Skip to content

The Lark: Vol 2, Issue 20, March 2023

larkwebsitebannersmall

INSIDE THIS EDITION:

  • SPOTLIGHT/THE MEMOIR: I Hate Bats by Bill Hudson
  • ANNIE FOR JAZZ LOVERS by Ruth Levy Guyer
  • HELP! I WANT TO LEAD AN LLC CLASS, BUT WHERE DO I START? by Maggie Miles
  • REMINDER: Current shows at RISD MUSEUM

Spotlight/The Memoir

I Hate Bats
by Bill Hudson

I hate bats. I do not claim that my aversion rises to the level of a genuine phobia. A vision of these dismal creatures does not produce in me cold sweats, cringing revulsion, or fainting spells, like one associates with genuine phobias. Bats are ugly and repulsive with their grotesque ears, wrinkled faces, bulging eyes, and sharp little fangs. I would never have been likely to cuddle the hairy little brutes or stroke their leathery wings, yet even in all their ugliness, I would have been happy to live in co-existence with the miserable creatures. My hatred arises from distressing encounters with representatives of the species on two occasions. Now, I do admit that my hatred for an entire species based on the action of only two of their number might be considered excessive, even prejudicial. I hope my account of these encounters in this little essay will convince a sympathetic reader that the trauma these miserable bats induced justifies my on-going hatred. Moreover, my experiences convinced me that the deplorable actions of these individual bats derived from behavioral patterns instinctive to the breed not the random impulse of particular bats. If ever I come upon a bat again, I would expect a repeat of my experience. I hate bats.

There was a time when peace prevailed between me and bats. When I was an undergraduate student in Southern Indiana, I went spelunking on a couple occasions in some of the many caves that adorn the region. When one enters a cave, one should expect to encounter bats and so we did. I recall moving through narrow passages only inches from the hundreds of bats hanging from ceiling and walls around us.

This experience did not bother me in the least nor did it bother the bats who slept peacefully as we scooted by. At the time, I also could expound on the valuable ecological contribution of bats who nightly cleansed the air of millions of mosquitoes and other insects. Bats do play a valuable role in the balance of nature. This benign attitude toward the bat species would still be with me today had it not been for my two encounters, the first of which is related here.

Encounter #1

My first encounter with an abusive bat occurred at the end of my senior year at Indiana University. At the time, I lived in the basement of an old house about a block from campus. How I came to live in this basement is a long story that need not concern us here. I describe my abode as a basement rather than a basement apartment because the word apartment suggests something more refined than the jerry-rigged living quarters in that basement.

The basement had its own entryway down some stone steps at the north side of the house. The door to the basement, secured with a padlock, opened into an area containing the house’s furnace, water heater, and electrical boxes. This utilities room took up about one third of the total basement area, a plywood partition separating it from the rest of the basement. A number of holes had been cut in the top of this partition for the steam pipes and water lines that served the house’s upper levels. A detail about these holes should have forewarned me about the events to be described in this narrative. A previous resident had stuffed old dirty rags around the pipes to seal off any gaps between the pipes and the sides of the holes. Someone had been concerned to forestall invasion into the basement living area.

A door in the center of the plywood partition, secured with another padlock, provided entry into my living quarters. On entering, to the left, was a bathroom area with a toilet surrounded on three sides with more plywood, a large sink with a small, mirrored cabinet above, and the “shower”. This latter consisted of a hose with an attached shower head draped over a hook in the ceiling. Directly below shower head was a drain in the basement floor. The end of the hose divided into two components each connected to what must have been at one time hot and cold-water faucets for a clothes washer.

Stairs going up to a door to the first floor, locked on the first-floor side, partially divided the bathroom area from the rest of the living quarters. Immediately to right was a large table that served as my desk. A bed ran across the basement’s south wall opposite the desk with a small stand holding my stereo record player just below a small basement window on the west wall at the end of the desk and bed. Just to the left, a small couch, facing the stereo, stretched from the head of the bed to about four feet from the base of the stairs. Behind the couch was my kitchen: a small table with two chairs and a short wood plank/ cinder block bookcase with a double burner hot plate and a toaster oven on the top shelf. The bookcase ran along the east wall below another basement window.

These two windows, one over my stereo and the other over the kitchen shelf were the only two in the basement. The lower two shelves of the kitchen bookcase provided storage for a few dishes, pans and skillets, and some cutlery. The entire area was lit with a couple of floor lamps, a desk lamp, and a ceiling florescent light turned on by a chain that hung down just by the side of my bed.

From this description of my basement abode, the reader would be justified in wondering whatever possessed me to live nearly an entire year in such primitive quarters. Even absent the bat-related encounter to be described here, this was not a healthy or safe place to live. The place clearly was a fire trap. Had a fire erupted in the furnace area, a likely place for fires to start, I would have had no exit.

The door to the upstairs was locked, neither of the small windows offered a chance to leave – I do not think they could be opened. The basement was not fit for human habitation. But to my post-adolescent addled brain it was a pad and, besides, the rent was extremely low!

Despite the primitive conditions, I lived quite comfortably, in my mind at least, in the basement from September 1969 until May 1970. I sat on the couch, read articles in the New York Review of Books and pretended to understand them, listened to Simon and Garfunkel on my stereo, and occasionally entertained lady friends with gourmet meals produced on my two-burner hot plate.

Over the course of the year, I got to know my upstairs neighbors, a couple of graduate students, who even invited me up a few times for drinks and what I thought to be profound conversation. What they thought of me, the weird kid living in squalid conditions in their basement, I do not know. Things went along fine until my fateful last week in the basement.

A few weeks before that final week, when, upon returning home, I switched on the light to the furnace room and perceived two brown patches attached to the plywood wall a couple of feet to the side of my entry door. From my spelunking experience, I quickly understood that I was looking at two resting bats. Approaching my door gingerly so as not to disturb the creatures, I let myself into my pad, now, understanding the significance of those rags stuffed around the pipes above.  Assuming those rags and the good nature of the bats to be protection from any close encounter, I proceeded with little thought to what I had seen. Besides there was a lot going on. Nixon had ordered the invasion of Cambodia, Ohio National Guardsmen had killed some protesting students at Kent State University, the IU campus was in an uproar with daily demonstrations, sit ins outside classroom buildings, and I owed my Comparative Literature professor a final paper. Although final exams had been canceled, my professor did not cancel my paper pointing out that it had been due well before any American troops had crossed into Cambodia. So, when my final week in the basement rolled around, I had not had any further sightings of bats and I was concentrating, between anti-war protest, on finishing up my paper.

The next to the last night that I was to be in my basement, I was sleeping peacefully when a rustling noise above my head woke me up. In the dark, I was at first puzzled by what I was hearing then I remembered those bats I had seen in the furnace room.  A bat was circling just over my head! I immediately pulled my blanket up over my head, lay quite still, hoping it would just leave. It did not. Woosh, woosh, sounds continued just on the other side of my blanket barrier.

 

The situation called for desperate action. Mustering all my courage, I raised up out of bed using my blanket as a shield, pulled the light switch by my bed to turn on the overhead fluorescent light, and dashed for the stairs to the first-floor door. Looking behind me I could see the bat making repeated dashes in my direction whether to simply exam who this strange screaming creature was or to plant his ugly fangs on my person I could not be sure.

I assumed the latter. All the time waving my blanket to deflect the bat, I pounded on the door. “Let me out – bat – bat” I screamed. Pretty soon the door latch clicked, the door opened, and I escaped. After some explanation, my graduate student buddies consented to my spending the balance of the night on their couch. The next morning, I opened the door and searched below for the bat. He was gone. Hoping that awful experience was behind me, I went down and prepared for the day.

Late the next night I sat at my desk typing the final draft of my paper. The planned agenda for the next day was to turn in my paper then move my belongings to a real above ground apartment a few blocks away that a friend and I had rented for the summer. As I was typing my paper’s last paragraph, I heard a noise just behind my head. There he was. The bat had returned to bedevil me. I could see him close – only inches from my face. His little eyes seemed to glare at me, although if bats are truly blind the glare was in my imagination. I could see his ugly wrinkled face and those fangs that I imagined sinking into my neck. Once again, I dashed for the stairs screaming “Bat-bat” and pounding on the door seeking admittance. My friends indulged me for one last night on their couch.

The next day, as planned, I finished my paper, got it to my professor, and returned to pack up my things for the move to the apartment. Thankfully there was no sign of bats. I also was thankful that I was leaving that basement realizing how lucky I was to have only encountered the bat my final days there. I spent the next three months with my friend in our apartment, above ground and quite free of bats. At the end of the summer, I left Bloomington for Providence, Rhode Island, leaving, I thought, bats behind me. That would prove to be wrong.

Watch for Encounter #2 in the next issue of The Lark.

larkbirdalonexs

Annie for Jazz Lovers
by Ruth Levy Guyer

Many of us have become groupies of Clay Nordhill, the wonderful jazz guitarist, who has been teaching the five-week summer jazz course at LLC for many years. And a subset of us have spent many summer Monday nights in Wakefield, where Clay hosts a weekly jazz concert in the park. So, at the end of last summer, we took note when Clay announced that he had been hired to be in the touring musical theater company for Annie, which would be traveling around the United States from September to June.

Then, a week later, we learned that Clay’s girlfriend, Jen, who is a classical pianist, would also be in the orchestra. Soon, Jen was elevated to assistant music director. And, just before the tour began, Sam, the bassist who often plays with Clay, was hired on, because he plays an unlikely pair of instruments—acoustic bass and sousaphone—and so that one guy could fill the last two slots that the musical director needed to fill.

During the summer, Mark and I had taken our two older grandchildren to Wakefield a few times, and they had met Clay and Jen and Sam and also Clay’s parents, who are also always at the Monday night shows. One of those evenings after Jen had finished complimenting our adorable 9-year old granddaughter on her cute dress, Jen said “if you get to Annie at PPAC in February, let us know, and we can show you around backstage.”

So, remembering that generous, warm invitation, I sent an email to Clay in late January saying that we would be at the matinee on February 4 with the kids and was there a chance we could say hi to him and Jen. Clay wrote me back saying they were having a wonderful time seeing the country, the tour had been going well, and they’d love to see us. But there was a problem. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “our Covid protocols have been so strict that the mothers of the orphans aren’t even permitted backstage.”

My first thought was… are we talking here about orphans separated at US borders from their immigrant parents? Why is that relevant to Annie? Then I realized he meant the kids in the cast who are living in cruel Miss Hannigan’s orphanage along with little orphan Annie. He did say that we might come around to the stage door to see them at the end of the show or we could try to make our way down to the orchestra pit at the intermission.

I decided we should attempt option 2, because February 4 was the day that our temperatures here in Providence dipped to minus 6, and the attraction of standing outside a stage door in the cold eluded me.

So, at intermission, we went against the tide of people streaming up the aisle—PPAC was sold out that day and each of the 3,100 audience members was hurrying up the aisle to buy a snack or acquire some Annie merchandise or visit a bathroom, or to accomplish all of the above. Lo and behold, there, deep in the pit was Clay standing in his soundbox with his guitar, ukulele, and banjo; and there, still standing on her conductor’s platform, was Jen. Almost all of the other musicians had taken the opportunity to leave the pit to get a drink or breathe some fresh air or smoke or eat something or make another kind of pit stop.

Jennifer Christina, keyboardist and associate musical director for Annie

Jen hugged and kissed the kids; Clay chatted with us and then called out to Sam at the other side of the pit when he returned from his break and reminded Sam that our grandson was the kid who played bass and wanted to talk about when Sam elected to pluck or to bow. I squeezed in quick conversations with Jen, Clay, and Sam and also with Clay’s parents, who were leaning over the railing as were we.

As the orchestra pit began filling up with the other musicians and they began tuning and warming up their many instruments—there were two reed players, one person playing violin and viola, a drummer, someone playing cornet and trumpet and flugelhorn, another playing trombone and euphonium—we flew back up the aisle, once again bucking the human slipstream. Our seats were three flights up in peanut heaven—the only seats we’d been able to purchase—and we all settled in for the second act.

It was an impressive show. The acoustics at PPAC are excellent (unlike those at Trinity and The Gamm, where both Mark and I have recently sent in feedback that, if they want people in our demographic to keep coming, they should give the actors microphones). Annie’s music was clear and strong and majestic. And what a thrill that our friend Jen was the conductor for that performance. She had a keyboard in front of her, and, even from our distant seats, we could see that she sometimes was conducting with two hands but also, at times, was playing her keyboard with one hand while conducting with the other.

This production of Annie stuck closely to the Annie story that first hit the comic pages of The New York Daily News in 1924. The main theme was Annie’s optimism and charm and winning ways and her hopeful search for the parents who had dropped her off at the orphanage when she was a baby. Daddy Warbucks’s can-do spirit eventually springs Annie from the orphanage, with some help from his friends, including FDR. It’s an old-fashioned musical for sure, alluding to the New Deal, communism, the labor movement, and Hoovervilles, and there was no updating to make it resonate with contemporary politics. In other words, a true and simple revival.

The children in the cast had remarkable singing voices and dancing skills (as did the adults), and who knew that Sandy the dog would be an actual dog! Jen told us that there are two Sandys—George and Addison—who have been traveling with the company, and she said that rarely does either one of them engage in unprofessional behavior on stage.

The show has ended at PPAC, but the company is continuing its US tour, and here’s the website where you can see if a future performance might be near where you are (https://annietour.com/tour/). I know that Clay and Jen would be thrilled to see more LLC people at their shows.

larkbirdalonexs

“Help! I Want to Lead an LLC Class, But Where Do I Start?”
by Maggie Miles

One of the beauties of LLC is that the sky is the limit when it comes to class offerings. We may reflect on our various careers and choose a subject we know and feel comfortable teaching, or we may enjoy a particular hobby and design a course around it.

We have heard many times that we do not need to be “experts” in a particular field, and we might be inclined to leave our comfort zone and choose a subject that we do not know much about.

A few years ago, Celene Healy and I knew it would be fun to teach a course together. We were both retired English teachers and we immediately started thinking about short stories, plays and novels. We then started talking about how we had been noticing that the word “empathy,” — “ability to understand what someone else is feeling,”—was in the news a lot.

Could we design an entire course around just one word?

Gabriele Rico, in her book, Writing the Natural Way, developed “clustering” as her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University in 1976.

Clustering is a brainstorming technique that invites you to generate ideas based on one word. You draw a large circle with spokes projecting outward. (Think of a child’s drawing of the sun.) You then write down all the words or phrases triggered by the word, placing them at the end of each “sun ray.” Within minutes, we had an extensive list!
One of us had written down the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit as a great example of empathy. This book led us to a long list of other children’s books that focused on empathy. Bingo! We now had one slot filled on our syllabus. Other slots were filled by films, art, and music.

EMPATHY

Researching the word ”empathy” led us to all kinds of articles such as: “Can Empathy Be Taught? “What are the Attributes of an Empathetic Person?” “What are the Emotional or Psychological Aspects of Empathy?”

Before we knew it, our syllabus started taking shape, but we felt like we were a bit out of our depth. Could we find a few guest speakers who were experts in this area?

We remembered reading about a course on empathy at Brown University Medical School. After all, we all want our doctors to be a bit more empathetic. After several phone calls, we found a medical student who was not only willing, but eager to talk to us. We also invited a psychologist to discuss “negative empathy” and “the downsides of empathy.” We ended up having no trouble designing a syllabus for an eight-week course. In fact, we had too much material!

Remember Atticus Finch’s line in To Kill A Mockingbird: “You have to climb into someone’s skin and walk around in it?” Over the years, his advice has been misquoted as “to walk in someone else’s shoes,” which is certainly easier to visualize.

Well, guess what? There are now traveling Empathy Museums around the world! And what are in the museums but donated shoes. People can literally walk in the shoes of others. While they walk, they listen to audio recordings of the owners of the shoes —from chefs to firefighters.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a small gift—three words that I think would make three great LLC courses— “Obsession,” “Risks,” and “Boundaries.” Maybe I’ll see you in a future LLC catalog!

REMINDER: Current Shows at the RISD Museum

Three current shows in the galleries and cafe of the RISD Museum (20 North Main Street, Providence) offer interesting and provocative opportunities to consider themes of the history of slavery and racism and the roles that art and artists (from the 17th century to the 21st century) play in unlocking the stories of diversity, equality and inclusion, past and present. For descriptions of the events see The Lark, Volume 2, Issue 19 ("Newsletters" on the LLC website).

Art and Design from 1900 to Now

This show closes June 9, 2024

Past Made Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black Atlantic

This show closes August 6, 2023

We’ve Been Here Before

(In the museum café and on the wall just outside the museum’s Benefit Street entrance)

This show closes June 25, 2023

RISD Museum Hours:

Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Thursday and Friday
12 noon – 7 p.m.

Admission is free on Sunday from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m and on Thursday and Friday evenings from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m.

larkbirdalonexs