Sharon McCarthy in Four Minutes

My friend Sharon McCarthy died this winter after living with ovarian cancer for umpteen years. Sharon asked me to speak at her funeral well before she died. She said I'd make people laugh. I didn't really think she was serious; surely she had better speakers in mind. After she died, John, her widower, asked me again to be one of the speakers at Sharon's party.

I know what you're thinking--why doesn't he just call it a memorial service? Well, it really didn't feel like a memorial service. People--perhaps 250 of us!--were happy, though there were lots and lots of tears. There was great food and drink, there were interesting new people to meet, and the setting--in John and Sharon's garden--was rural Centre County at its best.

John even thought of croquet (very Sharon) and the world's nicest port-a-john. It had AC, running water, everything but an attendant to hand you a towel so that you could dry your hands while you worried about what sort of tip you were supposed to give the guy.

Anyway, here, thanks to the magic of cut and paste, are the notes for my remarks. John McCarthy was quite adamant about us sticking to a four minute speech, which of course no one did. Well, perhaps the guy who wrote the bit of doggerel, but he would have been the only one. The twenty-three eulogies ranged from quite serious to amusing, and the speakers came from all eras of Sharon's life.

Of course, in person, you get the ad-libbed Rick-isms that you don't get here. So you have to imagine me tripping up the step to the podium, or, of course, laughing at my own jokes.

SHARON McCARTHY 1946 - 2012

I think it might be easier to bring lasting peace to the Middle East than to sum up Sharon in four minutes. 

I met Sharon in 1999 shortly after I joined the staff of the Arts Festival —Sharon was the committee chair for our gallery exhibition, Images and we met to hang the show. Sharon provided the brains and aesthetic judgment and while I did the toting, hammering, and lifting, as well as being in charge of causing any industrial accident we were going to have.  

It didn’t take Sharon and me long to figure out that we really enjoyed each other's company. 

As our friendship blossomed, Sharon told me about her life, from her Lancaster county roots to living in California, to her time in Washington, DC, and then back to here to Pennsylvania. 

If something interesting was happening, Sharon was there, like Zelig, the Woody Allen character:

Wearing a bikini to register voters on Santa Monica beach?   Check.

At the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was shot?   Check

Successful retailer in Washington DC?   Check.

Democrat with a capital D and serial wife?    Check and check again.

Oh, and the most unlikely and therefore coolest thing of all. High school majorette.

Sharon wasn’t just some Pennsylvania Dutch version of Dame Edna Everage, dishing about all the important people she knew. Sharon was interested in me too, hearing about my life, listening to my opinions—political and otherwise, laughing at my jokes. That’s why Sharon was a great friend--not because she had an interesting life, but because she was interested in all of our lives.

Somewhere along the line, Sharon told me about her former friend Rita Jenrette. Yes, the Rita Jenrette who told the world that she DID IT on the steps of the U.S. Capitol with her congressman husband. Sharon told me that when Rita Jenrette bared all (and I do mean all) in a spread (so to speak) in Playboy, she and John drove around Lancaster County looking for the issue when it was hot off the press.  

So in order to prepare this eulogy, I went to Penn State’s Pattee Library and trying to look scholarly, said to the woman at the help desk, “I'm speaking at a funeral on Saturday, and so I'm looking for the April 1981 issue of Playboy magazine. The deceased is in there. In the editorial, I mean."   

To which the librarian replied, "You know, we don't get that question very often."

She very professionally looked up the call number for me and told me how to find the microfilms room. 

So yes, there in the April 1981 issue of Playboy was Famous Congressional Ex-Wife Rita Jenrette showing all and telling all, including getting a little snarky—without naming names—about Sharon and her hot tub. As veteran of Sharon and John’s hospitality, I know that if Rita Jenrette didn’t have fun in Sharon’s tub it was because she didn’t know how to have fun. Even if she did boink the old ball and chain on the Capitol steps. 

And as a former heterosexual, I checked out the other parts of that April issue. In case you were wondering, Miss April’s turn offs included taking down the Christmas tree. Apparently she was good to go the other 364 days of the year.  And, in 1981, a Brazilian was still someone who lived in that really big country in South America. 

Some years after we met, Sharon joined the Arts Festival’s Board of Directors and she and John sponsored a prize for an artist showing wearable fiber.  She was a key figure in the success of our Silent Auction, an important fundraising event. Sharon’s retailing genius and her ability to throw a backyard storage barn, a bunch of low end art and craft items, fabric, and staples together and make it look like Nordstrom was to me proof that deep down inside of her, there was a drag queen trying to get out. 

Did I mention that she was a majorette? 

I could go on and on about Sharon—she was absolutely one of my favorite people, but as any of my friends will tell you, I don’t do feelings. In the interest of brevity, I’ll just say she was thoughtful and caring and bright and funny, and a helluva lot of fun, hot tub or no hot tub. 

In summing up Sharon’s life, I’m reminded of another artist, Sir Christopher Wren, one of England’s most celebrated architects. Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly who you were thinking of right about now. Among other things Wren designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, where his tomb bears this epitaph:  

LECTOR SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE

"Reader if you seek his monument, look around."

Today, if we seek Sharon’s monument, look around. Sharon’s love and affection for John, her family: the countless thoughtful things she did for an army of friends both present and absent, in good times and bad, this lovely home, garden; and even this party, her monument is right here for all of us to see. We are her monument. Bricks and mortar will eventually crumble, but our love for Sharon, and her impact on us, will remain forever.

Van-ity Fair

Sometimes you run into a ride that's just so nice you have to take a photo. I'm not much on camping--unless you count Courtyard by Marriott as camping. But a Volkswagen Microbus camper of a certain age--say from 1968-ish, that would be kinda fun. Instead of actually camping in it (egad to the third power), I'd save it to drive to events that have valet parking. Anyone--well, anyone with a deep enough pocket--can drive up and hand the guy a Lexus or Mercedes-Benz. It takes a certain style to drive up to the main entrance of the country, yacht, or hunt 'n' polo club and entrust the valet with a cherry air-cooled Swiss Army knife on wheels.

Another Kind of Hit in Vegas

A must do in Las Vegas, right after winning a zillion dollars at the blackjack table, is The Mob Museum, formally known at The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement.  For you old folks in the reading audience, doesn't this photo remind you of the closing credits of the old soap opera, The Edge of Night?)

The museum is in downtown Vegas, not out on The Strip, and is housed in a former Post Office/Federal Building. The Museum has done a super job restoring the exterior of the Beaux Arts building which is a world away from the glitter and glitz that's modern touristy Las Vegas. The building's interior spaces, where employees of the Post Office, a branch of the Federal Government, used to sort letters addressed to Santa Claus (at least according to Miracle on 34th Street), have been largely refashioned into exhibit spaces, but the main courtroom has been preserved and is incorporated into the museum experience.

The admission fee is $20, which was the “suggested donation” was at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the last time I went there. Bargain hunters should know that you get a lot more objects per admission dollar in New York than you do in Las Vegas. But hey, you can't stand in a mock lineup at The Met, can you? The admission at The Mob Museum is somewhat less if you’re a local, and yes, they want to see your ID. Apparently they aren’t about to let the crime pay when it comes to lying about your residency.

The museum covers four floors. The exhibits are mostly text panels and videos along with the occasional cheesy interactive station. These include shooting a fake Tommy gun and mixing up some cement for overshoes. OK, I was kidding about the cement. But not about the Tommy gun. The museum is a quart low on artifacts since no one has seen fit to donate stuff like some .357 shell casings and the bullet riddled dry cleaning receipt that was somehow missed by the CSI people after Clemente "The Rototiller" Pelliccia was rubbed out on leaving the One Hour Martinizing Shoppe in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1969.

Of the few actual artifacts, the niftiest slash most macabre is the actual barber chair in which Albert Anastasia, of Murder, Inc., was sitting when he was whacked in the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City on October 25, 1957. That crime remains unsolved. The label stated that the chair was formerly owned by Henny Youngman. Take my mobster, please. 

The most engrossing thing at the museum was a film that connected Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy to The Mob. I am not a big conspiracy theory guy, but the film laid out compelling evidence that connected Oswald to the Mafia. This was via his Maytag repairman, a strawberry blond girl named Lurleen who rode Oswald’s school bus and her next door neighbor's 1957 Desoto, maintained by a mechanic who wore the same size trousers as Sam Giancana. Hence....The Death of the President. Yes, I knew you’d believe it right away too. 

I loved the gallery filled with crime scene photos of mobsters who had been rubbed out. There was a sign that said that this gallery was not for the squeamish, which, of course, reminded me of those signs at movie theaters in the 1950s that warned of patrons being literally scared to death at some Grade B horror film. Naturally, I made a bee line into that gallery. There they were, black and white glossies of various mobsters you'd never heard of in the front seat of a car, gaping bullet hole in their head; or on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. When it came to retirement, mobsters seemed to prefer a slug from a .38 to a 401k.

There was also a representation of the electric chair. It was sort of a hokey. I mean, does anyone except possibly one of the stars of Bravo's Million Dollar Decorators believe that in any prison, anywhere, there ever was a melon colored electric chair? I mean, really. I would die of embarrassment before they hooked up any electrodes if I had to sit in that thing. It would, however, have been a cool interactive feature if you could have thrown the switch for the chair--to the right in the photo--and have the lights in the building dim for a moment, just like in old movies when No Good Frankie finally gets fried in the Big House. Oh the career I've missed as an exhibition designer!

After learning to shoot the fake Tommy gun, enjoying the JFK conspiracy film, taking in the mob hit photos, and the JFK conspiracy film, and even learning how to spell Estes Kefauver, I spent some time in the gift shop waiting for Tracy and The Other Rick.  Yes, they sell John Dillinger bobblehead figures.  When I was a kid I heard that Dillinger's personal weapon (so to speak) was in a shoe box at the FBI in Washington, DC. I think I believed it too, though I never did work through the issue of whether it would have been been wrapped up in tissue paper like a new pair of shoes.

Tracy was the last to come out, she’d been particularly engrossed the Hall of Animatronic Mob Wives sponsored by Fingerhut Plastic Sofa Covers. Later we discovered it they weren't Animatronic Mob Wives at all, instead they were just clips from The Real Housewives of New Jersey on a big screen TV.

OK, The Mob Museum is not The Met. Or the Hall of Drag, I mean the First Ladies Gallery at the Smithsonian. But for the average organized crime aficionado The Mob Museum is worth the $20....especially if you pay with a crisp $20 bill signed by Secretary of the Treasury Meyer Lansky.

Friends in Low (and High) Places

Recently I went to Las Vegas to see my two of my closest friends, Tracy and The Other Rick. He's really just Rick, but I call him The Other Rick just so I don’t get him confused with myself. I had a voucher on Southwest that was about to expire and all runways lead to Vegas when you have a voucher on Southwest that’s about to expire.

I’d never even been to a convention in Las Vegas before Tracy and The Other Rick moved there. Las Vegas, “Who needs it?” I thought.  But I went to visit them once, had a blast, and have been back several times since. I’m sure I’d have a super time visiting Tracy and The Other Rick if they lived in Duluth, Minnesota, but if I had my druthers I’d rather they live in Vegas than Duluth. No doubt Duluth has many wonderful sights and attractions (e.g. Lake Superior and Lutefisk World) but alas and alack, they’re on hold until I retire and start spending my time driving around the country in a motor home.

In my trips to Vegas since Tracy and The Other Rick moved there, I’ve done lots of the usual touristy things like Hoover Dam and the Liberace Museum. (It’s a crime that it’s closed.) But there are still plenty of things to see and do and there's oodles of local culture to absorb.

Unless I’m staying at The Other Rick and Tracy’s house in the suburbs, I stay at the Wynn. As my father used to say, you don’t go on vacation to save money.  The Other Rick is an executive there, and I believe in doing business with people who do business with you. I have a long way to go to pay them back for all the times I've tied on the feedbag at their house.

Lots of casinos seem to have a theme—The Paris, New York,New York,  Caesar’s Palace, etc. but the Wynn’s theme is well, it’s the Wynn.  And believe you me, that's all the theme it needs. Roger Thomas, Steve Wynn's interior designer (just profiled in The New Yorker) pulled out all the stops to create what feels like a 21st century cousin of West Virginia's legendary resort, The Greenbrier.

The spaces are grand, the décor is within a gnat’s eyelash of being completely over the top, and the place is maintained within an in inch of its life. There are plenty of Dorothy Draper elements--she designed The Greenbrier--such as dark walls quilted in diamond motifs and oversized white baroque plaster moldings.

Since the Wynn isn't low end, you don’t have the feeling most of the casino patrons have hawked their government cheese in order to feed a slot machine hoping for the big payoff which will allow them to move out of the trailer park, buy a big boat, and pay for a decent criminal defense lawyer for their good-for-nothing stepson, and ditch the old lady for a new, firmer, and with luck, augmented model. Vegas is way more fun for me when I can ignore all that real life stuff.

Saturday, The Other Rick arranged for Tracy and me to see Garth Brooks in concert at the Wynn.  I’d seen him in concert once before and was bowled over by what a great entertainer he was, so I was delighted to be going back. 

The crowd was well dressed, which in Vegas encompasses every fashion crime known to man and then some. More on that later. The men wore every sort of get up imaginable, from nice western wear—pressed jeans and western shirts—to shirt tails fashionably untucked, riffing on that great fashion icon, Ferdinand Marcos. Lots of women wore impossibly high shoes and dresses so short and so tight that they looked like Technicolor sausage casings.

The theater was intimate (esp. when you are in the front row) and it was plush in a way that reminded me of the theater at the Hearst Castle. The seats are the right size and you don't feel as if you's sitting on top of your neighbor. Everyone was SO excited to be there.

We had seats in the front row, right in the middle. (Thank you again, Rick!) When we sat down the seats around us were empty but that didn't last long. An older man doing one helluva impersonation of a drunken fraternity boy and his shovel-faced non-trophy but still not age appropriate date soon sat next to Tracy. Tracy remarked to me that he was going to turn out to be a jerk and she was right. He knew all the songs better than Garth and the usher had to come over and tell him to put a lid on it. Fortunately for us, he and his shovel-faced non-trophy but still not age appropriate date dashed out during the first standing ovation. They missed the encore but presumably beat the traffic on the way to the bar.  

A well-dressed, cute, young married couple sat next to me. She was a petite thing in a knee length flowing floral silk dress and expensive vintage dress cowboy boots. The Boy Next Door was thin and had a boyish face and a vaguely olive complexion. His short dark hair needed more (or better) product and he wore a suit, fashionably sans tie.  

Maybe the Boy Next Door just liked my hair or glasses or pink oxford, which may be the one clothing item no one ever wears in Vegas. All good possibilities. Or perhaps he wanted to know where I got my fetching brand spanking new green (yes, green) suede bucks. (Brooks Brothers). Then again, maybe he really liked the Toby Keith song, Who's Your Daddy? No matter what the reason, I had the distinct feeling that this marriage was not going to work out, if you know what I mean.

Mark my words, it won’t be long until he’s living in an expensive Design Within Reach-esque apartment in the gayborhood with his new partner Bruce, an underwear and men's accessories buyer at Neiman-Marcus. They’ll share their tasteful 3,000 square feet digs with their golden-doodles Dow (short for Dowager Empress Tz’u-Hsi) and Jones (as in Grace Jones). The B.N.D. will be the personification of his law firm’s commitment to diversity, and as a dedicated barefoot runner who takes off his shirt every time he has to run farther than the Xerox machine, he'll do great things for his law firm’s pulchritude quotient and scores in the bar association's citywide fitness challenge.

Back to the concert. It was great.  Actually, it was fantastic! Way, way, better than great! Garth obviously loves to perform. Everyone knows he’s one of the all-time great singer songwriters, but he’s also a great storyteller, with superb comic timing. He takes the audience through his life story, mostly in music, touching on George Jones and Merle Haggard, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, the Eagles, dive bars in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and his mother driving a P.O.S. Chevy Chevelle, going down Oklahoma highways like  a bat out of hell.

An added bonus was that his wife, Trisha Yearwood, unexpectedly came out on stage and sang a couple of numbers with him. They’re obviously quite in love, and she’s got a voice that just won’t quit.  I’ve always wanted to go to a concert where they announce that someone (say, Bette Midler) is in the audience and she comes up on stage with the scheduled performer and sings a couple of numbers. This was as close as I have gotten to that. It was great music and great theater.

At the end of the show, Garth left the stage and the crowd was on its feet in an instant. He came back and led the audience in Friends in Low Places which, of course, everyone knew by heart. It’s been sung at a billion fraternity parties, every bar at the Jersey shore, and plenty of wedding receptions where they'd run out of food but don't come close to running out of booze. 

  

We had scarcely finished singing when the house lights came up and The Other Rick appeared and led Tracy and me to a door at the side of the stage where he entrusted us to one of the house staff who was to take us backstage to meet Garth and Trisha. She asked Tracy and me how we liked the show as she led us down a long, antiseptically clean hallway deep into the bowels of the hotel. I wouldn't have been surprised had we passed a doorway marked “Undisclosed Location. Dick Cheney. Knock Before Entering.” 

We made a left turn and we found ourselves in an anonymous lounge sort of room. In a half a sec, someone said “they’re ready for you” and our guide took us across the hall, unlocking one of those weird push button combination door locks they have on data centers in hospitals. 

The door opened and there, in a room furnished with leather sofas and a big flat TV with the hockey game playing were Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. We introduced ourselves (they already knew Tracy) and they invited us to sit down and chat. Garth asked me if I wanted a beer and I said sure, and the next thing I knew I was drinking an Amstel Light. We chatted about his playing the Grange Fair eons ago and I mentioned that my sister had seen him near Elk City, Oklahoma even before that.

 

Amazingly we didn’t talk about how Tracy and I met in the 7^th grade math class and all the related topics that arise out of that. Garth and Trisha were warm and gracious and as nice as you could possibly imagine. After a while Garth mentioned that my phone must have a camera and I said I had an actual camera. One of his entourage members snapped some photos. Tracy said "Rick, you didn’t say what you always say, 'Say sex not everyone likes cheese!' and we had a couple of laughs about that.  Garth Brooks shook my hand and Trisha gave me a big hug. And that’s how Tracy and I came to have another story to share with our lunch table at our next high school reunion.

After we left, I looked at my watch. It was 10:10, way too late to call any of my friends back East. So for an evening at least, this was something that happened in Vegas that actually stayed there.

Muscletown USA

I went to York the other day for a meeting. I don't go there with any frequency. I mostly drive by on the Interstate en route to Baltimore. I say to myself, oh, there's the Harley-Davidson factory and then enjoy the sight of the rotating weightlifter sign at the York Barbell factory-slash-Weightlifting Hall of Fame. I always mean to stop at the Hall of Fame, but it's still on my to-do list.

My meeting was at the Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Complex. The complex is made a former 1920s vintage movie palace and an adjoining smaller vintage theater that have been adapted into venues for live entertainment. It's quite grand--there's nothing quite like an old movie palace. It looks as if they bring in some great performers, too. This year they're having performers as varied as Bruce Hornsby and David Sedaris. And, of course, lots of folks I've never heard of.

This sign was near a food cart in York's central square. I never really thought of sausages and lemonade as being natural compliments to each other.

York has a nifty central market which, unfortunately, was closed the day I was there.

The parking garage across the street from the Strand-Capitol overlooked a mural that would be more at home in West Hollywood, California than in York, Pennsylvania. The large work of art, in sort of a post Paint-by-the-Numbers style, celebrates York's place as Muscletown USA. During my few trips to the York metro area, it's never looked like the Dutch Country version of Muscle Beach to me. But what do I know?

In case you are wondering, it's just 36 miles from Muscletown USA to Chocolatetown USA and then another 497 miles to Hitsville USA.  

The figures in the mural are Bob Hoffman, Tommy Kono, and John Grimek.  They are framed by the York YMCA (no Village People visible) on the left, and on the right, some guys lifting two other men sitting in what looks to be an MG TC parked in front of York Oil Burner, the home of Strength and Health Publications.

Actually, the car looks as if it's levitating, so perhaps it's a reference to the flubber powered Model T in the Fred McMurray movie The Absent-Minded Professor. I know I could bench press a helluva lot more than I can now if I had a little flubber at my disposal. But I digress...

Bob Hoffman was known the "Father of World Weightlifting". In importance this title outranks the "Father of American Weightlifting" yet is outranked by the "Father of Galactic Weightlifting". All kidding aside, he seems to have had quite an interesting life. You can read more about him in the book, Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell. by John D. Fair. Whatever it costs, I think it's worth it just for the title.

Tommy Kono, America's greatest weightlifter was an asthmatic kid who spent part of his childhood in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. He won gold medals in two different Olympics and held lots of other weightlifting records.  Fyodor Bogdanovasky (you just knew he was going to come up sooner or later, didn't you?) of the Soviet Union once said of him, "When Kono looks at me from the wings, he works on me like a python on a rabbit." Fyodor had quite a way with the simile, didn't he?  Interestingly enough, this look (along with a different kind of python reference) was also employed when The Village People were hoping to enjoy the company of others at the YMCA.

John Grimek Mr. America 1940 and 1941, was called the "Monarch of Muscledom" and was the only undefeated bodybuilder ever. It would take an undefeated career to live up to the that title!

During my next trip to York I plan to drive around looking for a mural about 98-pound weaklings having sand kicked in their faces. I'm sure there's one someplace.
                                 

Charlottesville. Part Two

There were plenty of non-fiction authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book, though most of their presentations seemed to have happened before I got there. I did, however, have the good fortune of spending some time in the Charlottesville City Council chambers (easily Virginia's ugliest) attending a talk by Earl Swift, the author of The Big Roads, a history of the interstate highway system. I know what you're thinking, "I need to finish that utterly fascinating history of the Waring Blender before I start on something else..."

I haven't started The Big Roads yet, but I think it might surpass the history of the Waring Blender. Highway building attracted some fascinating characters--like the mover and shaker who required his wife to call him "Chief". Interstate highways have not only had an enormous influence on how we travel, but also on how we live and where we live. Interestingly enough, the Interstate Highway System was pretty much all a done deal when President Eisenhower came along. Calling it the Eisenhower Interstate System is a case of a politician getting credit for something he didn't do. Pretty shocking, eh?

 

Between sessions on murder and highways, I took time to provide economic stimulus to central Virginia by visiting a number of locally owned shoppes. How could I not stop in a store with large and colorful peters in the window?  The store was called Artifacts and it was the Charlottesville version of Aero Studios in New York City. They had lots of cool stuff and I bought some great cocktail glasses. Actually, by my way of thinking, any glass is a cocktail glass.

C-ville is definitely the place to go if you want to buy some pink skinny jeans. For men. Jack Wills University Outfitters can get you all decked out. The pink jeans are a nice change from the standard PSU raiment of a hoodie and sweatpants.

There was plenty real live music to shop by on Charlottesville's downtown mall. It's hard not to like a trio of band geeks having a good time on string bass, guitar and accordion.

There was also a kid in bright blue sneakers and coordinating blue and green striped t-shirt playing Mendelssohn on the solo violin.

There was vocal music, too. This man was exercising his first amendment rights by carrying his picket sign and signing This Land Is Your Land at the top of his lungs. I don't know when I saw an old-fashioned picket sign on a stick last.

Some guy finally listened to his wife (or husband) and took his mounted gazelle to The Consignment House. Presumably he needs to make room for a coffee table made out of a wagon wheel or an étagère filled with Precious Moments figurines. If it the gazelle had a cigarette hanging out of its mouth I might have bought it.

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There was an antique show in the arena that's just across Charlottesville's downtown mall from Omni Hotel, the home to most of the book festival. The show was a benefit for Preservation Virginia, formerly known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Founded in 1889, Preservation Virginia was the first statewide historic preservation organization in U.S. It is responsible for the preservation of lots of cool stuff, including Jamestown, the site of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the New World. So I looked upon it as my civic duty to go.

 

The show featured about fifty dealers and they were selling all the furniture and accoutrements that you would need to furnish an English country house. Antique oriental rugs that won't show the occasional episode of dog effluvia? Check. A lovely Chinese export porcelain tater tot dish? Check. Ancestral portraits? Check. Regency dining tables that seat more people than I have readers? Check. Just add a carload of chinless, freeloading relatives with bad teeth and a taste for Benny Hill to all this instant heritage and you'll have an authentic English country house experience.

There weren't that many customers about in the mid afternoon, so the gaggle of fleshy antique dealers channeling their inner Harry Potter really stood out. They all dress pretty much the same--blue blazers, nice trousers (with cuffs), Joseph P. Kennedy's gay cousin's glasses,  and expensive shoes, suede preferred. They all seem to posses x-ray vision that can zero in on your wallet as you walk by. (A good reason to wear clean underwear to an antique show!) If they think you're up to the rigors of an important Baltimore bow front chest, they are all over you. And if they think that you're cute AND up to the rigors of  an important Baltimore bow front chest, they cling to you like a burdock to your dog's fur. Antique shopping is not for the faint of heart.

There was some nice stuff, but most all of the stuff was out of my league, price wise. What's an extra two zeros among friends?  I saw a great duck hunting painting but it wasn't $26,000 worth of great.

Sunday morning, after we were done being Festive,  my friends and I were looked for a special breakfast spot since it was Karen's birthday. My go-to breakfast spot, The Tavern, formerly known as Sarge's--Where Students Tourists and Townspeople Meet (or so it said in a sign painted on the roof), recently closed after a zillion years of serving hotcakes.  So it was time for someplace new. Hence The Pigeon Hole on Elliewood Avenue.

The Pigeon Hole is in a tiny royal blue stucco building that for years was the home of Martha's Cafe. I think I ate enough asparagus quiche in that place to float a battleship. I know, I know, strictly speaking battleships do not float on asparagus quiche. But if they did.... Our waiter was a tall Ryan Gosling doppelganger, with a hipster haircut. He was wearing blue shorts and a plain formerly white v-necked tee shirt--next to the turtlenecked dickey, one of my least favorite clothing items of all time. He was so mussed and casually dressed that I thought,  Holy crap, we just got this guy out of bed!

Whatever our waiter was lacking in sartorial splendor he made up for in the personality department. After several trips to the table, I commented that he'd never told us his name. He replied that it was Andrew. I told him that I heard it as Amber and he chuckled and said, "Well, actually my name is Holly." Chuckles ensued. There were perhaps five people working there, and he was the only one who did not have a prodigious number of quirky tattoos on display.

The front dining room was so small that when the too-tanned parents and their laxer son came in and sat town, they were practically at our table. They wanted the Eggs Benedict but with the hollandaise on the side.
 

Everything in the place is deliberately mismatched. That might not have worked had the food not been delicious and the service epic. Epic is not a word I throw out casually. A card on the table recommended a 20% tip if the service were "epic". It's not every day that delicious food is served by a Ryan Gosling doppelganger, so I went with the "epic" tip. I highly recommend the huevos rancheros with grits.

The birthday girl's French toast didn't look bad either.

Soon enough we had eaten our fill and were ready to point the rental car back towards the Mason-Dixon Line. I won't be back in Charlottesville for a while, but I'm hoping that when I do that gazelle is still there. If it's taken up smoking--it's not hazardous to the health of a stuffed gazelle--he might just be coming home with me.

Charlottesville. Part One

I'm just back from Charlottesville and the Virginia Festival of the Book. I had a super time. Charlottesville is great at any time of year, and the Festival of the Book is pretty darned choice too.

There's a great line in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil where the protagonist is describing Savannah to a friend back in New York City: "It's like Gone With the Wind on mescaline." Charlottesville isn't quite like that, but almost. It's more like The Olde South meets the People's Republic of Berkeley.

I'm pretty darned sure that both Alice Waters and John Waters would feel quite at home there, not to mention any minor Continental royals who are tired of the bad plumbing, lack of cable TV, and the abysmal Thai food delivery options at the family schloss back in the Old Country.

And there are plenty of regular Virginians, too--the kind of folks who, if they didn't have such good manners, would roll their eyes at all the highfalutin' tomfoolery and drawl "there they go again!"

The first program I went to at the Book Festival was a reading by various UVa grads. I didn't really care about any of them except for Chad Harbach. He wrote The Art of Fielding, which I just finished the other day. I loved the the book, so did my best to get there in time to hear him read.

I arrived in the middle of a poetry reading by either some woman named Jazzy or  some other woman named Brittany. Hey if you are going to call yourself a poet, you might as well go by the first name Jazzy. Her poems sounded like a string of random words and occasionally one of the words would refer to a personal body part that is commonly covered by underwear. Unless you're going commando, I mean. Apparently poets named Jazzy do not do iambic pentameter or rhyming couplets. They go in for a trickle of consciousness that focuses on out of body experiences that take place on hospital gurneys. At least that's what I think she was talking about. I wasn't exactly certain. And didn't have the nerve to raise my hand and say, "Excuse me Jazzy. I don't understand. Is this going to be on the test?"

The room was packed and when they were changing poets on stage woman next to me commented that my silver bracelet looked like vintage Georg Jensen. This sort of thing never happens in State College. In State College someone would ask if my grill were vintage George Foreman. My neighbor was a local, an attractive-ish woman of a certain age (plus a few) who wore artsy sportswear and bright blue oxfords (two thumbs up on the shoes!). She was carrying The New Yorker (of course). She said that she reads the movie reviews first and admitted to sending in a caption to the cartoon caption contest once. She was sure that she'd nailed it, and of course, she never heard from the mag. Ever. Her voice was two thirds Virginia and the remainder equal parts Bombay Sapphire and black coffee. She'd read The Art of Fielding, too, but got tired of Henry, the main character. I replied that I wouldn't say I got tired of him but I certainly was ready for him to have a Disney-like redemption since my literary tastes ran to P. G. Wodehouse and romance novels with Fabio on the cover.

After Brittney (or was it Jazzy?), Chad Harbach read a couple of chapters from his book, and then all three writers took questions from the audience. A couple of the questioners seemed to be channeling their inner William F. Buckley since I had no clue that they were talking about. The poets seemed to, though. Or at least they did a passable job of faking it. I was the second person in line for the book signing. Chad signed my book which actually belongs to my friend Susan. He was quite charming and gracious, and if his fame is a drag to him it he didn't act like it. I should have asked him if he could have validated my parking.

After The Jazzy and Chad Show it was time for a personal tour of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.  It was so cool. They showed us everything from a letter signed by John Rolfe (Mr. Pocahontas) to the original manuscript for William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner wrote in longhand, on yellow legal paper, in about 4 point type. He did not cross any of his t's. No joke. Rose Mary Woods would have taken years (plus 18 minutes) to decipher and type the book. 

A little later it was time for a panel on Leo Tolstoy, E.B. White, and Kurt Vonnegut. The presenters weren't dry academics so the discussion was more fun than any panel on Leo Tolstoy, E.B. White, and Kurt Vonnegut had a right to be. The guy who wrote about E.B. White did seem to be channeling his inner drag queen and started to get the vapors when he talked about visiting White's barn in Maine, but thankfully that episode passed before he needed smelling salts. The counterpoint to his vapors was hearing how Kurt Vonnegut tripped over his yappy dog's leash and fell down the stairs of his brownstone, conking his head. He went into a coma and never recovered. What a way to go! I'm sure it was a bad day for the Vonnegut family but it made for an interesting story.

Dinner was an al fresco feast of fish tacos at a restaurant that used to be a gas station. According to its web site, "Mono Loco is Charlottesville’s original nouveau-Latin restaurant." I didn't even know that nouveau-Latin was a genre of restaurant, let alone that there were non-original knockoffs of the real deal in that dining category.

The post-dinner event was a moderated chat between bestselling novelist Steve Berry and another bestselling novelist I'd never heard of, Lisa Gardner. He's a former attorney and likes golf. She writes murder mysteries and enjoys taking kickboxing lessons with  her husband and daughter. I don't know where they come in on Frank Sinatra, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and long walks on the beach. Work wise, she writes murder mysteries and you can enter a contest on her web site to get her to kill or maim one of your friends. He writes books called stuff like The Jefferson Key and The Romanov Prophecy. He's prolific to say the least, and has a zillion books in print, all of which were probably purchased in airports.

After hearing him talk (and overhearing him in the parking lot saying "I was sitting in Chanel in Paris when....") I decided that the titles for his books worked like menu at an old fashioned Chinese restaurant--one from column A and one from column B.

       Column A                                                        Column B
Historical Figure or City                               Another Noun at Random

   Cher                                                                 Toaster Oven
   Buenos Aires                                                     Circumcision
   The Virgin Mary                                                 Indigestion
   Pancho Villa                                                       Divertissment
   Lord Cornwallis                                                  Bidet
   Gibraltar                                                           Jackhammer

There are no incorrect answers, so his  next book may very well be The Cher Jackhammer or The Lord Cornwallis Jackhammer. (Cher and Lord Cornwallis are about the same age, after all!)

Some stuff on the rest of the trip will follow in a later post. My copy of The Gibraltar Circumcision just came from Amazon.com and I can't wait to start reading. I hear that in some quarters it's a religious experience.