Voyagers v. Mustangs Musings

Here are some fans eager to see some good baseball. They look kind of familiar: Of course, I knew I had seen them before. Jerry and Joyce Hartnett and Carol Mueller.



A good crowd tonight to watch the Mustangs flail around at the plate fairly ineffectively. As you can see the left and center field crowd and the overflow folks on the grass down the left field line turned out in good numbers tonight. The little girls are watching the big girls strut their stuff and practicing their moves when the time comes.

Mr Hudson of the Great Falls Voyagers struck out 10 in 6 innings, made a lot of others look bad, and allowed one unearned run on two dink hits and a big error. Perhaps it was just as well that they called it in the top of the 9th because of lightning. It looked even worse to the north and west. Turns out they started play again after 90 minutes. The gazette said they were down to forty fans at the end. My guess is that they were all employees of the Mustangs or girl friends of the players.


Turns out there are more things going on at these games than just watching, beer drinking and brat eating. On the left is some sort of jump around thing for kids. Just behind it is a way of measuring how fast you can throw a baseball. It didn't seem very accurate when I watched.

I'm not sure who the guys above and below are working for. Their lenses suggest someone or something other than themselves. There are a surprising number of nice cameras at various places around the field, both still and video.

Speaking of girl friends and cameras, look what I found above. I don't know, maybe she was just a working girl. Sorry friends, the closer I examine this picture and the surrounding pictures, it looks like I have slipped in one from the night the Scottish play was performed at Dehler.

That big wide concourse all the way around the field is tempting. I imagine you could have a car show it is so wide you could have races on it probably. It makes up for some of the other deficiencies of the park, like no protection from the sun or rain. Maybe there is a plan to add to the basic park in later years. It looks like a 2nd deck could be built fairly easily with a number of deluxe sky boxes, incidentally providing at least some of the fans with protection from the elements. Maybe they could throw in a higher screen too. I notice the Legion teams are not even trying to get their baseballs back when they are fouled away.

Shakespeare in the Park, Dehler Park, that is

I wasn't sure the sign was truthful when I saw it a few weeks ago. July 23, Macbeth by William Shakespeare was supposed to be performed at Dehler Park, courtesy of the good folks from MSUBozeman who bring us Shakespeare in the Park all over Montana in the summertime, every year that we have lived here, now going on 28 years, in the the hope that we will keep supporting the schools in the manner they have become accustomed to.

The Scottish Play began in the usual way at about 6:30pm between the pitcher's mound and 2nd base, which was a little far away but they had a pretty good sound system, which only failed when the largest planes took off from Logan International in the background. The three hags were not that bad looking actually but we all suspended disbelief anyway.

And bad things happened in the usual way because the natural order of things was ignored by someone or other. I guess it was because we read it in high school that so many speeches stick in the mind: "Is this a dagger I see before me?" "Sleep, that knits up the raveled sleeve of care." "Out, damn spot!" And so forth. I don't know why, but I never can suppress a tear or two when MacDuff finds out that his family has been slaughtered, and he keeps asking, "All?" more than once.

This was a good performance with good witches, dancing and singing etc and a strong Lady MacBeth, and a quick and just end. I had forgotten how the fight at the end between MacDuff and MacBeth goes on for some time. One has to stifle oneself to keep from yelling out "He was a C=section!" though how that comes out as not "born of a woman" I'm a little puzzled by. I always like Banquo's ghost and the interplay between him and MacBeth.

I like it when they go straight through and not fool around with different scenes and acts etc. "Git her done." They had a pretty good crowd, see above, almost as good as a baseball game, though more refined, of course.

Coincidental Flashbacks

I always turn first to the obituary pages of the Alumni Newsletter from Carroll College. The latest issue reported that Professor Gordon Folsom (in the middle above shaking hands with me; I don't know who the gentleman on the left is) had recently died. 

By coincidence I was sorting through some old pictures that my mother saved and came across the above. I can't remember what the occasion was as the only contact that I remember is taking one semester of the professor's Shakespeare course in my senior year together with a bunch of English majors. I enjoyed the course very much and I think he liked me too, probably because I never worried what the correct answer to the question was. I always received a special test because he thought, I supposed, that it wasn't fair for me to be asked the same questions that the English majors were asked. I'm not sure what they thought of the practice. I suspect that I had already been admitted to medical school, but I surprisingly got an A in the course anyway. 

I remember dropping a calculus course in my sophomore year because I was aiming toward medical school and thought that I would be lucky to get a C, and that might just ruin that dream.

Hurrah for the Ides of October

The ides of October, which I think is singular, either the 15th of some months or the 13th of other months, is often more favorable than the ides of March, especially if you use the Roman rather than the Julian calendar, and of course, it is particularly more favorable if your name is Julius. But then, not many parents name their kids Julius anymore. One of these days the breeders are going to revolt and switch from names of towns to colors, just you wait. Or are they doing that now? How about Orange Julius? Well, no matter, ever since I opened my first Crayola box, the normal sized one, not the huge one, I have wanted Burnt Sienna as my first choice were I to find myself back in the naming racket, the color, not the band. I only knew about the latter because I looked it up in Wikipedia.


















Carol and I just returned from Oregon where the Shakespeare Festival (that is the outdoor theatre above, only used for evening performances from June through September) runs from late February to late October in Ashland, and a really good jazz festival has been held the 2nd weekend in October for the last 19 years in nearby Medford. I was surprised by a waiter, who had lived in Ashland for more than a couple of years, who said he had never heard of the Medford Jazz Jubilee. I suppose we could have found someone in Medford who was unaware of what was going on in Ashland, just 15 miles down the 5.

My favorite was Gem of the Ocean, August Wilson's ninth and penultimate exploration of a special family or group of people wrestling with their and our problems. This one is a part of Wilson's multi-faceted project of getting 20th century African-American life on the stage. The story takes place in Pittsburgh in 1904. Aunt Ester, a very old lady (285 years! to be exact), has the task of guiding younger generations in the business of soul cleansing. G. Val Thomas and Kevin Kenerly play some important parts wonderfully well, not surprising of course, but then all these players did well. The title refers to the paper boat Aunt Ester uses to sacramentalize the Atlantic Ocean passage that all their ancestors endured. Yes, there is something about water that has that hopeful quality.

















Wilson is obviously getting more confident by this time (2003) as he seems to almost effortlessly engage his audience in the business of "making the invisible visible." Like Joe Dimaggio, effortlessly, going after a flyball to deep centerfield in Yankee Stadium, we are carried along by the players to another time and place, somewhere we could never have gone by ourselves. I liked the a capella singing of the ensemble, calling up rhythms and words from an earlier time and generation. Sadly for all of us, Wilson died in 2005 just after completing his tenth play in the series, called I think Radio Golf. I wonder if he was aware of his impending early death when he wrote this play? As Aunt Ester says, "It's all adventure . . . you signed up for it, and didn't even know it."

The director of Gem of the Ocean, Timothy Bond, says it is a “secular African-American Passover Seder.” It didn’t look all that secular to me, not all that Jewish either, except for the idea of passing over the ocean, similar to passing through the Red Sea, as constituting an identity for African-Americans. Highly recommended.