We're excited to arrive in Nashville. I can see Loretta Lynn as she comes onto the Grand Ol' Opry stage for the first time. And Johnny Cash. The Carter Family. Minnie Pearl! Howww - dy! Buck Owens and his stars-n-stripes guitar. These were the icons of my growing up years; and my mother to this day, at 84, is glued in front of Country Music TV (OK, which to me sounds like pop radio, but who's to say??).
Not to mention, we are on the Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant trail. Our pals (see post below) came out here last spring to perform at the Frist Center for the Arts, in coordination with a Picasso-Matisse exhibit.
Like any visitor by car, we first get caught in the concentric swirling circles of highways, looped around the city like multiple strands of wooden beads (can't really say pearls, much as one might like to!). Working our way in, and in, and in: is there a there there?! Signs for Opryland and the Grand Ol' Opry and Opry Mills Drive; the city towers are still far off, but we careen off the exit as directed.
What we've got here is a mall; actually, more than a mall, a Disneyland. It turns out that the staggering number of visitors to the opry has caused them to rebuild it as a theme park, well outside the city itself. ! who knew?! I feel as if I have not been paying attention. Surely my aunt and uncle have visited, have told me this.
We drive by the ginormous Outdoor World building (irony not lost); the multiplex; the Grinch Ice Show; the box that is now the Grand Ol' Opry itself. We drive through the parking lot and out without stopping.
We need a downtown. Please. Somewhere. Anywhere. But first, for JJ, a Steak 'n Shake.
It turns out we have to go 30 miles south of the city for lunch at the latter, but we do. There is nothing so good as memory food. Hopefully we will naturally run into others along the route: thick shakes, shoe string fries, black and white tiles with gleaming stainless steel fixtures, thin thin thin steakburgers, no ketchup in sight this is the south they don't use it, JJ tells me. The waitress's voice is so preternaturally high we can barely have her talk to us, but we persevere and eat our steakburgers, me while reading Rick Moody on the Bible.
Now into Nashville. I am convinced there is an "old music" section of the city; I know for sure Loretta Lynn did not make her historic teen age debut at the mall we just visited. And sure enough, we find a beautiful historic train depot (now turned into a hotel); a grand classical post office (now become the Frist Center for the Visual Arts); and then a series of glass towers and boxes with rocket-shaped accoutrements atop them . . . we seem to have entered the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland. We enter one of the rocket ships, a glass paneled, triangular pod attached to a huge box that is the performing art center. Rows upon rows of self-serve electronic ticketing agents--maybe this IS the train station?? No, Stevie Wonder will be here in December . . . we talk to a nice blonde young man (we are definitively in blonde country now, and when I point this out to JJ she says yes, she was amazed when she came east, everyone was small and dark, the sky was small and dark, the people small and dark) who points across the street. Sure enough, at the foot of all the glass towers, we see a bulky brick building with cream trim. This, now renamed as some auditorium, was first built as a gospel house and was then for many years Music City: the place to which the legendary country stars pulled up in their black Cadillacs and two-toned rusted sedans and made their debuts. "They bring the Opry back here in the winter," the young man says, smiling. He then points out the Country Music Hall of Fame: another giant cement and glass box, this one adorned by cement artifice to suggest, maybe?, a piano, down the opposite block.
We go take a picture of the old Music City (above). Then we leave Tomorrowland behind us.
Late Monday afternoon we fought our way, as always, out of New York City. It is a place that reluctantly lets one go. There were so many more things we wanted to do there that we might never have left; and it was not a pleasure navigating the van through the Holland Tunnel and up to Route 80 across Jersey and the Delaware Water Gap, along with the thousands of commuters who do the two-hour drive daily to Pennsylvania. We did arrive at Whispering Pines Campground, north of Bloomsburg, PA, after dark, and settled in for our first humble dinner of crackers and cheese and pickles and wine; and our first night in the van. The air was cold but hey: with the two of us plus Tosca and Jack, you can believe the van is warm!
All of this as preparation for the great pleasure, early Tuesday morning, of meeting with Jerry Stropnicky, the Ensemble Director at Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (http://www.bte.org/). Jerry is a founding member of this 30-year-old theater company in rural Pennsylvania, founded out of love and respect for an amazing teacher, Alvina Krause (see photo of the theater exterior at top; and then Judith standing to the right of the ghost light on the stage), whom the founding members of the ensemble followed to PA from Chicago. BTE is an amazing and interesting artistic model for OHA: right up to the fact that they just had to re-engineer themselves to survive financially, on the eve of their 30th anniversary. Yikes. But they care about community-based theater in the same way we do, which is to say: making new work that reflects and moves the community in which we live. And they do it, with passion, and have done so for 30 years. Mazel tov to them; and thanks to Jerry for taking time out of his busy, between production schedule to have breakfast with us (at Perkins Steak and Cake, which was once a favorite of my dad's) and give us a tour of his lovely Art Deco theater in this humble little 'burg.
Most of the runners paint or otherwise wear their names on their sleeves, as it were, so you can cheer them on by name: and for 26 miles it seems all of NYC is out there doing just that for more than 13,000 runners--in specialized wheelchairs as well as clown suits--as they navigate the city from boro to boro.
