Blogs

  • Ambiguity in the Darkness

    Posted: January 1st 2015 @6:30 PM

    When Paris Went DarkThere are many stories about what happened in France during the German Occupation—almost as many stories as there were people who lived them. For some, France was filled with resisters who sabotaged the Nazis at every turn. For others, it was about the shame of collaboration. The truth, as is often the case, is both broader and more complex than either of these extremes would suggest.

    I know; my family lived in France through the second world war, and, like most French families, has troubles articulating its role in the four years of the Occupation. Those years (and the strange ways in which they affected the nation’s consciousness) are explored in When Paris Went Dark, by American professor and author Ronald C. Rosbottom, and the ambiguities outlined:

    “Even today, the French endeavor both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty — known by all as the Armistice — had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

    On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted city. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Subsequently, an eerie sense of normalcy settled over the City of Light. Many Parisians adapted themselves to the situation, even allying themselves with their Nazi overlords. At the same time, amidst this darkening gloom of German ruthlessness, shortages, and curfews, a resistance arose. Parisians of all stripes—Jews, immigrants, adolescents, communists, rightists, cultural icons such as Colette, de Beauvoir, Camus and Sartre, as well as police officers, teachers, students, and store owners—went from small acts of resistance to overt acts of terrorism.

    Paris in those years was “a city where many, many young and middle-aged men were in prison, concentration camps, in hiding, or in the underground,” so almost by default the Resistance became in significant measure a movement of the young and of women and girls, without whom “the Parisian resistance, no matter its ideology, could not have been as successful as it was.” And in the middle of all this, there remain “the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance?”

    One of the most often-asked questions about the Occupation of Paris concerns how and when its citizens resisted the imposition of a foreign host. Why was the city surrendered without a shot being fired? What sort of organized resistance developed? How unified were the different groups who did resist? What forms did that resistance take, and why was it not more successful? In the end, is it true that the French were more passive than active in their acceptance of German authority?

    The main character of this book is Paris, both the geo-political site as well as the imagined one. There are many, many references here to specific streets and boulevards, métro stops, neighborhoods, monuments, restaurants, cafés, churches, museums, cemeteries, parks, hotels and more.

    In some ways, this is a retroactive guidebook, for the city that the Nazis occupied has not changed much in the last seventy years. The other story is how two complex national and cultural entities—Parisians and Germans—reacted to each other, how they lived in an intimate embrace where the moves or caresses of one brought forth a reaction from the other. Neither was strong enough to control the other, but slowly, because of fatigue rather than strength, one finally manages to break away.

    The story of the Occupation of Paris fascinates us the same way that fictional works imagining the Nazi occupation of London or New York do. How can a city so well known—thanks to poetry, fiction, history, film, painting, photography, postcards, songs and the innumerably recounted visits of thousands upon thousands of world tourists—adapt to a sudden jolt that, unlike an earthquake or even a plague, lasts much, much longer than expected?

    It’s not a comfortable read, but it’s an important one. Thanks to the author’s tireless research and interviews with hundreds of Parisians, the reader is able to enter into the experience, ambiguities and all. Highly recommended.

     
  • Here There Be Dragons

    Posted: December 14th 2014 @1:57 PM

    cover53960-mediumMatthew Reilly’s new thriller, The Great Zoo of China, has action. Lots of it. On every page.

    Of course, a lot of action does not necessarily a novel make, and when even the most exciting of sequences is repeated too many times it becomes old. Really old. I was surprised to find myself scanning rather than reading page after page of this supposedly taut thriller: she’s in danger again. Oh, look, she’s in danger again! Oops, in danger again. In… danger… again.

    Let’s start with the premise, which will strike anyone remotely familiar with Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park as derivative. The Chinese government has been keeping a secret for forty years: they’ve found a species of animal no one believed even existed and are ready to unveil their astonishing discovery inside the greatest zoo ever constructed. A small group of VIPs and journalists is brought to the zoo to see its fabulous creatures for the first time. And, naturally, things go wrong. Really, really wrong.

    Fantasy landscape with a tower by the river and a dragonYep. You see where we’re going with this. And the author does so faithfully, building tension with hints and foreshadowing, even adding the requisite beast-chasing-human-in-the-industrial-kitchen scene.

    To do him justice, Reilly has given the premise a lot of thought. His zoo is well-designed and well-explained, and the visuals that rise off the book’s pages are nothing less than stunning. He supplements them with charts and maps that some readers may appreciate, and gives us character sketches that, while predictable, do manage to engage. He’s paid attention to everything about the creatures in the zoo, from birth to feeding habits to rituals and behaviors, and maintains a consistency within his science fiction that makes it seem plausible. That’s all good.

    I’ve done an episode on The Writer’s Toolkit here on WOMR that addresses the necessity for fiction to maintain forward momentum. You’d think that a novel in which people are fighting, running, hiding, getting killed (gruesomely) and performing feats of acrobatic impossibility (seriously, we haven’t seen anyone moving around the outside of a vehicle with such mobility since the unfortunate movie Speed) would have that forward momentum, but the reality is that momentum is maintained by changes of pace, and Reilly doesn’t have them: after the setup, he’s at 100%, 100% of the time.

    Still, if you’re looking for something to help you while away a couple of hours in total escapism, The Great Zoo of China is a good candidate. It’ll be out in January from Gallery Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) and if you have an action-lover on your gift list, you can preorder it today.

     

     

     
  • The Boss is Always Greener

    Posted: October 7th 2014 @8:50 AM

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    I took some zany jobs in my younger years. I was a barker at an amusement pier in Long Branch, New Jersey. I got on the microphone and called folks to throw down quarters, spin the wheel of chance and try to win A CARTON OF CIGARETTES! “Grab your girl, and give it a whirl! There’s nothing to it; you can do it!” I was 15. I thought the job was pretty darn glamorous. What I really wanted was my boss’s job. While I was sweltering with the gambling smokers, he was sitting in an air-conditioned office counting money.

    After I moved to NYC, I landed a job selling cosmetics at an outdoor market in SoHo. In the winter, when I was stamping my feet in the cold, trying to sell frozen lipstick as frostbite crept into my fingers and toes, I would look over at my boss, sitting in the van with the heat blasting and the windows fogged up and feel even colder.

    “One day I’m gonna be the boss!” I told the four-pairs-of-socks-for-five-dollars guy at the stall next to mine.

    “I’m too cold to talk,” he answered.

    When I decided that I wanted to be a chef, I took lots of jobs to learn while I earned. One outdoor supper club had me and seven guys sweltering in a trailer-turned-kitchen with no indoor plumbing, no sharp knives, not even a fan, while we cranked out food for a thousand yuppies a day.

    “Can we have sharp knives and a fan?” I asked the boss while his secretary counted what must have been a hundred grand on the table next to him.

    “You think you are suffering!” he shouted. “I was wounded in the war and had to stitch up my own wound! That’s suffering!”

    We sharpened our knives on a concrete block, wrapped ice in dish towels and put them around our necks and growled while the boss sipped iced coffee in his Jaguar.

    One summer, I allowed myself to be bused out to the Hamptons by a catering company that needed staff for its busy season of lux parties for the elite.

    “Ohhh, how swank!” a pal cooed into the phone when I told her I was being put up in a house in the Hamptons for a week.

    When I arrived at the house, which was also the kitchen, office and storage facility, I was led up the stairs and shown a ten-by-twelve-foot room filled with sleeping bags and mattresses.

    “Two knapsacks from the corner is your spot!” said the sous chef, a very tired-looking Chinese man.

    I was then herded downstairs and spent the next 10 hours cooking in a stifling-hot, cramped kitchen with a slew of cooks who looked as though they were ready to collapse.

    At the end of the day, too tired to do anything but eat our communal dinner and crawl up the stairs, we took turns (12 of us for one bathroom) showering, and then collapsed onto our spots on the floor.

    I was the first to break the ice: “This sucks!”

    “Really sucks!” came a voice from a sleeping bag in the corner.

    “I thought all homes in the Hamptons had swimming pools.” a young redheaded woman called out.

    “One day, I’ll be the boss,” I chanted in my head as I drifted off to sleep.

    It took me a few years to start my own business, but every time I did an event, they told people, who told people, and thankfully, the word did get around.

    It’s been 26 years since I became “the boss,” and I have learned a whole lot about the price you pay for being the owner.

    After a day of cooking in my air-conditioned kitchen with knives that are professionally sharpened every week, having had a proper lunch break, after which staffers returned to their ample workspaces with a lot of appreciation and all the cold water, coffee or soda they want, my employees leave for the day.

    That’s when I take off my apron and put on my reading glasses and go into the office to start my other job: owner. Between answering emails, paying bills, returning calls, writing proposals, scheduling meetings and contending with the endless, ENDLESS, barrage of legal requirements to running a business, I’ll be lucky to get out for a late dinner.

    It’s a solitary feeling, looking over that mountain of paperwork at the hipsters running to the bar, the kids running to the park and the moms running after their kids.

    When I am finally ready to leave for the night, my stomach growling and my eyes red and blurry, it occurs to me that I work longer hours more days of the week, than I ever did working for a “boss.”

    So what’s the reward?

    Top of the list is having the power to be nice to the staff. It makes me happy to give them proper meals, a comfortable workplace, very decent pay and respect. All except for the executive chef. She can never do enough to please me. That job, of course is mine.

    I get to hang my own art in the office (monoprints of Provincetown Bay right now), take all the personal calls I want (when I have time, which is rarely), play the music I like (rock ’n’ roll, of course), eat when I want to eat (if I’m lucky), and I decide when I am done for the day.

    But my biggest motivation to plow through the endless haze of stress, is that I am completely and absolutely unemployable by anyone other than myself.

    My proper corporate meeting attire may well include a vintage T-shirt on which is scrawled “RAW.” While I insist that every bit of food I plate up is exquisite, I serve my clients the truth, regardless of whether it’s palatable. Once I asked a bridezilla to get laid so she could stop stressing everyone out. Thankfully, she did, and we all lived happily ever after, especially the groom!

    I also need a LOT of personal space. My kitchen is constructed so that the front table with the wall of spices separating it from all the other worktables is my spot, you could say it’s my emotional throne. From there, I make the sauces, marinades, and dips while my chef does the sea salt and caramel whoopie pies, my prep cooks grill the shrimp and fry the mac and cheese fritters as Led Zeppelin plays in the background.

    The Queen is making killer satay sauce from her throne!

    So yeah, being the boss is not for the faint of heart, but at least I get to make my own fun.

    Now I gotta go, I have a very important meeting. I have to dress up! Hmm, the hunter green T-shirt stamped “Rebel” with Levi’s shorts and a pair of biker boots will do just fine.

     
  • Pride

    Posted: July 9th 2014 @8:38 AM

    Gay Pride 2014

    I was standing in front of “The Duchess,” a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village. I had just moved to New York City. I was 17 years old. I had found the courage to leave home, but the courage to walk into the Duchess? My feet were frozen to the concrete.

    An androgynous woman wearing a leather jacket, her brown hair slicked back, stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. She looked at me and snickered as she sucked her Marlboro. I ran all the way to the Sheridan Square subway station.

    By the time I mustered up the courage to enter a women’s bar, the Duchess had closed. I went to “Peaches and Cream,” a friendly joint on the Upper East Side. I can’t describe the sensation of walking into a bar filled with gay women. It felt a bit like being lost in a candy store where I was too terrified to touch the candy. Thankfully, some of the older women in the bar felt a maternal instinct toward the terrified teenager and welcomed me heartily. It was like finding a family I didn’t know I had lost.

    Being gay was something I’d kept on the inside. Being hurt, ostracized, cat-called, or worse, those were all real possibilities for being “out” in the 1980s. But at “Peaches,” I felt free to be exactly who I was: a young woman who loved women.

    I grew up fast … joined in gay pride marches, fell in and out of love several times, took part in New York City’s first glamour dyke parties, and years later with my bodacious partners threw our own women’s parties. We called ourselves “Nasty Girl Productions,” and we sure were.

    Over those years, the world changed, too. I remember when walking down the street holding my girlfriend’s hand risked a gay bashing, now I see young happy women holding hands all the time. They don’t think about homophobia. The world is their oyster, and I’m happy for that. I am happy for them.

    Gay marriage has become legal in a boatload of states, including New York, and at long last gay marriage has gotten its well-deserved federal rights.

    Thank you, Edie Windsor!

    The gay pride parade is now less a symbol of overcoming oppression and more a great chance for advertisers to make Gay Money. A lot of my pals don’t even go to the parade anymore. “It’s too hot. It’s too crowded. We’re too old.” But I still go. Every year in Manhattan on the last Sunday in June, I love to cheer the marchers on and wave my handmade signs. “Gay caterers spice it up” was last year’s sign. This year, it was “Gay chefs sizzle!” I hoot and holler until I’m hoarse.

    All that joy is exhausting. For me this day, is not just about celebrating, or partying; it’s a family reunion for thousands and thousands of relatives I never knew existed.

    It’s our day.

    It is PRIDE.

     
  • Paint and Sip at Terra Luna

    Posted: July 5th 2014 @5:57 PM

    IMG_3373Love to paint? Never painted before? Somewhere between the two? No matter. There’s a seat for everyone at Terra Luna’s Thursday afternoon Paint and Sip.

    Under the expert guidance of artist Colin McGuire, wine and appetizers are consumed while pictures take shape on canvas almost as if by magic. McGuire selects a painting by a master—this past week it was Van Gogh—and uses that masterpiece to teach participants about color, light, and form. “I break it down into its simplest form,” he explains. “We start with three or four big shapes and work in from there.”

    IMG_3400It’s not a new concept, and is often done en plein air (McGuire himself has done similar classes in Puerto Rico), so bringing it to the outer Cape, home of American plein air painting, seemed an obvious choice. And Terra Luna, with its inviting atmosphere and lovely garden, is ideally suited for the event. Visitors looking for an alternative to beaches and museums, locals looking for a break from the traffic and fatigue of working too many hours—there’s something here to de-stress everyone. Even yours truly: I’ve always held to the firm belief that as a visual artist, I’m an excellent writer; and I’m not sure that opinion has changed radically—but what I will say is that I had a lot of fun. (more…)

     
  • Freud’s Last Session Explores Gray Areas with Depth and Warmth

    Posted: June 25th 2014 @3:28 PM

    Good versus evil. Black versus white. Atheist versus believer. Playwright Mark St. Germaine sets us up in Freud’s Last Session (now at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis) to believe that we’re about to witness the extremes doing battle; what the audience doesn’t reckon with is the characters’ understanding and exploration of the gray areas between the two.

    Freud's Last SessionWe are in Sigmund Freud’s London study (and anyone who loves books and learning is going to covet Nicholas Dorr‘s set immediately). The psychoanalyst has fled Vienna and on this morning is pondering his own death—which he will soon hasten—as well as Germany’s invasion of Poland. He is about to be visited by an Oxford don, Clive Staples Lewis, who at one time shared Freud’s atheism but has recently converted to Anglican Christianity. Lewis has criticized Freud in print and fears that he’s been invited here to be given a dressing-down from the great man.

    St. Germaine’s choice of these two real personalities for his fictional conversation is enlightened: while modern audiences know Lewis primarily as the author of recently re-popularized children’s books, he was in fact after his conversion a lay theologian, not blindly accepting of dogma but rather bringing his incisive mind to wrestle with the problems presented by faith.

    What is immediately a little disconcerting in the opening scene is the sense that one is, actually, in the presence of Freud himself. Kenneth Tigar—who comes to the Cape Playhouse having already performed the role at Hartford’s TheaterWorks and Geva Theatre Center—just looks like every extant photograph of the psychoanalyst. And he remains completely in the physicality of an old man throughout the play: every movement, every expression, every word is clearly that of an aged and infirm person. This is not easy to maintain and Tigar does it to perfection.

    As Lewis, Jonathan Crombie—who played the role opposite Tigar in Hartford—is less like his real-life character physically, but does a good job of strongly countering the more verbally and even physically flamboyant Freud. Lewis is logical and rational, and calm—until his own defenses are stripped away during an air-raid signal—and Crombie allows both sides of the Englishman to emerge: the intellectual Oxford don and the frightened young soldier.

    The actors move from epigram to epigram without missing a beat. The play is filled with bon mots, most of them Freud’s, and at one point Lewis looks pointedly at the analyst’s couch and says, “There’s no avoiding this, is there?” No: it’s clear that there isn’t.

    HuthPhoto-KAH_8373After a great deal of extremely entertaining sparring, the men get down to brass tacks—the problems inherent in belief. Freud dismisses the New Testament: “These are myths and legends!” he exclaims, while Lewis calmly counters, “But does that make them lies?” He presses his point: the New Testament cannot be only comprised of myths, he says, it’s simply not imaginative enough. Freud has the last word: “You’re convinced of Christ’s existence because of bad storytelling?”

    The situation is, of course, absurd on one level: the play is punctuated by the war that is just beginning: Neville Chamberlain and King George’s voices on the radio, an aborted air raid, the seizing of gas masks. Freud uses the situation to attack the Gospel message once more: “Should Poland turn the other cheek?” he demands.

    The men discuss sexuality, the dynamic that lies at the center of Freud’s worldview; they remain distanced from each other in their beliefs but as the play draws to a conclusion there is the predictable personal rapprochement, enabled by Freud’s sudden painful physical crisis and the need for an immediate intimate connection. Each admits finally to his own weakness and Lewis ruefully remarks, “It was madness to think we could solve the world’s problems in one morning,” to which Freud responds, “The greater madness is not to think of it at all.”

    Geva Theatre Center’s Skip Greer‘s direction is light and never goes over the top into too much confrontation, too much pathos, or too much of any strong emotion for that matter. He allows the audience the play’s moments of humor that balance the serious issues under debate but then with a deft hand pulls back into the flow of the conversation.

    A lifelong admirer of Lewis’, I left this performance moved and thoughtful. Anyone with an interest in the gray areas between religion and atheism will find enough here to occupy their thoughts long after the play is over—which is, after all, one of the reasons one goes to the theater: to be challenged in an entertaining way. The Cape Playhouse’s production of Freud’s Last Session does just that.

    ***

    Jeannette de Beauvoir is the host of Arts Week on WOMR, a contributing writer to Provincetown Magazine, and a novelist, editor, and marketing writer. More about her at linkedin.com/in/jeannettedebeauvoir 

     
  • One Man, Two Guvnors, Lots of Laughter

    Posted: June 24th 2014 @6:13 PM

    0442My fellow Frenchpeople’s obsession with Jerry Lewis notwithstanding, I’ve never been a big fan of slapstick humor: a little, in general, goes a very long way indeed. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself not just laughing out loud at the Cape Rep’s production of One Man, Two Guvnors, but with tears of mirth streaming down my face as well. I stopped taking notes. I stopped noticing anything but the stage and the story and my own aching sides.

    That’s the sort of production it is: quick, clever as well as slapstick, and enormously engaging. We’re immediately transported to 1960s Britain, complete with a Buddy Holly-esque band (and the music is really excellent), clothing that makes us grateful that fashion has evolved, and a very young Queen Elizabeth in photographs on the wall.

    0286Let’s start with plot basics: Francis Henshall, a failed skiffle player, finds himself working for a local gangster at the same time as he takes a job with a criminal in hiding; both bosses, as we would say on this side of the Pond, are linked together in a very tangled web of romantic aspirations, about-to-fail schemes, and family ties. One of the two employers, Rachel, is a woman disguised as her dead gangland twin: the other, Stanley, is an idiotic clotheshorse, who is both the twin’s killer and Rachel’s lover. Francis is hopeless at keeping the various associations linked to the correct employer, and his solution is to try and keep the two from ever meeting. His own ongoing hunger and willingness to go along with whatever situation presents itself move him into the stuff of farce.

    0108I expect that much of the reason I found this slapstick enthralling is that it wasn’t limited to physical pratfalls: playwright Richard Bean made this show verbally funny as well, and his script is peppered with observations such as “first names are for girls and Norwegians,” and the ever-present threat of Australia as offering a “terrible outdoor life, sustained by barbecue, beer, and opera.”

    Brighton is a brilliant setting: as the late Keith Waterhouse has written, “Brighton is a town that always looks as if it is helping police with their inquiries.” Here mobsters (cross-dressing or not), pathetically stupid women, self-obsessed failed actors and efficient bookkeepers are the order of the day. (Sorry, Zoe Lewis: by the time you arrived, Brighton had no doubt cleaned up its act!)

    0099As is consistently the case with Cape Rep, every inch of the stage is used to great advantage. We move seamlessly (with the help of the band) from a parlor to a street to a questionable restaurant, even to a bridge for a dramatic suicide attempt, and all of it done without the audience noticing the transformation.

    I’d take some time to single out the best actors, but I’d simply be listing the cast, because everyone was absolutely perfect in their roles. No one missed a line or a beat, the timing was spot-on, and their smoothness in working with and off each other superb.

    0327A word of warning: sit in the front row at your own risk. Seton Brown, as Francis, is not only dealing with a complex set of verbal and physical requirements, he’s also ad-libbing at every performance as well. Enough said. Brown delivers some impressive physical feats (have you ever seen anyone jump over an ironing board before?), while Jonathan C. Whitney manages to deliberately and delightfully convey caricature onstage.

    Over the top? You bet! But I’ll bet that you’ll come away from Cape Rep’s One Man, Two Guvnors wheezing with laughter.

    One Man, Two Guvnors by Richard Bean, based on The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni and directed by Fred Sullivan, Jr., plays at Cape Rep from June 19th to July 19th. (Photo credit: Bob Tucker/Focalpoint Studio)

    ***

    Jeannette de Beauvoir is the host of Arts Week on WOMR, a contributing writer to Provincetown Magazine, and a novelist, editor, and marketing writer. More about her at linkedin.com/in/jeannettedebeauvoir 

     

     
  • Motherless Daughters on Mother’s Day

    Posted: May 16th 2014 @6:57 AM

     

    On Mother’s Day when we were kids, Dad would take us to a drugstore and buy hairbrushes, body lotion, athlete’s foot powder … you know, the sentimental stuff. He’d also pick up a Mother’s Day card and have us each scribble our names and affections on it. He always had leftover wrapping paper in the garage, and we’d take turns doing terrible wrapping jobs on the items. Each of us would claim one gift as our own. I tried to be glamorous and grab a lotion or a scented soap. If you didn’t move fast enough, you’d get the foot powder.

    It was clear that Dad had done the picking, but each year, Mom clasped her hands together and kvelled (kind of like beaming in love) all the same, then dragged her three children to her chest in delight. It was suffocating, but it went with the turf.

    By the time I was 10, I figured out a few things.
    1) Dad was a lousy gift giver.
    2) Mom didn’t care what the gifts were, as long we gave them.
    3) Mom loved lilacs.

    A neighbor’s tree exploded in fresh lilacs every year, right around Mother’s Day, and I decided to sneak over and acquire (steal) an armload of glorious, fresh lilacs to present to Mom. Our ragtag kitchen of cheap linoleum and paper plates took on the air of an eccentric garden with those pretty flowers sitting in a large glass apple sauce jar on our dinette set. I loved the smell, still do, but it may have something to do with the ecstasy of Mom’s face when I gave her the flowers. It became our annual mantra for five years:

    “Oh, I love lilacs!”
    “Yes, Mom, I know!”

    Things changed right around the time I discovered that even though I was 16, I looked old enough to get into bars without being carded. I didn’t give a hoot about my mother’s love after that; I wanted to party! I also wanted to paint, fly, have friends my mother hated, smoke, explore, and in short, leave the nest!

    By the time I was 17, I was living on my own, and Mother’s Day was a day when I called Mom and subjected myself to an hour of her prodding and digging about whether I would ever marry a nice Jewish boy. It was my gift to Mom, letting her eat my insides. It took me a few years to mention that not only would I not be marrying a nice Jewish boy, but if I did get married, it would probably be to a woman.

    Eventually we found our way to back to each other. Mom was a poet, I am a writer, and we started to talk about the creative process. It was an amazing thing to find out that my housewife, over-possessive, couponing, bargain-hunting mother was actually a spectacularly creative soul. She even won a local poetry contest and got her name in the newspaper.

    “Promise me, my Slovah (my Yiddish name), that you will write about me. I want you to immortalize me.”

    “Of course, Mom, how could I not? There’s so much material!”

    My parents were coming back from a trip to Florida, driving on 195 toward New Jersey when Mom went into cardiac arrest in North Carolina. She never made it home. I was 28 years old.

    For many years after that, I didn’t know what to do with myself on Mother’s Day. I felt that the whole world was celebrating a day that I was locked out of. The lilacs at the Korean deli sent me into tears.

    Then I decided I would spend Mother’s Day with her, death notwithstanding.

    I bought an armload of lilacs (bought!), hired a car service and rode from my apartment in Manhattan to her grave in Staten Island. It’s an old Jewish cemetery that houses most of Mom’s line of the family. My grandparents and great-grandparents are there.

    I laid out a towel next to Mom, and placed the flowers on her grave. FYI, this is a big no-no in Jewland. We don’t bring flowers; we place stones. But really, could we get any more depressing?!

    I slathered suntan lotion on my arms and legs and lay down next to Mom.

    Groups of mourners came by, horrified to find a woman in a hot pants and a tank top splayed out in the grass, but Mom would have liked it, and so did I.

    I told her about my life. Whom I was cooking for, what I was writing about, whom I was dating, what made me happy, what made me sad.

    She was a good listener.

    I’d like to say I still do this every year; I don’t. But it got me through the hardest Mother’s Days.

    Taking the car service back to Manhattan, I didn’t feel the cast-out sensation anymore. I looked out at the families coming back from brunch with Mom, happy and giddy. I spent the day with my mom, too! SO THERE!

    I still feel an incredible loss on Mother’s Day. I suppose having a baby would have helped. Then I’d be Mom, too.

    But it wasn’t my destiny to be a mom, maybe because I’m so busy mothering … EVERYONE!

    Happy Mother’s Day to all the motherless daughters out there. It’s our day, too! Make it a great one!

     
  • Adam Graham’s Provincetown Vision

    Posted: April 24th 2014 @2:12 PM

    SHADOWS AND FOG #5Artist Adam Graham was my guest this week on Arts Week (check out the podcast of the show if you have time), and I was impressed not only with his work—which is flat-out gorgeous—but also with his passion and articulation in talking about it.

    Here’s his bio and artist statement:

    “Adam Graham began studying impressionist painting under the guidance of his father, painter Bob Graham, who was a longtime pupil of Henry Hensche.

    hp2“Adam moved from his hometown of New Orleans in 1999 to further study the Henshe impressionist method at the Cape Cod School of Art under the tutelage of Lois Griffel. His interest is in using the principles learned painting en plein air for the last 11 years and applying them to new and original motifs.

    TRIPPING #2“Artificial light at twilight is Graham’s main focus. The time of day when the world takes on an indigo glow and is punctuated with glimmering street lights. Dark shapes take on new form and the ordinary world becomes a waking lucid dream.”

    SHADOWS AND FOG #8Looking through his work (as you can when you visit his website), I’m struck by how important is the sense of place. It’s always comforting to recognize a place or a person in works of art—one feels somehow connected to the artist and his creativity that way—but what this artist does is give one a radically different perspective on scenes familiar to us through everyday proximity. The giant ice cream cone outside of Twisted Sister becomes ominous under Graham’s brushwork, while seeing the streets from a frog’s perspective allows and invites the viewer to look at them with fresh eyes.

    Graham is represented by the Rice-Polak gallery in Provincetown. They’ll be opening for the season soon; make sure you stop by to see his work.

    ***

    Jeannette de Beauvoir is the host of Arts Week on WOMR, a contributing writer to Provincetown Magazine, and a novelist, editor, and marketing writer. More about her at linkedin.com/in/jeannettedebeauvoir 

     

     
  • From Whaling Capital to Whale Conservation

    Posted: April 11th 2014 @11:17 AM

    IMG_3110There’s a new exhibition at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum called Forgotten Port: Provincetown’s Whaling Heritage, and no matter whether you’re a native, a washashore, or a visitor, there’s something there for you.

    It details the story of how Provincetown evolved from hunting whales to saving them, with a special emphasis on the whaling days and how they helped PTown forge its identity. Once visitors get past the “ewww factor”  inherent in hindsight (i.e., how horrible that they did this, wasn’t it awful, I don’t like to think about it, etc.), this study in how an industry supported a town is fascinating.

    IMG_3125John McDonagh, executive director of PMPM, has said that “Forgotten Port is a story that hasn’t been told. Few realize the fundamental and enduring impact of the whaling industry in shaping the town’s economy and culture. Because of whaling, by 1870 Provincetown was one of the richest towns in Massachusetts and second in American whaling, rivaled only by New Bedford.”

    The exhibit is rich in narration, with snippets of information about whaling captains, whaling vessels, life onboard and life onshore, always allowing visitors to absorb the information at their own pace. See how sperm oil both illuminated and lubricated the industrial revolution; read the memorial to the wreck of the Rienzi; follow the Yankee and Portuguese captains and crews; learn about the family that built the Figurehead House.

    IMG_3104Along with the written narrative, you can follow images, artifacts, videos and voice recordings that create together a whole picture of the life of one of America’s most important whaling ports. The museum is also continuously running the film Whaling Days, the only film made of a whaling voyage—and, honestly, not for the faint of heart. You can also see it on YouTube. It was commissioned by Captain John Atkins Cook (who recorded it on the whaling ship Viola) and shows him leading the actual hunt, the capture, and the rendering of whales onboard.

    IMG_3109The history brought alive here starts with Provincetown’s early whaling days and the “drift whaling” practiced by the Wampanoag and early white settlers. It moves into Provincetown’s “golden age” of whaling, showing the details behind the statistics that between 1820 and 1920 more than 160 whaling ships left and returned to Provincetown, ranking the town fifth in vessels and third in voyages among 72 American ports. The final days of whaling are illustrated with the decline of whale stocks, and finally, the rise of ecotourism and the will to protect cetaceans are documented.

    IMG_3136There’s a strange connection between the past and the present: Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies president Richard Delaney says, “Today we’ve modified the same tools that were used to catch whales in order to save them.  By turning around the point of the harpoon that was used to catch them, we can now cut the ropes and free them.”

    Coming full circle from using to enjoying whales, this exhibit is well worth everyone’s time… and thought. Every generation leaves its mark on the places it inhabits, and reflecting on the marks of past generations while looking to the future is surely one of the most important of endeavors.

    Want to go? Forgotten Port:  Provincetown’s Whaling Heritage is open April 1 through November 30, 2014. The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum collects, preserves, interprets, researches, exhibits, and publishes archival historical materials and exhibit materials depicting important events of Provincetown history. Open Daily 9 – 5 April 1 to Memorial Day, then 9 – 7 to Labor Day, and 9 – 5 to Nov. 30.  Admission is $12 adults, $10 seniors, $4 children 4 – 12, 3 and under free. Parking is free every day through April. In May, parking is free Monday through Friday. until Memorial Day. 

    For more information, visit the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, call 508-487-1310, or follow PMPM on Facebook and Twitter.

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    Jeannette de Beauvoir is the host of Arts Week on WOMR, a contributing writer to Provincetown Magazine, and a novelist, editor, and marketing writer. More about her at linkedin.com/in/jeannettedebeauvoir