WHO's who where?

It feels like ages since I have written in SQD and chances are I have missed it more than you, dear readers, who presumably have more important things to do. But for those rare moments requiring distraction, I am returning with a few vignettes from our recent time in glorious Pleasant Pond in the north woods of Maine.
And closer to home, if you happen to visit the NYC offices of NRDC you need only go next door(Save energy! Be environmentally savvy!) to buy your weekly supply of Fake Blood, Cobwebs, Ice Effects and Mustaches.

Do you ever read the WHO’S WHO in the Playbill, hoping for something to catch your interest, spark your imagination, and tell you something other than the episodes of Law & Order in which this actor supported his or her art? Only to be disappointed. That is probably because you are attending theatre in one of the great metropolitan areas, watching serious artists perform serious plays.
But if you are lucky enough to attend any of this summer’s performances at Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan, Maine* you will find in the WHO’S WHO a wealth and breadth of biographical detail you had not dared to dream of. I offer here a few selections; to appreciate the full experience you too will have to sit in a Torquemada™ chair and watch the 350 lb. owner of the hardware store in Moscow, Maine tap dance across the stage (and he was great):

NANCY resides in North Anson and likes Mexican food, An Officer and a Gentleman, Judy Garland, Carol Burnett, the color green and Hawaii 5-0”. She is really good at multi-tasking and wishes she had the magical power to lower energy prices.
JUAN’S pets are named Guido, Rosie and Sully. The 150 guppies are unnamed. He claims he is really good at being patient and his hero is Albert Einstein.
IRVING of Stetson lives with wife Jantha, Zeus the dog, and twin cats, Phantom and Ariel.
MIKE was born in England and his family includes Paris, 4 ½ pounds of attitude with a rhinestone collar. He has a degree in rock mechanics and mining, and works as an insurance advisor. Mike claims he is really good at doing a British accent.
GARY is the doting grandparent of Izabel, Madden, Alyuia and Brennan. A Scorpio, Gary likes chocolate, the color green, “Grey’s Anatomy”, and Henry Fonda. He wishes he had the magical power to change his Maine accent. Gary would like to visit the Holy Land.
GREG resides in Hartland and says, “I was born in the wrong era”. Greg’s hero is his wife Dawn and he claims she says he is “really good at everything”. He wishes he had the power to teleport anywhere in the world.
BOBBY claims he is really good at “being kind”. His heroes are Kurt Vonnegut and Daniel Day-Lewis.

*111 years old, and one of the oldest summer theatres in America, on the western shore of Wesserunsett Lake, this Lakewood should not be confused with the Lakewood Center for the Arts in Oswego, Oregon; or the historic Art-Deco Lakewood Theater in East Dallas, Texas; or the Lakewood Theatre Company of Nashville, TN; or the Lakewood Amphitheatre in Atlanta (its formal name is: The HiFi Buys Amphitheatre) or the Lakewood Cultural Center of Lakewood, Colorado, or the Regal Lakewood Cinema of Lakewood, Washington. The Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan is not only the oldest and hence first Lakewood, but lays claim to the most uncomfortable seats among the Lakewoods, a coveted distinction.

Look for future posts on the Importance of the Jigsaw Puzzle to the American Summer Home; the Social Register at Pleasant Pond; the eternal problem of The Pecking Order; and the Virgin of Caacupé.

On loons and cucumbers (yes, again)

Dare I say it? The weather at Pleasant Pond is lovely. Last night - though not a full moon, that is tomorrow - the moon was exceedingly bright and large, and the loons were in excellent form, calling to each other from every corner of the pond, beckoning, teasing, coaxing; it was a noisy orgy of loons out there. It would be a challenge to even the finest loon-call-imitator out there (you know who you are) to replicate the audacity of the love songs last night on the pond.

And if you have not heard enough about cucumbers this summer, and who could ever hear enough about the versatile cucumbers?
While making corn fritters on the vast wood burning stove I noted that right after the recipe for corn fritters in the 1967 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the section of cucumbers, which begins thus:

“How often the Japanese draw these decorative plants! That their formal values were missed when the cold weather came was poignantly noted by Isaiah when he said, “As desolate as a cottage in a cucumber garden abandoned in winter.””

More tidbits like that, and my book on cucumbers comes nearer and nearer to a reality.

(Lest you think we suddenly have acquired Internet at the pond, never fear, we have not. I am just now ensconced in a leather sofa at Northern Outdoors, a lodge for rafters, hunters and beer drinkers, not necessarily in that order, where there are no less than 8 stuffed deer heads, one huge moose head (2 of us could comfortably sit in the hollows of his antlers)over the stone fireplace, 1 stuffed wolf (the whole thing), 1 stuffed beaver (ditto whole) and one creature I can't identify. They also have Wi-Fi.)

What to do when it is rain rain raining at Pleasant Pond for days on end?

• Wrack your brain for synonyms for rain & its attributes: deluge, precipitation, perilous precipitation, burst clouds & cloudbursts, torrential downpour, monsoon, cataract, pluvial unloading… swampy, malarial, foetid, muggy, miasmic, wet.
• Study the sky and look for cracks in the clouds that will reveal a leakage of blue; interpret every shift in light as “the sun coming out”.
• Get out the puzzles. Luckily for us – or not? - CSB’s grandmother, L.M., was very fond of puzzles and amassed a collection of wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring bucolic rural scenes. L.M. was born in Bingham, Maine, back when Bingham was a good place to be born. Now that the lumber mill has closed, “hoodlums” hang out on every corner and the Odd Fellows Hall is for sale, along with most every other building. She favored a brand of Wood Interlocking Jigsaw Puzzles made in England and sold at Glencraft, in South Windham, Maine.
• Read the local papers. CSB has turned me into a devoteé of the Morning Sentinel. He has taught me to appreciate obits written by family members: in central Maine every deceased was married to “the love of his/her life” and they are without fail “avid” hunters/fishermen/ outdoorsmen. Women are always “devoted” to their children and/or their husbands; absent those basic appendages it is their nieces, nephews and/or cats to whom the female in question was devoted. Given the state of the local economy, the obituaries are often the most cheerful section of the paper.
• Read about Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and Benjamin Constant (1767-1830). Whenever I see the name Benjamin Constant my ears/eyes perk up, and not on account of my encyclopedic knowledge of French literature. Many years ago I went to the Colombian Amazon. Colombia has a sliver of land that extends down to the Amazon, because of course they want a piece of the Amazonian shore, as any self-respecting country would, and at the tip of the sliver is a town called Leticia. That is where we went. Leticia was a muddy, swampy, humid (Sound familiar? Leticia was MUCH hotter.) dump populated by escaped convicts, three-headed tapirs and defrocked priests. If you walked across the border into Brazil you were in the town of Benjamin Constant*, also a fetid agglomeration of shabby decaying houses. We walked to Benjamin Constant and visited a lopsided church on stilts. Inside the church (Saô Lorenço I think) a tape recorder was plugged into a long extension cord running down the nave, and all day long it played a recording of a Mass, including the music, the sermon in Portuguese, and the mumbled responses. Someone had rigged the recorder to play continuously, though I don’t know how. I didn’t know then that Benjamin Constant had been a lover of Madame de Staël, and I certainly didn’t know that his novel Adolphe (1816) is considered to be, by some, the forerunner of the modern psychological novel. On the other side of Leticia was Peru.
• Play full contact Scrabble. This means we thumb or arm wrestle to determine the correctness of a challenged word. Does TRAVELLER have one or two L’s? I would like it to be 2, because then I also get CURL from CUR. I lost the wrestle.
• Make collages from newspaper and NYRB cuttings.
• Listen to messages on the home answering machine. Long lost friends visiting from afar; a neighbor heading for the beach; a recording of the county executive expressing his deep concern about identity theft and encouraging us to bring our papers to the county’s mobile shredder (little does he know how excited I get by the very thought of a mobile shredder); my dentist reminding me I am six months overdue for a cleaning; and CSB’s x-wife gratuitously casting aspersions on my looks and moral character.
• You know it has rained for too many days when Listening to the Answering Machine is considered an Activity.

* It seems that for all these years I have been mistaken, in error and very wrong about the eponymous Benjamin Constant. The town, according to Wikipedia, was named for a Brazilian military man (1836-1891), who, having been born 6 years after the death of THE Benjamin Constant, I have to assume was named for the French writer and lover.