Live Long and Prosper: the Power of Performance

Dr. Ruth E. Grauert -- otherwise known to her familiars as Reg -- was a choreographer, lighting designer, production stage manager, dance critic and, with her life partner Frances Reid, founder of Bearnstow, a camp on Parker Pond in Mt. Vernon, Maine.

Reg lived to be 101, passing away just a year ago on May 20, 2020.

You can watch and be inspired by her dancing at age 100 here.

Reg and her legacy bear strong witness to the power of performance in our lives.

I'm sad and embarrassed to admit that, despite our firm commitment to contemporary dance for 17 years at Opera House Arts, we were too busy to experience this place, and her, in Reg's lifetime.

Thanks, however, to an invitation from my Maine performing arts colleague Laura Faure, I had the amazing good fortune to visit Bearnstow a week ago. The camp had finished its sessions for area students in July, and was between workshops for adults with two dancers I much admire: Clair Porter on "Writing and Moving" and K.J. Holmes on "Combining Disciplines for Creative Performance."

Of the 17 people at the camp during my visit, several had been engaged with Bearnstow for many years. Two in particular captured my imagination: a woman, first brought to camp by her mother in the 1970's, on her annual stay with her own two kids; and the great human, dancer, and choreographer Bebe Miller, chair of the Bearnstow board -- who had also grown up there beginning in the late 1950's when her mother was the camp nurse from Red Hook, Brooklyn. 

I found the depth of the connections between these two, their families, and Reg and Bearnstow to be very moving. Like the long lives of the loons that proliferate on the camp's lake, the place's long history creates a rich humous, many layers of smells and vitality and creativity that hum with fertility through the buildings and the paths between them.

The place itself is, as one of the generational attendees noted, remarkable for its stillness. Like many traditional Maine sporting camps, as an example of which it is on the National Register of Historic Places, it is a congregation of small wooden cabins along a densely forested lake shore. From the water, the cabins are barely visible through the spruce woods that, as Bebe remembers, once mixed with many birch, the decaying white-skinned remnants of which line the pathways and litter the forest floor.

In contrast to this long steady stillness of purpose and being, the mainstream White U.S. culture that is my own heritage is so much about change, the "melting pot" that is Whiteness: about letting go of connections to one's past, one's language, and even one's ancestors. I've experienced this phenomenon as an adopted child working to piece together family histories of first generation grandparents and parents. So much is lost; the dirt beneath our feet unnecessarily thin.

But this land's native peoples, and those who were brought here as enslaved labor, know and acknowledge the power of ancestors. We gain depth when we know and love our roots, when we pay tribute to all those who made it possible for us to be here to create the newness we each create. We wouldn't be here without these ancestors and places, and how much more delightful to gratefully know and honor their stories and lives that we may, from the layers of accruing soil, create more complex and meaningful art and lives ourselves?

Reg's long life and the legacy she has left make all this visible -- she indeed lived long and prospered -- for those who wish to see with our hearts as well as our eyes.

Laura, Bebe, Molly, Alison, Peter and others are working to build on and to extend this legacy into the future, so we, too, as well as those who follow us may experience the deep, generous creativity that is Bearnstow Camp.

To learn more about Bearnstow and Reg, check out the Bearnstow Journal. Most recently, Maine journalist Bob Keyes wrote a great article on the camp in the Portland Press Herald.

#dance

#liveperformance

#bearnstow

#mainecamps

ICYMI: data on Republican fiscal policy

 ICYMI, especially my Republican friends and fam: tax cuts and private investment are not the only keys to economic growth. In fact, since Reagan launched his assault in 1980 on government's role in balancing capitalist greed, these types of economic policies have been only the keys to increased deficits -- you know how much of a hole the Reagan, Bush, and Trump administrations left the economy, right? -- and increased inequality, i.e., the rise of the 1%.

The facts are that Biden's American Rescue Plan is doing its job. Not only is the economy booming, with unprecedented job growth in July (unemployment is now at 5.4%), but salaries are 4% higher. This is crucial as we should be ashamed to admit that our nation has been home for too long to many F/T, over-employed workers whose wages do not put them above the poverty line.

The new infrastructure bill -- finally passed, after much yapping and no action during the Trump admin -- is projected to create another 3 million jobs over the next 10 years. Not to mention give us better, more cost-affordable, and more universal high speed internet access, repaired roads and bridges, and more environmentally friendly technologies.

This is what government can and should be doing for us: balancing individual and corporate greed with the common good in order to increase prosperity for all -- just as FDR's and Eisenhower's administrations did during and after the Great Depression and WWII. Unregulated capitalism fails everyone but the 1%. Let's hope an increasing number of Republicans stop being obstructionists and continue to get on board with these facts and sense of common purpose to serve.

#PayAttention

#VoteSmart

#commongood

h/t Heather Cox Richardson for data

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.