Stimulus package with lye

Barack. Tim. Let's talk.

I don't know where the gazillions of dollars approved by Congress are going. Are they flowing like Smetana's Moldau grandly to the sea? Or are they going down the drain?

I am rooting for the drain and cheering for keeping the flow open. I want transparency and full accountability, and especially no hair clogs. No more trickling.

Every trip to Albertsons to buy Drano is better than not stimulating the economy at all.



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Daphne, Jenufa, J. Sterling, and the arrival of spring

Driving north from Topeka, Kansas on a chilly morning, Janacek's opera was the right choice for the Buick's cd player. The Daylight Saving Time sun was barely awake at 7:30, shining low on the east side of barns and old farmhouses, and spotlighting recent tree damage along U.S. 75.

"Jenufa" is all about raw, chilly light focusing on damaged individuals in a claustrophobic rural village. The tragedy of the opera differs from that of my immigrant ancestors, but every listening gives me new insights into their experience.

Plus, in the opera/drive-time category, "Jenufa" fits exactly the easy 127 mile trip. The recording takes me right to the entrance to Arbor Lodge State Historical Park in Nebraska City.

The park isn't really open this early in the spring, but people were walking their dogs on the grounds, and the driveways weren't blocked. The park is now encircled by the properties of the Arbor Day Farm, the Lied Lodge Conference Center, and the Arbor Day Foundation.



I love the juxtaposition of the statue commemorating J. Sterling Morton, the early Nebraska journalist, statesman, agriculturalist, and conservationist behind the sculpture of the Greek wood nymph, Daphne. It's been way too long since I consulted Edith Hamilton's Mythology!

Edith gives a short take of the Roman poet Ovid's version of the Greek nature myth. Daphne was a young huntress with wild hair quite uninterested in suitors of either Olympian or mortal variety. When the god Apollo caught sight of her, he decided she needed a beauty and fashion makeover, but then she would be just the perfect girl for him. Wise girl, Daphne fled from Apollo's attentions, and, with the assistance of her river-god father, was transformed into a laurel tree. This isn't really the best time for me to recount my own dang Apollo's demands for beauty and fashion makeovers, not to mention pierced navels, but Daphne has my complete sympathy.

Founded by J. Sterling Morton in Nebraska in 1872, National Arbor Day is celebrated each year on the last Friday in April. J. Sterling Morton's home, a 52-room neo-colonial mansion offered lovely reflections of bare trees in the leaded windows.



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Litton Farewell

This week I've been saying good-bye. Breakfasted with a dear, crazy art teacher friend who will soon be living in a cute college town and undoubtedly scrounging for interesting recyclables back east. Said good-bye to a incredibly talented young teacher I've had the joy of working with for three years. She's also moving to the right side of the map, taking my enormous respect (and her cute husband) along.

Last Sunday I said good-bye to Maestro Litton of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. True, I didn't know him personally. Andrew Litton and I shared just a few afternoons in the last year, but they were powerful aesthetic experiences.

On Sunday Litton introduced me to Elgar's Enigma Variations, and my world added many friends. In January he gave me the transcending gift of Janacek's Glagolitic Mass. Last fall he transformed me to glowing particles of pure energy with Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5. During the winter his youthful excitement before conducting Ives: General William Booth Enters Into Heaven made me feel like a co-conspirator in a raucous, colorful scientific experiment (or a bar joke); Red Barber, Red Skelton, and Red Grooms Go Into a Symphony.

I sit in the cheap seats behind the orchestra when I go to the DSO, or else up in the cardio workout section known as the Grand Tier (or K2). I love sitting in the Dress Circle Loft's eight dollar seats because I can look down on the orchestra members and straight into Maestro Litton's face. I consider those cheap seats the Catbird Section. The Grand Tier has its visual moments, too. Sunday's violin soloist, Gil Shaham, looked like he was trying to kick down trousers afflicted with horrible static cling without missing a note! On the drive home I wondered what that spray stuff was that we used to fight static cling.

Saw in the newspaper that the Littons are moving to the right side of the map to be near Andrew's father. I hope three generations of Litton males will head on out to some ballgames!

Catbird seat/empty nest catbird 1731, common name for the North American thrush (Dumetella Carolinensis), so called from its warning cry, which resembles that of a cat. Catbird seat is a 19c. Dixieism, popularized by Brooklyn Dodgers baseball announcer Red Barber and by author James Thurber (1942). " 'Sitting in the catbird seat' meant sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him." [Thurber, "Stories from New Yorker"] According to my bird book, a catbird is a close relative of the mockingbird, the Official Texas State Bird.

Carl on your answering machine, Nash for three

Starting April eighth, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, will air at eleven a.m. Saturdays instead of Sundays at one p.m. on KERA 90.1 FM. This is great! Ever since I found that KUCV in Nebraska airs WWDTM at ten a.m. Saturdays I've had to use the streaming online audio to get my fix faster.

Good things are better when shared across generations. Few things beat the glow of a cafe breakfast with your teen sons, their healthy appetites, and their grandparents.

I love discovering that my dad is equally partial to Wait Wait on NPR, and to the wind quintets of Janacek. We sat in shared delight watching Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns make nirvana three-pointers one evening.

Maybe the best was sharing the quest for the the true Tuna Frenchee. The real deal is the goal of the King's archaeologists. Where can we uncover that perfect food of the Olympians? Is the sandwich perfectly battered and deep-fried? Are the frescoes as fresh as the day they were painted? Where can we salute the Starkist and stripes? Word of the Day verisimilitude \ver-uh-suh-MIL-uh-tood; -tyood\, noun:1. The appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true.2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.

The cheese frenchee sandwiches at Amigos at 70th and A Streets in Lincoln are okay, but they won't satisfy a true connoisseur of the old King's drive-in frenchees. Don and Millie's Lenten tuna frenchees are closer on both batter and filling.

Music to my ears

Saturday's wonderful rain on this region so very parched was a fabulous sound for dozing in and out, and finally getting up and going. I was glad to run my weekend errands in the rain, as if I'm as much in a drought as the yards and fields.

I could not get enough of Janácek's Glagolitic Mass at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's performance Thursday evening. The piece is only thirty-nine minutes long. I wished the glorious music would have continued twenty more at least.

I was drawn to the concert by its Czech Night program which also included Dvorák's Seventh Symphony. I'm an itty-bit Bohemian, one quarter to be exact. My great-grandparents left Bohemia at the time when Dvorák, Smetana, and Janácek were all alive and composing.* Patriotism, national identity, and speech patterns of the language play important parts in these composers' music.

I learned to love "The Moldau," by Smetana, as a little girl watching Captain Kangaroo. About once a year his show featured the music accompanied by a film of the brooks growing into the river and flowing to the sea. I thank The Captain for this beautiful multisensory explanation of the water cycle. The film and music often come to mind as I work on my pet recycling project, and when I hear of my son's visits to Prague. The Moldau river is also called the Vltava, and flows through Prague.

How wonderful to hold that lesson combining music, beautiful photography, and science for forty-five years! What more can a teacher hope to impart?

But back to the Glagolitic Mass. I just love Janácek's music. It seems to mine into my core, and then sends white light down the shaft. That was my feeling when I first heard Jenufa, and still when I listen to it. I've been listening to some of his music for wind quintet lately, and have the same sensation. This performance was spine-tingling. The organ postlude was mind-blowing.



Glagolitic Mass is not something your surgeon removes and sends to the lab. Glagolitic refers to an alphabet created by St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the Ninth century A.D. to translate the Bible into the language of the Czech region of Moravia. It is related to the cursive Greek alphabet.

You can read the full text of Scott Cantrell's review for the Dallas Morning News. It's not written in Glagolitic. He writes eloquently about the music, and I wonder if he is just an itty-bit Czech, too:

I can't remember a musical experience more thrilling than the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's performance Thursday night of Leos Janácek's Glagolitic Mass.

What stunning music this is, a wondrous kaleidoscope of sound. To the traditional texts of the mass, but in Old Church Slavonic, brasses bray wild fanfares, strings churn, winds burble, the organ rumbles and roars. It's a score made for the generous acoustics of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center...

*Smetana, Bedrich (1824-1884), Dvorák, Antonín (1841 - 1904), Janácek, Leos (1854-1928).

Turning into my mother-in-law

Yikes! There's a scary thought.



A million years ago we took my in-laws to see Alvin Ailey at Omaha's Orpheum Theater. After a stunning performance that included "Revelations", we settled into the car for the drive home. My mother-in-law announced that the dancers, "must do Jazzercise everyday."

Tonight I watched Mary Preston, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's resident organist perform the postlude to Leos Janacek's "Glagolitic Mass" in the gorgeous Meyerson Symphony Center. A thought bubble appeared above my head with the words, "That girl's getting an aerobic workout."

Good golly. Maybe Richard Simmons will be the next featured soloist.