My daughter noodles around on the computer and finds fascinating things, like a link (or whatever it is) that will shrink photos you want to send to people – so you are not sending a photo that is 6 feet tall and 17 feet wide and will take about a day and a half to download.
She also found a site that you can make up web pages on, geared to a family scrapbook sort of thing and so she went ahead and started one. We have some wonderful scrapbooks and notes from my mother, some outlining our family history and some on events that happened while my sister and I were growing up, and on through the granddaughters’ early years.
I was just looking at that (as an email from a few months ago that she sent me when she started the page, and I am just now getting around to sorting and filing that time frame of my emails). Anyway, she put a couple of pages of our family heritage on the site, and I am going to bore you with some of that today.
The Peduzzi side of it is actually fairly calm, and for all that we say we are Italian, my grandfather was actually born in Gabbio, Switzerland. His family came to America when he was a young boy, they settled in Westchester County. That’ll be another story.
The Hough side, my mother’s family, however, has several ‘claims to fame’. The first of those is that our ancestors Francis Cooke and his son John, were passengers on the Mayflower. Other ancestors Sarah Warren and Allen Breed came to this country in 1623 and 1630.
According to history books, The Revolutionary War Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed’s Hill; no idea why the stories changed the location/name.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was named Avis, after another ancestor Avis Swift Keene (Keene was my mother’s middle name), who was the subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier “To Avis Keene”.
Another ancestor, Sarah Bassett, was sentenced as a witch (which may explain some of my personality although I spell it with a ‘b’) in 1692, but was freed 7 months later, happily.
Thanks to a once estranged family member who resurfaced and supplied much family history, my mother was able to trace the descendants of John Cooke to what might be our biggest ‘claim to fame’. John Cooke had three daughters. My mother’s family tree goes back to one of them. Tracing another daughter’s lineage to the same generation, we reach Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the third Cooke daughter’s progeny produced Winston Churchill. And, as my mother wrote, to make a nice tidy package of the whole thing and bring it all back to Kinderhook, Jenny Jerome, Churchill’s mother, lived at Lindenwald (the Martin Van Buren home, now a National Park) when she was a young woman.
Wonder what the Roosevelt’s and the Churchill’s would think to know they’ve got a pretty much broke relative living in a beat-up trailer home? Ah, like they say, you can’t pick your family.
The Hough/Stein (Breed/Bassett/Cooke, etc.) side of our family is having a reunion next month. The Peduzzi’s used to have reunions every year but Lynne was asking the other day and it occurred to me that the last one I recall was the year before my mother died, over 10 years ago. Gee, we should get our butts together, huh? We are down to my generation being the ‘older generation’ on both sides of the family now. I hope I can make it to the one next month, we don’t know that side of the family nearly well enough.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Beauty and the Beast review
We are currently doing the show Beauty and the Beast. You know, the Disney movie and Broadway hit. The show for kids. Or as we say, ‘kids of all ages’.
So far two reviewers have been to it, and written their opinions. One pretty much liked the show and was complimentary. The other, well, very honestly, I (and numerous others) couldn’t figure out quite what she was saying. Now, don’t get me wrong, over the years that she’s been coming to review shows, I’ve gotten to be somewhat friendly with this woman; we share some interests such as writing and animals and I commiserated when she lost a beloved cat a few weeks ago. But sometimes I can’t quite figure out what she’s trying to say in her reviews, and naturally we don’t always share the same opinion of the show she’s seen, but I give her the right to not think as highly of each production as we do.
For this one, though, what she basically said, near as I can figure, is that if she was 6 she would have enjoyed the show but since she’s 50+ she didn’t. She took issue with the script, the way the Disney edited the original version of the story, and so on.
Now, Disney is no dope. If they edited a story in a particular way, it was for pretty much one reason – they went with the version that would sell the most tickets. Yep, Disney is in it to make money and they’ve been pretty successful at that. They went with what made the best story for what they were doing, making a movie – and video - and show -that kids would want to see again and again, and that wouldn’t drive the parents nuts seeing/hearing it again and again.
It worked for Disney, big time. I wish I could say it was working for us as big, at least in the audience numbers department, but so far it isn’t – although sales are growing. The kids and adults are loving it. It is good (if I do say so myself). It is very good. We’ve got rolling arches that light up and change colors, the signature rose in a bell jar that flies (gets lowered from the ceiling) in and magically drops its petals, an Enchantress who rises into the air as she casts her spell, costumes that rival the originals, and some damn fine singers and actors making it sound fabulous. We’ve got 30 plus people in the cast, and over half of them singing and dancing on a 14x16’ stage at one time, while dressed as human sized kitchen equipment. And if that isn’t enough to appeal to any age, I don’t know what is.
Yes, the plot’s a little hokey and predictable. But it’s also sweet, touching, funny, and exciting. And it shouldn’t be written off because it’s what Disney did primarily as entertainment for kids. Think about a lot of musicals and they can relate to this one in story line, if not actual presentation.
When I have someone who has been coming to every show for more years than I can remember, someone who I will guess has sat through the movie or show or video with his own kids or grandkids, someone who is not easy to impress but who has appreciation for what he sees on this stage, tell me he thought it is the best show we’ve ever done – I’ll take his comment and think that we’ve done a real good job.
Nope, sorry, Ms. Reviewer – you’re not too old to just take this for what it is – a show meant to do nothing but entertain people all ages old - and I feel bad that you think you are.
You know what I think? I think that no one should ever be too old to enjoy a show like this. I think we all need to keep some of our childhood wonderment, our ability to laugh, to go ‘oooh’ at unexpected special effects, to boo the villain and cheer the hero and just sit back and have a good time with something that is meant to supply only that. Because if we loose those things, we’ve got a pretty dreary future ahead. And I personally don’t want that. Being an adult is tough, dammit, and we need to escape it sometimes.
To all my friends, and any stray people who might read this blog, if you’re close enough to Chatham, come and escape at Beauty and the Beast – if you’re not close enough to come, check the web page: www.machaydntheatre for photos and film clips. It’s awesome.
So far two reviewers have been to it, and written their opinions. One pretty much liked the show and was complimentary. The other, well, very honestly, I (and numerous others) couldn’t figure out quite what she was saying. Now, don’t get me wrong, over the years that she’s been coming to review shows, I’ve gotten to be somewhat friendly with this woman; we share some interests such as writing and animals and I commiserated when she lost a beloved cat a few weeks ago. But sometimes I can’t quite figure out what she’s trying to say in her reviews, and naturally we don’t always share the same opinion of the show she’s seen, but I give her the right to not think as highly of each production as we do.
For this one, though, what she basically said, near as I can figure, is that if she was 6 she would have enjoyed the show but since she’s 50+ she didn’t. She took issue with the script, the way the Disney edited the original version of the story, and so on.
Now, Disney is no dope. If they edited a story in a particular way, it was for pretty much one reason – they went with the version that would sell the most tickets. Yep, Disney is in it to make money and they’ve been pretty successful at that. They went with what made the best story for what they were doing, making a movie – and video - and show -that kids would want to see again and again, and that wouldn’t drive the parents nuts seeing/hearing it again and again.
It worked for Disney, big time. I wish I could say it was working for us as big, at least in the audience numbers department, but so far it isn’t – although sales are growing. The kids and adults are loving it. It is good (if I do say so myself). It is very good. We’ve got rolling arches that light up and change colors, the signature rose in a bell jar that flies (gets lowered from the ceiling) in and magically drops its petals, an Enchantress who rises into the air as she casts her spell, costumes that rival the originals, and some damn fine singers and actors making it sound fabulous. We’ve got 30 plus people in the cast, and over half of them singing and dancing on a 14x16’ stage at one time, while dressed as human sized kitchen equipment. And if that isn’t enough to appeal to any age, I don’t know what is.
Yes, the plot’s a little hokey and predictable. But it’s also sweet, touching, funny, and exciting. And it shouldn’t be written off because it’s what Disney did primarily as entertainment for kids. Think about a lot of musicals and they can relate to this one in story line, if not actual presentation.
When I have someone who has been coming to every show for more years than I can remember, someone who I will guess has sat through the movie or show or video with his own kids or grandkids, someone who is not easy to impress but who has appreciation for what he sees on this stage, tell me he thought it is the best show we’ve ever done – I’ll take his comment and think that we’ve done a real good job.
Nope, sorry, Ms. Reviewer – you’re not too old to just take this for what it is – a show meant to do nothing but entertain people all ages old - and I feel bad that you think you are.
You know what I think? I think that no one should ever be too old to enjoy a show like this. I think we all need to keep some of our childhood wonderment, our ability to laugh, to go ‘oooh’ at unexpected special effects, to boo the villain and cheer the hero and just sit back and have a good time with something that is meant to supply only that. Because if we loose those things, we’ve got a pretty dreary future ahead. And I personally don’t want that. Being an adult is tough, dammit, and we need to escape it sometimes.
To all my friends, and any stray people who might read this blog, if you’re close enough to Chatham, come and escape at Beauty and the Beast – if you’re not close enough to come, check the web page: www.machaydntheatre for photos and film clips. It’s awesome.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Happy July 4
Happy July 4. Happy Birthday, America.
Although to be completely historically correct, the whole Declaration of Independence was not signed on the 4th, it’s as good a day as any to celebrate what those men of vision, bravery, foresight and yes, a little treason, did 233 years ago.
I cannot tell a lie (yeah, me and George Washington), a good deal of my historical perspective of this day comes from the musical 1776. It’s as good a telling of the Continental Congress and the history of our independence as any, with some speculation and fiction thrown in to make it a good musical. It is, in fact, a great musical and it’s hard to watch without getting goosebumps. It’s a good representation of those times and those people, not just the men, but their women as well, personified as Martha Jefferson and Abigail Adams. Martha, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, is brought to Philadelphia to appease Jefferson, after he tells John Adams and Benjamin Franklin that he needs what we might call some ‘R & R’ with his wife – “But I burn, Mr. A.”, he says. “So do I, Mr. J’”, Adams responds, which brings Franklin’s response “You, John?” Franklin is portrayed as the somewhat lusty codger he was, while Adams is more shown to give all his passion to the cause. (This is belied in the songs between he and Abigail, where he asks ‘is my favorite lover’s pillow still firm and fair’ – yes, folks, they were real people with real loves and desires.) But, both Franklin and Adams realize they need to fulfill Jefferson’s need to fulfill theirs and get the declaration written, and so they send for Martha. When questioned as to how Jefferson is so lucky as to have a beautiful young wife such as her (and never mind all the things that he also found aside from her), she replies with the song ‘He Plays The Violin’ – what better reason to fall in love with a man than that he will play the violin for you.
Abigail Adams seems more practical, but then again, she’s a New Englander and they tend to be. She and John have needs for their causes and sing a lively debate over whose is more: he demands that she set all the ladies to looking for saltpeter – not for what they might think but for gunpowder, while she has a more practical request – that he find them pins for their sewing – they sign off one of their series of letters in song with the words that say so much more: “Saltpeter, John” “Pins, Abigail”.
These were the people who forged and formed our country. Thank goodness there are enough of them still around to keep it going.
July 4th memories: picnics with the family, bringing in hay, riding the horse in parades, running around the lawn with sparklers. And once, at my grandparent’s in Tuckahoe, so I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 maybe, there was a community picnic I think, in the courtyard of their apartment complex, and all the kids got together and spelled out ‘Happy 4th of July’ with sparklers and then tried to light them fast enough to have it all sparking at once. I think we made it.
Today the closest I get to a holiday is – hm, well, I guess I don’t. I have heard that red, white and blue dessert is planned for supper – no picnic because we couldn’t figure out how to do it around the Saturday Elks supplied supper. And it will be Patriotic Night again in coffee house and that always makes me a little snuffly. I listen to the company sing songs from ‘You’re A Grand Old Flag’ to ‘God Bless The USA’ to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and I think look at those proud young people – there’s hope for us.
Enjoy your 4th, and have a safe one.
Although to be completely historically correct, the whole Declaration of Independence was not signed on the 4th, it’s as good a day as any to celebrate what those men of vision, bravery, foresight and yes, a little treason, did 233 years ago.
I cannot tell a lie (yeah, me and George Washington), a good deal of my historical perspective of this day comes from the musical 1776. It’s as good a telling of the Continental Congress and the history of our independence as any, with some speculation and fiction thrown in to make it a good musical. It is, in fact, a great musical and it’s hard to watch without getting goosebumps. It’s a good representation of those times and those people, not just the men, but their women as well, personified as Martha Jefferson and Abigail Adams. Martha, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, is brought to Philadelphia to appease Jefferson, after he tells John Adams and Benjamin Franklin that he needs what we might call some ‘R & R’ with his wife – “But I burn, Mr. A.”, he says. “So do I, Mr. J’”, Adams responds, which brings Franklin’s response “You, John?” Franklin is portrayed as the somewhat lusty codger he was, while Adams is more shown to give all his passion to the cause. (This is belied in the songs between he and Abigail, where he asks ‘is my favorite lover’s pillow still firm and fair’ – yes, folks, they were real people with real loves and desires.) But, both Franklin and Adams realize they need to fulfill Jefferson’s need to fulfill theirs and get the declaration written, and so they send for Martha. When questioned as to how Jefferson is so lucky as to have a beautiful young wife such as her (and never mind all the things that he also found aside from her), she replies with the song ‘He Plays The Violin’ – what better reason to fall in love with a man than that he will play the violin for you.
Abigail Adams seems more practical, but then again, she’s a New Englander and they tend to be. She and John have needs for their causes and sing a lively debate over whose is more: he demands that she set all the ladies to looking for saltpeter – not for what they might think but for gunpowder, while she has a more practical request – that he find them pins for their sewing – they sign off one of their series of letters in song with the words that say so much more: “Saltpeter, John” “Pins, Abigail”.
These were the people who forged and formed our country. Thank goodness there are enough of them still around to keep it going.
July 4th memories: picnics with the family, bringing in hay, riding the horse in parades, running around the lawn with sparklers. And once, at my grandparent’s in Tuckahoe, so I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 maybe, there was a community picnic I think, in the courtyard of their apartment complex, and all the kids got together and spelled out ‘Happy 4th of July’ with sparklers and then tried to light them fast enough to have it all sparking at once. I think we made it.
Today the closest I get to a holiday is – hm, well, I guess I don’t. I have heard that red, white and blue dessert is planned for supper – no picnic because we couldn’t figure out how to do it around the Saturday Elks supplied supper. And it will be Patriotic Night again in coffee house and that always makes me a little snuffly. I listen to the company sing songs from ‘You’re A Grand Old Flag’ to ‘God Bless The USA’ to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and I think look at those proud young people – there’s hope for us.
Enjoy your 4th, and have a safe one.
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