"Home Invasion": A Review

For the last week or so, I’ve been reading Errol Morris’s new book, A Wilderness of Errors, which re-examines the Jeffrey Macdonald murder case from 1970. Sifting through the record, Morris advances the position that a cocktail of sloppy police work and prosecutorial sleight of hand have resulted in an innocent man spending three decades behind bars. It is a cautionary tale about the justice system. The “CSI” era is deceitful artifice; despite the fact that every week we are bombarded with television programming where every crime is solved swiftly, straightforwardly, and conclusively, Morris (whose previous filmwork included the superb documentary “Thin Blue Line,” which resulted in an innocent former-Death Row inmate being exonerated) is not so sure this is a storyline we can trust.

It turns out that this book was timely background for “Home Invasion: The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth,” a new one act play written by Anna Theresa Cascio and performed by Doc Dougherty. The story, based on events that have played out in Cascio and Dougherty’s lives over the past three years, plays out like some form of “method acting” in reverse: Doc (whose roles have included cops of “Law and Order,” a gangster in a daytime soap, and a fake FBI agent in an indy film) has a pair of Connecticut detectives show up on his New Jersey doorstep, accusing him of participating in a “home invasion.” A year or two before, Ann Bass, arts philanthropist and ex-wife of a wealthy Texas oil magnate, was held hostage in her home by masked gunmen, shot up by the invaders with hypodermic needles, told she would only be injected with the antidote if she paid an $8.5 million ransom. Doc, who bartends part-time for caterers in high ticket price charity events, has crossed paths on a couple of stray occasions with Ms. Bass. When an accordion case containing needles and empty cigar cases washes up near the Queens neighborhood where he grew up, Doc falls under suspicion. How? Well, there is a suggestion by the cops of “touch DNA,” the results of which may place someone from his family group on the scene. There is Doc’s history of brushes with the law as a teenager, his service as a medic decades ago in the military. But, there is also the mysterious fact that his brother has only just escaped punishment on a pair of serious offenses. He has seemed distant of late, and there is talk that he is offended by some perceived slight. Did a family grudge factor in?

Before long it becomes apparent that it is Doc and Theresa’s home that is being invaded. There are policemen loitering in cars outside their apartment building, unexplained clicks during phone calls that could be wire taps, cops showing up on the doorstep pressing Theresa and the neighbors to think the worst. It isn’t long before their domestic “fortress of solitude” feels like its secure, protecting walls have been breached. The receipts Theresa finds that could easily be an alibi are challenged by the agents as an elaborate ruse to cover up, and they threaten her with accessory. Doc’s feisty determination to not be steamrolled, the residue of a tough upbringing in Broad Channel, lead him to hard-headed and absolutist resistance that both increases the appearance of his guilt in the eyes of the investigators and the exasperation of a partner who wants desperately to believe the simple act of cooperation will make it all go away.

Doc commands the stage throughout the evening, bringing a wide range of characters (himself, his wife, his interrogators and lawyer, family members, neighbors and friends) to life. Deftly directed by Molly Fowler, the story is complicated and briskly paced, with only a few shifts of lighting and music samples to signal changes of time and location. It is a gift to be able to manage all of this— to use tiny bits of physicality and subtle vocal inflection to suggest the particularity of character in a way that keeps the audience oriented, while not resorting to caricature. Doc managed to bring these perverse events alive, inviting us to use our imaginations to occupy the confused and threatening space he came to inhabit through no fault of his own. By the time, near the end, he comes to ask angrily, entreatingly, to no one in particular how it is that years of hard work and determination to reshape himself— to alter his pathway from the man he might easily have become— count for so little against a police system that seems weighted to assume his guilt, we wonder with him: Is the woman holding scales outside so many courthouses masked out of a desire to mete out unbiased justice, or is she just sometimes blind?

“Home Invasion: The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth,” a one man show starring Doc Dougherty, written by Anna Theresa Cascio and directed by Molly Fowler, runs Thurs, Fri and Sat for the next two weeks at the Jorda Production Theater [Oct 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13] Tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258932.

"Other Desert Cities": A Review

The Wyeths have the kind of life a certain version of the American dream tells to us we ought to aspire to: They are wealthy, well-connected, well-educated, fabulously successful. Lyman, the family patriarch, is a retired movie actor who parlayed his Hollywood connections and celebrity into friendship with a president and an ambassadorship. His wife Polly graduated from Bryn Mawr, then came out West with her sister Silda to write screenplays that led to a series of profitable films. Son Trip produces a successful reality TV show, “Jury of Your Peers,” in which families come to play out their petty squabbles in front of a panel of second rate actors and D-list celebrities so as to grab their fifteen minutes of fame. And then there is daughter Brooke, who lives back East and published a critically successful novel several years ago. Her return home for this Christmas holiday after six years away serves as the ostensible basis for the events being acted out.

But, this is no Dickensian Yuletide celebration, nor a Hallmark family homecoming. The Wyeth home looks more like what a movie set of a family home is supposed to look like than anything genuinely lived in. The Christmas tree is stuck in a corner, looking more likely to have been dusted than trimmed. The furniture looks stylish, but rarely used, the kind you have “for show” to sit in when important company comes to call. Only it is the idea of this collection of people acting like “a family” that is as out of place as a houseguest. Silda drowns herself in drink, pills and sleep to escape her discomfort. So anxious and uncertain is Trip about the idea of this gathering that he has three flights booked for the day after Christmas, each to a fantasy land more exotic and faraway than the next. And, despite her parents’ hints that they would like her to relocate to the house next door (which has recently become available), Brooke notes how she was tempted to pass right by the Palm Springs exit toward “Other Desert Cities.” She would rather risk being alone and wandering in the barren wasteland than face time with her family. Clearly, this home is no oasis.

Brooke’s long-awaited new book is about to be published, and she has brought home a copy of the pages for them all to read. It is a memoir that focuses on Brooke and Trip’s older brother, Henry. Good looking, smart, and charismatic, he seemed destined for the success his parents dreamed of for him until his opposition to the war brought him directly into conflict with his parents. Unable to abide his disapprobation any more than he could bear their politics, Henry was shipped off to boarding school, where he became ever more distant and extremist. Before long, he joined a group of radical activists, spurned his family completely, and took part in a bombing that killed a homeless veteran. Brooke’s book tells what she knows and conjures what she doesn’t: On the run, Henry came to his father for help, only to be turned away by Lyman, who even called the police. Though Henry was never found, there was his suicide note that revealed hints of his disappointment and disillusionment with his parents, as well as his fragile and muddled state of mind. Brooke imagines what his last day might have been like.

Like all children, Brooke wantes her parents’ blessing, their approval, no matter that she is exposing old wounds to the cold, biting air. But, Lyman and Polly don’t want family secrets aired: There isn’t a thing out of place in this front room, and the clean designer lines and hardwood floors don’t allow for any rugs to sweep the dirt under. Amidst the pictures that inhabit the set’s unseen fourth wall— of Rock Hudson, Sinatra, Goldwater and Dinah Shore— we are told there are none of Henry. At one point in the family conversation, Polly even slips, referring to two children instead of three, a point quickly corrected by her annoyed and exasperated daughter. Brooke reads their silence as denial, their resistance to her work as a tacit admission of the blood on their hands. Goaded on in that interpretation by her Aunt Silda, who has secretly been reading and editing the manuscript pages, Brooke wants to unloose the family skeletons. Reeling from hospitalizations for depression and a failed marriage, perhaps Brooke thinks these pent up secrets are the pieces that will allow her to decipher her private puzzle. Locked into a lifelong struggle with a steel-willed mother, perhaps she hopes publishing this book offers a chance of detaching once and for all, even if takes wielding an axe to do so.

Using memoir to discern meaning is no straightforward exercise. Family stories, especially stories involving uncomfortable secrets, can be mirage-like, obscuring every bit as much as they clarify. Though Brooke fancies herself oak-like as her father, Trip reminds her that family resemblance is more nuanced than that. Much as Silda— the drunken fool the theatrical trope suggests is speaking truth— may want Brooke’s text to indict Lyman and Polly, she has her own awkward memories to avoid. Ever the politician, Lyman loves his daughter and his wife and desperately wants to traverse the minefield between the two that Brooke’s memoir doesn’t so much create as underscore. “Brooke, I’m looking for room to navigate, for this to feel less like we are cornered,” he says, equal part observation and entreaty. But, cornered they are, all of them, narrator as much as those whose lives she chronicles. Maybe Henry’s story is less the ticking time bomb they fear it is and more like one of the presents beneath the tree. It sits there wrapped and awaiting the arrival of Christmas morning when the secrets it holds can finally be opened and shared.

OTHER DESERT CITIES (by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Joe Mantello) is running at the Booth Theater (222 W. 45th St) and features a fine veteran cast: Stacy Keach (Lyman), Stockard Channing (Polly), Judith Light (Silda), Elizabeth Marvel (Brooke), and Thomas Sadoski (Trip).

"Marley:" A Review

Sunday afternoon I wandered down to BAM to see “Marley,” a new documentary of the reggae music icon (directed by Kevin Macdonald). The film features interview footage with Marley’s Wailer co-founder Neville Livingston (known as Bunny Wailer), wife Rita Marley, Cindy Breakspeare (a former Miss World with whom he had an on-going relationship and fathered a child), children Ziggy Marley and Cedella Marley (both musicians in their own right), and a host of former band members, family and friends. Essentially following Marley’s life chronologically, we move from the tiny tin roofed shack at St. Ann Parish in north-central Jamaica to the Bavarian clinic where he lived out his last months being treated for cancer, returning to Miami only days before he died in May 1981. Between, we hear about Marley’s first ventures into a musical career— Bunny tells how as teens he, Bob, and several others sang at night in cemeteries to perfect their harmonies and summon their nerve. At 16,Marley released his first single (“Judge Not), and the next year he, Livingston, and Peter Tosh formed the core of a group “The Teenagers” that eventually evolved into The Wailers. Reggae was just beginning, an organic form arising out of a cocktail of rock steady, calypso, and ska, achieved by a shift of emphasis on the beat. The Wailers found their way to producer Coxsone Dodd, and began to develop their trademark sound.

But, almost before any success could materialize, Bob was off: In 1966, the 21 year old Marley relocated to Wilmington, Delaware to live near his mother. He worked as a lab assistant at DuPont, then as a welder at the local Chrysler factory, before returning to Jamaica two years later, where he resumed recording and performing with The Wailers. He also converted to Rastafarianism, and grew the dreadlocks that would become part of his iconic look. Maybe it was his Samson moment: The small quiet lad who had been teased and felt the outsider, owing to his mixed racial identity, now found his voice and his strength.

The Wailers traveled to London, got £4,000 and a record deal with Island Records (who had just lost the label’s top artist, Jimmy Cliff), went home to Kingston and recorded the album “Catch a Fire.” “Concrete Jungle.” “Slave Driver.” “No More Trouble.” “Stir It Up.” It was a solid beginning, full of tracks that gave hints of the powerful creative force that was still to come. “Burnin’” followed later in 1973— with “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Now, instead of Jamaican acts garnering notariety at home by recording covers of American radio hits, it was their sound that was being imitated and copied. Less enamored with the touring necessary to promote their records, first Livingston, then Tosh withdrew from The Wailers, returning home to Jamaica. Perhaps it was as it was meant to be.

Continuing on, but now as the clear front man, Marley scored his first US breakthrough in 1975 with “No Woman, No Cry,” a deceptively simple song, utterly singable, carried forward by Marley’s haunting soulful storytelling, bluesy guitar accents, and punctuated by organ chord progressions and I-Threes harmonies that carry the wallop of great gospel music. Such was his influence at home that he was asked by Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1976 to headline a concert aimed at halting gang violence in Jamaica. (Two days before the event, Marley survived a gun attack in his home. He performed nonetheless.) Two years later, he did it again, headlining the “One Love Peace Concert,” intended to promote tolerance and conciliation between Jamaica’s two primary political factions. The film features footage of Marley, sprite-like and whirling like a dervish, coaxing and cajoling Manley and his opponent Edward Seaga onto the stage for a ceremonial handshake. Never have two men looked more uncomfortable, their oversized political egos rendered human-scale by the singer.

But, “Marley” is no thoughtless piece of hagiography, much as we may even secretly want it to be. The film presents a nuanced view of the singer— showing, for example, his complex relationships with women (he fathered eleven children by seven women) and his sometime emotional distance as a father. There are uncomfortable moments of Marley traveling to Gabon, initially unaware that it was a dictatorship. Later, he plays a concert for Zimbabwe’s Independence Day celebrations, a hopeful moment of the late 1970s during which, with the hindsight all these years later, we see installed another dictator, Robert Mugabe.

I had not heard Marley’s music when I arrived at Ohio State in fall 1980, where Marley was scheduled to play a concert at Mershon Auditorium that Halloween. Reggae had not yet come to southern Ohio (where I was from), nor had MTV arrived. But, my roommates had a clutch of Marley’s records— “Exodus,” “Survival,” “Rastaman Vibration”— and I quickly and enthusiastically latched on. The music appealed as a combination of opposites— simultaneously strange and familiar, exuberant and melancholy. There were good time, upbeat rhythms that represented the first flush of adult freedom I was feeling, accented by plaintive lyrics filled with human struggles and allusions to the larger wrongs— racism, social injustice, economic inequality— I wanted to right. I laughed a little uncomfortably Sunday, seeing images of sunburnt and drunken white college students singing along earnestly to Marley’s music— in some ways, I was one of them. But, in other ways (I hope), I was not. I look back now and speculate that some the attraction was the universality Bob Marley created in his music. In my case that was a connection to country music and gospel— both of which I detested, because they were my parent’s musics but which I had spent a lifetime listening to around the breakfast and dinner table, had sung in church on Sundays, had absorbed into my DNA. When Marley sang dolefully (in “Johnny Was”) about a woman crying over the death of her son, it had the ring of Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn. When that woman struggles with how to ever go on in the face of such a loss, the song bore hints of “Amazing Grace.”

Marley never played that concert at Ohio State. Having been diagnosed previously with cancer, a month before it was scheduled to happen he collapsed in NYC, and doctors told him the worst— that the cancer had spread throughout his body and that he had very little time to live. He played one last show in Pittsburgh in late September. His band members spoke heartbreakingly of a two-hour sound check during which Marley sang on and on, and of him summoning every ounce of strength to get through two sets of encores. I confess that I shed a tear near the end of “Marley” on Sunday, watching this energetic warrior made vulnerable, losing his dreadlocks to chemotherapy before finally succumbing to disease. It seemed such a loss that Bob Marley was only with us for 36 short years. But perhaps I was also sad at the impossibility that more than 30 years have further passed, that the youthful enthusiasm and idealism I first encountered Bob Marley with have been tempered by experiences over the many intervening years. I went home and put on an hour’s playlist of some of my favorites. The songs were all familiar, it was only the 50 year old me that was strange. But, it’s hard to linger in sadness listening to Bob Marley. There are powerful rays of sunshine sprinkled amidst the sobering words. It wasn’t long until I found myself feeling it was time to get up, stand up, and lively up myself. There’s still a lot to do.



"Marley," dir. by Kevin Macdonald, 145 mins. A soundtrack features 24 tracks by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The film is available for rent on iTunes.

"Van Gogh Up Close"

The first time you see "Almond Blossom" (1890), the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s stunning new exhibition, "Van Gogh Up Close," you are still a full two rooms away. You turn a corner, lift your eyes to see where you are headed off to, and there it is— hovering front and center in the distance, a turquoise haze with a crowd buzzing around it, the prize that awaits you, the answer to some question you sense is being asked. By this point you are some 30 canvases deep into the story, and have spent the last hour or more looking— reveling in the visual pleasure of scrutinizing and pondering bits of nature so common and ubiquitous that perhaps you never considered they were worth appreciating. Oh, there are show stoppers of the kind one expects from Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Those sets of gorgeous sunflowers— the ones from this museum’s own collection, eleven stems set in a simple earthen jug, each a distinctive act of creation, each in search of its unique sun, and the ones that normally live in NY at the Metropolitan, their droopy brown heads thrust so closely in front for our inspection that we can almost feel that if we get too close seeds and petals, all so delicately balanced on the canvas, will dislodge and fall onto the floor. There are vases of luminous red poppies and sapphire blue cornflowers, sunlit patches of slender irises and copper potfuls of fritillaries, radiant golden pears that seem to have just been spilled from a fieldhand’s wicker basket onto a dazzling swatch of table cloth.

But, there are also appreciations of spiny blades of grass, clumps of lawn covered in dandelion, pastures sewn together like quilted blankets, fields of flaxen wheat brushed with just a hint of sunlight, waving gently in slender bands of sky that seem filled with air that is alive. "I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself,” the artist wrote his sister, Wilhemina. It is clear from these canvases, even if we didn’t already know it from his biography, that the urge for looking— and for calm too— animated much of Van Gogh’s abbreviated life.

A lack of calm is palpable. It is there in a canvas depicting two haunted figures paused in a plot of forest, where rows of tall lean tree trunks seem to stand in for his asylum walls. Or, in dense tracts of sylan undergrowth, thickets drawn so nearly impenetrable that they barely allow a pathway for the eye. It is heartbreaking to hear in the audio commentary that some of the vistas depicted from Van Gogh’s time at Saint-Rémy (the hospital near Arles, where he committed himself and spent almost a year recuperating) omitted the bars in the windows that would have framed his view.

But, whatever disquiet and loneliness lurked within him, there are moments of supreme calm and breathtaking beauty in Vincent’s work, moments of serenity that, no matter how transient they ultimately were for him, transcend time and touch us all these years later by virtue of having been depicted with his brush. “Almond Blossom” (1890, painted in Saint-Rémy) is surely such a moment. Gnarled and knotty branches, scattered and drifting like wisps of smoke against a luminous, tranquil turquoise sky. The scrap of text next to the canvas notes that the painting was made after Van Gogh learned of the birth of his nephew, Vincent Willem, named for him. It might well have been a bittersweet moment— the vitality of new life and pride at having a namesake from his beloved brother Theo tempered by the immediacy of his hospitalization, an omnipresent confusion and uncertainty that riddled him and kept him locked away.

I’ve admired this painting since I saw it in Amsterdam about a dozen years ago, and have been lucky enough to see it again a time or two in the intervening years. I’ve had instincts about what experience the painting might be trying to capture, ideas that came back to me as I stood in front of it here. As I imagine it, the perspective is one of the artist laying on the ground, flat on his back, connected to solid earth beneath him, eyes turned heavenward into the infinity of a lushly lit morning sky. Between him and that limitless expanse are these branches, covered in the most beautiful pink and white flowering blossoms, that occasionally emit a shower of tiny petals that dance in the breeze like butterflies before drifting down on the artist’s face. But, beautiful though they are, the blossoms are only for a season, and from the ground the branches are just out of reach. The artist is resigned to that. And, still, he chooses to hold his gaze and be grateful for the moment. Perhaps, all those years of looking at the details around him, capturing a sense of rootedness and grounding, allowed Van Gogh the courage to acknowledge his own impermanence and to stare deep and full into the vast unknown.

“Van Gogh Up Close” opened today and runs through May 6. After its run in Philadelphia, it will move to The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Almond Blossom, 1890. Vincent Willem van Gogh, Dutch, 1853 ‑ 1890. Oil on canvas, 28 15/16 x 36 1/4 inches (73.5 x 92 cm). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Reflections: Reunion, Class of 1980

A few thoughts about my 30th high school class reunion.

When my children were a bit younger, they were obsessed with Harry Potter. For several months after they received the first volume as a gift, we would curl up on their beds and I would read a chapter or two just before lights out. Hogwarts seemed perfect to them. Yes, there was all the typical social infighting and gossip that made school difficult to navigate. (Every classroom seems to have a Draco Malfoy lurking and plotting off in one corner, or a Hermione Granger showing off about how quick and clever she is.) But, who wouldn’t prefer a classroom where the lessons aren’t boring, where instead of math and spelling you studied potions and spells? And, Hogwarts seemed to address perfectly any criticisms about the impracticality of grade school education: Of course, young wizards needed to know charms and incantations. Outlining sentences or knowing what a gerund is turned out to be a tougher sale.

I liked “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” as much as they did, for all its fantasy and adventure, but I fell in love with it toward the end of the book. Harry and his friends embark on a set of challenges that lead them toward a special stone hidden somewhere inside Hogwarts, hoping they can use it to extract an elixir of life. They happen upon the Mirror of Erised. The mirror’s magic, they learn eventually from Dumbledore, comes from reflecting back not the physical presence posed before it, but the deepest yearnings of that person’s heart. Erised, we learn, is the word “desire” written backwards. To my children, this revelation brought wide-eyed delight. It was a puzzle piece that helped solved the riddle. For me, the passage hinted that these were more than mere children’s tales. This duality— the chasm that exists between who we are and the longings and hungers that motivate us— as much as anything, captured the human condition. The recognition of that same duality captured an essence of what it means to be adult.

I thought of J.K. Rowling’s magic mirror last Saturday. That evening, the end of a humid late July day typical of the ones I remember growing up, the Portsmouth West Class of 1980 met for our 30th year reunion. Though there were reunions to mark the passing of the 10th and 20th mileposts, this was the first one I attended. Having gone first to college, then New York and London and, finally, New York again, my contact with my classmates is erratic. I had not seen most of them since the May night of our graduation, the few I stay in touch with I see infrequently at best. Ron, who played trombone in stage band, mentioned that he saw me driving on a highway once, but couldn’t get my attention; at least another twenty-five years passed before this chance to share a meal.

We met in the banquet hall of the local American Legion, which the night before a small, generous committee transformed into a more festive version of itself. Tammy and Scott, classmates who married 20 years after high school, still live in town and did most of the organizing, but others helped out— Diane and Mary live in Portsmouth, Myria, Marsha and Greg came in from out of town. There were twinkly strands of white lights strung overhead and around posts and banisters, offset with balloons in Portsmouth West’s black and orange. The tables were dressed in pompoms and tiny cheerleading megaphones. The placemats were laminated reproductions of our class photo— a composite of our individual yearbook photos. It served as a directory when confronted by someone at another table you no longer recognized. To aid us on that score, the committee created nametags that included a copy of our senior picture, which helped but didn’t always do the trick. Craig, whose dad managed my first minor league baseball team, looked almost no different than I remembered him. I started kindergarten with Arnold at Dry Run School. It seemed strange to see him with greying hair and a shaggy beard.

While my teenage children have “High School Musical” or “Glee” to caricature the teenage years and high school, movies like “The Big Chill” frame for me what a reunion might be like. To see it as projected on screen, both are events punctuated with rivalries and love stories, earnest exchanges in hidden corners, all playing out against a singable soundtrack, where modulations into minor keys are momentary and invariably resolve in a power chord. Now, here we were— or, at the very least, a representative cross-section of us— thrown together after years apart, trying to pick up the conversation like we had paused to take a breath mid-sentence, uncertain about whether what we were saying now still made sense given where we were before.

I’ve heard people sometimes say how they would love to have their high school years back again, but I can honestly say I wouldn’t. Don’t get me wrong: It was a great time with Friday night football and pizza or school dances afterwards, class plays and cast parties, band trips and basketball, Senior Skip Day. I remember a night out at the movies with Bill, John and Jody to see “Monty Python’s The Life of Brian,” complete with a recap in faux British accents as we sat in the drive thru at Rax Roast Beef. Saturday night, as Bob wandered between tables, he overheard someone recounting a prank he pulled involving snapping the straps on someone’s bra.

But, high school years have awkwardness and confusion, a sense of uncertainty that seeps into t-shirts and blue jeans like the smell of sweat or cigarettes. Who is in and out? How do you summon the courage to ask for a prom date? Who can you ask without risking public humiliation? How do you touch each other when it comes time to dance? Of course not a bit of that frailty can be admitted to anyone. It is all dressed up with a bit of swagger and nonchalance meant to disguise your insecurities to others, perhaps intended by dint of constant repetition to convince yourself you are okay after all. Duane reminded me that I told him I thought Ohio State, where I went off to college, was “boring.” I flushed with embarrassment, not because I recalled the conversation but because there was a time when I was arrogant enough to say such a thing.

No, I would not want to go back there, although doing so would at least allow me to forget how much time has passed. But as a parent now, I wish I could share a word with John at 18 to ease his future path— about how some things that seem so important turn out not to matter, how decisions we make in a moment are like stones thrown into still waters, setting off ripples that echo over time. That despite our angst and planning, it is the unexpected twist that tends to occupy us, that how we manage the crossroads of unpredictability defines us more than any road map ever could. But, such imaginings are a lost cause, and when I substitute my three teenage children as the audience, I’m no more successful than my parents were with me.

A reunion is a bit like listening to songs you know from years ago: Even the ones you didn’t especially take to are more comfortable to sit with now, though you can’t remember all the words. Familiarity matters more; the music triggers memory and becomes a shorthand way to summon a place and time. Not that time alone covers over everything: My observation was that people still sat in threes or fours with the people they hung out with. The smokers still positioned themselves closest to the door. But around the bar or after dinner, talking to others was much easier. They weren’t rivals or crushes or jocks now. There were careers, children and grandchildren to talk about, the places they had traveled to or lived. Rich moved to Texas just after graduation with a handful of others from West, he reminded me, worked and retired from Budweiser and has a pawn shop up the river in Barboursville. Pam lives now in Ashland and has a daughter at university where my Chelsea goes. Ed, who I stood next to during boys’ ensemble, is a preacher whose ministry has taken him to Honduras and Costa Rica. Carolyn is a nurse practitioner serving Scioto County; her son just graduated from high school and aspires to be drum major at Ohio State.

The organizers put together some prizes in categories like who travelled the farthest, who looked the same or had changed the most. Sue, who tied in the “most children” category, joked that if she had only known she would have had one more. I spent a bit of the evening talking to Barbara, Bob’s wife; it was interesting to hear from a spouse’s perspective what had filtered through about our high school years. And, because not everyone could make this evening, there was a chance to hear about some others that classmates were in touch with. Sherry, who moved back to Portsmouth fairly recently, said hi to a couple of us from Chris.

I’ve heard my siblings say, after they’ve gone to their class reunions, that most attendees come from out of town. That wasn’t my experience. There was a nice mix of locals and people who came in just for the occasion. I’ve only spent three summers in Portsmouth since I graduated, and I admit it can hard to come back when I visit my parents, even for a day or two. The day before, Dad and I spent two or three hours driving around and it was sad to see so many familiar shop fronts and factories gone. Wolfe’s, a popular men’s clothing shop, is now a Goodwill bookstore, and Portsmouth Paint, where Dad worked for forty years was transformed into a hair salon. Like many Midwestern towns, the landscape is littered with franchise fast food restaurants and strip malls, and Walmart seems as much as anywhere to be the popular meeting place. But, there are positive signs, too: the college has gone from one building to a substantial campus, with a state of the art auditorium. The high school is in a different location, and a new middle school building is about to open in the fall. Tammi’s teenage daughters take part in Cirque d’Art, a performing arts group that focuses on gymnastics and acrobatics. Nothing like that existed thirty years ago.

Derailed, a local band that includes Gary’s son, kindly offered to perform for free. They turned out a double album’s worth of covers: the Eagles and Allmans, a bit of Lynard Skynard and Aerosmith, all intended to put us in a late 1970’s mindset, to transport us back to evenings when we blared music with the windows down as we drove across the Towpath or parked along the river bank imagining what our lives might turn out like. But good as they were— and they were rocking— the real entertainment was seeing and talking to others. Too abruptly it came to an end. Too quickly, the sands shifted through the hourglass; it was as if, having formulated a bit of alchemy that allowed our class magically to reassemble, the chemical compound proved too unstable to hold at equilibrium for long. The band packed up their gear, while Marsha passed an upended megaphone for a collection. Tammy and Scott popped the balloons, others gathered up the table of yearbooks and the cards of pictures commemorating the seven classmates who have died. A few of us went down the street to a bar for a drink just after, but that lasted only about another hour, and soon enough I was headed back to Mom and Dads. I creeped up the drive, dimming the headlights, not wanting to wake them, like I was coming in past curfew.

The next morning I was off to church, then a family reunion, both of which in their own way were a continuation of the exercise in checking boxes and filling in the blanks. By seven o’clock that evening I was tired, but it was time to begin the drive back to New York. After two days of solid conversation and reminiscing, I was suddenly, mercifully, alone. A dozen hours of road lay in front of me, and I was looking forward to seeing my kids again, who spent the week with their mom. Much of Sunday evening’s stretch of highway was through West Virginia mountains, the hillsides like leafy green blankets, smooth and unspoiled, threaded only by highways that skim along ridges or weave through narrow valley passes. At times, when I could let my mind wander, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that I was traveling through land never seen before.

I needed time to think, to try to find perspective. Three or four hours before the class reunion, Marsha emailed me: Mrs Pfleger, a teacher meant to be the guest speaker, had a family emergency and now could not attend. Would you mind speaking, she asked, since you were the class president? I was honored to be sure, but am an uncomfortable public speaker, someone who feels safer writing down the words. So, I sat at my parents’ kitchen table for an hour and took some notes that tried to sum up thirty missing years. I settled on the image of a mirror. I thought about how, when I look in the mirror now, I often still see myself as a teenager—confident, excited, with everything to come. But then, one of my kids calls to me wanting something, or I think of a bill I need to pay. Suddenly, the grey hair and wrinkles are there, reminders of the time passed and the life lived. A reunion, I guessed, is a special chance to see both images at once: to reflect on some of what happened to us over the three decades since we left school, in a room of friends with whom we share memories from all those years ago. Now, a day later, I could only think of other things I wished I’d said, little turns of phrase in my nervousness I overlooked. I agonized like I was back in high school, insecure about whether I measured up.

Though I had some CDs with me, I was in the mood for radio. The only stations I could find kept fading in and out as the road twisted, so I kept scanning to find a channel not lost in static fog. This being the Bible belt, there was a bit of gospel music and preaching, and being West Virginia, there was country too. But I tended in the main toward classic rock. It was comfortable, familiar, and since I was by myself I could even sing along. I think it was somewhere near Morgantown that my scanning dial landed on the opening bars of a song I immediately recognized but had not thought of in at least twenty years. It was Styx. Not the “Renegade” that I remember Les and Eddie singing as we changed classes in the chorus room or “Babe,” the sentimental ballad we slow-danced to at the junior prom. Instead, it was “Come Sail Away.” Left to my own devices, I would have chosen another song to sum up the reunion. Something cooler, more sophisticated— a song with razor fine lyric by Bruce Springsteen or Ryan Adams, sung with the jagged melancholy edge of Tom Petty’s or Lucinda Williams’s voice. But sometimes you take your soundtracks as you find them, and because I couldn’t quite remember the words, I found myself listening. About setting out over uncharted waters. About reflections in the mirror of stormy waves that spark memories of the past and of childhood friends. About knowing some desires remain unrealized and some hopes remain unfulfilled. About choosing to carry on.

Review: "Norma," an Opera by Vincenzo Bellini, performed at The Caramoor International Music Festival

Last Saturday evening, a tiny corner of Westchester County was transformed into a Druid temple in ancient Gaul. The occasion was a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's tour-de-force opera Norma as part of the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah. The festival has its beginnings in 1945, growing out of recitals organized by Walter and Lucie Rosen, who built the estate during the decade before. The main house is an Italianate villa set on some 80 acres, offset by walks and gardens. Earlier in the day, rain threatened— an inevitable aspect of unpredictability that goes with outdoor music festivals. But, alas, as yellow sunlight of midday bent into the gold of early evening, the gods smiled. Grey skies were replaced by blues that gently faded as the evening approached. Picnickers spread blankets across grassy carpets, even as the coaches and cars crept in.

Part of the festival's mission is to provide a forum for young artists, an aspect that my elder daughter benefits from. (She was a chorister on this night.) The performers are young, well-trained but still developing. That aspect lends each event sense of a compound still under development, of vigor and opportunity being mixed in imprecise parts. For the audience, this is a chance at witnessing the infancy of talents, that with time and experience might mature into something wonderful; for the performers, this is a chance to hone their art. Before the evening's main course, a set of smaller performances were organized, set in a quiet courtyard, featuring some of the understudies and apprentices.

Because another central component of the festival is educational, these recitals are hosted and organized around themes related to the main event. Since 1997, after a successful production of Rossini's Le Cenerentola, there has been a particular focus on the bel canto repertoire at Caramoor. Bel canto ("beautiful singing") is a style of vocal music predominant throughout the 17th and 18th centuries that brought Baroque sensitivities— litheness of tone, technical agility, and graceful precision of phrasing— to the genre of song. Bel canto is at the base of Handel's oratorios, Bach masses, and (even earlier) Monteverdi madrigals written for the castrati. Later, the term was applied in a specific context to a style of operatic composition that prevailed, especially in Italy, from roughly 1805-1840. Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini were bel canto's champions, writing stage works at once demanding and beautiful, works like L'elisir d'Amore, I Puritani, and Semeride.

Eventually the bel canto style fell out of fashion, and was supplanted by a more animated, less delicate style of singing promoted by Richard Wagner (replaced even in Italy, by the end of the 19th century, in the works of Verdi and Puccini). But, that Wagner sought to move opera in a new direction did not mean that he had no appreciation for what came before. Will Crutchfield, the former New York Times music critic, serves as the Director of Opera for Caramoor and is a bel canto scholar: In 2003, he prepared and conducted the premiere performance of Donizetti's Elisabeth ou la fille de l'exilé, a reworking that had lain dormant for more than 150 years. Crutchfield served as the host of the pre-performance session I attended, organized around the legacy of Bellini in the work of Wagner. Crutchfield's passion for the history of this music was infectious, and he sat at the piano demonstrating passages that would allow us to note the historical debts and homages buried within the German master's ouevre. It was customary in the 19th century for composers to augment operatic performances with bits of their own work. Wagner composed an aria and a chorus for an 1837 production Norma, and so was intimately acquainted with the construction of Bellini's work. For our illumination, an aria from Norma was juxtaposed against a scene from Die Walküre. A performance of "Träume" (part of Wagner's Wesendonck song cycle) took on new meaning under Crutchfield's tutelage.

After the dinner hour, Andrew Porter, eminence grise of opera criticism, gave a detailed dissertation on Bellini's masterpiece and those who have famously performed the lead role. Porter himself saw Maria Callas's 1952 interpretation at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, some two years before she performed made her American debut in Norma during the opening season at what is now the Lyric Opera in Chicago; her Metropolitan Opera debut came also in Norma in 1956. Norma has, almost from the beginning, been seen as one of the most demanding roles. Porter reminded us that Lilli Lehmann, the Met's first Norma (in an 1890 production), found the role particularly exhausting: The German soprano, who sang in the first festival at Bayreuth, famously said that, in Norma, one needed more stamina than for all three of Wagner's Brünnhildes. In spite of those demands, the roster of Normas includes many legendary sopranos— in the modern era, Dame Joan Southerland, Beverly Sills, and Renatta Scotto. Porter's remarks gave a context for this Caramoor production, but also with questions about how young Angela Meade, cast here as Norma by Crutchfield, would measure up.

The tented performance space of Caramoor's Venetian Theatre was abuzz for this sold-out performance. Meade performed as lead in Caramoor's Semiramide last summer— with the production garnering honors on both The New Yorker and the New York Times annual "best lists"— so anticipation was high. Angela Meade made her professional debut a mere two years ago, standing in for an ill colleague to sing the role of Elvira in Verdi's Ernani at the Met. She is more widely known as one of the winners of the Met's competition, chronicled in the documentary The Audition.

The story of Norma involves tragedy being played out a multiple levels: An aging Druid priestess, Norma has a clandestine relationship with Pollione, a Roman governor, whose army rule over her people. She has borne him two sons, keeping his paternity a secret, but now senses that his affections lie with another. In fact, Pollione has fallen in love with with Adalgisa, a temple virgin and confidante of Norma. Guilt-ridden, Adalgisa confides her indiscretion to Norma. Norma curses Pollione, and determines to kill herself and her children. Ultimately, however, her love for the children wins out, and she asks Adalgisa to care for them after her death. The younger priestess is so moved by Norma's selflessness that she renounces her lover and pledges to convince Pollione to return to Norma. However, he refuses Adalgisa's entreaty, which enrages Norma when she is later told of the exchange. Calling the Druids together into the temple, Norma incites her countrymen to war against the Romans. Needing a sacrifice to lay upon the altar, they find one in Pollione who is captured trying to enter the temple to find Adalgisa. But, Norma's guilt makes it impossible for her to see him condemned. She confesses that Pollione is the father of her children, commends her children to her father, and bravely offers to take Pollione's place upon the sacrificial pyre. Seeing this, Pollione is overcome; proclaiming his love for Norma, he joins her in death.

Two weeks before, I had seen Meade perform at a showcase event at WCNY's Greene Space. That evening, in isolation on a small stage with only Crutchfield on piano, her performance seemed a tad heavy, more stolid than graceful, as if somehow the proportions were out of kilter. But on Saturday, none of that sense remained. Meade took command of the stage from the moment she arrived upon it. Accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke's, a chamber orchestra that serves as the festival's orchestra in residence, Meade was by turns defiant and tender. Meade's performance of "Casta diva" was supple, emotive without a hint of slipping into maudelin, and drew thunderous applause. On that earlier night, at the Greene Space, Crutchfield characterized bel canto as the "jazz of classical opera," and noted the opportunities the music provides for moments of improvisation. Meade and her fellow performers made effective use of those occasions throughout the performance. While I would say that the results were occasionally uneven, missteps were rather minor on the whole, and quickly forgiven. The singers' labors on our behalf were wonderfully appreciated. In addition to Meade, Keri Alkema's Adalgisa was sublime, her voice lithe and clarion clear, especially in the duet "Mira, o Norma." Daniel Mobbs, the bass-baritone, brought gravitas to the role of Norma's father, Oroveso, and Emmanual di Villarosa, a tenor, brought flair and vigor to Pollione.

Of course, for me the evening was framed by the lens of proud parent: I anxiously awaited each appearance of the chorus for the chance to see my daughter to do the thing she loves most— to sing. But, what an evening it was. Spectacular performances of breathtaking music. The kind of evening that reminds you of the immediacy and power of opera as an art. It was a pleasure to bear witness to a cast of talented young performers, one and all sustained by the joy of song.

Review: "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" by Aimee Bender

Rose is a young girl growing up in what seems to be the most normal of families. Her family live in a leafy southern California suburb, in a house so ordinary you paint in the green carpet of lawn without even being told. Rose’s parents are still married, having met at university. Her father is a lawyer, earning enough for her mom to stay at home. Joseph, Rose’s brother, is annoying as older siblings ever are, but also because he’s a brain. As the book opens, it is a few days before Rose’s ninth birthday, and she sits in the kitchen, doing homework, tasting the batter as her mom does a trial run of her birthday cake.

But, beneath the veneer of the 1950’s picture postcard, things are less than perfect in Rose’s family. Dad works long hours as a lawyer, and often spends evenings and weekends squirreled in his office on the phone. This leaves him disconnected from his family, who can find themselves feeling more supported than loved. Mom is dissatisfied with her life in that way those whose lives are given over to the care of children often are— she is listless, prone to headaches, lacking confidence and uncertain what the future holds. For years, Rose’s mom sustained herself through Joseph. He is, everyone recognizes, his mother’s favorite: At an early age, he was labeled a child prodigy, a distinction she encouraged, hoping to be reflected warmly in the glow of his special status and that through his successes her unrealized ambition might be fulfilled. But, a few years on, Joseph is just another smart eighth grader. Meanwhile, all the years with a “gifted tag” has left him a loner without many friends.

Mom supervises a door being cut through an outside wall into Joseph’s room— one last signal, be it confident or self-delusional, about the limitlessness of his future. While the kids are at school, she spends hours working with the carpenters, sawing and sanding, making certain that the details are just so. Dad comments that it seems strange to put so much work for a door into a room that only one of them goes into, ignoring the fact that the door also leads out. But not for Joseph: On the back of the experience, Mom joins a carpentry collective. She is anxious to recapture a sense of purpose, and carpentry is a chance to do something with her hands.

But, first, there is the matter of Rose’s birthday. To celebrate, she is treated to a special lemon birthday cake lovingly baked by Mom. Birthdays can be scary for children. Despite the excitement of parties and getting presents, it can be frightening to accept that the passage of time brings change. Anxious to have her treat, Rose sneaks a sliver while her mom is napping, but immediately senses that it doesn’t taste quite right. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but there, amid the lemon peel and brown sugar, is a pervading sense of sadness that she feels is somehow connected to her mom. The book chronicles Rose’s journey, from nine to her early twenties, and how she searches for way to accommodate this condition into her life.

I picked up Bender’s book, initially, hoping (from what I saw in the jacket summary) that the work could give me some insight into my two teenage daughters, and the complex relationship young women have with food. The story follows Rose from age nine to her early twenties, a period that corresponds from early adolescence to young adult, a time when young women struggle with images about their bodies, and when those struggles can morph into unhealthy habits and damage self-esteem. I wondered if a novel about food and emotions could help me understand some of what my daughters and their peers go through. Over time, Rose discovers she can taste the dissatisfaction in migrant workers picking her tomatoes and the plight of the dairy farmers providing the milk for her cheese. This condition takes much of the pleasure out of eating, and soon Rose prefers subsisting on fast food and items out of vending machines, since the food is processed and very little of the preparation is done by hand. This is the terrain where eating disorders are born— food being used as a void to fill a void, eating that is not so much about satisfying hunger as a hungering to be satisfied.

But, the more I read and digested Bender’s charming work, the more my attention turned to Rose’s parents. We parents want to believe we can hide things from our children— our thoughts, our histories, our dreams for them, the ones we once had ourselves that somehow got away. Almost invariably this is a lost cause. No one knows better who we are. All our secrets are on display. Being nine, Rose doesn’t have the vocabulary, and knowing things she shouldn’t know feels uncomfortable— like overhearing adults telling secrets you know weren’t meant for you to hear, but which curiosity makes you want to listen to anyway. Meanwhile, Joseph, Rose’s brother, is also struggling. Though being the “brain” gives him status, and a special role within his family, ultimately it carries a burden that, as he grows older, he doesn't want to bear. His future plotted out for years by his doting mother, Joseph wants to disappear into normality— opting out seems a more attractive option than to fail.

In “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake,” Aimee Bender offers a story that seems like a fairy tale, full of magic powers and mystery. But, like all good fairy tales, the story lingers because it resonates with the situations we find as we go about our lives. Becoming adult involves seeing, observing, endeavoring to make sense of things that in childhood appear as enigmas and confusions. It also involves emerging from the shadow of our parents— taking the elements they pass to us through birthright and osmosis, and fashioning them into a life we define for ourselves. Honing our skill of tasting, after all, is one of the ways we can learn to cook.

Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, published by Doubleday, $25.95