Sunday, June 23, 2013

The Inaugural Poet


On Thursday evening I went to the Wellfleet Congregational Church to hear the poet Richard Blanco read.  The younger generation refers to the venue as "The Congo" ... I've been to four or five events there, and the church is beautiful, but none of the events I've attended had anything to do with Christianity, and I suppose they rent it out for maintenance income.

Blanco looked so superbly tailored!  Handsome, bedecked in a creamy sports coat, white shirt, baby-blue tie, and blue trousers.  And he was so funny (about his poems, as well as in most of them) that he could make a living as a stand-up comedian. His poems are his autobiography. The photo below is from after the reading, when he'd moved to the basement to autograph books.





Tuesday, June 11, 2013

I can be a little slow ....

In March of 1981 a friend named Doug Best wrote and directed a play called "Beyond the Revolt of Mamie Stover."  The production was "mounted" at The Back Room Bar in The Crown and Anchor Motel in Provincetown. I had received a postcard announcement, and I thought the card was cool and worth hanging onto. How cool was I? Well, not too cool where this card was concerned, for it was about fifteen years after receiving it that I realized it was a take-off on one of Bob Dylan's album covers, and I was a Bob Dylan fanatic. I supposed that everyone else had immediately recognized that the cover of "Bringing It All Back Home" was the inspiration for the postcard; that only I missed it.