Green eyes. Red eyes. Hebrew-British eyes. And the eyes of Texas too.
The itch for England was strong today. I spent way too long looking at BUNAC and CCSA brochures and UK job search websites when I should have been editing a video and addressing graduation announcements. Yes, a sob tried to escape once, but thanks to the numbing American culture I'm soaked in, I couldn't allow it to get free.
Texas will always be home. But, oh, how I want to go back across the pond. Who knew heritage was so strong in this little girl's heart? 'Course, it ain't just heritage that's pulling me there.
If you want to totally waste your time... these are the papers I wrote for my London class. I got them back today and my professor was really impressed. That was nice. Then I saw all his London pictures on his door... and that was when the itch hit.
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Anyone who knows me understands that my love of music drives most of my actions. Traveling is another love of mine, but I am used to being without any recorded music while taking a vacation far from home. I'm either too poor or too cheap to buy an MP3 player, and the extra weight and space necessary for packing a CD collection is something my feminine back muscles have inured my heart to going without. So, having already been without recorded music for a week, my first chance to hear music played by real English players made a lasting impression on me.
The group of us were at Hampton Court for their celebration of a traditional King James-era English Christmas. As usual, the women had split off from the men to explore our surroundings at our own pace. As we entered the Great Hall, I was inspecting the tapestries on the wall. I barely noticed the two flautists and two lutists at the other end of the Hall, dressed in funny robes like musicians of King James' day. I couldn't finish my assessment of the Hall’s physical works of art after the musical artists played their first note. Once they started, my sense of time and awareness of my location were lost. All I could do was float across the room, hoping that I wouldn't scare the music spirits away as I approached.
The pitch of the flautists was perfect. The touch of the lutists was appropriately light. All four were perfectly locked in time with each other. Even beyond that, the comically-dressed band possessed that transcendent spirit musicians fight so hard to capture, which comes only when all the musicians are helping the listeners connect with the piece of music.
You see, the players weren't solely worried about their own performance; they were also being played by the piece they were playing. The effect of these musicians on me was enough to make me forget all the music I'd heard recently. I was bobbing my head on the downbeats and following the melody with my eyes. I tried to keep these motions from appearing too spastic, but I really don't know how much I succeeded, as I was occupied with trying to decipher the intervals between the counterpoint of the two flutes. Deep down I knew the song was simple enough for me to decode, but the excellence with which the players were casting their net made me feel out of practice. I listened like I hadn't heard music in weeks.
I knew it was my last hour to really explore the castle, but I couldn't bring myself to abandon the spirit that was present. The musicians started to play a second song. At one point, the two flautists stifled a wince, and then a laugh, and gave in to exchanging a knowing glance, the classic reaction given by musicians who have messed up. The mathematical part of my brain had indeed picked up some discrepancy between pitch and time, but I couldn't tell you which note or beat had been missed, much less which player had missed it. The spirit of their performance carried them through.
After two pieces with the flutes and lutes, one of the flautists stepped out from behind the table to deliver an educational speech. The music they were playing that day, he said, had been commissioned by King James to celebrate his marriage. He also told us that in King James' day, all the flutes in an orchestra or group's set had to be made and tuned at the same time and in the same shop in order to be in tune with each other, making it an expensive thing to order a set of flutes and pennywhistles. Speaking about the lutes, he said that the lutes there were bigger than those of James’ court, and that accurately sized lutes would have been about 2/3 of the size. I still wonder why they didn't make them smaller; their eight drones were already ridiculously long. The leader of the pack then took a moment to demonstrate a Jew's harp to the children in attendance. My friends had left me after the first song, and I could sense that people behind me were leaving and that I was now a step ahead of the crowd, but I only would have cared if I had thought the musicians thought I looked awkward.
Increasing my ecstatic state, the flautists then picked up bagpipes! I worked to contain my excitement about capturing the rare chance to hear bagpipes in person, and so close to Scotland! Of course, they were loud, but either the large room or my joy at finally hearing live music absorbed any excess volume, because I didn't think they were too loud. The harmonies nearly brought me to tears, marking the second time in my life I have been crying over a live concert. Fear of being embarrassed by red eyes, however, caused me to surreptitiously brush the tears away.
The concert ended much too soon. Knowing the opportunity wouldn't come again, I decided to ask the lead lutist a couple of questions about the lute. I considered concealing my eagerness to learn, thinking that a quality so inherent to an American student might translate differently to a British man. Weighing the options, I decided that the possibility of offense in this case was too small to overthrow personal equity of conduct.
I asked him about tunings and written music and where he studied such an instrument, and specifically mentioned the drones to clue him in that I do know a thing or two about instruments. He told me, amont other fascinating things, that the lutes had six strings tuned in fourths like a guitar, but with the lowest open string being a G. The high D and G were also tuned an octave down because of the excess string tension that would be required if the tuning had continued to rise. On the other side of the neck, the drones were tuned diatonically in G major. While the lutist had studied how to read sheet music written in the time of King James, all the players were reading from modern transcriptions.
I talked to the lutist until I felt I had annoyed him enough. It’s too bad that all English people don’t reply like the people Washington Irving meets in The Sketchbook do, because if they did, I’m sure I would have enjoyed hearing this musician’s entire life story. Instead, the lutists had to prepare to play for some actors portraying the king and queen’s grand entry into the Great Hall. Plainly, this did not interest me as much as the fantastic concert of lutes, flutes, and bagpipes. And so, I left King James’ court, but to this day the spirit of the court music has not yet left me.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Even though I confess to never having read more than a few passages of Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, the character of Nicholas’s widowed mother has been a character I’ve sought out for three years now. In the spring semester of 2002, my last semester of high school, I decided to audition for the stage production of Dickens’ book that my little sister was trying out for, for no better reason than that I didn’t have anything else to do that afternoon. Fortunately for me, our script, Tim Kelly’s stage adaptation entitled Nicholas Nickleby, was not the nine-hour long London stage version. It did, however, require a cast of forty-one players, increasing my chances of snagging a role. As either luck or talent would have it, I was cast as Mrs. Nickleby. I spent the semester pursuing an accurate representation of the character’s scatterbrained mannerisms and babbling speech, as well as the best way to convey her deep care for her family, which she readily extended to anything that was important to those she loved.
Exactly three years and a few days after winning the role, I was blessed to be in the very city in which the Nicklebys lived at the beginning of the play: London. Having cracked Dickens’ book a few weeks earlier, I had searched out as many facts about Mrs. Nickleby as I could. I found that Mrs. Nickleby had lived in two areas of London: she had boarded with Kate, Nicholas, and, later, Smike in the home of Miss La Creevy just off the Strand, and she had been given a home on Thames Street where she and Kate struggled to make a living. My companion Molly and I ventured out into London to see the modern versions of the London locations Dickens placed her in.
First, we went out to the Strand, a high street full of theatres, posh hotels, and large shops. The shops were mainly at the Trafalgar Square end of the street, where we began. They were not tourist shops, but they were the kind of places that would be useful if you were staying in one of the big, expensive hotels that we passed, like the Savoy or the Thistle. The shop names were chains like Boots Chemist’s, Marks & Spencer’s Simply Food, and popular consumer electronics stores, ready to help the international businessman who needs fresh breath, a quick energy re-up, or something to replace the mobile charger he forgot to pack. If the Strand were someone’s residential neighborhood today, the residents likewise would find the shops useful. Daytime tourist attractions were not a part of the street’s makeup, and Molly and I found only one kitschy gift shop to distract foreigners like us.
On the second half of the Strand were fewer shops and even more theatres. If the Nicklebys really had lived in this neighborhood, it would have been more of a reflection on their landlord’s, Miss La Creevy’s, personality than on Mrs. Nickleby. I could easily see Miss La Creevy getting excited about the wonderful shows opening just a few blocks away and the important guests coming to stay in the hotels. Although I visited in the daytime, I could easily picture the Strand being the type of area that never sleeps. Visitors out to be entertained, theatre players out entertaining late, and hotel guests out early to seize the day would keep the place buzzing around the clock.
When I tried looking at the area from the eyes of a resident, it looked comfortably affluent, like the upper middle class of the U. S. It was not as opulent as the Mayfair and Buckingham Palace area, where Mark, our coach tour guide, told us that houses sell for 22 million pounds. Fortunately, it was also more exciting, because the people there did not need to keep up that pretense of rank which forces privacy upon the residents of the richest areas. This accessibility allowed the area to hold an excitement in the air that comes when a community is able to share their lives with each other. The outsiders came to the area to see their shows and stay in their hotels, and the residents enjoyed the excitement the shows and visitors brought to the area, as well as sharing their own private jokes about those who invaded the area without taking the time to learn about the local culture.
The residences were not easily seen, however; they were packed away from the crowded thoroughfare. Molly and I didn’t find a family home until we left the Strand to cut through a few smaller lanes to the nearest tube station. The homes were tall and narrow without an inch of alleyway between them, and each edifice was different; some edifices had personalities larger than their size. The lane would have reminded me of a neighborhood in Brooklyn, if not for the engaging colors each home was painted. Some were plain colors like gray stone and brown brick; an equal number were more cheery, having blue trim or a sheeny cream paint; a few staked a claim on memory with colors that 99% of all males on this earth would not be able to name, like mauve and ochre. I took a moment to take a picture of one that fit my idea of Miss La Creevy. It had four stories of bay window seats jutting out over the sidewalk. Melon paint on the bricks matched warmly with the tan stonework trim, though the shade of magenta that possessed the awning over the front door was a little assaulting. The window seats, stonework and odd colors would have been just the thing for a romantic artisan landlord like Miss La Creevy, and Mrs. Nickleby surely would have ignored the rough edges like the electrical wiring that draped across the house like a rope belt between the first and second floors.
Molly and I entered the tube and rode to Thames St., whereupon it started raining on us. I did realize how poetic it was that we had to walk through cold rain on the street where nasty Ralph Nickleby had foreclosed on a mortgage to house Mrs. Nickleby and Kate. On both sides of Thames St. were gray and brown stone buildings which, as best I could tell, mostly held financial offices. The street was narrower than the Strand, and cut less like a thoroughfare and more like a rain gutter between the somber buildings and underneath two or three wide bridges. Hardly a soul was walking the pavement, and the only chatter we heard came from two city workers working together to clean up rubbish from the little corners into which the wind blew the paper trash.
Since we were wandering on a bank holiday, I couldn’t see any offices open for business. More disappointing, I couldn’t find a single residence or hotel that would have given me any hint of Mrs. Nickleby. The rain, wind, hunger, and lack of pubs in the area made me and Molly ready to quit and get out of the rain, until we came upon the Monument to the London fire. Then I made the connection - we were in the City, the important financial center that, according to Mark, was not only burned into dust in 1666, but was also bombed by the German Luftwaffe in World War II. That was why all the buildings were smooth, modern stone, as well as why no residences could be found. I wondered if Mrs. Nickleby would have found it cleansing or cathartic in any way to know that the house her miserly brother-in-law had put her in had been wiped out by a fight much bigger than the tiff she and Ralph had over poor Smike’s future. At the same time, how would she respond if she knew that her first London home had been built over by an office building, used by people of Ralph’s profession? After all, the pursuit of money eventually killed Ralph, and now it seems to have taken over his land holdings too. I can’t decide if Mrs. Nickleby would consider this good riddance of a tainted house, or a horrifying advancement of those who profit from the love of money.
Molly and I hopped the tube just north of the Monument and left Mrs. Nickleby’s neighborhood. The tube lines, however, could not take us out of the world of Mrs. Nickleby. We could see what Dickens wrote the widow character to represent in every person working to keep strong through a blighted life or a difficult time of loss. With a walk through the neighborhoods Dickens used to frame her experiences, it was easier to understand why Mrs. Nickleby fought to keep her surviving family together in imperfect circumstances. In a city as wonderful as London, I can think of none better to share the wonders with than one’s nearest and dearest family.
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You know, I could do it. I could take the BUNAC six-month work program. It wouldn't even cost that much. They say I can just show up there and get any job at any old hole in the wall. I don't know if I'd come out on top financially, working for minimum wage and all... but I could do it. So what's stopping me?
Texas will always be home. But, oh, how I want to go back across the pond. Who knew heritage was so strong in this little girl's heart? 'Course, it ain't just heritage that's pulling me there.
If you want to totally waste your time... these are the papers I wrote for my London class. I got them back today and my professor was really impressed. That was nice. Then I saw all his London pictures on his door... and that was when the itch hit.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Anyone who knows me understands that my love of music drives most of my actions. Traveling is another love of mine, but I am used to being without any recorded music while taking a vacation far from home. I'm either too poor or too cheap to buy an MP3 player, and the extra weight and space necessary for packing a CD collection is something my feminine back muscles have inured my heart to going without. So, having already been without recorded music for a week, my first chance to hear music played by real English players made a lasting impression on me.
The group of us were at Hampton Court for their celebration of a traditional King James-era English Christmas. As usual, the women had split off from the men to explore our surroundings at our own pace. As we entered the Great Hall, I was inspecting the tapestries on the wall. I barely noticed the two flautists and two lutists at the other end of the Hall, dressed in funny robes like musicians of King James' day. I couldn't finish my assessment of the Hall’s physical works of art after the musical artists played their first note. Once they started, my sense of time and awareness of my location were lost. All I could do was float across the room, hoping that I wouldn't scare the music spirits away as I approached.
The pitch of the flautists was perfect. The touch of the lutists was appropriately light. All four were perfectly locked in time with each other. Even beyond that, the comically-dressed band possessed that transcendent spirit musicians fight so hard to capture, which comes only when all the musicians are helping the listeners connect with the piece of music.
You see, the players weren't solely worried about their own performance; they were also being played by the piece they were playing. The effect of these musicians on me was enough to make me forget all the music I'd heard recently. I was bobbing my head on the downbeats and following the melody with my eyes. I tried to keep these motions from appearing too spastic, but I really don't know how much I succeeded, as I was occupied with trying to decipher the intervals between the counterpoint of the two flutes. Deep down I knew the song was simple enough for me to decode, but the excellence with which the players were casting their net made me feel out of practice. I listened like I hadn't heard music in weeks.
I knew it was my last hour to really explore the castle, but I couldn't bring myself to abandon the spirit that was present. The musicians started to play a second song. At one point, the two flautists stifled a wince, and then a laugh, and gave in to exchanging a knowing glance, the classic reaction given by musicians who have messed up. The mathematical part of my brain had indeed picked up some discrepancy between pitch and time, but I couldn't tell you which note or beat had been missed, much less which player had missed it. The spirit of their performance carried them through.
After two pieces with the flutes and lutes, one of the flautists stepped out from behind the table to deliver an educational speech. The music they were playing that day, he said, had been commissioned by King James to celebrate his marriage. He also told us that in King James' day, all the flutes in an orchestra or group's set had to be made and tuned at the same time and in the same shop in order to be in tune with each other, making it an expensive thing to order a set of flutes and pennywhistles. Speaking about the lutes, he said that the lutes there were bigger than those of James’ court, and that accurately sized lutes would have been about 2/3 of the size. I still wonder why they didn't make them smaller; their eight drones were already ridiculously long. The leader of the pack then took a moment to demonstrate a Jew's harp to the children in attendance. My friends had left me after the first song, and I could sense that people behind me were leaving and that I was now a step ahead of the crowd, but I only would have cared if I had thought the musicians thought I looked awkward.
Increasing my ecstatic state, the flautists then picked up bagpipes! I worked to contain my excitement about capturing the rare chance to hear bagpipes in person, and so close to Scotland! Of course, they were loud, but either the large room or my joy at finally hearing live music absorbed any excess volume, because I didn't think they were too loud. The harmonies nearly brought me to tears, marking the second time in my life I have been crying over a live concert. Fear of being embarrassed by red eyes, however, caused me to surreptitiously brush the tears away.
The concert ended much too soon. Knowing the opportunity wouldn't come again, I decided to ask the lead lutist a couple of questions about the lute. I considered concealing my eagerness to learn, thinking that a quality so inherent to an American student might translate differently to a British man. Weighing the options, I decided that the possibility of offense in this case was too small to overthrow personal equity of conduct.
I asked him about tunings and written music and where he studied such an instrument, and specifically mentioned the drones to clue him in that I do know a thing or two about instruments. He told me, amont other fascinating things, that the lutes had six strings tuned in fourths like a guitar, but with the lowest open string being a G. The high D and G were also tuned an octave down because of the excess string tension that would be required if the tuning had continued to rise. On the other side of the neck, the drones were tuned diatonically in G major. While the lutist had studied how to read sheet music written in the time of King James, all the players were reading from modern transcriptions.
I talked to the lutist until I felt I had annoyed him enough. It’s too bad that all English people don’t reply like the people Washington Irving meets in The Sketchbook do, because if they did, I’m sure I would have enjoyed hearing this musician’s entire life story. Instead, the lutists had to prepare to play for some actors portraying the king and queen’s grand entry into the Great Hall. Plainly, this did not interest me as much as the fantastic concert of lutes, flutes, and bagpipes. And so, I left King James’ court, but to this day the spirit of the court music has not yet left me.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Even though I confess to never having read more than a few passages of Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, the character of Nicholas’s widowed mother has been a character I’ve sought out for three years now. In the spring semester of 2002, my last semester of high school, I decided to audition for the stage production of Dickens’ book that my little sister was trying out for, for no better reason than that I didn’t have anything else to do that afternoon. Fortunately for me, our script, Tim Kelly’s stage adaptation entitled Nicholas Nickleby, was not the nine-hour long London stage version. It did, however, require a cast of forty-one players, increasing my chances of snagging a role. As either luck or talent would have it, I was cast as Mrs. Nickleby. I spent the semester pursuing an accurate representation of the character’s scatterbrained mannerisms and babbling speech, as well as the best way to convey her deep care for her family, which she readily extended to anything that was important to those she loved.
Exactly three years and a few days after winning the role, I was blessed to be in the very city in which the Nicklebys lived at the beginning of the play: London. Having cracked Dickens’ book a few weeks earlier, I had searched out as many facts about Mrs. Nickleby as I could. I found that Mrs. Nickleby had lived in two areas of London: she had boarded with Kate, Nicholas, and, later, Smike in the home of Miss La Creevy just off the Strand, and she had been given a home on Thames Street where she and Kate struggled to make a living. My companion Molly and I ventured out into London to see the modern versions of the London locations Dickens placed her in.
First, we went out to the Strand, a high street full of theatres, posh hotels, and large shops. The shops were mainly at the Trafalgar Square end of the street, where we began. They were not tourist shops, but they were the kind of places that would be useful if you were staying in one of the big, expensive hotels that we passed, like the Savoy or the Thistle. The shop names were chains like Boots Chemist’s, Marks & Spencer’s Simply Food, and popular consumer electronics stores, ready to help the international businessman who needs fresh breath, a quick energy re-up, or something to replace the mobile charger he forgot to pack. If the Strand were someone’s residential neighborhood today, the residents likewise would find the shops useful. Daytime tourist attractions were not a part of the street’s makeup, and Molly and I found only one kitschy gift shop to distract foreigners like us.
On the second half of the Strand were fewer shops and even more theatres. If the Nicklebys really had lived in this neighborhood, it would have been more of a reflection on their landlord’s, Miss La Creevy’s, personality than on Mrs. Nickleby. I could easily see Miss La Creevy getting excited about the wonderful shows opening just a few blocks away and the important guests coming to stay in the hotels. Although I visited in the daytime, I could easily picture the Strand being the type of area that never sleeps. Visitors out to be entertained, theatre players out entertaining late, and hotel guests out early to seize the day would keep the place buzzing around the clock.
When I tried looking at the area from the eyes of a resident, it looked comfortably affluent, like the upper middle class of the U. S. It was not as opulent as the Mayfair and Buckingham Palace area, where Mark, our coach tour guide, told us that houses sell for 22 million pounds. Fortunately, it was also more exciting, because the people there did not need to keep up that pretense of rank which forces privacy upon the residents of the richest areas. This accessibility allowed the area to hold an excitement in the air that comes when a community is able to share their lives with each other. The outsiders came to the area to see their shows and stay in their hotels, and the residents enjoyed the excitement the shows and visitors brought to the area, as well as sharing their own private jokes about those who invaded the area without taking the time to learn about the local culture.
The residences were not easily seen, however; they were packed away from the crowded thoroughfare. Molly and I didn’t find a family home until we left the Strand to cut through a few smaller lanes to the nearest tube station. The homes were tall and narrow without an inch of alleyway between them, and each edifice was different; some edifices had personalities larger than their size. The lane would have reminded me of a neighborhood in Brooklyn, if not for the engaging colors each home was painted. Some were plain colors like gray stone and brown brick; an equal number were more cheery, having blue trim or a sheeny cream paint; a few staked a claim on memory with colors that 99% of all males on this earth would not be able to name, like mauve and ochre. I took a moment to take a picture of one that fit my idea of Miss La Creevy. It had four stories of bay window seats jutting out over the sidewalk. Melon paint on the bricks matched warmly with the tan stonework trim, though the shade of magenta that possessed the awning over the front door was a little assaulting. The window seats, stonework and odd colors would have been just the thing for a romantic artisan landlord like Miss La Creevy, and Mrs. Nickleby surely would have ignored the rough edges like the electrical wiring that draped across the house like a rope belt between the first and second floors.
Molly and I entered the tube and rode to Thames St., whereupon it started raining on us. I did realize how poetic it was that we had to walk through cold rain on the street where nasty Ralph Nickleby had foreclosed on a mortgage to house Mrs. Nickleby and Kate. On both sides of Thames St. were gray and brown stone buildings which, as best I could tell, mostly held financial offices. The street was narrower than the Strand, and cut less like a thoroughfare and more like a rain gutter between the somber buildings and underneath two or three wide bridges. Hardly a soul was walking the pavement, and the only chatter we heard came from two city workers working together to clean up rubbish from the little corners into which the wind blew the paper trash.
Since we were wandering on a bank holiday, I couldn’t see any offices open for business. More disappointing, I couldn’t find a single residence or hotel that would have given me any hint of Mrs. Nickleby. The rain, wind, hunger, and lack of pubs in the area made me and Molly ready to quit and get out of the rain, until we came upon the Monument to the London fire. Then I made the connection - we were in the City, the important financial center that, according to Mark, was not only burned into dust in 1666, but was also bombed by the German Luftwaffe in World War II. That was why all the buildings were smooth, modern stone, as well as why no residences could be found. I wondered if Mrs. Nickleby would have found it cleansing or cathartic in any way to know that the house her miserly brother-in-law had put her in had been wiped out by a fight much bigger than the tiff she and Ralph had over poor Smike’s future. At the same time, how would she respond if she knew that her first London home had been built over by an office building, used by people of Ralph’s profession? After all, the pursuit of money eventually killed Ralph, and now it seems to have taken over his land holdings too. I can’t decide if Mrs. Nickleby would consider this good riddance of a tainted house, or a horrifying advancement of those who profit from the love of money.
Molly and I hopped the tube just north of the Monument and left Mrs. Nickleby’s neighborhood. The tube lines, however, could not take us out of the world of Mrs. Nickleby. We could see what Dickens wrote the widow character to represent in every person working to keep strong through a blighted life or a difficult time of loss. With a walk through the neighborhoods Dickens used to frame her experiences, it was easier to understand why Mrs. Nickleby fought to keep her surviving family together in imperfect circumstances. In a city as wonderful as London, I can think of none better to share the wonders with than one’s nearest and dearest family.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
You know, I could do it. I could take the BUNAC six-month work program. It wouldn't even cost that much. They say I can just show up there and get any job at any old hole in the wall. I don't know if I'd come out on top financially, working for minimum wage and all... but I could do it. So what's stopping me?