Biscuit City

I know, I promised you part 3 of “The Wedding Singer” today which is about our trip last week to Vermont for a destination wedding. Instead there’s something I want to write about that’s incredibly self-serving of me to do so, or it would be if it didn’t involve over 100 talented people. And that’s the first concert of this season by the Manassas Chorale (full disclosure: my wife directs the group and I sing second tenor in it) on Friday, October 7 and Saturday, October 8 at 7:30 PM in Merchant Hall of the Hylton Performing Arts Center on the Prince William Campus of George Mason University. From all I’ve seen in rehearsals,  it should be an intense and special theater experience.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is a dramatic reading version of Civil War Voices, a new work with book by James Harris and arrangements of traditional American folk songs by the American composer, pianist, conductor, and workshop leader Mark Hayes.  Among other things, Mark writes music for the church that is sophisticated and light-years from being overly simplistic or “dumbed down.” The musical won six awards at the Midtown Theater Festival in New York City in June, 2011, including “Best Production of a Musical.”

The production uses the words and thoughts taken from letters and diaries of five characters embroiled in the conflict. Joe Harris was a cotton planter from Alabama with a conflicted conscience.  (The discovery of the existence of his Civil War diary inspired the play.) Elizabeth Keckley was born a slave, bought her freedom, and became Mary Todd Lincoln’s closest friend and personal assistant in the White House.  Theo and Harriet Perry were a young married couple from Texas, who were seperated by the war.  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a college professor from Maine, who enlisted to fight for the Union.

The play follows the lives of these five characters as the Civil War progresses.  Theo Perry’s wife gives birth to a son a few months after he leaves to fight in the war.  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain becomes a national war hero as a result of his actions at Gettysburg and accepts the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.  Elizabeth Keckley endures the indignity of slavery in early life, but eventually gains her freedom and moves to Washington, D.C.  There she becomes close friends with the Lincoln family.  Her joy at the news of the Confederate surrender turns to sorrow when President Lincoln is assassinated.   She eventually wrote a tell-all book about experiences in the White House called Behind the Scenes. The nation was not ready for such a book written by a black woman and she was scorned and ridiculed for it. She died alone and nearly destitute.

These characters are animated by the actors of the Gray Ghost Theater Company directed by Ken Elston; the music consists of solos and multipart arrangements sung by the over 100-voice award-winning Manassas Chorale directed by Becky Verner.

Even if you care nothing about the Civil War, you owe it to yourself to experience the thoughts and anguish of these five people, brought to life in a haunting, beautiful and powerful fashion.

Tickets for this concert are $18 for Orchestra and Parterre Boxes;
$15 for First Balcony; and $12 for Second Balcony.

They may be obtained by Phone:  888-945-2468 (daily 10:00 AM to 9:00 PM) (service charge added)
Online:  www.hyltoncenter.org (service charge added)
and in Person at the:

• Hylton Center Box Office (Wednesday through Saturday, 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM)
• Hylton Center Box Office on the night of the concert

GMU Students (with a valid student ID) and Children (12 and under) are free but must pick up a ticket at the Hylton Box Office.  If you are purchasing tickets ahead of time, you must inform the Hylton that you require one or more children’s tickets so that they can reserve those next to the seats that you purchase.

Friday we went back to the Church Street Marketplace to look at some shops we didn’t have time for the day before.  We started to park in a parking garage that charged outrageous prices, but the sign said no parking on the roof and there were the only spaces.  We exited without paying since there were no spaces available to us.  Becky suggested parking at a meter and did one of her phenomenal parallel jobs, ending up with the Fusion parallel to the curb and four inches away from it. I fed the meter, which ran $1.00 an hour, the bargain of the century except for the free space the evening before.

One of the stores we went into was Ten Thousand Villages, which features the work of craftspeople from all over the world. I saw a canvas messenger bag that looked like something left over from the days of Empire in India. Sure enough, it was from India and about half-price. The nice young lady working in the store said it was one of a kind, a sample made for use in the store which was not picked up for general sales. If you see me with it, it is not a purse.  You can call it a “man bag” or a “messenger bag.” (I suppose you could call it whatever you want. It’s up to you.)

We had lunch at the Vermont Pub and Brewery at Bank and St. Paul Streets. It was quite good, and recommended to us by Debbie Cobb of the VBMB.

Then we did something I wish we hadn’t.  We went down to the waterfront where we paid a flat $8 to park in a parks and rec lot (should have used the meters) and went to the ECHO Aquarium on the waterfront.  Even with a couple of discounts it was $9 apiece. I have had better aquariums in my house.  The “aquarium” was suitable for children about eight years old.  Our advice is, if you are a child or have a child with you, go.  Otherwise avoid it like the plague.  (There was one mildly amusing section, again for kids, called “Grossology” which examined such phenomena as urine, mucus in your nose, throwing up, and flatulence, among others.  Very amusing if you are ten years old.  Maybe I am, mentally.)

The battery in Becky’s camera died again so we went back to Radio Shack to see about a new one.  The young woman there gave us one from a new camera. We think the rechargeable did not have much of a life (like me) because it had not been conditioned (discharged and charged five or six times) and the temperatures were in the 50’s, which will put a drain on batteries.

We went back to the room to rest and decided to go to Leunig’s Bistro and Cafe on College Street. We had been by it several times and were attracted by the traditional French look of the place. Plus, it had good reviews in our Vermont book (which also recommended the ECHO aquarium).

We drove around and around trying to get to a parking lot and ended up in a municipal lot with meters. I thought I would have to feed them (they were a bargain at 25 cents for 35 minutes) but the bartender in the restaurant said there was no charge after 6, which it was about then. We had a half hour wait for a table, so we went down to the waterfront (five blocks downhill going and guess what coming back) where Becky got some nice shots of the sunset.

Our meal at Leunig’s was phenomenal.  Wonderfully French, with attentive service.  We got desserts to go.

Afterward, we went to a big two-story Barnes and Noble where I had some coffee and bought a bargain book on home repair.

And so to the hotel, and to bed.

Tomorrow: The Wedding Singer, Part 3: Goin’ to the Mountain to Watch Someone Get Married, or, Gone with the Wind

At least that’s what they say and they’re always right.  I never knew who they were, but they seemed to have an anonymous authority that not even my teachers had when I was growing up and believe me, they had a lot of power. One word about the slightest deviance from the straight and narrow on my part and I was in trouble both in school and at home. Maybe that’s why I became a teacher: I wanted some of that power they wielded over the poor unfortunate charges in their care.  Then I became a teacher and I learned not so much, as the kids say. Actually I never had a mean-spirited or unkind teacher until I had a certain lady for chorus in eighth grade who was the teacher from the Bad Place.  I won’t go into what she said and did.  It still makes me shiver.  But with my other teachers, just the knowledge that they could ruin our lives was enough to keep us in line.  But I digress.

I was thinking about things running in threes the other day, and they seem to do so. Take our recent spate of disasters: earthquake, hurricane and flood. Coincidence that we had three natural disasters and no more?  I think not, Smilin’ Jack. Or that people we know in the church and community seem to die in threes. And then there are airplane crashes.  We flew to Charleston, S.C. the same week that the Concorde crashed in Paris and a smaller plane went down.  They delayed our flight for mechanical troubles and I was worried, but we got to Charleston and came back without mishap. It wasn’t our time.

I wrote about appliances and house systems and cars communicating with each other and failing one after the other.  Probably just coincidence again, but as I wrote yesterday, our dryer stopped drying and then my dad’s Impala that I drive started making a loud and annoying clicking sound from the dashboard, even after the engine was turned off (the mechanic said it was the “blend door actuator motor” or something like that). Both were quickly fixed but I waited for the other shoe to drop.  Sure enough it came last night when I wanted to finish a blog that I had started about noon.  My computer was comatose and couldn’t be roused so I had a forced shutdown and it shut down all right. It restored itself to its noon time state and the work on the day’s blog was lost.  I didn’t want to redo it since it had some detail in it so I did a simpler one about my dryer breaking. Then my color printer was affected by the computer’s misbehavior and kept insisting it was out of ink after I had installed four new cartridges.  This is the printer I want to throw out of the second story window every so often because it misbehaves like this every so often. Then my good old reliable laser printer kept trying to come on and making horrible groaning sounds that caused the lights to dim. I was able to set things right with my computer, but I hope I won’t have to deal with any group of three disasters again any time soon.

 Last week I was drying a load of laundry and went off and left the dryer running.  This is not a good idea for a couple of reasons: the less serious one  is that if you leave the clothes in the dryer after it is done, the clothes wrinkle.  Then you have to iron them. That’s no big deal for me because I love to iron but most clothes these days don’t need ironing if you get them out of the dryer shortly after it does go off.  In fact, I love to iron clothes so much and rarely have the chance to do so you can bring your wrinkled clothes to me and I will iron them and talk to you at the same time!  Amazing, I know.

The more serious reason that I should not leave the dryer running is that it can catch fire and burn the house down. This I would not enjoy. We know someone who had their house burn down from a dryer fire, and we ourselves had the lint in a poorly designed lint filter catch fire.  Fortunately all it did was burn up the wiring inside the dryer which meant we had to get a new one which was OK because we hated the old dryer about as much as I hate my color printer which is clicking and groaning and burping right now and telling me it needs more expensive color cartridges when I just replaced them. Excuse me while I throw my color printer out of a second story window.

All done. I feel better now. Anyhow, I came back to my running dryer after about three hours of supporting the local economy and found that it had not burned anything, including itself, up and that it was still running after three hours.  That was because the clothes were not dry. The dry clothes fairies that live inside the dryer had noticed that the clothes were not yet dry and had not used their magic dry clothes fairy powers to shut the dryer off and wrinkle the clothes.  The clothes were wet because the dryer wasn’t heating up. So it wasn’t a dryer. It was a spinner and a darned fine one at that. I guess it would have eventually dried the clothes by spinning them but that would have taken billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity and ruined our planet forever. And I would have been responsible.  Glad I didn’t hit that last bookstore. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Readers of a certain age may remember a song called “Sixteen Tons” which went to number one on the Billboard charts in 1955 in a version by Tennessee Ernie Ford (readers of a certain age may remember him). I always thought the song was written by Merle Travis (inventor of “Travis picking” on the guitar, a finger style way of playing) who recorded and released the song in 1947, but George S. Davis, a folk singer and songwriter who had been a Kentucky coal miner, claimed on a 1966 recording for Folkways Records to have written the song as “Nine-to-ten tons” in the 1930s.

I was thinking of this song when, as part of my insulating the attic project (see yesterday’s blog, “Hot, Hot, Hot”), I decided to take down all but last seven years of tax return records. We moved into the house in 1988 and I think the earliest records date to 1981.  There might be earlier ones buried beneath the others. I found it interesting that the assorted documentation associated with a tax return first fit into a shoe box, then a Girl Scout cookie box, and then a letter-sized storage box.  That’s what I used last year, and I think I’m going to have to go to a legal-sized storage box this year.

Of course, I just can’t put tax records out with the other recycling: they need to be shredded or otherwise properly disposed of.  We have a pretty good crosscut shredder, but it is an arduous process to shred thousands of checks (they used to be sent back with your monthly bank statement). My father (who I wrote about last week in Bring Him Home”) is staying with us in between a stay in Manassas Rehab Center after an illness which put him in the hospital and a place in about a month at Caton Merchant House assisted living.  He wanted something useful to do so he offered to shred the contents of as many boxes as he could until he moved to CMH. I took him up on his offer and he’s done about three boxes in two days.

I investigated what it would cost to have the documents shredded by a company and the answer was about a dollar a pound. I weighed all the boxes and they came to 138 pounds (or .069 tons).  I told my father I would pay him a dollar a pound to shred and he said he wanted time and a half for overtime. We are now conducting contract negotiations.I’ll let you know how it turns out.