This week I realized that I have had no vacation this summer–it’s been work, work, work, except for the times I’ve carved out to play on this blog. And while I like work, and lord knows I need to work–hard and fast–to complete this project, I also needed … a change of pace.

That’s how I found myself braking for butterflies on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The Rockfish Gap Overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway

Now you may find this hard to believe, but though I live less than 20 minutes from the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway/Shenandoah National Park, I’ve visited precisely once in the fourteen years I’ve lived here. Earlier this week, I had to go “over the mountain” — as we say when we cross Afton Mountain into the Shenandoah River Valley — on business. I wrapped that up by ten, so instead of coming straight home on the interstate, I took the dogleg onto the parkway and drove … for hours.

Homestead with chicken coop in the backdrop

Now I’m familiar with the work of Chuck and Nan Perdue, folklorists at the University of Virginia, so I knew that thousands of families had been moved off their lands to create the parkway and the park. But it never clicked until I found this cabin, part of a farm “exhibit” near Humpback Rocks that included a tiny garden, a chicken coop that was more like a palace, a root cellar, a springhouse, and a cow byre.

These, mind you, are real buildings assembled from farms from which the owners had been displaced. Beautifully crafted–they were built to last–and meticulously maintained by the National Park Service, the buildings allow visitors to the park to experience selected sights of farm life without any of the sounds or smells. No sweaty humans with funny accents and guns to chase off the unwelcome visitor. No animals except for a single, exceedingly fat hen. The only sounds were the voice of the costumed interpreter, bird song, and the buzzing of insects.

Pipevine swallowtail in ecstatic communion with coneflowers

I stood in deep woods looking at the springhouse, the care with which it had been built from stone, wood, and mud mortar, and my body, which had been vibrating with fear and anxiety for weeks, began to relax. I stood marveling at the temperature–it was at least 10 degrees cooler than the city. I daydreamed amid massive flowering wands of black cohosh, drifts and drifts of them, with Humpback Rocks looming above … and gradually the shattering cacophony of bird voices began to resolve into individual songs: the fluting of wood thrushes, the peter-peter-peter of tufted titmice, the wicka-wicka-wicka of flickers.

My only companions were the insects: The forest was simply alive with insects. The occasional hornet. Bees and beetles aplenty. But especially (marvellously) butterflies. Thousands of them. Spotted. Tiger-striped. Giant and swallowtailed. Tiny as my thumbnail and silvery white… Lazily fanning their wings as they fed on the coneflowers and zinnias that surrounded the farmhouse. Dancing by the dozens in ecstatic spiral flights at the side of the road.

I bought a souvenir at the National Parks gift shop and hit the road after about an hour of that, but found my reverence for the butterflies lingering. I slowed my car when they launched themselves across the tiny ribbon of asphalt ahead of me. When I saw a huge swallowtail just chilling in the middle of my lane, I actually stopped the car , backed up, and drove slowly around it…

By this time hours had passed, and I was starved. So I exited the Parkway at VA 646–which, going east, leads to the ski-and-spa resort at Wintergreen and, heading west, leads to Sherando Lake, a swimming-camping-fishing complex around a beautiful spring-fed lake that, even though it was built by the CCC during the Depression, remains something of a secret.

“Beautiful people” or “regular people”? Four-star restaurant and spectacular views or fried chicken (if I was lucky) at the gas station up the road from the lake?

Royal Oaks Country Store in Love, VA

As it turned out, it was neither. I ended up in a country store in Love, Virginia. I chatted with the young man behind the counter about his garden–and the three dozens squash and cucumbers it was pumping out daily. “I’m so sick of squash–squash casserole, squash with butter and onions, squash any kinda way you could think of–I just told my wife to start giving it away,” he chuckled.

I couldn’t resist ordering a “Love Sub” and, while he made it, I browsed among the Appalachian kitsch in his gift shop: homemade soaps and jams and jellies, alternating with arrows fletched with fake hawk feathers and Indian maiden statuettes with angel wings.

Then, loaded down with the sandwich, chips, soft drinks, and water, I headed to Sherando Lake.

Bathers on the beach at Sherando Lake.

There were fewer than a hundred people there. If I’d had my bathing suit, it would have been the perfect day….

A few days ago, Sam, one of two special men in my life disappeared for a full 24 hours. He didn’t come home, wasn’t seen in any of his usual haunts, missed his breakfast and his dinner.

That was the factor that sent my doting Southern mama genes into panic mode. Because Sam–short for Sambuca–is a feral cat rescue. I don’t know how much you know about feral cats, but missing meals is not something they do.

Sam, right, and Tiger sharing a mug of water.
I’d last seen Sam about 8 o’clock the evening before. He and his brother Tiger–both born under my porch and tamed only gradually over a long, painstaking period of months–had eaten a dinner of their favorite canned food (Harris Teeter brand–go figure), then glided out into the garden: Sam to sprawl on the warm soil; Tiger to hide under the tomato plants and lie in wait for an unwary bird to fly too close. It all looked as normal as normal could be. I smiled to myself and closed the back door.

The next morning, I’d opened the door at the usual time–6:30. Tiger bounded out of the sunflower bed before I even had time to draw breath to call. But there was no Sam–not at 6:30, not at nine or noon or three in the afternoon, and not at dinner time. He didn’t respond to calls, to the sound of an opening can, or to persistent tapping on said can with a spoon.

And I was deeply, heart-stabbingly worried.

Being in the feral cat rescue business means dealing with beings who live dangerous, precarious lives–disease, hunger, indifferent cars, passionately interested dogs, and rock-shying humans are only a few of the dangers they face. But like more than a few humans I could name, feral cats tend to think their risky lives are just fine, thank you very much. They’re not typically interested in your desire to help–though canned food is high treat and a brush is something they can come to look forward to with positive relish.

Gaining their trust is a slooow process. There are some real hurdles to overcome: things like confinement in cat carriers, visits to the vet, the occasional bath when they’ve gotten into something particularly nasty. And there is the constant gnawing worry they can cause you. Because there’s nothing safe about loving a semi-wild animal. It may grow to love you, but it will never belong to you.

Nine feral cats and kittens moved through my life in roughly an 18-month period. I trapped them, got them spayed and neutered at the SPCA, hand-tamed almost all of them. I watched three of them die, and performed the heartbreaking duty of digging a grave for the kitten who had been my favorite–flattened by a speeding neighbor (the bitch–she never even apologized). I found homes for two of the cats, watched two of them find homes for themselves(!).

But of all of them–Midnight, Tweety, Tink, Lucky, Darla, the two mama cats, and Tiger–it was Sam who had given me the most sleepless nights.

While oddly self-sufficient, he was also incredibly needy.

Nearly starved to death when his mother weaned him–just couldn’t make the adjustment to the dry food. I watched him grow weaker and weaker–until I couldn’t stand it, started experimenting with various combinations of kibble, broth, and milk until I finally stumbled on something he could hold down…

Sam before he was weaned.

He went from being adorable at three weeks to the skinniest, ugliest, funniest looking kitten in his litter at three months. When I trapped him and dropped him off at the SPCA for what would be a monthlong stay (I had to go to Europe and he needed to be neutered) I didn’t recognize the cat who awaited me on my return. His glossy adult coat had grown in and he was quite handsome–if still painfully skinny…

At six months, he’d started to fill out, his appearance and skittishness seemed to be improving daily. And then he took a swan dive off the roof and snapped his femur cleanly in half. He got a screw in his thigh that year–and my family got homemade cookies for Christmas…

All these memories were going through my mind as I closed the door to my house at 5:30 p.m. and headed out to a meeting at church. I had a serious purpose–helping to pick an interim pastor–but I was finding it hard to concentrate.

So instead of running up the stairs to the library, I made a u-turn into the sanctuary instead. I knelt down at the altar–not sure at first sure what to say. But the words just started pouring out. Prayers that Sam would be safe whether or not he returned to me. Prayers that he would find a loving home if he did not. Prayers that he would return home–but only if my home were indeed a place where his little cat spirit was intended to dwell. Because somewhere, dimly, I was groping to a realization, no, a certainty, that however much I loved him, Sam was not … in fact, my possession… that he could come to harm or simply choose to live elsewhere, and there was not a single thing I could do about it… but pray that he would be all right.

So you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?

Sam came home.

As I drove down to the end of my dead end street, made the Y-turn, and pulled slowly in front of my house, he slipped from behind the neighbor’s hedge, sat in front of the gate, and calmly curled his tail around his feet.

“Where have you been!” was my scolding greeting, though I was so happy tears were pricking my eyelids. “You scared me half to death!”

He blinked his great gold-green eyes in reply, as if to say, “Such a fuss! Calm yourself, kiddo.”

But he also dashed pretty quickly through the picket fence to the front porch when I opened the gate, made a beeline for the kitchen when I opened the front door, and tucked into his Harris Teeter canned food with a voracious appetite.

“Humph! Well, I guess they weren’t feeding you wherever it was you were,” I muttered.

A few hours later, though, he gave me his nightly signal: he walked over, rubbed against my legs, made sure I was looking at him, then sat by the door. He was ready to go outside for the evening.

“Sure you haven’t had enough adventures for one day?” I said, hoping against hope. He cocked his head consideringly, then meowed and turned his gaze on the door. Clearly the answer was no.

I hesitated, but only for a moment. Sighing, I got up, opened the door, and watched Sambuca glide silently into the long blue shadows under the daylilies and disappear…

… because when you love something, you have to set it free. Especially if it’s a feral cat.

Sambuca, spiritual teacher.

This morning, I took a walk along the Rivanna River. It’s the first time I’ve walked the area since the Woolen Mills dam was demolished last August, and the changes seemed quite dramatic.

Now mind you, it’s been some years since I walked the Riverview. Time was — when I lived near the river, in the section of town called the “Woolen Mills,” after the mill founded there in 1841 — I walked that trail every day, winter or summer, whether the weather was dry and fine or ice and snow. My daily companion on those expeditions was Jade, a lab-collie mix with a pure white coat, root beer eyes, a pink mottled nose, and the best disposition of any animal it has ever been my pleasure to share my life with. If an animal can, in fact, be a spirit guide, then she was surely mine … But Jade died in 2002 after a short bitter fight with liver cancer–and I’ve barely set foot on that trail or even in the park that’s the entrance to it since…

But today, I promised a friend who runs a community service agency — QCC, the Quality Community Council — that I would join the ladies taking part in one of her weekly health walks. There were about a dozen of us–some elderly, some disabled, a mother with a toddler, one woman in full walkers’ regalia including an iPod armband. We got a brief pep talk from Susan Pleiss, a volunteer wrangler extraordinaire who does amazing work with parks and gardens and transportation and the poor, and Chris Jensic, the city planner who works with the trails system. Then we all set off in a big crush… but in short order I found myself … all by myself.

I got left behind rather quickly because I had to stop to look at the river. It had been many years since I’d taken a good long look at it, and I noticed the changes wrought by the destruction of the dam immediately. From a deep, sluggish, mossy green snail, the river had turned shallow, wide, clear, quick-moving as a coachwhip snake over rocks that I had never even known were there.

The deep shade cover made the walk blessedly cool, so I walked a bit slower (and, as it happened, a lot farther) than everyone else. I took the time to listen to Susan and Chris bemoaning the colonies of invasive Japanese bindweed that were overtaking the riverbanks (one was literally as tall as a house). I watched bees pollinating chest high stands of milkweed. I stopped to pick mulberries from a tree at the side of the path and exchanged a few laughs with a guy on a mountain bike who stopped and pulled down the branches so I could reach them, then fed handfuls to his daughter.

Cardinals and grackles and catbirds were calling, and there was a memory around every bend. There was where Jade got into a fight with that mean-ass Dalmation. There was where she’d launch herself after sticks until my arm was heavy and aching and her tongue lolled almost to the ground. There was where I scattered her ashes…

But there was much that was new, too. The city has widened and resurfaced the path so that it’s more like a ped-bike superhighway than the little goat track we used to scramble up and over. The deepest, darkest, shadiest portion of the trail–the section where Riverview Cemetery looms 100 feet on a sheer bluff overhead–is now dappled with sunlight because the city permitted a luxury development that decimated the enormous trees that used to block the light. And the trail just keeps going now instead of ending at the city limits.

This requires some explanation: The city and the county actually got together (this may sound strange to folks from other states, but in Virginia, they’re separate and often competing entities) and connected their trails. So now, instead of just ending at U.S. 250, at the city-county line in effect, the trail winds under the Free Bridge, and continues along the river through Darden Towe Park to end in Pen Park, on the far north end of town. … Now I don’t know about you, but to me, the thought of walking through woods in a complete circuit around the east side of town from the southern limit of the city to the northern– that’s cool. I can’t wait to try it.

So I’ll return to Riverview. In addition to the scary, ropy vines of poison ivy — thick as my arm — climbing the sycamores beside the trail, I saw Queen Anne’s Lace and wild yarrow. And the milkweed is just starting to mature. The umbels, though as big as my fist, are just starting to turn a rich coral color. Soon they’ll start attracting monarch butterflies. I want to be there to see that. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get a picture.

(P.S. Apologies for not posting any pictures with this. I didn’t have my camera today, but I’ll be going back soon!)

First allow me to whine that I could only stay for the first weekend of the Spoleto Festival. There’s so much stuff I want to see!

Stuff like: Le Sacre du Printemps performed by Compagnie Heddy Maalem, with dancers from Mali, Senegal, Benin, Mozambique and choreography that’s draws on modern dance, ballet, and African dance. (Sound effects of baby bawling.)

Stuff like: The U.S. premiere of The Great War by Hotel Modern, a troupe of puppeteers from the Netherlands. Using animation, film, visual arts, and models of miniature battlefields projected onto a giant screen, the puppeteers recreate a vision of the trenches in World War I.

But I was present only for opening weekend of Spoleto, and opening weekend is all about opera. So I saw two: on opening Thursday, Anthony Davis’s Amistad, a dark, brooding look at American history and American slavery; on opening Friday, Rossini’s La Cenerentola (che-nuh-REN-toe-la), known to those who speak American as “Cinderella.”

No pix with this post unfortunately–just some thoughts.

I’ll start by nothing that there was an unflattering review of Amistad in the Charleston papers on Sunday morning by visiting critic Tim Page from the Washington Post. His words set off a war of the blogs between folks who found the opera musically and morally challenging and those who found it … not so much.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I found myself falling into the camp of … not so much.

I wanted to like Amistad. I really, really wanted to.

Anthony Davis, the composer, and Thulani Davis, the librettist, had started with a completely different premise from that of the Steven Spielberg movie that opened the same year as the initial run of the opera at the Chicago Lyric Opera. What if, their version asks, the Africans had a completely different notion of why they had ended up in their predicament aboard the slave ship? What if they believed they had offended their gods? What if those gods walked the earth or sang from the depths of the ocean — were, in fact, ghostly characters haunting the proceedings on the stage?

It sounded like a fabulous premise to me, and I was all set to love the drama. But not only did I not love it, I actually fell asleep in the second act, waking just in time for the finale, a glorious chorus in which the captives, now freed, celebrated their court victory with a passion and verve that, had it been on display all night, would have riveted my eyes to the stage.

So what went wrong? The libretto, after all, had been a work of gorgeous poetry … but apparently gorgeous writing doesn’t always translate into drama on the stage. And in dramaturgical terms, nothing much happens during Amistad. The first act is set on the ship, with the captives fearing they’ve been betrayed, the navigator secretly steering for North America rather than West Africa. After the ship runs aground on Long Island, there’s a palpable sense of menace as officials arrest the captives and the townspeople jeer. But Act II fails to deliver on the promise. It’s, in effect, a long courtroom sequence in which the major events are told in flashback… a potential snooze even when the characters aren’t singing their lines.

Of course, the music is–and should be–the focal point in opera. And Davis’s score did offer a challenging mixture of jazz and atonal elements … just nothing to fall in love with. There were moments that sounded bluesy–there were even moments that recalled for me African American marching bands. But there was no African music mingled into the idiom. And the absence was jarring, particularly so when the composer and librettist had made the African origins of the captives such a point of emphasis.

Even these things could have been forgiven had there been a strong central character to root for, but that, too, was lacking. One expected the opera to belong to Cinque, the leader of the mutineers. But while Gregg Baker was an imposing presence on the stage–at least six feet, five inches, of gorgeous hunk-a-hunk-a-burning-baritone–he didn’t seem to have been given a whole lot to do. The focus often settled on the Trickster God, sung by Michael Forest with bell-like vocal clarity, but he was an observer rather than a precipitator of the action and seemed to disappear for long stretches.

A few of the singers went at their roles with everything they had: Mary Elizabeth Williams as The Goddess of the Waters delivered a show-stopping aria in Act II; Michael Fruitiger as the abolitionist Tappan displayed both acting and singing chops. But most of the actor-singers seemed to be wandering the stage aimlessly while they waited to deliver their lines. The sum of it all ended up being much less, rather than greater than, all of its parts.

By contrast, there was no aimless stage wandering in La Cenerentola. There was ardent scenery chewing, airborne props, even a bit of wacky animation–but it all seemed quite purposeful, and the sole purpose was fun.

Now I am a fan neither of comic opera nor of Rossini, and the Cinderella story is about as fresh as a century-old baguette. So there were moments in the second act when my attention flagged, the action seemed to drag, and I felt my eyelids begin that inevitable downward droop (we’re talking a piece that clocks in at two hours, forty-five minutes, people!). But the Rossini confection had a quality that the Davis collaboration failed to achieve. It was almost compulsively watchable–and not just because of the spinning, rotating, gyrating sets, the gorgeous lighting and costumes, but because the talented cast of singers were also supremely gifted actors.

Cenerentola’s wicked stepsisters, Clorinda and Tisbe (sung by Jennifer Check and Laura Vlasak Nolen) were actually funny, and Cenerentola’s (Sandra Piques Eddy’s) scenes with them were among her best. The wicked stepfather, Don Magnifico, was played by Tim Nolen as a vain, strutting, slightly ridiculous peacock of a man. The true master of comic timing, however, was Bruno Taddia as Dandini, the servant masquerading as the prince who’s demoted back to servant once the prince falls for the lovely, virtuous Cenerentola. His face, gestures, body language were astonishingly expressive for a man who was also singing at light speed. The most powerful presence on the stage, however, might have belonged to the mysterious Alidoro (Paolo Pecchioli), a trickster figure with a commanding presence and a magnificent bass, who seemed to be pulling the strings of everyone on the stage.

Now I find Rossini’s music to be no more memorable than Anthony Davis’s–for quite the opposite reason. While Davis’s music seems intentionally to defy the expectations of an untrained ear, Rossini’s music is a bit too user-friendly, a bit too familiar. It fails to surprise (though it’s often capable of delight), and sometimes, as during the interminable “reconciliation” sequence at the end, it turns so treacle-sweet as to be a misery…
But where La Cenerentola simply leaves Amistad in the dust is in the zest, the all-out commitment of its cast. Those actor-singers were having so much fun on the stage that it was impossible not to be drawn in.

Now admittedly, I saw Amistad on a single night–even if it was opening night, it may have been an off night. But those singers are going to have to dig deep and discover a collective passion for the material if they want to wrest the tiara of festival favorite from La Cenerentola’s head.

For the past few days, I’ve been in Charleston, SC, for the opening of the Spoleto Festival USA. The festival is something I try to make every year, partly because it’s one of the premiere performing arts festivals in the country and it’s held in my hometown. But I also work at the festival–more precisely I do projects for my friend and mentor Mary Jane Jacob.

Mary Jane is an “independent curator,” which may sound a bit odd. But what it means is that her whole career since the late ’80s has been based on a critique of museums–their limitations as spaces where the public can encounter art. Shifting her workplace to the street, MJ has done a series of of provocative community-based art installations, starting in 1991 at Spoleto with “Places with a Past”–which engaged directly, provocatively with Charleston history of slavery and segregation–and continuing through “Culture in Action,” “Conversations at the Castle,” “Evoking History,” and “Places With a Future.”

The teams are interdisciplinary and collaborative–we engage deeply with communities that are disenfranchised, forgotten. The one I joined in 2004 included the disciplines of visual and conceptual art, landscape architecture/design, and poetry. You can see images of the project we produced, “Water/Table” on my website, and Thursday night saw the grand opening of one of the sweetest fruits of that collaboration, “Alicia’s Garden,” a memorial garden dedicated to the memory of Countess Alicia Spaulding-Paolozzi, designed by the Places With a Future Collaborative: Mary Jane, Walter Hood, Ernesto Pujol, and little old me.

Seems like something that was worth a party.

But actually, the party was for the reopening of Memminger Auditorium, a 1938 WPA opera house in the middle of the peninsula of Charleston that had fallen on hard times. Upstaged by a glitzier facility in the city in the 1960s, it had been allowed to fall into disrepair–Hurricane Hugo punched holes in the roof in 1989, the building had been officially condemned, it was a home for bats and pigeons basically–until the festival’s director, Nigel Redden, saw it and fell in love with it.

He staged amazing, daring stuff there even when the place was barely habitable. (We won’t talk about those wooden seats, which were a crucifixion even during my 8th grade graduation, 30-odd years ago, not to mention the decades worth of grime and pigeon poop–and please! let us never mention again those the bathrooms…).

But somehow, Nigel made it all cool. Festival fans are still talking about Heiner Goebbels’ post-apocalyptic Surrogate Cities, in 2000. And The Peony Pavilion, an epic-length Chinese opera that turned the building into a fantasy land, all bamboo forests and lotus-filled pools, in 2004. Then there was that sexy Don Giovanni in 2005 that was so popular they had to bring it back for 2006. All the while Nigel was raising money to completely renovate the building…

As we saw Thursday night.

Cool, huh? It changed colors all night… Hmmm, having a full production staff at your disposal … It must be an event planner’s dream…

The interior was no less spectacular…

The production was Amistad–an appropriate choice for the bicentennial of the end of the Atlantic slave trade. But more on Amistad later. Let’s get back to the garden. It turned out to be exactly what we thought it would be… a great place for a party.

The Places With a Future Collaborative could relax and have a glass of champagne. The professionals had taken our vision and made it a reality….

From left, you see Russell “Rusty” Jacob, Ernesto Pujol, Mary Jane Jacob, and Ernesto’s friend and collaborator Valarie Samulski. And last but certainly not least, there’s Walter Hood, with one of his architect buds.

This blog has been idle for many moons and, to my friends and fellow travelers in cyber world, I apologize.

The only excuse I can offer is that I’ve been lost in the universe between my ears–writing the dissertation that was the reason I moved to central Virginia … Lord, going on 15 years ago now. I’m writing the last chapter of the book–and writing the preface to the life I plan to live now that it will no longer be my companion–so I’m reawakening to things that were once important to me that had to be put aside … first so that I could finish my term in politics, and then so that I could finish my book.

I’m reawakening to poetry, to cooking for myself rather than grabbing fast food on the fly, to sorting and filing rather than piling paper on my desk (and the floor around my desk). And most importantly, I’m reawakening to my garden.

There’s been blessed plenteous rain in Virginia after two years of drought. The Sugar Hollow Reservoir is full, at least for the time being, and the roses are spectacular.

The news that John Sayles was bringing his newest film to the Virginia Film Festival has been all that anybody has talked about in this town for weeks–a fact reflected in the line of laughing, gesturing, excited filmgoers that wound about a block-and-a-half down Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall before the show.

Sayles made a brief appearance before the movie with his longtime partner in producing and love, Maggie Renzi. And for middle-aged cineastes in the crowd like me–those who’d, in a manner of speaking grown up with this pair from Return of the Secaucus Seven to Brother from Another Planet to Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish and so many others–it was an “ahhh” moment.

Sayles lumbered over to the podium in a charcoal T-shirt–I’d had no idea he was so tall; he simply towered over everyone on the stage; even the hands that gripped the sides of the podium were enormous, expressive. Renzi wore dashing half-boots and something in bronze and black with a gypsy flair. John was a bit gray; they were both a bit thicker in the middle–but the affection between the two of them and their shared zest for the movie was palpable.

I just wish I shared it. Honeydripper ended up being, for me, toothache sweet. And a bit of a bore.

The movie is set in Harmony, Alabama, where the roads are dusty, and the sunlight dazzles on fields full of hip-high cotton. Danny Glover plays Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis, a man haunted by a violent past who has a struggling blues club, a wide-eyed stepdaughter named China Doll (YaYa DaCosta), and a wife, Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who’s torn between her sanctified church and her loyalty to her man. There are great bits from Charles S. Dutton as a lovable sidekick, Davenia McFadden as a “woman with needs,” Stacy Keach as a corrupt sheriff, Keb’n Moore as a blind guitarman who may or may not really be there, Mary Steenburgen as an aging belle who can’t lay off the sherry…

(Caution: Spoilers looming.)

But it’s all straight out of the dusty trunk of Southern kitsch. Fifteen minutes into the movie I knew exactly what was going to happen and to whom. I knew the skinny kid with the homemade guitar (Gary Clark Jr.) was going to save the day. I spent another sixty waiting for the kid to bang out those first chords–and they seemed interminable.

Because nothing is really at stake. In Honeydrippers, armed deputies prowl the cotton fields glaring at the convict labor–but they exude all the menace of department store dummies. The men rounded up as vagrants enter the fields in white shirts and leave in white shirts. Nobody gets dirty and nobody sweats. In Alabama. During the cotton harvest. The crooked judge cheats the laborers and the sheriff blusters–but all he really wants is a piece of the action at the club and some of Pinetop’s wife’s fried chicken. A city boy and a country boy square off on the night of the big show, but the fight is over almost before it begins. The club is saved, everyone pairs off, the blind bluesman announces his work is done… And the credits roll. The end.

I go to a John Sayles movie for the sharp racial, political, and class observation that made movies like City of Hope and Lone Star gripping and essential viewing. Racial, political, and class observation are present in this movie, but they get drowned in a warm glow of sentiment, of nostalgia. This is a movie that is, after all, is set at a time of deep strife and injustice. But there’s so much honey dripped all over Sayles’s vision of the period that the contestation almost seems to justify the reconciliation–the heavy hand of the white South led to happy darkies jooking at the jook joint and the birth of rock n roll. Strange roots, but good fruit? Sorry, it just didn’t work for this viewer.

I think some folks will really like Honeydripper. It’s warm and sweet and kind of goofy–a fable of sorts and definitely an homage to a music and people the Sayles-Renzi team clearly adores. But I, for one, expect more from a John Sayles movie. And I was left … with a toothache.