The first summer I lived in Boston, a friend of mine (in town doing research at the Historical Society) took me out for lunch and left her wallet on the table when we left. Ten minutes later, when she realized it was gone and went back for it, someone had already taken it and disappeared. What followed were endless phone calls to put holds on credit cards, debit cards, renew IDs and replace other vital forms of information (library card anyone??). Not as catastrophic as it could have been in the identity theft department, but certainly a headache all around.
So this morning, when — tired and distracted by the back-from-research-trip “to do” list — I left my wallet at the Coolidge Corner post office on my way to work, and didn’t realize I had abandon it until about fifteen minutes (and a mile’s walk) later, I was prepared for the worst. I was already starting to make a mental list of the places I was going to have to phone as soon as possible to make sure our bank accounts weren’t drained through the ATM machine.
Which is why I would like to extend my fervent thanks to the anonymous, civic-minded soul who picked up my wallet from the post office counter and turned it in — every piece of money-generating plastic inside — and handed it in to the post office staff. So that when I turned up, sweaty and anxious from my one-mile trek back up the road, they could hand it back to me.
I don’t expect generosity from strangers, but it’s sure as hell a wonderful feeling to know there are people out there in the world who choose to be generous in their daily lives. Generous to someone they’ve never met, but whose life they’ve just made a hell of a lot less stressful than it could have been today. So whomever you are: Thanks.
Living in Boston, Hanna and I have ample opportunity to peruse used bookstores, which could put a serious strain on our already-stretched budgets . . . except for the wonderful phenomenon known as $1 carts, which can provide brilliant finds for $1/each.
Last weekend, we stopped at the Brattle Bookshop near Downtown Crossing and I found five books that could be justified as having some scholastic thesis-related or otherwise worthy worth:
Appleby, Joyce Oldham, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob. Telling the Truth About History. New York: Norton, 1994.
Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School; Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. New York: Knopf, 1961.
Macedo, Stephen. Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Roszak, Theodore. The Dissenting Academy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.
Wartzman, Rick. Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2008.
So far I’ve read parts of The Dissenting Academy and Reassessing the Sixties. The Sixties book mostly sucks (written largely by people who identify the evils of modern civilization as — and I kid you not — feminism, environmentalism, and rock music), but I’m pleased I paid the $1 because its one redeeming chapter is an essay on the children’s rights movement of the early Seventies, written by law professor Martha Minow. Since the children’s rights movement is chronically understudied from an historical perspective, I was pleased to see it represented therein — and not in an unsympathetic though also not wholly uncritical light.
so a few last thoughts on the eddie izzard “big intimacy” show and then i promise i’ll shut up about him for awhile.
as you may have noticed in my thursday post, anna and i had a phenomenal time at the show. neither of us are big on concerts, shows, or big arena-type events and it was the first time either of us had been at the banknorth garden. i have to say, though, for a relatively big event, the running of it was really smooth. the banknorth staff were really helpful and very polite. our tickets got upgraded very seriously at the last minute — not that we realised this until we were sitting down and triangulated where our original tickets would have placed us — and the process went really smoothly.
with the new tickets, we weren’t quite “stage-side” but we were way closer than we would have been which was originally somewhere in the nosebleeds of the nosebleed section. we wouldn’t really even have been able to see the jumbo-tron screens very well. as it was, we were about a dozen rows back from the seating on the actual floor and just about ideally placed to take advantage of the three gigantic screens on the stage. mr. izzard looked quite tiny by comparison to the giant digital versions of himself. he did realise this and made a point of telling the audience, particularly those in the front rows, that they weren’t to feel obligated to try and look at him: “because, really, that guy up there? he’s doing the exact same things as me. except — maybe a bit slower.”
honestly, i thought he was hilarious. three hours worth of pretty damn solid hilarious. when considering live performances, i try to take into account — for some strange reason — whether or not i could or would be willing to try and do the same kind of thing. in this case, hell, no. i am in awe of his skill at a) remembering material; b) handling an audience; and c) making them both seem effortless. i mean, i am sure he could recite this material if woken up out of a dead sleep he’s said it that many times — and it seemed new. it seemed as though he were just making some of it up for our benefit right then and there because he thought we’d think it was funny. making that kind of connection with an audience of several thousand people is a fucking impressive skill. this is why great rock band front men are great. the same skills apply here, i feel.
and you know what else is a fucking impressive skill? getting that same audience of several thousand people in tears of laughter over latin. latin, people. (i apologise for the sound quality on this one; it’s a little dodgy. but also lots of thanks to anna for digging up all the youtube clips for me when i didn’t have the time to do it in time to put this post up.)
i did have a moment or two of indecision when it came to using these at all since “no recording” rules were on the tickets. but then i decided…well, what the fuck. it really is too funny to give up the opportunity of illustrating my point with primary source material, so to speak.
the only real irritation in the show came from two young women seated behind anna and myself — they left just after the start of the “second act,” thank god, or i would’ve had to dopeslap them — who insisted on critiquing the show quite audibly and discussing their social lives when they weren’t commenting that, “oh, he’s done that joke before” or “that’s just what he did in st. louis.” well, yes, probably both true. two essential points that you’re missing here: a) he is here, now. why don’t you shut up and enjoy the show in front of you? and b) there’s a fine line between “recycled material” and “a long-standing joke with the fans” both of which he had but he mostly managed to keep the first feeling like the second. it has to do, i think, with the variety of characters he manages to summon up out of thin air to populate the stage and illustrate what he’s talking about:
Uncharacteristically impulsive (every once in a while you gotta try a new approach to life, eh?) Hanna and I decided at the last minute to use some Christmas gift money for tickets to see stand-up comic Eddie Izzard live here in Boston at the TD Garden, one of the stops on his current Big Intimacy tour. Hanna discovered Eddie Izzard’s stand-up routines this past fall on Netflix instant and much hilarity ensued. I’m not really into stand-up comedy, and comedy generally wears thin for me in feature-length installments, but I have to say I find Mr. Izzard great fun. There’s something totally winning about the fact that as a self-described “executive transvestite” he doesn’t make his gender presentation central to his routines (it comes up, but his humor doesn’t rely upon it) and also the fact that his humor, while irreverent owes a lot to the best of shows like Monty Python rather than cheap locker-room laughs (not to say he’s never crude — it’s just that, again, his humor doesn’t rely on it).
Hanna’s already posted some of her favorite clips over at …fly over me evil angel…, which if you’re interested in a taste of Izzard’s work I totally recommend you check out. But for you lazy blokes who aren’t willing to click through the link, here’s one from the latest DVD we watched, recorded live at Wembley Arena in London. I picked this one especially for you, Dad!
I have another post up at the Beehive recapping the lunch talk given by MHS fellow Karen Woods Weierman on the 1836 court case, Commonwealth vs. Aves, in which abolitionists in Boston sued a Southern slave-holding family in order to free a 7-year-old girl they had brought North with them while visiting relatives.
Tonight, we’re off to the Blue Heron Renaissance Choir’s “Christmas in Medieval England” concert at First Church in Cambridge.
Also in the Christmas spirit, I bring you this photograph of gingerbread daleks, courtesy of Jason Henninger @ Tor.com. Hanna and I have plans to try making them on Christmas Eve. If they turn out at all recognizable I’ll provide photographs!
So this morning, when — tired and distracted by the back-from-research-trip “to do” list — I left my wallet at the Coolidge Corner post office on my way to work, and didn’t realize I had abandon it until about fifteen minutes (and a mile’s walk) later, I was prepared for the worst. I was already starting to make a mental list of the places I was going to have to phone as soon as possible to make sure our bank accounts weren’t drained through the ATM machine. 
the feminist librarian 