6/22/2008

The REAL Indiana Jones




The summer of 1981 I had just finished my sophomore year in college and was about to embark on one of the grandest adventures of my life. Several friends and I signed up for summer school: not some dreary course with a heavy reading list, but a class in ancient history that gave us 6 hours of college credit. This was just the paperwork part of it ; the actual class involved two archaeological digs in two different countries : a one month long archaeological excavation in Beersheva , Israel, and a one month long excavation in Metaponto, Italy.

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The college professor who would be teaching these classes was a 33 year old, recent PHD grad himself, WJN, who taught classical history courses at the college I attended. WJN was tall and tanned, muscular and handsome, with the sort of thick wavy blond hair, roughly cut, that you associate with ancient images of Alexander the Great found on old Greek coins. The kind of good looks that used to be described as "Byronic" (Although the real Byron had a club foot, and who knows how sexy that was?) . I have never cared much for blonds, myself, and even I thought WJN was handsome. He frequently wore a black, billowy peasant type shirt with white jeans, which looked just fantastic against his tanned muscled body. He was a sexy smart sort of pirate. Each fall he would show slides to his students of the digs he had participated in the previous summer. A fascinating and deeply knowledgeable teacher, WJN was one who drew deep connections between various broad - ranging aspects of history. Someone who made it all come alive, was fun to listen to, and seemed as captivating as a bedtime story. It is easy to see why his classes, just like those of "Raiders of the Lost Arc" movie character Indiana Jones' were full of girls and guys who idolized him and who stared dreamily at him with " luv you" written on their closed eyelids. ....and all this was before "Raiders of the Lost Ark " was released in theaters. Let me just state for the record, I never saw WJN use a bullwhip, for any purpose. We were never chased by Nazis.

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In 1981 I had just spent my sophomore school year drinking beer with WJN and a group of history students at an on-campus pub named "Valhalla", which was located in an odd tunnel shaped room , formerly a storage area, underneath a steep flight of stairs that led up into an old building known as "the chemistry lecture hall". The door to this secret lair was around to the side of the building and it was unmarked; you kind of had to know where to look, to find it. Valhalla was dark, even at brightest noon, and perennially smokey. The bartenders played only music by "The Rolling Stones". No disco or pop allowed. They also felt it was their right to throw out anyone they didn't personally know or like. I was never thrown out, in fact, I often danced to the Stones atop the bar in Valhalla, and regularly flirted with all the guys around. WJN, in a moment of excitement once drank beer out of one of my Dansko clogs (it had a little design made out of perforated holes in it, much like a small leather colander.) So I felt, at the tender age of 20, myself to be a member of a very select, glamorous, secret sort of club. The cool history students club.

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In hearing these tales, many people have asked, or surmised, that perhaps WJN and I were at one point, lovers. I am not sure if I would have been tempted, or not.....but the simple fact is, we were each involved with other people at this juncture in our lives. I was having a passionate love affair with a young man my age whom I refer to as "Latin Boy", or LB; and WJN was busy sleeping with his baby-sitters. You heard me right - for you see, WJN had a wife, a 3 year old child, and a college-aged, former student of his - his lover, also his baby-sitter. Later he broke off with her and found another gf, who may or may not have been one of his baby-sitters at some point. He was a playa, WJN was. It's all very much like "Mystic Pizza".....the oldest cliche in the book. So I felt a certain amount of detachment from the amorous goings on of this group, as off to Europe I went that grand summer of 1981, to participate in two, not one, but two, archaeological digs with my extremely sexy college archaeology professor and his retinue : his wife, his kid, his former girlfriend, his latest girlfriend, her ex boyfriend. And about a dozen odd other random students. Keep going, it gets better.

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College ended in early May, and my boy friend at the time,"Latin Boy" or LB ( so named b/c of our common interest in all things relating to ancient Roman history, language and culture - he was an extremely tall , lanky Texan , smart beyond words, and is now all these years later, a law professor) and I headed off together, planning to meet up later with the others in the summer school contingent. Latin Boy and I took a flight which landed us in Amsterdam, and for inexplicable reasons, we decided to go to Greece as soon (and as cheaply) as possible. Towards that end, we immediately hopped on a train that took us on a week long journey from Amsterdam to Athens, through former Soviet bloc countries , stopping every few hours at some random station along the way . I remember what seemed to be days and days going through Yugoslavia, it was always raining , and having not planned well for this jaunt, we had brought no food with us. The train sold sandwiches and coffee and pre-packaged cookies, which we got tired of eating after awhile, and we often tried to run out (when we had a 10 minute stop in a station somewhere), and grab something hot, just to vary this diet a bit. One night, in the middle of the night, the train was very crowded and getting more so at every stop. (Some segments of this trip, we had the compartment all to ourselves, and could stretch out and sleep in relative luxury.) Around 3 am, a family got on board and crowded into our already packed compartment. Speaking to each other what I am sure must have been Serbo-Croatian, they pulled out a giant picnic basket and began smacking away. LB and I must have been watching them, hungrily - they were eating, of all things, fried chicken - because they offered us some, and it was mighty tasty.

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It was our last hot meals for days. We had to go all the way AROUND Albania, for some reason, the train was not allowed to go through that country, and we never stopped, either, just miles and miles of high concrete or metal walls lining the train tracks; the officials in charge didn't want us to see fully the bleak countryside we could peep at beyond the walls. There were cracks in the walls, though, and you could catch glimpses of guard dogs, razor wire and laundry hanging dispiritedly on lines. Everything looked gray. We eventually pulled up in Thessaloniki, Greece, at around 6 am. With a 10 minute layover in the station, LB ran out and grabbed the only food available - hot fresh Spanokopita and warm orange Fantas. Let me tell you, I have never had such a tasty meal in all my life.

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Latin Boy and I spent the next month bumming around Greece-the mainland and the islands, seeing all the sights. Had a memorable moment where we nearly died together, when a motorcycle we were riding wiped out of a patch of gravel, on a steep hillside, on the island of Crete. Fortunately, we were only scraped up and minorly injured, and managed to get up off the bike and gimp back to the road, where a kindly sheep farmer eventually came along in his truck, picked us and our bike up and hauled us back to town.

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We showed up in Beersheva, Israel, late on a night when every single roadside stand and place to grab a bite was closed .  It must have been after sundown on the Shabbat. Fortunately, our group was staying at a sort of group residence - not exactly a kibbutz, not a camp or dorm, but something sort of similar to all 3 . Being hungry was to be an important part of our memories for this part of the trip ......the actual archaeology part of being an archaeologist is not nearly as glamorous as it seems in the movies. In "Raiders of the Lost Ark", you see Indie running from native head hunters, clutching a gold statue or artifact in his hand while arrows rain down on him. Just in time his friend comes by with a seaplane and rescues him. For this dig, which was an iron age site out in the middle of the desert, we used the modern or American technique ( find the walls, or the initial item that has gathered your attention, such as the Leakeys searching for pre-hominid fossils in Kenya while scouring the ground for anomalies that might prove to be artifacts- then follow them, dig down carefully) rather than the British technique (lay out a grid, dig the grid, no matter what you find, or how it aligns, or doesn't align, with the grid. A very good illustration of this style of excavation can be found in "Raiders of the Lost Arc" in the scenes where the huge excavation is going on in Egypt, with thousands of laborers toiling in squared-off pits , marked with sticks and rope, while a director sits in his tent with a map and some native waving a fan on him.) We were a small group from a small college; we only had ourselves to do all the labor, intellectual, manual, or otherwise.

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This all meant waking up at 4 am. Quick breakfast of hot tea, toast, one raw zucchini, one tomato, and a boiled egg. Drive out to the site, riding in the flatbed of a pickup truck, and be at work, with shovels, picks, axes, and wheelbarrows, by 5 am. Our site was what was believed to be an ancient small town, or part of a town, outside the modern day small city of Beersheva, in the middle of the Negev Desert. The site we were working was on a small tel - a raised hillock, out in the middle of nowhere. We worked in the hot sun, shoveling up sand and rocks, loading wheelbarrows full of it, walking them to the edge of a cliff , and dumping them off. Now and then using a hand ax and brushes to carefully clean and clear a wall or a large pot. Using the pick axes to help clear large rocks. It was back-breaking work, and while we all got really great tans and in the most fantastic shape of our lives, we were also burning far more calories than we could possibly take in. At 10 am we took a 30 min break, sat in the shade of a tent we erected over a picnic table, to eat the same meal as breakfast, all over again. This meal also had the addition of one fresh orange per person. While we ate, we looked out over the valley below, where a few Bedouin off in the distance managed flocks of goats. Every now and then you could hear a donkey bray. The guys in our group wore shorts and mountain boots and bandannas on their heads with headbands, "Arab" style, much like the locals. The gals wore bikini tops or halter tops, shorts, hiking boots, and pony-tails with bandannas tied as head-kerchiefs. Every now and then the wind would blow , which would cool it down from the 120+ degrees that it was, but would also stir up the sand , which would blow into your eyes and nostrils till it choked you and you couldn't breathe. That's when you'd wrap your bandanna head scarf around your face , and breath through that. You knew it was safe to take the headscarf off when the sand stopped stinging your skin.

                                                                           Negev Desert

People always say to me, upon hearing that I spent a summer on an archaeological dig in college, "Did you find anything exciting ? " Archaeology is rarely that exciting in the short term, and as Indiana Jones says, "X never marks the spot". You work for days or weeks doing back breaking labor, and maybe find a pot shard that proves the date of your site. Somehow it all fits together in some professor's theory of the importance of that area, some complex idea of trade routes or whatever. It's not like Carter's discovery of King Tut's Tomb, folks, - those days are long gone. Sure there are the random moments of excitement - I recently read a whole new series of tombs were found in a previously unworked area of Luxor, Egypt. But most of the time, it's teams of college kids and professors, slogging through mounds of data, trying to fit it all together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle of information. It's exciting if it happens to be your area of research or will help you write another paper or a thesis and get a grant, make a name for yourself. But it isn't exciting at that particular moment; rarely do you find a golden skull.

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On the Israel dig, we'd head home for lunch at noon, and this commune or whatever kind of place we were staying in only served one meal, over and over, the same meal every day. Broiled liver. By then we were ravenously hungry, and would have eaten the hind leg off a live donkey, if one had been available. But most members of the group hated broiled liver, and they got pretty sick of zucchini and boiled eggs, too. Fortunately for me, I could tolerate all these things, and ate well. I ate what they did not want. Then we all took showers and long naps till around 4 pm. Next  it was over to the pottery shed, where we put in a few more hours carefully washing, dusting, labeling and storing various artifacts we had found - mostly pot shards, broken chunks of pottery. We were working this dig with another group from another university, and our professor and theirs would meet with various local professors who would confer on the pot shards, hazard theories about their dates, what it all meant.

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By early evening, we'd head out for a meal in town most nights - we'd find a restaurant to eat something different - even though the camp provided an evening meal-you guessed it, more zucchini, boiled eggs, and liver. There was a pizza spot in town - Israeli pizza was quite different than American, they put all kinds of seafood and stuff on it. But it tasted pretty good, washed down with a cold beer. There was also a Chinese restaurant in town that we sampled some. I learned to eat falafel and hummus at every meal. We were all so hungry - the guys and the non-liver eaters, especially, we'd have gobbled up anything that came our way. After dinner, we stayed out late, listening to Israeli music, dancing in Israeli discos, playing hacky sack - it was much like the early scenes of "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" - then went back to the dorms and slept. There was a swimming pool at this place where we were staying, but the lifeguard tried to make all of us - even the guys - wear those 50's style rubber bathing caps. We would have none of it, so we never tried swimming in the pool again, after the first time. Our lives had little relaxation other than the quest for food, and booze. Then the next day we started all over again.

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Weekends we spent on road trips - went to see Masada, went snorkeling in a barrier reef on the Red Sea, went to Qumran, Nazareth, Bethlehem, one trip to Tel Aviv to eat cheese burgers at the cafe in the Hilton hotel there. Several times natives mistook me for a Jewish American kid visiting the place, and I got invited to tour a kibbutz, visit a Shabbat service in a synagogue, or eat dinner with a family of strangers. I enjoyed it all and learned a good deal about other cultures. Ended up the month in Jerusalem, and saw all the historic sites there. A very powerful place, emotionally, religiously. We stayed together in a cheap hotel, and one night, I had a bit much to drink. Fell asleep , fully dressed, on my bed in my hotel room, with my shoes on. Awoke the next morning, with the shoes gone - they had been stolen off my feet while I slept. A pair of American topsiders, extremely worn . I bought a pair of Israeli sandals which I wore for the rest of the trip. All through this time, the dynamic between my history prof with his harem of wife and two gf's managed to stay relatively calm. People got along, no one argued much. How could this many people all share close quarters together without petty jealousies arising ? Maybe we were all too hungry, and too tired to be volatile, to have the extra energy  to think about it all. Mean while, my bf LB and I had a lover's quarrel and decided to part ways for a bit. At the end of this dig, I took off travelling with one of the other girls in the group, and he set off with some of the other guys. A few days later, the group was re-assembled in Metaponto, Italy, for the second dig.

*                                                          Greek temple at Metaponto

If Italy is a boot, then Metaponto is in the arch of that boot. The whole of southern Italy (from Naples on south) was colonized by the ancient Greeks as well as Phoenicians, and the area is just criss-crossed with ancient temples, towns, farms, and other sites of all kinds. Some of them have been fully excavated and you can go visit them, like Agrigento in Sicily. Some of them are still awaiting discovery......We were working a remote site situated in a farmer's field ,  a few miles from the coast just down the road from Metaponto Lido, which is famous now to Europeans as the location of a Club Med resort. For this dig our professor had rented the top half of a farm house for our HQ. This farmhouse was down a deserted gravel road in the middle of the countryside. There was no other habitation as far as the eye could see.The upstairs portion of the house had 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a spacious rooftop patio or piazza area .We were surrounded on all sides by fields lined with sun flowers and a few scraggly trees now and then. I can't remember exactly what was growing in the fields, but I think it was what the Europeans call rape, a sturdy yellow grain that is used as feed for cattle or for fuel or oil or something that humans do not eat. The beach, Metaponto Lido, was a few miles away; you could smell the salty ocean on the wind, and after we laid off work in the afternoons, instead of napping, we'd walk down the gravel road to the beach and swim in the Mediterranean Sea. I remember walking down that hot white road, the only sound was the cicadas buzzing, running from shady spot to shady spot, tree to tree, till I got to the beach. It smelled like sage, green herbs, wildflowers, and dust. This was years before the Club Med was there, there was nothing, no shops or people once you got to the beach at all, no other tourists, only a camp ground full of hairy pale Germans in tents several miles away, and one little stand that sold soda pop and played VOA on a radio. We had the beach and the ocean to ourselves. As you looked out at the water towards Africa, the ocean was calm, with few waves; it was just flat dark blue water, and a fishing boat way off in the distance.

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Because we were renting a house, or half a house at any rate, we did our own cooking. This being Italy, the options were fabulous. The hunger that had prayed on us, made us focus on eating and nothing else while we were in Israel, finally abated. We began to make a grocery store run every day, around 10 am, to buy the food to cook for lunch and dinner. This excavation was entirely different from the one in Israel - we went back to a 9-5 daily schedule, for one thing, kept more normal hours. It wasn't as nearly hot. Only high 90's! But the clay in the fields which we were trying to excavate with hand shovels was so thick and hard and heavy, we had to water the site the night before we planned to dig, so it would be soft enough that we could shovel it up the next day. After a day or two of this, the girls started to peter out . Up till now, we had all been stalwart troopers, working every bit as hard as the guys. But this soil was just back-breaking. We needed a massive John Deere with roto-tilling blades the size of cows to till this field- which maybe explained why this site had never been excavated before. We began resting in the shade of a nearby tree every hour or so, while the guys kept going. I volunteered to do the grocery shopping and cooking for the group. At mid-morning every day, I took off, along with WJN's wife, who drove us in our car. Off we went to Bernalda , the nearest town, some 20-30 km away.

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Bernalda was picture book quaint. It is a charming little medieval stucco-ed Italian town , with red clay tile roofs, perched on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. At some point, Mussolini or somebody had built a fancy new interstate high way through the area, but we were often the only car on it, passing farmers with horse-drawn carts going clickety-clack along as we passed them. Once in town, we drove round and round and up and up, navigating the narrow winding streets and a town square with a fountain at the very top. Church bells rang out to call townspeople to mass, or to mark noontime, or to watch a funeral procession. We saw one there one day : all the town members came out for it, there was a horse-drawn carriage pulling a glass walled hearse that revealed a flower draped casket inside. Members of the procession wound around and around, wearing their dark Sunday best, carrying saints ' effigies on giant poles. It was like something out of the National Geographic; you've seen that film where they take the saints' effigies, draped in flowers, out to bless the sea. Each day we would roll into town to grocery shop, and first thing we'd do was to find a spot to park the car. Then we'd stop in at the little cafe and sip a cappuccino, before going from store to store to buy pasta, produce, dairy, vino, and meat. Each item had its own little shop. Then back to the farmhouse. I'd start cooking, while WJN's ex-wife would go pick up the others from the site and bring them home to eat. We ate pasta and seafood and fresh produce and explored all kinds of wonderful Italian dishes. A professor friend of WJN's joined our group, and gave impromptu cooking lessons. (This was the start of my lifelong love of cooking, esp Italian cooking.) The schedule wasn't as harsh as it had been in Israel, but we were so isolated, too. There wasn't anything around us to entertain or to distract us, either. We had only ourselves. Some evenings we sang. Some evenings we played cards. Every evening, we drank. We bought wine by the casket - giant 5 gal drums of it - on a near daily basis. It was so thick and stout we watered it down 50%, like the ancient Romans did, to make it palatable.

*                                                                     Bernalda, Italy

On weekends, we took a few little side trips. Went to Grottaglie, which is famous for its pottery shops, and toured the countryside, looking at Trulli houses around Martina Franco ; saw of course the famous ancient Greek temple at Metaponto, which had been excavated earlier. (That was not our excavation, we were examining a purported ancient villa or farmhouse out there in that field. ) We visited all the quiet and somber little towns in the region, dozing sleepily in the sunshine, where WJN would shop in local junk shops for ancient artifacts. It was, in fact, illegal for locals to possess or sell them, and for us to try to buy them, for as Indiana Jones would say, "it belongs in a museum ! " But you never knew what farmer Gianni might dig up while plowing his fields one day.....and the area was just honeycombed with ancient habitations going back thousands of years. WJN had a way of browsing through the local "junk" stores, which invariably had fly-specked windows full of bric-a-brac and grand-ma's cast-offs. While seeming to peruse a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, a broken toaster,a wobbly chair, or an old bit of fascist ornamental stonework that had fallen off the corner of the local post office. He'd casually ask the owner- all the while not making eye contact - if he had anything "older" to sell. The owner would start bringing out things, a 1930's art deco vase, a wagon wheel, a older gold crucifix, a tattered bit of fabric, old books. "Older", WJN would keep saying, through each century's detritus, until , at long last, a small but perfect little ancient Greek drinking cup, a kylix, maybe no more than 3 inches across, would come out from the dusty back room.

*

It was the first time all summer that our bellies were full, and it is no surprise that it was here that the trouble began. It started out as a low level rumbling, overheard grumbling from the ex wife and the first ex girlfriend, complaining about the latest of WJN's girlfriends. (It takes a certain kind of man to go off of an extended trip with 3 women he is sleeping with, after all.) Days passed, and invisible lines were drawn up, who was on who's side. Who had been slighted, this little incident, or that. I think there were actual arguments and various events that had occurred all along, but I had been too caught up in my own volatile on-the-rocks romance with LB, to notice. I tried to remain neutral, to stay out of it. But suddenly, one night , a fight broke out as we were all sitting on the upstairs patio, drinking, and several of the guys, in a drunken stupor, began throwing broken wine bottles about. It seems the ex-boyfriend of the second gf of WJN was a tad upset about something. Can you imagine ? The farmer's family , who lived downstairs, got all upset, and called the carabinieri. This was not good. I don't remember exactly what happened next - it was all so long ago- but it seems that the dig was cut short. Or maybe we were near the end, anyways, when this particular event occurred. It seems like we left soon thereafter, or else I just don't remember what happened next. I think the guys directly involved in the fight left right away, and the rest of us, a few days later.

*

LB and I parted ways, for good, at that point. Our quarrel was unresolved, and with the passage of time, I have often asked myself just what the issue was, and had no good answer. I remember being sick and tired of all the soap opera like drama from all these characters. I left the group and continued to travel throughout Italy with the female friend I'd journeyed from Israel with. We went on Florence and Rome. This girlfriend, a strict vegan, was a difficult travel partner at times - it was a challenge to meet her dietary requirements. After a few weeks, we parted ways, I was tired of eating Japanese and wanted meat ! I went through Switzerland and back to Amsterdam by myself. I remember being in such great physical shape from all that hard labor on the digs that I rented a bike and rode through the Alps, no problem at all.

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Years later, I ran into LB, and we buried the hatchet, and spoke to one another again. We ended up friendly acquaintances.

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I also ran into WJN in as well....it seems the university did not take so kindly to an untenured professor sleeping with his students. Some colleges turn a blind eye to that sort of thing, but who knows, maybe there were other incidents, other issues, which got back to the college and ruined his chances there. Would Indiana Jones' mythical Ivy League university really keep him on, much less grant him tenure, if they knew of all the international incidents he had caused ? Last I heard, WJN was drifting about, as a guest lecturer of little old ladies Sunday School classes, I am sure charming them with his tales of adventures past. He seems to earn a living as a guest lecturer. I had a school I taught at once hire him for an evening, to tell the kiddies all about archaeology. Once, later, I ran into him at some function, where he was with a date ( no one from this story). The date, upon hearing that I was a former student of his, said to me, " I am sure he must have made a great impression on you." I smiled and said, " Yes", but to myself silently added , "If you only knew what kind of impression that was, lady....."



























My Knight at the Opera

I have a deep , dark, dirty little secret. What could it possibly be, you ask ? Am I leather fetishist ? Do I belong to a nude Harley riding club ? Do I grow dope in the basement ? Am I a long lost member of the Weathermen ? A Unitarian ? It's nothing that exciting , trust me. It's just that when I tell people about it, well, they give me that weird look. I tend to keep kind of quiet about it, as a result.
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Classic example : A few weeks ago, there was a school-sponsored event in the evening, after school hours, that some faculty members chose to attend, and I had already long ago made other plans, and could not go. In casual conversations, co-workers would say stuff to me like, " Are you going to be at ______ tonight ? " And I would cough, and lower my eyes, and reply, " No, unfortunately, months ago, before I knew the date for this event, I made other plans. So I'll be busy that night." "What are you doing ?" "Uh, I'm going to the opera." Long, long pause. Seconds ticking by loudly on the clock nearby."Oh."
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Not once, in all these years, have I run across the casual acquaintance who would answer back to me, " Oh, that's interesting. I enjoy listening to the opera, too. Which one are you going to see ? " For you see, I have been attending the opera since I was 13 years old. Did my parents drag me ? Was I born into a classically performing musical family ? No, and no. It's actually a much cuter story. There was this boy, you see, that I knew in jr high. A boy I had a crush on at the time. He would sit in my English class every day, and prattle on and on about Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, doll houses and The Borrowers, and opera. Esp Beverly Sills. This is an odd list of interests, I confess, esp for young teen suburban kids growing up in Dallas, Tx, in the 1970's. It seems this boy had recently been taken to an opera for the first time by his godmother-auntie, and he just fell in love with the beauty, the music, the pageantry, the excitement of it all. And in his excitement, he got me interested. I confess, I went that first time, coercing my parents into buying tickets, hoping to run into him there. The opera, as I recall, was "Siege of Corinth" . I didn't run into this boy as I had hoped , of course, but at least it gave me something to talk about to him, at school, the next time I saw him.
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Of course, I grew up in a family that listened to all the old Broadway musicals instead of pop music or rock and roll. I knew the lyrics to "On the Street Where you Live," "What Do the Simple Folk Do ? ", and "Some Enchanted Evening" , long before I knew them to "Yesterday" or "Love Love Me Do." So for me, attending an opera was not that far out there.
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The next time I went to the opera, a few years later, I went with this very same boy. It was a dreadful choice for a first serious date between us. The opera was Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde". I seem to remember it was something like 5 hours long, and this particular production fell into the " minimalist " category - mostly just two singers, 1 male, 1 female, standing in front of a roll-down backdrop of a giant greenish swirl ( suggesting what ? grass and the forest ? the sky ? ), singing, for 5 interminable hours. The only other thing on the stage, for all that time, was a large fake plastic rock, off to stage right. This was in the day and age before operas used what is called "hypertext" that is, large screens over the stage that translate what is being sung into English. So it was 5 hours of German gobblydigook against a minimalist stage and two people singing who never moved. 99.9% of the people on this planet would have refused to ever go out with that boy, ever again. I kept hoping he'd reach over and try to make out with me, in the dark , but he never did. Yet something in me responded to the music, at least ! "Tristan and Isolde" has some of the most beautiful musical passages that exist, and I , a classical music cretin, still recognize them when I hear them on my local radio station, to this day.
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I know I am not your normal Bible belt mid western housewife. I'm sort of a culture junkie, love art museums and theater, books, movies, bookstores, etc. I have attended so many events in the DFW and Houston areas, ( yes, I actually take road trips, just to see museum exhibits or performances, even drag my children along with me, book a hotel, etc. Most recently went to Houston to see the "Lucy" exhibit at the HMSH, and the "Pompeii" exhibit at the HMFA, back in the spring. ), these past 40+ years that I have started to notice I see all the same people, over and over again. I call them " the 500". Not the "500 people you meet in in Heaven", or the "500 people who will be saved when our Lord and Redeemer brings about the Judgement Day" or the "500 people who contributed to my campaign" or the "500 people with dreadfully good taste". There are many people and corporations, thankfully, who give of their time and money to support the arts, and lord knows society needs them to keep doing that, through economically lean times as well as good times. But I think that of all the folks who give money to the arts, there is a smaller subset, in Texas at least , who actually enjoy watching or attending the arts. This is not NYC, where everyone at least SAYS they enjoy they arts. Folks here are far more likely to fork over $50 for tickets to see a monster truck rally than they are to spend the same amount of cash to see the ballet. The few people who truly enjoy the arts are the same 500 people I keep running into, over and over again.
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Somehow, in spite of that rather challenging first opera experience ( I would not recommend "T & I" as a first opera to go see, for anybody. I suggest something with a lot more action and sizzle, something by Puccini, or Verdi. ) that boy and I stayed friends, in spite of that inauspicious beginning, to this day. We have continued to attend operas (and other cultural events, classical concerts, solo performances, museum exhibits, plays, etc) together, wherever we have found ourselves , from Texas to New York to Paris France, for over 30 years now. He is far more knowledgeable and excited about opera than I am, went so far as to work for an opera themed publication, and he knows singers and attends performances all over the world. Yet his joy is contagious to all he meets , and he inspires nearly all of his family and friends to at least attend a live show, or listen to some particularly dazzling diva on cd, no matter who they are. I often think of him as the Johnny Appleseed of opera, spreading a love of this particular form of entertainment, wherever he goes.
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So this is how I happened to be spending this particular late spring evening attending a performance of the Ft Worth Opera's 2008 Opera Festival. When my friend, the Johnny Appleseed of opera, comes to town, he will often see several different shows, and write reviews of them for his various projects or publications. I am lucky enough to get to tag along to one of them (probably could go to more, if my schedule permitted) , which is always a treat, as he gets the very best seats and it is always exciting and enjoyable to be able to meet and schmooze, even if only for a bit, with some of his colleagues- the director of the Ft Worth Opera, an occasional singer here or there, other members of the press, opera aficionados of all stripes. This year, I saw " Turandot ", and had a lovely time. It was a beautiful performance, lovely singing, gorgeous sets and costumes, with an added kick of a stranded troupe of Chinese acrobats doing their juggling routines in the crowd scenes. Sitting in our very wonderful seats, which I never could have afforded for myself, and looking over the silvery heads of the crowd at the palatial Ft Worth Bass Hall, I couldn't but help think to myself, " Who will comprise the 500, when all these baby boomers are dead ?" I mean, seriously, I was the youngest person there ( other than the performers, bartenders, or members of the press ) by about 20-30 years, and I am not that young. We have got to get the younger generations interested in the arts. I am doing my best, dragging my increasingly surly children around as much as possible, but that is not enough.
*
Lest you think I am unduly morbid, I will end on a cute, upbeat note. My childhood friend, the Johnny Appleseed of Opera, and I once entered our jr high 9th grade talent show. We were co-authors of a satirical little skit where we , and several of our nerdy little friends, dressed up as various members of the Marx Brothers and ran around the stage, throwing whipped cream pies at each other. We won the first prize of this talent show - I seem to remember our chief competition involved a girl singing "Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me Down" in an earnest off key voice - and none of our parents were even there to see us do it! That is the diff between how parents were, back then, and how they are, nowadays, my friend. Can you imagine how many mini-camcorders would be present, in a similar venue, nowadays ? It was a seminal moment in our friendship, Opera Boy, and I. And so it is, that for over 30+ years, either he or I have been the Margaret Dumont to the other's Groucho, or vice-versa. And so it goes.

6/12/2008

Walk A Mile in Another (Wo)Man's Moccosins

Welcome to the Friendly Frontier ! Welcome to Abilene, Texas !


I went on a road trip last Sunday with a man not my husband - it was interesting to live a day in another woman's shoes , tolerating her husband , trying him on for size and all - in a safe and non-sexual way, of course. KC and I took our 2 sons to an orchestra camp for kids in Abilene, Tx (his kid plays cello, mine , violin) and with all the instruments, luggage, grocery bags of snacks and a cooler, kids and us, my giant purse, there just wasn't room for spouses on this trip. We loaded up KC's monster SUV early in the morning and headed off down the highway, lookin' for adventure. Whatever comes our way......

*

The trip from Denton to Abilene is about 3 hours each way, give or take. KC had one of them fancy-pants GPS little computer doo-hickeys, which he kept fiddlin' with, talking to, punching things into it, coordinates and all. Most of the time, it kept talking to us in a robotic woman's voice, telling us useful things like, "make a legal U-turn, as soon as possible, and proceed in the opposite direction". That's because there was a point of disagreement, it seems, between the GPS device and ourselves, as to which was the best way to get anywhere. I had an atlas on my lap, a paper book of maps ( for those of you who don't know about old-fangled things, like atlases). Normally, we would not even have needed such a thing, being true Texans and all, mostly because we just point our behemoths towards the interstate, put the pedal to the floor, and go ! (Energy crisis ? bah humbug ! Who cares if it costs $120 or more to fill up our vehicles ? As long as we can glide along the road, our bottoms ensconced in rich Corinthian leather, enjoying the arctic air-conditioned splendor high above the teeming masses scrambling behind our exhaust wake as we blow by them at 90 or 100 mph. Because on the interstate in Texas, even the grannies in their Cadillacs go 80 mph...)

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On this particular day, however, there was an event at the nearby local race track, (Evil Kneivel's son or somesuch, jumping his motorcycle over a mess o' Hummers - now that they have no other functional use, it seems) and we wished to avoid the 10,000,000 rednecks and their pickup trucks who would be clogging I-35 west in their fervour to see this truly "fantastic" event. So we chose a path that took us around said "entertainment ", avoiding the interstate and the easy route, (which the GPS kept trying to get us to return to) and instead, we picked a route which formed the hypotenuse on a very large triangle, that , via a series of smallish towns waiting patiently in the dusty air of West Texas, would put us at our destination and allow us to avoid all the highway traffic vying to see Evil Kneivel.

*

Orchestra camp, you say ? I must confess, that in spite of having put both kids through years of piano lessons, then later, first-born son through years of percussion lessons, band practices, driving a van full of hungry kids home from games, tournaments, and other "fun" activities late at night (mostly, avoiding the other way-too-gung-ho band parents, who, if they catch you in a moment of weakness, will twist your arm till you scream " mother! " and agree to sign up for a shift at the band boosters booth - try saying that 5 times fast - where snacks, like those atomic yellow melted rubber cheese nachos, are sold.) , I had absolutely no idea what the world of being an orchestra parent entailed. With the band shtick, it was : drive your kid to practice, give him some lessons, and that was it. For band, percussion esp, since the instruments are so large and communal, the school rented you the instruments, and both instrument rental and private lessons were cheap (With a highly regarded school of music here in town, music students willing to earn a quick buck teaching your kid are a dime a dozen.)

*

This is not enough for the parent of the orchestra child. You have now entered a world of intense and subtle competition, and I am not even on the topic yet of how well, or not , your child plays his instrument. There are demarcations to be felt based on what kind of instrument your child is playing, where you bought it, or where you rent it, what country it came from, it's quality, etc. (And this extends on down to components of said instrument, the quality of the bow, the maker of the stings, etc. Upon trying to purchase a set of strings the other day, the very helpful man behind the counter was trying to guide me towards picking the right ones. "Does your child vibratto ? " he asked, matter of factly. "Um, I don't know", I replied. "He's only in 6th grade, what do you think ? Probably not.") Who your child's teacher is of high importance , and of course, how many hours a day your little genius rehearses. There are orchestra perfectionist subgroups, such as the PAKS ( Perfect Asian Kids ) , whose moms won't even talk to you, but will gabble to each other in Chinese or Korean and giggle at lord knows what - it's just like getting your nails done at the salon at the mall - if you try to engage them in a conversation about "what kind of strings do I need ?" or some such. Being a working mom, I am perennially out of the loop and clueless on important matters, like the absolute necessity of sending one's kid to a summer orchestra camp. Which one is the VERY BEST ONE IN ALL OF TEXAS, etc . Here I had lived all these years, blissfully unaware there was this whole other world out there , orchestra camps. Had no idea they were apparently, a necessity, much less which ones were de rigour, and which ones, for slackers. So I have relied on my one mommy connection in the whole neighborhood, KC (her husband is also named KC) , to tell me where I am supposed to take or send my kid, and what I am supposed to do, when. I just write the checks and show up when and where she tells me. As her husband and I agreed on this little road trip, " it's easier that way."

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This was my first real foray into west Texas, having grown up primarily an east Texas child. As one ignorant Yankee once said to me, at a cocktail party in New York City (upon having heard I had just moved there, from Houston) " How can Houston be, as you say, like a rain forest, if Arizona is a desert ? " And that, my friends , just about sums up why this country is in a crisis over (the lack of) teaching of basic geography, as a subject. (To all the uninformed out there, the answer is , " Because Arizona is 1700 miles away ! ") And what lies between San Antonio and Arizona, little children ? It's all......west Texas ! Hubby dear, who loves almanacs , just looked this fact up : you can put all of New England, incl New York state, into West Texas, and still have plenty left over !

*

Heading west, you leave the DFW area, driving through some rolling hills with creeks, trees, cows and whatnot, and think, well, this isn't so bad. Then gradually, the trees get smaller and smaller, and soon without realizing it, they are gone. Just miles and miles of flat earth all around you, it's like being on the moon - and we aren't even talking about FAR west Texas. You glance at your watch and realize, you still have hours to go. The kids , of course, get to watch the fold-down tv screen with movies in the dvd player, the whole time. KC the dad and I passed the hours talking , some - neither KC nor I are real big talkers. He's a coach at a rival high school to mine, so we talked about the differences in our football programs , what it's like teaching different things for different schools in the same district, some gossip about folks we knew in common. Then we ran out of stuff to talk about. Then KC mentioned that , if possible, he wanted to eat some BBQ at this great place he had heard of , Joe Allen's in Abilene, if he could find it, and that was why he had brought the GPS. We got to talking about road food, and esp, Texas eateries, and that carried us all the way there. We let ourselves get a little bit excited, at the prospect of a really great meal, after all the drudgery of this drive, checking our kids into this camp.

*

We checked the kids in to the camp, held at a local college now empty for the summer -which involved first an audition, so the kids could be placed in their appropriate ability groups. Lots of standing around in crowded hallways for hours, waiting for one's kid's turn to play in a lonely room with stern faced judges asking him to sight-read increasingly difficult passages, till he failed at something - then the next kid is brought in, and you are free to go to the paperwork check-in line, then the dorm check -in. This being my first attempt at this high stakes world of orchestra camp, I did not know to bring a book to read. What do I know ? The previous summer camps my kids have attended, more traditional Christian VBS type camps, held in the piney woods of east Texas, have gotten so fancy and slick in recent years - with trains of golf carts to greet the flotillas of Mercedes' and Lexuses that drive the kids out from the big city , carry folks and their luggage around the vast acres , past the pool, the lake, the tennis courts , the dining hall to the air conditioned cabins, ( remember folks, this is Texas, after all. It's HOT here in the summer.) where eager young fresh-faced earnest counselors carefully peel kids away from tearful parents with a well-placed ,"Hi, I'm, Josh. What's your name ? " They then send parents, still on the golf cart trains, to an auditorium where they watch a feel-good video, with upbeat music, then start asking for donations ( in addition to the hefty fee ) , so you will be eager to finally leave . No down time, to read a book, or stand around, waiting.

*

We finally got finished with the auditions, and now I could hear the rumbling stomachs of the men in my group. Someone passed a little gas, nerves probably, and I thought to myself, " this is not my husband's odor." (Hubby dear is a maestro of gasseous emissions. He could provide enough material to create an atmosphere for the moon, if such an act of service was needed for all mankind, and turn it into a hostile posionous environment, comparable to Mercury.) We decided to feed the kids junk food, immediately, and save the search for the elusive BBQ joint, as a special treat for ourselves, later. There aren't a lot of options in this town, or the part of town we are in - a Taco Bell and a Subway. (Of course, my own husband can drive across America and happily survive , eating at ONLY at these two chains, and that's what makes a day spent with another man's husband so interesting. You mean people eat foods other than hubby dear's famed ketchup-tuna-hot sauce-rice concoctions ?) We notice as we are driving around that this town, with roughly the same population as our own, seems to have no cars on the streets and no one walking around. Just dust a blowin' in the hot wind, coating the trees and bushes - it's like a scene from " The Last Picture Show" . Sure, its a Sunday afternoon, it's hot, but our own hometown has people mobbing the parking lot of the 24 hour Kroger to get the best spot and get in without a fender bender, at all hours of the day or night. What's up with Abilene ? Don't people have the desire to get up and go somewhere ? Or did they all , already, get up and leave ? It remains a mystery.

*

I couldn't help but notice, as I was standing in this line or that line, as we checked our two sons in to the dorm, where they were to be roommates , that people were looking at us oddly. Surrepticiously, out of the corner of their eyes, then stop whenever I looked up. "I guess they think we're married or something, " I thought to myself. "Or maybe they wonder why we are taking ourselves on this road trip , a man and a woman, without our spouses. Why it's not the two moms, or the two dads, doing this". (The answer is, my hubby had to work, and KC's wife had to work. Very simple.) Our kids don't particularly look alike, it's obvious they are not brothers. I kept looking at our clothes, my purse , my makeup, my shoes, typical woman things - trying to figure out what was drawing the attention. We had a little incident - when our kids checked into their dorm room, their room had no window coverings at all. All the other rooms had blinds - the one in our kids' room was gone completely. KC went out and asked the RA's what they were going to do to remedy the situation, and got a lackadaisical response as the barely-post-teenagers in charge of our children lounged around, mouthing inane replies while watching a sports event on a big screen tv. KC came back to the room, where I was unpacking and setting up stuff ( these kids are 12 years old ; if I leave their toothpaste in their suitcases, it will not occur to them to brush their teeth the entire week ! I know this from past experience.). We talked it over, decided that the RA's were, in fact , not going to do anything about the lack of window coverings. So I went out to the lobby, and in my best outraged mother voice, planted my feet wide, crossed my arms, and started hollering at them : " We are way past saying it's going to be fixed when you call the campus facilities department tomorrow ! You must do something to repair this situation by 6 pm dinnertime ! You cannot expect two little boys, in a ground floor room next to the walkway that everyone walks by, to get undressed and dressed in front of a wide window with no window coverings at all ! It is immodest ! It is unreasonable ! So come up with a plan RIGHT NOW - I don't care if your plan is go to the local Wal-Mart and buy a bed sheet and a roll of duct tape - I WANT THAT WINDOW COVERED NOW !!! " This scared them enough to at least get off their keisters and move around some ( and when I called my son later that night, he said, that was exactly what they did.) Now why had they not done anything when KC asked them to - was it because he was too polite ?

*

After getting our kids settled in the dorm, ( sure, we felt a little sad at leaving them. "My son has never been away from home before," KC said, softly, as we turned and walked off. We stopped a minute, to look into their non-covered window, worrying we'd see the two little rascals sitting forlornly on their beds, scuffing a toe in the floor.......Naw. They were happily punching each other - never even noticed we were gone. ) , and so, off we went in search of the world's best BBQ joint in Abilene, Tx, a place called Joe Allens, which KC also claims, has the world's best chicken fried steak. I was dubious. ( Most Texas food aficionados will tell you , the trifecta of BBQ, chicken fried steak, and Tex-Mex, are rarely met in one location ) ....

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KC kept typing in addresses to his GPS machine doo-hickey, driving and searching for this elusive hole in the wall that was supposed to be really great. It proved to be a challenge to find. At first, this restaurant had moved from the original location, with only a street address scrawled in faded red shoe polish on a dusty fly-specked window of the original shack. Not very confidence inspiring. Once we found the second , newer location, it was inexplicably closed - this quest was like searching for Brigadoon, through the mists.... with the goal, a sliced brisket plate with two sides , constantly just out of range . You could almost smell the meat cooking on the wind, but never find the source . But it was definitely closed - no cars in the lot , no lights on in the building. On a Sunday afternoon ? There was no sign posted, saying " on vacation" or " closed due to repairs." Just locked doors and emptiness. The building looked fresh and new, in good shape, like it was a going concern, as my mother would say. KC could not believe it was , after all this, actually closed, and had to try jiggling the door handles, for himself."Is it some kind of holiday ? " he muttered under his breath. I've never seen a man more crushed , when we got the final verdict that it was , in fact , actually closed. The sad sight of him slumping of his shoulders as he turned from checking the doors ( why do we always, as humans, have to check the door handles for ourselves? Even though the lights are out and there's not a car in the lot....we just refuse to give up hope, till that one last tug of the door handles confirms what we knew, all along) , to walk back to the car in the parking lot. It's just heart-breaking, to see a man so defeated that way.

*

With heavy sigh, we got into the car and headed home. It was now getting to be rather late. KC called his wife KC, to tell her he would not be able to bring home a bag of delicious take-out BBQ goodness. We were silent for a long time. Hours ticked by. Stopping at one point to get gas, we saw a chain BBQ restaurant, and decided to eat there, knowing it wouldn't be any good, but hungry nevertheless. It was dry, the sauce tasted like it came out of a bottle. We ate it in tired silence, got back in the car , and headed home.

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I feel , somehow, like this experience bonded KC and me in a special way. You never really know a person till you've spent 15 hour day driving around a foreign small town with him, searching for BBQ hole in the wall restaurant that turns out to be closed. KC turned out to be remarkably sweet - tempered and patient .....lord knows, my husband would never have searched all over any town for a restaurant at all, he is always way too impatient to be on his way to his destination. KC was friendly and polite to me in the car, offering up drinks and snacks he had packed himself for the trip. His eyes glazed over at some of my vocabulary choices, but after all, he's a coach, I'm an English teacher - it's normal. I never did figure out why folks kept staring at us, as we registered our kids and took them around to various places at this camp. You don't think it's because KC is African American, do you ? I sure hope not. He's a really nice guy. Living in Denton, one gets so used to mingling with folks of all colors, shapes, religions, ethnicities, one starts to forget to "see" these differences.
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Story update :
The very next week, we all got to return to the fabulous Abilene, to pick our kids up from orchestra camp. This time, all the spouses, grandparents and siblings went, ( because the camp concluded with a concert, that all family members needed to hear), so we took individual cars, by family. It was in marked contrast that hubby dear and I set off : a classic , and oft repeated moment, which just sums up our relationship in so many ways, occurred as we were departing at 6:45 am . Hubby was running frantically around the house, naked, putting in his contacts, looking for his cell phone, all the while screaming , "Hurry up ! We're going to be late ! ". Which was a moot point, because I was at that moment, dressed, packed, sitting in the car with the engine and a/c on listening to the radio, and had already stocked up on a cooler full of drinks, several books and newspapers to read, etc. Hubby's hollarings fell on deaf ears.
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Because hubby was late to getting off, we barely made it in time to pick our son up. Even though I had made this trip only 7 days prior, hubby found it difficult to believe that I might actually know how to get here or there, and kept arguing vociferously with me, where to go - even though he had no map, no GPS, had never set foot in this town before, and kept getting his left and right, and his north and south , all mixed up. We had to race across town to a rehearsal for our son's final concert , which wasn't to be held for another 5 hours, making several U-turns , back and forth along a main street, b/c hubby couldn't just let me tell him where to go. Curious decision, on the part of the music camp, to force kids to check out of the dorm at 10 am, then hang around town for a concert that begins at 3 pm. I think they planned this whole thing so we'd be trapped in this god-forsaken place, and forced to visit the frontier museum, (as many of their camp handouts exhorted us to do - that or the zoo, which was "right out", as it was easily 100 degrees by 9 am this day ) . We had no choice but to eat lunch in a local restaurant, as well, all contributing to the economy. And it worked - while killing the 5 hours between the mandatory dorm check-out and the final concert, I managed to : find a great little to a local bakery and stocked up on home-made pies, rolls, biscuits, etc. Shopped a "friends of the Abilene library sale " and puchased over $800 recent hardback fiction novels, from my various reading lists , for only $50 - a total of 42 books in all. And of course the greatest pleasure was finally hitting the famed Joe Allens, and it was open this time. I did sample both the BBQ and the chicken fried steak , and must say, it's a toss up which one is better. They were both done just right, with melt in your mouth goodness. Mmm, mmm, mmmm.