting and marrying two years later) on the Lower East Side, along with thousands of other immigrants from Eastern Europe and beyond, fresh off the boats from Bohemia in 1892.

Mary and her two older brothers, Joseph and Frantisek, Jr., were born in that Avenue A apartment. They grew up speaking Bohemian. Frantisek was a butcher in the city. At some point, between a trip back to Czechoslovakia in 1900 and the birth of their fourth child there, Rudolf, and the 1910 census they relocated to Killingworth, CT and became a farming family on their own small farm.

These photos were taken on a family vacation to #Eastport, #Maine in 1955 and collected into a tiny paper photo album.

Mary and Richard

ALL vacations were family vacations throughout my own growing up: we never went anywhere -- Vermont, Maine, the Catskills -- without my grandmothers, all of us packed into a tiny Scottie travel trailer like so many sardines in a tin can, we children swinging in red cotton hammocks with our noses pressed against the metal ceiling, living our post-WWII best lives.

Mary and Aunt Jody

My uncle Richie, my mother's older brother, and his wife Jody took both his parents with him on many vacations -- such as this one to Eastport, on which my unmarried mother, Mae or more familiarly "Maisie," also accompanied them; as well as all the way across country by car to California a couple of years later, after my grandfather's death. 

A bear greeting my Uncle, Aunt, and Grandmother
on their first trip to Yellowstone 1957.

Richie had been previously engaged to a mystery woman of whom, along with her small terrier, I have photos but no name. She broke his heart after his return from serving at Anzio, Italy in WWII. He then married his first cousin once removed, Johanna "Jody" Herel Harris, the granddaughter of his own grandmother's sister and the third consecutive Johanna in her own family tree.

Mary is 57 in these photos -- three years younger than I am now. This is how I remember her looking: 6' tall and well over 200 pounds, with the broad features of her Slavic ancestry in which you can still see "the old country" as it was repeatedly referred to in our family -- and a bipolar lust for life from which we all benefitted and, at times, ran.

Mary Urban Endrich

On the 56th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

 Yesterday, August 6, was the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, we now stand at yet ANOTHER existential crisis in this country over voting rights, and whether it is the individual states or the federal government who gets to decide and to enforce our Constitution and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments which extended universal suffrage to our Black citizens.

One doesn't need to be much of a student of history to be aware of how White southerners have fought against Black equality for centuries, often using "states rights" as their justification -- including for the Civil War.

During my lifetime and yours, Black Americans have been bloodied, beaten, and killed for registering to vote, voting at all, or demonstrating for the vote. This is not even to mention being murdered while walking, running, or driving.

One doesn't need to be much of a lawyer or Constitutional scholar to understand that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments gave the federal government the power to enforce implementation of the rights they made explicit for Black Americans -- because the states had already, in the late 19th century, proven that they could find ways, including gerrymandering, to restrict these rights.

Yet over and over again, conservative White institutions -- most recently the Supreme Court lead by Republican John Roberts in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder case, and again this year in Brnovich v. DNC -- have stripped away voting rights and protections that ensure equal access to the ballot for those Whites seek to suppress.

White racism not only lives in the U.S., but continues actively to fight to maintain White power through decisions such as these and through current Republican state efforts to restrict voting rights.

The bottom line White Americans continue to resist is that racism is embedded in White dehumanization of Black people in order to have justified their enslavement -- and now their mass incarceration -- for White economic and social benefit.

The American history some of you don't want to learn or acknowledge is that White people committed genocide against native North American civilizations living here sustainably for more than 12,000 years in order to remove them and take their land; and then tortured, murdered, exploited, oppressed, imprisoned, and continue to discriminate against Black people in order to build the White wealth from which we ALL, rich or poor, as White people benefit.

Yours or mine or even our ancestors may not be the hands that held the whips. And still, we own homes and drive cars and get jobs and receive college loans and experience unrestricted rights thanks to a system that privileges our white skin by disadvantaging others.

Once you learn or acknowledge the reality of American history, you are then morally accountable for doing something.

Here are a few, but hardly all!, ideas for ways you can join me in this effort:

* #learnUShistory

* ensure your children and other family members learn history civics, and media literacy, and that all equally benefit from quality public education

* #stoprepublicans, who as a party are seeking to suppress Voting Rights for Black people and others of color

* donate time and/or $ to ensure everyone can and does vote #GOTV

* vote for policies and programs that provide reparations, even in seemingly small ways, for all that has been stolen from people in the making of this nation. These include tax policies that transfer wealth from the 1% to public services for all. Recognize that the amassing of such wealth does not square with the language in our Declaration of Independence or Constitution for democracy

* #acknowledgewhiteprivilege

* #sharethewealth

* #helptheneedy

Life Riddles Us

Early today, this shell appeared on the beach.

It had not been there long enough to be collected.

The shell's beauty, as it becomes lace-like, is the result, most frequently, of being riddled by the sharpened tongues of tiny carnivorous sea snails.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are:" [link is to a wonderful 1966 essay by the inimitable Nat Hentoff]

“But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go - we’ll eat you up - we love you so!”

The world does eat us up as it keeps us with it. Life riddles us with mysteries (carnivorous sea snail?!), pains, and pleasures that leave our faces pitted, our knees scarred, our backs twisted, our hands gnarled.

We are lucky to be consumed by the world that loves us so.

And yet: consumption is not always pleasant. We endure great suffering as we are gnashed within the teeth of this world, some more than others.

I found this shell on Third Beach in Middletown, RI, where I am for the week supporting a dear friend who, 12 years ago at age 48, was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's.

Hers is a particularly virulent form of the disease inherent to her genetic roots in the Portuguese Azores. This goes far beyond the trembling (known as dyskinesia) you can see in Katharine Hepburn's later movies. It involves a separate but related disease, known as dystonia: painful, prolonged muscle contractions that cause abnormal movements and postures and physical damage. In my friend's case, the dystonia has been breaking bones in her spine and neck, resulting in two surgeries in each area, all only somewhat successful.

My friend is a brilliant and engaged doctor of economics. The world loves her so it is eating her up, bite by bite, each bite all too apparent to the rest of us who also love her.

Life riddles us with mysteries and holes. Why her and not me? Why do our bodies fail in such painful ways? While death is an essential part of our natures, some of the routes we take to arrive there seem unnecessarily excruciating.

And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps in all our various sufferings and pains, all of the violence and anguish, the replaced joints and cancers, the divorces and abandonments and cruelties we might understand, in our battered bones, how frail and imperfect, how vulnerable we as a species are.

We could be humbled in the face of this frailty, and in our humility we might focus on how to hold these soft, vulnerable bodies, hearts and souls, and the planet of which we are but a part, with care and kindness.

Instead in so many ways we double down, ferociously keeping death at bay with one hand while with the other wreaking the very havoc that increases our suffering: murdering, raping, and pillaging not only each other but the entire planet with toxins, trash, and tactics that brutalize it, drilling millions of tiny holes in the very atmosphere meant to protect us, in the water that is our life blood. Refusing to see how these poisonous habits are the source of so many of our cancers, so much of our suffering.

It's not about someone else "out there" or a god who is not in every one of us. It's about us.

Life riddles us. Our shells are filled with tiny holes, sometimes visible, sometimes not. And rather than exulting in the wondrous mystery of it all, we pull in our heads and pretend we are not just each a tiny organism dependent on the millions around us.

The Body and the Blood

Casting a big shadow
on my first communion.

Becoming a "bride of Christ" with my Catholic first communion at age seven was a joyous occasion. I had a pretty good if unconscious affinity for myth, parable, and fable (thank you, Aesop, and Sunday school, too) but not much of a grip on metaphor so the transubstantiation was as it should be: a mystery. Honestly, that we would eat the body and blood of Christ on a regular basis makes a lot of sense if you grow up understanding that Christ is the spirit of the world -- love -- and you need to physically ingest this spirit to become and live it.

If you don't grow up with that understanding, it's possible you do not hold food as sacred; and this in turn has supported the development of a White American culture in which food is cheapened, made unhealthy for our bodies through over-processing and additives, and then wasted while too many children experience food insecurity.

You may also believe Catholics are cannibals. Or worse.

Being confirmed by the Bishop of the Diocese of Norwich, CT in 1975 at age 14 WAS worse. I had already read Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle and quite possibly Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation lurked as a stolen library book beneath my bedroom chair. The photos of my confirmation all feature me red faced and swollen from the sobbing, screaming, middle school tantrum I seemingly held right up until the moment I was standing alongside the Bishop.

I quit going to church the moment I stripped off my hand-made red sash sporting my confirmation name in honor of my beloved grandmother, Mary. I spent the next four years in my parents' home enduring not the wrath but, much worse, the quiet disappointment of my family members.

Since then, the Catholic Church has not improved much over its history of witch burnings during the Inquisition; its Doctrine of Discovery justifying the genocide of native peoples; the sexual abuse of uncountable numbers of children and the death of many more in native boarding schools; and homophobia and the myopic misogyny of its all-male priesthood and anti-abortion policies.

Yet somehow, in the face of all this and despite 30 years of Buddhist practice, I still hang my deep faith in the mysteries of this world on the Catholic liturgy of my youth -- on communion, forgiveness, love, service, congregation and praise -- and attend mass when I can.

The reconciliation of all of this -- the differences between the shame of the institution and its many lovely people and the liturgy itself -- is no small hat trick and keeps me hard at work.

Let me just give you this. During my radical lesbian separatist heyday in the early 1990's, when I was employed by The Village Voice and also an editor for TRIVIA: A Journal of Ideas and Firebrand Books, my mother would take the train from Mystic to visit me in Brooklyn every Mother's Day. One morning I woke up to find her reading one of my issues of TRIVIA, which was crammed with lesbian-feminist philosophers, artists, and theorists including the likes of Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. Later that afternoon as we were walking down a shady block of 6th Avenue past a beautiful old Romanesque Catholic church which many Haitian immigrants attended, I asked her if she still went to church every week as she insisted we did throughout my childhood.

Mae shook her head. "The Church is just something created by men, right?" she asked me. "And they change the rules all the time. I feel closer to God in my raspberry patch."

#transubstantiation

#communion

#lesbiannation

#rubyfruitjungle

#reconciliation

#liturgy

Missing Marvelous Motors

I didn't realize how much I was missing Marvelous Mel Eaton until my dump run down the Quaco Road Wednesday morning. Melvin was only 65, a few years older than I, when he passed away two summers ago. 

There are many scenes in the rural U.S. like the photos at right of the now-abandoned Marvelous Motors, because every business out here is individually owned and operated. While there are a few franchisees (Ace Hardware, Irving Gas), we've got no stop lights and the nearest "big box" store to Deer Isle, Maine is a 2018 Family Dollar Store 20 miles away in Blue Hill.

When we lose the individual in rural America, we lose much more than a single person. We lose essential aspects of our communities that each person represents. Values. Sensibilities. Character.

The Coke machine with its block printed BACK OFF sign and the multiple Beware of the Dog postings have a disheartened look now with the weeds growing tall in front of the garage bays, the lot empty of used vehicles for sale, the mobile home bereft of its occupants. Only a bit of the shiny, Mariner blue fringe that once strung across the lot’s entrance to attract attention is visible here, forgotten on a roadside branch; the handprinted sign is fading. The row of defunct school buses which once held Melvin's massive local tire inventory are empty and the valuable automotive tools have been removed.

Marvelous Motors could be chaotic and disheveled looking even when it was thriving: boys and men and young mothers in and out for repairs, to find an affordable ride to get to work, and mostly for those stacks and stacks of tires stored in the tireless school buses. You had to know where to find him though, hidden off on the side road ending at the town’s transfer station.

In those days Melvin was a key character in the documentary video Tire Tracks by John Steed that I produced while directing the digital media program for Opera House Arts. Still cited today — sometimes negatively by those not understanding that the intentional making of tracks is not related to speeding — Tire Tracks tells a story of how rural men literally burn through tires, brakes, rear ends, “trannies”

and cash to make their marks on this world. While not a cautionary driving tale in the way many hoped or thought it should be, the video documents the peculiar alienation of white American male culture and the ingenious ways those who feel invisible create ways to be seen. 

What I really miss in Mel’s absence and the abandonment of Marvelous Motors is the kind of hurly burly, small rural business life they embodied.

The pandemic brought scores fleeing crowded American cities to remote outposts such as Deer Isle, bringing with them different sets of values and aesthetics.

For the main (and to grossly generalize), they appear to like their yards and villages tidy and neatly organized. They have enough excess wealth to trade in their used for new vehicles every three years or less, or to have dysfunctional appliances hauled away, before they have a chance to rust in the door yard; and the time to protest the construction of a Dollar store in their newly-adopted towns. And where a stern man flush with seasonal cash might find some pleasure in a new set of tires for play, the inequities of the U.S. economy mean the incoming folks have enough excess to feel entitled to post PRIVATE PROPERTY / NO TRESPASSING signs around woods and shoreline once shared by native and local communities.

The word for this invasion of excess wealth and the value and displacements of privacy that tag along with it — i.e., wealth not used for the common good -- is gentrification. Gentrification is the inflation of property values, taxes, rents, coffee prices, movie tickets and general living that occurs when individuals with more than they know what to do with drive up demand for life’s essentials and then feel the need to justify and secure their limited, rightful access to them.

I have a great fondness and longing for places such as Marvelous Motors — locally owned, individually operated, catering to working people who can’t afford a new car or who get their day-to-day pleasure from lighting up their tires — are a bulwark against gentrification. Its absence is another chink in those defenses.

#gentrification

#tiretracks

#ruralamerica

#deerisleme

The Fatal Flaw of Fatalism

 White Americans -- particularly those of us who are or who grew up working class and poor -- are very often fatalists.

For centuries those who would exploit our labor (while torturing, enslaving, and murdering our neighbors of color) have encouraged us to accept what befalls us because there is no other choice -- the world just "happens" and it "happens" to us.

The fish are either there or they are not there: it's not in our control. The climate is either warming or it is cooling: not in our control. The pandemic is going to kill more Americans per capita than in any other country: not in our control.

The "invisible hand" of capitalism or god -- too often conflated in white protestant america -- is at work.

That is what the profiteers want us to believe.

Yet even and perhaps especially for those of us who DO have faith that the world is larger than us -- that we are NOT gods and exist as small beings within a much larger universe -- the knowledge that every breath we take, every action we make impacts some other life is crucial to HOW we live our lives. The choices we make every day. Are they about ourselves alone, or do we consider our impact on everything around us?

This is why our understanding of government action or inaction is so critical to how good of a nation we actually are for EVERYONE.

The Trump Administration shrugged off the pandemic just as it shrugged off climate change. All the words and statements are on record showing that the administration's belief that the "private sector" of business would take care of us was a huge and miserable failure costing us, unnecessarily, hundreds of thousands of lives. Go back and listen to Jared Kushner saying the the procurement of PPE for our health care workers was not the government's problem, while meanwhile our health care workers, and those in their charges, were dying.

While the T Admin helped support the work of private enterprise to create the vaccines -- please remember Pfizer, the first to be released, did not use federal help -- they had NO PLAN to deliver vaccines into arms.

Now, quietly and surely, the Democrats are once again cleaning up the godawful mess left by the private-sector Republicans before them. Most of us of a certain age have witnessed this before -- remember the financial crisis of 2007-2008? -- and it would be nice if we all studied U.S. history a bit more thoroughly and remembered these lessons for the future.

U.S. government was created to BALANCE the rights of individuals for the responsibilities of the whole.

In order for ALL of us to thrive -- including our planet -- the rights of individuals or individual corporations to amass wealth at the expense of the greater good must be regulated and limited.

The world need not be a competition against each other. While we are not in control of everything, our individual actions DO matter. Every day, in every small way. We are responsible for stewarding our beautiful world for each other.

The excruciating and extreme losses the U.S. has suffered in this pandemic were not "inevitable." They did not "just happen." The Trump Administration bears accountability. And climate change is not "just happening." We all bear accountability for the choices we make that further it.

We need a government that understands its important role to work against profiteering and for the common good. Luckily we now have such a government in place. Let's all work to support #votingrightsforall to be sure we keep it.

"In America, the two very different responses to the pandemic have given us a powerful education in government activism. “For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination we needed,” Biden said, “And we have seen the tragic cost of that failure….” - h/t Heather Cox Richardson

End of Saturday AM rant -- thanks to those who read, listen, and even respond!

#voteasifyourlifedependsonit

All We Leave Behind

 

Evert Hjalmer Nelson, my dad, at left
with his mother Signe in 1959 as she
was about to set sail for a visit home
from the U.S. to her native Sweden.

A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation that moved me greatly on multiple levels.

We were prepping for a March 3 public presentation in Portland Ovations' Seeking Resonance Series -- Toward Being Future Beings, a preview of an ongoing commissioned work with Yu'pik creator Emily Johnson.

I was honored to be in the room.

We were talking about home. About our connections to place and people and ancestors. About culture and what we create from these connections.

Jason Brown, a self-professed "hyper creative" of Maine's Penobscot Nation, was among us. Jason began talking about how he was teased in school for being a "half breed" because his father was Swedish and his mother Penobscot.

As importantly, he was talking about how he knew nothing about the Swedish side of his family. They had sailed for America and left it all behind them: the language, the culture, the stories, the families along with the land.

I might be 100% French-Canadian in my genes, but my adopted family was second gen from Bohemia on my mother's side and first gen Swedish on my father's side. Similarly to the Swedish side of Jason's family, our people had left their old lives and seemingly their old selves behind with little trace when they immigrated to the States.

It's a lot to leave behind: those gifts of belonging to place and culture and the people who came before.

And as a result, White America tends to be a very disconnected culture. And in our disconnections, we have done a lot of damage -- especially to the land, but also to each other.

I was lucky growing up. Signe did keep returning for visits to Sweden. She spoke Swedish with the Swedish community in New Britain, CT, and made us Swedish foods for the holidays. Sometimes Swedish cousins would appear in CT on vacation. And when I was 13 she took me to Sweden with her for a month.

This all sounds like a lot and it was definitely something. But my dad never once went to Sweden. None of the rest of my family ever did. He did not speak the language, and as my grandmother aged we saw less and less of the Swedish cousins. I never connected with them as adults and their names and addresses are lost to me. My connections to the people who came before me are not strong, and I've noticed that is baked into White American culture. Our people were leaving behind where they came from, and when they arrived here, in order to benefit from the privileges of joining "White America," they conscientiously erased their differences.

Looking back, I see the moment when I was a teenager and became aware of this. In the 1970's, Puerto Rican immigration to New Britain boomed and new arrivals quadrupled the existing population. My father -- who no longer lived in the industrial city in central CT in which he was born -- began complaining about them. He was predominantly angry that they insisted on speaking Spanish, and often cited Signe's experience -- of arriving in the U.S. and attending night school to learn English.

Like many white western European immigrants, Signe valued assimilation. The new Puerto Rican population valued sustaining their native cultures: they brought their home with them to the mainland U.S.

We all leave things behind. Yet the history of native genocide, enslavement of Africans, and domination resulting from white immigration is a tragic result of our displacement from our own native cultures, places, and peoples. We're disconnected. We've forgotten our "we" to fiercely hold onto our "I's." In so doing, much of value has been lost to us forever -- including the humility that arises when one gives credit to those who came before.

Meatloaf and the Common Good

 

This is the Pyrex bowl in which my mother always made meatloaf.

And yes, being overseen by the Shawnee Pottery mid-20th century vintage pig bank and cookie jar in which she never kept cookies. Or coins.

I still make meatloaf in this sturdy old bowl, the same way she did: for every pound of ground meat (hamburger only in Mom's house) add 1 egg, ketchup and Worcester Sauce and salt and pepper to taste, packaged Italian bread crumbs, and enough milk to bind it all together. Set the loaf on 3 strips of bacon and put 3 more on top.

For some reason, making meatloaf for a family had me thinking about the cultural values that must be top of all our minds since the election, then January 6, then January 20.

The other overseer of both my mother's and my Gram's kitchens were magazine photos of JFK taped to the walls.

It was important to them to have a Catholic President -- not because he was a member of the same institution as they, but rather because they shared his values.

They believed in asking "not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

I suppose it sounds terribly old-fashioned and simplistic to call up this old warhorse, but I'm grateful that our new President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris are asking the same thing.

They're focused on how to help working folks rather than put more dollars into the hands of Big Business and the 1%. They're focused on ending the pandemic: on track to get more than 1 million doses of vaccine not just manufactured but into people's arms by March. They're focused on rebuilding our nation's sorry infrastructure -- think Texas in an ice storm -- because our roads and power and internet and communications are what regular people like you and me rely on to survive and to thrive.

And maybe because we too often don't share a common belief in the goodness of this universe, in which we are so small, and thus in the power of our communities -- I just don't get Republicans. Their very transparent selfishness and lust for power and control boggle my mind. I don't want to believe in it. I don't understand those who support it. I don't want you to believe in it, either.

In the faith in which my mother raised me, there was no room for living a life based on anger and resentment. We didn't have much, but what we did have -- family, a roof over our heads, meatloaf -- was a gift and a blessing not to be ignored.

My mother had multiple, painful, ineffective eye surgeries before she was 10 years old. She had a full hysterectomy at 17, in 1941. She couldn't have children. She married a man who was legally deaf.

Together, they adopted first me and then my brother. They built a home on land given them by my Gram and on my father's machinist salary. By the time I was 11 years old, we were ALL working 12 hour days on a gravel pit-turned-campground my dad had envisioned and was managing, and on which we were living.

My parents were deeply grateful. They had had plenty of experiences that could have led them to live lives of anger and resentment -- and they chose not to.

This is just one of the many wonderful articles of faith which they passed along to me. I am grateful, too.

#pyrex

#meatloaf

#commongood

#jfk

#growingupinCT

Maine Legislative Breakfast 2021: The Impact of Our Cultural Sector

Below are comments I delivered to a Maine legislative breakfast hosted by the Maine
Association of Nonprofits on Friday, January 22, 2021. By posting them here I am able to include links to underlying statistics, research, and resources for your reference. Questions? Need additional info? Please don't hesitate to be in touch with me at lindanelso@gmail.com.

Good morning. Thanks again to you all for being here --  we're all grateful for your interest in and attention to the vital work nonprofits play in Maine, as well as to the impacts the pandemic has had on our work and priorities.

I'm Linda Nelson, Deputy Director of Portland Ovations and founding Executive Director of Opera House Arts in Stonington, with you today from Bath, the homeland of the Sagadahoc of the Wabanaki Confederacy.

As I hope you are all aware, the performing arts in Maine, as around the country, were among the first to shut down and will be among the very last to regain normalcy. Stages are shuttered; hundreds of thousands of events cancelled; millions in event and related revenues are lost.

This extreme shut down is due to one very crucial fact: bringing people together is the heart of the charitable mission of nonprofit performing arts organizations.

Literally bringing people together. To share experiences. Across differences.

We are traversing an historic time when our need to create such opportunities is greater than ever. Learning and understanding each others' stories, perspectives, and cultures through music, dance, and performance -- sitting in the dark beside a stranger with whom you later talk, laugh, and cry; watching live people perform ourselves and others on stages across our great state -- is one of our most powerful, and underrated, tools for uniting us. And for healing.

That's the heart of what we need to acknowledge today: arts and culture are the unsung heroes of the strengths of our Maine communities.

Nationally, the arts generate more revenues than construction or transportation. Fact. Surprising, hey? The latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that arts and culture make up more than 4.5% of the nation's GDP, with over 5 million wage and salary workers.

Here in Maine, the last study of five years ago documented over $150 million in revenues generated by this sector, with over $12 million in state and local government revenue.

Here in Maine, for every dollar spent on a cultural event ticket a local purchaser additionally spends more than $30 in that community. A visitor, who has been attracted to that town by that performance, spends an additional $60 plus dollars.

Maine's nonprofit arts and cultural sector employs thousands of people around the state.

While these numbers generate significant impact, there is also opportunity for growth as indicated by the national figures.

But economic impact is not the only, or perhaps even the best way, to understand the impact of arts and culture in Maine communities.

That, perhaps, was best felt during Wednesday's inauguration.

When Lady Gaga performed a national anthem like no other, gesturing to the flag that still flies above what was a besieged U.S. Capitol.

When J. Lo brought her own amazing heritage to This Land Is Your Land and America the Beautiful.

And most strikingly: when 22 year old U.S. Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recited an original poem that returned the light to many hearts.

Amanda reminded me and hopefully everyone here today of Maine's own recent Poetry Out Loud champions, Joao Victor of Lewiston and Allan Monga of Portland.

THE ARTS had people weeping and remembering why we love this country. THE ARTS enflame a passion for UNITY in our HEARTS -- where it matters most.

But this pandemic has stolen many such experiences from us and will continue to do so.

My organization, Portland Ovations, is working almost entirely virtually and despite the optimism of Dr. Fauci, in his recent keynote address to the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, does not see a return to "normal" ticket sales until our 2022-23 season. Like our peers in the cultural sector, we've used our creative ingenuity to pivot -- and our pivot includes investing our budget, greatly supported by recovery dollars, directly in Maine artists, in the form of five commissions of new performances.

State and federal recovery dollars make up ESSENTIAL parts of our budgets: keeping arts workers employed and nonprofits from permanently shuttering. Even the most innovative amongst us -- and I look toward my peers and friends at Portland Stage, Penobscot Theater, Opera House Arts, Celebration Barn and beyond -- are, like the 90-year old Portland Ovations, operating at less than 20% or our usual revenue capacities.

We are all swimming hard to get back to shore -- making up new strokes, including a pilot project called the Cultural Alliance of Maine that unites Maine's cultural organizations for a stronger voice and more visible seat at the table. We can't continue to retain and attract workers and visitors alike to Maine; we can’t continue to support the Maine artists and events that are an important component of what makes Maine a special and unique place; we can’t continue to bring people together across our differences and divides without YOUR continued inclusion of the cultural sector in all that you do for Maine people.

Maine people and communities need the arts to thrive. And the arts need you.

Thank you.

#nonprofitmaine

#MANP

#cultureME

#MaineArts

The Holiday Card List Revived for MLK Day

I'm guessing that a lot of us working class white people of a certain age had a mother who kept some kind of list of Christmas card recipients.

Mine kept hers in a couple of places as time went on, but they started out very neatly on index cards in a little box. Everyone had an index card, and everyone had the many, many years marked on the card on which she had shipped off a holiday card to them.

I decided to copy this tactic. It being 2021, I loaded my list of recipients into a Google Doc in Google Drive and decided to send cards in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and our perpetual quest to become a nation that lives up to the ideals in our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution. 

It's been a long quest and it's not over yet.

Meanwhile, I keep my mother's box next to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, CA salt n' pepper shakers I recovered from my grandmother's stash when I was cleaning out my mother's house in 2014 (see previous post).

Actually, I'm not sure they're a pair. Not sure what the rabbit is doing there or where it came from. But I imagine it on its way through the hot desert (I mean, its ears are drooping) trying to find its way to Hollywood to get its paw prints in the famous sidewalk.

My mother's oldest brother, Richie, and his wife, Jody, never had kids. So they made a plan to take all four of us nieces and nephews on a roundtrip road trip to California when we turned 12. It was held out before us our entire lives, something to look forward to despite the fact that cars back then did not have air conditioning and by the time we would reach Needles, CA it would be 111 degrees in the shade.

They road tested the trip on my grandmother, Richie's mother, Mary, in the late 1950s/early 1960s. I wish any of them were alive now to talk about that trip. My grandmother was a big woman, six feet tall and over 200 pounds. What kind of car did they travel in? I know she -- a huge enthusiast for life with a loud voice and endless generosity and maybe a touch of manic-depression -- loved the trip and brought back boat loads of souvenirs -- pieces of the Painted Desert, cedar toothpick holders from Crater Lake, etc. in addition to the salt and pepper shakers -- so how did they fit all of this into the vehicle?! It had to be larger than the one in which we journeyed in 1973, a blue, four door Mercury Comet circa 1971. 

The first of the kids to go was my cousin Walter in 1965. My cousin Cindy must have been on the trip in 1969. Looking back at the sometimes violent civic unrest of that era during the height of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, a time in which the nation sustained the political assassinations of four progressive leaders, I am wondering what both those trips were like. Did they follow the news? Did they circumvent certain cities? 

Luckily my cousins are still well and with us, and I can find out. Luckily we've elected a new administration in Washington that is respectful of Dr. King's legacy, the Black Lives Matter movement, and our ongoing work for equity for all. Stay tuned.

The Slippery Longings of Crises

Last Sunday I found myself pulling out my mother's 1938-vintage Hamilton-Beach stand mixer to make some banana bread. 

Who can believe this damn thing still works. But it does, with its two white Pyrex bowls and a crumbling cord no doubt leaking asbestos covering across my counter.

This is no Vita Mix. It needs some help creaming butter and sugar together, scraping the sides of the bowl toward the beaters, unclogging the beaters which...just don't go fast enough. It's not that they've slowed down. It's that things just didn't go as fast in those days.

In the six years since she died a month before turning 91, I've been surrounded by a lot of my mother's stuff. My brother, a local garbage hauler who had loyally and miraculously lived with and cared for our diabetic parents until each of their deaths, had run up some debts and could not afford to keep the house. We had to empty and sell it. Our parents had lived in that same cheaply built tract house in Mystic, CT for 41 years at that point. Previous to that, they had resided in the house they built for themselves, with heavy plaster walls and an ocean of front lawn on land my maternal grandmother had given them next door to her own, for only 16 years before moving to Mystic to follow my father's entrepreneurial dreams.

Yes, those cereal canisters in the background of this photo were my mother's too.

Finding myself making banana bread with my mother's mixer caused wave after wave of longing for my parents and my grandmothers to crash over me: for times when I, an adopted child, was secure and loved and cherished by the strangers who took me in. Blessed.

That's how everyone wants and deserves to feel right now: secure and loved and cherished.

And very few do. The COVID-19 pandemic has us quarantined in our separate homes, many, especially elders, fighting the ills of social isolation. As I write this, almost 4,000 people A DAY are dying from COVID here in the U.S. alone. And all around the world, people continue to die not only from the pandemic but from violence, starvation, grief. Many try to flee the horrific circumstances in which they find themselves, refugees seeking better lives just as my biological French ancestors did emigrating first to Quebec and then across the border to the U.S. But we, the wealthiest nation in the world, essentially closed our borders and wallets to refugees under the Trump administration.

It's possible that Trump himself and his "base" feel the least secure, loved, and cherished. They sure act that way. Their white male "politics of resentment" is right from the playbook of the insecure. Like the Confederacy before them who fought to keep Black people enslaved in their service, these fellows' insecurity about losing their white privilege and power becomes aggression against the rest of us. The fragility of their white masculinity is on display for the world to see.

Change is tough, and to achieve equity those of us with privilege -- whether skin color, education, gender, or economics -- are all gonna have to give up something. We need to use government to do what it does best: bring us into the commons where we can figure out the difficult solutions that will best serve the most of us, and in particular those with the least among us.

It would be easier to feel compassion for these angry white men if they were not so hateful, armed, and violent.

In the meantime: we have to hold them accountable for themselves not cherishing those around them. Not the women, girls, boys, people of color, or legislators with whom they differ. They are operating under the misperception perpetrated by Trump: that their government supports their incivility. They are wrong, and our government now needs to hold them accountable for their uncivil, illegal behaviors. Only after they realize they are NOT supported can we start to urge them toward healing.

My mother never made a banana bread from scratch her life. She was a fan of Duncan Hines and Pillsbury prepared mixes, and produced unmessy, perfectly even, black-speckled little breads every time.

Mine, on the other hand, is densely filled with banana mash and walnuts.

A fine example of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Sunday Morning Observances: We Belong Together

 

Woke up at 4 am with Nina Simone in my head.

"It's a new dawn, it's a new day, and I'm feeling..."

How AM I feeling? How are YOU feeling?!

On my end: the divisiveness of the country has me truly disheartened. 

Yesterday, Trump’s motorcade drove through a far right, white supremacist crowd (have you seen the photos of the many Nazi and Confederate flags that flew above them? I don't want to do them the honor of reprinting here, but it was appalling) on his way to ... yep. You got it. Play golf.

Our lame duck president is not working to manage the growing pandemic, nor to shore up our economy being damaged by his lack of management. Instead he is playing golf, while actively encouraging these segregationists -- he is encouraging our civil division even as his many lawsuits are tossed out by the courts. He refuses to concede and continues to lie about the election and stall the transition to the Biden administration. Even worse, one of his former officials--one at the heart of the Russia investigation no less, tweeted, “The military is with the president.” 

Luckily for us, they're not. Trump's pants must be on fire with so many lies, which is why he is mostly keeping out of view and not working.

We belong together: fighting for justice for all after centuries of oppression.

Our nation does not deserve white supremacists stoking another civil war as they did in the 1850's. These are, historically, the same people as the Constitutional originalists--in fact, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson, this was one of the strategies they promoted at the time. Government could not act, could not even build bridges or roads, unless it was written in the Constitution. Because if government DID take these actions, it would build a thriving economy APART FROM their system of enslavement.

A strong government serving all people takes power from the enslavers.

The parties have flipped--Lincoln's Republican Party was formed in OPPOSITION to these white supremacist southern Democrats--but the strategies remain similar. Our modern Republican Party now represents the slaveholders' legacy, as well as the interests of the 1% who hold the majority of our nation's wealth.

They don't want government support to repair and to grow a thriving economy independent of their white male interests.

So with this historical schism very much alive and well 200 years on, we're witness to a peaceful transition of power being stonewalled by those who desperately want to keep power for themselves.

I'm asking myself, and I ask you: what are we called to do in these short, impermanent lives that we have been given?

What actions will we take today, tomorrow, next week, to best serve others and not just ourselves?

How will we continue to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice?

Sunday Morning Observances: Healing the Resentful and Aggrieved

 

It's an unusually sunny and warm day beginning the second week of November in Maine.

Some of my feeling of light and warmth has to do with the hope that washed across much of the nation last night, as we celebrated the election of Joe Biden as President and the first woman and first person of color, Kamala Harris, as Vice President.

Kamala appropriately wore white in a nod to the suffragettes who, 100 years ago this year, succeeded in passing the 19th Amendment and gaining white women the right to vote.

Black women wouldn't have the same for another 45 years, until the Voting Rights Act. Yet as Kamala so gracefully said, "I'm the first women elected Vice President and I won't be the last."

And even as I celebrate, I know that while we the people have voted that we no longer wish to be led by a man who lies, breaks the law, divides us, and serves only himself -- another 70 million of us feel this man's actions represent the American way.

As Joe Biden noted, this is really a battle for the soul of our nation. It is about the culture of our country.

Will we allow ourselves to be divided, ever angry at persons who either look different from us or hold different beliefs? Always fearful of what we are losing, rather than what we gain together? Can we rediscover values that we share?

I look around at family, friends, and communities and I hear and see and feel the resentment. The aggrievement is real. We cannot afford to dismiss or ignore it. We need to fix the roots of this toxicity at the very heart of the U.S.

For far too long we have allowed -- as a people, as a culture -- money, land, and the racism and privilege that accompany these to become our nation's bully pulpit.

We as Americans hate to admit we suffer from the same diseases that are the scourge of world politics. Racist oligarchs everywhere such as Trump on both left ("big tech," "the media") and right ("big oil," "Wall St.") -- those who have inherited and wish to maintain white wealth and power -- benefit from dividing us and deepening the oppression of many for the benefit of the few.

And yet as Americans we have an advantage, when we choose to use it, over some of our global brothers and sisters -- we still have a free and fair vote to express our voices.

This election demonstrates it is time for us to unite in our opposition to wealth inequality: to the 1% and the culture and policies that enable and sustain it.

Because democracy cannot be sustained with as many resources in the hands of so few white people.

A quick reminder of the data: As of 2014, the wealthiest 1% of Americans possessed 40% of the nation's wealth; the rest of us, in the bottom 80%, owned 7%. The gap between the wealth of the top 10% and that of the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1,000% for the top 1%. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour."

This wealth gap DOES divide us. It should not be surprising to us that so many are so open to a politics of division and resentment. We dismiss these feelings to our own peril.

And now, for the second time this century, Democrats are being asked to step in and fix a giant Republican-made mess.

The policies of resentment and aggrievement have allowed the current administration to destabilize the economy by tax cuts to the wealthy which have underfunded our common needs, such as infrastructure and education; destabilize public health by underfunding and not managing our response to the pandemic; destabilize the environment by rolling back protections designed to reduce the harm to our families and economies caused by climate change; destabilize our democracy by alleging voter fraud where there is none; destabilize our communities and our future by feeding racist fear and fury designed to drive us apart over race, gender, wealth, and more.

Our nation is unstable and reeling. We find ourselves in desperate need of policies and rhetoric that bring us together rather than tear us apart.

We need policies and rhetoric that recognize the parts of our culture, like the obsession with white-held, individual wealth over diverse community good, that really do divide us.

We need to do the hard work and take the small steps, one at a time, to get us out of the pit into which our democracy has been sinking over the last four years.

Joe Biden, a decent man committed to serving the public good for more than 40 years, and Kamala Harris, representing the future of this country, will need every bit of support from us -- they need ALL of us to, as Biden asked in his speech last night, "give each other a chance."

#uniteagainstfear #endweathinequality 

Talley's Folly at Portland Stage: It's...LIVE. And it moved me to tears

Once upon a time, sitting in a dark theater close upon others and watching even more other humans interact on stage -- making music, making art, making drama, making beauty -- was a regular part of my life: of many of our most privileged lives. Recently, thanks to an unchecked/unmanaged pandemic in this country, we've had to settle for the performances made available to us in our private homes, on our screens.

Until you are back in the room with an audience and artists, it is difficult to describe the layers of humanity we are missing in these electronic interactions.

Kudos to Portland Stage for having the courage to lead us back together with its current production of Talley's Folly by Lanford Wilson.

As a fellow arts administrator who has worked with the actors' and stage unions, as well as with the public, I know Executive and Artistic Director Anita Stewart had to move mountains to make this happen.

Lucky for us, she did. In old fashioned reviewer terms: run, do not walk, to see this production. 

Not only will you get to see a wonderfully acted and staged live performance, you'll get to feel safe as part of an audience with others. Because everything Portland Stage does around this production is geared toward keeping us safe so we can carry on together in this new normal.

For carry on we must. It is not only grocery store and health care workers that are essential to our health. It's artists. And theaters. And musicians. And the big hearted, generous, earth shaking humanity of sharing live performance. We are not creatures of social isolation. We ARE creatures of INNOVATION -- especially artists. It is our job to figure this thing out. And figure it out we are -- with Portland Stage and Talley's Folly helping to lead the way.

Thank you.

In terms of the performance itself, I'll admit to some prejudices. I'm lucky to be friends and colleagues with the actors and director, Dave Mason, Kathy McCafferty, and Sally Wood. And they all do a wonderful job bringing forward a classic from set in the Ozarks in the mid-20th century to our modern New England ears. And Anita, doubling down as she often does as scenic designer, knocked herself out by giving us a set with...water. 

How magic is that? -- Answer: it always is, to see a river replicated live on stage.

Dave does an incredible job with a big role -- lots of language, lots of trickiness, PLUS some great physical acting (ice skates!) all wrapped up in a unique Lanford Wilson character that belongs so much to the WWII era. Ostensibly a romantic comedy, Talley's Folly tackles capitalism and anti-Semitism as it goes.

But the killer for me was much more personal. In the climactic scene, Sally Talley's secret is revealed. It is a secret my own adopted mother shared [SPOILER ALERT]: not being able to have children and, at that time, being thereby considered un-marriageable. 

It's a different world today, with so many options for women to have children, so I don't mind giving up that spoiler. But seeing Kathy/Sally wracked with pain, doubled over live before me on that stage -- brought home to me, with a stab to my gut, what my own adopted mother must have felt like and endured. Until, like Sally Talley, she met my Dad: her prince for nearly 50 years, precisely because he said, "No problem. We'll adopt."

Thank you, Dave, Kathy, Anita, Sally, and the rest of the Portland Stage crew. For giving me that and other moments of emotion, of our shared humanity, safely in our new normal.