Saints Preserve Us

Today is St. Joseph’s Day, the feast day celebrated by Rhode Island’s significant Italian American population, and the only day the rest of us eat zeppole, a lightweight, deep-fried dough ball often powdered with sugar, filled and/or topped with custard, cannoli, jelly, pastry cream, a butter/honey mixture or some other sweet stuffing.

Italian Americans represent the largest demographic in the state, with 19 percent, a figure that is also the highest percentage of any United State. Which is why it always seems a little odd that St. Joseph’s is such a low-key day, especially given the noise St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, makes hereabouts.

Most feast days are occasions for communal celebration and religious devotion. But St. Patrick’s, like Christmas, has morphed beyond its religious roots. As the second largest cultural community in Rhode Island (a little over 18 percent), Irish Americans also contribute greatly to the Ocean State identity. Per capita, Rhody has the third-largest Irish American community in the country, behind only Massachusetts (23 percent) and New Hampshire (20 percent). (The other three New England states are also in the top 10, and Boston, the Hub of the region, often called Ireland’s 33rd county, has the highest population of Irish Americans of any city in the country.)

But St. Patrick’s is really a worldwide phenomenon – a tribal party turned global, sustained in part by mythmaking and marketing. It’s an expression of triumph for a poor island nation that sent its sons and daughters to shores around the world, where they have endured, thrived and helped build nations in both hemispheres. So in Rhode Island, when March arrives, we have three straight Saturdays of parades, festivities and pub crawls in Pawtucket, Providence and Newport. (And next week some of the same revelers and participants will take the party just across the Connecticut border, to Mystic.)

Last Saturday, on the actual feast day, I visited my local, a pub called Crossroads, in Warren, owned by an Irishman now living in Rhode Island. Between rounds of Guinness and platters of corned beef and cabbage, the Providence Police Pipes and Drums Band showed up, banging and blowing “Danny Boy,” “Amazing Grace” and other classic tunes, as part of a six-pub visit that included Patrick’s in Providence and Lucky’s in East Providence. Inside, the pub was greener than the Emerald City. The dabblers had their green beer; the drinkers stuck with the black stuff or the caramel-colored whiskies lined behind the bar. The room was sardines. Customers kept bumping into Lance, the armored knight that stands between the entrance and the bar. (Some of them even apologized.) A good time, as always, unless you were the besieged wait staff, bartenders, cooks or busboys, slammed for hours, working through the mirth.

Other feast days are celebrated in Rhode Island. The state also has the largest percentage of people of Portuguese origin (Portuguese Americans and Cape Verdean Americans, comprising over eight percent of the population, most located on the East Bay). Their feast days are a chance to sample favas, chourico, malasadas, cocoila, sweet bread and blade meat, among other delicacies. But like St. Joseph’s and festivals for Rhody’s large French Canadian and Liberian populations, days devoted to St. George or the Feast of the Holy Ghost aren’t ritually observed statewide. Rhode Island, by far the most Catholic state in the nation, keeps its saints close at hand and embedded in the calendar. But the state itself has no patron saint, unless one is willing to grant the honor to its founder, Roger Williams. The problem there, of course, is that Roger was decidedly not Catholic. So, in scanning the list, perhaps we are best off with Saint Drogo, the patron saint of coffeehouses. Given the local mandate of a Dunkin’ Donuts on every corner, Drogo would seem to be an obvious candidate. (He is also the patron saint of unattractive people, so that covers a lot of ground.) If you’re with me, raise an espresso to Drogo on his designated day, April 16.

Otherwise, who should be Rhode Island’s patron saint?

Scratch, Scratch Rhody

Just as Rhode Island’s latest one-in-30-million lobster, a calico dubbed Spoticus pulled from the waters off Newport, was getting used to its new Save The Bay aquarium digs, a Newport woman dropped by the Bellevue Avenue Stop & Shop with a family member for a frozen dessert and figured she might as well get a Powerball ticket, too. She chose three Quick Picks with the Power Play option along with a tub of rainbow sherbet. Later that evening, Louise White, 81, of Newport learned that the $336.4 million lottery prize was hers.

But the story doesn’t end there, because the day after White claimed the prize, another Powerball jackpot was won in Rhode Island. This time, the winning ticket of $60 million was sold at the convenience store, Quickets, in Smithfield. It’s not the first time a state has won back-to-back Powerball jackpots – Indiana managed the trick three times in a row once – but the odds of that happening are way up there in yellow/calico lobster territory.

The cyber-ink on last week’s blog post (“The Ballad of the Anonymous Powerball Winner”) had barely dried when the announcement came that White was the winner. The Newport Daily News (which owns Independent Newspapers) broke the story. Reporter Sean Flynn’s entertaining first look at the winner noted that White, who lives with her son, Leroy White (a longtime and popular musician and performer in Newport) and daughter-in-law Deborah White, a surgical nurse at Newport Hospital, established the Rainbow Sherbet Trust to administer the winnings. In Flynn’s words:

The trust bears the name of the frozen treat that drew a family member, accompanied by White, to Stop & Shop the evening she purchased her winning lottery ticket.

How cool is that?

So Rhode Island, suddenly lucky in lobster and lottery, likely will ratchet up its obsession with shellfish and numbered Ping-Pong balls in the coming days. For a state with at least one village created entirely by lottery (Avondale, formerly known as Lotteryville, in Westerly), whose residents routinely give each other scratch tickets as stocking stuffers, this can only mean that the gaming madness is going to intensify. The state needs money, so this is the perfect time to introduce a plethora of instant games into the market.

Some possibilities:
Where’s Roger? (Scratch the tree root. If you discover the head of Roger Williams, you are an instant winner.)
Yellow Lobster (Scratch the lobster. If you discover a calico lobster underneath the yellow one, you are an instant winner.)
Roomful of Blues Mystery Tour (Scratch the band. If you discover a Rhode Island musician who hasn’t played in it yet, you are an instant winner.)

Beyond that, Rhode Island has joined the other five New England states to create a new regional lottery game – Lucky for Life – that will pay winners $1,000 a day for the rest of their lives. The game also will be an interesting lesson in kinship. Every New England state revels in its own cranky independence. (Rhode Island even has an Independent Man that stands atop its State House, enduring heaps of pigeon guano every day.) Outside of Yankee magazine and sports fan tribalism, there isn’t much we celebrate together.

Years ago, the short-lived New England magazine, a high-quality monthly that tried to do for the region what weekly New Yorker and monthly New York magazine do for the Empire State, couldn’t find enough advertisers to sustain its publication. Knowing that Yankee had already targeted the “lighthouses and covered bridges” demographic, as one New England magazine editor snidely put it to me, the publication tried to provide a niche between Yankee’s culture-and-travel kitsch, Boston magazine’s personality-driven content and The Atlantic’s high-brow focus on ideas. It didn’t work (possibly because The New Yorker and The New York Times seem to spend as much time in New England as their own state).

But this lottery thing. This could have legs.

This week’s question: What should be the next scratch ticket game in Rhode Island?

The Ballad of the Anonymous Powerball Winner

On Feb. 11 someone bought a winning Powerball lottery ticket worth $336.4 million dollars at the Stop & Shop on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue. You know, the street where the Astors and the Vanderbilts camped out every July and August in those modest little summer cottages overlooking the ocean. Understandably, the winner has so far been reluctant to go public, but the prize and its mystery recipient have been bubbler fodder for weeks. The following ballad, roughly written, humbly submitted, is dedicated to the hubbub:

From Adamsville to Quonochontaug
Everyone wants to know:
More than three hundred million in Powerball –
Who won all that dough?

Cameras are ready, pens are poised
To record someone’s instant fame.
The ticket is won, the game is done,
But we don’t even have a name.

A native? Or some visitor?
We can’t be sure which gender.
The only thing we’re certain of –
That’s a lot of legal tender.

The ticket was sold as one of three
At the Newport Stop & Shop
The store soon became a celebrity
With a weeklong photo op.

For days that’s all we talked about:
Who was the mysterious winner?
What would you do with all that cash?
Where would you go for dinner?

The lucky anonymous lottery champ
Probably hired a lawyer
To help with the financial windfall
And deal with Diane Sawyer.

The longer this goes, the more people ask
A question that sounds a bit funny.
We’d all like to win the lottery but
Is it possible to get too much money?

Would it really be worth all the trouble
And the constant aggravation –
All the kooks, all the friends, all the family,
All those suffering in desperation

All converging on your home
Begging for a little assistance,
Relentless in their hounding,
Furious at any resistance.

You’d have to change your phone and mail
And unplug your computer, too.
You’d probably have to leave the state
Just to escape the zoo.

You might need to go into hiding
Otherwise you’d have a whole nation
Watching your every move and step,
And joining you on vacation.

But all that most of us want for now
Is to see the face and learn the fate
Of the richest lottery winner in RI
So we wait and we wait and we wait…

This week’s question: What is one thing you would do if you won $336.4 million in the lottery?

The Delaware Destroyer

The American political landscape is rife with the caricatured corpses of presidents and vice-presidents. Cartoonists and comic impersonators exploit their physical characteristics, but each politician also exhibits certain behavioral ticks that, fairly or not, will define him for posterity. So Nixon, waving his arms and telling the country “I am not a crook,” only emphasized to most Americans that he was. Ford was a klutz (even though he had been an elite athlete in his day…that’s what happens when you hit a few spectators with stray tee shots, stumble down the steps from an airplane to the tarmac and start your presidency at about the same time that Chevy Chase begins his television career). Carter had lust in his heart and ran away from killer rabbits. Reagan forgot everything, including the fact that a little thing called “Iran/Contra” was being run out of a walk-in closet just a few steps away from the Oval Office. Bush Sr. never had “the vision thing.” Clinton is remembered for his predilection for late-night cheeseburgers and cigar innuendo. Gore was the stiff geek who thought he was smarter than everybody else, probably because he invented the Internet. Bush Jr. was lambasted for his Dubya-isms (“I think we can all agree, the past is over.”) and his premature flight suit fashion statement. Cheney was the misanthropic evil genius pulling puppet strings from a series of hidden bunkers. And, according to the Daily Beast, “the prevailing caricatures of Obama are solidly fixed. To the right he is a socialist, to the left a middling messiah.”

And then there’s “Botch It” Biden. As in, give Joe a simple task, he’ll botch it; let Joe speak on behalf of the administration, he’ll botch it. Generally thought of as a genial and caring guy, Biden is equally known for his gaffes, thanks in no small part to Jason Sudeikis’ sharp portrayal of the veep on “SNL.” So last week, when Biden’s publicists sent out a press release announcing that he would be visiting “Road Island” to campaign for U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at the “Built More,” the only real surprise was that Sheldon’s last name wasn’t spelled “White House.”

Now, we know Biden doesn’t write his own press releases. No doubt his staff relied a bit too heavily on Spellcheck to produce the boilerplate. (We learned firsthand the dangers of Spellcheck long ago when one of our first editions of the software consistently replaced every reference to the word “black” with the phrase, “African American,” inspiring some truly imaginative news copy.) But the Biden mistake virus is apparently so infectious it has spread throughout his entire entourage. Just for punishment, we should make the Biden contingent come back to Rhode Island and visit the villages of Annawamscutt, Cocumscussoc and Quonochontaug while they’re here.

“Road Island” is, of course, particularly ironic, given the decrepit state of the roads in these parts. Suppose it could have been worse: i.e. “Rode Island,” as in “he rode shotgun; I rode island;” or, “Rowed Island” as an appellation for The Dinghy State. But here’s hoping Biden, who hails from the second-smallest state in the union, enjoyed his time in Little Rhody. For our part, two consecutive weeks of Delaware – or maybe we should say Della Where? – intrusions to this blog are enough to hold us for awhile. But we don’t want to leave before addressing the commenter, “Misplaced Floridian,” who posted to the WPRI blog about the “Road Island” typo:

Let’s face it…with only two electoral votes, and certain Democrat votes at that, RI isn’t worth spell checking. They’ll never misspell Florida, California, Texas or any other state that matters.

Couple o’ things “Misplaced”: First, as Rhode Islanders, we love our irrelevance. We revel in our irrelevance. Our irrelevance feeds our collective irreverence. So keep the irrelevance coming and let the Other 49 wallow in the delusion that they matter. Second, wasn’t Florida, a “state that matters,” single-handedly responsible for botching the 2000 presidential election after designing ballots with chads hanging, dangling, pregnant, pimpled and dimpled, which confused elderly Jewish residents into voting for Pat Buchanan over Al Gore, thereby setting into motion the reality of our national election being hijacked by nine people who go to work everyday wearing black robes, and politicizing the institution of the Supreme Court to such an extent that it lost all credibility with roughly half of the American populace?

Sheesh. Even Biden couldn’t botch things that badly.

This week’s question: Where in “Road Island” should we send Joe By Done?

Some possibilities:
Pee Pack
Riz Dee
Coven Tree
Egg Sitter
Roger Will Yum Spark Sue

Rhodyware? Delarhode?

There’s been a new development in the frequent media use of “the size of Rhode Island” as a unit of measurement. Lately, some reporters have done the math and found a way to lump us in with Delaware in their descriptions of territory. No offense to Delaware, but Rhody size is already watered down (depending on whether you count Narragansett Bay or not). We don’t need some mid-Atlantic poser honing in on our folksy demarcations.

We first noticed this in a recent article in The New York Times, perhaps the most prolific employers of “size of Rhode Island” references of any media making noise anywhere these days. The article by Timothy Williams, headlined “Brutal Crimes Grip an Indian Reservation,” refers to a Wyoming reservation named Wind River:

A rambling stretch of scrub in central of Wyoming the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, Wind River has a crime rate five to seven times the national average and a long history of ghastly homicides.

About a week later, we read the following headline in a Web site touting “Solar Reviews”: “Solar Turbines: To Power New York with Solar, We Only Need an Area the Size of Delaware and Rhode Island?”

Yes, that’s exactly what Rhode Island aspires to be…New York’s wind farm.

Doing a little digging, we discovered this nugget going back to last summer in the Science Daily, under the headline, “Gulf of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ could be Biggest Ever”:

Researchers from Texas A&M University have returned from a trip to examine the scope and size of this year’s “dead zone” and have measured it currently to be about 3,300 square miles, or roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, but some researchers anticipate it being much larger.

The question is: How much larger? New Jersey larger? Vermont larger? Large enough to eliminate Rhode Island from the calculation entirely? This is one of the problems with global warming – for every Rhody-sized chunk of floating ice it creates, it turns the Rhody-sized dead zones and deserts into something more closely resembling Connecticut.

What would you like to see measured in Rhode Islands?

Valentine's Blush

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Wiener Love

A little blog-on-blog love today, as Half Shell gives props to Fork in the Rhode, an Ocean State food blog, for its annual ranking of the top 10 New York System Wieners in Rhode Island.

Nice to see they included Rod’s Grill, my wiener local, in Warren. No surprise that the West Warwick wiener joints of Ferrucci’s Original New York System and Nick’s New York System made the list, along with the Providence classic, Olneyville N.Y. System. Three Warwick locales are featured, including perennial favorites Cosmic Steak, Pizza & Wieners, along with Sam’s New York System and Timmy’s Restaurant. The Cranston standby Wein-O-Rama also returned to the top 10, which this year extended a long arm to Ben’s Chili Dogs of Newport and Santoro’s Pizza of Coventry.

Fork in the Rhode’s RhodeCrew and 48 other judges visited 50 wiener joints around the state to make their selections. All wieners were ordered “all the way,” as they should be, (meaning dressed with meat sauce, chopped onion, mustard and celery salt). Each individual wiener was scored based on the following categories: Appearance, Steamed Bun, Wiener Texture, Meat Sauce, Onions and the vampiric-sounding Overall One-Bite Taste.

South County was shut out, even though locals have plenty of wiener options. On the other side of the parking lot from the Independent offices, Jessica’s Quick Rick’s serves them, while just down the road Kingston Pizza (the long-ago Anton’s on the back side of the Peace Dale Flats rotary) advertises “WILD WIENER WEDNESDAYS!” Even the University of Rhode Island is well-stocked, wiener-wise, with a handful of establishments in the Kingston Emporium offering them. Last week, prior to an interview at URI Theatre, I stopped in at Albie’s Place as a young man next to me asked for “nine wieners all the way.” The cook didn’t even blink at the request.

Fork in the Rhode, founded by bloggers David Newell, Scott Friedman and David Tagliatela, was created to cultivate a greater appreciation for Rhody’s unique cuisine (most of which involves wieners, clams, coffee, fried dough or some combination) and ordinary places (diners, pubs, greasy spoons, clam shacks, grinder joints, pizza houses and the like) in which you can partake in the Rhodyliciousness of it all – the dives and drive-ins and stay-a-long-times that are a staple of the Rhody gastronomic landscape. It’s a worthy quest. Here’s hoping Fork will one day consider Half Shell as a wiener judge. We would be humbled and honored to serve. All we ask is a coffee milk chaser to go.

Where can you find the best wieners in Rhode Island?