Taste for Tacky

After passing the pink gates and fake deer menagerie of a Bristol home along Route 114 en route to Newport, I began thinking about the profusion of tacky lawns in Rhode Island. With streaks of forsythia and daffodil clusters yellowing the commute, and the pinks and whites and pastels of the blooming and budding spring bushes and trees serving as colorful distraction, Rhody’s endless fascination with lawn animals, mini-lighthouses, glass orbs and leftover holiday decoration can go unnoticed. But operating on the theory that there is nothing in the universe that can’t be Googled, when I got to work I plugged into the Matrix and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s already a blog called Tacky Lawns dedicated to documenting the wonderful world of yard kitsch.

Our purpose and mission is to document the hordes of tacky lawns and lawn ornaments that blight American yards. We seek out everything from the ordinary tacky (pink flamingoes, gnomes on the roam, resin animals of every stripe and shape) to the extraordinary in tackiness.

My search led to a post on the tacky lawns of West Warwick, a photo sequence accompanied by the following note:

As of April 1, 2000 there were 13,186 housing units in West Warwick. As of November 2, 2009, 90% of these housing units featured Tacky Lawns.

Rhode Island, Land of Giant Termites and Six-Foot Mr. Potato Heads, has long loved its kitsch. Somewhere inside most homes you are liable to find one of the following: Pope-on-a-Rope Soap, Smoking Monkey, Yodeling Pickle, Boxing Nun puppet, a Buddy Christ Dashboard Statue or something equally cheap and tawdry that indulges the bad taste impulse in all of us. (Full confession: My thing is plastic lobster. One crustacean lives in the kitchen; the other’s on a bookshelf.)

Like the circles of hell in Dante’s “Inferno,” there are levels to tackiness. At one end you have pink flamingoes and garden gnomes, deserving induction in the first class of the Kitsch Hall of Fame. Somewhere lower you’ll find the Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure, a pajama bottom-wearing, slipper-clad, wild-eyed, sloppy-haired elderly woman crawling in cats. Or Fred Toothpick Holder, a bulbous, vaguely man-shaped figure, stuck mercilessly in dozens of toothpicks, like an acupuncture session gone horribly wrong, available in “Ouch Gray.” Or a Lookin’ Good for Jesus mini-makeup kit, a selection of Tattoos for the Elderly or Instant Irish Accent Mouth Spray, all novelties in the marketplace of ideas that make you go “hmm…”

So where is the tackiest yard in Rhode Island?

The Daffodil Man

I’ve never met the Daffodil Man, but I’d like to thank him. Ronald Lee Fleming, a city planner and urban designer, was honored by members of the Alliance for a Livable Newport recently for his generosity and vision. Fleming is the man responsible for funding the Daffodil Project, in which more than 120,000 daffodils have been planted throughout Newport over the last seven years. As quoted last week by Sean Flynn of The Newport Daily News, Fleming envisions “a gold necklace from the city’s entryways right down to the water.”

As our communities asphalt and concrete and sprawl themselves into one homogenous, gray Blobville, we take pleasure in what little grace notes of beautification are left in the landscape. It improves the drive to Newport, for example, on a late March/early April day, to notice satellites of daffodil clusters streaking yellow at the Rotary, in the field along Admiral Kalfbus Road and next to two burying grounds on the aptly named Farewell Street. Somehow civilization doesn’t feel so drab when bulbs are in bloom.

A few daffodils at a time, Fleming has transformed Newport. His contribution to Newport’s charm is reminiscent of local heroes in other communities – such as the late Antoinetta Goodwin, better known in South County as The Chicken Lady, for the Rhode Island Red figures that adorned her automobile and mailbox along her Route 138 property. (Her son has carried on the chicken mailbox tradition, with the birds decked out in Red Sox garb or seasonal decoration, amusing commuters along the route that once connected Tower Hill to Little Rest.) Goodwin made it her mission to plant flowers in many of the roadside and rotary medians in the villages of South Kingstown, bringing color and a sense of tranquility to the increasingly noisy, suburbanized space.

People my age who grew up in Barrington may remember Karl Jones, who tended what was thought to be the country’s largest private rose garden at his property along Nayatt Road. Jones was a cranky, Yankee iconoclast, but his cultivated roses and landscape were beautiful, drawing visitors from around the world in June. Each year he donated his land to Barrington High School for a day, so the graduating class could hold its Friendship Service on the grounds, while the roses were in bloom. When he became too old to take care of the garden, he approached the town for help, hoping his flowers, with a little care and tending, would have new life in posterity. Barrington balked. Jones sold to private developers. The property was split up and turned into a cul-de-sac of homes with an address of Jones Circle. A trellis with a few thorny vines is all that remains visible to the public along Nayatt Road, an echo of what once was the town’s quirkiest and most beloved attraction.

So Barrington lost its rose paradise, and much of its character and charm in the process. Newport is still building its Brigadoon of daffodils. If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it takes a villager who sees the world with the eyes of a child to save it.

What would be one way to transform an ugly part of Rhode Island?

Waiting for 'Moonrise'

Quint drinks a can of Narragansett in “Jaws.” Bluenote was the name of the horse that wins the fourth race at Narragansett Park in “The Sting.” Miss Rhode Island wins the Miss America crown in “Miss Congeniality,” and when pageant host William Shatner asks her to describe her idea of a perfect date, she says “April 25, because it’s not too hot, not too cold.”

These are a few of the sterling Rhode Islandisms in Hollywood films. Despite the best efforts of the Farrelly Brothers, and the fine work of some exceptional actors – including Richard Jenkins and Viola Davis – the Ocean State still comes up a bit short on the Silver Screen. More movies are being made here, but few of them have been very good, so Rhode Islanders have contented themselves with lapping up appetizers of scenery or Rhody references while mostly cringing at the dialogue and plot contrivances.

But that could change in May, when the quirkiest of film directors, Wes Anderson, opens the Cannes Film Festival with a new movie filmed in the quirkiest of states, Yours Rhody.

“Moonrise Kingdom,” featuring a stellar cast (Edward Norton, Francis McDormand, Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban), tells the story of a 12-year-old boy and girl in a New England village, circa 1965, who fall in love, make a secret pact and escape together on the eve of a impending storm, with the villagers in pursuit. If the trailer is a true indication of the film’s verbal wit and visual enchantment, “Moonrise” may end up being the movie that stamps Rhode Island in the minds of film buffs in the manner of Martha’s Vineyard in “Jaws” and coastal Scotland in “Local Hero.” Much of it was filmed at the South Kingstown Land Trust conservation easement Bayfield Farm, and advance scenes suggest that Anderson has captured the fairy-tale atmosphere of its sloping fields and tangled woods.

Leading us to this week's question: What Rhode Island location would you like to see filmed in a movie?

Rhody Universe: Soupy Sales
Last December I wrote an article about the art of making soupy, a family tradition in the villages of Westerly that originated in parts of Italy in which spicy sausages are made before Christmas, hung over winter, and distributed to kin and close friends around Easter. The article, posted on our Web site, prompted an e-mail from a reader, who wondered how to acquire soupy, which he had enjoyed years ago. I passed on a couple of suggestions – Ritacco’s Market, Dipollino’s Packing Co. – and didn’t hear from him again until recently. He’s having his bathroom remodeled and talked to “the guy that is putting in the flooring.” Turns out the flooring guy goes to Westerly every year to make soupy. So now he has a soupy source. The universe that is Rhode Island works in mysterious ways.

Ode to a Greasy Spoon Diner

I belong to the counter culture, the kind of person that prefers sitting in front of a bartender, waitress or short-order cook than in a booth or at a table. Cafes are nice, but sometimes they can have too much milieu. When I want an environment without the fancy French vocabulary attached, I head for pubs and diners.

Growing up in Rhode Island, the birthplace of the American diner, I always looked for the dives and greasy spoons – for the food, yes, tasty, cheap and served in big portions, but also for the conversation and the characters. You could run into anybody. Millionaire. Fisherman. College professor. Stripper. The diner seemed to be a safe haven for all walks of life. Some of my strangest conversations have occurred in diners. Today it was a thread about whether you could eat another human being to survive if you had to. The consensus was it depended on how much Tabasco was available.

(I remember a conversation at the old Jigger’s Diner in East Greenwich about how the town had an unusual number of wedding shops. One man at the counter was from a college town in New Hampshire. He said you couldn’t turn a corner without running into a pizza house. Another guy was from Brockton, Mass. He said, “Our thing is funeral homes.”)

Working now from our Newport Daily News offices above the slots, I can tumble down the hill anytime to Bishop’s 4th Street Diner at the Rotary. It’s the kind of rough-and-ready place where a frappe is advertised as a “Great Hangover Cure!” on the menu. Rhody food figures prominently. There are R.I. Johnny Cakes and stuffies, meatball grinders and clam strip rolls, and plenty of items featuring “Portuguese” in the name, including Portuguese breakfast sandwiches, Portuguese Sweet Toast and even Portuguese French Toast. The Portuguese Omelet includes the signature twist in all Rhody food described as “Portuguese,” a spicy sausage called chourico (it is combined with onions, peppers and cheese in the egg). At Bishop’s, a waitress scrawling shorthand on a receipt pad might yell out, “Drop a fry, Mikey!,” indicating in diner lingo that a particular order has been placed. The customers are mostly locals and regulars, and everyone seems to use a lot of ketchup.

Sometimes even the names of diners create a feeling of Rhode Islandness. The Hope Diner in Bristol. The late and lamented Wampanoag Diner in East Providence, where Mama Dot and her family worked. Like Champs Diner in Woonsocket and many others, the Wampanoag lingers only in the haze of nostalgia and the eternal scent memory of cigarette smoke, infiltrating every fabric of clothing.

The tourists come to see our lighthouses, but the locals prefer the diners. There is Snoopy’s in North Kingstown, the Middle of Nowhere Diner in Exeter and Haven Brothers in Providence. There’s also the Modern Diner and Right Spot Diner in Pawtucket, Seaplane Diner and Liberty Elm Diner in Providence, State Line Diner in Foster, Beacon Diner in East Greenwich and Miss Cranston Diner in Cranston, among others, calling on all souls. Because the average Rhode Island diner always felt to me like the kind of place where the angels and demons might show up after midnight, meeting behind windows and chrome reflecting rain-streaked neon. The winged and horned, mostly invisible to the rest of us, sitting at the counter to square up the previous day’s soul-stealing and soul-saving over coffee and hash. Loser pays the tab. Winner leaves the tip.

What is your favorite Rhode Island diner?

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?