Happy Easter

Just a post at twilight, just before I go, (to watch The Simpsons, and then to bed). Best Easter wishes to those few who may stumble in here this evening. Not that you asked, but here's what we did today.
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Our Easter Sunday began with an 8AM Mass here at the Catholic Church in our tiny northern border town. The kids attend Catholic school and so pretty much know the drill. My Methodist upbringing left me a little at sea (kneel, genuflect, kneel etc) but I liked it. We weren't much for statues and incense back at Eastern Parkway United Methodist, but the little church in our village here has quite a beautiful statue of the Virgin and Child and I liked the incense burning bit. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the priest here at the moment is Nigerian. I had read about him a few years ago in a local paper, when he was new in Vermont and assigned to a parish in a neighboring county. He's a long way from home, and believe me when I tell you our village is a little thin on Nigerians. He had a lovely voice and lots of charisma. Watching him minister to all the stolid farm-town lilly-white Yankees, in his demonstrative way, was touching to me, and heartening about the whole Big Picture.


Then it was home to put out an Easter Dinner spread for ourselves and some Montreal friends. WHusband had brought all kinds of great stuff from the Slovenian butcher and Italian grocer in Montreal and I dragged out the fancy vintage china and flatware (auction bargains all), really cleaned the dining room (which serves as an office and rec center most of the time) and a good time was had by all. I played vinyl record albums of movie musicals all afternoon: Gigi and My Fair Lady and Oliver, and music hall favorites from the 19th Century (hence the reference, which you may have missed, to "Just a Song at Twilight"). The music helped to put us all in a good mood and to keep us there - even me with what seemed like a thousand dishes to wash before all was said and done.


It's Clean! Quick take a picture!...

In all the driving around I have been doing (see the last post) I have had the chance to listen to a lot of music. One of my favorite CDs is Johnny Cash Greatest Hits. (Aren't I full of surprises?) Johnny Cash makes me proud to be an American. His version of "Were You There", with his wife, June Carter Cash and her Carter family sisters singing along, is my favorite song on the record. It's a great song for Easter and here's a version for your consideration. It's fun (and funny) - but I don't think it is mocking (or I wouldn't have posted it). If you are put off by Lego people singing gospel, just listen. (You have to admit, these filmmakers made a great job of animating this). June Carter reaching for (and finding) those high notes goes right to my heart. Enoy, put away intellectual doubt, and have a happy Easter.

Some Local Scenery

I meant to sneak out of the house this morning BEFORE the kids were awake so I could take a quiet walk with Maisy up on Jay Peak. The sun is coming in earlier and earlier and the floor boards get creakier and creakier with the predictable result that kids woke up and said they wanted to come too. Not that I don't like to have them along, of course, but when I am planning a real walk they tend to cramp my style. After about 20 minutes this morning on the lovely Jay golf course (they are still skiing at Jay but golf will be coming soon) the Understudy slipped into Goth-Tween mode and complained loudly that she was starving.

Amazing what the dark looks of an 11-year-old can do to bright mountain scenery...


So, the walk was short, but it had its rewards.




Hot chocolate in the cafeteria was restorative...


A Little More Snow...

And on Thursday, we had one of the Vermont versions of "April Showers". That would be snow showers. The snow was gone by 11 AM, but it looked nice for my return to the Recreation Path in Stowe. This is Mount Mansfield, the highest mountain in Vermont, where they are also still skiing, at least for a bit longer.



It still looked a lot like Christmas, briefly.



I should really take a picture of the dusty dashboard of my car as that is the local scenery I see most often lately. Somehow, our lives have been contorted into a shape that has lately required me to drive at least 3 hours a day. (There are two, count 'em two, nag lights lit up now on the old dashboard - "Check Engine" and "Maintenance Required" - I was going to get some black tape and cover them up but I am getting really good at ignoring them. My carbon footprint must be like Godzilla's. Sorry about that. We're trying to make a new arrangement.)

I manage only because I can get out of the car and walk around periodically.

Those Are Pearls ...

(John W. Waterhouse, Miranda - The Tempest (1916)

We had theater tickets both nights this weekend!
Weellll, before you suffer a pang of jealousy or wonder at the social and cultural swirl that effervesces around us here on the Vermont side of the Canadian Border, the tickets weren't exactly for Broadway. We were headed more off Broadway, like off in a school cafeteria. Our tickets got us seats at the lunch tables (thankfully, these can be converted into benches) to see two performances of Shakespeare's The Tempest, as enacted by the middle school students at the small Catholic school attended by the children of the Last House.

Our own little girl, (known on these pages as the Understudy) made her theater debut as a Sprite.


The Understudy On Stage as an Otherworldly Creature

The director of this production, an extremely dedicated woman with a history in professional theater, reinterpreted it some, but all the poetry was there. The kids all hit their marks, every speech was delivered, the story was told again and credibly. Oh, the effort involved!

I haven't gone back to the actual text to see if Sprites were an, hmm, "innovation" for a middle school production (where the casting director needed to find a few parts for fifth grade girls), or if they are creatures of Shakespeare's own invention. Somehow, either way, I like to think he would have approved of having 11-year-olds appear in silvery togas to do a dance, and to move the plot along by doing the bidding of Prospero and the island gods.

Both Whusband and I were surprised to find that sitting through this version of The Tempest was not at all a chore. Maybe now that I am well into my 40s, I am finally ready for Shakespeare. Maybe I would have liked it better and understood it more all along if I had watched it acted live by school children.


Great Juno & Company

In any case, I can honestly report that this was my best experience of Shakespeare to date, and not just cause my kid appeared in brief flashes. It was a pleasure to see it played and to hear it spoken by these earnest young people. As I shifted on that hard bench (in a darkness achieved by taping cardboard over the windows) I was reminded of Frank McCourt's reminiscence of Shakespeare in Angela's Ashes . He wrote about how, when he had been hospitalized with a near-fatal illness as a kid, he heard, or read, some lines from Shakespeare while he was convalescing. He said them aloud, over and over, not really knowing what they meant, but because he found them, "like jewels" in his mouth.

The Director of the school version rejiggered the famous speech delivered at the end of the play by Prospero, a character originally played by Shakespeare himself, in his final performance in his final play. She moved this bit, which appears in Act IV Scene 1 (as I just learned) to the end of the play and integrated it with the rest of the speech made there. Prospero, after the action is done, addresses the audience not as Prospero, but as Shakespeare (or so we were informed). Whether this is exactly correct, I don't know. I think the lines fit very nicely at the end of the play and I have been pondering them since I heard the 14-year-old Prospero speak them twice over this weekend. Here they are for your consideration.

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Typing the Letters Off My Keyboard

Our foremothers read the covers off their Bibles. I have typed the "p" and the "h" off my keyboard. Hmmm. "HelP!?"

It is a cheapo Ebay bargain laptop. I bought a warranty that is probably still good but I would be both worried and embarrassed to send this off to be repaired: worried that I would lose all the files, especially the pictures that are stored here, and embarrassed about the manky swill that lurks beneath (as I can now see). Has the science fiction story "It Came from the Keyboard" been written yet?

Truant in the Trees & Treasures: Could This Be George Washington's Teacup?

Shackleton is being tutored three days a week now, far from the Last House, at a place where they have experts who will transform him into a reading boy. (Oh please, and fast! These experts don't come cheap).



Tutoring ended at noon today, a Friday. I was supposed to be at work but because WHusband is down Mexico way giving a paper at some academic conference, and because tutoring must not be missed, I took the day off to attend to Shackleton.



Remember, it was NOON on a FRIDAY when Shack was sprung from tutoring. His school is about an hour from the tutoring center, meaning he wouldn't get there til 1 PM. Schol ends at 3 PM. The sun was out. Our favorite park, Redrocks Park in South Burlington, Vermont -- where some of the last old-growth trees in Vermont grow on cliffs above Lake Champlain -- was just down the road. Should we drive an hour back to school or get a picnic lunch and go to Redrocks?



One guess...

In Other News

My day began today with WHusband summoning me to the phone with shampoo in my hair. His hair was practically on fire down in Mexico because we got a robot call from a credit card company yesterday saying "Call Immediately about Your Account." I passed on this info. in an email, but it turns out he couldn't call from Mexico - the number wouldn't work. "Fix this!" He was nearly frantic. I could not fix it for various reasons. (Like, I am not on this account). Long story short, after many early morning abortive attempts to resolve the mystery credit card issue ("call and enter this code," was all the instruction I had, and the code didn't work) we left late for school. I drove through the morning's gray rain in a BAD Mood. After dropping Shack with the experts, I was on my way to a computer somewhere to see if I could attack the credit card problem online when my attention was diverted by a sign "Williston Antique Center" and a flag that fluttered by the door, "Open". The sun came out at about that moment.

Brown transferware from the aesthetic period is a recent interest. Et, voila:








And haven't we been talking off and on about hat boxes?



And you know my unfortunate weakness for anything English and twee? I think these are from about 1948...



I felt much better after an hour in that shop. The jug may have to go to EBay to finance this little bit of therapy. However it works out, though, it was cheaper than a marriage counselor or a divorce lawyer.

I didn't get to my email til we got home around dinner time. It turned out there was no fraud. (He finally got through to them on his own). The robot phone call was the fraud. Take note. Whusband was apologetic in his last email.

One Last Thing - Could This Have Been George Washington's Tea Cup?

After tutoring yesterday (Shack doesn't go back to school on Thursdays cause tutoring starts late) we went to the household goods store at Recycle North. It's a great place where they sell donated goods for good purpose. I love it because you never know what you'll find and I have no guilt buying stuff there. Shack got a Soap Box Derby trophy and a change bank and I got a bunch of Made in USA midcentury pottery:





for about $6.

My great find yesterday, however, may be this little teacup. It was sitting with all the other 25 cent tea cups - but I could see right away it was old, old, old. Any experts out there who can weigh in with some info.? It is not so white as modern porcelain and it is rough to the teeth when you rub it. (I think this means something about how it was made, which is why I am willing to share that I have rubbed a junk-store teacup against my teeth.)









OK experts, do your stuff. I would be grateful for anything you can tell me about this object. We're talking, there's-a-prize-in-it-for-you grateful. Something kind of good, though not this teacup. I am taking it to Shelburne Museum next time I go...

The Sun Coming Up in March

Just this morning, a few minutes ago...



And yesterday, about 7 AM - the sun was off to the right and a rainbow of sorts appeared in this cloud.

March has its consolations.

A Little Cecil Beaton Update:

For those of you who might be in London sometime in the next couple of weeks, the famous Chris Beetles Gallery is having a Cecil Beaton retrospective (in conjunction with Sothebys) for about a month starting on April 22. I take it that means a whole bunch of his photos are going on the block in May. For those of you who will be in London this spring with a wad of cash, take note.

Sisters

A couple of months ago iTunes gave away a song called "Hometown Glory" by a teenaged British singer called Adele. I like to get things for free, so I downloaded it. Adele was described by the iTunes mavens then as the Next Big Thing over in the UK. I didn't hear much about her after her moment in the Free-Download-of-the-Week Sun.

Well, that has changed, hasn't it?



I was put in mind of Adele tonight in a roundabout way. My friend Nan, over at Letters from a Hill Farm, (see the sidebar), recently posted a Dusty Springfield video on her blog. You should go to there and check out a link to a WBUR in Boston interview about the wonders of Dusty and all Nan's other great recommendations - for all manner of things, from muffin recipes to murder mysteries. (I'll give you the video here too, in a minute).

After being reminded by Nan of how great Dusty Springfield was, I ran back to iTunes and bought a few DS classics. Listening to those put me in mind of Adele, who seems to be carrying the fire of White-English-Girl-Genuine Soul. "Hometown Glory" has become one of my favorite songs. I did a little reading about Adele just now and learned that she did, in fact, seem to be fizzling in the US until she appeared on the same Saturday Night Live show that featured Sarah Palin last year. There, she sang this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz7vGW2_5c0 (sorry, you have to cut and paste the link to Youtube as embedding has been disabled; it's worth it).

I can't believe this girl is 20 years old. What a gift! I hear she is just starting a concert tour in the U.S. this month and will sing with Etta James at the Hollywood Bowl in June at the end of it. I don't like crowds, and I don't like California, but I would like to see that. So, while Fergie may claim (in "Fergalicious,") that there "ain't no other lady can put it down like [her]" here are some others who don't need to brag in or about their songs...

Some classic Dusty to complete this evening's circle: