This week, I’ve been thinking about pears.

Mmmm. Pears…

Pears? I can almost see your furrowed brows. Why pears? you may be wondering and well you might.

Apples are, after all, the glory of Albemarle County. We have our own heirloom variety—the tiny, tart Albemarle Pippin—not to mention apple festivals and fall pressings and, my personal favorite, my buddy Kevin Lynch’s homemade hard apple cider.

Just this fall, apples have adorned the cover of Edible Blue Ridge magazine here in Charlottesville; they’ve been the subject of countless newspaper food section spreads all over our region; they were the star of—well, at least the opening act in—The Botany of Desire, the book that started the whole Michael Pollan phenom. And yet … I can’t stop thinking about pears.

You see, they, too, are in season—though you’d never know it to look at the grocery store shelves, which abound with pears fresh off the container ship from China and Chile twelve months of the year…

But the “slow foods”-local foods folks have got me thinking about seasonal eating. And that’s meant thinking back, way back to childhood when “farm fresh” meant the food I ate “down home,” at my grandparents’ farm in Godsey, a tiny community of emancipated slaves who all purchased land together, founded a church together, married, farmed, worked, and lived together near Ninety-Six, a one-stoplight hamlet in South Carolina’s Appalachian foothills.

Yes, there’s a story behind the name Ninety-Six, and one day I’ll tell it, but today I’m thinking about the pear trees on my grandfather’s farm—one hundred fifty acres of the “sweetest land on earth,” my Uncle Lee Moss used to call it.

Just after dawn last November: an old tree swing, the sweetest land on earth

There was a pear tree by the cotton house, where the cotton was stored until it could be taken to the gin, another by the well house and yet another next to the enormous woodpile that fed the woodstoves, the one on which my grandma—we called her Mawmaw—cooked and the ones that heated the house.

I knew nothing of varieties in those days, just that the fruit were green and stony hard and they’d make you sick if you tried to eat them too soon (and we “grands” tried every year). But that was just until late fall, and then they’d turn honey sweet and golden yellow—well worth the wait.

Those trees gave fruit in such abundance that it was impossible to eat fresh. So my aunts and uncles would pick, and Mawmaw would can in quart-sized Mason jars or turn the fruit into meltingly sweet preserves.

Sweetness. That was what I remember of that farm. Now, I was a city kid and no stranger to penny sweets from the corner store. But there was nothing in my city life like the sweetness to be found on that farm, which, along with pears, produced  green and red apples, yellow and white peaches, bright red plums not to mention the sweet melons from Mawmaw’s one-acre vegetable “patch” and the mulberries, maypops, blackberries, scuppernongs, muscadines, persimmons, and so much more that grew wild.

By the time of cold weather, this time of year—the time of frosty nights and grandkids snuggled two and three to a bed under piles of quilts sewn on a foot-powered Singer by Mawmaw and my aunts—all that sweetness had been dried or canned or jellied and was waiting in neat rows in the root cellar to be turned into dessert.

So I’d like to share a recipe for my grandmother’s cobbler—a word she never used, by the way; her desserts were either “cakes” or “pies.” I was lucky enough to get the green thumb gene from my Mawmaw—the baking gene, unfortunately, passed me by. But this cobbler, which is neither a cake nor a pie but a kind of best-of-both-worlds cross between the two, is so easy even I can’t mess it up!

One note about the pears—my grandmother made this all-purpose recipe with fresh peaches or berries in summer or with canned pears or dried (and reconstituted) apples in fall and winter. A really firm pear would likely not cook to the desired consistency, so I’d recommend really ripe fresh pears or lightly stewed pears for this recipe.

Mawmaw’s Fall Pear “Pie”

1 stick of butter

1 cup of self-rising flour

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of milk

1 T of vanilla extract

½ tsp of cinnamon

A pinch of salt

2 cups of peeled pears

Peel and chop the pears. If they’re nice and soft, add 1 T of sugar, a squirt of lemon and set aside in a bowl. If they are firm, stew for about 10 minutes in a small amount of water with 1 T of sugar and either a pinch of salt or a squirt of lemon. (A touch of tart to cut the sweetness).

Preheat oven to 325 degrees, place butter in a casserole-style baking dish in the oven.

Combine wet and dry ingredients separately, then slowly combine wet with dry to create a cake-like batter.

Remove the melted butter from oven and pour the batter on top of the melted butter.

Pour the pears and some of the reserved juices on top of the batter.

Shake the dish to even the distribution of batter and fruit.

Bake about 30 minutes or until a golden brown crust forms on top. (Note: This will not be a “dry” pie, but gooey and delicious).

Serve with a tall, frosty glass of (raw!) milk or with a scoop of your favorite vanilla ice cream.

OK, this is making me hungry. I gotta get in the kitchen and get baking. … But stay tuned. I’ve got a lot more to say about my farming ancestors. I think you’ll find them quite an interesting crew.

For the last month of Saturdays I’ve been “working” the Charlottesville City Market.

Mmmmm, City Market…

Now, those of us who love Charlottesville have long known about the Charlottesville City Market. And what we know  surer than celery with our Buffalo wings is that the CCM is no longer the city’s best-kept secret. In high summer, it’s more like the ultimate see-and-be-scene. If you’re not there by 8 a.m., you’ll never make the circuit in under an hour. If you’re not there by 10, you can forget finding your favorite wild mushrooms, arugula or farm fresh eggs.

“Working” the market, now … that’s a bit of a fantasy for us avid see-and-be-City-Market-scenesters. But it’s also the perfect cover for those of us who are just … hanging out with our boyfriends.

Yes, gentle readers, I admit it–even though it may cost me my feminist membership card. My new Saturday “job” is motivated largely by my high school-esque desire … to hang out with my guy.

But hey, I have been useful, a value-added aspect of the proceedings. All these years in the city–and those few years on City Council–mean that people are always coming over to talk to me and some of those folks actually buy. They’ve absolutely been lapping up the eggs Marc has been selling as a favor to his good friend, Laura Dollard. In fact, that’s sort of my Saturday alter ego. When I’m at the market, at his side, I kind of morph into … “the egg lady.”

Don’t laugh. OK, you can actually stop rolling on the floor now. It’s great fun, and I’ve actually enjoyed telling Laura’s story.

I have, after all, spent a number of hours with Laura’s chickens. I’ve gotten to know the “pets,” Rocket and Henny Penny, who live in cat cages in the kitchen when they’re not out in the yard scratching in the dirt and eating bugs with their sisters. I mourned with Laura and Marc when a predator got into the barn and killed eight of the girls and wounded several others nearly to death. I was sobered when Laura–who has the kindest of hearts–showed the steel in her backbone by putting a chicken-killing dog down rather than allow it to kill again.

But I don’t think I fully understood the value of what Laura does, who she is, what Broomfield Farm represents, until I sold a dozen extra large eggs to a young man at City Market on Saturday.

I arrived late, around 11ish, and the day was bright but cold. It wasn’t even the City Market any longer–it was the Holiday Market, with mostly different vendors, selling wreaths and jewelry and hand-spun, hand-dyed yarns rather than jams and okra and  dahlias. The shorter days meant Laura’s rooster-less hens were producing fewer eggs, so there were only two dozen left when I assumed the position at Marc’s stand: one dozen extra large at $4 and one dozen double-extra-jumbo eggs at $5.50.

That’s when the young man showed up.

I gave him the prices and, automatically, started to apologize for the size of the eggs and the prices. These are the thing most people complain about, in my brief experience as the egg lady. “Gosh, that’s high,” someone will say, even though they’re looking at eggs graded as “colossal”–twice the size by weight of medium eggs. Or, “Lord, those eggs are big,” they’ll say–thinking, no doubt, of cholesterol or whether the cake will fall or who knows what.

But before I could even draw a breath to respond to what I imagined as his concerns, the kid just cut me off.

“i’ll take the extra large,” he said. I closed my mouth. He handed me four bills, and I handed the eggs over. There was a little bit of byplay while he figured out how to carry them safely in his backpack.Then, spontaneously, he started responding to what I had not quite said.

“Yeah, they’re a little more expensive than grocery store eggs. But it’s not a problem for me, not  when I think about the conditions on those factory farms.”

He kind of gave a little shudder that might have been theatrical, except for the seriousness in his eyes and the set to his youthful, bearded chin. “Yeah, I buy my eggs at the market because it’s just important to me to participate in this food chain.”

He looked around, his eyes taking in the vendors, but not smiling at all. “You know? It makes a big difference to me … that this is a food chain that’s not, that’s not cruel,” he said.

It stopped me cold for a hot second. My meet-and-greet-the-public smile faded, and I gave him my real smile. And then I said, “I know just what you mean.”

Because I did.

I’ve seen what that food chain looks like. It looks like Rocket:

Rocket, the house chicken

I’ve sat at Laura’s kitchen table in sandals and gotten my toe pecked by that food chain, because Rocket wanted to make sure that my painted toe was not something good to eat. I’ve stood in Laura’s backyard gorging on juicy just-overripe peaches watching that food chain scramble for every morsel I dropped or tossed down. Who knew? Who knew that, in addition to bugs and grass and feed, chickens loved peaches? Or that they’d even beg for a bite of your ham sandwich? Who knew chickens had personality? I sure didn’t.

Behold Laura’s girls, chowing on a little squash with their feed …

… and scratching (there’s a reason they call it chicken scratch) in the dust

Free-range eggs are said to be a joke. I’ve found websites defending–seriously, defending–the practice of caging chickens and turkeys, cutting their beaks off so they won’t peck each other, and sending them to slaughter the moment their production falls off. (Check this one out, if you dare. It manages a creepy-crawlie intersection of biblical scripture, anti-organic food rant, and factual reference to nutritional studies.)

But I spent my summer vacation singing the Jets’ theme  from West Side Story to Rocket (”got a rocket in your pocket–keep cooly cool boy!”) while she gazed quizzically up at me with her golden chicken eyes hoping against hope that I’d spare her a bite of bread, so I know sure as celery that free range–at least in Albemarle County–is for real. And those sweet-and-sweaty wings from McGrady’s–well, I don’t feel the same way as I did about them back in the spring, when they were just cheap food to go with my basketball viewing.

(Warning here: I’m about to climb up on my political soapbox.)

Yeah, you do pay more for free-range eggs. But there are real differences between factory-farmed and organic local eggs. There are differences in grade. In the grocery store, you get, for the most part, medium, large, and jumbo. Laura sells pullet eggs (the equivalent of medium), and the sizes move up from there to large, extra large, jumbo, extra jumbo, double extra jumbo and colossal (which are roughly twice the weight of pullet eggs). Why so much larger? Partly because the chickens are large–Rhode Island Reds, a healthy-sized breed–who eat well and get lots of sunlight (which encourages hens to lay).

At left, jumbo from the grocery store; at right, double extra jumbo from Laura’s girls

But to a large degree, the eggs are big because Laura doesn’t slaughter her hens the minute they get older and their production starts to fall off. Older hens produce larger eggs, fewer in number, rather than more, smaller eggs. It’s a raw economic calculation on the factory farm that it’s cheaper to kill a chicken (and turn her into … say, buffalo wings) than to feed her once her laying capacity falls. Fact is, Laura doesn’t even slaughter her hens when they stop laying. They just hang out on the farm and live out their lovely chicken lives–scratching in the dirt and eating bugs and grass and (that increasingly expensive!) chicken feed.

Yeah, that grocery store egg is much cheaper–maybe as little as $1.99 for a dozen. But that grocery store egg is also older, possibly weeks older depending on the point of origin. The egg weighs less, because an air pocket forms between the egg and the shell as it ages. The egg is tougher, chewier because it’s less moist (that whole air pocket thing).

There’s also noticeable difference in the color of the yolk–the grocery store egg’s yolk is a pale yellow rather than the deep rich nearly orange color of the Albemarle County free range egg. That’s partly due to the difference in feed: factory farmed chickens eat a diet that’s mostly genetically modified, pesticide-doused grain and antibiotics rather than the mixed diet of organic corn, bugs, grass and the occasional fruit or bread treat that Laura’s chickens enjoy. And of course, there’s a big difference in nutrition. All eggs are high in choline, B-vitamins, and loads more stuff that’s good for you–but you don’t get that dose of pesticides and antibiotics and hormones with your free-range egg.

At left, grocery store; at right, one of Laura’s girls

I’ve been thinking about this all summer, particularly as I’ve spent more time in Albemarle County with people who live close to the land. Laura has 100 chickens rather than the thousands in cages it is one’s misery to behold (not to mention smell) on the factory farm. The kinds of economies of scale that are possible on those big operations are out of reach for her and the rest of the small farmers in our area. When a bag of feed goes from $8 to $14, it hurts–hurts all of them–and it shows up immediately in the price we pay at the City Market for those eggs or that meat. But one thing you can be assured of is that the chickens and pigs that are the source of all that City Market goodness were well fed and well treated. (And you don’t have to believe me: You can visit the farms and see with your own eyes).

So yeah, my participation in City Market started out being all about hanging out–hanging out with the boy, seeing the world from the vendors’ angle, running my mouth with my friends, that kind of thing. But what I realized on Saturday was that this endeavor has real meaning. We are all part of a food chain in Charlottesville, in Albemarle and the surrounding counties. And for those of us who sell or patronize the sellers at City Market, for those of us who grow our own, even if it’s just a tub of tomatoes on the deck, those few links in the chain we’re able to contribute? They have value, because they’re not cruel. I’ll always be grateful to that serious young man for reminding me of that.

So chew on that with your morning omelet. And I’ll see you in this space soon.

Trifle, the fierce beagle who watches over the chicks

So I never realized what a city mouse I actually was until a tall, handsome, dashing stranger—the kind we’d all order up from Design-a-Man.com if we could bring ourselves to believe they really existed—invited me to sleep (chastely) with him under the stars in a bower of love and peace (just like Tristan and Isolde, only without the sword and, well, the adultery), and my reaction was not an enraptured, “Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!” (which a cute guy actually said to me earlier this year when I asked him out on a date). It was to cringe and even take a half-step backward and say: “W-w-won’t there be … bugs?”

Yep. That’s what I said.

City mouse.

But a sport nonetheless. I squared my shoulders, summoned up my most dazzling Southern belle smile, said, “Ah-ah-are … you sure?”

Being assured that he, indeed, was, I suffered to recline in the bower of love and peace, stuffing down my misgivings as I kicked off my jeans, and … was most pleasantly surprised. I can even testify that—between the tarp and the blankets and sleeping bags, the unheard-of-for-July-in-Virginia sub-70-degree temps, and the fairy carpet of stars stretching out overhead—Isolde never had it so good.

And that ominous crashing in the underbrush that woke me up at 4 a.m.? Well, that just made me snuggle just a wee bit harder against the broad shoulders of the dashing stranger … which, now that I think about it, is probably what he had in mind all along.

The girlfriends, city mice one and all, were thrown into transports when they heard about this escapade.

“Oh, my God! He made you a bower under the stars!” said Marcia. (Alas, as much as I’d like to claim it, the word bower was not original with me.) “That is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard!”

“Easy for you to say,” I thought to myself, recalling the last time I’d idly floated the idea that we take a summer hike through the rolling Virginia hills. Her response then was more like: “Sunblock! At least 70 SPF, don’t you think? And oh my God! Ticks! I know Deet’s illegal, but shall you bring it or should I?”

Of course, I don’t mean to scoff. We all are one and all of us city mice. Some of us may have a fleeting romance with the Green World. We patronize farmer’s markets. Talk knowledgeably about heirloom tomatoes with our chums. Tout the benefits of free-range eggs. Perhaps even dare make herbal teas with what’s growing in the back forty. I certainly for quite some time liked to imagine myself as some kind of budding artist-cum- goddess of the cottage garden a la Gertrude Jekyll or Anne Spencer.

But the fact of the matter—proven by the fact that it only took 18 months of dissertating to utterly wreck my garden—is that that is a flimsy fantasy. The reality is, I’m a city mouse.

It’s a tiny city—just ten square miles—but I love it passionately because, within its environs, I have everything I need. I live smack between the university and the Downtown Mall, where I currently work. I can walk to either, but if it’s hot or raining or I’m feeling lazy, the city bus line is sixty seconds from my door, and the university bus only a two-, possibly a three-minute walk.

No, there’s no chain grocery store within walking distance. But on Wednesdays and Saturdays between April and October, there’s the Farmer’s Market. And other seasons, there’s Integral Yoga, run by lovely bunch of hippie, vegetarian Buddhists who also have an ashram in nearby Buckingham County—or if I’m looking for a bargain, there’s Cville Market, which has cheeses, wine, and locally produced meats in addition to the best prices on produce in town.

For real bakery bread, there’s BreadWorks, in the strip shopping center one block from my front door. The chocolate muffins with butter cream icing, I have it on good authority, are actually made with crack.

There’s also the best coffee in town, Shenandoah Joe’s, two stores beyond that. Reid’s, a few blocks in the other direction is a locally owned grocery with real, live butchers. And there are fish markets, an organic butcher, an Italian products market, the finest local and imported cheeses within all walking distance or a short drive away.

Clothes! I see you think you’ve got me there. You gotta have a mall, or at least a Marshall’s, for clothes, you’re thinking. Well, actually, no.

Sure, I could go to the mall and buy something new from J. Crew. But where’s the challenge in that? I’d much rather find a fabulous men’s tuxedo shirt at the Twice as Nice (next to the bakery), get the saleswoman at Martin’s Hardware (on the other side of the bakery) to help me pick out fancy bolt caps to use as studs, then shimmy into a mini and my Lucchese cowboy boots for an evening of dining, live music and dancing on the Downtown Mall…  A five-mile drive to the county mall for a little light shopping and Starbucks, well, it sounds downright dull by comparison, don’t you think?

For years I’ve said everything I need, everything I could even imagine wanting, is within the ten square miles of the city limits of Charlottesville…

OK, so the Pet Food Discounters is not within the city limits of Charlottesville, but cat food is expensive and I only have to drive out there once a month…

And all right! There’s one other thing that’s not in the city limits of Charlottesville…  The guy. And the bower under the stars.

Yes, that guy. You knew we were getting back to him.

If I’m city mouse, he is indubitably, indisputably, one hundred percent country. Intimate with heavy machinery. Uses words like “tractor” and “bush hog” in casual conversation. Digs stumps and builds stone walls. Fixes things—including his own trucks and, in 15 minutes, my front gate, which had been sagging off its hinges for two years. Knows every tree, every shrub, every flower, every by-gosh weed in the field by its Latin name.

Is a bit obsessed with football.

But also loves history.

And poetry.

No, really. Poetry.

So, I’m spending a lot more time these days watching swallows swoop in and out of the barn as I drink my morning coffee.

…finding patches of blackberries and fences to sit on while I eat them off the vine.

…noting the trees where the goldfinches have built their nests.

…watching my fella fish frogs out of the dog’s water bowl.

…getting to know the ways of chickens—there are 120 of them in the barn, and did you know they’ll eat anything?

…walking around, talking and holding hands with a guy who can tuck me under his armpit and kiss me on top of my head.

…and feeling the fears and stresses of 18 months of dissertating, living off an ever-dwindling store of stipend and savings, getting done just in time to watch every academic job I might have imagined applying for vanish like a puff of Virginia fog in the blaze of a little thing called the worldwide economic meltdown, working shit jobs for no money, losing ground, losing hope—just feeling all that kind of … fall away as we explore this this unexpected but oh-so-very-welcome … whatever it is you call when a woman of fifty starts falling for a guy who’s precisely her age.

There’s no denying the situation presents … challenges. Last Saturday morning, for example, I was at the farm doing what I always do on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee curled up with a book (Flaubert’s Egyptian journals; the library at the farmhouse is simply not to be believed) when an incredible rattling and banging made me look up to the sight of the guys from the farm next door driving past the house in an enormous red truck, pulling an even more enormous red trailer, which contained the largest blackest Black Angus bull I’d ever seen. Word of God it was every bit as big as a Volkswagen bus, if not even bigger. I had to go out on the porch just to gawk.

The guys in the truck spotted me and waved. I waved back … and caught a glimpse of my beautifully manicured nails, painted stop-traffic red. They were so out of context I had to stop and stare at them a moment. And my eyes kept moving down, down to my designer flip-flops and my matching stop-traffic-red toes…

Now farm boy doesn’t just tolerate my little vanities, the hard-learned and hard-earned wiles of the Southern version of the girly-girl—he downright adores them. Marvels at the notion that a woman would take the time and trouble to match her blouse color with her fingers and toes. Pays tribute with kisses and compliments. Which I, in turn, adore. Every performance must have its audience, after all.

…But I think a truer gauge of the distance we’re trying to bridge might be found in the eyes of Laura, the 73-year-old widow who’s his best friend. Laura—a woman with nearly a thousand acres who’s raised crops of children, Thoroughbred horses, heirloom tomatoes, chickens, and heaven knows what all else— looks at me with liking and affection, but also puzzlement, as if I were some kind of exotic bird who’d shown up at the feeder. Decorative, without a doubt, and such a lovely song, I see her thinking—but now that she’s fluttered out of her cage, can she make it in the wild?

Lana, so kind, so wise. I don’t think she’s quite sure.

I’m trying to remember how the story of the city mouse and the country mouse went. The details escape me—something about a great meal in the city, then getting chased by a cat, the country mouse declaring the city sucked and lighting out for the territory … Not a happy-ever-after tale, in other words.

But I have high hopes for me and farm boy. He’s got a great lap for lap-sitting and a chest that, even when I wear my tallest shoes, is just the right height for a cheek to rest on. He’s got a great truck for riding around and looking at the gardens he’s designed. He’s kind and funny and sexy—and just as good at wine and conversation as he is at wrestling stumps out of the ground. He is, in fact, the guy I would have ordered from Design-a-Man.com, if I could have brought myself to believe that such a paragon could actually exist.

So who cares that, on paper, this does not quite compute? I am starting to relax about the bugs.

Allow me to repeat that: I. am. starting. to. relax. about. the. bugs.

That may sound like a small step to you. But, trust me, it’s a giant step for girly-girl-kind.

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.

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.