Walsh Wonderings Column

“Summer’s Unwelcome Bus Stop”

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on August 26, 2010, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

It’s so easy to forget what it’s like to be a kid. Even as a teacher surrounded by them, I am constantly reminded how adults can forget the pain of things like the end of summer vacation. No matter how hard we try to make school fun, it’s hard to compete against the freedom and unpredictability of summer. When those first few signs that classes are about to begin start appearing, a pall falls over even the happiest of students. This year, it happened in late July as I was watching Big Brother on CBS. A George Orwell fan, I’d stumbled across the show thinking it would reference 1984, and instead I’d fallen down the rabbit hole of reality television at its cattiest. Right in the middle of my weekly fix (I’m not proud), Walmart came on to utter the summertime blasphemy feared most by children: the dreaded “Back to School Sale.”

As a kid, these commercials were nails scraping across the chalkboard of my summer vacation, the clammy hand of mortality resting on what remained of my carefree days. After those first few advertisements for school supplies appeared, my friends and I viewed everything through the prism of our impending imprisonment, a kind of doomsday clock that loomed large over each passing day. On the other hand, our parents seemed to giddily count down the days as if anticipating parole.

None of the four seasons has such a clear starting line as autumn in America: regardless of what the calendar says, children know summer ends the minute the yellow bus stops on their street. The fall season used to be the one time kids never attended classes because they had to help with the harvest; now it marks the inevitable return of the ten-month planting season of academia. This year Stratford students begin school on August 30th, with their teachers reporting five days earlier to prepare the soil.

In the last two weeks, Stratford has been alive with preparations for the Big Day. In late August, even Staples resembles the birthday room at the Discovery Zone as kids bounce around the aisles in search of the perfect notebook. Parents perform subtle acts of bribery to ease the sting: I know you don’t like math, but this calculator has a picture of Dora the Explorer. Shopping for school supplies is at once horrifying and exciting for reluctant learners: only the love for my brand new Harlem Globetrotters lunchbox managed to pull me from my mourning bed and off to the bus stop on that first day of school.

From my perch on the library bench this week I see the mad dashes of harried eighth graders rushing to the references desk in the hope that suggested summer reading books haven’t all been taken out. I overhear two of them indulging in a little summer arithmetic: “We’re expected to read 8-10 books, but we only have to complete the reading questions for two of them. With six days left, that means…” Meanwhile, the mandated summer math packets pop up like Black-Eyed Susans on the sands of Long Beach as clusters of teens put the finishing touches on both their tans and algebraic equations.

Also in evidence are the dizzying effects of a parental grapevine that’s in full bloom: “What have you heard about Ms. Record for Physics?” one concerned father asks a neighbor at the deli counter of the Pickle Barrel. Talk quickly turns to plans being made for their free time now that the kids are back at school. “I might even get to a day game at Yankee Stadium,” he adds. Off to his side, his young son glares up at him.

As I placed my order, I could see myself in this youngster. I’m sure he feels the same sense of betrayal at how adults can so callously discuss the Death of Fun right in front of them. So I was as disappointed as anyone when it slipped out, completely by accident, as I chatted with his father. “Did you see that Irene Cornish wrote the school day is going to be fifteen minutes longer this year?” Now his kid was glaring at me.

If that young man happens to read this, please forgive me; sometimes we just forget. I hope everyone has a happy and healthy start to the new academic year.

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“It Was Just That The Time Was Wrong…”

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on August 12, 2010, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

“A love-struck Romeo sings the streets a serenade

Laying everybody low with a love song that he made.
Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade
Says something like, ‘You and me babe, how about it?'”

— Mark Knopler, “Romeo and Juliet,” 1981

Stratford has always had a complex relationship with its renowned American Shakespeare Theatre, but 1981 held such promise. Newly appointed director Peter Coe had just signed Christopher Plummer and James Earl Jones to lead the Stratford Festival season productions of Henry V and Othello. The theatre seemed ready to “step out of the shade” of the previous years’ financial difficulties and into a new era. Unfortunately, 1982 saw the theatre’s last full season before the state took control amid looming foreclosure on the mortgage in 1983. For the future of this once-proud building, that season’s production of “The Comedy of Errors” proved prophetic. The next twenty-seven years played out like a Shakespearean tragedy as battles over its name (changed to American Festival Theatre in 1988), deed (finally given back to Stratford in 2005), and vision eventually erupted into the legendarily vitriolic town council debates over its latest renovation.

That the fate of the theatre still stirs such passionate debate underscores its importance to all of Stratford, embodying as it does not only our history but our noblest aspirations in the arts. It’s offered its citizens Shakespeare, yes, but also served as a gateway to the arts in so many other ways. In 1979 my dad took me to see Beatlemania there, and I still remember staring in awe as the majestic facade of the theatre emerged from the trees. After college, the siren song of the theatre was one of the reasons I chose to settle down in Stratford.

“I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you ’til I die. There’s a place for us, you know the movie song. When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?”

While the time might have been wrong for the American Shakespeare Theatre to remain solvent back then, there has always been a place for this regal figure in the lives of Stratfordites. This Thursday, the 2010 Festival Stratford adds to the rich tradition of the theatre as the Stratford Arts Commission sponsors four days of free entertainment on its grounds. Each day the Stratford Arts Guild will showcase the work of local artists, and yoga instructor Ashley Bardugone will conduct classes each morning at 8am. “Quickies in the Park,” which showcases new works by Stratford’s SquareWrights members, will be presented along with the parody The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) more classic fare such as The Tempest. Children’s Day on Sunday begins with performances by local dance schools before Shakesperience Productions presents Rapunzel and the Interactive Shakespeare Workshop for Children and Families. (For times and other specific information, please go to www.festivalstratford.com or StratfordStar.com.)

This is Shakespeare the way Peter Coe would have wanted it: sparse, immediate, personal—how appropriate, then, that Henry V will also be performed. This festival represents Stratford in all her finery, showing off our best talent in one of our most scenic locations. Anyone that was lucky enough to attend one of last year’s performances will attest to the magic in the air as children and adults of all ages gathered to celebrate a truly unique family experience.

One can’t help but wonder if Stratford, without the constellating figure of the theatre towering over the Housatonic like the Bard himself, would feel the same pull to preserve and promote the arts as we do. Or do we reach a little higher because of it, our pride in our shared stage history pushing us to bigger and better things? I can think of no greater gift to our children than preserving the legacy of this magnificent building and allowing future generations the opportunity to experience the wonder of the theatre in their own backyard. As we celebrate Festival Stratford, let’s not forget the words of the man who helped built the theatre in 1955, Joseph Verner Reed, who said its purpose was “to present Shakespeare to young people in such a way that the plays become living, beautiful, exciting—and enduring.”

In these tough economic times, it’s hard to think of the future in the face of so many obstacles; I don’t claim to know the best way to fund the necessary renovations, nor do I know which artistic direction will best allow the theatre to become self-sustaining. I do know that the gift of Joseph Reed, compounded by the blood and sweat of countless hundreds over the last 55 years, was not a gift only for us. It is for our children and grandchildren who one day will look back and thank us for passing that gift onto them.

It’s fitting that Mark Knopler’s birthday is August 12th, the first day of this year’s Festival Stratford on the grounds of our weather-scarred theatre. The final words of his song could have been sung by the theatre herself to the citizens of Stratford, hoping that the time is right: “You and me babe, how about it?”

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“The Retail Queen of Fairfield, Connecticut”

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star newspaper on July 22, 2010, in “Walsh’s Wonderings”)

It is the day after Thanksgiving, and the masses descend upon the local retail outlets like water from a burst dam, flowing like lemmings through the aisles in a pre-Christmas frenzy. However, one woman in a lonely corner of the grocery store is not there to shop. She waits patiently at the Returns counter with a turkey, or at least what’s left of it after her husband and seven kids had attacked it twelve hours earlier. The skeletal remains were easy to slip into the small plastic bag—even the wishbone had long since been taken out and snapped.

“It went bad,” this woman says to the lady behind the counter, sliding the carcass across the counter. Only a pro walks into a store and demands her money back on a turkey without any meat left on it. Janet Walsh is a pro.

My mom understood the craftiness one must adopt when trying to feed a family of nine each day. The family checkbook was packed like a musket with coupons skinned from local newspapers. Trips to the grocery store were military operations as seven kids invaded the unsuspecting stores offering samples on Saturday afternoons—who needs lunch when you can wolf down eight tiny slices of pepperoni pizza and wash it down with a thimbleful of the newest Coke? Our family did not merely buy in bulk; we stocked up as if winter was coming to Valley Forge. Each grocery trip ended with a game of culinary Tetris, where we’d stuff three separate freezers and two refrigerators with surgical precision. There was no rummaging through the fridge in my family; asked what was for dinner that night, my mom’s answer was, “Whatever’s up front.”

It was not uncommon for a loaf of bread to lie frozen in state like Vladimir Lenin for up to a year before it was discovered in the back of the freezer. She’d thaw it like the wooly mammoth on those National Geographic specials, using a hair dryer to separate a few pieces for school lunches. These clay pigeons with peanut butter and jelly slathered all over them sat in our lunch pails like a muttered apology, still frozen by the time our class had lunch.

“It keeps the sandwich fresh,” she’d say as we showed her our chipped teeth.

What the poor lady working at the Returns counter that day couldn’t know was that my family lived on food that had long since passed its expiration date. She viewed the freezer as a time machine, cryogenically preserving batteries, cheeses, cold medicines, and milk that would make the folks at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not take notice. In fact, there were three types of milk in or refrigerator: the “good” milk (within a week of its expiration date), “mixing” milk (older, used on cereal or in recipes), and “sour” milk, which would only be so designated when something inside it tried to bite you.

“The date is only a suggestion,” my mom would say whenever we brought it up. “They just want you to buy more.”

Local shopkeepers were talked into 10% discounts for the privilege of clothing her family.

“I have a carload full of customers in this family: growing children who like to buy new clothes!”

They agreed to the discounts, never realizing that this woman put clothes into a rotation that would be the envy of the New York Yankees. Each outfit bought for my oldest brother and sister filtered its way down to the youngest in a kind of corduroy waterfall, and all our class pictures looked as if we’d just pasted a new head on last year’s set. Being the youngest boy, I was always ten years behind the fashion, a Fonzie t-shirt in a sea of Gap mock turtlenecks. You could pick a Walsh kid out of a crowd because of our awkward Frankenstein gait, a result of my mom’s decision to sew massive patches on the insides of our pants and shirts to make sure they’d last to the next sibling. Where most kids wore clothes, we wore armor of reinforced nylon and denim that restricted our range of motion to that of the Tin Man.

“You just have to work them in a bit, like your baseball mitt,” she’d say.

As we grew older and more conscious of our fashion maladies, she picked up toddler Izod shirts or tattered Garanimals attire at consignment shops and sewed the telltale lizard onto the discount shirts she’d bought at K-Mart. “That’s strange,” my friends would say, “I always thought the alligator was on the other side!”

Growing up with my mom, one learned that opened bags of candy on store shelves were considered “samples,” and that any expensive item mistakenly placed in a discount section must now be sold at the discounted price. Four-dollar wine became vintage when poured into a different bottle. There was so much bread in the meatloaf that we didn’t know whether it should serve as the inside or the outside of the leftover meatloaf sandwiches.  Clothes could be “rented” from local stores for special occasions and returned the very next day as long as you pinned the tags to the inside sleeve and kept the crease. Armed with a receipt and the original bag, there was nothing you couldn’t return.

Her ability to make the most out of little is surpassed only by her incredible ability to make her family feel loved. She never missed an opportunity to tell us how much she loved us, even during times we’d given her little reason to. She made prom dresses and dozens of Halloween costumes from scratch even as we complained that everyone else’s mom bought them new ones. In an age before carpooling, she drove seven kids to tennis matches, swim practice, track meets, ping-pong clubs, soccer practice and extra help after school. She made midnight calls with a cold washcloth and Vicks Vap-O-Rub when we were sick and showed up to every banquet even if you only got the “Participant” ribbon.

How do you follow an act like this? I’ll thank her the only way I know how: I’ll allow my kids to use up all my gas when they borrow the car. I’ll remind them of the high holy days and forgive them when they forget the holiest day of all: my birthday. Most importantly, I’ll teach them about the way life should be lived. They’ll learn about laughter because they’ll grow up listening to a lifetime of stories around the kitchen table. They’ll learn about the importance of family because they will know that your family is the one place in your heart that is always open. They will learn about love because their grandparents gave it unconditionally.

And I’ll wait in line at the grocery store Returns counter with a half-eaten holiday turkey in the original bag, receipt in hand, and wonder how the heck she ever managed to pull this off.

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