The Little Sparrow

I don’t know when I first heard Edith Piaf. She died when I was but a sophomore in high school; I certainly was not aware of her life, or her passing. All I can tell you is that sometime between her death on October 11, 1963, and my first trip to Paris in December of 1990, I learned to love her music to the point that visiting her grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery was very high on my list of things to do in Paris. Her grave (see photo below) is among the most visited, perhaps second only to Jim Morrison’s.

The playwright and filmmaker Jean Cocteau reportedly said, upon hearing of her death, "Ah, la Piaf est morte. Je peux mourir aussi.” (Ah, Piaf's dead. I can die too) – and then he did. Paris came to a standstill on the day of her funeral; the cemetery was mobbed by tens of thousands; more lined the streets.

I speak very few words of French and I understand fewer, but translating the words is not necessary to comprehending the magic that is Piaf. Try it. Listen to “Non, je ne regrette rien,” perhaps my favorite Piaf tune; or try “Milord,” one you may already know. I bet you’ll love them, even if you have no idea what they’re about.

I just gave my copy of the single CD “Edith Piaf’s Greatest Hits” to a colleague, Agnes, the coordinator  in the French department at Yale. Why? Because I finally started listening to the 9-CD set I bought years ago, “L'intégrale de ses Enregistrements 1946-63,” which has everything that’s on the single disc, and so much more – 196 tracks altogether. It’s over ten and-a-half hours of music. I’ve listened to it all in the last two days, though admittedly while at work.

Now I see there’s an expanded version of the same set: 20 CDs with 413 tracks! What’s a boy to do? (Don’t worry, Ransom, I’m not going to spend the money for it, although it’s an amazing $38.21 at amazon).

Music truly is the universal language. Yes, that’s trite, but Edith Piaf is the proof. Give her a listen if you don’t know her; you may find yourself as hooked as I am.

Does this make me look girly?

If anyone needs another argument against the existence of god, I offer one word: gnats. How could a supreme being blunder so stupidly as to create gnats? My (very brief) online research finds not one good reason they exist. Many contributors agree with me: they exist ONLY to fly into my eyes and mouth and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

On the left is one of my weapons against the scourge that is the gnat. For those of you too young to know what it is, let me explain. It is a fan. I hold it in my hand and wave it back and forth, creating a breeze that cools me off a bit, and, more importantly, blows those infernal pests away.

This fan, like the ones pictured below, is likely 50 years old. They were my Mom’s and were almost certainly bought in Japan sometime before 1963. You don’t see fans much anymore, other than in churches in the South. Do folks in Japan still use fans like this? I wonder.

When Ransom learned I was using this fan, he was aghast. He must have been afraid someone would see me. He thought a fan like this was NOT something a man used.

“Why is that?” I protested. It works, that’s all that matters. I’ve always hated the gender roles that society force on us. “You’re telling me I have to suffer the heat and the gnats to protect my masculinity?”

“Bullshit” say I.

“Bullshit” say I as well to what I call the “Tyranny of the Tie.” It’s always struck me as unfair that while women have hundreds of way to be dressed up, men have only one: a coat and tie.

The New York Times magazine a couple Sundays back ran a fascinating article titled “What’s Wrong with a Boy Who Wears a Dress?” Depending on how you stress the words, you might think they were asking “What’s WRONG with that boy?” -- for surely something must be wrong. In fact the Times attitude leaned more toward “What’s wrong? Nothing really.” It’s a fascinating article about a rarely discussed subject.

One can only hope that as time goes by we will all be more free to be who we are.

Miscellaneous moments

Following are some thoughts I jotted down on my iPhone; they didn’t make it into any other post, so here they are, in no particular order.

• Getting on the elevator the first time I left the hotel and pressing “1” only to stay in the cab when the door opened and press “G” for ground. I knew better, and the “G” button is clearly differentiated from the numbered buttons, but I wasn’t yet in Euromode.

• That same elevator announcing “door opening” and “door closing.” A bit odd when I’m on the landing and the elevator is sitting there empty, about to open, and chirps “door opening” to an empty cab. 

• Jamie’s Italian: Jamie Oliver’s restaurant; incredible polenta chips with garlic mayonnaise and excellent pasta with 10-hour cooked pork. With a Lemonata and tip, under $25!

• Asking the man at ScotRail why there was both a ScotRail ticket office and a Virgin Rail ticket office in Central Station; asking him to repeat the answer; smiling and thanking him, then walking away, still having no idea what he said. Talk about a Scottish Brogue!

• Walking, walking, walking. And then walking some more!

• Looking into a handful of live music venues and not liking what I saw or heard. My hope of hearing some live rock and roll was dashed by the reality of being 63 and defining rock and roll quite differently from how the the local young toughs do. (See yesterday’s post for a different experience).

• Chatting with a ticket agent at a rock club when a 20-something comes in asking to see someone. When asked who she should say is here, he responds, “I’m his wee brother.” (The agent and I kinda melted).

• A 30-something couple in the serve-yourself hotel breakfast room sit down together; she gets up to fill a plate for him, pour his coffee and fetch his juice before serving herself. I assumed they were man and wife, but maybe she was his nanny.

• This from Bread, Bones and Butter: “I have even loved, on a certain level, being the tongue-tied patron in the restaurant who so badly wants to eat what the natives all around me are eating but being too afraid or unwilling to ask.” I’ve been that person, but reading this helped me NOT be that person this time.

• The door code for after-hours entry to the hotel is the one number that virtually any educated person would remember. I should explain: the hotel is on the sixth (top) floor of an office building; once the workers go home 21st century security demands the street door lock. And the code: 1066 of course.

• Overheard in the breakfast room where two couples, just met, were chatting:

“How long were you in India?”
“Oh, only two and-a-half weeks.” 

As a typical American who almost never takes more than seven days, that smarted a wee bit.

• What’s wrong with Scottish plumbing? I saw signs all over that read “Disabled Toilet”

• Finally, a travel memory I will long cherish: I thoroughly enjoyed eating two dinners in the hotel dining room, largely because Margo the cook was highly skilled and also a lovely person with whom I enjoyed talking. Because Bread, Bones and Butter is so much about cooking, I gave it to her when I finished it. She received it with glee. When I returned from my Edinburgh marathon I found her copy of chef Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential with a very sweet inscription to me. That’s such an important part of travel: great interactions with strangers. I will long remember Margo and the rest of the staff at the lovely Hotel Grasshoppers. Be sure to consider them if your travel take you to Glasgow!

My friend Don asked me today what my favorite moment was. I’m going to cheat and respond with two. From the larger perspective it was the dance performance And then one thousand years of peace by Ballet Preljocaj. The dancing was excellent, the tightness of the ensemble amazing, the music varied and compelling – it was a near-perfect performance.

On a smaller scale, as you might guess from above, it was my interaction with Margo. She was such a delight, the food was so good and the reward of coming out of my shell outshone the effort I put into it. Maybe this curmudgeon is learning to loosen up a bit.

At the Fringe

I start this on the eight-hour flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Think about that for a moment. Why was I in Amsterdam? Isn’t that in the wrong direction when traveling from the UK to the US? And then why am I flying over the east coast, halfway into the country, only to turn around and head to New York after a six (that’s six, s-i-x) hour layover in Detroit? (Detroit? Please! The airline gods do have an exquisite sense of pain).

But I am not complaining. Not a whit; for I am sitting in the front of the plane (Business Class on Delta). It was remarkable: I approached the end of what looked to be a 30-45 minute queue at the gate when, just as I took my place, an agent came up to me and said “don’t wait in that,” glancing at the line and at my gimpy leg and my cane, “follow me.” She took me to the front of the queue and then checked me in, bumping me up to Business. May all the flying gods be praised!

I am especially appreciative because I am flying on exactly no sleep. Tuesday was an action-packed, walking-heavy day in Edinburgh. I saw four (!) shows at the Fringe, took the 23:30 train back to Glasgow and was on the 03:40 bus to the airport. Between midnight thirty and two thirty I packed, Skyped Ransom, dealt with email and had a 30-minute lie-down, but no sleep.

In case you don’t know, the Edinburgh International Festival is an over-fifty-year-old arts festival that includes theatre, dance, music, lectures, tours and all kinds of varied programming. It was under the EIF’s auspices that I attended the two performances I talked about on Sunday.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs concurrently and includes thousands of events: searching their website for everything returned 2,851 events! -- usually smaller, often weirder, sometimes really out there. Yesterday I saw four:

Godspell, in a 95-minute interval-free production by a very young and very talented troupe on a bare-bones set, sang to (I think) recorded backup. Somehow I had managed to never see Godspell (my friend, and best man, Sally’s favorite show), so this was the perfect opportunity, at £8.

Assassins: the Sondheim musical about people who have tried to kill POTUS, the President of the United States. This too I had never seen though I own the OCR and liked it well enough the two times I listened to it. Well, I LOVED this production by an enormously talented Princeton University drama group. Again, bare bones; this time, bare back-up: electric piano on stage; but terrifically sung and acted. I will be moving Assassins into my iTunes library when I get home.

Mr. Braithwaite Has a New Boy is a slight but very funny hour-long comedy about a retired Aussie who hires a rent boy, hires him again, and again, and then decides to adopt him. There are some wonderfully funny one-liners and ample amounts of one of my favorite off-Broadway experiences: full male nudity.

Monstrous Acts is a harrowing 70 minutes spent in the company of two inmates in a French prison in the fifteenth century. We learn early on from Sebastian why he’s locked up, but only in the last few minutes do we grasp the enormity of Gilles’s crime. Based on the story of the real-life Gilles de Laval, he is in jail for debauching, sometimes dismembering, and eventually killing over two hundred children, mostly boys. As I said, harrowing. And beautifully acted on the tiniest set I have ever seen in the hottest theatre in which I have ever sat. I said to a staff member on the way out: “excellent drama, and a free sauna to boot.” We were dripping. Literally.

I also spent time walking up and down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, which I found dotted with lots of curiosities and interesting sites but absolutely overwhelmed by shops and, of course, tourists. I had a lovely chat with a lovely Scottish traffic control cop and we laughed together at the behavior of these tourists. By 18:00 they are queuing up in the hundreds behind police barriers to get in to the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo -- which at that time is three hours away and for which they have a reserved seat! WTF? The LSTCC says he tells people to show up at twenty minutes to nine and take their seat, but nobody listens.

Finally, I ticked one last thing off my To Do list: I spent some time between shows in a music venue – a hollowed-out old church as a matter of fact (see pictures) – and heard three guys playing some wicked acoustic guitar (loudly amplified) and trumpet. They did a version of Louis Armstrong’s St. Louis Blues that blew the place apart.

I took the 09:15 train to Edinburgh and, as I said, got back to Glasgow after midnight. A long, exhausting, but wonderfully rewarding day. I really hope that some August there's a week in Edinburgh in my future.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain

Not so in Scotland. Here, it seems to rain country-wide. It’s rained every day I spent in Glasgow and yesterday it poured in Edinburgh. While getting ready to head there I opted not to carry my backpack, which means I left without an umbrella. So for the, what, hundredth time, I bought another umbrella when caught unprepared.

But it sure is green in Scotland!

Rain or no, it was a great day at the Edinburgh International Festival. I’ve wanted to come for years and yesterday convinced me that I need to come back, stay a week in Edinburgh itself and pack in the culture.

Today’s adventures actually started Saturday night. Let me begin with a story: I was the House Manager at the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts in 1984-85. It was the best job ever for, without it, I never would have met Ransom, who played there as a guest of the Richmond Symphony.

The ushers knew to call me over whenever there was a problem with a customer’s ticket. One evening our most experienced usher walked over, handed me two tickets and returned to his post. I looked at them and called the man away from his wife, so as not to embarrass him. “Sir,” said I, “these tickets are not for our theatre -- and I’m afraid they were for last night’s performance.” I offered to let him into our show for free, but he was too irritated and stormed away, his confused date struggling after him.

Though I was very kind to him, I thought to myself, “the wrong place and a day late; how dumb do you have to be?”

Well Saturday night I was looking at my email confirmation of Sunday’s two performances: Ballet Preljocaj at 7:30pm and Gulliver’s Travels at 8pm.

What? That can’t be right. The Swift is at 2:30pm, not 8. It says so right here in my calendar!

Well, yes, it does say that, but that be wrong! Somehow I had ticked the wrong box when I ordered these tickets online weeks ago and I had not noticed the error until Saturday night. To quote the Firesign Theatre: How Can You Be in Two Places at Once?

I decided to go to the matinee performance and see if I could exchange the ticket. I didn’t hold out much hope. Like all arts organizations, the festival makes it clear that all sales are final, no exchanges or cancelations. I figured, at worst, I’d buy another ticket, if they were not sold out. But I had forgotten something. I’m not in the USA; I’m in Scotland. The kind woman at the King’s Theatre box office was more than happy to help. Within two minutes she had exchanged my double-booked evening ticket for a ticket to the matinee performance. She even apologized to me that it wasn’t quite as good a seat as my original. Can you imagine? At a US box office I’m sure it would have been “Sorry, Charlie. Next!”

Was it all worth it? Definitely. This 90-minute take on Swift’s satire is weird and strange, mostly compelling and occasionally daffy. I don’t see enough experimental theatre – wait, was this experimental or am I just too traditional? – so I was very glad to see this. If you’d like another opinion, read the Guardian’s review here.

I then walked down into the town centre, skirting the base of the castle, through Princes Street Gardens, where I happened upon a free concert: six women singing a capella to a tiny crowd huddled under a small tent while hundreds of seats remained empty in the rain. (See picture below). Poor them; their dream of making a splash at the Edinburgh International Festival was met, but not in the way they hoped.

I headed to buy that umbrella. I took the few pictures below, but I was mainly stumbling around, not really knowing what I was looking at. I was reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter, a book I HIGHLY recommend, and came across this: 

I have loved making my way, imperfectly, around a foreign city on my own. I have loved walking endlessly and getting lost and arriving at the museum or restaurant or store I wanted to go to just as it was closing. Missing the point of my excursion has forced me, on so many occasions, to find the secondary smaller points: the old woman sweeping out her front yard and putting water out for her cats, the baker cleaning out his ovens for the afternoon, the two kids refilling their shoe shine box with polish and clean rags – all of these small moments found only by wandering down a side street behind whichever museum I have failed to get to during its operating hours, or on the one day of the year it is closed for some local holiday I’ve never heard of. I have loved being pummeled by the intricacies of a city. And also loved the feeling of conquering, in small ways, a city by myself…

I hear you sister. Yesterday I emerged from Edinburgh Waverly station into a city that was far larger than I had imagined and had no idea whatsoever which way to go. Google Maps had told me it was under a two-mile walk to the King’s Theatre but had not pointed out that it was ALL UPHILL. So I chickened out, and for the first time here, hired a cab. The £6 was well worth it and helped me orient myself; all the rest of the day I walked, and if I return tomorrow I will know exactly where I am when I get off the train.

So that leaves Ballet Preljocaj’s performance of And then one thousand years of peace. How was it? In a word, breathtaking! In another: brilliant! You want one more: thrilling! It was an interval-free 100 minutes of high-powered, very acrobatic dance, often amazingly synchronized, always wondrously staged to a score that ranged from the loudest imaginable drum-driven techno to a Beethoven sonata. It was an evening that vaulted instantly into the top five dance experiences of my life. Fabulous. For another, not quite so ravishing, opinion, read this.

A 21:40 train (9:40pm to you Yanks) back to Glasgow and in the hotel by 11:10, er, 23:10. And today, I’m planning nothing but a late afternoon visit to the modern art gallery. Skipped breakfast and probably won’t leave the room til lunchtime. This holiday-making is tough!

Real troopers, performing to a vastly smaller audience than expected.

The lobby of the lovely King's Theatre, where I saw Gulliver's Travels.

Looking up to the Royal Mile. Maybe next time.

The Scots love their Walter Scott!

And I love a city that puts up a statue to a dog. There was no plaque, but I found this.

Inverness

Yesterday was a long day; I spent seven hours on a train riding to Inverness and back. It was exactly what I wanted though and gave me a chance to relax, read and enjoy the beautiful countryside. And then Inverness was incredibly lovely. I don’t have time to write more; I’m dashing off to Edinburgh for a festival event, maybe two. Here are some pictures though.

The view from the train; is that heather?

I told you I can't resist a unicorn.

The town hall

What is this? Oh right, another cathedral!

The view from the restaurant balcony on which I had lunch.

The Free North Church, from the restaurant photo

Inverness Castle was built in 1835.

Why can't US trains have snack service like this?

If that’s a cathedral, Walter must be traveling.

It is. I am.

I’m into my second day of exploring Glasgow and that’s, duh, Glasgow Cathedral on the left. Not terribly attractive from the outside; the centuries of industrial grime and the hideous 21st century scaffolding don’t help; and it’s not a wonderfully proportioned church either. The inside is something else though! Not spacious and airy like Amiens, or massive and huge like St. John the Divine, or tall like Köln, but, rather, ancient like no other cathedral I’ve been in. Although Durham (1093) actually predates Glasgow by over a century, this one (1197) feels older. Looks it too.

I walked up the hill to the cathedral from my hotel, which is on the same block as Central Station; walked back too. (See picture below; hotel is lower left; cathedral upper right; click here for Glasgow map). I noticed during all that walking that Glasgow has a lot of buses. A LOT of buses! Almost everyone I saw was moving via foot power or bus power. There were tons of parking spaces on the streets, for there were few cars.

I also noticed that I can’t walk like I used to. I am way slower and I pay a much steeper price.

I was approached three times by Glaswegians soliciting me; one from the Scottish Red Cross, one from Greenpeace and a third enlisting folks for a toilet tissue trial. (I don’t make this stuff up!) All three were fun to talk to and sorry I couldn’t help them, me being a Yank and all. What is it that makes Scots want to approach me? Doesn’t happen in the States.

Today’s hike took me to the Glasgow Green, along the River Clyde to the Auditorium and then inland to the Kelvingrove Art Galley and Museum. After a couple hours touring this quirky and fascinating place my feet were screaming to ride one of those buses back down the hill. So I did. Had my first (and only) fish and chips and headed back to the hotel to write this all down.

Tonight? Live music at a nearby club I’m hoping.

I know it's too dark: the DAY was too, but I can't resist a unicorn.

St. Andrew's Church; only open 2.5 hours a week; couldn't get in.

Glasgow's Catholic Cathedral; small for a cathedral, but lovely.

Inside the cathedral. I guess if the sermon's bad, you can turn on Meet the Press.

There's a modern building next to the cathedral; I loved the contrast.

The Glasgow Auditorium -- NOT modeled after the Sydney Opera House as many think.

This photo does not do justice to this beautiful Glasgow University building.

 This shows how much it rained today. I had to make a detour whilst walking this path; the dogs are happy though.

 The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Wonderful on the inside too.

The main hall inside. Note the organist giving a recital.

Note the organist's feet -- and hot red socks!

Who knew this Dalí lived in Glasgow?

This is an orchestrion. I had read about them, but never seen one in the flesh. (Not counting Pat Metheny's)