Oh, Jimmy: The Peanut Farmer Who Became A Beloved Statesman

Oh, Jimmy.

In 1980, you were the first person I ever voted for for President.

But the majority of the country, including my family and my home states, the usually reliable Democratic electorates of Maine and Connecticut -- arguably still in shock from the string of four political assassinations and frustrated by the upheavals of the1960s and 1970s they marked -- mocked you as an inept buffoon.

You broke my young and hopeful heart, winning only six tiny states and losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.

Your loss precipitated nearly 40 years of a widening wealth gap and decimation of the middle class in our country, thanks to Reagan's "voodoo," or supply side, economics and tax cuts -- in both of which too many are still fooled into believing.

You were then still young, in your 50s and not the leader you would become, belatedly winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for your "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” (The Nobel Prize)

We forget the terrible situations you inherited as President in 1977, only remembering you appeared to be unable to correct those most key to voters -- inflation, an ongoing energy crisis that was resurgent in 1979, and the Iran hostage crisis. 

Yet on your second day in office you pardoned all Vietnam War-era draft evaders. You created the Departments of Education and Energy, and introduced energy conservation, new technologies, and price controls. You facilitated a lasting Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

You were a working class kid from a small rural town who became a submariner and inherited nothing, yet then worked successfully to revive your family's peanut farm. You believed in your service to the world and pursued numerous strategies to create healing for many, culminating in your establishment of the Carter Center to promote and expand human rights in 1982 -- for which you have been working ceaselessly since.

As high school students, we made fun of your big, toothy grin and that you were called "Jimmy," had a brother called "Billy," and couldn't seem to restore U.S. power and privilege. All of which, to many, appeared "unpresidential."

Yet now again you set a leadership example for us, opting to stop hospitalized medical care to return to die at your home, with your family. Having lived a good life and choosing to die well, too.

In following your many examples, it is good for us to remember to forgive; to always to return to the potential and beauty within each of us; and to know that we are merely servants to love in this world -- and that that is a commitment which requires decades of hard work.

Oh, Jimmy. Thank You.

"The reason that remarkable stories of forgiveness take our breath away is that we instantly feel the liberation in the lifting of boundaries, the end of separation, of “inside” and “outside.”

Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, “The Seventh Zen Precept”

#1980 #voodooeconomics #wealthgap #diplomacy #jimmycarter

The Real Genius of Theater is How it Builds Community: Remembering Jean Wilhelm in Eastport

The towering Eastport Arts Center,
formerly a Baptist Church in Maine's
easternmost community.

As theater makers, we deal in physicalities.

The voices and bodies of actors. The buildings and stages in which we gather audiences and create imaginary worlds that heal our hearts and minds, that build new, temporary mini-communities with every performance. We learn to and honor being present in our bodies and places.

Our work often involves buildings -- saving old ones and at times building new to house our stages, roofs under which to bring people together.

So it was with our dear compatriot Jean Wilhelm throughout her career, but especially in the last two decades as she helped to purchase an old Baptist church in Eastport, Maine -- our nation's most eastern outpost -- and create the Eastport Arts Center.

As its website says, "The Eastport Arts Center (EAC) nurtures and promotes six year-round constituent groups engaged in theater, art, music, film education and community outreach."

Music to Jean's ears, and a song to my soul.

Jean, who was in her late '70's already when she relocated to Eastport, didn't do this on her own. She worked closely with another woman, Joyce Weber, who died two years before Jean, as well as many, many community members. Because in theater we don't do anything on our own. Theater is the art of the ensemble, of community. It is about bringing people together to share an experience, "to breathe," as one friend of mine said, "the same air."

This is its most potent power for change.

Jean Wilhelm memorabilia at her memorial
service August 13, 2022  in Eastport, Maine.

From the moment Jean sought us out at Opera House Arts in Stonington we knew she was a kindred soul. She believed deeply in the need for every community member to participate in and experience art of all forms. We asked her, in 2008, to direct a community playreading and she chose three exquisite short plays by Tennessee Williams: "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," "Portrait of a Madonna." The language in these plays is almost ridiculously beautiful, stunning, and Jean guided the community members young and old -- most unfamiliar with the work of Williams -- to find themselves within these stories from the 1940's.

Jean had fairly auspicious roots but, born in
1927 and graduating from high school in 1943, she became a woman during a time when being independent was not the norm. She had to, and did, literally sail her own course: straight through Smith College where she worked with the iconic Hallie Flanagan and on through advanced degrees in theater at West Virginia University and the University of Minnesota, on to the University of New South Wales in Australia and Goucher College in Maryland and finally on up the Maine coast. It was while getting her PhD in Minnesota that she forcefully introduced herself for hire to the legendary director Sir Tyrone Guthrie; opening up, as she said, "a whole wonderful sequence of events" including directing Guthrie's infamous worldwide touring version of Oedipus Rex in Australia in 1970-71.

The thing that most resonated with us about Jean was not even her artistic work -- we traveled up to see both Brian Friel's "Dancing at Luhnasa" and Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" under her hand in Eastport -- but her dedication to democracy: in civic life as well as in theater. The two came together for Jean as they do for us.

Jean's official President Obama
commemorative photo.

For example, at her memorial service on August 13, 2022, I newly learned she had been in front of the Eastport post office every Saturday -- protesting George W. Bush's falsified war in Iraq. She shamelessly supported Democratic candidates, including Obama. Her small-D democratic values powered her work -- as it did our own.

Jean's nephew Bill deBlasio, former Mayor of NYC.

As her most famous nephew, Bill deBlasio, former mayor of NYC noted at the beginning of his comments Saturday, the beautiful photo of Jean and Joyce talking with each other, taken by a student, was right out of the Nixon era of "un-indicted conspiracists." It turns out the two actually WERE conspiring at that moment, seated on a bench in the unfinished upstairs theater space above where the photography workshop was happening -- plotting the creation of the Arts Center.

In Jean's bright blue eyes, the world was always wonderful and marvelous and the charge was always ONWARD! This is just the expansive, glass overflowing attitude we in theater and really in all our lives need to accomplish our work and improve our communities, or so much of it would never get done. It is a world in which, in Jean's own words, death is “not frettable.” (sic)

ONWARD! dear Jean. And ONWARD! all of you making moments of beauty that gather and heal those around you, whether through theater or faith or civic duty.

#MaineCulture
#CultureChange
#NewBlogPost
#Onward

Goosed

Our biggest challenge along the
Erie Canal Bike Trail??

Hissing, beak wide open, wings spread, the goose came at my right flank. I swerved the bike and accelerated my peddling. It was a narrow miss.

The goose was protecting its brood, mate, young and fellow geese, of whom 15-20 were spread across the Erie Canal Bike Trail. Repeatedly. It's June, and the goslings are of different ages, many verging on adolescence, and the adults are in full molt: they lose their big wing feathers at this time of year, and cannot fly, leaving them extremely vulnerable.

And defensive.

On Day 1 of the ride we'd witnessed a rider knocked to the ground by a flock of geese in Tonawanda.

They appear to be the most dangerous part of our 400-mile journey. Clustered at many various points on the trail, protecting their young, charging us on our bicycles as we attempt to part their feathered flocks and urge them not-unkindly off the path into the canal.

But being goosed -- prompted, urged, herded -- is for many of us a rather necessary thing.

Doing a long ride such as this, dependent upon your own physical strength and mental determination, "gooses" one forward toward new revelations and perceptions. As any herd dog, or goose, might tell you: a bit of a sharp nip on one's haunches, a change of scenery, a physical challenge is often what one most needs to get to the destination(s) one desires.

Riding the trail last month, I was goosed to consider what it really means to be a 60-year-old queer, feminist, childless woman out in the world, a body visibly traversing in real, human time the state of NY.

In my welcoming Maine community, I live a fairly protected life in which such facts of my difference from the normative culture don't often present themselves. But out here, exposed to the hissing of geese and the fury of young white men, I am just an old white dyke in their way.

And since then, there is the Supreme Court with all its illegitimacy and unrepresentative decisions that threaten our individual human rights -- including overturning the "settled law" of Roe vs. Wade.

It's easier to forget in these days, when fluidity of gender and sexuality has been more normalized in many-but-not-all places, what internalized homophobia and misogyny feel like.

As I pushed my body and my mind along the path for those two weeks, I was reminded of the things I carry that for the most part I have successfully evaded. In response to the cat calls and questions and assumptive "sir's" comes the internalized reality that to be a masculine female is indeed not only to be triumphantly queer but to be wrong. To be a woman my age without kids or grandkids: wrong. How much easier it seems were I to take testosterone, grow a beard, lower my voice even further so I could just be one and not the Other: both. A queer butch woman, unapologetically without children, masculine and yet still a woman. Powerful in myself, cycling 400 miles: someone others in their fear of what is different would like to disempower.

My tactic for the past 50 plus years to prove my rightness to myself has been to assert the power of my sexuality. To seduce and to charm the world around me. 

But I am 60. I am tired. I don't want to charm anyone anymore. And it is in that final 10 miles, riding through the 40th mile to the 50th, that I feel very alone and sad: living proof that the choices I've made are naturally wrong. We all have these moments when confirmation bias is achieved and escape velocity not. This is the point of vulnerability at which the power of the loving community is paramount.

#newblogpost

#queer

#whatisnormal

#imokyoureok

#lovingcommunity

Post-Bike Trail Notes: The Many Roads Not Chosen

One of my many paths not chosen was the path of classical music performance.

Riding a bike every day, all day, creates that beautiful space that dancers and other performers know well: the life right here now, in the physical body in time and place.

As the cinder of the Erie Canal Trail from Buffalo to Albany unspooled beneath my wheels the first two weeks in June, I could spin into a kind of trance state of cadence and motion. Being.

Yet at every juncture, choice and often action were required. Wayfaring signage was not always available or clear, maps not detailed enough, priorities of co-riders not the same. And at times, even with due consideration, initial choices to follow a certain route had to be remade. Sometimes a path just didn't "feel right," and a 360-degree turn was required.

Bicycling is, of course, a well-used metaphor for life. And the trip gave me time to reflect on several roads I did not take.

The first of these materialized in the first few days of the ride when we arrived in Rochester -- home to the Eastman Kodak company, inventors of the Brownie camera that popularized and democratized photography at the beginning of the 20th century; and its philanthropic offspring, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Kodak Hall, the largest performance venue at
he Eastman School of Music in downtown
Rochester, NY.

George Eastman, the inventor who founded Eastman Kodak (Kodak is not a collaborating partner but rather a name Eastman devised for his company), ascribed to the philosophy of "noblesse oblige." He stood alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie as one of the most philanthropic men of his era. He provided Kodak employees the first "stock bonus" in U.S. corporate history, and invested millions in education at MIT and in Rochester. He was the largest contributor to HBCU's in the 1920's, and a pioneer in dental and medical philanthropy.

A scientist, he also recognized the links between the creative and scientific processes, particularly through music. "There are no drawbacks to music: you can't have too much of it," he famously said.

This passion led him to establish one of the nation's most famous music conservatory programs, the Eastman School of Music, where my path nearly intersected with Eastman's vision and philanthropy for music.

I became a trumpet player at age 9 by accident: we were invited to begin in our school band program at that age, and this was the instrument found moldering in my grandmother's attic -- provenance still unknown. But I took to "blowing my own horn" like a fish to water: I love music, and I love the feeling it creates in my brain and body when I create it myself.

The trumpet is an utterly collaborative, ensemble instrument: yes, you can solo, but it is not really the instrument for living room confabs. As a wind player, I pursued first concert band, then orchestral playing, then brass quartets and quintets.

My love for it was so clear that my parents -- who had earlier told me a piano was beyond our financial reach -- broke down and sent me off to NYC with my junior high band instructor to purchase a decent instrument along the hallowed musical hall of 48th Street.

But most importantly, they hooked me up with private lessons and somehow I was charmed enough to wind up with one of the best trumpet instructors in New England: Irvin Bourque, who had previously taught at the Juillard School and who had himself studied with the famed NY Philharmonic trumpeter William Vacchiano and played for the larger-than-life conductor, Arturo Toscanini (bringing a type of "What would Toscanini do?" filter to my life!).

All more esoterica on trumpet legacy than you may need on a Monday morning.

Mr. Bourque, who dragged me willingly with him from town to town as part of the Norwich (CT) Civic Band and several brass quartet/quintet configurations, had me headed toward Eastman, at which one of my best friends, a French Horn player, matriculated the year before I was to go.

Through her, I began to understand what it meant to go to a music conservatory. Hours and hours of practice alone in a cement block practice room! What of softball, what of history, what of writing, what of lesbian bars?!

The world was too wide and enticing. It distracted me from the alluring tones of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and landed me instead -- again, almost by happenstance in the form of a high school U.S. history teacher whose sister worked in Bowdoin's Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Ultimately, at Bowdoin, I DID spend hours and hours in that cement block practice room with my horn, as well as on stage with the college orchestra and pit bands, as well as on Bowdoin's fields and in its seminar rooms. Yet standing before the hallowed hall in Rochester fired my imagination: what a very different life mine would have been in choosing the Eastman path!

#music

#musiceducation

#EastmanSchool

#trumpet

#newblogpost

Our Longing for Home Along the Highways of New Ideas

We are all migrants on this continent,  even many of our First Nation peoples whose following of natural food ways resulted in the creation of winter and summer camps.

As White immigrants who arrived here fleeing persecution, poverty, and oppression and seeking something better, we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional and ahistorical -- a country full of "firsts" -- while at the same time being obsessed with the concept of "home."

Yet the internet, that glorious, fast, invisible tool that sends information, our thoughts, and visual depictions of our lives flying around the globe, is by no means the first highway of new ideas in the U.S.

That badge of honor MIGHT be said to belong to the Erie Canal, opened in 1825. 

This new super highway was quickly flooded with those headed west, as it was a relatively flat and quick route that avoided crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It is said that more migrants and immigrants used the Canal to move into and across the western frontier than any other means.

Among those headed north and west in the mid-19th century were many escaped slaves, as well as others who just didn't "fit" where they were -- the queers, the radicals, those who wanted something other than the Puritan, male, patriarchal state.

The Underrground Railroad ran strongly along the canal with critical junctions in Syracuse, Rochester, and Niagara as gateways to Canada. These cities became known for their abolitionists, who also fomented other radical, social justice oriented movements -- including Utopianism, Mormonism, and Feminism. Enveloping all of these movements was the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that was so strong in western and central NY along the Canal that it became known as the "Burned-Over Diistrict." Without access to many trained clergy, individual laypeople created an evangelical air of "extravagant excitement" -- leaving the impression in many others that religion was a mere delusion -- all seeking the path to "go home" to the Lord.

Among those who had his beginnings along the canal was L. Frank Baum, noted author of The Wizard of Oz and a large number of fantasy books, born in Chittenango in 1856. A small, family-run museum alongside the canal exemplifies our obsession with Oz, Dorothy, the Wizard, the Witches, and of course the yellow brick road.

The scene I best remember from the cherished movie version of this book is at the end, when we are back in black and white from our Technicolor fantasy and Dorothy is waking up in bed surrounded by family and farmhands -- all of whom had become characters in her fever dream. "There's no place like home," she is chanting/mumbling as she awakens from her unconscious. There's no place like home.

As an adopted person and in spite of my wonderful adoptive family, I too am a person who will always be yearning "to go home." But as so many have said - from German-Jewish refugee philosopher Hannah Arendt, who spoke of the need of the persecuted Jewish people to carry their libraries with them, in their heads, as they fled pogrom after pogrom; to current musicologist and musician Rhiannen Giddens, who speaks of the power of music to allow us to carry our ancestral homes in Africa and the Middle East within us as we flee and fly -- the only homes we have are those we carry within us.

One more reason for raising readers, writers, musicians and artists, and for developing rich, complex arts and cultural sensibilities in our selves and our communities.

#arts #culture #eriecanaltrail #bikeride #Oz #home #community