Blizzard Thoughts

Why do we give names to hurricanes but not blizzards?

That was the thought that kept me company during the digging out this morning. Sometime between 6 and 6:30, while the coffee was brewing and the weather forecasters were explaining why they got wrong what they got wrong, I shoveled and scraped and warmed up the car in a Blanding Avenue conga line with my neighbors. The drive to South County was sloppy, choppy and slow, but the roads were mostly empty, and the office, once the computers rebooted, hummed with electricity and heat. Now, moaning winds and the plow music of beeping, grinding and road rumble make the sounds of the day beyond the window. Phones go off haphazardly. The workday settles into the pace of a snowdrift.

The Not-Quite-White Christmas was truly a Boxing Day blizzard, with aftermath lingering into Monday. It barely made deadline as the biggest storm of 2010, the largest accumulation of snow in Rhody since the two snowfalls that struck last December. Between blizzards, we passed a year, and in this week’s Arts & Living section we relive some of the scenes of 2010 from southern Rhode Island – from roads turned into rivers during the March floods to the University of Rhode Island research vessel Endeavor voyaging to the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil spill. Skipping through the images in our photo archives was an odd experience, compressing the news and seasons of an entire year into a couple of hours of fleeting glances and memories.

In the whirl of a snow globe, photographs fell from filing cabinets and folders, no two quite alike. A pair of snowmen greeted travelers along Slocum Road in Exeter. Children pushed through a tight passage of blossoms at Kinney Azalea Gardens in Kingston. Visitors to the South County Museum in Narragansett held newly hatched chicks and watched cracking eggs during the museum’s Fourth of July Rhode Island Red Chick Hatch. Waves from tropical storm Nicole battered the breakwater off Point Judith. Maples erupted in red and orange over an artist’s studio in Rockville.

A swirl of scenes, brief moments and encounters, and then it was over. Times grow yellow in a dusty morgue. This weekend's snowstorm at least gives the space and silence necessary for appreciation and reflection, countering the norm of accelerated lives. So to friends and strangers, followers and any folks just passing through, may these winter-worn days, dressed as they are in snowflake sweaters, thick boots and skin-tight balaclavas, give you pause to be grateful for the people and places you know. Remember, "zero visibility" is just a weatherman's way of saying "blindness," and always keep a shovel and a scraper in your car – but don’t forget the sleds, skates, skis and snowshoes either.

Rest in peace, 2010, and happy New Year.

What will you remember most from the past year?

Saugatucket Solstice

It appears that the calendar will conspire with New England weather to turn tomorrow’s historic winter solstice, timed to coincide with a total eclipse of a full moon, into just another cloudy workday. So for me the ritual walk likely will be little more than a late afternoon trip for coffee along the icy Saugatucket River, just a snowball’s throw from my window.

It’s still worth celebrating the return of incremental light, and scenes of mallard tribes huddled against the riverbank and randomly scattered copper oak leaves trapped under thin skins of cracked ice make the detour a pleasant one, despite the increasingly annoying intrusion of sign pollution marking the short walk. Where once there was just a river abutting a parking lot, with no signs to speak of, now there is a fenced boardwalk leading to a gravel path connecting the area to the bridge that leads from Wakefield School to Main Street, sprouting signs like weeds. They are permanent admonishments, mostly variations of: PLEASE DON’T FEED THE WATERFOWL and PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG. While the rebukes are well intended, it’s somewhat ironic that before the river walk became a recreational haven, it lacked the aesthetics of modern leisure (benches, viewing platform, a dock) – but it also didn’t need the cautionary overkill.

No doubt the walkway has brought more people to the river. And, yes, there are minefields of doggy detritus to navigate because some pet owners can’t be bothered to pick up after themselves. And, yes, some misguided souls like to feed Wonder Bread to wildlife. But the signs don’t seem to prevent people who leave waste untended and feed Twinkies to geese from doing those things. They just sort of ruin the view. If signs really could change behavior, I’d be the first in line to make them: PLEASE FEED THE HUNGRY. PLEASE CLOTHE THE TATTERED. PLEASE SHELTER THE HOMELESS.

As long as we’re admonishing folks, we might at least try doing society some good.

What sign would you like to post for anyone passing by?

A Scrooge a Day

‘Tis the season of dueling ‘Messiahs,’ battling Claras and Scrooge-a-Palooza, a trinity of choral concerts, ballets and plays around the winter holidays that serve as a kind of artistic eggnog, the comfort food of creative expression at Christmastime. The Chorus of Westerly, which performed the region’s first concert of Handel’s “Messiah” just before Thanksgiving, editing the masterwork from its 2-1/2 hour running time to 75 minutes of highlights, sent out a press release with the following note:

In December, when The New York Times lists holiday musical performances, there is an entire section entitled: "Messiah and other oratorio performances."

And it’s true. There are "Messiahs" wherever you look. Scores of them, in churches and colleges and community chorales throughout Rhode Island, from Brown University’s orchestrated production to the sing-it-yourself-"Messiahs" at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd (Jan. 2) in Kingston and the First Baptist Church (Jan. 9) in Wickford.

But one might just as easily publish a calendar with listings for dance and theater that reads:
“'Nutcracker’ and other ballets” and “'A Christmas Carol’ and other plays.”

Rhode Island “Nutcrackers” range from the Festival Ballet of Providence version at PPAC to the lavish staging at Rosecliff Mansion in Newport to Rhode Island Youth Theatre’s “Madeleine Meets The Nutcracker” in East Greenwich. The New York Times recently ran a piece titled “'Nutcracker’ Nation: Yes We Can!,” chronicling Alastair Macaulay’s quest to see two dozen productions of “The Nutcracker” across America. One in Washington, D.C., set in a Georgetown mansion, featured Miss Liberty and John Paul Jones in the company of Drosselmeyer’s dancing dolls and staged Act II in a dreamscape of the Potomac “with female cherry blossoms dancing the Waltz of the Flowers.”

“A Christmas Carol” is the annual cash-cow staple at Trinity Rep in Providence. But they’re also playing the Dickens out of it in East Greenwich (The Academy Players at the Varnum Armory), Cranston (The Black Box Theatre at The Artists’ Exchange), Woonsocket (Encore Repertory Company at the Stadium Theatre) and Westerly (The Granite Theatre, where artistic director David Jepson performs all of the roles in a one-man show).

Like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, every year Handel, Tchaikovsky and Dickens come back to haunt the hallowed performance halls of Rhode Island. No doubt one day, for sheer convenience, the works of all three artists willl be combined into one festive event.: “The NutMessCarol.” Scrooge is redeemed, waking on a snowy Christmas morning to the sound of the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Nutcracker Prince singing the “Hallelujah” chorus, while Tiny Tim marries Clara, Marley’s Ghost dances the pas de deux with the Snow Queen, and the Cratchits welcome the angel Clarence, the Little Drummer Boy, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, Heat Miser, Snow Miser and all the boys and girls of Whoville to their humble home.

This week’s question: What turns you into a Grinch?

Season's Greetings

As we wait for the first snowfall, Rhode Islanders are comforted by certain sights that kindle the spirit of the winter holidays, from the tree lightings and Main Street ornamentation that give each town and village its distinctive seasonal look to the backyard glowing-bulb narratives of nativities, winter wonderlands and Santa’s workshops.

Each day my commute passes Santa on a forklift along I95 South and every evening I return home to the sight of New England Pest Control’s giant termite, wearing lighted antlers, a blinking red nose and blue illumination on its thorax and abdomen. But Rhody’s Big Blue (Christmas) Bug isn’t the only yuletide roadside ritual.

Trips to Tiverton are marked by the homeless nativity scene at Amicable Congregational Church, where about a dozen years ago Pastor William Sterrett and local chainsaw artist Michael Higgins teamed up to present a modern version of the First Noel. The scene features Jose, an unemployed migrant farm worker; Maura, a pregnant runaway; Hope, their newborn daughter; Gabe, an African American angel; David, a Native American working at Walgreens; Anna, a battered woman working the night shift at a medical center; a shopping cart; and an oil drum providing heat.

Another sign of the season is the holiday press release. Every year companies pitch various holiday-survey stories to newspapers to keep their products in the public eye during the Christmas blitz. Last week we received one from Dunkin’ Donuts asking the question: “Which part of the gingerbread man cookie do you eat first?” Turns out that 64 percent start with the head (my choice), while 20 percent go for the legs and only 16 percent begin at the arms. Left unsaid is that gingerbread men occupy the same diminished land of extremities as Oscar statuettes and harem guards, but since this is a family-friendly blog, we’ll leave our exploration of this topic right there.

Except to add that a town council in England recently voted to change the name of gingerbread men to gingerbread persons, only to reverse course after people not made of gingerbread complained that it was a plan that could only have been dreamed up by a fruitcake.

What is your favorite sign of the winter holidays in Rhode Island?

Winterizing

Geographically the dividing line between southern and northern New England may run in a rough, jagged crust separating rocky beach from sandy beach, but culturally the difference is most keenly felt in how each region handles winter. Up in New Hampshire, where I last lived, it was common for store marquees and school booster boards to proclaim “THINK ICE” or “LET IT SNOW” as soon as the apples dropped from the trees and until someone collected the payoff for correctly predicting the exact day of ice-out.

Down here in Rhody, it’s a different story – a tale of dreaded snowfalls and legendary blizzards, snowplows stuck behind school buses and annual milk and bread panic. The first scrape of winter was apparent this morning in my West Barrington cove, where the neighborhood woke to frosted car windows and a temperature reluctant to climb out of the 20s. Over the weekend I reshuffled the wardrobe, moving out the Hawaiian shirts to make room for clothes of a more Alaskan bent – the scarves and sweaters, fleeces and balaclavas that accessorize winter.

Alaskan aside: The 49th State is getting a lot of mileage and free publicity out of TLC’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” so here’s a way for Rhody’s new governor to put the 13th State on the map: “Linc Chafee’s Rhode Island,” a reality TV program showing the Chafee family living la vida Rhody. Suggested programs: 1) “East Bay Ecstasy”: The Chafees enjoy a morning of duckpin bowling at Dudek Lanes in Warren, followed by lunch at Rod’s Grill (an arm of gaggers all the way) or Blount’s Clam Shack, culminating in a night of competitive bocce at the gravel pits in Bristol’s Colt State Park. 2) “South County Sojourn”: With halibut-bashing not an option, the Chafees choose to spend the morning quahogging barefoot in the mudflats along Galilee Escape Road, before hopping on the slow boat to Block Island for an afternoon of TV drinking games at the bar in The National Hotel. (How it works: Every time Sarah Palin says “Obamacare” or “lamestream media,” you have to drink.)

Join the fun. Suggest an episode.

Alaskan aside, part deux: On a whim, I decided to Google “How many Rhode Islands can fit into Alaska?” Here’s the scary part: Dozens of sites have answered that question – and others like it, from “How many Rhode Islands can fit into Texas” to “How many Rhode Islands can fit into Mississippi?” In fact, pretty much name a place and somebody has worked out how many Rhode Islands can be squeezed into it. Of course, it wouldn’t be Rhode Island if everyone agreed on the math. Yahoo! Answers says that Rhode Island fits 423.56 times into Alaska, while Wiki Answers puts the number at 634.7. The difference is that Yahoo! uses the 1,545 square-mile calculation, which includes Narragansett Bay, while Wiki sticks to the land-only number of 1,045 square miles. Yes, this is how I spend my Monday afternoons.

And now, back to the post:

As for winter, New Hampshire may be colder, but like the reverse of an Arizona summer, it’s a dry cold. The loss of light in Rhode Island seems even more dispiriting than it does in moose country, for reasons that I can’t entirely fathom – although perhaps it has something to do with our lack of dark sky. Street lamps and neon strip the night of stars. That’s a bad tradeoff, especially in the season of Orion.

This week’s question: What do you dread most – or look forward to most – about winter?

Bear Essentials

There’s a rogue bear roaming the woods and neighborhoods of South County this fall. Suspected of killing four sheep, the Eastern black bear has been spotted crossing Ministerial Road in South Kingstown but has so far eluded and outwitted state environmental officials.

A week or so ago, DEM set up a trap filled with doughnuts and meat, long a Rhode Island staple. (At least it’s in the local culinary tradition of anything goes with dough. Consider the chourico sticks at Sip ‘n’ Dip in Bristol – essentially a cruller of fried dough surrounding a spicy Portuguese sausage – exhibit A.) The bear swiped the doughnuts but left the meat hanging, backing out of the trap while showing a healthy skepticism toward free carcass for the taking.

So many questions remain: Were the doughnuts honey-dipped? Did DEM cheap out with day-old leftovers from Dunkin’ Donuts? Or did they come from Allie’s, the legendary North Kingstown doughnut shop and Rhody pilgrimage site whose founder, sadly, passed away a week ago?

Here’s what we know: This particular bear likes doughnuts and sheep. So we at Half Shell humbly propose an idea for the next trap: “Mutton doughnut.” Yum. Great sheep taste in a deep-fat fried pastry. What bear could resist that?

Bears haven’t been around much in these parts since the Colonial days, when settlers clear-cut the forests, hunting them out and driving them away. But they’ve returned in small numbers in recent years, attracted by the state’s second-growth forests and a chance to stretch their legs away from the crowded conifers of Connecticut. The last time a bear got this much attention for visiting Rhode Island was in 2008. That summer I wrote an article for the autumn issue of South County Living describing the frenzy:

One day in late May, a black bear crossed over the Connecticut border into Rhode Island, carving a swath through upland forest and along rivers, blissfully unaware of the invisible line that separates Nutmeg from Ocean State culture and its own impending celebrity. The bear was hungry, quite likely just out of hibernation, and looking to set up his territory and find a mate. It wandered through the Foster-Glocester-Scituate region of northern Rhode Island and meandered in a southeasterly route into Coventry and, eventually, South County, where it was spotted Memorial Day weekend on Liberty Lane in West Kingston.

On May 27, the young bear, estimated at two years old and about 130 pounds, swam from the South Kingstown side of Narrow River to the Narragansett side, where it indulged in a breakfast buffet of birdfeeders and trashcans in the North End. But its visit to Mettatuxet started a frenzy, and before long the bear, dubbed “Fluffy” by the media, was dodging the wildlife paparazzi of camera-toting residents, TV crews and uniformed environmental law enforcement.

The saga of “Fluffy” lasted about a week, as new sightings were reported on television and radio, in local papers and in various blogs. The CVS/pharmacy in Wakefield hired someone in a bear suit to stand near Main Street with a sign urging shoppers to purchase “bear necessities.” Narragansett resident Jeanne Vicario printed up T-shirts that read “Where’s the Bear?” and “Mettatuxet Bear Patrol” and sold them at local bars and stores, donating a portion of the proceeds to the Sierra Club.

The giddy response to the South County Bear was a spontaneous reaction to the rare sighting of a totemic animal that, in the age before the settlers arrived, once foraged freely in these forests. Bears disappeared from the local landscape for hundreds of years, only recently showing up once again as a blip on the Rhode Island radar during the past decade. Narragansett Deputy Chief Dean Hoxsie told The South County Independent that he’d never seen or heard of a bear in the area in 24 years of law enforcement work.

Two years later, there's a new bear in town. Good news to those of us who believe in cultivating a little wildness wherever we can in an age of suburban overgrowth and digital overload. Then again, never been mauled by one. Might whistle a different tune then.

Leading to this week’s totally unrelated question: What is your favorite Thanksgiving ritual? (Bonus points if you can work doughnuts into the answer.)

Potato Head Mash

We return to the lighter side this week with a new look at the perpetually ascending stardom of Pawtucket’s own Mr. Potato Head. As reported in previous posts, the globetrotting Hasbro toy continues to straddle the celebrity tightrope between fame and scandal, having served as courier in an ecstasy drug deal from Ireland to Sydney, Australia; an octopus’ boy-toy love child in Cornwall, England; potato paparazzi in a series of snapshots taken with 2008 U.S. Presidential Candidates; and charged as racist in his “Tourist Tater” appearance as part of a Rhode Island tourism campaign.

Last year, life imitated toy as bicyclists in the Netherlands created a 1,000-kilometer long bike tour called the “PieperPad” (Potato Trail), donning potato costumes to ride the route designed to get people “out into the countryside and enjoy potatoes, a well loved Dutch staple, in a totally new way.” And as part of the new economic reality, Starbucks began using Mr. Potato Head as a model for the benefits of efficiency, requiring its managers to reassemble and box a Mr. Potato Head toy during training sessions.

But the growing Potato Head dynasty has found even more fertile ground in 2010, threatening to overtake “size of Rhode Island” in the media barrage of Ocean State references. The British press has routinely taken to calling England footballer Wayne Rooney as “Mr. Potato Head.” Most recently, Rod Liddle wrote in The Sunday Times: “So, a nation heaves a sigh of relief. After all that worry, Mr. Potato Head is back in the ample, if recently sagging, bosom of Manchester United.”

Earlier this spring, Mr. Potato Head joined Barbie in a group art exhibition – “Bodies Unbound: The Classical and Grotesque” at the Johnson Museum at Cornell. As reported in the Cornell Chronicle:

Elizabeth Emrich, curatorial assistant at the museum, believes the show’s success stems partly from the wide range of objects on display. Hasbro Inc.’s Mr. Potato Head, for example, demonstrates the potential for amusement in manipulating and distorting the human form and shows that children’s toys can find a place in art.

This summer, Birmingham, Ala., hosted “The Adventures of Mr. Potato Head” at the McWane Science Center, highlighted by a collection of Mr. Potato Head memorabilia from Birmingham’s own Dennis Martin. Matt Cuthbert at al.com writes:

…one kiosk ties it all together, and it suddenly makes sense. Kids are asked “What’s ahead for you?” And given the opportunity to place themselves in the role of several different careers – from gardener to astronaut. And that’s what Mr. Potato Head has always been about. You can make him into anything you want…His theme isn’t just imagination, but the opportunity to be and do anything. At one station, kids get the opportunity to exercise those imaginations and play with a huge tray full of Mr. Potato Head parts. Go ahead and give him princess shoes and a construction worker’s hat. Plug arms into his nose and mouth holes. He won’t mind – he’s been through worse (just see “Toy Story 3”).

Speaking of which, Mr. Potato Head excelled once again as a supporting actor in the third installment of the “Toy Story” trilogy, one of the best movies of the year, leading Ty Burr of The Boston Globe to comment: “‘Toy Story 3’ hits a high point of comic surrealism when Mr. Potato Head is forced to reinvent himself as Mr. Pita Bread Head – it’s harder than it looks, especially when a pigeon turns up…”

Also this summer, the Elvis Estate in Graceland teamed up with Hasbro to create Elvis Potato Heads. The first figure, timed to be released for Elvis Tribute Week in August, featured Elvis in a jumpsuit. The second figure, Elvis in black leather, will be available for Christmas.

Residents of San Francisco also made Potato Head news this year when some of them discovered a Mr. Potato Head staring back at them from newly issued blue recycling bins scattered throughout the city. According to writer Joe Eskenazi of SF Weekly:

The concept is simple: Mr. Potato Head would be more appropriately named Mr. Plastic, of which he is entirely crafted – and, short of plastic wrap or plastic bags, any sort of plastic is acceptable in a blue bin. But city residents don’t see bits of plastic when they glimpse Mr. Potato Head. They see vestiges of their childhood. And then they get angry.

Mark Westlund, a spokesman for the city’s Department of the Environment, confirmed that it will be removing Mr. Potato Head from future printed materials as soon as possible. Quite simply, San Franciscans have been too emotionally affected by the sight of Mr. Potato Head to absorb the intended message of placing him alongside detergent bottles, disposable cups, and other plastic items. As a result, the city has received a number of indignant phone calls. “They say, ‘That’s Mr. Potato Head! You can’t throw him away! You’ve gotta give him to the neighbor kids.!” Westlund says. “People identify with him so much.”

What does the future hold for Mr. Potato Head? Steam punk and robots, apparently.

Which leaves us with this week’s question: What explains the enduring popularity of Mr. Potato Head?