Give Our Regards to Broadway

Our New York Marathon

Day 3

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

We have been on Broadway every day since we got here, and we know we will be back again.

We begin with a picture from Times Square at night, when it sparkles with millions upon millions of LED lights promoting an endless array of products in constantly changing displays that don't merely compete for attention—they demand it. We joined the light-watching crowd in Times Square last night, after we saw "Sister Act," our first, and surely not our only, Broadway show of this trip. We absolutely loved everything about the show—wonderful music, an outstanding cast, and a good plot with an uplifting message. It will be hard to top this one.

Today's Broadway attraction was a two hour walking tour led by Joyce Gold, a New York University History Instructor. We knew she would bring her 25 years of teaching experience to our walk the minute she pulled a stack of index cards four inches thick out of her tote bag. What a wonderful romp up and down the streets of Broadway, punctuated by Joyce's analysis of the history of the area as viewed through the lyrics of popular show tunes and the subject matter of award-winning musicals. Who but an enthusiastic academic would point out the symbolic importance of opening a Children's Theatre in what used to be a sleazy adult entertainment district—the strongest possible message that Broadway was a family venue now (a message families can't miss these days, with a three story M&Ms store on Times Square across the street from the huge Hershey's store, we might add). We also picked up some surprising popular culture tidbits, like the fact that the Seminole Indians of Florida now own the entire Hard Rock Café chain, and my favorite show, "The Good Wife," is filmed in Brooklyn. We just eat this stuff up, but we recognize we are out of the mainstream, because there were only seven people on the tour, and we were the only tourists—the others were all native New Yorker life-long learners.

Along our tour route we walked through the Café Edison in the Edison Hotel, a pre-show dining institution for Jewish folk through the ages. It clearly hasn't had a face lift or a menu change (other than price increases) since the 1950s. We only recognized one kind of soup--matzo ball--and chopped liver was presented in every conceivable format from salad to sandwich to entree. The white-haired ladies on our tour recommended it highly, so we stopped in for lunch after the tour. With 25,000 restaurants in Manhattan, it is a mystery how a place like this thrives seemingly without even trying. The power of location plus inertia, perhaps?

Take a look at Times Square, the heart of Broadway, day and night. Isn't it grand?

After lunch we headed to the American Folk Art Museum, which is celebrating the Year of the Quilt with a series of quilt exhibits. We were disappointed in the exhibit on display now. Although it had some old quilts with fine workmanship, most of the quilts were unremarkable, and there was only one contemporary quilt that we would consider an art quilt. The curation of the show was meager, we didn't even leave with any memorable stories behind the quilts we saw. We were glad that we got in free, because our Telfair Museum membership shares reciprocal visitation privileges with the Folk Art Museum. This is a picture of our favorite quilt from the show.

Tomorrow, we will be back to Broadway. We are eager to see another show.

Surprising New York Lighthouses

Our New York Marathon

Day 2

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Today dawned sunny and hot—perfect for a three hour Circle Line Cruise circumnavigating Manhattan Island.

An avid lighthouse lover, I saw four of them along our route. Although our guide John was exceptional, he only told us the story of the city's most famous light, the Little Red Lighthouse that stands forlornly dwarfed at the foot of the George Washington Bridge. He failed to point out the lighthouse history of New York's most famous landmark, and he overlooked an intriguing lighthouse high atop a building in the Bronx. Thanks to the Internet, I have the rest of the story.

Let's start with Lady Liberty, whom we last passed aboard Starsong on a windy choppy overcast day almost exactly six years ago (June 2, 2005). The words from the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the statue's base, "send these, your homeless tempest-tossed to me," had special significance for us that day. But, I digress. Let's go to the next line of the poem—"I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

The Statue of Liberty's lamp has always held symbolic meaning as a beacon of hope and liberty. It was once, for a short time early in its life, a beacon with a practical purpose as well. The torch was lit to guide ships into New York's inner harbor from 1886 until 1902. Befitting its majesty, it was the first lighthouse in the country to use electricity, and the arc lamps in the 305 foot tall torch could be seen up to 24 miles away. It was a very expensive proposition, though, which is why the lighthouse was decommissioned by the Coast Guard as an aid to navigation in 1902.

Our next light was the Roosevelt Island Light, a beautiful fifty foot tall octagonal gothic spire designed by the famous architect James Renwick and built in 1872. Although it stands at the island's shore on the East River, it was commissioned by the city to light the island's insane asylum, rather than to guide wary sailors on their way. Inmates from the nearby penitentiary hauled the rocks and built the tower.

The most intriguing lighthouse was a standout in the Brooklyn skyline, sitting regally atop a big brick building in a cluster of brick factories and warehouses. A little research revealed that this little light on a pedestal shaped like a big book is the trademark of the H.W. Wilson Publishing Company, and it has been on the roof of the company's headquarters since 1929. H. W. Wilson is the publisher of numerous bibliographies and reference books—most famously The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. The lighthouse atop the book symbolizes the company's mission: "To give guidance to those seeking their way through the maze of books and periodicals, without which they would be lost."

The Little Red Lighthouse, more formally known as Jeffrey's Hook Light, was immortalized in the book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge, written by Hildegard H. Swift and illustrated by Lynd Ward. Built in 1921, the light was no longer needed after the George Washington Bridge was constructed in the 1930s, and its much higher bright lights could be seen by river traffic from much further away.

Hildegard Swift's book, published in 1942, captured the tension of this time, telling the story of a very foggy night when the lights of the bridge high above the water could not be seen by boats below, and a big tugboat crashed against the rocky shore. The little red lighthouse was lit to save other boats from the same sorry fate (a plot line mixing the best of David and Goliath and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Alas, in the real world, the light was decommissioned in 1947 and slated to be sold for scrap. Schoolchildren across the country were heartbroken, and their letters, numbering in the thousands, saved the light.

One more sight from the boat—because we can't resist collecting examples of the world's biggest, smallest and best. Here is a picture of the Colgate Clock, which at fifty feet in diameter is reputed to be the world's largest clock. The minute hand advances three feet every minute.

A Memorial Day to Remember

Our New York Marathon—Day 1

Monday, May 30, 2011

We were up at 4:15 a.m. to catch our plane to La Guardia, off the ground not long after 7 a.m., and in a cab weaving through traffic at supersonic speed by 10. So began our latest adventure, wherein we will care for Willis—a very fat and well-coddled cat—at his home in a Lower East Side third floor walk-up apartment.

It is only our first day here, and we vowed to take it easy, since we will have over two weeks to play and explore, but Manhattan doesn't take it easy, and we couldn't help going with the flow. So, here's what we did today:

· met Lois and her daughter, and went over their detailed instructions for keeping Willis in the pampered manner to which he is accustomed. Also got the lay of the apartment (no air conditioning, a couple fans), and the neighborhood. By the time we were done, we had a huge list of restaurants and ice cream shops within a few blocks walking distance and concluded that if we aren't careful we could be as fat as Willis by the time we leave.
· walked up Second Street to peruse dining and great grocery shopping options—Trader Joe's and a huge Whole Foods store, where, too hot for a picnic in the park, we bought sushi, a sandwich, a cupcake and some designer juice drinks to eat in their café in front of a big window overlooking Union Square.

· spent a long time talking to the nice lady in the bullet proof booth at the metro station, figuring how the subway worked and our best deal option for riding--a seven day metro card.

· found the New York Welcome Center—the quietest spot in the city, with very few tourists and only a couple staff members. The Savannah welcome center is three times as busy on a slow day. Nonetheless, we purchased a passport book to save us 40% on admission to attractions we plan to visit, and we got a coupon sheet for reduced price tickets for a bunch of Broadway shows.

· called American Express to convince them that we really were here and would like them to stop declining our attempts to purchase stuff.

· bought tickets to the Broadway show Sister Act for tomorrow—12th row center 30% off.

· visited Times Square and the Broadway Welcome Center, where we wrote a wish on a piece of confetti that will be released when the ball drops on New Year's 2012.
· ate dinner at one of our little neighborhood restaurants, Frank's, where they only take cash, and the kitchen is a tiny open spot behind the bar. Four cooks and a dish washer dance around each other making dinner in a floor space about four feet wide and ten feet long. The kitchen lighting is very dim, except for the occasional flaring of food being flambéed in the pan.

Is it any wonder that by the time we got home after dinner, we could hardly keep our eyes open any longer. If there was any noise from traffic or patrons of the bar that occupies the lower level of our building, we were blissfully unaware in our exhausted state.

Grey Skies Can’t Dampen Family Fun

March 27-30, 2011

Tybee Island

After a month-long draught and a couple weeks of temperatures hovering in the 70s and 80s, a storm front has pulled in and decided to stay awhile—just in time for our family vacation at a Tybee Beach house.

On Sunday, Dick and I got an early start at the house, bringing over beach toys, stocking the cupboards and refrigerator with a starter food supply, and procuring a beach wheelchair for Meredith, who broke her tibia and fibula just last week. We were so warm that we changed into shorts and tee shirts before test-driving our wheelchair options on the beach.

An hour before the Glover clan from Cincinnati was due to arrive, a ferocious storm blew in, with 40 mph winds propelling marble-sized hail like bullets. The air temperature plummeted twenty degrees, and all the crushed ice hail in the dipping pool spa cooled the water by ten degrees. Dick and I had two buckets in our room catching leaks from the roof.

It is Wednesday now, and we have not seen the sun yet.

But, that has not stopped us from having lots of fun.

Monday we took a trolley tour of Savannah, and then stopped for ice cream at Leopold's, Savannah's favorite ice cream parlor since 1919. The Cincinnati contingent agreed it was good, but not quite as good as Graeters, a Cincinnati institution since 1870.

Then we visited our house, where Dick had set out a crab trap in our lagoon before we left for Tybee. When he pulled in the trap, he had caught a blue crab, which we all examined, then let go.

The twins have gone swimming in our little spa pool twice, while the rest of us have lounged around the porch bundled up in our sweaters and jeans. We have had lots of leisure time to read, watch big screen television and play dominoes together.

Yesterday, we had an afternoon without rain, so we all headed to the beach, pushing Meredith in her beach wheelchair, provided compliments of the Tybee Volunteer Fire Department. Dick and the twins flew a kite. Matt and Harrison played a little bocce ball. Bridget and Natalie and Molly built a sand village surrounded by a big moat, then Matt helped to build Mount Vesuvius towering over the town. (Natalie has been studying Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, and provided us with the pertinent details.)

Last night, Dick and I introduced everyone to Low Country Boil. Our extremely well-provisioned beach house has a Low Country Boil cooker on the front porch—a propane burner topped by a huge pot with a steamer basket inside-–and the guest book includes a recipe for this regional delicacy. Our answer to the New England clam bake, Low Country Boil is made by boiling up water with a whole lot of Old Bay Seasoning, then tossing in red skin potatoes, followed 15 minutes later by corn and kielbasa sausage, followed about 7 minutes later by shrimp. Traditionally, the boil is served by pulling out the basket and dumping it on a newspaper-covered table. We covered the table with newspaper, but used a big platter to serve it, out of respect for our $500 damage deposit.

After dinner we all walked into town for ice cream at Tybee's best purveyor—a little store offering home-made gelato. The verdict—better than Leopold's but still not as good as Graeters. A spitting mist of rain began as we were finishing up our ice cream and walking home.

Today, the rain continues with a vengeance. Looks like a great day to head to the movies . . .

A Day at the Beach--Sort Of

March 14, 2011
Tybee Island

We are on a little vacation just 26 miles from home. Dick bought a $25 raffle ticket from a Kiwanis buddy, over my objection at the outrageous cost, and, to his relief, he won us two nights at the Savannah Beach Inn on Tybee Island, validating the wisdom of his decision to purchase the ticket and invalidating my cheapskate objection.

Furnished in Victorian splendor, our Bed and Breakfast Inn is the centerpiece of Officers Row—a street of gracious homes built around the turn of the 20th century for high ranking Army officers serving at Fort Screven. The post was built for coastal defense, and occupied the north end of the island for half a century or so, although its big guns never fired a shot upon an enemy. It was active from the Spanish American War through the Second World War, when it was the Army’s only school for deep sea diving soldiers. George Marshall was a colonel in command here—maybe he even lived in this house.

Right now we are sitting in the kitchen, catching up on our e-mail while enjoying the cookies and milk our innkeeper provides for us every evening.


We have had a very full, but quite relaxing (for us) day, beginning with a breakfast of Bananas Foster French Toast at the Inn, which provided us with plenty of calories to fuel our bike riding adventures all over the island. In our quest for geocaches, we visited the island’s only cemetery, a very tiny plot originally created to provide a place of eternal rest for victims of shipwrecks and other drowning catastrophes. Modern analysis indicates there are no more than about 30 people buried there, including three beneath a gravestone that simply states “washed ashore.”

We rode to the beach, which was full of revelers celebrating St. Patrick’s Day week with temperatures well into the 70s. The bars have green beer and green margaritas, and the ice cream shops have renamed their mint chocolate chip ice cream to make it sound Irish.

We snagged a cache at the end of the crowded Tybee fishing pier, which has signs prohibiting shark fishing--a bit of a scary thought considering all the people in the water below who would prefer not to be swimming with sharks. While searching for another cache beneath a modest little fishing pier stretching into the Back River we saw some fishermen land a big ray.


Then we were off to the Crab Shack, “where the elite meet to eat in their bare feet,” to see if they still were harboring a hundred alligators in a big pen to amuse people who had to wait hours to get a table for dinner. Those little gators were an unforgettable sight the last time we were there, five years ago, and they remain so today. We can’t wait to share the view with our grandkids when they visit in a couple weeks.
We discovered another unique Tybee spot on our way back to the Inn—Ralph Douglas Jones Fish Art. Jones displays his whimsical and colorful fish sculptures made of found objects in the front yard of his shop, and a massive metal mermaid towers over the front door . It is impossible (at least for us) to pass it by without stopping to gawk--and giggle. At the entry gate there is a bucket with a sign requesting $1 for just stopping to look—we paid and considered it a bargain.
Sixteen miles and six hours after we left this morning, we returned, just in time for the Inn’s afternoon wine and cheese happy hour. We took our drinks and snacks out to the front porch where the sea breezes cooled us and kept the no-see-ums at bay. We agreed that we really need to vacation here more often.

Horsing Around in Aiken

Aiken, South Carolina

January 7-9, 2011
Aiken, South Carolina is about three hours northwest of Savannah, and we had never considered it worth a visit until we heard that Ysaye Barnwell would be conducting an all day vocal workshop there. Dr. Barnwell is a talented composer, musician, and long-time member of the highly acclaimed a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. I couldn't resist the opportunity to spend the day singing under her direction. Dick wasn't so wild about spending a whole day singing, but a little internet research convinced him he could keep himself occupied around town while I was singing. We decided to make a long weekend of it.

We drove the back roads to Aiken, but found very little along the way that tempted us to stop and explore. The poor rural landscapes and small town main streets with lots of vacant store fronts were uninspiring, if not downright depressing. After hours of somewhat dismal driving, Aiken spread before us as a welcome oasis.

The town's most unique feature is its parkways—streets built with very wide park-like medians running down their centers. Over 175 of Aiken's streets are parkways--totaling about fifteen miles. The entire town is an arboretum, and somewhere (we never found the spot) a map exists that you can use to locate all the different varieties of trees throughout town.

While I was attending my workshop, Dick took the once weekly two hour trolley tour around town, and discovered a lot of other unique and interesting things about Aiken.

Around the turn of the last century it was the winter playground of the wealthy horsey set. Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson were frequent visitors to Rye Patch, where their friends Edmund and Dorothy Rogers build an addition to their house and bricked up arches in their brick perimeter wall to assure the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's comfort and privacy.

The train almost always had an unscheduled stop here when Franklin Delano Roosevelt rode in his private car to his therapy sessions in Warm Springs, Georgia. It is rumored that he slipped from his rail car into the back door of the Willcox Hotel for "private meetings" with Lucy Mercer Rutherford, Eleanor's social secretary, who maintained a winter home in Aiken.

The Willcox also has hosted Astors, Vanderbilts, Mellons, Winston Churchill, and us. We enjoyed Sunday Brunch in the somewhat shabbily elegant dining room of the hotel (overlooking a leaf-strewn terrace with pots of dead plants beside the rail road tracks where we imagine Roosevelt's train sat idling while he was otherwise occupied). While lounging in the lobby, paneled in beautiful curly pine (a wood that cannot be replaced because the tree is extinct), we overheard a woman swathed in a generous full-length fur talking on her cell phone, assuring a friend that she had procured their table at "The Willy." The tradition continues. . . .

As does Aiken's appeal to elite equestrians. Home to the oldest Polo Club in the country, Aiken boasts over fifty polo fields in and around town. The two top-ranked polo players in the world live here.

Aiken's 2100 acre Hitchcock Park--one of the largest urban parks in the country--only allows pedestrians, horses and horse-drawn carriages on its grounds. The 65 miles of paths through the park are a special mixture of sand and clay for ultimate horse hoof comfort. Around the perimeter of town, where the Sultan of Brunei and other wealthy polo aficionados, fox hunters and thoroughbred trainers have their luxurious spreads, the roads are also sandy dirt for the benefit of strolling horses.

We were enchanted by Aiken, but, frankly, with gray skies and temperatures in the high forties it was just too darn cold to be our winter playground. We'll be back in polo season.

As for the reason we were in Aiken in the first place, the workshop, Building a Vocal Community, was a tremendous exploration of music as metaphor, tracing African American history through rhythms, words and harmonies, while revealing higher meanings and the power of coalition as our eighty voices joined to build music together.

The Palmetto Phoenix--Old Sheldon Church

November 27, 2010

Sheldon, South Carolina

We skipped the service at our own church this morning, and visited the Old Sheldon Church near Beaufort, South Carolina instead. Built in the mid-1700s, it was burned by British troops during the Revolutionary War. It was rebuilt in 1826, only to be destroyed again during the Civil War. Depending on who is telling the story, either General Sherman burned it during his March to the Sea, or locals looted it in a desperate effort to get the materials they needed to rebuild their homes after Sherman's army destroyed them.

Either way, only the skeleton of what was once Prince William Parish Church remains, and from its bones we can imagine its past grandeur. It is still hauntingly beautiful—an open cathedral with soaring arches framing views of ancient live oaks and a row of stately brick pillars no longer supporting anything but the sky.

Many photographers find inspiration here. Other visitors find deep spiritual messages--endurance beyond hardship, inner beauty that man cannot destroy, a phoenix rising from the ashes, or god's eternal presence despite man's efforts to deny it a place.

Dick says a good picture tells a story. This church has so many stories to tell that a few hours there hardly turns a page. We will be back.