What I Learned at My Reunion

I’m back from three days at my 50th high school reunion in Edina, Minnesota and it was amazingly fun and moving and left me very proud of my class—especially those who defied illness or injury to show up. Friday night was cocktails and catching up at the Westin Edina hotel, where, during a trivia game, we all showed an uncanny ability to remember the dumb lyrics to those silly rock 'n' roll records of the late fifties.

At first I walked into a room full of tall strangers silhouetted against the windows and recognized no one. (All the guys had white hair and almost none of the women did.) Then I was met with hugs and shouts, and people started to turn into their remembered selves. Someone quoted a friend who had just come from her fortieth reunion: “For the first fifteen minutes, I was depressed at seeing all these old people, and then for the next three days, I was 18 years old again.”

Saturday morning was a bus tour of Edina, which looks nothing at all like the village I remember, where we would play kick-the-can until after dark down by Minnehaha Creek while our parents, busy barbecuing in the backyard, had no idea where we were and what we were doing. Now it’s all very high-end malls and high-rise buildings. The bus took us into Minneapolis proper and we toured the amazing architecture of the Guthrie Theater. I realized that Minneapolis is a very culturally happening place.

At Saturday lunch I gathered with classmates who had also gone to Wooddale Grade School. As we chatted, I began to realize that the men in the group had somehow, over the years, become charming, witty, entertaining, introspective, intuitive, chivalrous and thoughtful. All weekend, to my astonishment, chairs were pulled out and doors were opened for the “weaker sex” and someone always offered to help me struggle into my winter coat. (We had snow and the weather was bitter. On Sunday I left before a storm dropped three more inches. This is Minnesota, folks. No wimpy winters!)

Later I remarked to my daughter that, on the whole, my male classmates were amazingly improved over the last fifty years, and she replied, “Of course they are! What’s worse than an 18-year-old boy?”

Saturday night was the big dinner and dance at the Interlachen Country Club. I got a chance to catch up with some friends who had stayed in touch, but found the noise level and crowding to be intimidating. I’m always a bit claustrophobic and it was such a big and animated group that the hubbub made it hard to carry on a conversation. But the next day at breakfast in the hotel, there was time for some good post-party gossip before heading for the airport.

I believe there were 330 in our original senior class. Now 39 are deceased (the photos above show the memorial photo exhibit from Saturday night.) How young we were in 1959!

When you’re 18 years old, anything seems possible. Maybe you’ll cure cancer or write a bestseller or become a star or make a million—if only you can get into the right college.

When you’re 68, you know how your life will turn out, and for so many, that fifty years after graduation brought loss and heartbreak, illness and disabilities, but almost every one of the 187 classmates who wrote their biographical page for our Reunion Book ended with the words “I have been truly blessed” or a similar sentiment.

When you’re 68 years old, you’ve gained a certain amount of wisdom just by traveling over the bumps in the road. Many of my classmates shared some in their reunion book pages. I wish I could compile “The Collected Wisdom of the Class of 1959” but instead, I’ll just quote three classmates—as it happens all three are women (and now crones, since we’re all over 60.)

One wrote: “A rich life is one made up of family, friends, faith and fun – the four F’s.”

Another quoted Addison’s definition of happiness: “Something to do…something to love…Something to hope for.”

And a third concluded her page saying, “It amazes me how level the playing field is now. The very fact that we have survived 50 years post-high school makes us equals.”

MY 50TH HIGH SCHOOL REUNION!

(The design above, for the reunion invitation, was created by classmate Cary Carson.)


Tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 9) I get on a plane to fly from Boston to Minneapolis to attend the 50-year reunion of my class of 1959 at Edina Morningside High School. This is scary and exciting, nerve-wracking and exhilarating. It’s an event that many of us have been planning for more than a year. I was privileged to be one of the editors collecting bios and photos from 187 of our nearly 300 classmates for the Reunion Book. (Forty classmates are deceased and 22 of them have memorial pages in the book.)

High school was definitely NOT the happiest time of my life. I longed to get away from Edina, Minnesota, where we all seemed so homogeneous and competitive. Immediately after graduation, I traveled with a group of students to Europe for most of the summer and fell in love with travel—even though it was the ultra-budget variety. (The first hotel in Germany was a barely converted stable that still smelled like horses.)

At the reunion, I hope I’ll recognize my fellow classmates. The super-conscientious organizers of the event have created name tags for us—presumably with our high school yearbook photos—for ease of identification, but of course I’m too vain to wear my glasses so I probably won’t be able to read them! And I’m notoriously bad with names—can hardly remember those of my own children.

But I know from collecting the photos and bios that many of us have not changed that much in looks, despite the half century that’s gone by. What surprised and delighted me was how we’ve all traveled in different directions and survived a stunning variety of challenges.

As teenagers we all seemed pretty much alike. As 68-year-olds, there are plenty of classmates who describe lives filled with grandchildren, of course, and golf, tennis and going south for the winter. But who knew there would be so many senior citizens riding motorcycles, flying their own planes, women racing ATVs and jumping horses, painting portraits and writing books and deep-sea diving?

Some classmates described living on a boat or isolated in a lighthouse, raising their own grandchildren, writing movie scripts or poetry, serving in the CIA, surviving cancer, leading congregations, missions, Bible study groups and pilgrimages. One man who lost a leg as a youth founded a company making prosthetic limbs. A woman has spent years working with rescue dog rehabilitation in the treatment of veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Another woman lived on a sailboat for 30 years, performs as a cabaret singer and has written books about a French poet and an Indian tribe in Panama.

Many of our classmates have suffered loss of a spouse through death or divorce and then found love late in life. And some are currently struggling with disability or disease, but still fighting to appear at this reunion.

In our adult lives, my generation has lived through the most momentous changes in history—the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, political assassinations, Viet Nam, equal rights for women and the technological revolution. We basically invented teenagers and rock ‘n’ roll. Now we’re working out new ways to cope with old age.

I expect to learn a lot of fascinating and illuminating stories over this coming weekend, and when I get back from Minnesota, I’ll share what I’ve learned. This isn’t going to be our grandparents’ Fiftieth Reunion!

The Scarred Back of a Slave Named Gordon

On page 14 of Sept. 20’s Book Review, The New York Times published a shocking photograph of a slave with a horribly scarred back to illustrate a review of “Deliver Us from Evil”.

Because I collect antique photos and have many dealing with slavery and the life of black people in the 1800's, I wrote to the Times the back story behind this photo, and the letter, somewhat abbreviated, is in the book review section this Sunday--Oct. 4.

I wrote: This famous photograph, usually titled “The Scourged Back”, was widely circulated by abolitionists and is one of the earliest examples of photography used as propaganda. A contemporary newspaper, The New York Independent, commented: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by the 100,000 and scattered over the states. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. (Harriet Beecher) Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye.”

As photo historian Kathleen Collins explained in The History of Photography Vol. 9 Number 1, January, 1985—it shows a slave named Gordon who escaped his master in Mississippi by rubbing himself with onions to throw off the bloodhounds. He took refuge with the Union Army at Baton Rouge and, in 1863, three engraved portraits of him were printed in Harper’s Weekly, showing the man “as he underwent the surgical examination previous to being mustered into the service—his back furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas Day last.”

The actual photographs of the escaped slave, taken by McPherson and Oliver of New Orleans, were widely circulated as carte-de-visite photos. On the verso of the mount were the comments of S. K. Towle, Surgeon, 30th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers: “…Few sensation writers ever depicted worse punishments than this man must have received, though nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness—but on the contrary, he seems intelligent and well-behaved.”

I have a colored glass slide of the same photograph (above) in my collection, undoubtedly used in anti-slavery lectures. Abolitionists exploited the new medium of photography, circulating, in addition to "the Scourged Back", CDV’s of a slave named Wilson who was branded on the forehead, and selling thousands of the series of emancipated “white”-appearing slave children from New Orleans, posed patriotically, including wrapped in the American flag. On the back was printed: “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the department of the Gulf now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”

April 24, 2013--Because of questions I've received about this famous image, I am now adding below one of the original CDVs of Gordon's back showing him with his head tilted farther back to show his beard.  I do not own this image, but I've always been aware of it. I always assumed that both these poses of Gordon were taken at the same time, but when I study them together I don't know.  Another question--I always assumed that "my" image up at the top was  reversed--something that could easily happen with a glass negative.  (All daguerreotypes and ambrotypes are reversed mirror images of the actual subject, so if the subject is holding a newspaper, for example, the headlines will be reversed mirror-image writing.)  Now, looking at these two photos of Gordon together, I can't tell if the images show him turned to face opposite sides, or is one of them reversed and he's looking over his left shoulder in both of them?  Or do you think they were taken at two different photo sessions, separated by time?  Opinions? 

FIRST BLACK WOMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE -- ELIZABETH KECKLEY

(This is the first of an occasional “Crone of the Week”-- women whose stories I want to tell. I’d appreciate your suggestions of women in history who accomplished something courageous, significant or even outrageous during their cronehood years and deserve to be featured on A Rolling Crone. You can e-mail me at joanpgage@yahoo.com)

Born a slave in Virginia in 1818, Elizabeth Keckley (also spelled Keckly) became—not the first black woman to work in the White House—there were surely some employed as workers and servants before her- but she was the first black woman to have so much influence on and access to the President’s family that she became the first person ever to write a back-stairs book, revealing the inner workings of Abraham Lincoln’s domestic life. Keckley was the only person who could calm Mary Todd Lincoln when she would suffer a nervous crisis before an important event. After the inauguration, Mrs. Lincoln insisted all her gowns be made by Keckley. (One of them is pictured above.) She turned to the former slave for help and advice on domestic details and protocol for White House parties. Elizabeth traded jokes and compliments with the president, who teased his wife about her penchant for low necklines and said to Mary, when he saw the first Keckley-made gown, “I declare, you look charming in that dress. Mrs. Keckley has met with great success.” Elizabeth also served the Lincolns as a baby sitter when the boys were ill, and nursed the first lady when she was suffering one of her crippling headaches.

Elizabeth was born to a slave named Agnes, owned by Armistead and Mary Burwell in Dinwiddie, VA. “Aggy” had been taught to read (which was illegal) and she taught Elizabeth to read and to sew, and they both worked as house slaves to the Burwell children. On Aggy’s death bed she revealed to her daughter that their master, Armistead Burwell, was also Elizabeth’s father.

After Burwell died, Elizabeth was loaned to other owners who beat her, although she defied them and refused to cry out. She was eventually raped by a white man, and gave birth to her only child, George. Since Elizabeth was mixed race and her rapist was white, George was so light that he claimed he was white in order to serve in the Union Army. He was killed in action in 1861.

Through a combination of business acumen, sewing skills and intelligence, Elizabeth eventually managed to buy freedom for her son and herself, and moved to Washington D.C. where she became the most favored modiste to the likes of Mrs. Robert E. Lee. Another socialite introduced her to Mary Todd Lincoln, who had just arrived in Washington and was very insecure about the city’s fashion sophistication and social mores.

Elizabeth then became the exclusive dressmaker for the new first lady, as well as her best friend and confidant. She would dress and calm Mary before every event, fixing her hair, accessories and jewels. As she prepared the first lady, Elizabeth would chat with the president and received many compliments from him for her skills. When Lincoln was assassinated, the first person Mary Todd Lincoln called to be with her was Elizabeth Keckley.

When Mrs. Lincoln moved back to Illinois after the assassination, she insisted that Elizabeth travel with her. Keckley returned to her profitable dressmaking business in Washington, and the widow wrote her many letters. Finally, Mrs. Lincoln, convinced she was running out of money, told Keckley to meet her in New York City where, using assumed names, they tried to sell possessions and clothing of the Lincolns to raise funds. Word got out about what Mary Lincoln was doing, and she felt disgraced by the news reports. Elizabeth Keckley then wrote what was the first backstairs-at-the-White-House tell-all, called, “Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House”. In the back of the book was an appendix with 24 letters that Mrs. Lincoln had written to Elizabeth, including the statement that she considered her “my best living friend.” The book was denounced by everyone from Lincoln’s son Robert to the New York Times as “backstairs gossip” that desecrated the memory of President Lincoln, although Mrs. Keckley kept trying to explain that she only meant to defend Mrs. Lincoln.

Mary Lincoln felt betrayed and their friendship ended. Eventually, when the former first lady descended into total madness, her son had her institutionalized.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Keckley continued to earn money by sewing—although most of her white clients had abandoned her. In 1892, when she was 74, she moved to Ohio to become head of the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts at Wilberforce University, which her son had attended. She organized a dress exhibit at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and, in her 80’s, she returned to Washington to live in the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children—which had been established in part by the Contraband Relief Association that Keckley founded during the war to help freed slaves. Until her death, Elizabeth had a photograph of Mrs. Lincoln on her wall. She died in 1907 at the age of 89 and was buried in Harmony Cemetery in Washington. She had been careful to pay far in advance for a plot and a stone, but when the graves were moved to a new cemetery, her unclaimed remains were placed in an unmarked grave.

I learned about Elizabeth Keckley when I bought, on E-Bay, a cased ambrotype portrait of a mixed-race woman. Pinned to the velvet lining was a scrap of paper with the words “Elizabeth Keckley, Formerly a Slave”. Many of my favorite crones were introduced to me through antique photographs that I’ve bought and then researched, to find out their “back story.” In my next post I’m going to show you some portraits of Keckley and ask you to be a detective and help me find out if my E-Bay image of Elizabeth is authentic.

WHAT IS A CRONE, ANYWAY?

Almost a year ago, in October ‘08, I launched this blog, saying: “I will try to address issues and events that are of interest to crones over sixty, who are definitely under-served in the media. Yet we are, as a friend remarked, the pig in the python—the huge population of women who are still tuned in and creating despite (or because of) our age.”

It was daughter Eleni who came up with the inspired name “A Rolling Crone” for the blog after I had discovered that “Crone Chronicles” was already taken.

I e-mailed my friends and colleagues announcing the blog, and was surprised when I heard from several friends that they found the word “Crone” offensive and insulting to women. (Some of them added that they also were offended by being referred to as “Ladies”, when they were, in fact, women, not ladies.)

I noticed that most of the objections to the word “Crone” came from the Midwestern states—where I grew up—while friends on both coasts, in Europe and in Israel generally loved the blog’s title.

One reason I used the word “crone” was that, when I lived in Manhattan, about five of us, er, women friends, started calling ourselves the Crones back when we were in our early fifties. (Our husbands, naturally, were the Geezers.) The Crones did fun things --some athletic, like hiking or kayaking, but most of which involved sitting in a restaurant laughing so loudly that we were sometimes asked to leave.

The most fun thing we did, in my opinion was a Crone Walk from the top of Manhattan (Fort Tryon Park) to the bottom (Battery Park). Husbands were allowed to meet us for dinner on the last day. The walk took three days and involved staying in hotels (where martinis were consumed) eating in restaurants, and visiting stores, art exhibits and historic spots. Our first lunch—in Spanish Harlem—was in a restaurant where no one spoke English, only Spanish. Our last lunch was in a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, where no one spoke English, only Chinese. (Just one of the reasons why Manhattan is my favorite city ever.)

After hearing complaints from my friends about the word Crone, I decided to research it. I was vaguely aware that some indigenous peoples considered Cronehood to be the honorable third stage of a woman’s life (Maiden, Mother, Crone) and that entry into cronehood—and menopause—was celebrated with rituals, because the crones were revered as wise women who could impart their knowledge to the tribe.

When I started researching “Crone” and “What is a crone?” on Google, I quickly realized that this is a topic for a Phd. thesis, not a single blog posting.

If you would like academic insights into the various historic personifications of the wise crone, check out a site by Kathleen Jenks, PhD, called “mythinglinks.org”, especially an essay called “Common Themes, East & West: Crones & Sages”.
She refers to Eve, the Mother of All, (holding in her hands an opened pomegranate, whose Hebrew name, rimmon, comes from the word rim, to bear a child.) She also mentions Hecate, Baba Yaga, native American rituals , tales from India’s Crone shamans—it’s a treasure chest of crone facts including a bibliography.

That led me to a lyrical and eloquent essay by a woman called “Z Budapest”-- “Crone Genesis” --that begins, “I am in my first year of Cronehood. In my sixtieth year.” Near the end of her essay she writes “We are one block of herstory, one savvy chain of generations, one strong and active generation that is going to continue to change the world. When we are done, being old will be fashionable, stories and movies about old people will be normal, and we will live a long time.”

I also discovered that women who celebrate their cronehood, especially with rituals, are often Wiccans—followers of paganism as a religion. This is not true of me and the Manhattan crones—who each probably have our own brand of religion or spirituality, although we’ve never discussed it. What joins us, I think is laughter, not a particular political or religious agenda.

But there is, I quickly learned, a growing Crone movement in this country —probably multiplying in strength as more and more women reach cronehood.

If you look up cronescounsel.org, you will see that the upcoming Fall 2009 Gathering, Crones Counsel XVII is happening Oct. 21-25 in Atlanta, GA.

That site says that the mythological Crone comes from the mists of ancient times, in the Middle East, Greece and the Balkans (30,000-10,000 BCE)… “The goddess was revered as one all-encompassing mother goddess who controlled birth, death and rebirth. This concept began to change as women themselves became increasingly under the dominion of men…Crone, hag and witch once were positive words for old women. Crone comes from Crown, indicating wisdom emanating from the head; hag comes from hagio meaning holy; and witch comes from wit meaning wise. The Crone began re-emerging into our consciousness in the early 1980’s and today many older women are embracing this connection. We are tapping into the ancient crone’s attributes of wisdom, compassion, transformation, healing laughter and bawdiness.”

So I submit that calling myself a crone and my blog “A Rolling Crone” is not insulting to my age group.

I’ve noticed, among my friends, that when a woman turns sixty, she often throws a birthday that basically is a celebration of herself, although previous birthdays and most of her party-giving efforts might have been devoted to celebrating her husband or children or parents.

I think at sixty a woman tends to step back and think “I’ve done pretty well so far, so I’m going to give myself something I’ve always wanted—a trip to Europe-- or enroll in a class to learn tap dancing or piano—or just throw a party that’s all about me and invite all my friends. (One of the New York crones rented a chateau in Tuscany and invited her friends.)

Here are some thoughts I came across from Linda Lowen who writes a blog about women’s issues. In an essay called “The Crone Movement -- Empowering Older Women”, she quotes a past member of the Crones Counsel Board who said “A Crone is a woman who has moved past mid-life and who acknowledges her survivorship, embraces her age, learns from the examined experience of her life, and, most likely, appreciates the wrinkles on her face…A Crone is a woman who is comfortable with her spiritual self, her intuition, and her creative power.”

Linda Lowen comments: “Wonderful qualities for a woman to possess at any age, but especially significant for a demographic that often feels bypassed by a society that has little use for women once they reach menopause. This Halloween, if you’re a woman 45 or older, instead of feeling tricked by the process of aging, consider the treat of making peace with yourself as you appreciate this phase of your life. Embrace your inner Crone.”

(That’s easy—Every Halloween as I wait on the porch for the influx of trick-or-treaters, I’m always dressed as a witch!)

I would like to hear from you how you feel about the word “Crone”.

Michelle Obama's Arms--Can a Crone Get Them?

Remember about thirty years ago when everyone wanted Farrah Fawcett’s hair? (R.I.P. Farrah.) Then about 15 years ago, it was Jennifer Anniston’s hair that everyone wanted. Around the millennium it was Angelina Jolie’s full lips, leading to a lot of ill-conceived lip-plumping inoculations. Now everyone wants Michelle Obama’s sculpted arms. (While some hyper-critical folks say she should hide those muscular arms—they aren’t lady-like. That’s ridiculous! It’s not as if she’s so ripped that the veins are popping our of her arms, the way they do on Madonna.)

Yesterday’s big news story was that Mrs. Obama’s personal trainer, Cornell McClellan, has revealed how she gets those arms. It seems that Michelle, like her husband, tends to get up about 5:30 in the morning for a grueling workout that ends with her “arm-shaping superset” of tricep pushdowns (that means pulling a straight metal bar down against the resistance of a pulley—on a machine) followed without resting by a set of hammer curls using dumbbells. Fifteen of each make a set, then do it all over again two more times.

Was it Oscar Wilde who said “Never wave good-bye after forty.”? He was right. There comes a time in nearly every woman’s life when she realizes that sleeveless dresses are no longer appropriate for her wardrobe because sleeves are necessary to hide whatever that is hanging down from her upper arms. (Evidently it’s called “Bat wings.” As in “Old Bat”, I presume.)

When I was in my 30’s, I wrote an article for Ladies Home Journal that involved interviewing the “Dancing Grannies.” These were a group of women--all over 55 years old and living in a retirement community in Arizona—who had formed a dance troupe similar to the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, and traveled around performing high kicks and other dance routines not usually considered appropriate for grandmothers. They looked great. One of the grannies, I remember, told me that her upper arms had started to look crepey, but she countered that by doing arm curls with weights as she sat watching television.

At 68, I’m 13 years past the minimum age to join the Dancing Grannies. (I wonder if they’re still around?) A year ago, when I started taking pilates classes, I was flat on the floor struggling through the push-ups that always end the session (as a novice I get to do them while braced on my knees, not on my toes) and I looked at my upper arms and sure enough—major creping. Crepe paper was smoother than the flesh of my upper arms. When did that happen, I wondered?

(And whatever happened to crepe paper, I also wondered. When I was small, my mother would sew Halloween costumes for me out of crepe paper every year.)

Today, I’m exactly one month away from going back to Minnesota for the 50th reunion of my high school graduating class of 1959 from Edina Morningside High School. This will probably require a cocktail dress for one of the nights. And a cocktail dress might reveal some things I’d rather keep hidden about my upper arms.

(Speaking of 50th high school reunions, yesterday at the supermarket I was paging through the latest National Enquirer, as is my wont, and there was a photo of actor Nick Nolte being pushed in a wheelchair through an airport and the caption said that he was headed for HIS 50th high school reunion. He looked gaunt and old. At least I can walk through the airport to get to mine, I thought, feeling thankful for that.)

So starting yesterday, because I do have five-pound hand weights—I’ve instituted an “arm sculpting” routine inspired by Michelle Obama. Of course I don’t have that handy machine with the metal bar that you push down, but I know a maneuver with the weights that’s supposed to exercise the right muscles. (Hold your arms straight over your head clutching the weights, hands facing. Then bend your elbows so that the weights drop behind your head, somewhere at the back of your neck. Then straighten up the arms again, weights reaching toward the ceiling. Repeat 15 times.) Then do 15 arm curls with the weights extended out to the sides.

We’ll see, if I do three sets of 15 each in the morning and again in the evening, perhaps the firmness and flopping of my upper arms will be improved by the time I go to the reunion on Oct. 9. I’ll let you know. Or maybe I can just find a cocktail dress with nice long sleeves.

Dukakis At Eleni's Memorial, Lia Greece

Michael Dukakis, who ran for the presidency of the United States in 1988 and was the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history, arrived in the small northern Greek village of Lia last week on Aug. 24, causing great excitement throughout the country, and especially in Lia, where the village had been spruced up, pot holes filled, foliage pruned, and a heliport repaved to receive Dukakis' entourage, (although the man himself chose to drive up the vertiginous mountain roads so he could see the countryside on the way.)

Dukakis' maternal grandparents came from Vrisohori, another small and, until recently, isolated village not far from Lia. Although Mike and Kitty have visited Greece many times, they had never visited Northern Greece and his grandparents' village. The couple, along with Kitty's sister Ginnie and Ginnie's husband, Al, used the Grand Serai Hotel in Ioannnina as a base. After a lavish dinner hosted by the Mayor of Ioannina, they left the next day to see Vrisohori where Sen. Dukakis, with tears in his eyes, lauded the village which had produced his mother Euterpe, who became one of the the first Greek-American women to earn a college degree. (The small village also produced the father of film director John Cassavetes.)

The next day, Monday, Aug. 24, the Dukakis group arrived in Lia to attend a memorial service for Eleni Gatzoyiannis, my mother-in-law and the mother of my husband Nicholas Gage

Eleni Gatzoyiannis was executed by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas in Aug. 1948-- her body left in a ravine along with 12 other murdered civilians. Before that day, she was imprisoned, crowded along with 31 other prisoners into the tiny basement of her own house--which had been taken over as guerrilla headquarters.

When the guerrillas, who occupied the village in the last months of the Greek Civil War, started collecting children to take them behind the Iron Curtain, Eleni began to plan a nighttime escape for her own children. (In the end 28,000 children were kidnapped in the pedomasoma.) The escape succeeded after two abortive tries--but on the third try, she was forced to stay behind, to provide two women from her household to harvest wheat for the guerrillas. She chose herself and her 15-year-old daughter Glykeria, and said goodbye to her nine-year-old son, Nicholas and three older daughters. After her children disappeared, Eleni was questioned, tortured,imprisoned and ultimately executed on Aug. 28, 1948.

Nick's book about his mother, «Eleni», has told her story around the world in 34 languages. It was followed by the film Eleni. Her sacrifice to gain freedom for her children was cited on national television by President Ronald Reagan.

Last week, 61 years after Eleni’s execution, Michael and Kitty Dukakis attended a memorial service in her honor in Aghios Demetrios Church, where she worshipped, and where her remains were placed in the ossuary after her body was recovered from the ravine where she fell.

Also at the church last week were survivors and descendents of the 12 other civilians who died that day. After the service, mourners were given the traditional kollyva to eat--a sweet combination of boiled wheat, pomegranate seeds, almonds, sugar and raisins-- to symbolize the resurrection and immortality of the soul.

From the church, Mike and Kitty Dukakis came up the mountain to see Eleni's house as it is now--rebuilt from ruins in 2002 by our daughter and Eleni's granddaughter, author Eleni Gage. (She spent a year in the village restoring the house and writing a travel memoir "North of Ithaka" about the experience.) The house has been decorated to look just as it did before the Civil War. On the mantle is a photograph of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her husband Christos--who was working as a produce seller in Worcester when war broke out in 1939, preventing him from returniing to Greece for the next decade.

Nick then showed the Dukakises his grandfather's house, lower on the mountain, and the path that the children took when they escaped down through the minefields at night, until they reached the Nationalist soldiers on the other side. They were sent to a refugee camp where they lived until their father was able to bring them to the United States a year later.

Finally, the villagers of Lia gathered with Mike and Kitty Dukakis in the village Inn for a celebratory meal, including the traditional local pita pies. There were tears as well as smiles as Mike and Kitty greeted and hugged the villagers, old and young, who had lost loved ones and grandparents on that day in 1948.

Nick welcomed the visitors, saying in part «I’m very moved that Mike and Kitty Dukakis have come here to remember the fate of Eleni and to recall how she suffered and from whom.»

In turn Gov. Dukakis, also speaking in Greek, said «Having read several times the powerful work of Nicholas Gage about his mother, we are are very moved to come to Lia and see the places of her martyrdom.»

This celebration of her legacy--the legacy of a simple Greek peasant woman who died to save her children--was something that Eleni Gatzoyiannis, murdered at 41, could never have imagined happening 61 years after her death. Hundreds gathered in her village as she was honored by the only Greek-American to run for the presidency of the United States--the country she longed to see, but never did. (After Nick's father Christos died in 1985, Nick brought his mother's bones to Worcester, MA to be buried next to her husband, in Hope Cemetery)

It was an honor that Eleni Gatzoyiannis could not have imagined when she was alive --but the spirit of Eleni has often been felt in the village over the years since her death, as people from around the world have made the pilgrimage to see where she lived and died.

I think she knew.

THE GREAT PITA PIE FESTIVAL IN LIA, GREECE

(Please click on the photos to enlarge)

Last week, when we drove up the winding mountain road in northern Greece and arrived at Nick’s native village of Lia, just below the Albanian border, we were thrilled to learn that the famous “Yiorti tis Pitas”—or “Festival of Pita Pies” was happening the very next day—Saturday Aug. 22.

The Greek calendar is full of religious holidays—like the August 15 festival of the Virgin Mary, which is second only to Easter in importance—but each village also has its own Saint’s Day (Lia celebrates July 21—the feast day of the Prophet Elias.)

But we had never been lucky enough to be present at the “Festival of Pita Pies” which, as far as I know, is unique to Lia.

Our neighbor in the village—Dina Petsis –was elected Lia’s first female president in 2006 and she brought to the village the Festival of Pita Pies—a kind of harvest festival—now in its third year. Pita pies are the traditional delicacy of this area of northern Greece. The pitas are not desserts, but savory pies with all manner of good things baked between layers of phyllo dough. (But Dina also cooked a sweet apple and cinnamon pita as well—because I asked for it.)

In 2002—when daughter Eleni spent a year living in Lia, rebuilding the ruined family home and writing her travel memoir “North of Ithaka”, Dina introduced her to the secrets of pita making,including a pita made with 13 kinds of wild greens including nettles, and another cheese-y pie called “dish rag pie”. Eleni even learned to make a sweet cake that a single girl can bake and take to church, which she called in her book “Get a Man” pie.

Last Saturday, Dina, who is not only village president but also the finest cook in Lia, let Eleni help her make 5 different kinds of pitas. All the village women from miles around were cooking their specialities. Dina’s contributions included a pita full of various greens, a quiche-like pita featuring zucchini (everything from her garden, of course) another pita with macaroni and cheese in it, and my personal favorite—a pita filled with chicken and rice. (The secret ingredients, Eleni told me, were mint and grated carrots.)

Dina had been so busy getting ready for the Pita Festival that she cheated this time and used store-bought phyllo dough for her pitas, although most of the village women proudly make their own homemade phyllo dough, which is rolled out on a board with a stick that resembles a broom handle.

A large, level area in the village, shaded by plane trees and called the Goura, was strung with lights and Greek flags. The ladies contributing pitas came early. There were 76 pitas in all, cooked by more than 30 women. Notis, who runs the one village store and coffee shop in Lia with his wife Stella, had been roasting lambs on spits all day for those who were not satisfied with pita alone. He and his helpers also sold beer and local wines. Notis would hack meat off the lambs with his cleaver, fill a plate and weigh it to know what to charge.

But the pitas were free. Daughter Eleni and Dina and her helpers cut the pitas into squares and brought each table a plate filled with a variety. There were no prizes—for no one could taste every pita and decide which was the winner. (Our table, however, unofficially awarded first prize to Dina’s Cotopita—the chicken pie.)

Then Dina, in her role as president, gave a speech of welcome and the orchestra began to play. The clarinet player, as usual, was the star, assisted by a fiddler, a bouzouki player, a singer and a young boy on the tamborine.

Our village priest, Father Procopi, along with Dina, started the dancing and the lady cantor from the church joined in. (In the photos Dina is wearing a black and white blouse and Eleni a turquoise dress.) Then, as the high spirits (kefi) increased, more pita-baking women and exuberant young people joined in the dance. The older men mostly watched and drank and devoured the 76 pitas donated by the expert cooks.

We went to bed around midnight, but Dina and her husband Andreas didn’t stop dancing until 2:30 in the morning.

We’ve already marked next year’s calendar for August 22-- the fourth annual Yiorti tis Pitas in Lia.

ALI PASHA & THE BLOODY HISTORY of IOANNINA

(Please click on photos to enlarge)

On our first evening back in Greece, last week, a stroll down the main street of Ioannina took us past reminders of the cataclysms that have racked this area for the past 200 years. The entire population of the city seemed to be outside, enjoying the perfect weather. Ioannina (also spelled Yannina) is the provincial capital of Epiros and the stepping-off place for my husband Nick’s village—about an hour’s drive farther north on a mountain just below the Albanian border.

I often remind myself, when I’m in Greece, that any Greek my age—old enough to remember World War II—is a survivor of the Italian and Nazi occupations, the terrible starvation that followed, and the bloody Civil War that rent the country after that. The Civil War still splits the populace along political lines when you bring up stories like that of my mother-in-law Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who was imprisoned, tortured and killed in 1948 for engineering her children’s’ escape from their occupied village. She began planning the escape when the Communist guerrillas started collecting children to send to re-education camps behind the Iron Curtain. (This was called the pedomasoma, and while many claim it never happened—like Holocaust deniers— in fact 28,000 children were taken from their parents and reared in communist countries.)

In Ioannina, as elsewhere, Greeks traditionally take an evening stroll—the peripato-- families walking together, pushing baby strollers, the youth checking each other’s fashion statements. Everyone eventually sits at an outdoor cafe to enjoy an iced coffee or a glass of wine or ouzo and watch the passing parade. (Dinner doesn’t start until ten p.m.). The peripato is especially popular in towns on the sea or on a lakeside harbor like Ioannina.

Tourists have not yet discovered this city, which is little changed from the days when Lord Byron visited the notorious tyrant Ali Pasha in the walled Turkish Kastro which still stands—its walls intact, its minarets and palaces now turned into museums.

In Ioannina we stayed in the new Grand Serai hotel, ornately decorated with marble, crystal chandeliers and copies of paintings showing Lord Byron and Ali Pasha—the Albanian vizier who tried to seize control of the area from the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople.

Ali Pasha had 300 women in his harem and 300 boys in his seraglio, so they say in Ioannina. Most of them were kidnapped from the neighboring Greek villages—pretty girls for the harem, promising boys to be trained as soldiers in the Janissary corps. Turkish rule ended in Northern Greece in 1913, but even after that, village women like Nick’s mother Eleni, warned their daughters to cover their faces with their kerchiefs to avoid being kidnapped for their beauty. Nick’s father, who was born in 1891, wasn’t sure of his exact birth date because his mother, like everyone else, lied about the age of the boys, making them younger so they wouldn’t be taken as Turkish soldiers.

Ali Pasha had a habit of drowning individuals who displeased him by sealing them in sacks weighted with stones and dropping them into the bottomless Lake Pamvotis below the walls of the Turkish Kastro. They say that in the morning mists over the lake you can see the ghosts of the women who died there, including Kyria Efrosini, the lover of one of Ali Pasha’s sons, who tried to sell her expensive ring in the marketplace. A famous painting portrays her and her maids, who were drowned with her, being rowed to their death by grinning evil Turks.

Today the lakefront is the scene of excellent restaurants and nightclubs which are filled to overflowing with the youth of the city, partying late into the night. Even at midnight, families are out, dining al fresco as children enjoy a Lunar Park of carnival rides and outdoor shows of traditional Greek shadow puppets. There are the gypsies, selling everything from mixed nuts to cheap Chinese electronics, and the little ferryboats, chugging to and from the island in the middle of the lake. Day or night the lakeside is a happening scene,

Ali Pasha was assassinated in 1822 in his summer home on the large island in the middle of the lake (which has many tavernas featuring freshwater fish like trout, plus eels and frogs legs.)

Ali’s wife was Kyria Vassiliki, who was kidnapped (if I remember correctly) from her village of Plessio at the age of 15. The old man trusted the lovely Vassiliki, but she learned of his plan to torch Greek villages and she abetted assassins sent by the Sultan in Constantinople—giving a signal which allowed the killers entrance to Ali Pasha’s island home, where they shot him from the floor below.

The Turks cut off Ali Pasha’s head and carted it to the Sultan in Constantinople, along with Vassilki as a witness—to prove that the tyrant was dead. His headless body was buried under an elaborate wrought- iron cage in Ioannina, still standing near the mosque that is now a museum.

In gratitude for saving her fellow Greeks, Kyria Vassiliki was returned to her village and became the first Greek woman to receive social security.

As we walked down the main street--Averoff— toward the lake front, we passed the entrance to the Turkish Kastro, and a shrine to two local Greek warriors who were hanged by the Turks from a nearby plane tree. They are now saints.

Then we passed a monument to the Jews of Ioannina, who lived mostly within the Kastro—near the ancient synagogue which still survives (although there are rarely enough men to make a minion.) A sign says in both Greek and English, “In memory of our 1,850 Jewish cohabitants who were arrested on March 25th, 1944, and executed in the Nazi concentration camps”. That is another story in Ioannina’s bloody history and one that is still being written about.

As we approached the lake, we passed a warren of shops featuring wares of hammered copper and brass as well as silver filigree: traditional handicrafts of Ioannina. Some of the objects are made from mortar shells left from the war.

Then we reached the lakeside, where the music was blaring and the populace was eating and drinking and admiring the view. Aside from some lakeside statues of veiled women, representing the victims of Ali Pasha, there was no sign of the city’s tragic history, only merriment and music on a balmy summer night.

HAIR in the Park--Forty Years Later

The Age of Aquarius Re-Visited

The first time I saw the rock musical “Hair” in 1968 in London, I had left my job and my boyfriend in Manhattan to work for a British magazine, arriving just in time to enjoy two years of swinging London. “Hair” was a scandal (the cast famously got naked at the end of the first act.) It was no coincidence that it opened in London one day after the abolishment of the Theatre Acts which had given the Lord Chamberlain the power of censorship since 1737. I was thrilled by my first look at the theater of the streets—the music of a new anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-everything generation: my own.

When I learned, last summer that a revival of “Hair “ was being staged at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, that the tickets were free and there was a special line for senior citizens, I drove from home in Grafton, MA. , listening, on the way, to the original cast album and getting a little misty at the thought of how young and optimistic we were in 1968, protesting a misguided war and believing we could make a difference. I slept on my daughter’s couch and set out early for the Park.

I reached the Delacorte box office at 8:15 a.m. and joined the seniors’ line – thirty-some individuals sitting patiently on three very long benches. The other line stretched out of sight into the park—young people sprawled on the ground, some in sleeping bags.

I sat next to Ivan, a lawyer smartly dressed in a dark blue suit and black tie who was fielding clients’ calls on his cell phone. Soon all three benches for our line were filled and there was no more room to sit. A newcomer passed by muttering “Bunch of hippies!” and we chuckled. But we were a bunch of hippies….grown up. When Lorraine, a striking woman with her English spaniel on a leash, mentioned her recent trip to India—floating down the Ganges and sleeping on the riverbank in tents—she collected a handful of retirement-age listeners, including me, all of us planning trips to India and eager for advice.

Our five-hour wait was eased by nearby bathroom facilities, a hot-dog cart, and menus from Andy’s Deli on Columbus, which delivers to the line. We did the Times crossword, read, debated politics and exchanged life stories. Lorraine related her years of struggle to protect her rent-controlled apartment which ended in a settlement and a new home.

“I used to be all about work,” Ivan mused, “But now I think it’s more important to enjoy life.” He fished out a photo of his grandson whom he frequently flies cross country to visit.

At 1 p.m. Curt returned with a handful of tickets. “One ticket or two?” he asked each of us, then checked proof of age. Triumphantly, Lorraine, Ivan and I all scored two. Then, right after me, I heard Curt say, “I’m sorry folks. That’s the last one.”

At 8 p.m. we gathered with our guests on a perfect summer evening, under the “brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” as Shakespeare and the tribe members of “Hair” described it. The first six rows of one section were for us. The rest were filled with hundreds of people who, like the cast, had not been born when “Hair” premiered.

The performance was just as electrifying as when I saw it in London, only this time I kept turning around to look at the beaming faces of my generation —singing along and remembering. The lithe young cast members displayed better abs than I recalled from the original production and at the end of the first act they shed their clothes and ran off stage.

During the intermission, my daughter pondered the changes in bikini waxing since 1968. Lorraine and I exclaimed in unison that no one had heard of bikini waxing back then. The conversation turned to pot smoking and a stately woman sitting nearby chimed in—“I started late. I was stoned for most of the summer of ‘73. That was after my ex-husband came out of the closet and before people started dying of AIDs.”

As we reminisced, I realized that for most of the audience, like my daughter, this performance was a time capsule—an entertaining look into an era long gone. But for us it was a chance to revisit our youth and reflect on how things had changed. It wasn’t depressing, although we were no longer young and optimistic and our country was once more fighting an unpopular war. At least we were still here. Some among us could no longer sing “I got my hair”, but like the kids on stage, we could belt out “I got life” without it being a lie.

As the second act began, Lorraine asked me, “Are you going to go up on the stage and dance at the end?”

I thought about it. “I didn’t forty years ago.”

Lorraine leaned forward. “Joan, I think this time you should.”

As the Tribe danced to “Let the Sunshine In”, she ran down to the stage. So did most of our age group. I didn’t dance and I didn’t smoke pot that night, but I left Central Park on a contact high of pride. Maybe my generation didn’t end war, eliminate racism, and create universal tolerance— despite all the anthems about peace, love and freedom now. But we tried. And we still had the motivation to try… to sit for half a day in the hope --but not the certainty-- of getting free tickets to revisit the first ever “American tribal love rock musical.”

(A few days later, Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton attended—although I suspect they didn’t have to wait in line.)

Leaving the park, we caught up with Ivan, who remarked that forty years ago, a woman alone could not be walking here alone at night without fear, but now there were several visible ahead of us, leaving the concert.

As we passed the Temple of Dendur, I was struck by a variation on that ubiquitous Mastercard slogan: “Cost of tickets to ‘Hair’: zero dollars. Time spent to get tickets: five hours. Watching your generation let down their ‘Hair’ 40 years after the first time: priceless.”

(The reception to Hair in Central Park was so good last summer that the same cast is now performing it on Broadway and the tickets will cost you from $37 to $122!)

OBAMA'S MAMA WAS A TEXTILE ARTIST AND COLLECTOR (LIKE ME!)

(please click on the photos to enlarge)


Reading my weekly Antiques and The Arts newspaper, dated July 17, I came across a small item that thrilled me. It said that Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, wove textiles for wall hangings early in her life and when she moved to Indonesia with her son in the 1960’s, she began to amass a collection of the vibrant batik textiles of the country.

She had married an Indonesian after Obama’s father left Hawaii to return to Africa, and her daughter, Maya Soetoro Ng –Obama’s half sister—has loaned her late mother’s collection of batik textiles for an exhibition in Washington D.C. from August 9-23 in the Textile Museum there. (www.textilemuseum.org ): “A Lady Found a Culture in its Cloth: Barack Obama’s Mother and Indonesian Batiks.” “She did not acquire rare or expensive pieces, but rather contemporary examples that were an expression of a living tradition, patterned with both classic designs and those of passing fashion” according to the press release.

Later, when Ann was studying anthropology at the University of Hawaii, she tried to find ways to help craftspeople. She worked with the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and with USAID and the World Bank, and set up micro-credit projects in Indonesia, Pakistan and Kenya to benefit poor women making textiles.

I have always considered textile making (weaving and embroidery) a fascinating art form. In many countries this the only medium of artistic expression available to women and the only way they can earn money. Whenever I travel, I buy textiles –ideally from the women who created them. Now my walls are covered with antique American quilts, Mexican huipils, Haitian voodoo flags and Greek embroidered table runners. Most pieces cost under $100 but they’re priceless, because they embody the maker’s artistic talent as well as (in some cases) their religious or political beliefs and their dreams ,(the embroidered wedding couples worked into a Greek tablecloth as part of a dowry.)

Around 1970 I got interested in antique American quilts. On our second floor stair landing I hung a “Tumbling Blocks” quilt behind a sea captain’s chest full of teddy bears. (The worn teddy with wings on the wall is my childhood friend who has passed on to his reward.) The section from an unfinished velvet and silk Victorian quilt is called “Windmill Blades” and the large “Barn Raising” quilt is from a very old variation on the Log Cabin pattern.

Mexican and Guatelmalan embroideries fascinate me with their sophisticated and wild use of color. I’ve decorated the wall of my studio with antique Mexican huipils that indicate the native village of the woman who wears them. The lady on the right is Maria, whom we met in the marketplace of San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico. She was the best among the many women weavers and embroiderers who crowded the marketplace. (San Cristobal is heaven for the collector of textiles.) Near the border of Guatemala I found the embroidery made by a Zapatista woman who was also selling dolls with faces masked like Commandante Marcos. The pillow that was made in Guatemala looks to me like a happy man walking in a graveyard. Could this be a memorial or something to do with the Day of the Dead?

Daughter Eleni, who studied folklore and mythology, introduced me to the sequined voodoo flags made in Haiti and used in the religious rites. These are usually made (and signed) by men and they represent the gods who take possession of the worshiper. These sequin flags and the artists who make them are taken very seriously as art now, which means they can be very expensive. The two large ones represent La Sirene—-The Enchantress—and Baron Samedi—who mitigates between life and death.

Textile artists reflect the life they see around them—the Greek wall hanging is an island scene with table, chairs and cat; the festive wedding scene (brought from Pakistan by Eleni) shows a wedding party celebrating beneath an umbrella. The exquisite antique Chinese embroidery was in a box of textiles I bought for $75. The incredible detailed work and the wonderful reproduction of all those birds, animals and flowers make it beyond price. ( The knots are so small I think it must include the “forbidden knot” that would render the sewers blind.)

Finally there is lace: a simple lace handkerchief and a lace runner that I’m told represents French cathedrals. It may sound silly to buy pieces for a few dollars and then spend much more to frame them, but I do. Last Monday, at the Antique Textiles Vintage Fashions Show and Sale in Sturbridge, which kicks off Brimfield week three times a year, I photographed that lace runner with the deer.—The price tag says $950.00.

I always go to the “Vintage Clothing Show” in Sturbridge, as I call it (The next one is Sept. 3) partly to gape at the celebrities and crazily dressed fashionistas talking into their cell phones in French or Japanese, but I also go to educate my eye and find the rare bargain, and when I go home I enjoy my own collection all the more.

*(To all my English major friends—don’t write to tell me that ‘Like me’ is bad grammar. I know it but used it anyway!)

World Largest Crustacean Means Summer in Worcester

(Click on Buster to make him bigger.)


We who live in (or near) Worcester MA, population 170,000, are fiercely loyal, even though big city papers like The New York Times tend to refer to Worcester as a “sleepy industrial backwater”.

Worcesterites fondly refer to their town as “Wormtown” and “The Paris of the Eighties”. The Worcester Historical Museum even sells a T-shirt (above) that makes fun of the way people always mispronounce the city’s name . (The correct pronunciation in the local accent is: ”Wusta.” If you call it “Wor-chester” everyone here will think you are wicked lame.)

With its rows of three-deckers and its mostly deserted brick factories, Worcester is like a time capsule that was sealed in the 1950s or ‘60’s. (It’s also a great place to shoot a movie—and several have been filmed here.) We have at the moment an airport with no scheduled commercial flights (well, I think there’s one to Florida), an auditorium,a courthouse and a vocational high school that stand empty (making great movie sets) and a central downtown discount fashion mall that has been deserted for years awaiting the wrecking ball.

Worcester has a quirky history full of rebels-- from Isaiah Thomas, who took his printing press and exited Boston ahead of the Tories (the Declaration of Independence was first read in public on our courthouse steps) to Abbie Hoffman who grew up in one of Worcester’s three-deckers (they were built for the families of the factory workers.)

We still have Coney Island Hotdogs with its famous neon sign, and the Boulevard Diner where Madonna ate spaghetti after a concert at the Centrum, Table Talk Pies and Sir Morgan’s Cove (now Lucky Dog, I think) where the Rolling Stones in 1981 gave an impromptu free concert. Worcester boasts seven colleges and universities including Holy Cross, WPI and Clark (where, in 1909 Freud gave his only American lectures.)

Luminaries who came from Worcester are a motley bunch including S. N. Berman, Emma Goldman, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, Dennis Leary and Marcia Cross--the red-headed desperate housewife. Also the Coors twins, Diane and Elaine Klimaszewski.

Worcester is especially proud of its “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the first commercial Valentines, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball and, most famous of all, the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon.

In Worcester, the perennial sign of summer, as sure as the fireworks and concert in Christopher Colombo Park on the Fourth, is the arrival of the gigantic figure of Buster the Crab, lying on the roof and hanging over the Sole Proprietor Restaurant on Highland Street.

My husband and I ate there last week. There was a special menu of crab dishes, in addition to the regular Sole offerings. From the menu, I learned the following fascinating facts: This is Buster’s 17th year at the Sole Proprietor. Buster is the world’s largest inflatable crustacean. It takes 45,000 cubic feet of air to inflate him. He has a 75-foot claw spam. Buster could feed 200,000 people if he were real. That would require 35,116 pounds of butter and 45,447 lemons.

The crab dishes on the special menu ranged from fried tomato and crab Napoleon with smoky tomato dressing , Spyder Maki with soft-shelled crab, masago, cucumber and asparagus, to crab, mango and pickled cucumber cocktail and Crabmeat Casserole au gratin. I had crab and shrimp salad, which included avocado and tomatoes and sweet lemon herb vinaigrette. My husband had the soft-shelled crabs (sautéed, not fried). It was delicious. On the way out, I even wangled a copy of the Buster the Crab coloring book, usually meant only for kids. When we left, the wind was blowing and Buster’s giant claws waved good-bye.

Michael Jackson and Art Collecting-- Death Was a Smart Career Move

Today columnist Liz Smith asked “Will there be no end to this?”—‘This’ being the wall-to-wall coverage of every little Michael Jackson-related bit of ‘news’.”

I agree, but I can’t stop reading everything about Michael’s life and pitiful death, because the story’s got as many plot twists as an Agatha Christie novel. Two days ago we learned that the real father of Michael’s two oldest children was his dermatologist. Who knew? Yesterday I read that Michael would throw away his children’s toys every night, when they were little, (for fear of the germs that might be on them) and buy new ones. Today we learned that Debbie Rowe, the nurse who gave birth to the first two children, is going to try to get custody from Michael’s mother. (In the past Michael convinced Debbie to give up her claims – twice — with infusions of cash. She has never lived in the same house as the children.)

I hope, for their sake, that whoever gets custody, the children will have near them Grace, that nanny from Rwanda (originally she was a personal assistant to Michael) because I think she’s the person they bonded with and she seems to be the only person in this story who is not motivated by the desire for money. (I could be proved wrong about that. Tune in tomorrow.)

Michael Jackson was an art collector. He would go into a gallery and buy millions of dollars of paintings in one shopping trip. As far as his taste in art, I read that he commissioned – and hung in his most recent home — a copy of Da Vinci’s Last Supper with the figure of Michael in place of Christ. The disciples included dead celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.

Today’s New York Times (July 3) had an interview with an art gallery owner from whom Michael had ordered numerous copies of Norman Rockwell paintings of children and animals — he had them framed but never picked them up. The Times also reported that Neverland is deserted and the rooms empty, except for numerous statues throughout the grounds of children at play.

Despite my reading all the flood of Michael news, on Wednesday I found a rather sad and, as far as I know pretty much unreported, story about Michael and his art in – of all places — “Antiques and the Arts Weekly”—a fat newspaper that I get once a week about the antique trade, published by The Bee Publishing Company in Newtown Connecticut. (Everyone calls the paper “The Bee”.)

The newspaper, dated July 3, had two separate stories about sales of Michael Jackson memorabilia. The first article described the sale on May 1 (weeks before his death) of items from the Hollywood Wax Museum, which has evidently closed down after 44 years. “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a true piece of Hollywood history,” said the president of Profiles in History which ran the sale. Life-size figures of Jesus and his disciples (from Da Vinci’s Last Supper — no Hollywood celebs in this version) went for $15,340. You sort of wonder how the buyer will work that into his home’s décor. Michael Jackson’s costume from the 1988 “Bad” concert went for $35,400. That, of course, was before his death.

More revealing and sad was the second news story describing a sale in Las Vegas of twenty-one items once owned by Jackson and given to David Gest. You remember him -- “the producer and promoter once married to Liza Minelli”, the article explained. “Jackson introduced the couple and was best man at their wedding.”

This sale in Las Vegas, held by Julien’s Auctions at the Planet Hollywood hotel-casino, had estimated the Jackson items would go for about $6,000 for the entire collection. But that was before he died. Turns out the auction, held as scheduled on June 26, the day after he died, went for a total of $205,000.

A 55-year–old Tina Turner impersonator named Larry Edwards came to the auction intending to buy a drawing of an African-American Mickey Mouse, drawn in primary colors when Michael was a child and signed “Mike Jackson.” (Don’t you think it’s sad that the child Michael imagined Mickey Mouse as an African American but as an adult, when he was ordering up his children, he decided to have them be Caucasian?)

My friend Bill Wallace, director of the Worcester Historical Museum and one of the world’s great collectors of Disneyana, told me about an auction in Los Angeles when he paid a premium to get in early before the doors opened and found himself standing next to Michael Jackson as they both examined a rare 1930’s Mickey Mouse tea set in its original box. They decided that the price was too low — there must be something wrong with this treasure. Then, as the doors opened to the general public, Michael’s keepers whisked him away.

The Tina Turner impersonator was ready to pay $1,000 for the childish drawing of Mickey but the opening bid was $1,500 and it finished at $20,000 plus a 25 percent commission.

The most expensive item in the collection was a Swarovski crystal-beaded shirt worn in Michael’s 1984 Victory tour that went for $52,500. The man who bought it said “I see Elvis Presley costumes go for a quarter of a million….I’m hoping this will be an investment.”

That’s a pretty good bet.

One of the most revealing and sad items sold in that auction was a handwritten note from Michael to someone named Greg. The misspelled and badly punctuated letter was undated. He wrote:

“Thanks for a magic moment in my life, I hope it was the same for you, please come visit me at Neverland. Lets hope this is the beginning of a lovy friendship and never lose your boyish spirit its immortal.”

The note sold to an unidentified bidder on the phone for $18,750.

Also in today’s Times there was an article about Jeff Koons, the artist who specializes in pop art — if that’s how you describe a giant “balloon dog”. I enjoy his work. Some of it was on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum last year. Now he’s opened a show in London featuring an inflatable lobster and many paintings of Popeye with his can of spinach. (You may recall that Koons has also done statues of himself making love to his ex-wife who was an Italian ex-porn star.)

One of Jeff Koons’ most famous works is pictured above — a life-sized statue of Michael Jackson with his chimpanzee Bubbles. (He had to give Bubbles away because the animal started getting aggressive about the time Michael started having children.)

At the end of the long article about the new exhibit, The Times mentioned the Bubbles and Michael statue. “His 1988 sculpture of Mr. Jackson with Bubbles was decorated with gold metallic paint and brought $5.6 million when it sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2001. Larry Gagosian, the New York dealer who represents Mr. Koons, said on Wednesday that if one from the edition (he made three along with an artist’s proof) was to come up for sale now, it could make more than $20 million. ‘And that’s conservative,’ he added.”

Good thing I don’t have twenty million to buy that statue. I don’t know how I’d ever work it into my home’s décor.

People, Places and Puppets that Pull Me Back to Greece

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)


I’ve been traveling to Greece for the past 40 years (and lived there between 1977 and 1982 when our children were small) and every year certain places and people keep turning up in my photos. When I get back home some of those people and places end up in my paintings. And then I know I’ll go back to find them again.

Two years ago Eleni and I were in Mykonos taking photos at the fish and produce market in the harbor and I painted a particularly animated vegetable seller who was overwhelming his elderly customer with the sales pitch for his tomatoes. I liked that painting so much I used it on my business cards.

This year, about a month ago, we were back in Mykonos for a wedding and found the same manavis (produce seller) in the same spot wearing the same hat. I showed him the card and he insisted that we take more photos of himself and his fellow produce seller Yiorgos. The two men told us sadly that the elderly customer in my painting, named Manoussis, had passed away. The next day Eleni gave those two the photos she took and I promised to mail Mr. Yiannis, the guy in the hat, copies of the painting. We learned that his friend, Yiorgos, has talents beside selling produce—he was one of the musicians playing the accordion at the wedding.

The man playing the lyra—a rare instrument native to Crete —is Yiannis Demarchoyiannis, well into his eighties, the unofficial mayor of his mountainous village of Axos in Crete. He came up to us in the village coffee shop two years ago, and asked if he could join us to practice his English. “You look so young,” he said to me, full of Cretan flattery and charm, “that I thought you were brothers.”

Yiannis insisted we come to his barber shop where he served us pears and his homemade raki (moonshine) and played and sang to us mantadas—the Cretan songs which the singer makes up on the spot in rhyming couplets to suit the occasion. “Take me to New York as your bar-bear,” he sang to Eleni, “and I will style your golden hair.”

This month I took a photograph (above) of the bell tower of the church of Aghias Paraskevis in my husband Nick’s village of Lia, next to the village Inn. The painting is one I did on the same spot many years ago when it was early spring and the Judas trees were in bloom all over the mountain.

Every time we go to Nick’s village, on the Albanian border in northern Greece, we start by flying from Athens to Ioannina, the provincial capital, which was under Turkish rule until 1913. Its most infamous ruler was Ali Pasha who entertained Lord Byron and made a habit of drowning women from his harem and anyone else who annoyed him in the deep lake.

Every time we’re in Ioannina we eat at one of the outdoor restaurants on the lake shore and I always take a photo from the restaurant toward a mosque in the walled Turkish city –now the demotic museum. I’ve painted this scene several times over the years. In the painting above you can see the snow that remains on the mountaintops well into spring. On our recent trip, the snow was gone and I shot the scene with a rose in the foreground.

Every time we’re in Athens we drop by the “Icon guy” as we call him in a tremendously crowded little shop near the Cathedral – at 20 Apollonos, in Plaka. His name is Stavros Tassis and he is a true folk artist who compulsively glues bright cardboard icons all over things—a bread board, a door, a priest’s hat, a chair, a wooden drawer from a bureau—and then distresses it to make it look old. His work always is religious in theme, although he includes small non-religious objects in his eclectic works of art. He is also the source of most of our collection of Greek shadow puppets, the karaghiozi—who are often painted on camel skin and still can be seen in the shadow puppet shows that delight the children in Greek towns and amuse the adults with their satire.

Thanks to the icon guy, who can find almost any puppet you want by rooting around in the bowels of his shop, we have decorated the walls in our house in the village and our porch in Massachusetts with shadow puppets—and it’s really hard to find the authentic hand-painted and signed originals outside of a museum any more.

This year I dropped in to see the icon guy on my last day in Athens. He was muttering about spilling paint on the floor of his shop. (How he can even see the floor is a mystery, the place is so crowded.)

I knew that the greatest of the Karaghiozi puppeteers Evgenios Spatharis, had died a month before at the age of 85. The icon guy showed me a painting he made as a tribute to the great man. He had written on it “Great teacher, the angels are waiting for the great performance”. Then he listed three late, great puppeteers: 1. Spatharis, 2. Kouzaros, and 3. Antonaros.

I hope it’s true that they’re all together with their puppets behind a lighted screen, delighting the child and adult angels in Heaven. That’s a performance I’d to see.

The New Acropolis Museum & the "Elgin Marbles"--Sneak Peek!

(click on the photos to enlarge)

Today, Friday morning, as I walked out of the Grande Bretagne Hotel on Constitution Square in Athens I saw that metal detectors and guard ropes were set up in the hotel lobby and a crowd of police and secret service types outside were screening those who enter. This is because eight heads of state and various church dignitaries are expected to arrive at the GB today and tomorrow for the ceremonies surrounding the opening of the new Acropolis Museum on Saturday.

But last night, Thursday the 18th, Nick and I were lucky enough to attend an opening party at the new museum. About 280 people—mostly Greeks from Athens, I think—got to attend a sort of dress rehearsal. It was completely thrilling and moving and certainly the best Museum party I’ve ever attended. Thanks to the photos I took with my little digital camera, I’m able to give you a look at it all ahead of the foreign and domestic press, who are invited to do it all tonight (Friday). Then on Saturday will be the official opening with the heads of state and their bodyguards.

I realize the world press has already printed a lot of words and photos about the new museum because of the controversy over the “Elgin Marbles” which will move into high gear this weekend. Books have been written on this subject but to tell it in a nutshell — back in the early 1800’s when Greece was still suffering under its 450-year occupation by the Turks, British diplomat Lord Elgin got permission from the Turks to chop about half of the priceless sculptures by Phidias off the frieze and metopes of the Parthenon and cart them back to his estate in England. This act of desecration gave him bad karma leading to personal, physical and economic disasters (he lost his wife, his nose and his money, for example) which forced him to sell the marbles to the British Museum for 35,000 pounds.

Since then, Greeks and Philhellenes have been trying to get the British Museum to give back the marbles so they could be rejoined with the other half of the Parthenon sculptures, but the British have replied that they could protect them from pollution better and show them to more people than if they were in Athens. The new
Acropolis Museum, ten years in the building, has been created partly as a reply to those assertions.

In the new museum everything is climate-controlled and the surviving Parthenon marbles are displayed in a special top floor gallery facing the building where they originally existed. It’s a dramatic sight, especially at night when the huge sculptures are reflected in the window wall with the Parthenon lighted high above.

At the opening last night, after speeches by officials including Minister of Culture Antonis Samaras, challenging the British to return the marbles, we were led on a tour of the museum’s five levels. As always happens in Athens, when they started to dig on this spot, an entire pre-Christian village emerged underground, so the museum has been built on pillars so that the excavations can continue underneath. And the floors of the museum have been made of glass so that the excavation is visible even from the top floor. The glass floors made for a lot of nervous tiptoeing last night especially among those guests with fear of heights or extra-high stilettos.

On the tour, we were told not to take photos in the top gallery featuring the controversial Parthenon marbles, displayed in a continuous frieze, as they were meant to be shown on the Parthenon — with white plaster casts standing in for the missing British Museum marbles.

After the tour, we were led to the third floor where a string quartet serenaded while we filled plates from three separate buffets of bite-sized Greek delicacies. Then we wandered out onto the immense terrace jutting toward the illuminated Acropolis and I realized that there was a light show projected onto a wall and a large building that created a horizontal screen several stories high right below the Parthenon. (Other light shows were being projected on the front of the museum building itself.) The show featured objects from the museum collection but they were cleverly animated—a silent, smiling archaic statue of a goddess would slowly wink, a calf being carried on a marble kouros statue’s shoulders would suddenly swish his tail, and a primitive bird on a red clay vase would suddenly come alive and fly off toward the next building and up to the sky. (There were even archaic red cat figures rambling across the horizon—perfect for my next Greek Cats book!)

I watched the light show for over an hour, slack-jawed in wonder. Every new scene was unforgettable and a stunning way of dramatizing the treasures in the museum and making them come alive as a moving and vital part of the life of Athens in the 21st century.

On our way out we were given favors—a silver medallion stamped with two archaic horses from the museum collection. As we climbed the steps to the pedestrian walkway outside, toward the majestic outline of the illuminated Parthenon, we saw that dozens, maybe hundreds of passers-by who had not had the privilege of going inside were gathered, watching the light show.

I hope it will continue long after the festivities this weekend, and that everyone will have the thrill of walking through this new world-class museum at the foot of the Acropolis.

I also hope the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum will eventually be restored to this site where they were born. The elderly President of the Museum Dimitrios Pandermalis, said that he believes they will be returned someday, “but I wonder if I will live to see it.”

Pelicans, Rabbits, Dogs & Scads of Cats

(Click on photos to enlarge)


After 40 years of traveling in Greece and photographing the country’s ubiquitous cats, I put the best of the feline photos into my book “The Secret Life of Greek Cats” last year — telling each cat’s story, recounting their folktales and insights into Greek life, food, history, myths and holidays.

This year, I still can’t stop photographing every cat I see, so I thought I’d share some new ones taken on this trip. But I couldn’t overlook a couple of dogs we encountered, as well as rabbits, pheasants and of course Petros—the famous pelican of Mykonos.

First in the photos above is a cat we saw guarding the temples in the Roman Forum of Athens, right below the Acropolis, next is a cat on Mykonos who loved having her back scratched by the “Big Eleni.” Third is a cat who tried to crash Maggie’s Mykonos wedding by walking down the aisle ahead of the bride.

Next row shows Eleni and Marina getting to know Petros, the pelican who is the mascot of Mykonos. (There’s a Mrs. Petros too, and several other pelicans who keep an eye on the fishing boats as they come in every day.) Next is Marina holding Ruda, a morbidly obese and very spoiled little dog from Nick’s village of Lia who thinks she’s a person. Third is Marina again, getting to know a puppy belonging to our Corfu cousins, and finally — a sign on a Corfu handicraft shop asking if anyone would take six orphaned kittens and keep the siblings together.

Third row shows what we found when we took a little boat from Corfu’s new harbor to the nearby island of Vidos to watch the sun set. The tiny island used to be home to expatriated Serbian officers (who got cholera and died), then to a juvenile detention school. Now the imposing buildings are in ruins and there is only a single taverna (and a lot of camp grounds,) but to our astonishment the island is teeming with rabbits—large and small and all colors—maybe thousands of them—and they’re tame. So are the pheasants that are nearly as numerous as the bunnies. The third photo show our Corfu cousins holding some of their four kittens as well as the afore-mentioned puppy.

The fourth row shows some of the six cats belonging to a British lady named Val who has a beautiful little resort of stone cottages on Corfu. Three of her cats are all white and also deaf. I already knew that white cats with blue eyes are usually deaf (it’s a genetic thing) but the one of Val’s that I photographed most—named Nobu—has greenish eyes.

Finally are two photographs of the hard-working taverna cats who decorate nearly every outdoor restaurant in Greece and usually wait very politely for scraps from the table. On the left are two cats at the Cephalonian taverna of Annoula where we were treated to the delicious local treats by Aunt Lillian, and on the right is a cat at the pink and blue Lefkada taverna called “The Seven Islands”.

Our Greek odyssey is drawing to a close in a week and we’re now in Athens where the dogs outnumber the cats. Right before the Olympic Games in 2004, the city picked up all the street dogs, had them spayed, vaccinated and dressed with a color-coded collar to show they belong to the city and put them back in the streets where they seem to be well fed by local merchants. The dog that lies sleeping by the door of the super-elegant Grande Bretagne hotel is nearly as fat as Ruda.