Part 21
Photo by Laura Goldman
Welcome to my past.I was born the year before WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and colorful life.
I can’t remember when friends first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays on Facebook.
Before long, readers started telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea, this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color, involved in over 200 (and counting) essays.
I next considered a website, but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.
Since I’ve long been familiar with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing 20 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size as a result of importing material from other sources)
These tales are not in any kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.
Welcome to my past.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: The US South, Southwest and West; Summer 1961
SKETCHING THE WEST (KIND OF)
In 1961, my family went on a six-week odyssey that’s enshrined in our history as “the Western Trip.”
We happened to hit Disneyland on July 4th, and almost had the place to ourselves because everybody else assumed it would be crowded. Then we visited San Francisco and Berkeley, where my Uncle Jim and his family were on a sabbatical from Cornell, and living in a house where Carl Jung had stayed on visits to the University. Then up the coast on Route 1, etc., etc.
It was quite the long haul, and then as now, I tended to crave a lot of “alone time”—hard to come by when traveling as a family pod.
My go-to tactic became wandering off and ensconcing myself behind my sketchbook, rendering my own unconventional take on the places we visited. (I should mention that at the time, I tended to draw a lot of cartoon mice.)
Recently, going through some stored memorabilia, I found a collection of musty sketchbooks, dating from 1959 to 1962. (I stopped drawing when I got to college and roomed with students doing “Serious Art.”)
Among the sketches were those I’d made on the Western Trip. About the same time, my brother, who was 11 in 1961, sent me a collection of my dad’s wonderful photos from that summer.
How could I not combine some of them?
(Note: Although Dad took some spectacular shots of scenery, I've mostly used human-interest pics here.)
Taking off in the Ford Fairlane
On a beach somewhere. I frequently attracted little kibitzers, so I drew these kids...
A whale in pajamas.
More kids. One of our most interesting stops was at Acoma (ACK-oh-ma), the oldest continuously inhabited town in North America, located on top of a high mesa in New Mexico. We happened to arrive on the occasion of a festival that included games on horseback.
These kids were teasing their little brother about falling off of his pony, so I memorialized the event.
My brother David (foreground), sister Sue and me at a roadside stop. I was clowning around about taking a jump. Sue was a blonde that summer.
This bear at Yosemite...
...inspired the above drawing.
...on the wildlife.
Four on the road: me my mother, brother David, Dad.
Somewhere in Texas
We thought this was a big tree until we hit the California redwoods.
At the Grand Tetons
Grand Canyon artist...
...and the product.
Sue meets a Sanitary Engineer.
Disneyland
Dad gets frisky at Knott's Berry Farm.
Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
Little girl, Chinatown, San Francisco.
We split up toward the end of the trip; my dad having business at home, and I, needing to prepare for my stay as an exchange student in Germany, flew cross-country (my first time in an airplane), and my mother, Sue and David drove back to Pennsylvania.
Dad had wanted to give us a memorable trip. That he did.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Versailles, France, 1750; Sebastopol, California, 2010-Present
GOOGLING FOR TREASURE/GETTING THE BIRD
Back in 2010, I began volunteering at the wonderful Sutter Hospice Thrift Store in Sebastopol. Around here, when you admire a piece of clothing or jewelry, you might get the reply: “This? Oh, I got it at Hospice,” as if it were a brand name, like Target or Tiffany’s.
Light and airy for Halloween.
Located in a former department store in a shopping center, the Hospice store is light, airy, colorful and tasteful, a far cry from the musty jammed warehouses of my thrifting youth. Here's a look:
Basket Display
The small city of Sebastopol, in the heart of Sonoma County wine country, is a friendly, upwardly mobile and generous place. which explains why, seven days a week at 10:00 AM, a line of donation-crammed vehicles forms in the parking lot behind the Hospice store, and bags and boxes of potential items for sale pour into its back room. Although the official time-frame for this activity is listed as 10AM-1PM, donations are often cut off early, simply because there’s just nowhere else to put them.
I must say that volunteering at Sutter Hospice Thrift Store is a three-times rewarding activity: helping the community, retail therapy, and a lively social scene, with both the constant stream of customers and with a volunteer and managerial staff full of colorful (and competent) eccentrics.
Halloween in the back room.
I started out straightening clothing on racks, re-hanging dropped garments, and policing dressing rooms, and eventually migrated from cashiering to the ongoing treasure-hunt in the back room; this is where decisions are made as to which items are new, like-new, seasonal, valuable, relevant and/or otherwise special enough to go out onto the sales floor.
In the back room during Covid.
Unlike Goodwill Industries, Hospice doesn’t have space or facilities to repair and launder clothing and linens, so items with stains, musty or overly perfume-y odors, missing buttons, rips, split seams, etc., are saved for an organization that deals with these flaws and provides clothing for needy people in Ecuador. (On a smaller scale, facilitated by willing volunteers, some items go to local homeless shelters.)
“Who ever thought THAT was a good idea?”
And, more commonly,
“What the hell IS that?”
For years, we depended on our own experience and various types of personal volunteer expertise in fashion, jewelry, handbags, shoes, books, electronics, toys, artwork, ceramics, vintage objects, etc.
And for years, we received bits of feedback about objects purchased for a few dollars that turned out to be worth MUCH more. All we could do was shrug and return to the stream of donations pouring through.
Then somebody discovered Google Lens™, an app available free to anybody with Google on their phone. (I’m still surprised at how many people haven’t heard of it.)
Google Lens allows you to take a photo of an object, select settings like “Identify,” “Translate,” and “Shop,” and AI will respond with a photostream of the same or close-to identical objects, usually with prices shown; links to where they can be seen or purchased; and an automated opinion on what you’ve got there, like ANTIQUES ROADSHOW without having to wait in line.
Armed with this technology, more quickly than you might believe, we began discovering hidden treasures: commemorative T-shirts selling for $200 on Etsy or eBay; belt buckles made by famous silversmiths; high-priced antique dolls mingled with headless Barbies; pieces of Tiffany jewelry culled from baggies full of tangled costume junk.
We don’t, of course, charge anywhere near the actual value of these discoveries (we are, after all, a thrift store), but we can get a bit more than we'd ask for a run-of-the-mill item in our quest to help fund the county’s hospice services.
Of course, once I realized that this technology was available on my own phone, I went around my house Google-Lensing any interesting-looking object—I have many—and finding some surprising treasures.
Eventually I got around to a handsome engraving of a hawk-like bird that used to hang just inside our living-room door in the house where I grew up. My dad had acquired it at a farm auction in the late 1930s or early '40s; my mother later put it in a larger frame, and I eventually wound up with it.
To my astonishment, it turned out to be a relatively well-known piece of art, even found in the collections of a few museums, although, since it’s a single page from a 16-volume set, it’s not exorbitantly valued. (The entire set of volumes was sold by Sotheby’s for around $12,000.) This one seems to be one of the most popular of the illustrations and is treated as an art object in its own right.
Here’s the online description:
"'Le Milan Noir' is a hand-colored lithograph of the black kite, or MILVUS MIGRANS, from HISTOIRE NATURELLE DES OISEAUX edited by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French polymath and head of the royal botanical gardens under Louis XV.. The lithograph was engraved by French engineer, engraver and naturalist François-Nicolas Martinet and the volume was published in 1770.
"The book includes a description of the black kite and a hand-colored plate of the bird, a raptor that lives in tropical regions of Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia."
I didn’t want to try to take apart my mother’s framing, which is pretty much held together by duct tape and thumbtacks, but on checking the piece closely with a magnifying glass, I could see that it was rendered on a fine watercolor-type paper, and note the texture changes and small unevenness caused by the application of watercolors. Yes, our family "Black Kite" is not a print, but the real deal, a 275-year-old hand-colored engraving.
If you compare it with one that was auctioned off at Sotheby’s (see below), you can see small differences in the shading at the edges of the tail, the top of the wings, the throat, and the beak, as well as on the log on which the kite perches. The all-over difference in color saturation can be explained by the fact that the Sotheby’s bird still appears to be in the original book, while ours has been hanging around outside, guarding Hill doors for about 80 years.
The bird recently sold by Sotheby's is on the left; ours is on the right for comparison. My mother used a standard-sized mat, which cuts off the name of the bird—it's still there, hidden below the matting.
I have no plans to sell or exhibit "Le Milan Noir;" I just kind of like the idea that a museum piece hangs on the wall inside my doorway, well out of the sun’s rays, as it did in our family home all those years ago.
So here’s my advice: get yourself some Google Lens, and go on your own treasure hunt.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1950s; Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Black Point, Novato, California; 1976-1980 and 1994
STRANGLEWOODS: A SOMEWHAT TWISTED TALE OF LOVE AND STRANGENESS
When I was growing up on Mammy Morgan’s Hill, one of my favorite playgrounds was an 80-plus-acre swathe of pristine valley woodland belonging to our closest neighbors.
It contained everything an adventurous kid could want in a woods: a stream with actual waterfalls, in which one could move stones around to engineer wading pools; deer trails to follow; log bridges to navigate; jutting rocks where one could dig out hideouts and construct forts; even the occasional arrowhead to be found.
Me at about age 10 with a non-stranglewood fishing pole
Back then, my busy parents were refreshingly free of helicopter tendencies; as long as we kids showed up for meals, chores and family activities, we could pretty much go where we liked in the surrounding forests and fields.
One of my favorite sylvan activities in those days was hunting for “stranglewoods.” (I once heard a neighbor use the term, and have employed it ever since.) These living artifacts are created when young trees and vines such as bittersweet, wild grape, or honeysuckle compete for the same space, with the latter inevitably twining tightly around the former.
STRANGLEWOODS: A SOMEWHAT TWISTED TALE OF LOVE AND STRANGENESS
When I was growing up on Mammy Morgan’s Hill, one of my favorite playgrounds was an 80-plus-acre swathe of pristine valley woodland belonging to our closest neighbors.
It contained everything an adventurous kid could want in a woods: a stream with actual waterfalls, in which one could move stones around to engineer wading pools; deer trails to follow; log bridges to navigate; jutting rocks where one could dig out hideouts and construct forts; even the occasional arrowhead to be found.
Me at about age 10 with a non-stranglewood fishing pole
Back then, my busy parents were refreshingly free of helicopter tendencies; as long as we kids showed up for meals, chores and family activities, we could pretty much go where we liked in the surrounding forests and fields.
One of my favorite sylvan activities in those days was hunting for “stranglewoods.” (I once heard a neighbor use the term, and have employed it ever since.) These living artifacts are created when young trees and vines such as bittersweet, wild grape, or honeysuckle compete for the same space, with the latter inevitably twining tightly around the former.
Note the vine scars on the mature tree.
In the mid-1970s, in my second year of creating the Renaissance Faire character of “Mad Maudlen,” I began to envision her, in her endlessly wandering state, as a pilgrim. And, as in illustrations of the period, I pictured her as carrying a staff.
I forget exactly how Maudlen’s first staff, a delicately flared and fluted length of sassafras wood, got from Pennsylvania to California, but it proved the perfect accessory, helping me to navigate barefoot over rough spots, and adding yet another subtle layer of strangeness to the character.
When I left to take a job on the east coast several years later, I passed the staff on to artist and sundial-meister Gino Schiavone, who had always admired it.
Gino wrote: "You stick in my memory."
In 1994, I received a request from the Faire promoters to re-create the role of Maudlen that fall, and was delighted to accept. On a visit to my parents in Pennsylvania during the summer, I mentioned to my dad, who, in his retirement years, had begun crafting unusual items from unusual pieces of wood, that I was in need of a new staff.
Dad, as it happened, had become as fascinated by stranglewoods as I was, and had even taken to creating his own, substituting lengths of clothesline for vines, and patiently waiting years for the results. He disappeared into his workshop and emerged with a five-foot-long six-twist length of oak that had grown considerably before losing the battle with a grapevine.
With Dad and his collection of twisted walking sticks in Pennsylvania.
We cleaned it up, trimmed and smoothed the ends, embedded a tiny pilgrim’s seashell into the top, and shipped it off to San Francisco. It and Maudlen navigated the Faire wonderfully.
Not long after that, an accident left me with a broken leg. During my recovery, when I still needed a cane to walk, I received another long thin parcel from Dad. He’d turned one of his manufactured stranglewoods into a sturdy walking stick, complete with leather strap, thumb-rest, and my name meticulously carved into the handle.
Sometimes love, like strangeness, comes with a twist.
Walking stick on the left, oaken staff on the right.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York; February, 1964
SHE LOVES YOU, Or,
A SIGN OF THE TIMES
(Although it was rambling, musty, and located in a particularly dicey area at the very edge of the campus, Sherbrooke was actually a step up from my freshman living unit, Washington Arms, an erstwhile fleabag hotel popularly referred to as “The Armpit.”)
The Armpit
Among the Sherbrooke residents were quite a few art students, distinguishable by their ever-present portfolios and tackle boxes full of art supplies, and their unconventional swoopy garments—the rest of us were trotting about meekly in pleated skirts, crewnecks, knee socks and penny loafers.
Arty types
One of the more swoopy of the art gang was a young woman named Sue, a free spirit and wild dresser with close-cropped brown hair topped with a blonde wig that, as she informed us, was called “Murgatroyd” when she was drunk, and “Elizabeth” when she was sober.This hairpiece almost seemed to have a social life of its own, as Sue was wont to leave it here and there all over campus, often to be returned to Sherbrooke by some male art student, fraternity lad or sports hero (Sue had wisely equipped Murgatroyd/Elizabeth with a discreet sewn-inside name-and-address tag.)
Sue was the first among us to sniff out the beginnings of Beatlemania, even before the Liverpudlians’ landmark appearance on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW in February of ’64.
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| The boys |
She celebrated the Fab Four far and wide throughout the dorm, with posters on the walls, stickers on the windows, and the strains of “She Loves You” on repeat blasting from her open doorway.
If she thought you deserved it, you would be invited to join a select group in her room to listen to more obscure cuts like “Anna,” “Till There Was You,” and “Don’t Bother Me.”
The culmination of her devotional campaign was an event recorded by a photo in a local newspaper, with the following caption:
“’Beatlemania’ has hit the SU campus, and the British boys might be flattered to know that a dormitory has adopted their name. Residents of the former Sherbrooke Apartments at 950 Madison St. voted at a Sunday night house meeting, to call their living center ‘Beatle Brooke.’”
It didn’t last long, but oh Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
I even had a quasi-Beatle haircut. (Photo by Chan Rudd)
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Boston Massachusetts; July 4th, 1976
SO HE USED CANNONS
One of my all-time favorite Fourth-of-July moments came in 1976, with a PBS Bicentennial broadcast of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra playing the heck out of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”
They expected 25,000 people. They got a LOT more. In this rare video (the PBS coverage was better), there’s a warm-up with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” odd footage of an uneasy commentator who thinks he’s off-camera, and then the main event. (If you don’t want to sit through the beginning, the real fireworks start at about 15 minutes in.)
I’ll never forget it: full orchestra sawing and blowing and banging away; howitzers blasting from barges on the Charles River; churchbells ringing throughout the city of Boston; fireworks erupting, and 750,000 spectators on their feet screaming as if they were at a rock concert.
And in the middle of it, in his shirtsleeves but barely breaking a sweat, Maestro Arthur Fiedler, calmly conducting as all hell breaks loose.
Now THAT's a Fourth of July party.
THROWBACK THURSDAY: Sebastopol, CA, October 2022
WITCHY WOMEN TAKE OVER
A couple of Octobers ago, I decided to make a Halloween collage for a young friend. Pumpkins, I thought, some amusingly grinning pumpkins; a goofy ghost or two, a silly skeleton, black cats, the classic trope of a witch on a broomstick silhouetted against a full moon.
Things did not go as I expected.
Riffling through the delightful calendar put out annually by a local musical group known as the “Accordian Babes,” I was caught by the image of the sultry October Babe, draped provocatively along the bar of what appeared to be a Hell’s Angels hangout, complete with a snarling stuffed fox and several skull-and-crossbones insigniae.
Then I found a catalog from a ceramics company called Windstone, which, along with more benign images, featured snarling gargoyles and gryphons, leering owls, menacing wolves, and cat-like demons.
AUDUBON magazine yielded a life-sized bat, a tiny coiling serpent, and a crocodile skull. A Native American arts catalog displayed a ritual buffalo mask made (yikes!) from the flayed face of a once-living bison.
A disquieting theme was developing. I was hooked, but I had no idea of how to fit all these elements together until I began leafing through a calendar of Hindu deities.
Whoosh! There she was, Kali, arrayed in her traditional divine destructiveness, all dressed up and ready to party.
“Pumpkins, my ass!” she hissed.
I bought my young friend a sweet little Halloween card that year.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Northeastern US; 1975-2014
CHARIOTS OF CHERUBIM CHANTING
OR,
WHY I LOVE THIS VIDEO
In 1975, my friends John Roberts and Tony Barrand, a brilliant and beloved British-music duo, decided to try something a little different for the winter holiday season.
With John Roberts at the 1972 Dickens Fair
This was the winning formula:
• John Roberts – vocals, English concertina, Anglo concertina
• Tony Barrand – vocals, tambourine, percussion
• Fred Breunig – fiddle, harmony vocals
• Steve Woodruff – button accordion, Anglo concertina, pennywhistle, harmony vocals
The original lineup: Steve Woodruff, Tony Barrand, John Roberts, Fred Breunig
Their repertoire of winter songs was no mere lineup of predictable seasonal tunes, no “Frosty the Snowman” or “Jolly Holly Christmas.” These were music scholars who went hunting for, and found, a captivating and unpredictable collection of winter songs and carols, some ancient, some contemporary, some religious, some secular, some downright pagan, and many of them, according to one review, “carols you can dance to.”
(Scholarly note: this makes sense, as many of them were adapted from dance tunes in medieval times after repression by the Church was lifted.)
Check out this lineup from their 2013 album BIDDING YOU JOY:
1. "Bidding You Joy" (Alison Burns)– 1:08
2. "Masters in This Hall" (William Morris) – 4:30
3. "Awake! Behold!" – 4:10
4. "The Old Hark Hark" – 2:46
5. "I Saw a Ship" (Addington, A. Burns) – 3:23
6. "Cold December" – 4:05
7. "Mummers Night in Oshawa" (A. Frank Willis)– 4:08
8. "Apple Tree Wassail" – 3:16
9. "New Zadoc (While Shepherds Watched)" – 3:39
10. "O the Holy Holly" – 4:52
11. "O Bethlehem" – 3:21
12. "The Worcestershire Carol" – 3:21
13. "Penny for the Ploughboys" (Colin Cater) – 4:51
14. "Stay and I'll Sing!" – 4:24
15. "The Derby Ram Goes to Sea" – 3:44
16. "The Door of the Year" (A. Burns) – 3:07
17. "Villagers All" (Andy Davis) – 3:19
The four guys had so much fun in that 1975 holiday season that they went on to re-convene each winter for nearly 40 years, record six CDs, publish a songbook, and appear each winter in churches, coffeehouses, pubs, living rooms, small theaters and grand concert halls, even in New York’s Kennedy Center.
In mummer's motley: John, Fred, Tony, and Andy
At one point they began to introduce “mummers' plays,” a tradition that’s been traced as far back as the 11th century, rowdy ritual performances with a cast of stock characters, often performed by roving troupes of masked men or “guisers,” (as in “disguise,” and yes, that’s where we got the term “geezer” for an old guy).
St. George slays the dragon in a British mummers' play, as Old Father Christmas looks on.
One of NSWC’s favorite “party pieces” was “Chariots,” a remarkable carol composed in 1995 by singer John Kirkpatrick, but somehow seeming much older.
Simultaneously stirring and humorous, rollicking and reverent, the song was first recorded on their 2000 CD JUST SAY NOWELL, and became the group’s ultimate holiday sing-along.
There are a number of videos of “Chariots” online, some by noted choral groups, but my favorite will always be the one below, recorded in 2008 at the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro Vermont, with the audience happily stomping and bellowing along with that chorus-you-can’t-get-out-of-your-head.
This “Anthem of Alliteration,” at the hands of these wonderful musicians, accompanied by fiddle, accordian, concertina, and drum, becomes a joyous carnival oom-pah of a song. Here it is, and below are the words, in case you want to sing along.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzhv7sqUGCI ("Chariots"/Nowell Sing We Clear/Stachis Theater; Brattleboro, VT/2008)
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CHARIOTS
O Shepherd O shepherd come leave off your piping
Come listen come learn come hear what I say
For now is the time that has long been forespoken
For now is the time there′ll be new tunes to play
For soon there comes one who brings a new music
Of sweetness and clarity none can compare
So open your heart for heavenly harmony
Here on this hill will be filling the air
(Chorus) With chariots of cherubim chanting
And seraphim singing hosanna
And a choir of archangels a-caroling come
Hallelujah Hallelu
All the angels a-trumpeting glory
In praise of the Prince of Peace
See on yon stable the starlight is shimmering
And glimmering and glistening and glowing with glee
In Bethlehem blest this baby of bliss will be
Born here before you as bold as can be
And you'll be the first to hear the new symphony
Songs full of gladness and glory and light
So learn your tunes well and play your pipes proudly
For the Prince of Paradise plays here tonight
(Chorus)
Bring your sheep bleating to this happy meeting
To hear how the lamb with the lion shall lie
It′s mooing and braying you'll hear the song saying
The humble and lowly will be the most high
Let the horn of the herdsman be heard up in heaven
For the gates are flung open for all who come near
And the simplest of souls shall sing to infinity
Lift up and listen and you shall hear
(Chorus)
The warmonger's charger will thunder for freedom
The gun-maker′s furnace will dwindle and die
And muskets and sabers and swords shall be sundered
Surrendered to the sound that is sweeping the sky
And the shoes of the mighty shall dance to new measures
And the jackboots of generals shall jangle no more
As sister and brother and father and mother
Agree with each other the end to all war
(Chorus) (Chorus)
As a candle can conquer the demons of darkness
As a flame can keep frost from the deepest of cold
So a song can give hope in the depths of all danger
And a line of pure melody soar in your soul
So sing your songs well and sing your songs sweetly
And swear that your singing it never shall cease
So the clatter of battle and drums of disaster
Be drowned in the sound of the pipes of peace
(Chorus)
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The group’s last performance in its original form was in 2014; slowed by advancing age and/or illness. Tony performed those last years from a wheelchair, his voice clear and true to the last note.
John and Tony are both, to my sorrow, gone now, but Fred and Andy carry on the winter-caroling tradition with a group of other fine musicians that includes the group Windborne, of which Fred’s daughter Lauren is a member.
Here’s a short video (3:01) that gives a great mini-tour of the unusual kinds of songs performed by Nowell Sing We Clear:
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Wikipedia Nowell Sing We Clear Discography
• NOWELL SING WE CLEAR (1977)
• TO WELCOME IN THE SPRING (1980)
• THE SECOND NOWELL (1981)
• NOWELL SING WE CLEAR, Vol. 3 (1985)
• NOWELL SING WE FOUR (1988)
• THE BEST OF NOWELL SING WE CLEAR 1975–1986 (1989)
• HAIL SMILING MORN! (1995)
• JUST SAY NOWELL (2000)
• NOWELL NOWELL NOWELL! (2008)
• BIDDING YOU JOY (2013)
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mannheim, Germany; Vienna, Austria; 1756-1840
SMILE, STANZI !
Or
A PHOTOGRAPHIC BOGGLE
What impressions (other than his music) does the name Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conjure up for you? Satin knee-breeches and elaborate wigs? Extravagantly hooped skirts and elegantly embroidered brocades? Harpsichords, minuets, court intrigues and Imperial patronage?
Mozart was born in 1756, 20 years before the American Revolution, and died a mere 35 years later, leaving behind, as we all know, an extraordinary body of musical composition. He also left behind a mountain of debt, two of his six children (four had died in infancy), and his 29-year-old widow, Constanze.
Wolfgang and Stanzi
Theirs had been a loving, tumultuous, faithful, and (famously) often erotic marriage. Mozart’s “Stanzi” came from a hard-working and essentially middle-class musical family, the Webers of Mannheim, Germany, then an important cultural, intellectual and musical center.
The 21-year-old Mozart visited Mannheim in 1777, developed a close relationship with the Weber family, and fell in love—not with 15-year-old Constanze Weber, but with her older sister Aloysia, a talented singer, who ultimately rejected him.
By 1781, the Weber family had moved to Vienna, and took Mozart in as a boarder, whereupon he began to court Constanze. Her father had recently died, and her mother thoroughly disapproved of the match (as did Mozart’s dad, Leopold), but the young couple thwarted their parents by simply moving in together. To avoid scandal, they were married in August of 1782.
Surviving letters from Mozart to and about Constanze reveal that, far from being the giggling airhead portrayed in the film AMADEUS, she was very much involved in her husband’s musical process, acting as a performer, muse, and manager. As a trained singer, she appeared in his concerts—including the premiere of his MASS IN C MINOR—organized his papers, and fostered his interest in Baroque music.
In Amadeus, played by Elizabeth Berridge
Mozart died from some form of acute infection in 1791. He was not, as is often maintained, buried in a “pauper’s grave” —The custom in Vienna at that time was that only aristocrats got to lie in solo graves topped with monuments; "ordinary" corpses were simply bundled together into unmarked mass pits.
He also didn’t die a pauper—he was actually in Vienna’s top 5% of earners—but was seriously financially irresponsible. He loved to live large and generously, took out loans and then forgot about them, and was apparently too busy having fun and composing immortal music to keep track of income and expenditure.
After his death, faced with Wolfgang’s tangle of debts and sloppy bookkeeping skills (which were as minimal as his music was transcendent), Constanze fluffed up her big-girl petticoats (no panties then), rolled up her sleeves, and got to work dealing with his loopy finances.
She quickly developed into an acute businesswoman, managing her late spouse’s debts; selling his manuscripts to publishers for profit; organizing and producing memorial concerts (in which she frequently performed); securing a pension from Emperor Leopold II; co-writing the first Mozart biography; and essentially turning her husband’s genius into a lucrative ongoing brand.
So, you might ask, why am I rattling on about Constanze Mozart? Well, not long ago, I happened upon one of those marvelous YouTube videos that use AI to bring old photos to life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei5awzOgUfE (The Oldest Photographs in History — Brought to Life | Real Faces from the 1830s & 1840s)
And there, at about 10:03, was a surprisingly informal group photo of seven people. Described as having been taken in 1840, its subjects are (as noted in WIKIPEDIA):
Distinguished Bavarian composer Max Keller, seated front and center between two women. The younger folks in the back row are identified as his family cook, brother-in-law and two daughters. On the lower right in the photo is Keller’s wife, Josefa. On the left is a woman identified as…
Whaaaaat?
…Constanze Mozart.
Mozart’s wife lived long enough to be PHOTOGRAPHED?
My mind was officially boggled.
I should mention that there’s a lot of controversy about this image, with various experts weighing in as to whether this sober matron was, in fact, Mozart’s “Stanzi.”
The truth is, however, that, if not Stanzi, it jolly well could have been, as Constanze Mozart Nissen—she married a Danish diplomat in 1809—was at that point very much alive; she would pass on in 1842 at the age of 92.
In 1859, American poet, essayist, and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described the camera as "the mirror with a memory." We have no photos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who achieved immortality without benefit of photography.
I like to think, however, that this image links his time to ours, and that a little mind-boggling, like great music, is good for the soul.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1990s
THE CREATIVE PROCESS: A HOUSEHOLD HINT
When I first made this drawing in the early 1990s, there was no story behind it, just a vague image that slipped into my mind.
But of course there’s always a story.
Some years later, a friend was going through my portfolio of drawings, and found this one. “This looks like an illustration for a fairytale or folktale” he observed, “but I can’t remember which one.”
I couldn’t resist. On the spot I invented “The Smirchcrow,” a clumsy bird who blunders between dimensions, using clean laundry as portals from one to the next.
“I never heard of that one,” he said, “Where does it come from?” Then he caught on: “You made it up!” he accused.
Of course I did.
A few years later, I came upon the drawing again. This time the story came out as a set of verses:
Ladies, in your launderings
Beware the SMIRCHCROW’s wanderings,
From outer space to linens fine
That hang upon your washing-line,
For sometimes, blundering through the dark
He’ll lose his way and leave his mark
Of stardust tangled in his wings
With shards of planetary rings
And other starry stuff that clings
Onto your sheets and underthings,
(My verse this timely warning brings:
Beware the Smirchcrow’s wanderings.)
Hint #2: To deter him, try a little bleach; he hates that.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton, Pennsylvania, 1958-1960s; Hollywood, California, 1981-Present
THE MOST SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF LITTLE JACK
As a family, the Colemans were not only numerous, but a patrician force to be reckoned with: direct descendants of Benjamin Franklin, with a Pulitzer Prize-winning grandfather.
There was eminent historian and distinguished Lafayette College professor Dr. John MacDonald Coleman; his aristocratic Katherine Hepburn-like mover-and-shaker wife Agnes; and their seven children, four girls and three boys—each more beautiful and brilliant than the next—with whom I attended Sunday-school classes, ballet classes, birthday parties, etc.
Around 1962, I was talked into being an assistant teacher in the little-kid version of Vacation Bible School, a kind of churchly daycare for three-to-five-year-olds. My role consisted primarily of reading sanitized Bible stories, making dioramas, and keeping the adorable tykes from pelting each other with Play-doh.
Me in those days
One of those attending was the youngest Coleman, little Jack. Tow-headed, button-cute and whip-smart, Jack actually listened to the Bible stories, asked penetrating and precocious questions, and especially relished those incidents involving miraculous transformations (wine into water, burning bushes, raising the dead) and adventures/heroics (David and Goliath, Joshua at Jericho, The Flight from Egypt).
After that summer, I went away to college and other lives, and seldom watched TV, missing entire small-screen eras—roughly from “The Brady Bunch” through “The Sopranos.”
On one visit home, I overheard hear my mother’s friends discussing the fact that little Jack had gone into acting and was on television. There was an odd tone to their remarks, later explained when I learned that, from 1982-88, he played Steven Carrington, one of TV’s very first openly gay characters, on “Dynasty.”
Oh, yum. Jack as Steven Carrington on Dynasty
Then, around 2008, while briefly sidelined at home with Netflix Streaming, I discovered entire seasons of cultish must-watch shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Lost,” and a quirky and innovative comic-book spinoff called “Heroes,” about ordinary people who became possessed of superpowers.
As I watched it, I realized that one of the actors, a good-looking fellow whose performance walked a brilliant and subtle line between sympathetic and downright evil, seemed oddly familiar.
When I saw the name in the credits, I realized that the guy whose face, voice and expressions I was remembering (though not the evil aspect) was Dr. John Coleman (1918-1998), who, like this protean character, Noah Bennett, was graceful, brilliant, charmingly off-center and wore somewhat geeky glasses.
Dr. John MacDonald Coleman at Left, in his seventies, and Jack as Noah Bennett in "Heroes." "HRG" is an alternate name for Noah in the series (someone obviously couldn't tell just-plain-geeky glasses from horn-rims). Dr. John is rocking the real thing.
Good Lord! (I realized) It was Little Jack, consciously or unconsciously channeling aspects of his dad into his TV role. (His acting genes actually came from both parents, who frequently took leading parts in faculty plays at Lafayette College.)
“Heroes” continued for four seasons (2006-2010), and a mini-series, “Heroes Reborn,” aired in 2015. Beginning with his 1981 debut in “Days of Our Lives,” Jack Coleman has gone on to become one of the most quietly successful and hardest-working small-screen actors in the business.
He has appeared in or starred in over 60 TV shows and movies, including “Touched By An Angel,” “Diagnosis Murder,” “House MD,” “Nip/Tuck,” “Entourage,” “Scandal,” “CSI,” “Criminal Minds,” “Nightmare Café,” “Ultimate Spider-Man,” “The Mentalist,” “Rock the House,” “Castle,” “Vampire Diaries,” and many more.
Heroics: check.
Adventures: check.
Miraculous transformations: check.
I like to think that little Jack is in his element.
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New THROWBACK THURSDAY: Multiple Gardens; c. 1950-Present
WHEN A PEST IS NOT A PEST:
SOME THOUGHTS ON OXALIS
I’ve worked in family food gardens; large demonstration gardens; private showplace gardens; sprawling container gardens; and backyard gardens from large to tiny.
Throughout my years here, I’ve labored under a small cognitive dissonance. When I first arrived in Sonoma County in its glorious springtime, I was enchanted by roadside billows of intensely green shamrock-like leaves crowned with waves of brilliant yellow five-lobed trumpet-like flowers.
Oxalis stricta
I soon learned, however, from experienced friends, that introducing this beauty into a garden would be the beginning of a horticultural nightmare.
Although Oxalis stricta, known as yellow oxalis or wood sorrel, is (unlike its truly nasty mat-rooted garden-pest relative, the creeping Oxalis corniculata) shallow-rooted and easily pulled up, it seeds prolifically and gently insinuates itself EVERYWHERE. I thus have spent many hours yanking this pretty invader out on sight, waging a silent stubborn war against its proliferation.
The nasty Oxalis corniculata.
Last year, however, I moved to a semi-rural property with wide-open spaces that, because of an uncontrollable gopher population, are allowed to grow into flourishing meadows of wild grasses, cresses, clovers, cranesbills—and, yes, yellow oxalis.
My gardening endeavors have dwindled to a tidy little collection of container plants on a deck well out of gopher range, and I rejoice that I can finally cherish the lovely blooms of oxalis without feeling the unwilling primal urge to yank them out by the roots.
Free-range Oxalis
It’s the little things.
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