Walking the Berkshires

Holding the Groove

I grew up at a rural boarding school in New York's Hudson Valley.  The formative years  were 1976-1982, before I went off to boarding school myself.  The students in those days still wore their hair long, and the girls favored long overcoats and fedoras.  I idolized the high school students who were actors, and the ones who played guitar on the steps of their dorms and faced their huge stereo speakers out windows towards the quad. 

Disco was dead on arrival, but not the Grateful Dead, nor were the Talking Heads.  Classic Rock was not yet a commercial radio format; it was what your older cousins or big sister turned you on to, before they left home and moved on to new sounds.

Back then you discovered new music in used record stores, from dorm mates who hailed from hipper locales, or over the weak signal of some backwater college radio station.  Forget about wanting my MTV; there was no cable and barely any television reception so we went without.  We traded tapes until the clones lost all fidelity.  We taped pennies to the stylus to hold the groove. 

Today my vinyl sits in the attic, waiting for me to gather up the components needed to reassemble an analog stereo system with those huge, Boston Acoustics speakers from my parent's living room that now sit mute and unconnected.  I bought my last vinyl recording in 1989 - a used one at that from Plastic Fantastic Records store, that one-time music collector's mecca out on the Main Line. I'm not sure what market there is today for an original recording of Bob Weir's solo album Face, but I have it upstairs, along with lots of other music from my youth that was old even then.

I have written before about music as touchstones of the past, reflections of the person and the place I was at the time.  If I find myself driving along, up and down the dial, and suddenly I hear "Rudie Can't Fail" or "Like a Rolling Stone" - or, God help me, "Sugar Magnolia", then I drive down other highways of the mind, back in that familiar groove when I was 12, or 16, or 20. I am still a tourist, though, an observer from the future, when the switch gets flipped and the music comes from "another times forgotten space." 

The soundtrack of my life today is much harder to pin down.  The source material is different, for one thing, and my environment is not rich in new sound.  I am singing more, though, as often as not around a reenactor's campfire -  "Give me the punch ladle, I'll fathom the bowl" - and sometimes lyrics of my own devising.  You won't be hearing any of these on the radio, though they sometimes find their way onto Youtube.

I still love a righteous groove, plenty of bottom, and hot horn hits.  I'm partial to songs that last more than 3 minutes.  In this age of earbuds and bowling alone, sometimes I want to lift the sash and let some mighty music off the leash.  Perhaps on the first warm day of Spring, when all these pupating houses disgorge their blinking butterflies, I'll find what is hip in the old vinyl stacks.

 

Living on Sugar Mountain

We have been enjoying a remarkable stretch of fine summer weather here in the Litchfield Hills.  True, there has been some rain, and in general the season has been wetter and cooler than usual, but for all that there have been a number of brilliant blue skies with low humidity and a fresh wind.  The temperatures have stayed in the comfortable 80s and high 70s during the daylight hours, with cool evenings ideal for sleeping.

Nonetheless today I hear the drone of the first cicada, a harbinger of the advancing season if ever there were one.  My vegetable garden is in that transitional stage where the early greens and herbs have bolted but the beans, squash and tomatoes have yet to ripen.  The wild blackcaps are in season now, if one knows where to find a sufficiency without undue risk from poison ivy, and the cultivated red raspberries in my yard are more productive than in other years.  My thoughts turn to pie, and vanilla ice cream smothered in berries, and cool drinks in the evening shade.

I am also considering which of my potential summer projects I will actually tackle this year.  Will I get the oft-threatened dumpster and cart away the accumulated dross and bulky waste produced over a decade in residence, or will I sharpen my chainsaw and drop the sickly butternut and carve another totem pole?  Is this the year when I will take the well seasoned ceder posts and make a pentagonal rondavel complete with phragmites thatch?  Will I muster the energy and enthusiasm required for any of these ventures, or will I be content to trim the verge, weed around the edges, and acknowledge that I am still weary from the long journey to life after divorce?  Despite my genetic predisposition and familial conditioning to bustle, there is something to be said for simply taking one's ease.  For that, there is fresh mint for iced tea, and the occasional key lime mojito.

Today my children will come over from their mother's for the afternoon so that the three of us can go to the local carnival.  They have an African Elephant to ride and the usual carni amusements, and there is a model train display in the partially restored Union Train Station.  It is a fine day for cotton candy and colored balloons.

 

Into White

"I built my house from barley rice
Green pepper walls and water ice
Tables of paper wood, windows of light
And everything emptying into white."

- Cat Stevens

(Not So) Easy Rider

 

"The river flows, it flows to the sea
Wherever that river goes that's where I want to be
Flow river flow, let your waters wash down
Take me from this road to someother town

All he wanted was just to be free,
And that's the way it turned out to be.
Flow, river flow, let your waters wash down
Take me from this road to some other town."

- Ballad of Easy Rider (Roger McGuinn)

 

 

 

 

 

Caption This!: 20 years after edition

Through the magic of Facebook, this phograph came back from my collegiate days fronting for a 16 piece Funk Band with these fine folks.  My son and daughter looked at this picture, and their father's younger self, at left, and had very revealing responses.

Emily (age 10): My Dad looks so cool!"  (I am doomed).

Elias (age 7):  You look like the Duke of Buckingham! (as played by Simon Ward in the 1973-1974 Three Musketeers movies, favorites in our house).

In any case, the picture is a priceless candid of the Hiram L Weinstein All-Star Memorial Funk Project in action in the Spring of 1990 at Haverford College.  What it really needs now is a witty caption that only you can provide.  Have at it!

Harry's Reply

Those of you who craved the full text of Haverford Harry's Reply after reading this post about the Bryn Mawr step sing last Alumnae Weekend need look no further, thanks to the Class of 1967's online songbook.

Harry's Reply
To the tune of (The Girl that I Marry)

The girl that I marry will have a degree,
Not B.A., nor M.A., but Ph.D.
A Mawrter to the core!
She's enlightened, but frightened:
Three locks guard her door.

Her suite will be occupied by ten cats,
A parakeet, goldfish, and two white rats.
Mind's precocious, hair's atrocious;
If you get her in bed, she's ferocious.

Her books are all fingered and thinly worn.
That text in her knapsack is really Greek porn.
Education, then stagnation,
Bryn Mawr women are doomed to frustration.

She seems to think all men have one-track minds,
While brushing her teeth, she first closes the blinds.
She's a sickly, strangely picky,
With her ten o'clock tea friends, she's cliquey.

Yet the Mawrter I cherish
Has deans that would perish
If they knew she was married to me --
(spoken) For only failures wed!

"The Tea Party Chorus" (à la Gilbert and Sullivan)

The Tea Party Chorus

A libretto by Tim Abbott

(With apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan and my right-of-center friends.  Who loves ya, Baby?)

 

From the Right of the Republic

We’re tri-cornered as can be!

We wave the flag and our tea bags

At  Washington, D.C.

We do the Limbaugh Limbo

And we’re at the call of Beck.

We raise our fists at Socialists,

We’re madly mad as heck.

 

(chorus):

When there’s Shiites in our bedsheets,

‘Bama bailing out our spreadsheets,

Then we‘ll march there like a March Hare

And we’ll have a Tea Partee!

(yes we’ll march there like a March Hare

And we’ll have a Tea Partee!)

 

We don’t demand Miranda rights

For every terrorist.

Just like the Founding Fathers

We’re Guerrillas in the Mist.

We’re Right, and tight, and mostly white

But free of prejudice.

We’re offended by “Teabagger”

(Though we don’t know what that is)!

 

(chorus):

When Obamacare’s solution

Violates the Constitution,

Then we‘ll march there like a March Hare

And we’ll have a Tea Partee!

(yes we’ll march there like a March Hare

And we’ll have a Tea Partee!)

 

On a mission for emissions

That no one may cap and trade,

We’ve got Ron Paul ‘stead of Rupaul

Heading up our Pride Parade.

So when Birchers turn to Birthers

Sure to stir a Patriot’s blood,

You can keep your Samuel Adams;

For our movement moves with Bud!

 

Chorus):

When economies are failin’

What you need is Sarah Palin!

Then we‘ll march there like a March Hare

And we’ll have a Tea Partee!

(yes we’ll march there like a March Hare

And we’ll have a Tea Partee!)

Serial Optimist

This has proved to be a week where everything keeps coming up roses.  It is a week of heartsong and merriment.  All this in spite of everything, or because the silver lined clouds are pure silver in shrouds.  So tap your feet while they still touch the ground and let the warmth shine through the tears because it is June and there are always better possibilities.

The Return of Haverford Harry

There used to be a much closer connection between formerly all-male Haverford College and the women of Bryn Mawr just a short stroll out the Main Line.   Even in my day, when Haverford was co-ed with a vengeance, the bi-college identity was inclusive enough for there to be room for that species of male, of which I was a proud member, known as the Bryn Man, who gravitated toward the Bryn Mawr vibe. 

The two institutions and their student bodies have fewer interstices today, which I consider a great shame, yet the pulse of that dynamic tension and affection of old still beats when both colleges invite their Alums back on the same weekend, and so I knew that the first night of my reunion I would spend at the Bryn Mawr Step Sing.  I also suspected that when duty called, I would not hesitate to answer, but more on that in a moment.

Step Sings are important and beloved rituals at Bryn Mawr, as indeed they were in my mother and grandmother's days at another of the Seven Sisters.  Classes with their distinctive owl lanterns convene under the direction of their respective songs-mistresses about the Senior Steps on the side of Taylor Hall.  They draw from a songbook that includes generational anthems, rounds and ribaldries, and often punctuated by the college cheer invoking the Goddess Athena:

Anassa kata, kalo kale,

Ia ia ia Nike,

Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr!

There is a Haverford rejoinder, cribbed from Jabberwocky - "O frabjous Day! Calooh, Callay!" - but there are few now who remember it.

At the Step Sing last Friday, I arrived fashionably late with a Mawrter for company, only to find "the precession had proceeded according to precedent" and thus had not yet gotten underway.  There were hundreds of alumnae and their friends and families, including children swirling glow sticks and more than a few clinking glasses.  We knew it was going to be an eventful evening when the class of 1940 got the ball rolling in spectacular fashion.  A gray haired nonagenarian in a short skirt with long woolen stockings of some indeterminate hue and wearing her glow stick like a torc gave a rousing rendition of a song from her youth about snorting cocaine.

We thought that would be hard to top.  I mentioned that in 10 years or so the class songs would be by Lady Gaga instead of Paul Simon or the Indigo Girls, and right on cue two songs-mistresses did a 4 bar intro of Poker Face.  But there was also a rendition of Haverford Harry, which I have taken the liberty of sharing here in full courtesy of the Class of 1971 Songbook:

Haverford Harry

The boy that I marry will have to be
A hermit, neurotic, and wear a goatee,
A Haverfurdian.
He'll be arty and smarty and smell of raw gin.

His hair will be stringy and shoulder length.
He'll snow all the girls with his sheer brute strength.
He's a nudist, a  Zen Buddhist,
And his social deportment's the crudest.

His room will be cluttered with sculpture weird.
His chin will be covered with unshaved beard.
He's terrific, he's prolific,
His demands and desires quite specific.

He seems to be haunted with some strange hex,
A complex concerning that thing called sex.
He's sublime-o, what a wine-o,
For some young thing from Shipley, divine-o.

So a Haverford Harry the boy I marry must be ... inevitably!

When they had finished, the mistress of ceremonies noted that there were also lyrics for Harry's Reply (though sadly not reproduced in the 1971 songbook), and offered the opportunity for any 'Fords in the audience to come up and sing it.  She didn't sound as if she expected any takers, but then, I knew of at least one who knew what to expect and was more than willing. 

I waited a beat or two, then walked down the aisle in my panama hat and clad in Haverford's scarlet and black, acknowledging with a slight bow the delighted gasps of "It's Tim!" that came from the vicinity of the BMC class of 1990 section.  I confess I was relieved that the statute of limitations on my various youthful indiscretions in Athena's demesne appears to have expired with all long since forgiven or forgotten.

I faced the crowd, accepted a microphone and the lyric sheet, and said something rueful along the lines of "Good God"  Then up from my left stepped a fellow 'Ford from the Class of 1980, who I remembered afterward had been the only other person with me when this same scene played out at reunion 15 years ago.  We were prepared to brazen through another duet, when another Haverford male came forward, and still others, until we may have been a dozen strong up there and game to give it our best.  We shook hands and turned to face the music.

We sang the lines with gusto, and let me tell you it was at least as good sauce for the goose as had been for the gander.  I recall one small part that went something along the lines of "She's precocious, hair's atrocious, If you get her in bed she's ferocious" which was a crowd favorite (and after which I could not resist getting the aside "You don't know how right that is...")

The whole thing was a lark and went over very well.  Someone from the Alumnae office wanted our names afterwords in case they use any of the photographic evidence.  I was greeting throughout the rest of the night with anonymous calls from the darkness of "Haverford Harry, you were great!"  It was the very least I could do for Bi-Co relations, aside from love the Mawr and its Mawrters, which I do, I do.

The Last Salvo in the S-chords Humtone A-Cappella War of 1989

Back in 1989, the normally pacifist campus of Haverford College witnessed a no holds barred grudge match between its two all male a-cappella singing groups: Skip Doo Wop and the Humtones and the Ford S-Chords.  The Humtones were the older of the two groups, and viewed the S-chords as a bunch of scrappy upstarts, which indeed they were, having been founded just a few years before by a couple of singers upset that the Humtones had not scheduled auditions. 

I joined the S-chords in the spring of 1987 when the founding members were still part of the group, so naturally I am fiercely partisan.  Individual S-chords and Humtones were occasionally able to connect in bipartisan relationships - I was in a production of Godspell with a couple of Humtones and was friendly with one or two others - but this was like the friendships between Justices Scalia and Ginsberg, or Senators Kennedy and Hatch.  Business was business and whatever we thought of each other off the stage, we were rivals in earnest when it was time to get our games on.

Back in my day, a-cappella groups were to our college what athletes are in Division One schools.  We were like John Stewart blended with Rod Stewart, kings of the hill and cocks of the rock, and what we may have lacked in polish we made up for in attitude.  With all that testosterone and 4 part harmony, things were bound to get ugly.

It was customary to do clever intros for some of our numbers, and these provided ample opportunities to  poke fun at our rivals.  The Humtones had some very funny guys, including Mark Hudis who is now a Hollywood screenwriter, and on one particular evening when the Humtones performed, they let us have it with full, relentless broadsides.

All may be fair in love and war, but rather than throwing down the gauntlet this was more like a barrage of mailed fists to the jaw.  The part we remember as the cheapest shot was a top ten list why they were not S-chords that includes something to the effect that the spending allowance of one of our founding members, Clipper Robinson, was more than the net worth of the Humtones.

Clipper came from money but you would never know it from the way he acted and it was the very last thing he wanted you to know about him.  He drove a beat up Chevy station wagon and none of us made anything at all out of the net worth of his parents.  We considered this crack  well below the belt and planned our revenge.

 The S-chords had a concert several weeks later in newly renovated Founders Hall.  For reasons now lost in the sands of time, but attributable to John Capen, another of our Founding members, the S-chords traditionally open their shows by dashing on stage with a raucous cheer of "Boola Boola Boola, Ha ha ha!"  Not this time.

We started up the aisle in a slow procession whose leaders intoned the chant of the flagellate monks from Monty Python's Holy Grail - "Pie Jesu Domine dona eis requiem." - pausing at proper intervals to bash themselves in the forehead.  We bore Clipper at shoulder height reclining on a litter, wearing an ascot and dinner jacket and smoking a huge cigar.  Two of us knelt so he could step onto our backs when alighting to the stage.  Clipper snapped his fingers and another S-chord ran up and grovelled with palm outstretched for him to extinguish his cigar.  He paused, looked smugly out at the audience, and in his best, stiff jawed impression of Thurston Howell III, announced;

" The Top Reason why I'm an S-chord....because I bought them!"

The house erupted and we launched into "Violent Love" by Dr. Feelgood.  Game, Set and Match to the S-chords.