White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Notebook: Theater as It Should Be; Fish and Chips Disappearing in U.K., Plentiful in NE; The Myth of the Frozen North

by Leave a Comment

Little Arctic, R.I. and Its Amazing Theater

Arctic Impresarios: David Vieira (left) and Jim Belanger. Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

Theater should be readily accessible, affordable and good. For me, the ideal theater experience has always been to pop off to the theater at the last moment and get an affordable seat.

There was a time when you could do that in London and New York. But theater-going has become an expensive chore, both in the West End and on Broadway: Buy exorbitant tickets far in advance, drive, park and get a bill for the evening which can run to over $500 for two.

Not so where I live — just down the street from the amazing Arctic Playhouse, which is to theater what food trucks are to restaurants: accessible, affordable and good.

The Arctic Playhouse is by any measure an anomaly. It just shouldn’t be. Arctic is a distressed hamlet in West Warwick, R.I. Once, it was prosperous shopping area near working textile mills. Now it has fallen on hard times, having lost its retailing base to shopping centers. Washington Street, its main street, has boarded-up shops and a pervasive sense of decay.

But Arctic has live theater at the Arctic Playhouse: a very modest but nonetheless effective theater space where, for under $15, you can see what is often a damn good show. The theater, by the way, will be moving to a larger space on the same street.

I write this in the warm glow of having just seen such a show with my wife: “I Love … What’s His Name?” As its subtitle says, it’s a cabaret about confusion in love in the 21st century.

We were dubious, but we really like the spirit and intimacy of our neighborhood theater and its energetic impresarios, Jim Belanger and David Vieira.

So we ate a light supper and drove a few minutes to be enchanted by a clever review, well-executed by a topnotch cast, including co-creators Rachel Hanauer and Jeff Blanchette, Angela Jajko, Jessica Gates and supported with industrial-lifting, as it were, from pianist Bob Logan.

The cabaret featured a series of ballads and patter songs — some by musical greats, like Tim Rice and Stephen Sondheim — about dating. Very modern, too: Cell phones play a big part in a show that is funny, tuneful and rip-roaring good entertainment.

I’ve always said you don’t need a palace to put on a good show, just good players. It’s about the play and the players, as Shakespeare said in “Hamlet,” not the venue. Arctic proves that, production after production. Local fun in a clubby atmosphere with free cookies, decaf coffee and popcorn, and a full, cash bar.

Give my regards to Broadway, but you won’t be seeing me in many a day.

If You Want Great Fish and Chips, Try New England

Rightly, you think the national dish of Britain is fish and chips. Well, maybe not anymore.

It is increasingly hard to find fish and chips in Britain and Ireland. Not impossible, but harder than it was when there was a fish-and-chip shop, known as a chippie, almost on every corner.

The other shocking thing is that the fish and chips in the chippies, when you find them, are likely to be squeezed in with other fast food —hamburgers, sausages and even lasagna.

What you are more likely to find in every town or village is an Indian or Pakistani restaurant. In fact, I’ve read it argued that the national dish of England is no longer fish and chips, but curry and rice.

But I’m delighted to report that some of the best fish and chips to have crossed my plate in a long time are to be found in New England, particularly in Rhode Island. Almost every restaurant and bar has very good fish and chips. Excellent, in fact, but missing that standard of the British Isles version: mushy peas. You don’t have to have them with your battered cod in the U.K., but you’d be missing the full experience if you don’t.

Mushy peas are, as they sound, peas cooked to produce a mush. Sounds disgusting, eh? Well, they’re delicious.

Why, I wonder, with so much excellent haddock around, is there no smoked haddock to be had? Finnan haddie is just not on sale among the wonders of the sea in every supermarket. The Brits like to eat it at breakfast, and the French serve it as a main course. My wife, Linda Gasparello, who grew up in Hingham, Mass., says finnan haddie and cod cakes were regular offerings on South Shore menus.

Very good too. Ladies and gentlemen, start your smokers.

The Myth of the Frozen North

We moved to Rhode Island from the Washington, D.C. area five years ago and we still shuttle back and forth with some regularity. It is hard to be a journalist and not be drawn into the Washington maelstrom.

We sing the praises of Rhode Island as loudly as operatic stars. We go on about its great food, wonderful beaches, fabulous architecture and nice people.

But people in Washington, and elsewhere in the country, believe that we live in igloos, kept warm at night by a five-dog team of huskies. They believe the cold dominates our lives and that we drive Humvees to get through the snow.

It’s not an argument we have been able to win. But the fact is the climate in most of New England is much better than the climate down in the nation’s capital where the summers are insufferably hot and humid and the winters can be as cold as they are in Providence. There is less snow there, but everything ceases up when it does snow —usually a big one every year.

The pathological fear of cold keeps people away and living in worse climates. Pass the grog.

How to Become a ‘Bee Host’, from Stephen H. Burke, secretary of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association

by 1 Comment

We call ourselves “beekeepers,” but it’s been suggested that perhaps a better description would be “bee hosts.” We don’t really “keep” them at all. They’re free to leave whenever they want, and sometimes they do.

But we provide a place where a colony of honeybees can be warm, dry, well-fed, and protected from predators. We dedicate our time and resources to financing, building and maintaining bee residences: hives. We purchase protective equipment as required, food and medicines, to assure our charges stay healthy and productive. In return, we get the joy and satisfaction of a success in a challenging and rewarding hobby, as well as honey, beeswax, and other products of our hives.

Want to give it a go? Here are some steps you can take:

First, locate some other beekeepers where you live. I’m writing this in Wakefield, R.I. in November 2017. By now, there are few areas in the United States that do not have an active beekeeping association of some kind, and the same is true nearly all over the world. Nearly all associations have web sites, and some sort of educational outreach program to teach beekeeping. Many have active mentor programs that will hook you up with an experienced beekeeper. My local beekeeping association provides 12 ½ hours of instruction for about $75 and has an active mentoring program for new beekeepers.

Do some personal research, in libraries or on the Internet. Find out what you’re getting into. “Beekeeping for Dummies,” for example, is a very readable book that provides an excellent overview of the skills and equipment you’ll need, and the problems you’re likely to face. No resource is perfect, but once you “catch the bug”, so to speak, a visit to Randy Oliver’s site (see below) will give you an idea of what you should expect from a quality beekeeping course, and the syllabus identifies more texts that will help you learn more about being a good host for your bees:

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/scibeeimages/BEGINNERS-OUTLINE-PDF.pdf

Take the beekeeping course offered by your local beekeeping association if possible; otherwise, take one elsewhere, but try to find a course near where you live. Your local environment will have special characteristics that in some cases will make your job easier, and in some cases, harder. Where I live, for example, there are few hive beetles to prey on our hives, and the Gulf Stream tends to moderate the winters compared to more inland locations 200 miles to the west. Were I to undertake beekeeping in Atlanta or Montreal, I’d face a whole different set of challenges, such as Africanized bees (in Atlanta) or icy cold winters (in Montreal).

Once you understand why beehives are built the way they are, you’ll need to build a hive for your bees to live in. Happily, if you’re not a woodworker, hives can be purchased online from beekeeping suppliers. Several of the larger ones in the United States are at the links below. It’s also not uncommon for local supply houses to exist, and your beekeeping association can help with locating them.

https://www.betterbee.com/

http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/

https://www.mannlakeltd.com/

Any of the above suppliers will supply not only the hive components, but also the protective gear you’ll need to work safely with stinging insects, the equipment to harvest, store, and bottle your honey, and the foods, medicines and devices you will use to protect your charges from pesticides and disease.

Finally, you will need the bees themselves. The easiest way to acquire them, as bizarre as this may sound, is simply to order them, by the pound no less, from a bee supplier. While it’s possible to get them in other ways, ordering and buying a “package” from your local supplier is by far the most common way for new beekeepers to break into the hobby. Most packages come with about 20,000 worker bees, one queen, and enough food to permit the bees to survive the journey from the supplier’s facility to your local distribution point. You can learn how to get packages of bees from your class instructor or your local beekeeping association.

People have been hosts to colonies of honeybees since before the pyramids were erected. That’s a very long line of joyful, interesting, helpful, frustrated and committed people and you’re welcome to join it.

We walk a rocky, challenging, but ultimately satisfying road. Remember they are insects and sometimes they live, sometimes they die. Sometimes we know why, sometimes we realize we might have prevented a lost colony, and sometimes we never figure it out. But if you work at it, the successes are sweet and, in the long run, they eclipse the failures.

Stephen H. Burke, a Rhode Island lawyer, is secretary of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association. He is also a beekeeping instructor at the University of Rhode Island. His e-mail is steve@stephenhburkelaw.com.

Cities, I Know Them by Their Bread

by Leave a Comment

By Linda Gasparello

I’ve always associated cities with bread. Boston, south of which I was raised, I associate with oatmeal bread. Washington, D.C., where I spent most of my life, I associate with white bread — the Wonder kind.

New York, where I lived for a few years, I associate with seeded rye bread. If you said “New York” to me, I’d think of the malty, sour taste of the rye flour, the slight licorice flavor of the caraway seeds and the fight my teeth would have with the crust. Seeded rye bread is assertive, like New York.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have lived in Rhode Island for nearly five years. But I don’t yet associate a bread with Providence. This is curious because the city abounds with artisan and ethnic bread bakeries, especially Italian and Portuguese.

What’s really curious is that restaurants in Providence and around the state don’t routinely bring you bread at some point between sitting down and getting your food.

Restaurants serve bread for a number of reasons. Here are two: Traditionally, serving bread has been a way to welcome guests; and practically, a basket of bread or a small loaf keeps guests happy before the food arrives.

When the poet Omar Khayyam said ecstatically, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou,” he was sitting beneath a bough with his beloved, reading a book of verses. Just think, if the 11th-century lovers were alive today, they’d be sitting in a Persian restaurant (alas, there isn’t one in Providence), reading their menus and eating nan-e barbari, a flatbread with pillowy ridges.

I could associate Providence with a flatbread that is ubiquitous in the city: pizza. Providence is a welcoming city. It’s not a stretch to associate pizza with the share-a-slice-with-us welcome that my husband and I have gotten from the city.

It’s Comedy and a Concert Tonight!

Last October, I was introduced to the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra by a friend who sings with the Providence Singers. Under the superb direction of guest conductor Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra and singers performed Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” on Oct. 15.

Before stepping onto the podium, Tovey told the bizarre story of how Mozart got a commission from a court intermediary to write a piece commemorating the death of Count Franz von Walsegg’s young wife, Anna, which the pretentious count could pass off as his own. The musical heavyweight died, at 35, while writing the requiem.

Tovey’s lecture came as a surprise to me. Conductors, in my symphonic concert-going experience, never spoke and carried a small stick. My friend told me that the orchestra’s musical director, Larry Rachleff, loved to talk to the audience: It was his schtick.

For 21 seasons, until his retirement from the orchestra on May 6, Rachleff often gave short lectures before he lifted his baton. He is a noted music educator, and currently holds the Walter Chris Hubert Chair at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, where he lives with his wife, mezzo soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, and their young son, Sam.

Rachleff is also a skilled standup comedian, as I found out during his farewell concert on May 6.

The performance of the second piece he chose, Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” was delayed to deal with an offstage problem with the soloist’s – his wife Susan – gown. For about 15 minutes, Rachleff summoned all his comedic talents: He told a story about how his family had encountered a naked woman in a lobby of a hotel in Geneva. When someone walked onstage with his score, he joked, “Usually the librarian hands me the score, but tonight she must be otherwise engaged.”

His adoring audience laughed, and they cried when he took his final bow.

Cry Me a River

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time,” said Leonardo da Vinci.

For nearly a week, if you dipped your hand into the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., you’d touch mounds of filthy foam and pieces of white styrofoam blocks.

From morning till night, I watched this dreck float down the river, collect on the banks and cascade over the dam. I watched pairs of mallard ducks and flocks of geese wading in the smelly suds trapped in the shrubs on both banks. I watched cardinals and other birds, that usually stop for a bite at my neighbor’s porch feeder, pick at the styrofoam icebergs and carry off pieces, presumably to their nests in the wooded banks.

I took pictures and reported this to Anna Cole, a technical staff assistant at the state’s Department of Environmental Management. She dispatched Robert Fritsche, an environmental scientist the department’s Bureau of Environmental Protection, Office of Compliance and Inspection, with impressive speed.

My husband has praised Rhode Island’s beauty in columns in The Providence Journal, on our television program, “White House Chronicle,” and on Rhode Island Public Radio. Now I praise the government for taking the preservation of that beauty seriously.

Above: Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., Photos by Linda Gasparello.

Notebook: The Limits of the Writing Life for a Journalist

by Leave a Comment

As opportunities in journalism have tightened, many of my colleagues have tuned to writing books. I admire them. Actually, I more than admire them: I’m astounded by them.

Among them is my friend Richard Whittle, a former Pentagon correspondent for The Dallas Morning News, who has written two first-rate books. His first was about the V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff aircraft and his second was about drones.

Whittle is hard at it on a third. He tells me that he loves his second career – and, as an elegant writer and an impeccable reporter, he’s doing well.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t take this path and write books about the subjects I know something about or, to be exact, subjects about which I’m supposed to know something. The answer is simple: fear. Not fear about my ability, but fear of boredom. Fear of waking up every day and having to take up where I left off the day before.

The peripatetic journalistic life suits me; maybe too well. I love the idea that each day could bring something new, unexpected and thrilling, just because it’s new.

Like many newspapermen, I answer phones with alacrity because the next call might, as it says in “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” could “in a trice life’s leaden metal into gold transmute.”

The poet was referring to liquor, and it might be why liquor and newspapering have been so indelibly linked. Certainly, the drinking by newpapermen — and I’ve worked on newspapers in colonial Africa, London, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. — was endemic and awesome.

Less now, I gather. The venerable National Press Club in Washington used to support two bars and, at lunch and in the evening, drinkers crowded them 15- deep. Now the only bar is sadly empty most of the time.

Once I ran into a colleague at the end of the day at the Paris Air Show. “How are you?” I asked. “I’m cold, I’m wet, my feet hurt and I haven’t found a story,” he said. I knew why he was miserable: Life’s leaden metal hadn’t been transmuted into gold nuggets of news.

The book writers, if they’re any good, unearth many stories, but the thrill of publication isn’t daily. It can take a year or longer. Not for me.

News writing, like drinking, produces its thrills predictably, and I’m for the early gratification. More power to my colleagues who are undaunted by the long haul.

 

Why Are the Bus Riders Left Out in the Cold?

Rhode Island, where I live, is, as I have found, a kindly place: people look out for one another. So why, I wonder, are there so few bus shelters and even benches?

I find the public transportation users (I’m one) standing forlornly, in all kinds of weather, waiting for a bus. Recently, in the heavy rains, they were especially bedraggled. This must negatively affect ridership. Since I have difficulty standing for long periods, I don’t take the buses in Providence and its surrounding communities. But I’d take them if I could sit down while waiting.

In Washington, D.C., where I’m often, I take the buses a lot. There are seats in shelters that don’t keep you warm but do keep you dry.

It’s cruel to leave those who ride buses without shelter or seating.

 

Sleeping Rough in a Place of Learning

I travel to Cambridge, Mass., quite a bit. But recently, in this self-regarding gyre of great ideas, I’ve noticed more homeless people than ever sleeping on the streets. One wonders, wandering the streets so close to the Great Minds, whether some of them haven’t thought of a solution? Is it a step too far from the ivory towers to the hard pavement where the luckless sleep?

 

Second Story To Add Restaurant, Lose One Stage

I went to Warren, R.I. to see “Art” at 2nd Story Theatre. At the end Ed Shea, the dominant force there – by turns actor, director and manager — came on stage to announce that the building, which now includes two small theaters and a very pleasant bar, is to be refurbished, and that the first-story theater will be transformed into a restaurant.

I wish them well, but it’s unclear how this will work. Will the restaurant be complimentary or competitive? If I’m going to eat and go to the theater, I favor supper after rather than dinner before. Going to a good restaurant is, in itself, a theatrical experience and competes with theater for entertainment hours.

One of the joys of Rhode Island is its profusion of really good places to eat. Warren is no exception. New Orleans has the reputation, but Rhode Island has the vittles.

Second story will lose a stage, but Shea still plans to cook up some imaginative theater on the remaining one.

Fake News and the Winds of Hate Roil the U.S.

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

There is an ill wind blowing across the nation. Sometimes it is a foul gale, other times just a smelly zephyr. But it is as evil as it is nauseating, as noisome as it is cruel. It blights good fellowship, throttles reasonable discourse, and brings threatening clouds for the future.

Lies, insinuations, fabrications and distortions are not new to politics, but now they have an awesome delivery system: fake news on the Internet.

Fake news likely inspired a man to storm into the public library in Barrington, RI, on Nov. 10, and verbally attack a young patron. Wearing a Trump hat and T-shirt emblazoned with “Racist Cracker 88,” he approached her, chanting, “Obama is out! We control this place now!” The librarians called the police, and the man was escorted out.” To this buffoon, literacy was akin to elitism, liberalism and moral decay.

A fringe of the already fringy alt-right believes that the election victory of Donald Trump established a new order of self-righteous bigotry, as though decency has been repealed, kindness put on hold and common sense sent to the jailhouse.

A quiet block of small businesses on Connecticut Avenue in the Chevy Chase section of Washington, D.C. has become a focal point for the venomous malice of fake news on the Internet.

On one side of the road is a Washington institution: the book store Politics & Prose, a favorite place for authors to talk about their books on C-SPAN. Across the street are two neighborhood restaurants: a large family pizza place, Comet Ping Pong, and a small French bistro and craft shop, Terasol.

All three establishments have been the victims of fake news, which alleges that they are dealing in pedophilia, claiming Hillary Clinton, her presidential campaign manager, John Podesta, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who have been customers, are kidnapping children and holding them in tunnels under the pizza place.

Sabrina Ousmal, who with her husband Alan Moin, own Terasol, has also been under attack. Here, I feel a personal involvement. Ousmal worked for me for more than a decade, and she and Alan are personal friends of me and my wife, Linda Gasparello.

Alan works full-time at Terasol, while Sabrina is the assistant publisher of The Energy Daily, which I founded in 1973 and sold in 2006.

She has been besieged with hundreds of e-mails, spreading a vile story of child molestation and kidnapping and even suggesting that The Energy Daily is an alternative energy publication. Not true. It covers the electric utility industry and the government nuclear complex with dogged determination.

Politics & Prose is under attack, presumably, because the owners, Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, had worked as Washington Post reporters, and Muscatine was a speechwriter for First Lady Hillary Clinton.

The police and the FBI are on the case. But this is a new perversion of truth and the perpetrators enjoy the courage that comes from anonymity: the courage of the ultimate bully.

The implications here go far beyond one block of small businesses in Washington.

The problem as I see it is that people love to hate and once that infection has taken hold, it is resistant to cure. I have seen people warming themselves at the fires of hate around the globe; in South Africa, where the Afrikaners and the English traded in hate, as did the Xhosa and the Zulu; in Zimbabwe, where the hate was stirred by its evil president, Robert Mugabe, between his Shona people and the Ndebele.

It has been stirred up, largely by a section of the press in Britain toward the continent, particularly the French. This, in the name of sovereignty, has led to the slow, almost ritual economic suicide now playing out in London.

Hate is at work daily in the Middle East, where it is the one thing people cling to: the paradoxical love of hating. Now there is a hate front here. — For InsideSources

Pardon Me, Rhode Island, but You Have Lovely Manners

by 2 Comments

By Llewellyn King

I have special reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving. One is to be thankful to America for admitting me as an immigrant back in 1963. From what I can remember, I was welcomed as part of the then-huge British quota that applied to me, even though I was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

I am also very grateful to Rhode Island, where my wife, Linda Gasparello, and I have, by happy chance, made our home for more than four years.

People, you have a little treasure here; a bolthole for the world-weary, a welcoming and pleasant place with great restaurants, a wonderful selection of beaches, interesting countryside and the warmest people this side of I know not where — and I have traveled to more than 100 countries and lived on three continents.

Take it from me, Rhode Island is a treasure. To me, it nestles between the arrogance of Massachusetts and the upward-tilted-nose superiority of Connecticut.

In London, they listen to how you speak: “Just listen to her speak, She’s not our class, darling.” In New York, they speak about money: “I’m heavily invested in pharmaceuticals.” In Washington, they speak about power: “I’m well-connected at the White House.”

By comparison, Rhode Islanders speak about everyday things. But, oh, must you have such a bad self-image? Self-deprecation has its limits and, if I might be so bold, you have reached them. I sometimes want to take dear Little Rhody by its lapels and gently shake it, saying, “Don’t you know you have it all here, give or take a larcenous politician?”

John of Gaunt described England in Shakespeare’s Richard II as “this other Eden, demi-paradise.” Of course, he had not seen Rhode Island, the jewel in New England’s crown.

But Rhode Island, my adopted home, is more than being about eating and sunbathing. A special delight for us has been good, affordable theater. There is live theater everywhere, if you look. Sure you know about Trinity, the Gamm, 2nd Story and Ocean State. But did you know about the Arctic Playhouse, in West Warwick’s impoverished Arctic village? Its productions are polished, and it is moving to new, swankier premises next year. Whereas the other theaters charge around $50 a ticket (which is a bargain), little Arctic only charges $10 for its own productions. That should be sent to the Guinness Book of World Records for theater ticket prices.

Newport has its place on the list of destination cities, but I would throw in Providence with its downtown masculine charm, its best Italian food offerings in the nation. I speak as a man familiar with the likes of Little Italy in Baltimore and North Beach in San Francisco.

When I lived in London in the early 1960s, the thing that struck Americans was how polite the English were. Now London and New York are interchangeable, and Washington is well on the way to losing what is left of its manners.

I would offer up the whole state of Rhode Island for recognition as a place of lovely, cheering politeness that makes daily living a pleasure, and smooths a little grease on the rough edges of any day. People of all ages open doors, thank you profusely for even a small purchase, give way to traffic entering a highway and stop for pedestrians.

Also — and as an old newspaperman, this is important to me — Rhode Island has great pubs, as in public houses. A bar is where you go to drink, a pub is an extension of a living room: a place to hang out, meet friends, eat and, yes, imbibe, if you wish. In Rhode Island, as in Britain, people tend to have a “local,” a regular haunt. I have two quite different locals that are quintessentially pubby: the Harris Grill in Coventry and the Square Peg in Warren.

I give thanks to Rhode Island and you, the Rhode Islanders. You are a good lot. — For InsideSources