#FOWC Archives – Page 91 of 102

August 21, 2019August 28, 2019

Road Trip Redux

Note: This is one of my favorite early essays from 2016, reconstituted and updated.

“Kathy”, I said,
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
It took me four days
To hitch-hike from Saginaw.
I’ve come to look for America.”
–Simon & Garfunkel, America

I-whatever, photo by responsecrafting.com

The sun is lower in the horizon now, stabbing through the late afternoon windows when we drive westward home. My baseball team is starting to lose all hope of catching the division leaders. Even pet stores have back-to-school sales. It must be mid-August. It must be time for the End-of-Summer Road Trip.

Everybody’s had these. Maybe when you were a kid, and your parents loaded the station wagon/minivan/SUV with odds and ends and headed off to the Grand Canyon or the Smokies or the Adirondacks or Yosemite. Or, in college, when you and some friends just crammed into someone’s old beater and took off for somebody’s friend’s place where you could crash. Road Trips usually take place at the beginning or end of summer, or at the beginning or end of Something. They are part demarcation, part vision quest, like the mythic journeys where the heroes and heroines go into the underworld or across the sea.

Road Trips allow for a lot of staring out the window and contemplation as well as for Seeing Something New, possibly Interesting. Possibly Just Something. Let’s load the car. Personal epiphanies and experience, coming right up.

August 14, 2019August 21, 2019

The Hottest Ticket in Town

The Divine Sarah Bernhardt playing Cleopatra, the original transformational theater experience

Transformational! G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time)! You’ve never experienced anything like it!

Gobblyedook? Hyperbole? No, as you might guess, these were some of the Facebook comments about Hamilton, which we enjoyed seeing in San Francisco last week, despite the exaggeration and hoopla surrounding its existence. This is not a review of the show, about which you most likely already have an opinion, but it got me to thinking about the other It Performances and Artistic Experiences that also left long shadows from say fifty, a hundred, or even longer ago.

Contrary to some recently held beliefs, Hamilton is not the only theater experience that has ever been deemed life-changing. It was only about fifty years ago that musicals themselves were transformed by the introduction of contemporary music, young people, and irreverent ideas, in the first true rock musical, Hair. A century ago, there was a single person–and her rival–who changed all of theater. Still further back, there was a guy who changed how people wrote, what people read, and even how people think about Christmas. There are all sorts of ways to influence the arts.

When the Moon is in the Seventh House…

The musical Hair premiered off-Broadway in 1967, before moving to Broadway for a very popular, if critically tepid, run. When it migrated to London’s West End in 1968, the start was delayed until changes were made to the Theatres Act in order to allow for the nudity and profanity. Then, it ran in London for nearly 2000 performances.

Written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who also appeared in the show, the musical explored the controversial themes that exploded across headlines the late Sixties: the youth counterculture, opposition to the war, air pollution, racism, free love, and bureaucratic oppression. The songs are joyous and sarcastic, hummable tunes of subversion. We had the album at home when I was nine, and I loved it. Of course, there was no place to actually look up the words to the lyrics, so imagine my dismay at 23, when I finally realized some of the words I was singing in the tune “Sodomyyyyyy…..”

July 31, 2019August 7, 2019

Trigonometry: Secant-ing out New Life in Ancient Civilizations

It’s irresistible. The siren song of Wikipedia calls to me. All I was trying to do was find out which Greek invented trigonometry. Was it Pythagoras and his bean-renouncing cult or someone else? And I come across this enticing little tidbit, a curious little reference which, to a history buff is like the smell of fresh cookies…

Based on one interpretation of the Plimpton 322 cuneiform tablet (c. 1900 BC), some have even asserted that the ancient Babylonians had a table of secants.[8] There is, however, much debate as to whether it is a table of Pythagorean triples, a solution of quadratic equations, or a trigonometric table.
Wikipedia: History of Trigonometry

Much debate? Some have asserted? This sounds like historical mystery to me. I was instantly overjoyed at the thought of poking around to see if anyone denounced anyone else in the public square or started fistfights or wrote long letters to the editor of scientific journals about how their enemies were cretins who didn’t know a hypotenuse from a hippopotamus. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Don’t Be Afeared, it’s Just Math

First, a few definitions. Even if you’ve never taken trigonometry or if the very word causes you to put a blanket over your head, don’t worry. Imagine that it’s a warm sunny day in Greece (or Babylonia or Sumeria or Egypt) and you notice that the pillar of the nearby temple, next to where you are sunning yourself, throws a shadow. Since you like to measure things, you get out your handy measuring stick and you measure the length of the shadow. You know the length of the pillar. You start doing calculations.