Grab bag: Not delicious

Random 10: Week Before Christmas Edition

As one of my friends observed on Facebook recently, I haven’t posted anything in quite a while; either my life is too boring or insanely busy. I am trying to work on driving down the “too busy” factor as we get into the holidays, but so far about the only thing I can manage is to sneak in Christmas carols and music at every opportunity. Hence this random 10, generated by shuffling the Holiday genre on my iPhone (a relatively short list this week, hence the repetition). What’s your holiday music playlist look like?

  1. Boston Camerata, “The Heavenly Courtier” (An American Christmas)
  2. Julie Andrews, “Angels from the Realms” (Christmas with Julie Andrews and André Previn)
  3. The Beatles, “1967” (Fan Club Christmas Records)
  4. Boston Camerata, “Pretty Home” (An American Christmas)
  5. Maddy Prior with the Carnival Band, “In Dulci Jubilo” (A Tapestry of Carols)
  6. Theatre of Voices, dir. Paul Hillier, “Susser die Glocken” (Carols from the Old and New Worlds)
  7. Tewkesbury Abbey Choir, dir. Andrew Sackett, “The Truth from Above” (Christmas Carols from Tewkesbury Abbey)
  8. The Beatles, “1963” (Fan Club Christmas Records)
  9. Elvis Presley, “Santa Claus is Back in Town” (The King of Rock’n’Roll: The Complete 1950s Recordings)
  10. Elvis Presley, “Santa Bring My Baby Back (To Me)” (The King of Rock’n’Roll: The Complete 1950s Recordings)

Star time with the Pops

We had an unusual Holiday Pops concert last night. It wasn’t the normal Monday night audience by any stretch of the imagination–unless your “normal Monday night audience” includes an active and a retired US Senator, the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and more than your average number of glitterati.

Last night friends of Senator John Kerry “bought the house,” and the program was a mix of a traditional Pops Christmas program, including “Sleigh Ride,” “White Christmas,” singalongs, and the TFC’s famous “Twelve Days of Christmas”; patriotic program (“God Bless America,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever”); and encomium to the senator on the occasion of his 25th year in office. And the tributes came from a bunch of different directions: documentary filmmaker Ken Burns spoke and presented a short film about Kerry’s career that came off like a campaign puff piece. James Taylor sang three songs and expressed his congratulations to the Senator. Governor Deval Patrick gamely read “The Night Before Christmas” while tossing out his best wishes. Senator Kerry’s Swift boat crew came and his second in command offered a salute that left the senator choked up. Former Senator Max Cleland (who had been shamefully swift-boated himself) did not speak, but got about as much applause as Kerry did. All the time the Tanglewood Festival Chorus was at the back of the stage, watching or singing.

And then there were the two musical highlights. Senator Kerry conducted the “Stars and Stripes Forever” with a surprisingly good sense of rhythm, though he occasionally gave his downbeat as an up-beat, but with an endearing amount of mugging self-mockery that left one in mind of an amiable crane; his face as the chorus entered was beaming.

And Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow, better known as Peter and Paul of Peter, Paul and Mary, gave a little lesson in folk singing, discussing the past and their connection with the Senator. They performed “A Soalin'” as a duo, then began “Light One Candle,” which the TFC has been singing this season. At the chorus they began to wave to the audience to sing along, so a few of us joined quietly; when they heard us, Paul waved us to sing louder. So we sang backup to two of the most significant living folksingers on that tune, and then on “Blowin’ In the Wind.” All my coffeehouse dreams of youth realized.

One of these days, I’m going to have to put my performance resumé together. It would have to include: “Sang with Renée Fleming, Dave Brubeck, and Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow” and “Sang in ensembles conducted by Robert Shaw, James Levine, Seiji Ozawa, and John Kerry.”

Grab bag: Change your passwords.

Grab bag: On- and offline protest edition

Grab bag: “Thought Leadership” edition

Grab bag: Errors and Jimbo

Back in Newport News

On Sunday I had to make my way back down to Virginia for a family emergency. While the cause was not pleasant, it was nice to be back in the town of my birth, for the first time in about ten years.

In the summer of 2000 my parents sold our family home and relocated to the family farm near Asheville, North Carolina. And that, I thought, was that, as far as visiting home. While I had friends in town, somehow I just couldn’t manage to make the trip from Boston, then later Seattle. So much of the town had changed since I grew up; it didn’t feel like I had a reason to come back.

But on Sunday, as I drove down from Dulles, around Richmond and into the hospital at Williamsburg, I started being aware of uncanny memories in my muscles. I knew where that on-ramp to 295 was; I knew how long I had before getting off on 64. After visiting in the hospital, I knew how to make my way down 199 into the center of Colonial Williamsburg and to drive around Merchant’s Square. I remembered the twists and turns to get back out of town on Rt. 60 (okay, my sister had to help a little with that one), and all the bits and pieces of the drive back into Newport News from there. And I remembered how to turn just there, off Denbigh Boulevard and up Old Courthouse Way, and take the back roads into the old neighborhood. As I turned onto Nicewood Drive it was a weird feeling, as though my parents would be there in the old house waiting with dinner made.

Muscle memory gave way to emotional memory, and I was riding my bike to the comic store, getting on the bus to go to school, washing the family cars in the driveway. Even the sight of someone else’s stuff through the big picture windows in the living room of the house didn’t break the spell.

But it was overlaid with different perspectives. I was conscious, really conscious, of a fact that had never seemed important when I was growing up: how close I was to the wetlands. Newport News is on a peninsula between the James and York Rivers, and at the edges is all estuary and wetlands. And somehow, growing up, my mental axes were aligned to the roads that led out of town; I never understood how close I was to those wet edges. Turns out, it’s darned close.

I drove to the family friends who were putting up my parents and sister, and when we got the call that other family friends were ready for me to come, drove down to Beechmont and after catching up went to bed.

And in the morning, I opened the curtains in the guest bedroom and saw the picture above. And the trees and red leaves and reeds and the creek and all, and I suddenly missed the place I was born.

UVa’s second Jewish professor and the “Virginia Yell Song”

Today’s Virginia Glee Club history update is about one of the classic University of Virginia football songs, and the man who wrote it–the University’s second Jewish professor.

Linwood Lehman wasn’t a Glee Club member–he was an undergraduate during a period where the Glee Club was mostly dormant, graduating in 1915 (the club had just revived that year after several less fruitful seasons). But he was a triple Hoo, taking a bachelors, masters, and doctorate at the University, and then going on to teach Latin there until his untimely death in 1953.

What is perhaps more surprising is that when he became a professor in 1920, he was only the University’s second Jewish professor. It turns out that Virginia, despite Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom, was not particularly welcoming for Jews. The University’s first Jewish professor, J.J. Sylvester, was hired in 1841 but lasted less than a full term; the faculty failed to discipline a rowdy student who challenged him, and he was subsequently attacked by the student’s supporters. At the time of his hiring, the Richmond-based Presbyterian newspaper The Watchman of the South protested, claiming he had been hired over 40 other qualified candidates and stating “We have often said that as infidelity became ashamed of its own colors, it would seek to form alliances with Papism, Unitarianism, Judaism, and other errors subversive of Christianity.”

By the time Lehman came along, things had gotten a bit better. He stayed as a professor for 33 years, and had a significant impact, teaching Glee Club member and future Music Department head Ernest Mead among others. Mead remembered him as “somewhat offbeat with chic tastes, great humor and fine sensibilities.”

Lehman’s humor is present in the “Virginia Yell Song,” written when he was an undergraduate. The only UVa football song with a parenthetical interjection, it sounds in places like a conversation between slightly jaded onlookers who will only cheer a winning team:

Down the field our team is dashing–fight, Virginia, fight!
Carolina’ll get a smashing right
We are out for blood today so yell, boys, yell!
(–Will we get it? –I should say so!) Yell like hell!

But the overall song, with its “Let’s give a yell, boys, and we’ll yell Wa-hoo-wah/and raise our voices loud and roar,” has proved a worthy addition to the UVa football song repertoire. It was recorded on the Glee Club’s first album in 1951, and has made an appearance on the most recent one as well.

Grab bag: pretty good for government work