Birthdays are often a meld of disappointment, relief, enthusiasm, ennui, and if you’re lucky a couple of unexpected but happy surprises. My 44thdawned without fanfare or let-down, on a beautiful sunny day in Boston, with blue skies and gentle breezes.
It began in simple and quiet form: a breakfast at Sonsie’s. Now, apart from a cocktail or two, I’ve never had a proper sit-down meal at Sonsie’s. I remember when it first opened so many years ago, and how popular and crowded it had been, and ever since then I’ve sort of avoided it. Not for any specific reason, it was one of those places that was always there. The older I get however, the more I realize how fleeting our time here can be. No day but today, and so we began with a mimosa, and a panhandler reaching into the cafe area for donated spare change. He was quickly chased off by a manager, and the live theater of Newbury Street resumed.
We made a few shopping stops before winding up at my favorite place in all of Boston, the Public Garden, where a fleet of geese and a few very sociable squirrels crossed our path. By this point. Andy was tired out and headed back to the condo, while I went on to Downtown Crossing for some solo shopping.
On every birthday, and every special day in my life really, I somehow manage to find a bit of alone time. Usually it’s not intentionally-planned, it just happens, and I am always a little grateful for it. I traipsed around the bustling stores downtown, then returned to the condo with enough time for some stoop gazing.
The Braddock Park fountain gurgled in the near distance and I watched the people and dogs walk by. It was a perfect afternoon – sunny but comfortable, and a beautiful breeze kept things cool. We had an early dinner at Explorateur, and though the Avery bar at the Ritz Carlton was closed, we found another place nearby that served a pre-theater cocktail.
The next morning was overcast and windy, the leaves of the oak trees lining Columbus Avenue were turned inside out, and when the host at Petit Robert asked if we would prefer to sit outside or in, we chose the latter, where we could watch the windy day safely ensconced behind a pane of glass. A post-birthday brunch made for an enjoyable Sunday morning, and after procuring cookies at Cafe Madeleine, we were back en route to Albany. Another trip around the sun had begun…
It began with a Thursday afternoon entrance to Boston, which was super-hot and sticky, and not at all conducive to walking, so we took an Uber around the corner to the new Four Seasons residential building which housed Zuma. Surrounded by construction, Dalton Street looked like it held promise, but it was still a bit far off. No matter. Once inside, it was a different world, and as we dramatically ascended a winding staircase that led from the lobby to the restaurant, I was a happy camper.
Andy was game and generous enough to try the signature omakase dinner of eight to ten chef-curated dishes (or so they told us) and the endless parade began. We ordered a pair of cocktails: the lychee and rose petal martini for me, and the burning history for him (Suntori Toki whiskey, honey, ginger, egg whites and barrel stave smoke).
Then more dishes came.
And still more dishes.
By the time the dessert boat of molten chocolate cake, raspberry meringue, and a couple of different ice creams arrived, we were beyond full. But you only live once, and this was worth it. (Even if it filled us up for the entire weekend.)
The next day we headed over to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Gender Bending Fashion exhibit. They seem to be in step with the Met’s ‘Camp’ theme, and did their best with some memorable ensembles that I actually recalled from various red carpet moments.
We also got to try out the newly-refurbished restaurant (formerly Bravo and now 465), which had dishes that looked as gorgeous as they tasted. One would expect no less from the MFA.
Part of my birthday celebration included a visit to the Downton Abbey exhibition at the Castle at Park Plaza, and it was better than expected, as well as perfectly-timed for the release of the movie next month.
It’s my new favorite haunt, with a glorious cocktail menu, including the artfully-rendered ‘Sunset Over Instanbul’ – a perfectly-balanced concoction of gin, lemon, apricot liqueur, and orange bitters.
We ended the night across another street – at Strip by Strega – where a delicious steak dinner granted Andy his beef wish. We returned to the condo, where I spent my last night as a 43-year-old, peacefully convalescing until the clock ticked to #44…
On this date exactly 18 years ago, Andy drove me to the Department of State, then at the bottom of State Street, at the corner of Broadway in downtown Albany, where I began my career with the State of New York. Nervous and scared and unsure of where it would take me, I stepped into the role of Data Entry Machine Operator, the very lowest on the totem of entry-level positions, and began the journey that would become my state career.
When this blog has its fall season premiere – tentatively slated for September 23 – I’ll expound upon that journey – and all the various twists and turns it has taken over the years. It probably won’t appeal to anyone outside of fellow government workers (and probably not even them to be honest), but it seems as good a place as any to begin our 16thfall season on this website, when we look to re-set the stage, when others are going back to school and getting another chance to begin again. School and work, comedy and tragedy, yin and yang – we will be right where we need to be – and hopefully you’ll come along for the ride.
Before that, however, a few more weeks of summer are at hand, and a couple days of summer wrap-ups since I stuck around for the sunny season this year. Whether you liked it or not…
Our glorious brown turkey fig tree, which made such a showing already this year, gave me two delicious birthday presents when we returned from Boston (more on that trip in a bit). A pair of figs was finally ripe, and I hastened to cut them up and devour them in case we don’t get any more. The tree has been producing a multitude of fruit, but none of it looked close to being ripe, so I’d been researching tricks to hasten the process along.
The first was an instinctual one: to cut off some branches and pinch off a few growing tips to signify that the plant may be in peril and fruit production should commence to ripening as soon as possible. I also wanted to save a few stems in case our lovely pot doesn’t survive a winter in the garage.
The second was less well-known, and slightly more controversial. Like bananas, figs require a certain gas to ripen fully, and by sealing off the bottom of a fruit with some olive oil, it is said that this gas stays within the fruit, thereby impelling the ripening process. The controversial part is that fruit ripened in this method is said to be a little less sweet. Personally, I didn’t care – I just wanted something ripe regardless of how it was done. And it seems something worked – at least for two.
Whenever I get annoyed at the stupidity of people, I think back to the day in 7thgrade when my friend Tim was trying to console me about being annoyed with the stupidity of people. We were talking about someone who made some stupid statement, and he simply and succinctly said, “He’s surprised to see the sun come up in the morning.†It still makes me chuckle and takes away some of the annoyance.
When I see kids growing up online today it makes me glad I never had to do that. By the time social media was a thing, I was a grown-ass adult. Maybe I didn’t always act like it, but I knew enough that what was done here would be done forever – that you didn’t ever erase something that was online, so I made the decision to live as openly and freely on here as I would in my real life existence. In other words, it had to pass the mother/husband/best friend test: if it was fine for my Mom, Andy and Suzie to see, then it was ok to put up here. Thankfully, none of those people nor myself have been particularly prudish, and nothing I put up here has been disrespectful or rude unless someone really deserved it. (Hello Pier 1 Imports.)
As I get even older, I stand by just about everything that I’ve posted here. I may cringe at former righteousness or shirk off some shameless show-offiness, but for the most part I have no regrets. I can say that at this age. When I was fourteen years old, I couldn’t have done as well, so I’m thankful the internet wasn’t born before I was. A head-start makes a world of difference, and I needed it to get ahead of the trauma and drama that today’s social-media-saturated world can inflict.
When I see a teenager with a YouTube channel and millions of followers, I worry that they didn’t ever know what it was like to develop without being watched in some way, to grow and flourish and become who you were meant to be without the influence of perception on such a large scale. What does an absence of privacy and a chance to be completely alone and isolated do to a person? The next generation is about to find out, and everything I see happening in our world seems to be tipping toward a major shit-show. Part of me is glad I’ll be dead when all of it comes to fruition. And maybe somewhere these words will live on as a wish and a warning.
There’s a tinge of sadness when I see the hydrangeas sending up new blooms at this time of the year. It’s a crap shoot for whether they will all make it before the first hard frost hits. Most of these should flower before we get there, but there are those that don’t. In the past I’d try to bring them inside, to save a few like we did with green tomatoes, but not anymore. There is a time and place for everything to slumber, and that cycle, forged and refined and perfected by Nature herself, will not be hijacked by my endeavors. Still, there is sadness when buds are on the brink of being felled, and I may cut them if words of a frost carry on the wings of night.
The garden often gets a little second wind at this point when summer’s heretofore relentless heat and haze gives way to a crisp, cool alacrity that seems to snap order back into the proceedings. It’s as if suddenly everything is aware that the season is coming to its close, and goes about putting on one last show. The colors are more vibrant, and though the blooms are usually smaller and secondary, they carry stronger hues and deeper shades. The lower light works in tandem to show them off at their most expressive. It’s something that can’t be produced in the high-sun days of July or early August.
Dear Betty Lynn ~ Having just witnessed your next to last night as Dolly Levi in ‘Hello, Dolly!’ I immediately went back into your songbook and am listening to your rendition of ‘Come On, Come On’ as I write this. After such a wonderfully affirming celebration of musical theater, I had to hear further ruminations on life through the story only a song can tell. I started out with your ‘Hope’ album, and that gorgeous almost-liturgical title track by Jason Robert Brown, where our hope is our only religion. I seek out a way of understanding our present condition, a way to make sense of the madness that is the world around us. Whether or not the answer is to be found in a song, a work of art, or the voice of one of our generation’s great vocal talents, I do not know. You remain, however, a vessel who has always illuminated deeper truths. Maybe that’s why your recent performance in ‘Hello, Dolly!’ became so much more than a theatrical legend taking on a legendary role.
I still have fond memories of how you stepped into the role of Norma Desmond, and with laser-like precision and practiced artistry, made the role into your own. Following in such famed turbans as Gloria Swanson and Glenn Close, you rose above the fray the world wanted so badly to see battered and scarred, and you gave Norma not only the heart that was so brittle and broken, but the voice that she, and the show, so badly needed. Ever since then, your voice has supplied a way for me to connect to the human condition. From the song collections of that time – ‘With One Look’, ‘Much More’ and ‘Heart to Heart’ – and the live performances at London and Carnegie Hall – your voice has mapped out a way to unlock a few secrets of love and loss and simple longing. I didn’t always want to know, and I didn’t always learn them well, but I could count on you to make it feel a little more bearable, and breathtakingly more beautiful.
I wonder if you were haunted or comforted by the ghostlights that formed the namesake of your 2014 collection. The gentle ‘Come to Me, Bend to Me’ and the gorgeously portentous ‘If You Go Away’ nestled alongside a melancholy ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Lazy Afternoon’ gave ‘Ghostlight’ its dream-like atmosphere, wherein you were able to craft a cinematic soundscape, painted solely by your guiding voice. The ‘Story Songs’ that formed your epic double album of the same name were just further proof that nobody could tell a tale through melody and music better than you. The way that you occupied different characters in miraculous fashion, inhabiting and then becoming them through studied nuances and microscopic adjustments, apparent to the fascinated rapture of the listener, was a sight and sound to behold. While it’s one thing to take on a single song, it’s quite another matter to hold an entire show on your shoulders, but we already knew you could do it.
It takes more than a skilled singer to transmit so many layers of meaning – it takes a cunning actor too, and even though you expressed some surprise at being asked to step into the indefatigable boots of Dolly Levi, I always knew you would be superb. Who better to pilot this train of beloved Americana through the country, dispersing wisdom and warmth and happiness to cities near and far, than Broadway’s own Texas cowgirl? It wouldn’t have worked if you were merely game for the challenge – it required a full investment, a commitment, a generosity of spirit that only a consummate professional could conjure.
Throughout it all, there was a slight but absolutely necessary sliver of darkness that lurked beneath the most upbeat moments, a darkness that you have often thrillingly channeled, from your demonic Southern sorceress in ‘Preacher’ to the imperious (and let’s not forget murderous) Norma Desmond to the dominating mother in ‘Carrie’ and the ferociously-wounded feline Grizabella in ‘Cats’. There are some murky undercurrents even in the confection-like world of Dolly Levi. You manage to find the lonely, desperate pathos that belies all the pastel splendor around you, plumbing the riches of that reservoir to garner the emotional heft that raises the show into something grand and expansive.
As ‘Before the Parade Passes Us By’ began, you wiped your tears away, and you might as well have wiped all our tears away – so enraptured were we at the way life could be so bursting with joy and yet sadness at the same time. Somehow you showed us the strength and conviction to still be part of it, to dive back into the tumult no matter how much it may have hurt us in the past. The memories of lost ones are ever on the edge of when we think things might be ok, and you as Dolly, sadly freed from the binds of a beloved lost husband and trying valiantly to move forward, led the way. How to bring the rest of us so much gladness when your own heart is broken? I don’t know, but you did it, and you’ve been bringing us such happiness for a year.
The harmonious way you worked with the rest of the ‘Hello, Dolly!’ is a lesson in itself, and what a glorious ensemble it was. Lewis J. Stadlen matched your optimism with entertaining pessimism until you met happily in the middle. Nic Rouleau and Sean Burns won hearts and burned the boards with their electrifying singing and dancing, while Analisa Leaming and Kristen Hahn brought enough wit and comedic elegance to stand out in a troop of outstanding performers. Throughout it all, you wove a fascinating arc and managed to match the very spirit and essence of Dolly’s outlook on life.
How wonderful to see an actor being so generous – the genuine joy you conveyed while watching the company whirl around you elicited its own triumphant joy – happiness feasting on happiness when we were all so starved for it. We needed to smile. We needed to laugh. We needed to believe in a simpler, sweeter world, when people might actually be kind and decent to one another, a forgotten moment when we got through the darker times together.
After performing this demanding show for such a stretch, you more than deserve a break. Maybe you will return to your beloved ranch, to the horses that must have missed you so, to your faithful companion Lucas who just may need you more than we do, to recharge your creative batteries and simply be – and I wish you all the best. Selfishly I hope that you will come back to entertain and enlighten us sooner rather than later, to enrich our lives with the wonder of your voice and your talent, and to engage in whatever strikes your passion and fancy, the way Dolly returned to triumphantly descend that grand staircase before the parade passed by. In the same munificent manner that she viewed sharing her wealth, so too have you given to all of us over the years.
That communal exchange between performer and audience, and the way that this role fits so perfectly into spreading that love around is a once-in-a-lifetime collision of kismet, destiny and happy circumstance. You’ve been giving us such gifts throughout your entire career, and such generosity is rare. In the last year you’ve dedicated yourself to Dolly Levi, sharing a love and unbridled hope for the world throughout our country – and in a country that’s not always what it should be, we needed it more than ever. Thank you, Ms. Buckley, for sharing such excellence in your craft. Thank you for being such an advocate for people less fortunate and strong than you. Thank you, above all else, for showing us what loveliness is still to be found in this world.
COME ON COME ON, IT’S GETTING LATE NOW
COME ON COME ON, TAKE MY HAND
COME ON COME ON, YOU JUST HAVE TO WHISPER
COME ON COME ON, I WILL UNDERSTAND
After the sluggish start to spring, I wasn’t sure if our Angel’s Trumpets would bloom while it was still nice out, but these two specimens have been putting on a glorious concert over the past few weeks, dangling their fragrant trumpets and filling the backyard with their perfume. It is the quintessential scent of summer, one that brings me all the way back to our early days together, when I started a few plants in a guestroom at Andy’s old house. They struggled inside, but once they could get out into the warmth and sun they took off and put on an astounding show.
They usually take a year or two to really get going, which makes overwintering them a necessity. I tend to pot them up every few weeks and let them go as high as they want. Our relatively short growing season will force them to top off between six and ten feet, and right before the first hard frost I’ll cut them down to three feet or so and bring them in.
While they took their time, these have gotten the tallest we’ve had, which makes them a bit top heavy and one was just felled by some of the crazy storms we’ve had of late. They are so heavy that right them is no easy feat, and I added a few large rocks to their pots in the hopes of keeping them grounded. The few branches that broke off will be put into some water to see if we can get some new ones started. Eventually they will outgrow their pot, and rather than root-prune and repot, I’ll have hopefully started a few new ones to take over the mantle of summer perfume.
The final week of August has begun, and with it goes the final full month of summer. Our fall season won’t officially begin until September 23, and we intend to make full use of every last one of those summer days. Before that final flourish, however, let’s look back at this full week of August revelry…
{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}
One of the stronger cuts, and definitely one of the most fun, from the ‘Madame X’ album, this is Madonna (with some help from Anitta) putting on a proper shredder complete with a carnival plunked right in the middle of the party proceedings. It deserves to be heard and celebrated rather than analyzed, which means this Madonna Timeline will be short and to the point so we can abandon ourselves to the glory at hand.
I have no idea what she’s saying or what any of it means, I just know that I love it and it makes me want to dance. The best songs cut through words and literal meaning to hit at the very heart and soul, something raw and powerful and driving, and that’s what this is to me.
Seeing as how it’s my supposedly special day, it seems a fine time to focus on the frivolous bits of flotsam and jetsam that populate my scanning interest these days. Each one is a category on this blog because I post so much about them that this makes for easy organization. Such was the intent of early blog ambitions – these days if I want to seek out a specific post I simply type a keyword into Google, followed by ‘Alan Ilagan’ to see what exactly I wrote since the search engine here is broken.
Anyway, here are a few favorite topics and the links to their respective collections. The great revamping of 2012 obliterated most posts prior to that year, though a few choice ones have been saved that go back to 2009. After 2012, however, almost every post is still up and online here. It makes for a large body of work, because seven years of anything – especially when there are three posts a day – results in a vast collection of words and pictures. This is the modern-day diary, a virtual throwback to the little Garfield diary I once filled out in 7thand 8thgrades, that came with its own lock and key. Diaries are funny things. Blogs are too. Both feel a little antiquated, a little quaint, and more than a little necessary for those of us who feel the need to express things or burst. But it would be foolish to pretend that either a diary or a blog is entirely without guile or underlying purpose all of the time. We all wear disguises, even and sometimes especially when we purport to be naked. Veils of veils and shadows of shadows, the trickery of light at perpetual play – these are the subtle shifts of an online persona. The voice you hear now as you read these words is probably not mine. But I digress, entirely too much, particularly on such a fun day. Let’s keep it light and whimsical, like the very best notions that accompany one’s anniversary of birth.
