Everything That Happened

to me and sometimes to other people

Category: Music

A Day at the Opera

By

On August 1, 2019

In Family, Music, NYC, Religion, Teachers

In grades seven and eight I had a science teacher that I really liked and admired, Mr. Fischer. He knew I liked science and science-fiction books, and was open to such classroom questions as, if light is really particles (turns out it isn’t), can it be used to push a spaceship along, even just a little bit? The atomic bomb and the possibility of atomic energy were also hot subjects in our classroom. Mr. Fischer was a bachelor, with a slight lisp and some fussy behaviors. Given what we know, or think we know, today, he was probably gay. Mr. Fischer was good friends with our music teacher Miss Barnett, who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.

Miss Barnett offered Mr. Fischer a pair of tickets to see Aida, and he asked me if I wanted to go. My mom said fine with her, and off we went one Saturday on the bus to New York. On the way, we saw acres of empty steel drums stacked up in the meadowlands along the bus route. It later turned out they were not empty, as most of the world probably thought, and had been leaking toxic goo into the North Jersey soil for years.

We arrived at the Met, still in the original building at 39th Street, and climbed to our seats. This is not meant as a complaint about the tickets, but we were in real nosebleed territory, the highest section in the house. The section was so steep that when I looked around, I was peering straight between the knees of the old lady behind me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole outing and thought the opera was fantastic. I know now that some people think Aida is bombastic, but what did I know then, kids love bombast.

Aida. Metropolitan Opera, 2014

Now, here’s what I think happened next, deduced by putting together two and two and based on the available evidence,

One Mr. Grady, who lived two doors down from us on Rayburn Terrace, was the janitor at Cleveland Street School. He was a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning; he carried a rosary in his back pocket and could be seen fingering it from time to time. Mr. Grady hated Mr. Fischer for the predictable reasons, and had gotten wind of our opera excursion.  Mr. Grady put a bug in my mother’s ear that perhaps Mr. Fischer was leading her son astray, and she should beware. My mother then confided in her boss, Mr.Edwards, with whom she was on friendly terms and maybe just a little bit office-romancy – Mr. Edwards would sometimes drive her home at night so she wouldn’t have to take the bus.  Perhaps her bookish son was being groomed as a Friend of Dorothy? Mr. Edwards considered the issue and came up with an idea.

Next, the only tangible evidence I have of all this speculation.

My mother came home from work one day and said “Mr. Edwards thought you might like this calendar.” Indeed I would, for it was probably the most risqué pinup calendar then available, Vargas Girls in provocative poses and showing as much skin as was legal.  “Um, thanks!” I had never been given anything by Mr. Edwards before.

After a decent interval I was upstairs, the staples were out and my top six picks were on the wall alongside the Honor Roll certificates. I was cured.

12 months of Vargas Girls

Library card

By

On August 1, 2019

In Family, Music, Theft

 I was a good customer of the Orange Public Library. Usually the first thing I’d do when I arrived was head over to the reference room and take Gray’s Anatomy off the shelf, then find a seat where no one could see what I was studying. It was the already ancient 1905 edition of Gray’s, all black-and-white hand-drawn, scrupulous and scary illustrations of the various parts of the human anatomy, especially the lady parts. It was a well-worn, thick book, and if you set it down on its spine, it would fall open automatically to the V’s.

The non-fiction, or what I thought of as the Dewey Decimal part of the library, was at the back of the building, spread over  three levels connected by metal stairs. The floors between levels were of heavy, translucent glass and as much as you might strain and imagine, you couldn’t see anything of the people walking on the level directly above your head except the bottom of their shoes.

The library had a collection of classical music on 33-and-a-third LP albums; symphonies and operas.  German/English side-by-side opera librettos were available, so I could sing along in my living room until someone came home. My mother had no interest in opera of any flavor, but on Saturday afternoons we’d listen to the Philharmonic radio broadcast on NBC together.

There seemed no limit to the information available in the library. Here I sought out the recipe for gunpowder, and while browsing randomly stumbled upon a book about witchcraft. When I took the book home, I found that one page contained about 20 hexagrams that could Make Things Happen. One of them, if stared at long enough, would turn the starer into a werewolf. That didn’t seem like such a great idea for anyone, so I averted my eyes and tore out the page. I balled it up and threw it into a sewer next day on my way to school. Just a small public service.

After I got interested in building models I stole a thin volume called “How to Make a Ship in a Bottle”. That might be the first thing I ever stole. When my brother saw me reading it, he said “How to take a shit in a bottle” and laughed, and I got mad. I never did make a ship in a bottle, it looked pretty complicated.

 

Stickler Memorial Library, Orange, NJ, early 1900s. It’s still there, kids

Music class

By

On July 31, 2019

In Music, Race, School, Teachers

In seventh and eighth grade, we have music class twice a week. The class is divided into two groups for tonal management of the parts we sing. There is an alto group, mostly boys, and a soprano group, girls and boys like myself whose voice hasn’t changed . When not accompanying us on the classroom piano, Miss Barnett spends her time correcting and verbally abusing the sopranos. We can do nothing to her satisfaction. After a few weeks, I tell Miss Barnett that my voice is changing. There is no test to confirm my claim; she simply tells me to sit on the alto side of the room from now on. Goodbye to twice-weekly stomach knots.

Our repertoire comes from a long-out-of-print song book of standards, spirituals and other royalty-free music, for example “Comin’ ‘round the mountain”. Music is timeless, and our school board believes deeply in that thrifty adage.

One song in regular rotation is Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe”. It has of course been modernized since then, but in our classroom Old Black Joe grieves for “my friends from the cotton fields away”, with the chorus

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low,
I hear those darky voices calling “Old Black Joe”.

In our class are two black kids, Joe Stokes and Richie Strickland. I don’t look over to see if they are singing along, but I’ll bet Joe Stokes isn’t.

Richie and I are friendly, and one day he comes to my house with two fishing poles and we board the Number 20 bus to Branch Brook Park. As we pay our fares, I see other passengers nudge one another.

We try various spots around the lake but don’t catch anything. We come back to my house and sit in the sunroom, talking about baseball. After an hour or so, my grandmother takes me aside and says “Tell Richie he has to go home, we’re going to have dinner now.”

Presbyterian Minstrel Show

By

On July 25, 2019

In Music, Religion

My church, and I call it “my” church because East Orange Presbyterian was the closest Protestant church that my mother could get a neighbor to give me a ride to every Sunday, decided to give a minstrel show. I know what you’re thinking, but it was a long time ago, we didn’t know any better, and the nation was young.

Church members with an interest in show business  volunteered for the various roles of minstrelsy,  and rehearsals began on the fellowship hall stage. Maybe there is some sort of widely available, generic script for a minstrel show, for everyone seemed to know what they were doing. There was  singing (Swanee River, Polly Wolly Doodle), tap dancing, and comic skits — for example, one included a collection of one-off fruits and vegetables, and a woman who says to her suitor “But darling, we…”,  then  holds up, wait for it, a cantalope!, as immediately recognized and shouted out by a willing audience.

Was there blackface? I honestly don’t remember, but yes, probably. Burnt cork  is easy to manufacture,  apply and remove, and also makes a fine beard for a  Christmas Wise Man or Halloween hobo.

The players rehearsed religiously, seated onstage in the traditional minstrel-show arrangement of chairs. At  only nine or ten years old, I was a  stagehand, my sole duty being to open and close the curtains between  acts. The show was scheduled  for one night only, a Thursday. On that Thursday, as I was getting ready for bed, a stray thought crossed my mind and I froze and said to myself “Shit.”

I assume the show started  just fine without me, but I never went back to that church  and never knew  for sure what happened that night at eight o’clock. Whenever I tell this story to someone, they always say “Wow, maybe they’re still stuck behind the curtains.” That’s crazy, right?

Foul footsteps

By

On July 20, 2019

In History, Music

The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses, not that you’d know it from seeing any ball games. I have never heard verse 2, 3 or 4 sung in public. Verse 3 is especially interesting because it dumps all over that ‘band’ of dirty Redcoat bastards. It goes like this:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Link to all four verses

John Trumbull, “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777,” courtesy Yale University Art Gallery

 

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