Our Mid-South Road Trip (2000)

"Big Mo" Cave City, KY

The summer of 2000 we were in a good place. Newly wed, she had just stepped down from a gig as an editor for the weekly Free Times and started pursuing her first Masters degree. I was the artistic director of a new theater company coming off a string of very successful productions, most recently Lysistrata. And we were in deep negotiations about having a baby.

Assuming we would not have such an opportunity again, not for a long time, we planned an extended, three-week road trip. A week to the Outer Banks, where we would meet up with some friends for a week at the beach, and then a week to get home.

For the journey I made her the second mixtape in the ongoing Music From the Big Love series (1997-2000) and we had duped a number of episodes of The American Life, “streaming” them onto cassette using the RealAudio app.

Roadside attractions were on the schedule, including one of the great American attractions, Graceland. First, however, we were to check out Mammoth Caves in the appropriately named Cave City, KY.

Wigwam Village #2

Also on the agenda, unique quarters! That first night, we stayed at Wigwam Village #2, a circle of fifteen conical, cement tepees. Most young people would recognize the place as the inspiration for the “Cozy Cone” motel from the Pixar movie Cars. A remnant of the county’s two-lane car culture of the mid-20th century, there were once seven of these places across the Southeast and Southwest.

Wigwam Village #2 is still in operation today, twenty-five years ago it was owned and operated by Ivan John, a man who was unironically of Native American ancestry. Built in 1937, our little, circular room featured original hickory furniture, air conditioning and some very poor cable. I remember the TV in particular because we were trying to catch a re-run of Freaks & Geeks with little success.

But we also watched the local news and learned about a brand new phenomenon: The fourth book in the Harry Potter series (I had heard of that) was due to be released the next day, and children were dressing in costumes and waiting up until midnight to purchase them at their local bookstores. Can you imagine such a thing?

The next day, we took the “Grand Avenue” tour of Mammoth Cave National Park, a four-hour trek underground. 

Saturday, July 8, 2000 

“Near constant 54° temp, wore jeans and a sweatshirt, still got rather cool. Large tour group (60? 100?) moving swiftly through the subterranean corridors. Would like to have lingered in places, just as well we kept moving. Very few jerks in that group. I had a theory that with a post four to four and a half hour time span, a lot of cranky folks simply wouldn’t come. I was right."

We had lunch in the Snowball Room (yes) enjoying the bad coffee they sold, and sandwiches, cheese and crackers we had brought ourselves, which was wise given the selection we saw offered. Emerging into the light and excessive heat left us disoriented, and we took an afternoon boat ride down the Green River that we had made reservations for. It was pleasantly dull.

Big Mike's Mystery House

However, on our drive back to our tepee we stopped at Big Mike’s Rock and Gift Shop, home to the world’s largest fossilized Mosasaur skull. My real interest, however, lay in Bike Mike’s Mystery House – my first mystery spot!

Only one dollar (today they charge four) to “feel the force of gravity!” Yes, you can feel that for free. But can you walk on walls? See water run uphill? Witness cheap executive desk toys under black light? It was like a tilted headshop, featuring the kind of forced perspective and mirror tricks you can currently pay thirty dollars to experience at the Museum of Illusions off Public Square.

The next day we left bright and early, and had plenty of time for an unexpected stop: The Belle Meade Plantation. That’s not what they call it today, today it is the Belle Meade Historic Site & Winery. Twenty-five years ago, they still called it what it was, but things were beginning to change.

We took the tour, and learned the intimate details of the ten white people who lived in the house, but nothing of the 136 people who occupied the “slave’s quarters.” However, they had recently reconstructed one of those buildings which had previously been destroyed – and have since reconstructed more, which are today part of the Jubilee Tour where they “aim to honor those who were enslaved, formerly enslaved, and contract laborers by telling their stories.”

There’s also a wine and bourbon tour.

That night we arrived in Memphis, where we had a very difficult time trying to find an independent restaurant near our hotel. When queried, our concierge recommended two different chains. Good Lord, it’s Memphis, please don’t send your guests to Friday’s.

Graceland

The next day changed my life; we visited Graceland. I was prepared for something tacky, or ridiculous. I was not prepared for the place to be (relatively) small, homey and less than opulent. Toni observed that it reflected the tastes of a man who had grown up dirt-poor, and was struggling to be normal.

I found the oft-ridiculed Jungle Room (many cringe because it has shag carpet on the ceiling) to look fun and cozy. It has a wall fountain! The man definitely had a sense of humor. And everything was human-sized, modest. Even the swimming pool is just a small, kidney-shaped pool. A standard-sized kitchen. An intimate rec room. It was charming. It was touching.

That’s just the house, there was also a much larger area adjacent to the mansion that featured all the stuff – the planes, the cars, the clothes, the instruments – those things weren’t as interesting. It was interesting to note that the entire time we were there, with every tour guide we listened to, Tom Parker was mentioned exactly once.

We picked up his gospel LP How Great Thou Art at the gift ship ("Run On" is a banger) and a copy of Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, which we began reading to each other for the rest of the trip. It’s an incredible book and key to my now burgeoning appreciation of the singer.

The following morning we visited the Hotel Peabody, to witness the daily, morning march of ducks from the elevator, and across a red carpet to the lobby fountain where they splash around until 5:00 PM when they march back to the elevator.

I don’t know where they spend the night. No one does.

We took a walk around Confederate Park (now Fourth Bluff Park) and the statue of Jefferson Davis (removed in 2017) before driving to Sun Studio. Long live Sun Studio. So many legendary, early rock and roll records were recorded there, including the Delta Cats’ "Rocket 88", "Raunchy" by Bill Justis, and of course, "That’s All Right" as performed by Elvis Presley.

Rock City

But how do you “tour” a one-room studio? With sound and a charismatic young tour guide, in this case a guy named Mick with spiky black hair, chunky glasses, a huge smile and an apparent love for the art form. He told us the story, showed off the equipment, and played several session outtakes that put us right back into that time and place.

Then we went to Rock City.

I had seen road signs for Lookout Mountain (a natural formation) and Rock City (wait for it) through many road trips, but had never had the chance to see what it was all about. The main attraction of Lookout Mountain is the specious but nearly impossible to verify claim that from its summit you could see seven different states.

The attraction had been developed by a couple named the Carters, whose main claim to fame – outside of all the SEE ROCK CITY billboards – was franchising Tom Thumb Miniature Golf courses throughout the land. Their talent in creating diminutive, curated tableaus, augmented by artificial flora is also represented throughout this park, which was also a legitimate garden with well-identified plants and flowers.

We were greeted by Alvin, the singing, animatronic gnome and a mute, waving pig. We followed the Enchanted Trail, listening to elevator music pumped through hidden speakers. Back at Mammoth Cave, I had remarked to my wife how all the place needed was a few well-placed garden gnomes. Well, we finally found where they had all gone to. All the garden gnomes.

I learned an important parenting tip on our walk, as one small boy had a pop gun with the legend ROCK CITY burned into the stock. He was relentlessly popping it and his father kept saying, “Logan, cut it out.” Dude. You literally just bought him that, what did you think was going to happen.

Chattooga River

Our next unique accommodations came in the form of the tree house. Not an actual tree house, but a small, secluded apartment set high among the woods in Highlands, NC. From the vantage point of our deck we could see no other people (and we were strongly urged to keep sound to a minimum; no TV, no radio) with a view of the mountains and, we believed, Georgia. We heard the rain, the wind in the trees, a far-off motorcycle. There was a diffuse brightness that next morning, thick mist gathered over the trees. Then our journey took a nasty turn.

Thursday, July 13, 2000

“We went to see two waterfalls. It was a strenuous hike we both said we liked very much. It felt great to be so aerobic after being on the road for six days. I took pictures of each waterfall, stood, watched, meditated …

“We left for another beautiful, scenic location; the headwaters of the Chattooga River. On our way we got lunch from the Rosewater Cafe. String beans, chicken salad, a veggie wrap, two lemon sodas and a slice of buttermilk pie. We searched for a nice location, right by the river. I said, “What we need is a big, flat rock.” Lo and behold, there was a big, flat rock, right by the path, in the river!

“We walked to it with no problem. Sat, ate, shared everything. We took pictures. Toni put her feet in the water. A fish nibbled her toes. We put on our shoes, and collected our baggage, and turned to go. Toni was wearing sunglasses, looking into the woods, mistook her first step off the big rock, stumbled and crashed onto several rocks there. She tried to keep from hitting her face on another rock, and only glanced it with her cheek. A large branch in the way, however, cut her face, right in the middle of her left eyebrow.

“I didn’t know this. I knew she fell, and I panicked. I figured she may have badly hurt her knees, and that’s what she thought at first, but almost immediately I saw the blood, a lot of it, gushing from her brow. Her cheek appeared banged up, I whipped off my new Land’s End shirt, imagining I would mop up the blood with it. She told me to use Kleenex from her purse.

“Thank God we packed a first aid kit. I said we would need to go to a hospital. I knew this would upset her, I even knew she would say she didn’t need to. But I could see differently. It wasn’t until she looked at herself in the mirror in the car that she realized I was right.

“I drove back to town, not so fast as to make her nervous. I had fucked up, I thought. I had panicked, and she had to take care of herself. She kept having to calm me down.

“The hospital was great. The Highlands was established as a resort community by the Woodruffs – the Coca-Cola family. I assumed, with so many rich, older people here, the hospital must be top-notch. The waiting room was almost empty, the entire time in the hospital was about an hour.

“The doctor was a kind man. The worst part of the ordeal was injecting painkillers directly into her open wound, she was in terrible pain for the first two shots. The wound began to swell a bit, and the gash in her brown looked like a little mouth. Blood continued to seep from it. He cleaned it gently, removed some dirt or a bit of tree bark, a small piece, and made sure there was no eyebrow hair in the wound.

“The nurse said it would take two stitches, but the doctor put in six. With her all numbed up like that, it wasn’t any more of an ordeal. And it means the scar will match up much more evenly. I watched as much as I could stand. I didn’t watch the needle go in, but I watched the stitching.”

He did such a careful job, today you can’t even tell she has that scar. After that ordeal, we returned to the treehouse. She napped, took a bath. We decided to keep our dinner reservation at the Lakeside Inn; after all, we had to eat. It was awkward. She may have felt self-conscious about the bruise on her cheek and the large bandage on her face, but believe me, I felt worse. I knew what they were thinking I had done to her.

We spent a long day driving to Greensboro to hook up with friends, stopping briefly in Asheville (still hoping to get back there someday) reading Last Train to each other, and holing up at a gas station for a half hour, waiting out a torrential downpour. The next day we all got groceries and headed for the coast, to spend a week in the Outer Banks. Toni’s injury was healing well, our vacation continued without further incident.

So, for the moment, sightseeing was at a minimum, though – and I mentioned this as a historical reference as much as for any other reason – while we were staying in Rodanthe, Toni and I left our friends behind to visit the mainland and take in opening night of the first X-Men movie. Was Hugh Jackman ever so young? Were any of us?

Monticello

Our journey home from North Carolina also took several days, with stops at Monticello (we would return eighteen years later – with children) and the University of Virginia. The main difference between Jefferson’s home and Presley’s is that Monticello has a clock in every room, and Graceland has a TV in every room.

One July 26, 2000 – my 32nd birthday – we visited the Mummies of the Insane in Philippi, West Virginia. I learned a lot about Philippi; site of the first land battle of the Civil War, home to the only covered bridge that is part of the U.S. Highway system, and a charming and very full historical society, which is also home to the mummies.

The museum is free, the mummies were a buck. One hundred and thirty years previous, amateur embalmer Graham Hamrick experimented in mummifying fruits and vegetables, animals and yes, humans, acquiring the “unclaimed” bodies of two women from the WV Hospital for the Insane (now the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum).

We concluded our circuit with my in-law’s in Athens, lazing on the porch, enjoying margaritas at Casa Nueva. My wife’s sister was sixteen, she’d been reading these Harry Potter books. I picked up the first and read it in one afternoon. I read the next one the next day. It was a different time.

Saturday, July 29, 2000

“With a baby in our future, I wonder when we will get to hit the road again.”

Sooner than you wish, young man. Sooner than you wish.

On Sight (Pre-Operative)

Image of my Future Foretold
Self as Kent in "King Lear"
(Beck Center, 2019)

The good news is I will now be in town for the Borderlight Festival!

That’s a joke. I was going out of town for the week, now I am staying home to have surgery to repair a detached retina, so I’m not going anywhere. Jokes really do suffer when you explain them.

The Borderlight Festival, for those of you who are unaware, is an international theater and performing arts festival that takes place in downtown Cleveland and the only reason you haven’t read anything about it here is because it has always taken place when I am out of town.

I can’t tell you how much it pains me that there is now an international theater and performing arts festival in Cleveland, Ohio and that I am not part of it. But my family comes first, and I have no regrets about that. I have tried this year to flog a few of their offerings on social media, and hope someday to attend or even submit a production.

And up until yesterday afternoon, I was planning to leave town. A week long vacay with the entire family. They were ready to suspend travel, at least until I had undergone surgery, but I insisted they go. My son has a college trip schedule for tomorrow morning in upstate New York, and we have tickets to see the A.R.T. revival of 1776. That was my idea, I so wanted to see this production. But it would be a shame for everyone to miss it, I need them to report back to me how it plays.

Then onto Maine. My family vacation spot. My brother’s family is coming, my eldest will be joined by their partner – whose parents are also joining us (I mean them) ostensibly for my birthday, which is Tuesday. And the cousins, the cove, the view from the deck of the Barnstable.

One week out of the year, every year. Not this year, not for me. Having them miss it too would have made me even more miserable than I currently am.

Yesterday a doctor examined my eyes, prodding them with a medal stick. It was very painful. She remarked at how well I managed, so calm. My blood pressure, my pulse were normal, better than normal. My wife said she watched me breathe during this examination, that my hands and arms were relaxed. I was practicing my breathing. But it hurt. It hurt a lot. I did my crying later.

Today I am lying on my left side, so the damage doesn’t increase. After the procedure, I am to lie on my right side for the week. This is not a vacation. I cannot do anything.

So, I am depressed about not being with my family. I am extremely apprehensive about the procedure itself. I am anxious about not being able to run for the foreseeable future. 

And I am very, very worried about being alone with my thoughts for an entire week. Because I do not like being alone. I do not like being alone at all.

The BorderLight Festival continues through July 24, 2022 from Playhouse to Public Square in Downtown Cleveland.

The Nickel Boys (book)

Pengo's 2020 Summer Book Club

On Monday, the New York Times published an editorial in which Lucian K. Truscott IV, a journalist and (white) direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson proposed the third president’s memorial in Washington D.C. be demolished and replaced with one to Harriet Tubman.

My first reaction was, oh. But I like that one. My next was, who cares what I think? As Truscott points out, Monticello is monument enough. Even Jefferson himself did not think serving as President warranted mention on his own tombstone, who are we to argue?

Statues are coming down across America, and about time, too. We are supposed to be a nation established on ideals, and not individuals. Laws survive, and serve the people. Writing survives, the history remains. It's the hero worship that is being swept away.

It is at this moment, during a period of pandemic and social upheaval, that I read The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I’ve read two novels in this one vacation week, both released in 2019. The first grappled with the ripples of American Imperialism, the second with our nation’s as-yet unresolved sins of systemic racism. This one got the Pulitzer.

Inspired by the 2012 discovery of a secret cemetery on the grounds of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, Whitehead has done what he does so amazingly well, created a fictional story grounded solidly in undeniable (and accurate) truth.

It is a breathtaking tale, and by that I mean, I lost my breath. Halfway through the book I cried with something like, but not exactly like relief, and had to set the book down. And then, as with the Eggers book I read on Monday, I was whipsawed near the end and had to stop and regain my senses, to rethink everything that had come before.

"Nickel Boys" (2024)
Directed by RaMell Ross

“If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it.” So believes the protagonist Elwood Curtis, and it is a belief he tries to hang onto. Taking a stand for justice even in the face of overwhelming and absolute injustice, a young African-American in the early 60s caught the wrong ride and ended up in a reform school where silence and complicity were necessary for survival.

Much like the nation we are living in. Exactly like the nation we are living in, in fact. It’s not for me to defend the hagiography of the Founding Fathers, those who owned human souls and those who didn’t but looked the other way. We have all always known where the bodies are buried, and now they are being revealed.

Summer's not over. What should I read next?

Sources:
I’m a Direct Descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Take Down His Memorial by Lucian K. Truscott IV, The New York Times (7/6/2020)
Florida's Dozier School For Boys: A True Horror Story, National Public Radio, "All Things Considered" (10/15/2012)

Update: CH-UH district considers renaming Monticello Middle School, cleveland.com, 12/10/2024

How I Spent My Summer (2019)

Providence, RI

For the past several years I have taken a moment before the school year begins to reflect upon the fleeting days of summer. What does "summer vacation" mean to adults? Well, we do have school age children, and are each professionally tethered to the academic clock. We work, but we also play, and enable play.

The opportunities during warm weather months are great, and we endeavor to take advantage of them. This year my wife and I celebrated twenty years married, my daughter and I watched all of Stranger Things 3 over the course of two days, the boy and I went fishing. And there was so much more.

Beck Center for the Arts

KING LEAR

Feels like a million years ago now, but the summer began with a five weekend run of King Lear at the Beck Center, directed by Eric Schmiedl. Performances were only three a week (Fri, Sat eve & Sun mat) and there was something about that schedule which made performance much less of a struggle than a traditional, non-professional four show a weekend schedule. Just that much more manageable.

And yet, the focus I needed to exhibit, the hyper self-awareness, to conduct myself as this stoic, wound-up character. At times it was maddening, walking out in the lead, having the first line for this three-hour ordeal. One night, I cannot even comprehend how this happened, my tongue lost control and I stuttered my first line, in its entirety. It was through a supreme effort of will not to lose all confidence right then and there. I do not know how I was able to remember the rest of my lines.

Contemporary Youth Orchestra

JASON MRAZ

Working as an actor in a play (as opposed to writing or directing one) is that you are compelled to attend every performance. This is one of the reasons I don’t like acting, but only one of them.

As a result of this selfish commitment, I missed out on the opportunity to see my daughter perform with Jason Mraz. As a violin player with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra, she had been working on his catalog all spring, taking three days of rehearsal with this incredibly charming pop star culminating in two sold out performances at Severance Hall.

I was welcomed to one of the rehearsals, which was a delightful consolation prize.

Great Lakes Theater

CAMP THEATER!

Teaching middle school students to improv can be very challenging, and for a very good reason. Young people can be emotionally abused for making themselves look silly.

A: Help me to milk this water buffalo!
B: Uh, no.

The basic tenet of improv is YES, AND which is to say, agree to what is being offered and then add something to it. This year during Camp Theater! we had a camper who was not only very good at this, he raised acceptance to a new level. Shaun and I noticed that whenever someone made him a suggestion, he would not only agree, he would say, “Excellent!”

A: I have created for you a new dress made entirely out of termites!
B: Excellent, they will go so well with my new maggot boots.

It was the introduction to an inspiring summer of discovery.

Culver City Public Theatre

ROSALYNDE & THE FALCON

While I have had a number of my published plays produced in other cities, this was a first -- one of the works I wrote for Talespinner Children’s Theatre was being revived, and on the west coast, too! Culver City Public Theatre produced Rosalynde & the Falcon. Not only that, but it was an outdoor performance, offered for free to area families! And you know I love free.

ROAD TRIPS

July was an odd month, in that I shared a bed with my wife for perhaps one out of every three days. This is no sign of marital tension or anything like that, we were simply not in each other’s presence. She spent a week on silent retreat in Kentucky, we traveled separately to and from Maine, and I took my daughter on an extended weekend to New York City.

We visited potential schools on that journey, something we also accomplished driving home together from our Maine vacation by way of Providence, RI. My son and I drove there the week before, enjoying authentic Buffalo, NY buffalo wings and spying fancy cars.

Come From Away

COME FROM AWAY

For three years we have been subscribers to the KeyBank Broadway Series at Playhouse Square, and in all that time I was never so unprepared to be completely delighted and moved by a musical like Come From Away.

Come From Away is a magical illusion, with songs that still echo in my head, a small company, their everyday wear belying the speed and specificity with which they assume dozens of characters, to tell a story of tragedy without leaning into the tragedy (we all know the tragedy) instead focusing on what the best people do for each other no matter who the other people are.

One of our dates for the evening pointed out how refreshing it was to see a cast of characters who were entirely adults, and I have to admit I hadn’t noticed. Was that it? I polled my friends on Facebook, wondering if younger audiences preferred, for example, the teen-directed Dear Evan Hansen, but I received almost universal praise from all ages for this special Canadian musical … which did not win the 2017 Tony Award for Best Musical, whereas that other play did.

Story Board

WRITING "HOLMES"

Just the other day, Missy asked me about my writing process, and I have had a number of different processes, which is only correct. I am a creature of habit, but breaking them is as significant as adhering to them.

To complete the new touring script, I spent just one working week away from the office. I gathered all the notes I had made, then went into the attic to find an old cork board so I had a place to post them. I used drawing paper to create a “story cloud,” connecting one plot point to the next and filling in all of the details in between, with lists of actors and characters and who would be available to do what when.

It was all mapped out before I had created a single word of dialogue. The entire thing was drafted in three days, completed just before heading out of town for two weeks.

Barnstable

FRIENDSHIP, MAINE

Actually, I spent only seven days in Flood’s Cove this year. Sometimes that happens, but it felt even shorter as my wife and daughter (and mother-in-law) were flying in on a Monday, only to have their flight cancelled at LaGuardia. They did not arrive until Tuesday evening, and their travel drama troubled me for the better part of those two days.

There was an interesting collection of folks, so much coming and going, and the weather was hot. I missed cool weather, mornings by the fire, a slow pace, and perhaps most of all my father. His absence has been felt the past several years, this time he was just absent.

Hofbräuhaus Half Marathon

SEVERE ALLERGIC REACTION

Last week I ate something which tried to kill me, or rather my body tried to kill me for something I ate. I’ve never had an allergic reaction, to anything. And yet, something in that sushi made my heart race, and my skin turn beet red.

I’m fine, but it was scary in a manner in which I am not used to being scared. The week that followed was one of dragging my ass from place to place as I coped with the side effects of medication meant to ensure that whatever was in my system had run its course.

That also meant not exercising for the better part of a week, so ironic following my time running the Hofbräuhaus Half Marathon just the day before my attack.

TRAINING FOR THE CHICAGO MARATHON

Which is where I am left today. Hotter days of summer are behind us, the days already noticeably shorter. I am currently training for the Chicago Marathon, October 13. Have been all summer, and raising money for the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation.

Preparing for New York in 2006, and for the Twin Cities four years ago, August is when the training is supposed to be ramping up, pushing further across the city in preparation for the big day. Instead, I have had to take the better part of a week off, and it is discouraging.

But then, has it ever been easy? And isn't that the point.

Musical Roadtrip

Buffalo, New York

There’s an Onion article people like to post on my Facebook page with the headline, Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation. It came out eight years ago, folks think that just because I like to lecture them about how stupid their taste in music is that I am the kind of parent who schools his own children on what’s hip.

This is not true. My children have their own taste and quite often they are educating me. My friends on Facebook, however, have wasted their pathetic lives on garbage music, and I am doing what friends do. I am trying to help them.

As schedules panned out this summer, I would be driving one child up while my wife flies with the other. Then we switch -- children, that is. I will drive the other and she will fly.

Do I mind driving both ways? Heavens, no. I have developed a healthy aversion to air travel and really like to road. And hotels and dining in unique, interesting restaurants.

The boy, age fourteen, likes music. He plays the drums and bass (stand up, and electric) and listens to his phone. When he hears a song that interests him on the radio, he will look it up on Spotify and add it to a massive playlist of all of his favorite songs.

And that’s the thing. Like a lot of kids his age (though certainly not all) he doesn’t own copies of music. He has no CD player, he has a speaker for his phone, though he prefers earbuds. He does not subscribe to a premium channel, so when he does listen to playlists they are broken up with ads, and when he listens to “albums” he’s actually hearing it shuffled up, often with other “related” songs dropped in. And more ads.

So, my plan was to pull together a collection of CDs to listen on the trip -- entire albums, played all the way through. He gave me a list to get from the library, I chose several from my collections, and we would go back and forth, choosing albums.

The trip was much more exciting, if somewhat disturbing in places, and he rarely looked at his phone the entire trip, which I take as a major victory.

In every single case, whether we were listening to his choice or mine, these were albums he had never listened to all the way through before. Here they are, presented in the order we listened to them, accompanied by brief commentary. He’s O, I am D.

Saturday, Cleveland to Syracuse

The Cure: Disintegration
O: Funky, psychedelic jam band. Weird. There were few lyrics, leaving more space for music.

Pup: Morbid Stuff
D: Surprised it was such much about relationships. Triumphal, yet aggressively emotional.

De La Soul: De La Soul Is Dead
O: Inspired, they had so much to say about the people who misunderstood them.

System of a Down (eponymous)
D: Intense, tight, and dramatic. Old school pun and metal.
O: The first five songs are bangers.

Barenaked Ladies: Gordon
O: They seem like funny guys.
D: Some day I need to write a paper about this album. It won’t be pretty.

Soul Coughing: Ruby Vroom
O: It’s weird and funky and the drum beats are cool and it’s very musical and the bass is fantastic.

Sunday, Syracuse to Friendship

Ben Folds Five: Whatever and Ever Amen
O: The guy who wrote Dear Evan Hansen listened to a lot of Ben Folds.

Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP
O: He straight up says what he doesn’t like about things.

Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
D: This is where my education began.
O: My dad grew up in Bay Village.

Rage Against the Machine (eponymous)
D: Still painfully relevant. Paul Ryan is a chump.
O: Really good debut album right up there with Pup’s.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Trust
O: This is like all the music I like. I like the band, I like him.

Beastie Boys: Ill Communication
O: Shows their punk background. Really embracing that distorted microphone.

The Police: Zenyatta Mondatta
O: The whole album is a greatest hits collection.

Mike Doughty performs Ruby Vroom at the Beachland Ballroom on Friday, October 25, 2019.

How I Am Spending My Summer (2018)

last nite.

And what's it you do again?
Oh I'm a reminder
The hobbled veteran of the disk shop inquisition
Set to parry the cocksure of mem-stick filth
With my own late era middle-aged ramblings
- tonite, LCD Soundsystem

Sitting on the porch of Barnstable (or to some, “The Barnstable”) on the day after my fiftieth birthday, I am weighted with a feeling of loss. Not merely the loss of an old friend, or that sorrow that has followed our family, like a train, as we have lost fathers and heroes and our sense of hope for the future.

It does not help that I am currently reading Lincoln In The Bardo.

Topsail Island

This place is filled with memories, but also doubts. I carry with me the fear that I have failed or continue to fail in my efforts to be an active, engaged parent. As years pass and traditions fall by the wayside, or as I watch the moments tick by in which I am not actively creating or facilitating an activity, like fishing, or a game, like a treasure hunt.

Those moments in which I have intentionally passed on the opportunity to hold my children in a form of stasis, have encouraged them to grow up too soon, to make their own play and not to lean so heavily on mine. It is like a crime. I have such regret.

Seriously, I may need to set this book aside.

Each summer is marked by moments, those events we have scheduled and look forward to, signposts which I see approaching fast by the side of the road, and then catch in the rear-view as they pass at one thousand miles an hour.

With Joseph Morales (A.Ham)

Theater camp, outdoor Shakespeare, then North Carolina and Virginia. Pre-college, Hamilton, and now Maine. My birthday come, now gone, and we, too, will go, in forty-eight hours time. One million miles an hour.

The women were unavailable to attend Girl Camp this summer, and so for the first time since my son was five we have no opportunity for Boy Camp, which has always been a strange mystery. We will make up for that in other ways, at least I hope we do.

And yesterday I was gifted with tickets to see David Byrne at Jacobs Pavilion in two weeks! Another signpost. I am looking forward to that. And then, more or less, our summer will conclude. We are blessed with love and activity, but not enough time.

How I Spent My Summer (2017)

Raising Cairn
Celeste Roberge, 2000
Portland Museum of Art

As summers go, this past was not as historic, nor as creatively productive. We won no basketball championships, directed no productions of Shakespeare, attended no theater festivals, nor were we present for the nomination of a tyrant.

I wrote no new plays.

But summers are important, they always have been and for different reasons. I still work, to be sure, but this is when vacations are had, and my wife and I do strive to make the most of those brief moments as we can. Once it was because our children needed attention and occupation, and now it is becoming increasingly apparent our summers with them as children are running out.

And she wonders why I am depressed this week.

Humming
Jaume Plensa, 2011
deCordova Scultpure Garden

The first major journey was to attend, and in my case, to officiate, a wedding for my wife’s cousin and his beautiful bride. Perhaps you didn’t know I am an ordained minister, but seriously, who isn’t these days? I needed to register with the state to conduct ceremonies in Ohio, in Illinois they don’t ask. Are you in good standing with your church? Well, you better be, that’s the only thing they have to say about it.

We turned this delightful event, held in Aurora, into an extended stay in the Chicagoland. Funny, I set one of my recent works in suburban Chicago, though I’d never really spent any time there. Just research. Passing through and investigating those sites I thought appropriate, I was not disappointed. I tried to imagine my characters there. They must have been happy once.

The weather in Chicago was perfect, we did the architecture tour, saw the Neo-Futurists, spent a whole day at the Museum of Science and Industry. I had my own memories of that place from when I was a kid, I was probably there more for myself them for them.

A Sunday Afternoon On
the Island of La Grande Jette
Georges Seurat, 1886
Chicago Institute of Art

In July, I bought a new car.

Our schedule fell out so that we needed to be in town by August 1 for my daughter to begin soccer practice, so we barely got Boy Camp in before it was time to leave for the east coast, this year spending several days in Salem, MA before continuing on to Friendship.

Between the Art Institute back in Chicago and the deCordova and Peabody Essex in Massachusetts, we spent much leisurely time at art museums, both indoor and out. Our time in Maine, however, was brief. Before long we were heading back, a stop in Concord to meet friends and check out the grave sites of famous authors before making our way back home.

Throughout the summer there were macaroni and cheese topped burgers at the Speedtrap Diner, deep dish at Navy Pier, drop-dead ramen at Kokeshi, and our favorite waiter at Congress Bar & Grill. Also, I developed a strange obsession with Oh Hello, On Broadway on Netflix, which I watched at least three times.

Real Estate Goldmine
Joshua Starcher, 2017
Rooms To Let

After Maine, we still had all of August, which ended up being something of a blur, driving back and forth across the state. The truth is, a cloud has been hanging over us since the very beginning of the season, on what may have been the first unofficial day of this summer. It was a Saturday in late May, the kids were on a year-end, school-related Cedar Point trip, the wife and I had the day to ourselves and witnessed Rooms to Let in Slavic Village, the first of our many art-related summer explorations. It was while waiting for the kids to return on the bus that we received the call.

It’s personal. It’s family-related. I don’t want to go into it right now. It is enough for now to say I have been looking at things more closely at things this summer, and finding them horribly beautiful.

How I Spent My Summer (2016)

Son: I was expecting New York City to be a lot less like Cleveland. #nyc #cle #win

— David Hansen (@dhansenx) August 9, 2016

The Cleveland Summer 2016™. This year the wife decided not to over-program the kids. For years it was necessary to book the kids into as many camps as possible.

When I was a boy my mother’s work was the home, and so she was there and so was I and with the exception of a trip to Maine and maybe a couple weeks at day camp, I was mostly left to my own devices, watching TV or playing behind the railroad tracks in the city dump.

We each used to work year round, so our small children had to go somewhere. Sport Camp, Art Camp, Science Camp, Zoo Camp (they hated that one) or even our Theater Camp, Camp Theater!

Now that the wife is a high school teacher, and acclimated to her position, she declared that there would be few if any camps, spontaneity would be the call of the season, and that she planned to “bite the ass of this summer.” (That’s a reference to the movie Big Night, which by the way was released twenty years ago. Twenty years. Jesus.)

And bite the ass of summer we did, with plenty of swimming at the pool and sleeping in. No, I did not get to North Carolina as they did, but it was a fair trade. I went to Valdez, Alaska for the Last Frontier Theater Conference. Not so much like summer camp, more like a very full week at school. After it was all through I made an absurd number of “friend requests” in a single day. For every one I thought, I didn’t talk to you enough. I am glad to at least stay in touch in this way.

While I was away, I watched the Cavs return from a 3-1 deficit, or rather I received real time messages from the wife on their progress during the day and caught bits of it at the Best Western as it was rebroadcast in the Alaska Time Zone.

If it hadn’t gone to Game Seven (go ahead, watch that last minute again) I would not have been able to watch “The Final” with my family in Cleveland. And I cried. God help me, I wept over a sporting event. Not for me, not really, because I’d never been that invested in winning a game or a championship. But I was overwhelmed with happiness for all those who I call my neighbors across the region who feel pathetic or depressed because we have lost so much, so many times, and take it personally, that we as a city have internalized and even accepted this sense that disappointment is just what happens to us.

I was happy for them, for all of them. I am sorry Dad missed it.

The wife and I went downtown that Wednesday for the parade, not without a little trepidation but now we can say we were there, two among a reported 1.3 million. Can’t say I expect to experience anything like that again.

While they were in Topsail Beach, I labored every day to stain the deck and in the evenings rehearsed Twelfth Night (As Told By Malvolio). Trucking our mini-tour from east side to west, the set (one school desk) all packed up in my tiny car in celebration of a very old booking sitting in the main public library downtown. We were just concluding our final performance right there in that library, in the center of town, as the maelstrom that was the Republican National Convention and a whole lot of kooks moved into our city.

In spite of weeks of dread and concern that there would be violence in our streets the likes which have not been seen since Chicago ‘68, the police and activists and media kept it cool. There were an non-traditional number of essays of congratulations in the paper and websites across the nation, thanking Cleveland for being so darn polite, remarkably hip, and a great place to visit.

And as Sunday is to the weekend, August is to the summer, beginning lethargic and slow, excitement peaking early and then just kind of stretching on interminably until it’s time to go to bed.

(Yes, Douglas Adams put it much better, but we have no American equivalent for “tea time.”)

In brief, we left town. Visiting Maine for the first time without father surprised me in many ways, in fact I surprised myself by become overwhelmed by emotion heading out by car before we had even left Cleveland Heights.

Schlepping our bags into Barnstable that first night in, the sun already set followed by a heavy rain, his absence was larger. Everywhere I looked in this most familiar of places, he was not.

But my brother was and his family, and later cousins and more friends and our time was full and active. We returned by way of Lexington, MA and some friends who used to live in the Heights, and then to see Harris and Liz in Westport, CT.

We took a day trip with their family to Coney Island, and the following day just the four us us went into the city, for shopping on Fifth Avenue, a trip to the Met, Pokemon Go everywhere, and to see Hamilton.

Yes. We made it happen. Months ago the wife and I decided to just bite it and get tickets, and for a time when we knew we would be in the area, anyway, with friends to provide housing and no additional transportation costs.

We also knew that by August most of the cast would probably have moved on, and so they have, but the new company members are remarkable and have become new favorites of the girl, who follows them all obsessively on Snapchat.

Some day I am sure I will have more to say about the performance, but I am myself dealing with the disconnect that comes with looking forward to something for an extended period of time, experiencing it … then having it pass. And it shouldn’t be like that, because it’s a play and the play continues and the album remains and who knows, perhaps we will see it in Chicago next year, or Cleveland.

And here I am sounding like one of those lunatics who catch Les Miz every time they have the opportunity, I mean, what is wrong with those people?

That night, a storm struck Cleveland Heights, what they called a microburst, downing numerous large trees and bringing down power lines with them. Fortunately our tree was not affected, though we did need to pitch everything in the fridge … which was an excellent opportunity to clean the fridge. See? Lemonade.

Returning home meant returning to work and to school, and to soccer games and music lessons and normalcy. And here we are.

Going back over my notebook, one which has taken most of the year to fill, one observation I made on the puddle-jumper to Anchorage, reflecting upon my week:

“Just realized I’m from the big city.”

Time of Marvel

My Great-Grandfather Johnson first brought his family to Flood’s Cove in Friendship, Maine in the early 20th Century, sometime around 1910. My mother vacationed here as a girl. My children are the fifth generation to summer here.

The cabin in which we stay is named Barnstable. It was, once upon a time, an actual barn. Timbers bear gnaw marks from livestock that were housed here more than a century ago. Around 1900 when the land changed hands it was converted from a farm into this summer destination.

Until I was almost seventeen I visited every year with my family. The cabin is still quite rustic, though not nearly as much as it was when I was a child. The plumbing was updated around 1990, prior to that you needed to fill jugs at the spring for drinking water, the shower was also installed about that time. Before that you needed to sponge bath with the help of an electric kettle.

Plus ça change. I take my son in the motorboat to fish for mackerel, so my Grandfather Baker did for me. We sit on the porch and look out at the cover through a trio of birch trees my Grandfather Henrik painted some decades ago, a painting which hangs in my parents home in Lakewood.

Twenty years ago the woman I would marry and start a family with, we made our first journey here together and she just fell in love with the place. Since then we would visit every couple of years, and once the kids were a certain age made it an annual thing. Spending a week or two in Flood’s Cove with members on my side of the family has become their annual tradition, too.

My relationship with this place is a bit complicated, however. In spite of the simplicity, the calm, the quiet, my associations, my memories are tied up a great deal in the interior of my thoughts as a pre-adolescent, and early teenager. I cannot walk these paths or roam these unpainted rooms without being struck by strong reminders of pop culture from the late 70s and early 80s.

A great part of the inner world I created here had to do with the fact that I was often alone. My brothers are older than me, by several years. One stopped visiting entirely when he began high school, beginning in 1978. My eldest brother began visiting with his college-age friends, and I was not invited to be part of their events. Who could blame them.

There were other kids here, to be sure, and we played our games from time to time. But I never felt as though I fit into the special, summer cliques which formed here. I could go into the details, suffice to say I usually found myself creating my own, private play. This included creating artwork out of seashells, or using carbon paper to create a daily newspaper to distribute to each of the cabins.

Summer 1980, I was searching for a new comic book. Two years earlier my brother had gotten me interested in comics, but I only had the change for and interest in one single title, Howard the Duck. This is because even at the age of ten I was already a complete smart ass. However, HTD was discontinued in 1979, and so I needed a new storyline to follow.

That summer I collected every Marvel comic I could get my hands on. I did try reading DC comics, the kids in the Bungalow (an adjacent cabin) had a number of Batman and Superman comics, but those were terrible at that time, everyone knows that.

Funny, even my memory of DC comics is associated with this place, and not from home.

There was a newsstand in Waldoboro that was well-stocked in comics, and in my search for a regular thing I purchased plenty of them, auditioning the Marvel universe.

While several titles piqued my interest, like most kids at that time I became obsessed by X-Men. It helped that Marvel was currently peddling a series of reprints, so I was able to read the title from its origins in 1964.

One single issue, however, one story held me and haunted me and is one I remember to this day. Marvel Two-In-One #69: The Thing Battles the Guardians of the Galaxy was a story about a hero from the 30th Century who returns to our present to persuade his younger self not to become an astronaut and endure the living hell of being trapped in stasis for one thousand years, unable to move but mentally awake. Today a storyline like that one would no doubt be spread out over at least a half dozen issues.

Space Panic

Then there was my quest for video games. My son plays Pokemon Go right here in the cove, I had no such release. Every day-trip to Camden, Rockland or Damariscotta I would seek out those venues which would most likely feature Space Panic, Moon Cresta, or best of all, Crazy Climber.

The next year I turned thirteen. I had met girls. I had a Walkman. For hours I would sit in a hammock at the Birchview (yet another cabin) listening to cassettes. When we would drive I would commandeer the radio. Fortunately my father was totally cool with that, also in his mid-forties, he was at that time the most interested in popular music as he ever would be.

What was popular at that exact moment in time? Jessie’s Girl, Everlasting Love, and Sukiyaki, a cover version of a Japanese love song from 1961 that made my father wistful his time in the service. It was a time of interesting transition for popular music, just then beginning to swing away from introspective Baby Boomer brooding (Games People Play) to teenage Gen X angst and weirdness (Bette Davis Eyes).

I was shocked and surprised to receive a letter - an actual, physical letter - from a girl who I had been flirting with during Bay Days. She was not subtle, she was really looking forward to my returning to Ohio. I can’t remember if I had written her first or if she had gotten the address to this resort place from my brother. For the first time I desperately wanted to not be here, suddenly going away from home seemed a punishment and not an adventure.

My daughter is the same age this year as I was in 1981 (actually a half-year older) and upon arriving was distressed to realize that she wouldn’t be able to text message her friends from the cove, though she can still Snapchat. She was like, I dunno … like some astronaut trapped in stasis for one thousand years, unable to move but mentally awake.

My daughter has another thing I never had, for many years now she has had a friend here. They are almost the same age, they don’t communicate throughout the year (we have taken to negotiating with the girl’s parents to make sure we are in the cove at the same time) but spend all their time together when they’re in this place.

Nineteen eighty-two is lost to me. I can’t remember anything except feeling entirely alone. This is where my troubles began. My big birthday gift was an Apple II+ so that was cool, but it was also when I began to become peevish about having to visit.

Last year, when my son was ten, he taught the eight year-old staying here how to play a first-person sniper assassination video game. That’s nothing. When I was fourteen I taught a five year-old I was babysitting how to turn a can of bug spray into a flamethrower.

Can you see the bird?

The following year, 1983, was the end of the innocence and wonder. Only fifteen but my mind was older, I had a girlfriend in Cleveland to get back toand a desperate need to watch absolutely anything they broadcast on MTV. Making matters worse, there was an entire team of young adults here that summer, my eldest brother and visitors from Europe (former exchange program “family” members) and others from Bay Village who were just that much older than me to make my life miserable.

True, I was a complete dick that summer. But I was no longer the least bit interested in the bucolic setting, the sea, the trees, the quiet. I wanted music and dancing and fooling around. My solace was in trips to the towns where I could shop for records - records I wouldn’t even be able to play until I got home - and to immerse myself in cabinet video games.

Even then I accompanied my family to Maine for two more summers before graduating high school and breaking with tradition. Returning after a five-year break in 1990, I recall heading out to the great rock which faces Muscongus Bay. Even then I wasn’t ready to take in the landscape as it exists. I was wearing headphones and listening to Michael Penn.

Tonight.

My daughter loves it here. I have always wondered how long that would last, when the pull of home, of teenage interests would overwhelm the simple wonders of this corner of the world. My wife reminds me that she's not me.

The girl may have technological tethers to her life at home, devices which were not available to me, and a friend to look forward to seeing here. But she also finds beautiful places to sit and read, she loves to play the violin out-of-doors, to sit on a rock and sketch.

Tonight, our second-to-last night in the cove for the year, we had an extended social evening her at Barnstable. Wine hour with friends in the cove, a long dinner with family, a dozen sitting around the table, four generations represented (the youngest at ten months, the eldest eighty-one) my wife and I took a walk into the darkness, each step away from the light of the cabin the sky grew starker, the sky turning black, the most visible stars soon subsumed by an array of billions, the Milky Way evident and elegant, streaming across the heavens.

'S wonderful. 'S marvelous.