Our Trip to Tangier Island

A long long time ago, when I first went to college as a piano major, we were required to sing in the chorus. Then all of the chorus members were strongly encouraged to be in the onstage chorus of the opera. My very first one was Faust and I loved it. I went on to be in Pearl Fishers, Carmen, and during my last year my friend JoAnn and I played celeste together down in the pit in a newly composed opera by Gerald Muller called Joshua. It was based on the life of a preacher on Tangier Island, out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, who had been required to lead prayer services for the British troops on their way up to bomb Baltimore in the War of 1812. The music was exciting and the story was rather interesting. It left me hoping to one day visit Tangier Island myself.

I had kind of forgotten all about that until I read this post from Capital Spice, which described their recent trip to Tangier Island in great detail. I decided I HAD to go there this summer, and a few weeks ago I finally did. If you want to visit Tangier, definitely go read their post - it has all of the necessary links for transportation and lodging. We basically replicated their trip except that we arrived late in the day and stayed for two nights.

It was a great getaway, and could have been totally relaxing except that we spent the entire day we were there riding bikes, paddling kayaks, and walking around all over the place. The island is really small so we just rode around everywhere about six times. They don't have or need cars on Tangier, but nearly every family there has a golf cart. Some of them keep a car on the mainland.

Most of the people who live on Tangier Island are descendants of the original families and we saw the same last names over and over in all of the various grave sites. It was interesting to hear the rather unique accents - they all had the same features, but in varying combinations and amounts. What I mostly heard was British sounding vowels, combined with some of the inflections and rhythms and articulations of Baltimore. I had a nice conversation with one little five year old boy who was already tending to his very own crab cages and he definitely sounded more British than anything else.

So we took the late afternoon ferry from Onancock, VA which is just over an hour south of Salisbury, MD off of Route 13. We got in to Tangier around 7 pm, checked in to Hilda Crockett's guesthouse, went out for dinner, walked around some, got ice cream, and then went to sleep.

The next day we had the huge and delicious breakfast, went for a bike ride, split a softshell crab sandwich, went to the museum, went kayaking, ate the huge and delicious lunch/dinner at Hilda Crockett's, rode bikes some more, walked down to get some ice cream, and then went to bed so early that we were able to squeeze in another bike riding session before our 7am departure the next day.

Since we were so far south we decided to go to the beach at Chincoteague. It was beautiful and I'd go there more often if it were closer and didn't have so many ferocious flies. After we were done with the beach we drove home.

And here are the pictures - you can click on them if you want to see a larger version:

Onancock Wharf, where we caught the ferry

Some of the many crab shacks we saw on the way in to Tangier

The town, from the water

The softshell crab sandwich

The Reverend Joshua Thomas

Hilda Crockett's guesthouse

an old abandoned house

another old abandoned house

more crab shacks

crab cages

bird houses

snails

a white heron

a blue heron

local kittens

the birds at Chincoteague

Karaoke Conductor

Tonight I conducted in public for the very first time. One of my duties as a teaching assistant this semester is conducting the largest jazz ensemble at UMD for a few tunes at each concert. I have no idea what I'm doing. I never took conducting, so I'm kind of bad at it, I think. I can't actually tell. Anyway I did it and good or bad, it was kind of fun. I counted them off, waved my arms and pointed at people, and announced the tunes.

This particular band is huge - all the parts are doubled. They have about 12 saxes - maybe more, 6 trombones, 8 or 9 trumpets, 2 clarinets, 2 flutes, 2 guitars, accordian, vibes, piano, bass, drums, and a vocalist. Fortunately for me, a large jazz ensemble usually does not require much in the way of conducting skills. Once you count it off, it kind of plays itself. It will keep going even if you mess up. Just like karaoke.

I love how obvious it is that Spring is on its way and you can tell that even at night. That little white spot is the moon. It didn't photograph nearly as big as it actually was. But at least the trees look kind of cool.

Mizell Lumber & Hardware

We recently went to Mizell Lumber & Hardware in Kensington because we needed to buy some doors and they had given us a very reasonable price quote. Mizell is one of those old-timey hardware stores that has all kinds of things no one else carries. It looks like it could be about 100 years old.

I remember when I was a kid I would sometimes get to go there with my Dad back when we lived in Kensington. I really liked being there because it was right next to the train tracks, nearly directly across from the Kensington station. Anytime I got near train tracks I would daydream about jumping on the train and going off by myself to who knows where. I don't know why, but this was a recurring fantasy during my childhood. I loved hearing the sound of the train at night. There used to be a wooden bridge that went over the tracks off of Howard Avenue. It was rickety and felt dangerous but I just loved the feeling of going over that bridge.

So as a grownup going back to Mizell, I enjoyed remembering my little childhood fantasies (which I sometimes still have) but it was also a good experience for a grown up (I think!?) consumer. The salespeople there are knowledgeable and very helpful. They aren't snotty and rude and/or dumb the way they are at some hardware stores. I got some very useful information about thresholds there.

This lovely formica display made me start thinking about how much less expensive our countertops could have been, and they would still be very pretty. But it's too late now.

They sell nails by the pound!

Their shelves are stocked full of all kinds of cool stuff. If you are ever in Kensington, be sure to check out Mizell Lumber & Hardware.

Snow Day!

So I'm back in school over at the UMD. We had a snow day on the second day of classes - awesome! Those college kids are keeping me young, that's for sure. Yesterday I wrote a comment on somebody's blog where I said "She's all like....." Unbelievable. I don't think ever I've heard myself use that expression out loud - yet, that is. Maybe I have used it and don't realize it. And how ironic is it that this way of talking is creeping in as a result of increased contact with an educational institution? It's definitely not from watching TV because I don't have one. Anyway, I'm sort of amused by this recent development.

I love school so much! It's so much more fun than what I'm stuck doing when I'm not in school. And when the Foam Core Fantasy is finally finished, my entire life will be fantastic!

Water Tower, Part Two

Since I have nothing interesting to blog about except for this, I guess I'll just post another water tower picture. Do two entries make a series?

This trio of towers can be found near the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue and Route 28/198.

Water Tower

I took this photo a few days ago because this ugly old water tower was suddenly looking prettier than I've ever seen it. I guess the sunset helped quite a bit.

distracted by nature

We finally figured out a way to get all of the excess 12x4 sheets of drywall down two flights of stairs without killing ourselves.
Step One was to cut half of them down to 10 feet and the rest to 8 feet lengths. It is amazing what a difference that makes. They are about 17 percent less heavy, and with the shorter and more manueverable length they are completely manageable.
Step Two was to pace ourselves, so there was a little free time between each panel to check out the rather dramatic and rapidly changing weather. I took these out of the window of my house.

So windy!

And snowy!

And even snowier!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

so busy....

My blogs have kind of fallen by the wayside recently, and now that I finally have a free minute, I guess I might as well throw up some pictures (since I seem to also have diarrhea of the camera) and try to remember what I've been doing for the last week.

The trip to Atlantic City last Friday was quick but fun. My friend MyCatTom and I yakked away for the entire trip up and the entire trip back which made the drive seem really short. We rehearsed in the afternoon and did the concert that night. The various "Swingettes" came from DC, NY, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and Atlantic City. I enjoyed playing with all of them. There wasn't much free time, but I was able to hobble on down to the beach. It was unbelievably cold and windy there. On the way home the road was extremely well-lit by an enormous full moon.

The things you can buy in New Jersey!

Why is the beach so pink?

I guess I was walking around in the Red Light District

We saw this on the way home. Too bad they were closed!

The Messiah rehearsal and concert over on Kent Island last weekend went well. But I had to get up at the crack of dawn, which not exactly my favorite time of day.

Sunrise on the Severn

This must be the Great Wye Oak's great grandson.

I'm totally finished with school for the semester. I really enjoyed teaching my class, but I'm glad I don't have to do it next semester because my own course load is going to be much larger than it was this fall.

I'm playing a musical adaptation of Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking" for December graduation at UMD tomorrow. Just me and a singer. She has a beautiful voice and it's a pretty cool piece. The bass part works great in the original "guy" key but the transposed bass part lies in a kind of awkward and less resonant area of the bass, so there's no way to make it sound as good as the recording. Even the bass player on the recording would not be able to sound as good in the key I'm doing it in. So that's a little frustrating, but I think the over all effect will still be nice. I haven't played in a hall as big as the Comcast Center for a few years so I'm looking forward to that as well. We had the soundcheck this morning and the sound guy is great. I'm digging the reverb - a lot! Anyway, here's the original version of the piece, in the original, more resonant key.

Tennessee Tour

We left late Wednesday night last week for a little mini-tour which involved a lot of driving but was also a lot of fun. We had some gigs with a Benny Goodman/Peggy Lee tribute show that started in Cleveland, TN on Thursday and ended in Bluefield, WV last night. The headliners were from Boston, and most of the rest of the band was from the Knoxville area except for a drummer from North Carolina.


I had most of the day off on Friday so I did some exploring in the Knoxville area, but it was so cold that I spent the entire morning goofing off in a coffee shop in downtown Knoxville before heading out in my car to check out the rest of the downtown area and some sections south of town. I attempted to go for a walk by a lake. It was a pretty lake but too cold for me so I finished the day back at the coffee shop.




One thing I noticed while hanging out there was that a lot of the customers had nose piercings, which is fine, but they weren't the usual single stud or loop on the side of the nose - instead a lot of them had a piercing through the middle that looped down and ended in two balls, with one coming out of each nostril. Maybe it was the weather, but I started thinking that it looked like they all had silver snot hanging out of their noses. Now that's a whole lot more attractive than real snot so I'm actually kind of glad it was silver. But ewww, what if you had a piercing like that and suddenly had to blow your nose?


When I went to pick up Doug I got to see the amazing restoration and remodeling work that Vance and Emily are doing on their house way up on a hill overlooking the Tennessee River and downtown Knoxville. The style of the inside of their house is exactly how I want mine to look if we ever get to that point. Emily has done most of the molding work herself and has even built a few couches! Now I almost feel like trying that. Almost. Anyway it was very inspiring, and cool to see how good some of the things I had been envisioning actually look in a real house.
(A real house, as opposed to a Foam Core Fantasy).

We drove about an hour east to the Sevierville area to spend the night at Tom's house which is on top of a ridge way out in the woods in the Great Smoky Mountains. His driveway was about a half mile of this:

Kind of exciting in a Deliverance sort of way!

Tom's house reminded me of a ski lodge - very rustic but very nice. Doug said it was sort of log cabin style construction. If so, it was the most luxurious log cabin I've ever been in. The weather was appropriately cold - it got down to 17 degrees that night. Tom's girlfriend Teresa made an incredibly delicious dinner for us and also breakfast the next morning. Then we caravaned up to the gig in West Virginia.

Tom was nice enough to find an orchard store that we could stop at on the way that had Doug's favorite apple, the Arkansas Black, in stock so we bought an entire bushel of them.

They got quite a bit of snow down there in southeastern West Virginia, but the roads were fine.

This mountain didn't photograph very well because of the glare of the sun - be sure to shield your eyes!

November Sky

The sky went through many changes this afternoon.

Here are a few of the photos I took today:

You can make them bigger by clicking on them. They look better bigger.

an extra day in New York

The plan for the next day was to get up, check out of the hotel, get my car before the street cleaning deadline, drive downtown to pick up my bass, and then head home. But I was really enjoying my solitude so I decided to see if my room was available for an additional night. It wasn't, but they did have a different room so I decided to stay. I opened the curtains and looked out the window. The view included a brick wall about four feet across from the window and this plastic owl:

I guess he was there to scare other birds away.

I had to check out and register separately for another room so I left my bag in the checked baggage room and got to my car about 10 minutes late. It was the only car left on that side of the street and I guess I lucked out not getting a ticket or getting towed.

As I was heading back uptown after picking up my bass I suddenly, on a whim, decided to see if I could drive to Coney Island. It was about noon and my room wouldn't be available until 2:00 and I was already in my car, so what the hell. Except that I've never been to Coney Island and the only thing I knew about its location was that it is on the ocean in Brooklyn. Since I have a decent sense of direction and had plenty of time to kill, I wasn't too worried. If I couldn't find it, I'd see other stuff instead.

I turned right on Canal Street and went over the Manhattan Bridge and that became Flatbush Avenue. I've seen that street on subway cars so I thought so far, so good. I'm not lost yet. It went by Prospect Park, which I'd heard of. It looks like a beautiful park and it's big - maybe it's Brooklyn's answer to Central Park. So far Brooklyn seemed really nice - it's kind of more like DC than Manhattan in a way. At least what I'd seen of it so far. At this point I had no idea whether I was heading towards Coney Island or not, but I was perfectly happy driving on Flatbush Avenue for no particular reason.

Right after Prospect Park I saw Ocean Avenue and figured that was the ticket and it did seem to go in the right direction. It went for a long way through some beautiful old neighborhoods with really great architecture. I passed an absolutely gorgeous old synagogue called Midland or Midfield. Unfortunately my camera was in the back of my car and it was raining so I didn't get a picture. Then I saw Avenue M, N, O, and P, and was getting all excited that I'd see Avenue Q (I've seen "Avenue Q" but not the actual street) but there was a Quentin Street or something and then it went back to Avenue R, etc. I thought that was pretty rude.

Anyway I took Ocean Avenue all the way to where it sort of bumped into a harbour and I turned left on Emmons Avenue but it ended after a few blocks. The area I was in was called Sheepshead Bay.

So I turned around and headed south. I turned left at the next road that I thought went east and that finally took me to the ocean. I parked and walked up to the boardwalk there. I was surprised to discover that nearly everyone was speaking Russian. I used to play in a balalaika orchestra and I've been to St. Petersburg a few times so I know what Russian sounds like. It definitely was not Yiddish. Also, people were dressed the same way they do in St. Petersburg - kind of more dressed up than you'd ordinarily expect to see at the beach. Anyway, I discovered that I was in Brighton Beach and Coney Island was farther south on the same boardwalk.

But it was cold, windy, and a little bit damp, and my still-recovering foot was not feeling that great so I got back in my car and drove a little farther south. About half of the stores had signs with Russian letters and no English letters. This one had both:

I didn't really realize there were actual Russian neighborhoods in Brooklyn - because I don't know anything about Brooklyn! So I'm already making some cool discoveries on my little trip to Coney Island. I guess previously I thought all of the Russians mostly lived in Jewish neighborhoods, which shows how little I've actually thought about where Russian immigrants might live. Because, obviously not all Russian immigrants are Jewish. Duh!!! Anyway the balalaika players in DC certainly don't all live in the same neighborhood.

I still had my bass in the car and the neighborhood did not exactly have what I would describe as a crime-free vibe, but I managed to find a parking space that offered a little psychological protection, if nothing else:

I didn't see a police station, but there sure were alot of police cars parked there. Now this is the kind of building I was really expecting to see:

And especially this one, which is where I ate lunch of course!

They grill their hot dogs so they have delicious little burned places on them. I got one with sauerkraut and mustard. Yum! After lunch I went to the beach:

And then to Astroland. Everything was pretty deserted. Since I was having a deliberately antisocial trip, I kind of enjoyed that. I would have ridden on these rides if they'd been open. But I think I read somewhere that some of the main rides in Coney Island have recently closed for good. That's a real shame.

Since the weather was so dark and dreary I was not able to obey this sign:

I decided to see where the "Belt" Parkway went when it was time to head back to Manhattan. I lucked out once again. It went near Governer's Island where I stayed once when Doug was in the Air Force, and then there was a tunnel to Manhattan that I didn't even know existed which eventually became the West Side Highway. So that was super convenient. I didn't find any street parking so I parked in a garage instead. When I got back to my hotel my new room was ready and it had completely different scenery out of its window:

To the left

And to the right

I went up to the TKTS place and got a half price ticket to see Gypsy which was excellent, but very long. The kids in the show were fantastic. The orchestra was fantastic and it was great to see them behind the stage for the overture and entracte. Patti Lupone's Mama Rose was very different from Rosalind Russell's. She really made it her own. I'm not sure if I liked it better, but I did enjoy the fact that it was different. Her voice was a little distracting because the tone quality varied widely throughout her range. She had a lot of breaks. But it was all in tune. The final scene where she kind of goes nuts was intense and powerful and her tonal quality was all of a sudden extremely consistent. Maybe her voice only works really well at super loud volumes.

After the show I went down to Knickerbocker's and heard JoAnne Brackeen and Cecil McBee. They were wonderful as usual.

The next day I headed home. The clouds began to clear away the second I crossed into Maryland. Doug said the weather had been warm and sunny the entire time I was gone. But that's okay. The weather in NY was a better match for my frame of mind during the time I was there.