A CHARACTER'S CHARACTER

I learned this past Sunday that one of our youngsters at church got the lead in a musical being done at our local community theater this summer. I couldn't be happier for her. She really deserves this. Well done, Nessa! (No, that's not her name. Those who know her, know her name, and those who don't, don't need to know. I'm very protective about such things on the Internet. And for those who know, tickets go on sale June 16.)

I don't know if people realize how tough it is to perform either as an amateur or professional. First of all, you have to have talent, although there have been some people without talent who get to perform. (Anybody remember Mrs. Miller and her awful TV appearances singing "Tiptoe through the Tulips"? Or Tiny Tim with the same song? And there's always your Aunt Hildegard who insisted on singing "I love you truly" at your wedding.) But just having talent alone isn't enough. You have to work and develop it. Nessa gets full marks for hard work. Of course, she works hard at everything. Why else did she also get a President's Award for Educational Excellence recently?

It also takes persistence–going to auditions for parts you don't get and taking minor parts you didn't want. I know the story about Lana Turner being discovered at Schwab's Drug Store (or was it actually the Top Hat Malt Shop?), but that's not the way it works most of the time. So often directors won't give a new face a chance. Julie Andrews who starred on Broadway in "My Fair Lady" was considered too much an unknown to risk casting in the movie version. It went to Audrey Hepburn who couldn't even sing! (She was dubbed by Marni Nixon.) Nessa worked her way up over several years of productions before getting the lead. That's persistence.

Actually, this blog isn't about being a performer, per se, but about character. What stands out with Nessa is that she is a person of character–self-reliant, industrious, sensible, persistent, intelligent, inquisitive, honest, trustworthy, compassionate, not to mention musical, humorous, and charming. I am happy to report that while she is unique (I believe everyone is unique–one of a kind; there's only one of each of us, and in some cases that's a good thing), there are other young people like her. It's a shame that the media dwells on idiot teenagers who cause all sorts of trouble instead on the great number of teens who are terrific people. I have hope for the future because I see people who will do a good job of running things. I doubt that many of them could do a worse job than some of the block-head baby-boomers of my generation who are wrecking things now.

How do people develop a good character? I think it must start with a person's parents. They have to be examples of character. They need to give their children a sense of security while they are growing up. They need to encourage and support their children, and give them responsibility. (That's the kind of people Nessa's parents are.) And yet they can't become suffocating or try to live their lives through their children. Stage moms are scary. Dads who curse their kids at little league are scary. Parents who blame teachers, police, society or anyone else for their children's mistakes are scary. They destroy the integrity of their children.

And yet that's not everything. I've seen kids who don't come from supportive families turn out just fine. My guess is that there are other adults in their lives who help them. I also think some people are good at picking the right kind of friends. The right peers support each other in developing the right character.

But even allowing for all sorts of influences, the development of character is largely a choice an individual makes. The people I admire (like Nessa) make conscious decisions concerning the kind of persons they want to be. How come we don't make that more explicit in our society and especially in our educational system? There was a time, I think, when we worked in schools to develop persons of character. Now we produce people who can earn money and consume goods. We emphasize test taking. Ha! The real test is life itself, and that test doesn't require us to fill in circles with number two pencils. The real measure of a person isn't determined by percentile ranking on the FCAT, but by that person's virtue. As Aristotle wrote: "The good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Ch. 7). The life of virtue is the key to true happiness.

OK, I'll get off my soap box now. Thanks, Nessa, for your inspiration. God bless you and your sissies on your graduation.

And to all of you, may the Lord God bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

The picture is a very nice drawing of Nessarose by Brittany Lynn that I swiped from her bolg. Nessarose is a fictional character. The person behind Nessa in this blog is real.

LOUIS SULLIVAN

No question about it. My favorite toys were building toys–Tinker Toys, blocks, Lincoln Logs, American Bricks, a rusty Erector Set. I loved making structures of my own design. I still have a couple of Lego sets at my apartment–Snape's Dungeon and Hogwarts Castle, but you have to follow the instructions exactly with those–no improvising. Was I a budding architect? Alas, no. I did take architectural drawing in high school, and actually got a C–which was an improvement over the Ds and Fs I got in mechanical drawing–but I wasn't very good at making nice, neat plans. And I had even less creativity. An art teacher in eight-grade despaired of me saying I was a waste of paint.

However, lack of ability is not the same as lack of interested. I have long been an avid student of architecture. I have taken hundreds of photos of building and own dozens of books about architecture. I even taught an adult interest class in church architecture.

I suppose my interest really got sparked my father. Although he was a machinist, he had studied drafting in high school as I did. Same school. As a matter of fact, my drafting teacher was the son of a person teaching drafting when my father was at school. Dad's drawing are far better than mine. We still have them.

I suspect that my father's interest in houses and such was primarily technical–how things worked, electric, plumbing, structure. But my father was familiar with one architect, the most famous architect in Chicago, maybe the most famous architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright. Everyday on his was to work in the suburbs he passed a Frank Lloyd Wright house. When the family would go out to his place of work for the annual open house, he would always point out the Wright house. Maybe that's where my architectural interest got started.

Now this is going to upset my east-coast readers, especially the Noo Yawkers, but the birthplace of modern American architecture was Chicago, not New York. The first skyscraper, a building with a steel frame ten stories or more, was William LeBaron Jenny's Home Insurance Building, in Chicago, (1893-5). Of course that was demolished, so I never saw it, but I have seen and been in and photographed Jenny's second Letier Building (1889-1890) and the Reliance Building designed by Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root and erected 1890-94. The reliance building is amazing. Even though it's almost 120 years old it still looks modern.

For my money, the great genius of Chicago architecture was Louis Sullivan. I am intimately familiar with his work. The Auditorium Theater Building (1886-1889) by Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler was home to Roosevelt University which I attended. It was an ingenious design, a huge theater surrounded by a hotel and office building.



Despite it's ten stories with a seventeen story tower over the entrance, the building is load-bearing masonry. It has huge, thick walls on the first floor. It looks like a massive pile of stone. The whole building fell on hard times with the theater eventually used as a USO center with bowling alleys on the stage, but it was restored in the 1960 to it's former elegance. Some of the special rooms also were restored. The banqueting hall became the Ganz Recital hall where we musicians performed and listen to one another. The top floor dining room was the library. More recently the lobby and second floor observation rooms were restored as well. I don't know if they every fixed up the classrooms the musical college used on the tenth floor. It was pretty nasty in my day.


The auditorium itself is breathtaking whether you're in the audience or on stage.

(Yes, I can prove I've been on stage there. The stage entrance is under the first floor lobby stairway. Non-performers wouldn't know that.)



I sang there in the chorus many times, and I appeared in my only stage work "Third Planet from the Sun" by Ramon Zupko. This was one of the first theaters with electric lights and an early air-conditioning system. The perfect acoustics are the result of Adler's engineering skills. The elaborate decoration is Sullivan's inspiration. He advocated "organic architecture" which is most evident in the ornaments. He started with geometric patterns and worked them until they became something quite natural. Much of the decoration was carried out by Sullivan's young draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright. Although Sullivan would fire Wright some years later for taking side jobs of his own, Wright held Sullivan in great admiration.




It's believed by some that most of the work on the Sullivan's James Charnley Residence (1890) was done by Wright. I don't know. It's a much more starkly modern building than the Auditorium building, but it still seems to have the bulk of a Sullivan design. A few years back it was restored and opened to the public.

You wouldn't think that one of the most memorable works of a great architect would be a tomb, but it is true. Sullivan's Getty Tomb in Graceland Cemetery.




It's a great piece of work. The tomb appears in numerous books on architecture. Another tomb that Sullivan is supposed to have designed s the Wainwright tomb in St. Louis (1892-3). I've only seen picture of it, but it doesn't have the same elegance. In the early 1950s Wright confessed that he had executed the design for the Wainwright tomb, and he was very critical of his own work.

The other Sullivan work I am very familiar with is his 1899 Schlesinger, Meyer Store, now know as Caron, Pirie, Scott Store one of the great Chicago department stores.



Looking at it today, it's hard to believe it's over 100 years old. Sullivan was to first to conceived of the large glass display windows. When you look at the building from some distance, you're struck by the expanse of glass and gleaming terra cotta that conceals the steel frame. Up close the two-story ornamented cast-iron facade dominates. And then there is the main entrance. The original owners wanted a curved corner as the main entrance. Sullivan resisted their wish, but in the end gave them what they wanted, more than they wanted. The corner is striking because of that curved entrance.

This building was the last great work of Sullivan. He career plummeted downward probably due in a large part to his alcoholism. But his advanced ideas of modern architecture were also to blame. It just didn't catch on in the United States. It did in Europe, however, where it was the inspiration for what would be called the International Style. It came back to this country in the stripped-down steel frame and glass boxes that have dominated our architecture for years. This was the bete-noir of Wright. He hated the style with a passion.

Two last bits on Sullivan. In the mid-seventies I took a trip from Madison, Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota on Amtrak 's "North Coast Hiawatha." Madison is the capital of Wisconsin and the site of the University of Wisconsin, but the train no longer stops in Madison. You go to the train station and catch a little bus out to the nowhere town of Columbus, Wisconsin. I had time to kill until the train arrived, so I wandered through the downtown, such as it was. There I came upon the Farmers & Merchants Union Bank. I had never heard of it before, but I could tell just by looking at it that it was a Louis Sullivan design.



Done in 1919 it was one of several Midwest banks Sullivan designed in his declining years. This was not Sullivan's greatest work, though it has some nice stained glass windows in it.

There's one more Sullivan work practically in the neighborhood where I grew up. I probably passed it dozens of times without noticing it since by my time it was no longer a music store. It's the last of Sullivan's designs (1922), though he did only the facade. What gives it away is the elaborate letter "K" in typical Sullivan style that decorates the second story.



The last building and the last of Louis Sullivan. He died two years later impoverished, dependent on the support of old friends like Wright.

Oh, dear, I had meant this to be about Wright, not Sullivan, but there is something so tragic about a great man like Sullivan falling into oblivion. It's sad that some of his best work was demolished, notably the Schiller Theater and the Chicago Stock Exchange although the trading room of the later was dismantled and rebuilt in the Art Institute of Chicago, a fitting tribute.




One of these days I'll get around to Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the meantime, may the Lord bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

Note: All the pictures except the interior of the Auditorium, the stairway, and the Bank are my own.

TEA FOR ONE

This is probably going to be even more boring than my usual drivel, but I have a little bit more to write about my birthday. I buy myself presents. I am pretty much a tightwad. I expect change back from every nickel I spend. However, I do have certain extravagances, to wit, tea and books. I control book expenditures by rarely buying a book that isn't on sale, discounted, remaindered, or used. Tea is rarely on sale, so I just have to limit how much and how frequently I purchase it. Here's my report on this batch of tea.

Even a fairly mediocre tea is $12 to $15 a pound, and really good tea can run $150 a pound. I stick to the lower end of the spectrum. Lately I have been buying tea from Upton Tea Imports in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. They have a huge variety, will sell small samples so you can try out something new, and they only charge $4.00 for shipping no matter what size the order. I purchase 125 grams or 250 grams of teas I like, and sample of new ones. Here's some of my latest regulars. Harmutty Estate STGFOP1S. This is an Assam tea, grown at sea level in the Assam province of north-eastern India. This one of the regions where tea plants (Camellia sinensis) are native. I like Assams because they have a heavy body and malty flavor. The alphabet soup following the name describes the leaf size and type. This is a super fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe grade 1. Orange Pekoe indicates larger leaf pieces. The other stuff indicates that these include the flower tips of the tea plant. Despite the highfalutin name, it is inexpensive.

I tend to prefer Chinese teas to Indian, and one of my standards is Premium China Yunnan TGFOP. Yunnan is another place where tea is a native plant and is very close Assam in India. The tastes are similar, but I prefer this Yunnan. It is a better tea.

A nice blend of teas is Baker Street Afternoon Blend. I was, of course, attracted by the name which conjures up visions of Sherlock Holmes sharing a cup with Dr. Watson on a fogy London afternoon. This blend combines Chinese Keemun (one of my favorite types, very fragrant) and Darjeeling (Indian tea) with a touch of Lapsang Souchong. The later is a very unusual Chinese tea. It is dried over a pine fire. It has a very strong, smoky flavor. I have made Lapsang Souchong by itself, but it is such a string tea it sometimes upsets my stomach. It works much better in this blend.

I also drink flavored teas. These are real teas with flavoring, not herbal tisanes which aren't teas at all. The classic scented tea is Chinese Jasmine Tea. Jasmine flowers are added to the tea leaves and they are dried together. This is a pouchong tea, meaning it is only partly oxidized. A black tea is completely oxidized, a green tea is not oxidized, and puchongs and oolongs are only partly oxidized. Hence the tea is a yellowish color rather than black. I love this tea on a summer afternoon, very relaxing and refreshing. Although I didn't buy any this time, I also drink Rose Chun Mee, a green tea scented with rose petals. There's also a black rose tea, Rose Congu. A new flavor I tried was Osmanthus (Guangxi Gui-Hua). It's very much like Jasime tea, but I prefer Jasmine. With jasmine, rose, and osmanthus teas you can see the flower petals mixed in the tea.

Two other flavored teas I purchased were Sweet Almond and Mango Indica. These are black teas with bits of almond and mango mixed in. Two other flavored teas are much more complex. Orange Spice Imperial has cinnamon, orange peel, vanilla bean and clove. It is something like Constant Comment, but I think with a higher quality tea. Summer blend is amazing with grapefruit, orange and juniper needles and berries.

My order included 19 various samples. I've only had a chance to try a few. Here's my reviews. Scottish Breakfast Blend is supposed to provide and "eye-opening experience in the morning." It's not quite that, though it is a strong black tea with an interesting flavor. I think it's one I'll try again. Mincing Lane Breakfast Tea is a combination of Yunnan and Assam, but it was disappointing, undistinguished. Richmond Park Blend uses Keemun, Darjeeling and Ceylon, but I found it too much like Ceylon and Darjeeling which I don't care for. East Frisian BOP is a hearty Assam tea, a powerful, above average tea. Now is worth the extra $2 per 125 grams cost over an estate Assam? Maybe. I have another East Frisian blend to try.

In this batch I've also tried a Java blend. Of course, one thinks of Java as a place where coffee is grown, but they also grow tea. This in inexpensive and undistinguished, but might be good for iced tea.

I have quite a few to try yet especially some white teas. White teas are like green teas in that they are not oxidized at all, but the white tea isn't even withered so it is even more delicate than a green tea. I tried some white tea in San Diego last year and found it interesting.

At the other extreme from a white tea in a Pu-Erh. This is a Yunnan tea that has been allowed to oxidize twice. I understand it has a very earthy taste. Usually it is compressed into cakes, but the same I have it loose leaf.

Ah, it's four o'clock tea time. Must go. TTFN*

May the Lord bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

*Ta-ta for now.

OMNIUM GATHERUM

The protagonist of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels is Plantagenet Palliser, heir to the Duke of Omnium and Gatherum. All of Trollope's names are a hoot, but none more than the pretentious Dukedom of Omnium and Gatherum.

Long ago I used to read a newsletter column titled "Omnium Gatherum." It was a collection of assorted bits of information, mentions of books, comments about people, and so forth. It seems I am at the point of writing an Omnium Gatherum blog. You see, I have been working on many things, sketching out ideas, attending conferences (the picture is me at our recent Synod Assembly where I was parliamentarian), and reading various books with the result of nothing much gelling together. Bear with me as I run down a few ideas that might come to fruition, but then again might not.

First, I am well along writing another blog about tea. I just bought a bunch of samples of tea, and thought I'd give some commentary on them. I doubt anyone who reads this blog (all two of you) would find that interesting, but maybe someone would like a bit of information about tea.

Second, I have been much exercised about the legislature of the State of Florida working hard at finding a way to undermine teaching about evolution in schools. Some officialdom here has rightly decreed that biology should teach evolution and call it that–although the politicians made sure it would be called "the scientific theory of evolution." The politicos in the legislature wanted to make sure teachers would be free attack the theory in class and might offer an alternative, say, Intelligent Design. I want to write advocating theistic evolution showing evolution and Christian thought are not in opposition to each other, but that's going to take a lot of work and I'm rather lazy.

Third, I've been venting spleen about letters that appear in our newspaper attacking Senator Obama for being a secret Muslim who hates America. The argument seems to be he was raised a Muslim and then purposely set out to hide the fact by pretending to convert to Christianity. Of course then people attack the church he joined saying it's racist and not Christian anyway. Rather than a rational discussion of position on issues, we get this nonsense.

Fourth, I'm reading three books about Frank Lloyd Wright, and I'd like to comment about his, especially the tension within a person who is both a genius and a egomaniacal scoundrel. After all, he deserted his wife and children to run off with his client's wife.

Fifth, well I don't even know what the fifth idea is. Maybe something about the Inspiring Worship conference I was at with the wonderful musician Michael Burkhardt, perhaps with some side comments about my first experience eating at a Vietnamese restaurant or the wonderful Japanese restaurant I discovered. Or maybe about the note I got from my doctor that I should go on a diet, NOW. Or maybe the results of my unscientific survey that 80% of the trucks, vans, and SUVs I saw one day had only one person, the driver, traveling in them. No wonder we can't conserve oil. Or maybe I should write about the woman who stared at me on the beach, said to her friend in a thick Noo Yawk accent, "O, my God," and then after passing me remarked about my T-shirt, "Dead Sea Scrolls? I don't get it." Should I be insulted?

I don't know what's next, but at least this week is taken care of.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, PART 2

I received some very nice cards. I appreciate the time people take picking out something for me. I am not very good at card picking, so I seldom send any except for a few people. I am ashamed to say that I don't remember exactly who sent me the nice cards with pleasant pictures and encouraging verses. I tend to remember only the funny ones and the (sometimes funny) insulting ones. So for your viewing pleasure, here are my three favorites. (You can click on the picture to make it larger.)

As promised, a bit more self-centered birthday blog.


Nowadays there are also e-cards. Here is a funny one my cousin sent me. I'm not sure how long this link will work, but give it a try.

Funny Card

Now on to gifts. I really don't need any more stuff in my life, but a few little things are fine. First from Miss C.



Now Lar & Da in new outfits from my sister.




And finally a new resident, a Harry Birthday Bear, bought by my sister and transformed by my artistic brother-in-law.




Well, that does it for now. This is my first attempt using the new feature that schedules posts, so this should appear even though I am away for a few days.

May the Lord God bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne