1969-? A Taste for Opera

Posted on February 17, 2024 by Mike

An interest more than a passion. Continue reading →

Introduction to opera: It was a very important incident in my life, but I have only the sketchiest memories of the occasion. I am pretty sure that my viewing of the movie The Pad (and How to Use It)¹ took place in the TV room in the basement of Allen Rumsey House. The movie was released to theaters on my eighteenth birthday in August of 1966. I am pretty sure that I watched it by myself on Bill Kennedy’s afternoon show. He showed only old movies, and so I am dating this entry as 1969, the year that Kennedy moved his show to channel 50, WKBD. However, it might have been a little earlier, when he was still on CKLW, the powerful station in Windsor, ON.

The movie was based on a play by Peter Shaffer called The Public Ear. In it a guy meets a woman at a symphonic concert ( Mozart’s 40th, as I recall) and invites her to his apartment for supper. I admit that I watched this movie because of the promotions that portrayed it as a sexy comedy. In reality there is no sex at all. Parts of the movie are definitely funny, but the ending is tragic.

The guy (played by Brian Bedford), has mistakenly concluded that the woman (Julie Sommars) is an aficionado of “long hair” music. In his “pad”he shows her his sophisticated phonograph system and plays excerpts from Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer and the Humming Chorus from Pucini’s Madama Butterfly.

I was not familiar with either of these works. The Wagnerian selection did not do much for me (and still doesn’t), but I found the Humming Chorus really moving (and still do). The woman, on the other hand, was much more interested in the guy’s neighbor (James Farentino), who had volunteered to cook a romantic supper for them.

This viewing occasioned my purchase of a few vinyl record albums. In those days full operas came in boxed sets of three or more records, which made them pretty expensive. One-disk recordings of the highlights from operas were also available. I purchased one of those for Madama Butterfly, and I really enjoyed it. I also purchased a couple of “greatest hits” albums from famous opera singers such as Renata Tebaldi and John McCormack. I also found some collections dedicated to individual composers. The one that I liked the best contained Rossini’s overtures. I should emphasize that I bought almost all of these records after they had been heavily discounted. I seldom paid more than $2 apiece.

I also frequented the small library of recordings that was available in West Quad. I don’t remember finding anything there that I really liked, but it exposed my ears to some new composers.

I had little or no success in getting any of the other A-R residents to listen to these records. I am not sure that I even tried.

I had no phonograph when I was in training in the army. At my first permanent station, Sandia Base in Albuquerque, I was occasionally able to assemble and conduct a small group of air musicians to accompany my recording of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. That was fun. In my final assignment at Seneca Army Depot I finally found a kindred spirit. That experience has been recorded here.

Live performances: Operas have always been expensive. For the first half of my working career my wife Sue and I could seldom afford to purchase opera tickets. After the company became more successful my attitude changed.

The first opera that I ever attended was Verdi’s Aida. In 1981 the Connecticut Opera Company (CO) staged an elaborate production at the home of the Hartford Whalers. I have written about this experience here.

I did not attend another opera until more than a decade later when we went to the Bushnell in Hartford to see a production by the same company of Bizet’s Carmen. Denise Bessette accompanied us. I was interested in the music, Sue wanted a night out, and Denise was hoping to be able to pick up some phrase of the dialogue in French. I do not remember much about the experience. I only recall that we arrived too late to attend the talk that preceded the performance. That put me in a very foul mood. I had purchased a CD of the opera that featured Agnes Baltsa. I was surprised that the performance in Hartford (like every other performance that I have heard or seen) used the recitatives that were added after Bizet’s death.

Sue and I also attended at least one performance before 1999, when Willy Anthony Waters took over as artistic director of the company. I remember watching a very bizarre version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. For some reason the stage director had women dressed in purple wandering around the stage in nearly every scene. They were supposed to represent Don G’s memories of his previous amorous conquest.

At some point in the early twenty-first century I purchased two season’s tickets to the CO. Each year thereafter I renewed the subscription, and each year my seats and the performances got better (in my opinion). In the last year we were in row F right in the middle. I would not have traded seats with anyone.

The CO put on several performances of three operas per year. I am pretty sure that I was able to attend each opera for the period during which I had season’s tickets. However, I can only remember the details of a few performances.

Jussi performed in Hartford! So did Luciano!

I remember a performance of Don Giovanni in which only one set was used. It consisted mostly of doors.
There must have been a production of Le Nozze di Figaro, but I remember no details.
I am quite sure that I watched a production of Die Zauberflöte by myself between two empty seats. That experience was depicted here.
I am sure that I saw Verdi’s La traviata performed in the traditional way with a soprano that I liked a lot. I don’t remember her name. During this show an Italian lady sat next to me. On the other side of her were family members or friends who had purchased the tickets with her in mind. She softly sang along to “Di provenza il mar, il suol”, but she did not seem to think much of the rest of the performance.
A year or two later the same soprano starred in a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. I remember that the program made the strange claim that the only reason to stage this opera was to showcase a new soprano.
We definitely saw Richard Strauss’s Salome. It had more dancing than singing and was very short.
There was definitely a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto that starred a Black baritone who appeared in several other shows.
He was the star of the (rare) presentation of Puccini’s one-act opera, Il tabarro. It was coupled with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in which he played Tonio.
I have never been that enamored with Puccini’s Tosca. The one that was performed in Hartford had a very unimpressive climax. It was promoted by Mintz and Hoke, the one agency in the Hartford area that never agreed to talk with us.
I am pretty sure that one year Pagliacci was paired with its usual partner, Mascagni’s Cavelleria Rusticana.
I distinctly remember seeing Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel. I did not like it much.
We certainly saw a production of Puccini’s La bohème. I also remember seeing photos in the lobby of previous productions. Both Jussi Björling and Luciano Pavarotti starred in this opera in Hartford.
Presenting Richard Strauss’s Salome, a short opera with no memorable arias, was a strange choice. The big attractions were the dance of the seven veils and John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter.
I vaguely remember a production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.
One of the last operas that we saw was definitely the best, or at least the most surprisingly good. I went to see Rossini’s La cenerentola with low expectations, but I left with a real appreciation for what this company was able to do before its sudden demise.

The last season for the CO was 2008-2009. I attended the presentation of Don Giovanni in the fall of 2008. The attendance in Hartford was pretty good, but evidently the one performance in New Haven bombed. In February of 2009 the company abruptly shut down without refunding tickets already purchased. However, I had paid for three sets of two tickets using American Express, which refunded me the total cost of the tickets, including the portion for the one that we had attended.

I was shocked and very sad to hear about the OC’s demise. I enjoyed every aspect of attending operas at the Bushnell. By this time I was more than just appreciative of opera. Although the list of composers whom I did not like was fairly long, I really could hardly tolerate other forms of music. They seemed trivial by comparison.

In August Sue and I would sometimes drive to Cooperstown, NY, stay overnight at a horrendously overpriced hotel, and attend one or two performances in the beautiful Alice Bush Opera Theater. The theater was a very nice place to watch a show, but it had a tin roof. Those inside could really hear it when it started to rain. It also lacked air conditioning, but it was never intolerably hot.

I remember watching Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček, and Verdi’s attempt at comedy. Il regno di un giorno, There were probably others. I think that the last performance that we saw was Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, which starred baritone Dwayne Croft, whom I had heard many times on broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. His performance did not make anyone forget Robert Preston.

Sue and I also went to a couple of performances by traveling companies. We saw Carmen performed twice by foreign companies, once in Storrs and once (I think) in Amherst. We also attended a low-budget version of Figaro in Springfield, MA. After I had seen these “war horses” several times I no longer went out of my way to see them.

Sue and I also attended a couple of operas when we were on trips in Europe. We saw Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Rome as described here on p. 65. We also got to see an entertaining version of Figaro in Prague, as is described here. You can also read here about my adventure in Vienna that was capped off by a performance of the same opera.

Sue and I attended two operas in Pittsfield, MA, La bohème and Figaro. Both included a world class diva, Maureen O’Flynn, and both were extremely professional and entertaining. They were shown in and old-time movie house in downtown Pittsfield. Unfortunately the Berkshire Opera went out of business shortly thereafter.

In 2001 Denise Bessette and I witnessed a performance of Il trovatore in San Diego. That experience has been documented here. In 2006 Sue and I also spent a week in San Diego. On one evening we attended a performance of Carmen in the same theater. I also wrote about that vacation and posted it here.

I attended one opera on a business trip. It was in 2008, and the the client was Lord & Taylor. I walked from the hotel in which I was staying in Manhattan to Lincoln Center to watch a performance of La traviata by the Metropolitan Opera. That aspect of my relationship with L&T has been posted here.

Class: A guy named Mike Cascia² gave presentations at the Enfield Public Library the week before the Live in HD performances shown at the local Cinemark. I attended a few of these. He also taught classes in opera for the continuing education program conducted by the Enfield public schools. I never enrolled in any of them because they conflicted with the Italian classes that I attended

Mike had a very impressive set of recordings. He played quite a few selections from each of the operas that he covered. However, his presentations did not, at least in the classes that I attended, provide a great deal of insight.

I also saw Mike at the Cinemark at Enfield Square mall a few times. He always sat in the first row behind the horizontal aisle, and so I was four or five rows behind him.

Recordings: In the early nineties I purchased a Sony Walkman so that I could listen to tapes while I was jogging. My cars for that period, the Saturn and my first Honda, also had cassette players. I discovered that Circuit City had a large selection of inexpensive cassette tapes of classical music. I bought a fairly large number of them, mostly just to find out what I liked. They were discarded long ago. I remember that I had samplings of many composers, including opera composers. I also somehow obtained a recording of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

I also bought from The Teaching Company³.several sets of opera courses conducted by Robert Greenberg⁴. The details are explained below. I really enjoyed listening to these courses, which covered in some detail a few operas and the backgrounds of the composers. The most astounding thing that I learned was that Tchaikovsky was coerced into committing suicide so that his sexual orientation was never made public.

I bought several CDs as well, including the following full-length operas:

Georges Bizet opera: Carmen with Agnes Baltsa and José Carreras. I once listened to this recording, which has dialogue rather than recitative, a lot. That, however, was before I discovered the recording on YouTube in which Maria Callas sings Carmen.

Donizetti opera: Pavarotti and Sutherland are wonderful in Lucia di Lammermoor. The quality of the YouTube recording is inferior, but the performances by Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano are the stuff of legend.

Four Mozart Operas:

Figaro conducted by Sir Georg Solti with Sam Ramey (from Wichita, KS) in the title role. This was one of the greatest opera recordings ever. The cast included Kiri Te Kanawa, Lucia Popp, Frederica Von Stade, and Thomas Allen. It also included the arias in the last act by Marcellina and Don Basilio that were almost always left out of live productions. I remembered listened to this recording as I was hiking by myself in the Dolemites in 2003, as described on page 18 of this posting.
Don Giovanni conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini featuring Eberhardt Wachter, Joan Sutherland, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Giuseppe Taddei. I have listened to and watched a large number of performances of this opera, and none measured up to this one.
Die Zauberflöte conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. Ramey and Te Kanawa also perform in this recording.
Così fan tutte One of the three disks was in the portable CD player that I left at an airport. I was too cheap to replace something of which I already possessed 2/3 of the contents. Te Kanawa shines on this recording, too. I once heard her say that there was no room for error with Mozart. She said that she always strove to hit the middle of each note.

Three Puccini Operas:

La Bohème with Jussi Björling and Victoria de los Angeles. For some reason it is not in stereo, a fact that I did not realize until I played it.
Tosca with Renata Scotto and Plácido Domingo. I am not crazy about this opera, but you can’t beat this performance.
Turandot would have been Puccini’s best opera if he had finished it⁵. I never tired of listening to Pavarotti and Sutherland. Luciano never incorrectly answered any of the riddles. I often have stopped listening after Liu’s aria. The rest of the opera was written by Franco Alfano after Puccini’s death.

Two Rossini operas:

My copy of Il barbiere di Siviglia featured Domingo (a tenor) in the baritone role of Figaro. He handled it easily. Kathleen Battle is superb as Rosina.
Agnes Baltsa played the title character in my recording of L’italiana in Algeri. I bought this before attending a performance of it so that I would have some familiarity with it.

Three Verdi Operas:

You haven’t heard La traviata until you hear Pavarotti and Sutherland.
The version of Rigoletto that is in my collection features Domingo as the count. This is the only set that I have that did not come with a box and a booklet containing the libretto.
James Levine discouraged Domingo’s ambition to sing Otello for several years. I had a recording of their ultimate collaboration. Renata Scotto sang the Desdemona (which in Italian is pronounced dehz DAY mo nah) role.

Cav/Pag: I bought two recordings of the one-act operas that are often paired in performances, Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni and Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The one that features Callas and Di Stefano was recorded in the fifties. The technology for the other one, with Pavarotti and a pair of excellent female vocalists, is several decades newer. I prefer Pavarotti and Mirella Freni in Pagliacci, but Callas’s performance of Santuzza (which she never sang on stage) in Cavalleria is unforgettable. It ruined the opera for me whenever anyone else attempted it.

Singles: I purchased a dozen or so individual CDs. Most of them were collections of arias by various artists, including sets of Verdi arias by Callas by Andrea Bocelli. My best individual CD was probably the highlights from Aida with Leontyne Price and Domingo.

I downloaded some software that allowed me to make MP3 files out of all of my CD’s. I am not sure that I even had a CD player in 2024 when I wrote this entry.

Radio: From the eighties until the time that TSI closed in 2014 I worked at the office nearly every weekend. I often listened to two shows early in the afternoons, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturdays on WAMC from Albany⁶ and Sunday Afternoon at the Opera with Rob Meehan on WWUH, the radio station of the University of Hartford.

For many decades the Met broadcast its Saturday matinees live on public radio. The performances were mostly from the standard repertoire supplemented with a few new operas commissioned by the company. The singers and the production values were almost always first rate.

One of my favorite parts was the Opera Quiz that was held during intermissions. When I first started listening, my favorite participant was Fr. Owen Lee, who was an enthusiast of Wagner’s music, but not his politics.

Willy Anthony Waters from the Connecticut Opera often appeared on that program. I remember that he challenged listeners to name the character from La bohème who appeared in another Puccini opera. I never discovered the answer to this question, and it has bugged me for decades. La rondine and Manon Lescaut are also set in Paris, but I could not identify the two-timing character.

In order to enjoy the performances more I purchased a Bose Wave Radio, which remained in my office until TSI was shut down. I still had it in 2024, but I hardly ever used it in the last decade. For the most part streaming supplanted radio listening for me.

During the months in which the Met was not transmitting, WAMC played recordings of operas from other famous opera houses, primarily San Francisco.

Meehan’s show was quite different. It featured his huge collection of opera recordings, some of which were very obscure. Occasionally I had to turn his show off because the music made my ears bleed.

Met Live in HD: In 2006 the Met began transmitting HD recordings of its matinees live to theaters around the world that were capable of showing them. This was a terrific way to allow people who did not live close to a company that staged operas to see and hear the very best presentations. The Met also showed encore presentations on the following Wednesdays, originally in the evening and currently in the afternoon. They also showed repeats of three or four previous operas during the summer months.

Here are some of the operas that I seem to remember seeing at the theater. I may have actually watched a few on my computer when I subscribed to Met Opera on Demand, as listed in a lower section.

Kristine Opolais filled in with only twenty-four hours of notice and gave a great performance as Mimi in *La bohème*.

I have watched at least two productions of Rigoletto. The first one was an update to the rat-pack days in Las Vegas. The one shown in 2022 was also modernized, but the most striking thing about it was that Gilda was portrayed by Rosa Feola as a mature woman. That part worked fine, but the problem with moving the opera away from Italy is that the “Maledizione!” declaration that links the first act with the last just doesn’t ring true at all.
James Levine’s conducting of Verdi’s Falstaff was the last of a trio of “great comedies” that he conducted in the teens. It featured Ambrogio Maestri in the title role. The Met’s HD presentations always feature live interviews with the performers. Maestri gave a cooking demonstration. Since he did not speak English, his wife translated. I did not enjoy this opera much at all, and I cannot imagine how Levine could think that it was better than Il barbiere di Sivigla or L’elisir d’amore or several other works.
I enjoyed the 2012 production of Verdi’s Otello featuring S. African tenor Johan Botha, whom I had never heard before, and Renée Fleming, who was, of course, perfect. Botha and tenor Falk Struckmann both had previously specialized in the works of Wagner. In an interview Struckmann said that he had great admiration for the abilities of Bel Canto tenors.
The new opera, Marnie, which was shown in 2018. It starred Isabel Leonard, whom I have enjoyed greatly in other operas. I did not however, think much of this one. Why the composer made an important character in a modern opera a countertenor escaped me.
The Exterminating Angel was supposed to be a nightmare, and it definitely was. It did feature the highest note, which sounded like a honk, ever sung on the Met’s stage.
I was surprised at how dark Jules Massenet’s opera, Werther, was. I watched it mainly to see Jonas Kaufmann, but I liked the music enough to watch several additional operas by Massenet.
I was not familiar with Francesco Cliea’s Adriana Lacouvreur until I saw the performance with Ana Netrebko and Anita Rachvelishvili. They both were good, but I was really impressed by Rachvelishvili.
I liked Massenet’s music in Cendrillon, and I especially appreciated Joyce DiDonato (of Prairie Village, KS!) as Cinderalla. I found the production, which I viewed in 2018, a little contrived.
The Met showed Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci together in 2015. I think that I must have seen the summer encore a few years later. I liked the updated Pagliacci, but CR did nothing for me. I kept comparing it with Callas’s rendition of the Santuzza role on my CD, and it came up very short. The entire story takes place in the piazza of a church in Sicily. I see no reason to stage it on the carousel. The dancing was an unwanted (by me at least) distraction.
I am quite sure that I saw the version of Hector Berlioz’s grand opera Les Troyens that was shown in Enfield in January of 2023. I remember that someone in the audience complained about Deborah Voigt’s performance as Cassandra. I thought that she was OK, but I had nothing for comparison. I recall that I was sure that Fr. Puricelli would have approved of Susan Graham as Dido.
I remember virtually nothing about watching Verdi’s Ernani in 2012 except that the man later known as Emperor Charles V was a central character.
Hvorostovsky also played the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. I enjoyed Renée Fleming’s Tatiana much more. I absolutely hated the stark production. I had been spoiled by the wonderful YouTube video mentioned below.
I also watched Domingo in The Queen of Spades I found it depressing and tiresome. I had missed out on an opportunity to view a performance of this opera in Budapest in 2007. That misadventure has been described here.
I saw Faust, composed by Charles Gounod, in Enfield in 2011. I watched his Roméo et Juliette in Lowell, MA, in the middle of a bridge tournament. In both cases I was by myself. I did not really like either opera very much. Since those are the only operas of his that are ever performed, I have concluded that I do not like Gounod’s operas very much.
I might have watched Roberto Alagna’s performance in Samson et Delila on the computer, but I think that I saw the HD telecast in the theater in 2018. Alagna’s listed height was 5’8″, and his costar Elīna Garanča claimed to be 5’7″. She certainly appeared to be at least as tall as he was, and it was difficult to imagine Alagna tearing down the temple with his bare hands. Still, Camille Saint-Saëns’s music was enjoyable, and the performances by both leads were impressive.
I had purchased a record album of highlights of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier in the sixties or seventies. I never saw that opera until I watched the Met on Demand version during the pandemic. In 2023 I went to the theater to watch Giordano’s less familiar Fedora with Sonya Yoncheva and Piotr Beczała. I enjoyed it immensely.
I had seen the same two stars (along with Domingo in a baritone role) in Verdi’s Luisa Miller in 2018. I had never heard even one aria from the opera before that occasion. I don’t know how I missed it. The Met’s performance was very good. The only thing that I found hard to take were the duets by the two basses.
Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow is an operetta, not an opera. I only watched it in a summer rerun of the 2015 performance because Fleming sang the title role. She was great, but the story was tiresome.
I decided to attend Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2014 primarily because I had heard that it was Fr. Owen’s favorite opera. It was also conducted by Levine as part of his trilogy of great comedies. The third reason was to hear Botha in an opera. I enjoyed it, which I cannot say about any other Wagnerian opera that I have seen or heard.
If the Met showed a Puccini opera, I went. In 2014. Sue and I saw Kristine Opolais fill in for the artist scheduled to play Mimi in La bohème on 24 hours notice. I liked her performance, and I really liked the staging by Franco Zefferelli. I appreciated that Opolais was thin enough to pass as a victim of consumption. I went back to see her in the puppet production of Madama Butterfly and a traditional Manon Lescaut. In the latter she kept taking her shoes off in every scene that included her costar, Roberto Alagna, who was reportedly the same height but appeared considerably shorter even in his lifts.
I don’t think that I ever got to see Zefferelli’s production of Tosca, but Sue and I did attend the presentation of La fanciulla del West in 2018 with Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek. We both enjoyed it immensely. I could easily understand why Puccini considered it his best opera. The Met’s production actually included a brawl in the saloon.
One of the very few modern operas that I really liked was Nixon in China by John Adams. I saw it in 2011 with James Maddalena in the title role. Parts of it, especially the parts that included Henry Kissinger, who was portrayed as a clownish figure.
I came late to Vincenzo Bellini’s operas. The first one that I saw on the screen was Norma, which the Met showed in 2017. It starred two of my all-time favorite performers, Sondra Radvanovsky and Joyce DiDonato. It was an amazing performance of beautiful music and a pretty good story. It caused me to search for performances of the other three famous Bellini operas.
When Sue and I went to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 2017 there was a problem with the transmission or perhaps with the equipment. We got to see most of the part of the opera that I was most interested in, namely Fleming’s performance as the Marchelin. The theater gave each person in the audience a voucher that was sufficient to pay for another performance. We used them for a different opera. I later watched the entire performance of this one using Met on Demand.
Nobody thinks that Roberto Devereux is Donizetti’s best work. Met on Demand has no audio recordings of the work and only one video. I doubt that there will be another any time soon. Sondra Radvanovsky game such a memorable performance in 2016 that no one is likely to want to undertake the role for decades to come. For some reason her renditions of the other two queens that year, Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda were not selected for Live in HD. I had to watch performances by others on Met on Demand.
I absolutely hated the production of Verdi’s La traviata that the Met staged in 2012. For some bizarre reason a big clock was in the middle of the stage and a bright red couch that was carried around. However, there was one saving grace, the absolutely brilliant performance by Natalie Dessay as Violetta. It caused me to seek out her other performances on Met on Demand and YouTube.
Levine’s 2014 version of Mozart’s Figaro was updated to the Roaring Twenties, and it worked marvelously. This was the third of his Levine’s comedic trilogy. The entire cast was good, but Marlis Petersen stole the show with her phenomenal interpretation of Susanna. I was so impressed that I made myself watch her in her famous role as the focal character in Lulu.
I saw the live version of Don Giovanni in 2023. The title character (and nearly everyone else) was a gun-toting gangster. I hated the production, but the singing was good.
The production of Massenet’s Manon that was screened in 2019 may have exceeded my expectations more than any other. Lisette Oropesa was absolutely outstanding in the title role, and the production was superb. I had seen her in several smaller roles before in Werther and Rigoletto, but she just knocked me out in this one.
I did not think that I would like the updated version of George Frideric Handel’s story of Nero’s mother, Agrippina. However, there were a lot of good reviews. I found the whole thing silly, and I must conclude that I just don’t like baroque opera.
I had low expectations for Akhnaten, by Philip Glass, as well. I am sorry, but I cannot stand listening to a countertenor for nearly three hours.
The latest version of Lucia was set in Detroit in the twentieth century. It did not work. The character of the priest is critically important in this opera, and it made no sense in a drug-infested Detroit neighborhood. The tattoos did not help. Javier Camarena nearly saved this disastrous production with Edgardo’s arias in the last act.
I hoped to see George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess when it was show in 2020 just before the .pandemic hit A few years later it was shown as a summer encore, and I went. The singing was fine, but the story was embarrassing. If this was a great American opera, it says a lot about American opera.

It is doubtful that anyone will attempt to put on Luigi Cherubini’s Medea again in my lifetime. Nobody had attempted it since Maria Callas, and no one could hope to match Radvanovsky’s stunning portrayal in 2022. We can only hope that she finds a few more plum roles before retiring.
Verdi’s La forza del destino was once part of the Met’s standard repertoire. The Polish production that Sue and I drove to Buckland Hills in 2024 to watch attempted to update it to the twentieth century. Parts of this approach worked; parts of it did not. What really upset me was that important aspects of key arias were (presumably deliberately) mistranslated.⁷ However, it was still worth the cost of admission to listen to the fantastic singers, the orchestra, and, more than anything, the chorus. I always have hated Peter Gelb’s idea that current audiences cannot appreciate the historical background of the original story. It certainly requires a little education to enhance appreciation of the traditional presentations, but if it takes something like this to get some outstanding operas back on the stage I am for it. By the way, this production included the worst knife fight that has not yet appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The Met used this shot from the worst scene in the opera to promote the telecast.

On April 24, 2024, I canceled my bridge game with Eric Vogel so that Sue and I could drive to Buckland Hills to see Puccini’s La rondine with Angel Blue and Jonathan Tetelman, who, according to Gelb, had to make his Met debut with allergy problems. I just love this opera, and they, the other principals, Emily Pogorelc and tenor Bekhzod Davronov, the orchestra, dancers, and chorus definitely did it justice. Tetelman will surely be an international star if he was not already. He has a fine voice, is a good actor, and is 6’4″. A tenor! The only cringy part was when Blue and Tetelman were obviously uncomfortable dancing in the second act. After the women of the dance troupe had been flung around on the stage, the timid swaying of the stars seemed out of place. I was also a little put off by the problems that Blue’s appearance created. The maid, who was certainly less than half her size borrowed her clothes, and Ruggero failed to recognize her after meeting her in a group where she certainly stood out for her size and complexion. On the other hand, Pogoreld and Davronov were delightful, and a special treat was the analysis of the score by conductor Speranza Scapucci during the intermission.

Video Recordings: I subscribed to the Met on Demand service before the pandemic. This allowed me to watch some of the large number of operas recorded by the Met while I was walking on the treadmill. I set my laptop up on top of a cabinet that Sue once used to hold shoes. I then started plugged in my earphones, started the opera and then turned on the treadmill. Here are some of them that I remember watching.

I definitely watched the 1996 rendition of Andrea Chénier that featured Luciano Pavarotti in the title role. It was perfect for his “park and bark” style of acting. I was also quite taken with Maria Guleghina’s performance. I had never heard of her.
I also enjoyed Guleghina’s performance in Verdi’s Nabucco, which I had never gotten around to seeing. I think that she was wearing the same wig that she used in Andrea Chénier. I wasn’t crazy about the opera in general.
I guess that I must have seen Bellini’s I puritani with superstar Anna Netrebko, but I don’t remember much about it. I have never thought much of Netrebko’s acting prowess. However, her performance in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur was fairly impressive. She insisted that her interview be conducted before the day of the opera because, she said, she wanted to concentrate on her singing.
I liked the other Bellini opera a great deal more. La sonnambula starred my favorite soprano, Dessay, and the champion tenor of the Del Canto world, Juan Diego Flórez. The attempt to update the story to the twenty-first century did not work at all, but it was still better than nothing. The story depends upon the notion that an entire town would be unfamiliar with the concept of sleep-walking. This premise seemed even less valid in the updated version.
I also watched the same pair in a traditional rendition of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment with the same stars. Dessay was outstanding, and Flórez was given an encore to showcase his rendition of a string of high C’s.
Flórez was much less successful in the 2018 production of La traviata. He just did not seem right for the dramatic role of Alfredo.
I was surprised to discover that Teresa Stratas played Marie Antoinette in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. I did not recognize her. A young Fleming was also in this production, but Marilyn Horne stole the show as the exotic entertainer Samira.
As I mentioned above. I was able to view the rest of Der Rosenkavalier on my laptop.
I watched the Met’s 1979 production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Don’t ask me to explain it. I think that this was the show that made me a fan of Teresa Stratas.
Fleming made Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka an enduring part of the Met’s repertoire. It did not exactly showcase her skills. She was mute during one entire act. I am pretty sure that I also watched the Opelais rendition of this opera, either at the cinema or at home.
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice was very short. There was not a single break. I was familiar with the famous aria “Che faro senza Euridice?” from my recording of arias sung by Maria Callas. The star in the Met production, Stephanie Blythe, was a virtually unknown mezzo, who reminded no one of Callas. It was a big disappointment.
For some reason the Met decided to record Joyce DiDonato’s rendition of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda in 2013 rather than Radvanovsky’s in 2016. I like DiDonato a lot, but I would have liked to see what Radvanovsky did with the role. Likewise I wish that Radvanovsky’s portrayal of the title character in Anna Bolena had been recorded.
Marlis Petersen was fabulous as the central character in Alban Berg’s Lulu, but nothing would make me listen to another Berg opera.
Watching Natalie Dessay in Lucia was a big treat for me, even though it was that horrible production with the giant clock. She claimed in the interview that she had missed a note in the mad scene, but I doubt that anyone noticed.
She also starred in the 2003 production of Richard Strauss’s fantasy, Ariadne auf Naxos. I found it weird (twenty-foot tall women) but enjoyable. I probably would enjoy anything that she was in.
I thought that I might like Wagner’s Parsifal, if only because it starred Jonas Kaufman and René Pape. It also featured the so-called Lance of Longinus, which I was quite interested in. I was wrong. It was unbearably long and, in my opinion, just silly.
I did not think much of the 1989 telecast of Bluebeard’s Castle either. I have enjoyed other works of Béla Bartók, but I think that this one deserves its obscurity.
The Met has three videos of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. I watched the film of the oldest one that starred Pavarotti. It used the Boston version in a production that I could barely tolerate. I did not realize until I researched this that the Swedish version was shown in 2012, and it included Radvanovsky. I have put it on my bucket list.
I was disappointed with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. It had two things going for it. The doge actually wore that peculiar crown, and the female lead was Kiri Te Kanawa. The story, however, did not keep my interest.

A large number of video files of full-length operas have been uploaded to YouTube. I have watched quite a few of them. I have also used some software that I downloaded to make MP3 files out of dozens of operas. I have listened to them on a tiny MP3 player that I carry with me while walking as well as in my 2018 Honda, which can play MP3 files stored on flash drives.

Here are some of the YouTube videos that I could stand to watch from start to finish. In many cases I started and gave up on operas in which either the video quality was bad or the production was bad.

By far the best one that I watched was Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore performed in 2005 at the Vienna State Opera House. The stars were Rolando Villazón and Netrebko. She was OK, but he was unbelievably good. I often listen to his rendition of “Una furtiva lagrima“, for which he was allowed an encore. You can watch it here.
The second-best one was also fantastic. “Best Tosca Ever”, a film shot in 1976 featured virtuoso performances by Domingo, Raina Kabaivanska, and Sherril Milnes. The real star, however was the production. which was somehow shot in authentic locations—the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, Palazzo Farnese, and the roof of Castel Sant’Angelo. The video has been posted here.
Number 3 for me was the version of Eugene Onegin that was televised at the New Year’s Music Festival in 2014. This one does not have famous names as performers. In fact it has Russian singers for most roles and separate actors who were lip-synching. For me the most outstanding performances were Michel Sinéchal as Monsieur Triquet and the fantastic John Aldis Choir. The film lasts less than two hours, which meant that parts of the original score has been cut, but that did not bother me much. What was left told the story in a remarkably effective way, as you can witness here.
One of the comments written by a viewer of the Eugene Onegin film led me to discover Cherevichki, the comic fantasy written by Tchaikovsky about Christmas in the Ukraine. When I first sought a recording on YouTube, the only one available was a video of a concert performance. Later an audio recording of Russian singers was added. I have listened to it dozens of times while I was out walking. The tenor is exceptionally good. I later discovered the existence of an obscure DVD of a performance of Cherevichki at Covent Garden. The singers on the DVD are not as good as the ones on that album, but the finale is great.
I am sure that I watched one of the recordings of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, but I don’t remember much about it. I think that it might have been the BBC telecast.
I really enjoyed Ramey in the 1987 production of Don Giovanni that can be watched here. It is the only one that I have seen or heard that measures up to the one on my CD.
I also enjoyed watching Te Kanawa at the Glyndenbourne Festival production of 1973. Dame Kiri herself posted it here so that you could see it.
I am almost positive that I saw a British film of Verdi’s Macbeth on YouTube that starred a black woman as Lady Macbeth. When I researched this entry I could not find it. It was striking, but I did not enjoy the music much, and the filming was very grainy.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio did nothing for me. The plot seemed preposterous to me, and none of the music was memorable. At the Met’s previous home Beethoven was one of the few opera composers memorialized in an exhibit. In retrospect this seemed ridiculous. He only wrote one opera, and it was seldom performed.
Puccini’s La rondine has become one of my favorite operas. At first there was only one video with English subtitles. It was posted by a Russian woman who starred in it. Her Italian pronunciation was horrible. She even got her lover’s name wrong. The second version that I saw got the ending wrong! They had Magda walking into the sea. I wanted to watch the Angela Gheorghiu version, but the captions were in Japanese. I did find a wonderful recording of the entire opera that featured Anna Moffo and Daniele Barioni. You can listen to it here.
I was disappointed with the production of Massenet’s Le Cid with Domingo. I can understand why it is not part of the standard repertoire. I dimly remember the movie with Charlton Heston. At the time I had no idea of the historical context.
Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor is not often performed. When it is, the part that everyone is interested in is the ballet known as The Polovtsian Dances. The performance at the Bolshoi Theater that was posted to YouTube (here) is the only ballet that I have ever seen that I considered worth watching.
My fondness for Natalie Dessay was put to the test by the version of Jacques Offenbach’s insufferable Les contes d’Hoffmann. I skipped to Dessay’s section and quit when it was completed.
My recording of arias sung by Maria Callas included one from Gluck’s opera Alceste. I forced myself to watch a production on YouTube. I did not like it at all.

Tom Rollins was voted the greatest intercollegiate debater of the seventies

Recorded Lectures: The Teaching Company was founded by a great debater named Tom Rollins. I watched him in an elimination round one. It was something to behold.

His company contracted with academics from around the world to produce recordings of series of lectures about specific topics. The professor that he signed up to explain the world of symphonic and operatic works was Robert Greenberg. Each course came in several book-sized boxes that contained a number of magnetic tapes⁸ and booklets that were less than transcripts but more than outlines. The format provided a good way to learn, at least for me. The prices were very high, but the company often had sales. I paid between $20 and $30 for each course. I found four of these courses on the shelves in the basement.

The first course that I purchased were How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. Its forty-eight (!) lectures were organized chronologically. So, it was essentially a history of western concert music. A list of the titles of the lectures can be found here. Greenberg included musical samples of many of the periods. I don’t remember much of this but I do recall that the sonata-allegro form and explained that it was derived from the structures of three- and four-act operas. He also presented a great deal of historical information about various composers. The most striking story was the dastardly tale of how Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries coerced him into committing suicide rather than reveal his sexual orientation to the public. The other amazing revelation concerned how productive Mozart’s career was even though he died at the age of 35. Greenberg said that the best way to think of it was that Mozart was twenty years old when he was born, and he was therefore a productive composer from the age of twenty-five through his death at fifty-five.
Concert Masterworks contained less history and more details of compositions. Included were piano concertos from Mozart and Beethoven. A major part of the differences between the two styles was accounted for by the presence of much better pianos after Mozart’s death. There were several lectures on Dvořák’s ninth symphony, which I really liked. I preferred Beethoven’s violin concerto to Johannes Brahms’. In fact, I don’t think that the work of Brahms has held up at all. The last two composers were Felix Mendelssohn, a child prodigy who seemed to burn out in middle age, and Franz Liszt, who was a genuine rock star.
My favorite course was How to Listen to and Understand Opera, a subject that had haunted me since my college days. I learned in this course that the ancient Greeks apparently had what we would consider as opera, but the technique of combining music with plays was lost for centuries. A small group of men in Florence (including Galileo’s father) in the early Renaissance resolved to bring it back. Claudio Monteverdi’s⁹ L’Orfeo was still being performed in 2024. I learned about recitative (or recitativo in Italian)¹⁰, which refers dialogue that was sung at a conversational pace. Greenberg contrasted Mozart’s ponderous opera seria, Idomeneo, with his comic masterpiece, Figaro. He also played and discussed Il barbiere di Siviglia, Otello, Carmen, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Salome, and Tosca.
The twenty-four lectures of The Operas of Mozart inspired me greatly. They brought the young genius to life in my mind and also explored the details of Così fan tutte, Figaro, and Don Giovanni. I was quite surprised to learn about the Masonic elements of Die Zauberflöte, which technically was a singspiel, not an opera. It contained a great deal of dialogue.

During the pandemic I purchased one more course, Understanding the Fundamentals of Music. These lectures, which catalogued the various elements of musical composition came on CD’s. Although Greenberg considered them his most satisfying set of lectures, they did not enhance my appreciation much. For example, I still could not recognize key changes.

Books: I found six books about opera on the shelves in my office. Several of them were gifts from people who knew that I liked opera.

The one that I have consulted the most is John W. Freeman’s Stories of the Great Operas. It has short histories and synopses of 150 operas that have been performed the most often. My only objection is that it included the laughable Boston version of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.
Johanna Fiedler’s Molto Agitato was an entertaining read. It included a lot of gossip about Kathleen Battle’s off-stage shenanigans.
Jacques Chailley’s The Magic Flue Explained provided a lot of details about the Masonic influences in Mozart’s masterpiece.
Italian for the Opera by Robert Stuart Thomson was something of a disappointment. It explained a few things that had puzzled me, but it hardly helped me to listen more attentively at all.
The A to Z of Opera has synopses and short histories of hundreds of operas, many quite obscure. I had forgotten that this book came with a CD set that I had not played for decades.
I likewise had no recollection whatever of a short book called Quotable Opera. It was a collection of quotes by and/or about people involved in opera. I must have gotten to page 48 at some point. That is where I found a bookmark. My favorite quotes were both about Wagner. Mark Twain quoted Bill Nye, the humorist from Wyoming, as saying, “I have been told Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Rossini opined that, “Wagner has some beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours”

Miscellany: I discovered while doing this entry that Google capitalizes every major word in German and English operas. However, it only capitalizes proper nouns in Italian and French operas. I never discovered the reason for this discrimination, but I followed the same rules in this entry.

I did not mention in the YouTube section the recording that I listen to the most. It has fifty arias performed by Maria Callas.

1. The movie has apparently disappeared. As far as I can tell, the two images displayed here are the only traces of it on the Internet. I have found no recordings in any format. Its IMDB site is here. Presumably if recordings are located, they will be listed there.

2. Mike Cascia died in June of 2020. His LinkeIn page says that he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston until 2008. His obituary, which detailed his efforts to promote opera, has been posted here.

3. The Teaching Company was founded by Tom Rollins, whom I knew of as a legendary debater. I only got to see him in action once, but It was an awesome experience. He was extraordinarily talented. He later was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Relations. The company was sold in 2006 and now operates as Wondrium and The Great Courses. Tom’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

4. For several years Robert Greenberg had an arrangement with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He supplied the lecture; the orchestral provided the music. Sue and I attendedseveral of these performances. His webpage is here.

5. Puccini could not think of an ending to the story that work. I think that I could write a good one, but it would require rewriting at least one of the trios by Ping, Pang, and Pong. It would also require staging a murder by an arrow that appeared to be shot from a bow. That could be done, right?

6. Because of its powerful transmitter located on Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires, the reception of WAMC in Rockville, Enfield, and East Windsor was much better than that of WNPR, the local public radio affiliate.

7. In Don Alvaro’s primary aria, in which he provides the motivation for his character, he says the following (in Italian):

My father wished to shatter the foreign yoke
on his native land, and by uniting himself
with the last of the Incas, thought to assume
the crown. The attempt was in vain!
I was born in prison, educated
in the desert; I live only because my royal birth
is known to none! My parents
dreamed of a throne; the axe awakened them!

I could not locate a transcript of what was in the captioning at this performance. It certainly was nothing like the above. For me the acid test of a novel production is whether its captioning needs to lie about what the characters were actually singing. Incidentally, the word “last” in the third line is feminine Italian (“ultima”). So, in the original version Don Alvaro’s father married the last surviving Inca woman. So, the “forza del destino” driving Alvaro. The forces driving Carlo are family pride, racism, and Church-sanctioned colonialism. This version muddles all of this in favor of blaming everything on war.

8. During the period in which this transpired I had a Walkman and a cassette player in the Saturn and my first Honda.

9. Monteverdi in Italian means “green mountain”. Greenberg in German means the same thing.

10. Greenberg used the Italian term “recitativo”, but he pronounced the “c” like an “s”, as it would be pronounced in French. He mispronounced numerous other Italian words.

2006-2014 Learning Italian Part 2: On My Own

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Mike

Books and tapes. Continue reading →

Some of the events and activities described in this entry began before I stopped taking classes in 2006 (described here). Some of them continued after I resumed taking the advanced Italian classes in 2014. Also, I might be wrong about either or both of those dates. I can’t think of any good way to check either one. Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to group all of the extracurricular efforts that I have undertaken to increase my mastery of Italian in one place regardless of whether I was also attending one of the classes when I performed them.

Boxed lessons: I had purchased the introductory Ultimate Italian set after the last session of the beginning Italian class in May of 2002. Almost as soon as I finished its last lesson I returned to Barnes & Noble and purchased the advanced set of Ultimate Italian. I was not under severe time pressure this time, but I used the same strategy as I had before. I read through the textbook in the order presented, and I did all of the exercises. I had a better attitude than I had when I was doing just enough in school to get by. I studied each lesson thoroughly. I planned to go to Italy more than once, and I did not want to sound foolish when I tried to converse with the locals.

Both Ultimate Italian packages contained eight one-hour tapes and a book of grammar lessons and dialogues. The tapes mostly consisted of Italian speakers reading the dialogues in the book. They left time for the listener to repeat the sentence out loud.

I listened to these tapes every time that I was in my car. My trusty Saturn came with a cassette player, and, when I bought my blue Honda in 2007, I insisted—to the amusement of the sales rep—that it too should have one. Cassettes were superior to CDs (or anything else) for this purpose because rewinding the tape back a sentence or two was very easy. I did this often, and I am happy to report that I never had an accident or even a close call while doing so.

Acquerello Italiano: I don’t remember how or when I heard of Acquerello Italiano, a subscription that released—originally every two months but near the end only occasionally—a small magazine accompanied by a cassette tape or CD. The left side of each pair of facing pages in the magazine contained Italian text with numbered endnotes and, in bold typeface, difficult phrases. On the right side were detailed explanations in English of the difficult or idiomatic phrases. At the end were the notes explaining—in English—historical or sociological background for the text. Each issue contained a pleasant diversity of materials. Since the subject of every article was Italy and/or Italians, almost every issue featured some music samples and something about food, often including recipes.

The tapes contained everything on the left-side pages as well as the music. The articles were read by actors, but there were also some real interviews.

I really enjoyed Acquerello Italiano, and I was very disappointed when the company went out of business. I could find almost nothing about the magazines on the Internet. The only thing that I know is that the name of the publisher was Champs Elyssées, Inc., which was a small business that also published similar educational material in German, French, and Spanish. The company’s home base was Nashville, TN. Someone in Italy must have provided them with the material, but I never determined who was responsible on the Italian side.

I saved nineteen issues of those magazines. The oldest one had a copyright of 2004. The last date is 2009. I did not save any of the tapes. I had played each one countless times by the time that I bought a new Honda in 2018. Most of the tapes had eventually been damaged beyond repair because of the playing and rewinding. At any rate Honda no longer offered the option of a cassette player in their new vehicles.

Magazines: I was still doing quite a bit of travel for business in the early part of the “on my own” period of my Italian education. I discovered that one of the bookstores in Penn Station sold a few magazines in foreign languages. My favorites were Panorama and Oggi (which means “today”). Whenever I found one I purchased it and read it from cover to cover. Whenever I found new words I marked them in my Italian dictionary². I also added them to my flash cards³.

I also found at least one bookstore in a strip mall that sold a few such magazines as well. I have a vague memory that it was in Pittsburgh. I went there to install and train the people in the advertising department at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Those adventures are described here.

Books of short stories: For quite some time Barnes and Noble stocked books of short stories that were written in Italian. I bought three of these books and read all of the stories. They all had similar formats: Italian on even-numbered pages (left) and English translation on odd-numbered pages (right).

Whenever I encountered new words, I added them to my flash cards and marked them in the dictionary.

I read every story and have even returned to ones that were written by people whom I had seen mentioned in other books or magazines.

Miscellaneous learning aids:I purchased quite a few books that addressed things that were not covered thoroughly by the books and magazines that I had read. For the most part these contained lists of words that were important for tourists. Since the need for food necessitated communication with someone more than once per day, many contained items one might find on menus.

The item displayed on the right only looks like a book. It is actually a set of two tapes designed strictly to help the listener converse with Italians about food and to order from an Italian menu. I am sure that there are many restaurants in Italy that have menus that do not also contain English descriptions and hire only waiters that do not understand a word of English. However, in the sixty or seventy days that I have spent in Italy I do not think that I ever encountered one.

I think that someone bought the tapes for me. I thought that The Savvy Traveler was the name of Rudy Maxa’s series on PBS, but apparently it was actually the name of his radio show for Minnesota Public Radio. I used to watch his television programs, but I don’t think that I ever heard him and Diana Nyad on National Public Radio.

Books: The first book that I read that was completely in Italian was L’Italia e i suoi invasori by Girolamo Arnaldi, a medieval scholar who studied at both the University of Bologna and La Sapienza in Rome. I found the book in a bookstore in Assisi on our second visit there in 2005. I was determined to find something that I could take home with me, and this volume was perfect. Parts of it were difficult for me, but I managed to get through the entire book. It broadened my understanding of how the fact that the Italian peninsula had been repeatedly invaded changed everything. Subsequently that has colored my understanding of every aspect of Italian history.

I read three other outstanding books. The first was Il Nome della Rosa by Umberto Eco. I had read the English version back in the eighties, and I had read quite a few of Eco’s other works. I had a good time becoming reacquainted with the plot, which was more meaningful since this time I was familiar with Pope John XXII and the two competing branches of Franciscans. I also was well aware of the power that the monasteries in the fourteenth centuries wielded. However, I was a little disappointed that very little was lost in translation.

That definitely could not be said for Il Gattopardo, the wonderful story of the Risorgimento in Sicily and southern Italy written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The story itself is extremely compelling. The birth of the Italian Republic is very difficult to comprehend, and this insider view was very useful in helping me get a grasp on it.

It was made into a movie called The Leopard that starred Burt Lancaster TCM allegedly owns this movie. However, my wife Sue watches TCM almost every day, and she has told me that they never show it, not even when Burt Lancaster is the star of the month.

I slightly cheated on both of these books. I owned English translations of both of them—what we called in college “ponies”. Only occasionally did I need to consult the English translation to decipher the original text

I had heard about I promessi sposi, the classic novel of the Church, the nobility, the Italian side of the Thirty Years War, starvation, and the plague, from an article in Acquerello Italiano. Apparently all Italian children were required to read it, and almost all of them hated it. I decided that I had to try it. I don’t remember every having a printed copy, and so I must have purchased it on Kindle or downloaded it from somewhere. I am pretty sure that it was in the public domain.

The book was written by Alessandro Manzoni in the 1840’s. Reading it was a powerful experience for me! I would recommend it to anyone who wants to gain an understanding of the evolution of Italy. If it is not the greatest Italian work since Dante, all discussions of that designation must begin with it.

I also read a handful of recent popular novels. One was an Italian translation of a historical novel written originally in English. I no longer have a copy, and I remember little about it. I also read a couple of the Commisario Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri on Kindle. They were highly recommended by Susanna Perrucchini, the guide on our tour of Sicily in 2016.⁴ I have seen all thirty-seven of the made-for-television Montalbano movies on the streaming service MHz Choice. I liked the first thirty-six a lot. The last one was very disappointing.

Camilleri’s novels are written half in Italian and half in Sicilian dialect. This frustrated me because most of the dialogue is in dialect. I often could not understand it, and I did not know where to find out what was going on. I guess that I could have also purchased an English version.

I bought one other massive tome, I papi; storia e segreti by Claudio Rendina. I cannot claim that I read all 864 pages, but I did consult his treatment—which was pretty thorough—of several popes in different eras of papal history. Knowing that the papacy was held in very low esteem in Italy in the nineteenth century, I suspected that Rendina might have access to some sources outside of the Church’s official party line. In the entries that I read, however, I did not find that to be the case.

CDs and DVDs: Over the year I collected a few CDs and DVDs that were supposed to help with conversational Italian. I found them lying around in my bookcase. I have only a vague recollection of most of them.

The “Who is Oscar Lake?” DVD in the lower right was an interactive story. It was a mystery about the a mysterious person named Oscar Lake. It was my introduction to the word “commisario”. I don’t remember much else. Maybe I should try it again when I get done with The 1948 Project.

Videos: For a year or two we were able to receive transmissions from RAI Uno, the primary Italian station owned and operated by the government, with our Cox subscription. After a year or two we abandon it in order to save $10 per month. Up until then I watched some news shows and a few other programs on RAI, but I did not get a lot out of it.

Shortly thereafter I discovered that some of the same shows were available for free on the Internet. This was far superior. If you missed something, you could back up the video and repeat a section.

Much later I began watching European television shows on MHz Choice. Thecaptions in English that they provided were ordinarily quite good. In addition to the Commissario Montalbano movies I have watched the prequel series Giovane Montalbano, I bastardi di Pizzofalcone, Nebbie e delitti, Barlume, Commissario Vivaldi, Commissario De Luca, and Imma Tataranni. I liked all of these except Vivaldi. In my opinion Imma was the best, and it is still in production. The action is set in, of all places, Matera. I only pay $8 per month for MHz Choice, and I have literally watched hundreds of good shows.

For me one of the most enjoyable activities when I heard what the character said, and the person who created the captions made a mistake. It did not happen often with MHz Choice.

Drills while exercising: When I was jogging in the evenings or on weekends I would sometimes spend the time counting (often out loud) in Italian from one to one hundred, first with the cardinal numbers: uno, due, tre, ecc. Then I would do the ordinal numbers: primo, secondo, terzo.

When TSI began to close down in 2014 I had time to rejoin the adult ed Italian classes. The semi-annual booklet listed the teacher at all three levels as Mrs. Trichilo. That period is described here.

1. Acquerello is the Italian word for watercolor. It always struck me as a strange choice for the title of a magazine.

2. In 2022 I am on my third Italian dictionary, Webster’s New World Italian Dictionary Concise Edition. The first one that I bought was from a different publisher. The second one was the same Webster’s edition as the third. I needed to buy new dictionaries because the previous ones were so worn out that they were unusable—covers missing, spines broken, pages falling out. I brought them with me on both vacations and business trips.

3. The flash cards were home-made. One side contained a single English word or phrase. The other side listed Italian words or phrases. The cards were sorted alphabetically by the English word or phrase. I created over ten thousand of these cards, which were split into dozens of decks, and I drilled myself on them at every opportunity—at home, on the road, and at lunch when at the office. When I stopped this process I threw away the cards.

4. You can read my journal of that entire memorable trip here.

2005-2011 Jim Wavada’s Time in Enfield

Posted on November 19, 2021 by Mike

Jim Wavada living in New England? Continue reading →

Documentation: I found very few notes about the events described in this entry. Sue supplied a few details as well as a book of photos that she had made for my dad. I know from a note on the back of one photo that the move occurred in October of 2005, when my dad was eighty-one years old. It just occurred to me that the transition occurred around what would have been my mom’s eightieth birthday on October 2. That probably also weighed on dad’s mind as he contemplated his future. Most of the following is therefore based on my memory, which may, of course, be faulty.

I should mention in passing that during the entire period our house in Enfield was such a gigantic mess that we never invited any friends over for any purpose.

The problem: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration. Since he had already lost the vision in one eye to a detached retina, his vision was quite poor at this time. He still had a car and a driver’s license, but there was no way that he could drive. His doctor had prescribe the recently authorized periodic injections that arrested but did not usually reverse the degeneration. He also certified that dad was legally blind, which was useful for tax purposes. There was virtually no public transportation in the area in which he lived, suburban Johnson County, KS. If he stayed there, he would need to depend on his friends or expensive taxis.

Six years earlier my sister Jamie had cut off contact with my dad, or maybe vice-versa. I could see no reason to involve her in the problems.

I discussed the situation with my wife Sue. She agreed that he should come to Connecticut and live near us. He could live in an apartment for a while. If and when we added on to the house (that project was described here), he could come live with us. I talked with dad on the phone about moving to Connecticut. He was surprised but pleased.

Planning the move: In 2005 I was extremely busy with several monstrous projects at TSI. At the time Sue was no longer working at TSI’s office (explained here). She spent quite a bit of time with her father-in-law, Chick Comparetto. Sue helped dad pick out an apartment. I cannot remember whether he came out to Connecticut. She might have just described the choices to him over the phone. At the time Enfield had a few rather large apartment complexes and a greater number of smaller ones. If the search was expanded to the neighboring towns of Suffield, Longmeadow, Somers, and East Windsor, the selection would be much larger.

Fox Hill was an easy drive from our house.

I was not involved in this process. I am pretty sure that dad ruled out Bigelow Commons because he could not abide the notion of living in what was formerly a carpet factory. Instead he chose Fox Hill, which was near the corner of Elm St. and Elm St.¹

My dad wanted me to come to Kansas City and drive his Ford Taurus back to Connecticut. He knew that my Saturn was pretty old, and he wanted to give me the Taurus, but I did not want it. At the time the Saturn suited my purposes. When I eventually abandoned the Saturn I wanted to pick out my own car. Furthermore, I could not afford to spend several days getting the car to Enfield. So, on my advice he sold it. I don’t know the details.

In addition to his vision problems, my dad also had mobility issues. He had had one hip replaced, and the doctor advised him that the other hip was nearly as bad. After the surgery and therapy he could walk well enough. He could even ascend and descend stairs, but he went slowly and he need a railing.

I certainly don’t remember the chandelier.

Living at Fox Hill: Someone helped my dad pack up his belongings at his apartment. He engaged movers to take them to Connecticut. He flew to Bradley by himself. Sue picked him up at the airport.

The movers did not arrive on time. So, my dad and Sue spent an entire day sitting in an empty apartment. I am not sure where he stayed that night. There are several hotels in Enfield.

My dad’s apartment was on the first floor. Since there were no elevators, he would not accept a second-floor unit.

The apartment was not fancy. It had a bedroom, a living room, and a small kitchen. I seem to remember a picture window, too. It was at least two or three steps down from his place in Overland Park.

Sue took these two photos on the day that dad’s furnishings were due to arrive.

I had not considered it beforehand, but my dad would obviously need to do laundry. He occasionally brought a load over to our house, and one of use ran them through our washer and dryer. Most of the time he did his own laundry. He mixed everything together in one laundry bag. The closest laundry room was in the basement of another building. He had to walk there, throw his bag down to the bottom of the staircase, walk down the stairs, open the door, and go inside. The hard part was returning. He had to drag his laundry bag up the stairs.

What did he do with the pants and shirts that needed to be hung? He had them dry-cleaned. Either Sue or I took him to the cleaners, probably E-Jay’s on Hazard Ave. It was about the same distance from Fox Hill as our house was, and we drove by it almost no matter where we were going.

The machines in the laundry room at Fox Hill did not accept coins. They accepted only debit cards issued by the office at Fox Hill, which was quite a distance from my dad’s apartment. So, Sue and I would often stop by the office so that he could pay his rent or boost the balance in his laundry account.

Dad stayed at Fox Hill for more than a year, but a little later he felt that the place was becoming dangerous, and he was no longer comfortable living there. He witnessed some mild violence, and he told me that he was sure that there were drug transactions going on. I don’t know if he was right, but he definitely wanted out. I remember that he wrote a letter complaining about an incident that he witnessed and posted it on a website set up for that purpose. Soon after it was posted, several letters praising Fox Hill appeared. It appeared to me that they had all been written by the same person.

Sue once again helped dad find an apartment. I know that they drove to a house in Suffield that was renting a few rooms. He did not like it, but he did like Bigelow Commons when he finally visited it. I took him there to see it before he signed the lease. He asked me what I thought of it. I told him that if this was the same price as Fox Hill, I could not believe that he ever chose Fox Hill. He assured me that it was the same price.

I don’t know what was involved in transporting his belongings to his new apartment.

Living at Bigelow Commons: Dad’s apartment was on the second floor of the southernmost building at Bigelow Commons. There was an elevator just inside the door, and his room was close to both the elevator and the laundry room. He bought a small cart that he could put his laundry in. This was a far superior approach to what he went through at Fox Hill. He also located a dry cleaner that was within a few blocks of Bigelow.

The main reason that Bigelow was not able to charge more was probably because of its location in the middle of Thompsonville. The surrounding neighborhood could be a little rough, but the compound itself seemed plenty safe. If I lived there, I would be worried about my car being broken into or stolen. The parking lot was much more easily accessible than at Fox Hill. That was not a concern for my dad, of course. He did not have a car.

The biggest problem that my dad had at Bigelow was dealing with the windows, which were old and heavy. I could push them up and pull them down without much problem, but that was fifteen years ago. I wonder if I could still deal with them as easily in 2023 at the age of seventy-five..

Dad much preferred the atmosphere and the people at Bigelow. I don’t remember him complaining about anyone there, even the management..

Getting around Enfield: My dad was reasonably independent. I visited him once or twice a week when I was in town. We sometimes ate breakfast at his favorite place, the Farmer’s Daughter Cafe on Mountain Road in West Suffield. It was located in a small strip mall more than twenty minutes from our house. Sue sometimes joined us or took him there when I was out of town.

On most Wednesdays we would eat lunch together at Friendly’s near the Enfield Square mall. We both always ordered the same thing. He had the Senior Turkey Club Super-Melt and coffee. I had the Reuben Super-Melt and a glass of Diet Coke. The waitresses all knew us and treated us like royalty. They especially loved my dad, who insisted on paying and was a big tipper.

I always drove both of us from Friendly’s to Bigelow, but sometimes when I went to pick him up he was already at the mall. He had gone there to walk from one end to the other. He was very proud of being able to do this. He often told me that he thought that he “had a stride.”

How did he get to the mall? Enfield had a free bus service for seniors called Dial-a-Ride. He would call in to make an appointment. The bus would pick him up at the parking lot near his door and take him to the doctor’s office or any other location in Enfield.

It was a terrific service for seniors, and my dad definitely appreciated it. When you called for an appointment, you could specify the time and destination, but you could not specify the driver. My dad did not appreciate one of the bus drivers, who insisted on proselytizing his right-wing political views willy nilly to all the passengers. My dad complained about this guy almost every time that we were together.

Trying to read: After he retired my dad enjoyed four pastimes above others—golf, travel, reading, and writing. He played a lot of golf in the early years with my mom or with some friends. His hip and vision problems eliminated his favorite form of exercise, and I could not name what was second.

When mom was alive they traveled some together, but after her condition deteriorated it was difficult. After she died my dad took two big trips, one to France with a group of strangers who were part of a Catholic group and one to Ireland with Cadie Mapes, his granddaughter. I don’t know how much he enjoyed either trip. What he could get out of them was severely limited by his poor vision and his mobility issues. I know only that he loved the side trip to Normandy and had trouble getting along with Cadie in Ireland. The only trips that he made when he was living in Enfield were when dad and I attended two funerals in Trenton, MO. They have been described here.

He was able to write three books after he retired, and he was a voracious reader while he still had one good eye. The one thing that he really wanted while he was in Enfield was to be able to read books, magazines, newspapers, and the labels on items at stores. A fair amount of the time that we were together were attempts to help in this regard.

I had heard somewhere about machines that helped people with poor vision by projecting on a computer screen a greatly magnified version of something printed using closed-circuit television. We made an appointment to see one of these machines at a store in, if I remember correctly, Cheshire, CT, which was a drive of over an hour from Enfield.

For some reason we had to wait for fifteen or twenty minutes before someone could help us. There was little to do while we waited. The store had some magnifying glasses and a hand-held electronic magnifier, but that was all except for the CCTV machines.

Finally someone was available to demonstrate how the system worked to my dad. He (or maybe it was a she) sat my dad in front of the machine and asked him to look at the screen. Meanwhile he had to manipulate the magazine, which was a few inches under the camera. My dad had been trying to do this for less than five minutes when he became physically ill. The combination of the reading and the maneuvering of the text for some reason made him nauseous.

The salesperson and I had to help him to another chair away from the machine. It took him more than fifteen minutes to regain his equilibrium. The salesperson insisted that he would get used to it, but there was no sale on that day. Dad later purchased one of those hand-held magnifiers. He brought it with him to stores

On the way back to Enfield my dad confided to me that he had never vomited in his life. What? He was in the army in the Pacific. He must have gotten some bad food or bad hooch, right? And he worked in advertising for decades. He must have had one too many at least once, right?

No, I believe him. He was a unique person. He also told me that he had never had a dream, or at least he had never awakened remembering his dream. That may have been true when he told me, but I am almost certain that he had a real doozy later.

I knew how important newspapers and magazines were to my dad. I contacted an agency that provided special radios that had someone reading articles and stories from newspapers all day long. I got one for him, and he used it for a while. I also purchased some audio books for him and kindle books that he played on his computer. I remember that I came up with a trick on Kindle that worked until they upgraded the software. I complained about it, but whoever I dealt with insisted that the feature that I employed was unintentional and would not be added back. I don’t remember the details.

Writing was another story. He had never learned to type. So, even when his vision was not too bad, he struggled with typing on a computer. I adjusted the font size of his screen so that when he wrote something it was very large. However, he was also not adept at moving the cursor around on the screen. There really was no way for him to write much or to edit what he had written on the computer. Mostly he just sent me emails. He was definitely frustrated by this.

Errands: I don’t think that I ever took my dad to see any of his doctors. He generally took the Dial-a-Ride bus or asked Sue to take him. However, I often brought him to other places. Our first stop was usually the ATM at Webster Bank to withdraw cash. This was the only use that he made of his debit card. He had plenty of spending money. He had a good pension from BMA in addition to Social Security and interest on bonds. His expenses were low, and he had excellent health insurance to supplement Medicare. When he died in 2011 I discovered that his financial situation was better than I had guessed.

If I came to see him in the morning, which I did every Sunday, I stopped at McDonald’s and picked up a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich and a senior coffee for him.

We almost always stopped at Stop and Shop. He liked the salad bar there. Although he seldom consumed anything that was green besides string beans, he filled up a large container with fruit. He always paid cash, and he never bothered with coins. When he got back to the apartment he put all the change in a big bowl.

Another common stop was CVS to pick up extra-strength Tylenol for his arthritis. I tried to convince him that Tylenol had only one active ingredient, acetaminophen, which could be purchased much more cheaply under the store’s label. He would have none of it. He was loyal to brands that worked for him. I am like that to some extent, but when it comes to drugs that must list all of the active ingredients, I go for the cheap ones that do not waste money on advertising. Especially if there is only one ingredient.

My dad printed out emails that were sent to him because it was too difficult for him to read them on the screen. I set it up for them to be printed using a very large font. Consequently he went through quite a bit of ink for his HP inkjet printer. The ink cartridges for these printers were nearly as expensive as the computers themselves. I discovered a place on the Internet where one could purchase ink for the cartridges. It was possible—but not easy—to refill empty cartridges. I did this for him for a few months. Eventually it upset him to see me spending time doing this, and he asked me to just buy him new cartridges.

After his Kansas driver’s license expired he needed to obtain an official Connecticut ID. I think that Sue helped him with this. It involved as much rigamarole as obtaining a driver’s license, maybe more.

I took dad to church every Sunday. When he lived at Fox Hill, although other churches were closer, he went to Holy Family church² on the south side of town.

After he moved to Bigelow Commons he went to St. Adalbert’s, which was just a few blocks away from his apartment. Quite a few steps led from the sidewalk to the church. After a while he needed to use the elevator.

I would let him off, do something for a half hour or so, and then drive back to the church to pick him up. He never tried to persuade me to join him.

Every so often my dad sent me a list of groceries to order for delivery to his apartment. At first we used Pea Pod to order from Stop and Shop. When Geissler’s expanded its delivery area to Enfield, we switched to them.

Finances and taxes: Dad wrote his own checks, but he was utterly incapable of balancing his checkbook. I had to take over that responsibility before he even moved to Connecticut. I don’t remember how he provided the information to me. Maybe I did it on his computer.

I also did his taxes. They were very easy except for the first year in which he had to file in both Connecticut and Kansas. He always paid on time. I remember that for some reason he had a dispute with the IRS about his pension, which had been passed from one insurance company to another after he retired. He was upset at the insurance company more than the IRS. He was greatly relieved when the whole mess was straightened out in his favor.

I don’t know if he worked with a lawyer on this, but his personal affairs were in excellent condition at the time of his second fall.

Visits to the Lisellas: My dad naturally wanted to visit his grandchildren, all of whom were living in nearby West Springfield, MA, as much as possible. My sister Jamie was living elsewhere (explained here), but her ex husband Joe Lisella and his new wife Jenna (who was thirteen years younger than Jamie), seemed happy to involve dad, as well as Sue and me, in holidays and other events.

I don’t know if my dad enjoyed these occasions or not. He was much more sociable than I ever was, but the whole thing was awkward for him. Divorce was unheard of in his family, he did not know any of the other adults in attendance, he could hear but not see what was going on, and once he parked himself in an easy chair, it was hard for him to get up. The kids, especially Gina, treated him well, but he was obviously uncomfortable. I was, too.

I don’t remember any of them visiting my dad until his last days after the second fall.

Miscellaneous memories: My dad and I sometimes watched college football games together on his plasma-screen television³. He actually listened more than watched. I remember that he used the television for several months before we realized that it was not set to show high-density programs. A simple adjustment greatly improved the viewing, at least for me.

Sue tried to involve dad in the senior social life in Enfield as she had for Chick Comparetto. Dad did not think much of Chick, but he liked some of the other people.

My dad was not much of a cook, but he used his George Foreman grill to cook steaks and chicken fillets. He loved it when we took him to a restaurant for supper. He could not read the menu, and so he usually ordered Chicken Alfredo.

Dad and I had a long-standing argument about who was the worst president of all time, Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. He said that it was Bush because he had attacked Iraq even though Iraq had done nothing to the U.S. I claimed that it was Nixon because of his needless extension of the Vietnam War, his secret war in Laos, and his overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile.

I may have been prejudiced because Nixon was president when I was drafted. I always suspected that dad had voted for Tricky Dick in 1972 and was therefore sheepish about criticizing Nixon’s presidency. I admit that I had no direct evidence, but I remembered how vociferous he was about Nixon’s deviousness when he ran in 1960, and I know that dad supported the War in Vietnam until the publication of the Pentagon Papers,

The first fall: I think that the first fall happened in late 2010 or early 2011. My dad was in his bedroom. He might have been going from his bed to the bathroom, a distance of a couple of yards, when he fell. The lights must have been off because he was not able to get to his feet and he was disoriented enough that he ended up in the closet.

At some point on the following day the delivery man from Geissler’s knocked on the door. When no one answered, he contacted someone at the office. They did a wellness check and found my dad in some sort of pitiable position. An ambulance took him to Johnson Memorial Hospital on the far west side of Stafford. They called me to tell me what happened.

I visited him in the hospital several times. I never was certain what exactly was wrong with him. He could not walk, but when I asked the doctor what was preventing him from walking, he just said that that was a good question.

The doctor was most concerned about dad’s mental state. My dad had told him that he had been in Milwaukee with some friends of his. The doctor, of course, thought that he was hallucinating. I told him that a more likely explanation was that he had dreamt about being in Milwaukee, he remembered the dream, and he was unable to disassociate it from real experiences because he no practice at doing so. I do it almost every morning, but he claimed that he had never had a dream.

The doctor also asked if he was reckless. He was afraid of releasing a man with poor vision and mobility to live by himself. I assured him that he was the most careful person whom I knew, and, if anything, he was paranoid about fire, getting mugged, and other potential hazards.

After a few days he was walking behind a walker. He never did regain the ability to walk without one. The doctor told me that he would release him, but they wanted him to go to a nursing home for a while. They asked me to select the one that they would release him to. I picked Blair Manor⁴ on Hazard Ave., a few miles from our house. I knew nothing about nursing homes. I just picked the one that was closest to our house.

My dad’s stay at Blair Manor was not a happy one. On my first visit he was having paranoid hallucinations. He informed me that the nurses were trying to kill him, and instructions to them were being broadcast over the television. At the time Meet the Press was on someone’s set within earshot. I tried to calm him down, but he just got frustrated that I—of all people—would leave him in this perilous situation.

I talked to the nurse about this episode. She said that he had been taking some drugs that could cause such symptoms. She said that she would report it to the doctor. She did, and he altered the dosage, and dad was all right after that. It shook me up pretty thoroughly.

Dad later asked me if he had made a fool out of himself. I said, “No, powerful drugs prescribed by your doctor made you act like that. The nurse said that it happened frequently.” Even so, he hated the place and wanted to depart as soon as possible. They finally let him depart. I brought him to his apartment. The people at Bigelow Commons were very happy when he was able to return.

I don’t know how long the period was during which he needed his walker to get around. I remember going to Friendly’s quite a few times.

The second fall took place in August of 2011. It was shortly before his 87th birthday, which was on August 25. On this occasion he fell down in the laundry room. He used his wheeled laundry cart as a walker when he did his laundry. Someone found him there unconscious. An ambulance took him to Hartford Hospital.

Early the next Sunday morning I got a phone call that we should hurry to the hospital. Sue and I rushed there. The nurse said that she did not know why the doctor had ordered that such a notice be sent. Dad was still unconscious, but the nurse said that there was no imminent danger of him dying.

A few days later the doctor in charge told me that his systems were “just worn out”, and he should receive palliative care. It could be at the hospital, at a nursing home, or at a house. I told them that we would not be able to do it, and I could see no reason to move him to a nursing home. So, he stayed at Hartford Hospital. I visited him every day, but he never communicated.

Some of the Lisellas came by on September 12. They were shocked and saddened by his appearance. He died on September 13, 2011.

The story of his funeral and other arrangements has been posted here.

1. This looks like a typo, but it isn’t. Westbound Elm St., a major four-lane road (CT 220) north of Enfield Square Mall, makes not one, but two right turns at intersections where the road itself continues onward. It then strangely transforms itself into North St. where the latter appears on its left.

2. In 2017 St. Bernard’s and Holy Family merged to form one parish called St. Jeanne Jugan Parish. In 2022 St. Martha’s and St. A’s also joined. I guess that the administrative offices are at Holy Family. The schools are at St. Bernard’s. There was also a church in Thompsonville called St. Patrick’s. It had previously merged with St. A’s. I think that all five churches are still open in 2023.

3. We still have that television in 2023. Sue watches it in bed when I have gone to sleep.

4. Blair Manor was closed in 2017. It was subsequently converted to “assisted living” apartments.

1997-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Stage Stores

Posted on September 4, 2021 by Mike

People and events at SRI/Stage Stores. Continue reading →

Everyone with whom I dealt—and there were a great many people over the course of seventeen years—-called the large retailer based on the south side of Houston “Stage Stores”. Even their LinkedIn pages refer to Stage Stores. However, our contracts¹ were definitely with a company named Specialty Retailers, Inc. (SRI). The checks that we received were from SRI. This always seemed strange to me, but I managed to piece together from various sites on the Internet something of an explanation.

I spent many hours at the headquarters building on South Main. The visitors’ parking was perhaps thirty to the right of the palm tree.

SRI was incorporated in 1988. I was unable to discover who the original stockholders were or who ran the corporation. I also have no idea what, if anything, SRI did in its first four years of existence.

In 1992 the company purchased a Colorado-based retail company named Fashion Bar, Inc., which had seventy-one stores. The larger ones were branded as Palais Royal or Bealls². The rest were known as Stage Stores. In the nineties SRI purchased a large number of other stores. Most of them bore the Stage logo. SRI’s headquarters at 10201 South Main³ in Houston was known locally as Stage Stores, and that name, as you can see in the photo, was displayed prominently over the entrance. The only stores that were actually located in Houston were branded as Palais Royal. I recall actually purchasing a leather belt in one of them. Many people in Houston knew about Palais Royal, but Stage Stores and SRI were probably not on their radar.

In late 1996 or early 1997 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, received a call from Brenda Suire⁴, the Director of Finance for Stage’s Marketing Department. Doug and I flew on Continental Airlines to Intercontinental Airport in Houston to meet with Brenda and some other employees. We were somewhat surprised by the length of the drive from the airport to Stage’s headquarters.

The blue route on the map at left suggests driving through downtown Houston. That route would only be considered if the trip was in the middle of the night. We always took the western loop on I-610.

On the second day in Houston I demonstrated the functionality and design of the AdDept system at the local IBM office. It went over very well.

I recently found in my notes from January of 2001 some of the items that were included in the contract that resulted from that presentation and subsequent negotiations.

I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998.

As part of that initial contract the programmers at TSI wrote a great deal of new code. Stage Stores had more stores and fewer merchandise departments than the first few AdDept customers. In most of their markets they operated only one store. They were therefore much more interested in the ratios of media dollars spent on each store to the amount of sales that the store generated than in sales and expenses by department. To provide this information we wrote code to accept sales by store from the corporate systems. We also wrote a set of reports that showed the ratio of advertising expenses to sales for each store.

No one at Stage Stores had previously examined the broadcast (i.e., radio and television) advertising too carefully. The buys and audits were done by a lady (I don’t recall her name) from Reynolds Communications. She used SmartPlus⁵ software to make the schedule and audit the spots that each station ran. Stage soon discovered that she had been spending much too much money on television buys, especially in one-store markets in Louisiana. She knew that the company had a store in those markets, but she had no access to sales data.

As often seemed to happen in AdDept installations, this unexpected revelation allowed Stage Stores to save enough money on an inefficient use of funds to justify most of the cost of the entire system.

Brenda, Floyd, and Denise Bessette at TSI’s office.

Training and installation: In 1997 Stage sent three employees to TSI’s office in Enfield for several days of intensive training: Brenda, Floyd Smith⁶, and Hugo DuBois⁷. The emphasis of the training was on how to get the most out of the AdDept software in their environment.

Floyd was Brenda’s right-hand man in the business office. For the first few years—which (for reasons unrelated to the system) were rather chaotic—Floyd was the liaison between TSI and Stage. Hugo, a native of Belgium, managed the department’s local area network. He mainly worked with the production and creative people. I am not sure why he came to Enfield. Hugo’s only role in the project was to connect the network to the AS/400 and to install and configure the software on individual PC’s and Macs so that the department’s employees could access the AdDept system.

After the AS/400 had been delivered, and the network was connected to it, I flew to Houston to install the AdDept software and configure the database. Over the next few months I returned to help them deal with problems, to show them how to use new features, and to gather ideas about further development. I soon discovered that there was a better way to get from Connecticut to Stage. On most trips I flew on Delta or American and landed at Houston’s smaller airport, Hobby. Not only was it much closer to Stage, but there was usually a better choice of flight times.

Denise, Floyd, Hugo, the top of Brenda’s head, and Steve Shaw at TSI’s office.

Within a year or so the system was running fairly smoothly. Then in 1998 Brenda left Stage Stores, and for a while Floyd ran the advertising business office. His primary assistant was Toni Young⁸. One of the primary AdDept users was Renee Mottu⁹, who managed the expense invoices.

Fortunately for TSI, for the next year our involvement with Stage was reduced to answering phone calls and resolving mundane issues. I say “fortunately” because even though Stage Stores declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the effect on TSI’s bottom line was minimal. The effect on daily life in Stage’s advertising department was for a considerable period much more severe. My notes after a visit to their headquarters in January of 2000 stressed that “Those poor people spend half of their time trying to persuade newspapers to run their ads.”

Karen is in the red jacket. The man who is obscuring Floyd is, I think, the Advertising Director.

Brenda was replaced by Karen Peltz, who had held a similar position at Foley’s¹⁰, the chain of department stores owned by the May Company that was also based in Houston. At the time Foley’s had been using AdDept to solve various problems in its advertising department for five years. I had worked with Karen at Foley’s, but only a little. Eventually Floyd moved to another position at Stage Stores, and Toni Young managed the day-to-day operations of the marketing business office thereafter.

I had only a few interactions with Joanne Swartz¹¹, the Senior VP of Marketing, and the guy who was Advertising Director. I do not remember his name. I think that Karen reported directly to Joanne.

I dealt with two people in the media area. The woman’s name was Deidre Prince¹¹. I do not remember the guy’s name, and it is not in the notes. I also remember Sandra Green, who used AdDept for buying newspaper space. She seemed to have a lot more difficulty using the system than anyone else did.

My notes: I discovered quite a few email messages that I sent back to TSI’s office from Stage. They are dated between October 1999 and January 2001. I’ll start withe the earliest one

The New Skin bottle and the shaving/ medical kit that I kept it in.

Not a great start today. I woke up at 6 AM. I got up and stumbled around the hotel room for a few minutes. I ironed some shirts and pants. At 6:55 I shaved. I looked in the mirror and saw Dracula. The blood was pouring from my lip. It took over 40 minutes for it to stop bleeding. I painted the New Skin on it. I got dressed and went to Stage. The New Skin held until almost 5 PM. Then I bled all over my shirt and pants, but this time I got it to stop in only about five minutes. Life on the road is so glamorous.
Renee Mottu is looking for suggestions as to how to remove two possums that have taken up residence beneath her mobile home. She rejected my idea of sending in a dachshund. She said that the possums would eat a dog.
I didn’t get to run tonight. Toni Young told me about a good trail. I put on my running duds, followed her directions, and drove around for about 25 minutes looking for the place. I never found it. I drove back to the hotel, got some food, and settled into my room to watch “Norm” and “The Drew Carey” show.

I am pretty sure that the woman with the big hair to the right of Floyd is Renee Mottu. I don’t remember the names of the other two ladies.

The first paragraph refers to a blue-black circle that appeared on my left lower lip in the nineties. It has never caused any pain, and it has not bled in the last decade or so. The story of Renee and her possum continued for a few visits. Before reading the above I had totally forgotten that for a while Norm McDonald had a network television show.

The following are from the subsequent two days on the same trip.

It was in the 80’s here yesterday, but it felt cooler. There was almost no humidity, which is rare for Houston. Floyd’s office was freezing. He has an electric heater in his office. We had it running most of the day even though we had six people crowded around his PC all day long. I brought sweaters, and I will wear one today.
Stage has network printers. We sent a 40-page report to Floyd’s printer about noon. It was still in SND status when I left at 6 PM. Floyd said it will sometimes not print until the next morning. Have they ever complained about this? I think the culprit may be the faxing. They were faxing all day yesterday.
I noticed at Stage that their floors must not be very level. The pieces of their desk units come together at angles. I also noticed that some units were raised off the floor as much as an inch on one side.
I don’t think that I could possibly in good conscience approve more than five months for the palm tree research project at this time.
How much do you think is the monthly fee that Reynolds Communications charges Stage to handle (including auditing and approving invoices from stations) their broadcast advertising?

I don’t remember the precise answer to the last question, but I am pretty sure that there were two digits to the left of the comma. The next set of emails came from the trip that began on January 11, 2000.

This Silver Medallion card expired many years ago.

I was dreading the flight to Atlanta. I envisioned myself standing in line with the common people now that my silver medallion card has expired. I was delighted to discover that my ticket still says “Silver Medallion.” Half of the flight got on with the medallion status group.
The phone on my seat on the flight from Hartford to Atlanta has a little LCD display. It discloses the NASDAQ closing price every few minutes along with advertisements for various ways to spend your money on the phone.
A lady on the Atlanta flight has striped hair. Not streaks, stripes. She has brown hair intermixed with ½” blonde stripes. I guess it is a look.
The flight from Atlanta to Houston sat in the gate for about 20 minutes. Then we got in the usual long line to take off. It must have been over 100 degrees in the cabin by the time we hit the skies. The guy in the seat in front of me pushed his seat all the way back. I have therefore had to turn 45 degrees and put my laptop on my lap. Even so it is uncomfortable to type. Thankfully there is no one next to me.
Listening to Kiri Te Kanawa sure beats listening to salesmen. On my last few flights the planes were full of families and college students. The passengers on both of Tuesday night’s flights have been mostly middle-aged men.
I still have a 45 minute drive ahead of me after this flight, which won’t get in until about 11:00 central time. I need some caffeine.
I used the air conditioner in the car all the way from the airport to the motel.
… Renee Mottu asked me to hire her. I told her that we needed experienced, or at least trained, programmers. She pressed me on this. She said that she was sure she could learn programming and that Floyd would give her a good reference. By the way, she said all of this in front of Floyd.

I remembered to ask Renee what happened to the possums living under her trailer. She said they were still there. I repeated my recommendation about the dog. She said she didn’t have one. I said she should borrow one. She asked me (!) if I knew anyone who had a dog she could use. Later I heard her walking around intoning “Does anyone have a dog I can borrow?”

I think that by 2001 Stage Stores must have been emerging from bankruptcy and resuming their strategy of expansion by purchasing other chains. The biggest of those was the acquisition of Peebles, a chain of 125 department stores based in South Hill, VA.

For some reason the management at Stage wanted to keep track of all expenses and co-op income of the Peebles stores separately. This was the first, but not the last, time that I installed a second AdDept database on the same AS/400. There was still only one set of programs, but each user had two AS/400 user ID’s. Their profiles determined which database would be used.

Here are some of my notes from January of 2001:

Leaping Lanny Poppo became one late in his wrestling career

The meeting in the afternoon went well. Joanne, the advertising VP introduced me as “the resident genius.” The project has been scaled down. We need to be able to do accruals at the store level for media and production at the store level. We also need to be able to do prepaid to expense. One unusual wrinkle is that they do not want to allocate creative costs to stores. They want to be able to get ratios of advertising expense to sales from AdDept, but we must be able to reconcile this with what is in the G/L.
I was glad that I was an outsider at this meeting. The politics was just barely below the surface. Chuck, who I think is the CFO, put Joanne on the spot about something that was not even on the agenda. Their explanations were not at all impressive. The experience had the happy effect of reminding why I did not like working at a larger company.
Toni Young says that she thinks that Renee Mottu never got rid of her possums.
It turns out that what Stage really wants to do most is to start using what they have and what we have previously proposed—SmartPlus interface, sales interface, and expense payables interface. They spoke of the SmartPlus interface as if it were a done deal. I don’t recall them purchasing this module. I brought back the file layout for the expense interface. I did not come back with a lot of specs for new projects. Believe it or not, they want another week of my time. Both Karen and Joanne (the Senior VP) seriously asked me to stay over the weekend and spend next week in Houston. I didn’t tell them this, but I don’t think that I could have lasted for 24 days.
01/07/01: I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998. I will write up a quote to change it to work the way that the new documentation states.
Toni Young said that she thinks that Renee Mottu had not solved her possum problem.
I saw a sign at Stage Stores offering a $3,000 bonus to any employee that refers someone hired as a senior analyst in IS. The candidate must have five years of COBOL or Oracle experience.

Evidently I had already scheduled most of the rest of the month of January 2001 to travel to other clients so that if I had agreed to stay in Houston over the weekend and the following week, I would have been on the road for twenty-four days in a row! In those days we were charging $1,000 per day for my time. If Stage had still been in Chapter 11, I doubt that they would have proposed spending another $7,000 for another week of my presence. The bankruptcy court would have needed to approve the expense.

AdSend was a service offered by the Associated Press for sending the images of ad layouts to the newspapers. Hugo once told me that the company had twelve T-1 lines (TSI had one), and, according to him it was not nearly enough.

The neighborhood: Stage seemed to be a nice place to work. The headquarters was a fairly nice building located on the south side of Houston. They always provided me with a comfortable place to work, and there was ample parking in spaces reserved for vendors. The building also had a cafeteria that offered good food at very reasonable prices. I always ate lunch there, usually by myself. Many employees arrived at work early and ate breakfast there.

I took this photo of Enron Field under construction. It is now called Minute Maid Park.

It was not too easy to reach by a car driven from the south. Just north of the building Main Street became a divided highway with restricted access. Since I always stayed in a hotel north of the building, I had to drive my rental car to the first exit, drive under the highway, and then take the access road back to Stage’s driveway.

Most of Houston’s explosive growth had been in other directions. There was not much south of Stage’s location. However, just north of the building were the medical centers for which Houston was famous and Enron Field, which is where the Houston Astros played after the Astrodome was abandoned in 1999. I got to see (and photograph) the construction of the new stadium.

According to Yelp Marco’s is closed, but it still has a website.

I usually stayed in a Hampton Inn a few blocks from the stadium. My favorite restaurant was a Mexican place called Marco’s. Located in a hard-to-reach strip mall near my hotel, it was where I first became acquainted with tacos al carbon, one of my favorite dishes. Marco’s had ridiculously low prices. I often told the manager that they should open restaurants in the northeast. They could have doubled their prices and still filled the place every night.

During a couple of multi-day trips to Stage I met up with Sue’s cousin, Mark Davis, for supper. He worked for Exxon Mobil. We usually at an Olive Garden. The conversation was better than the food.

I jogged on the streets near the hotel nearly every evening when I visited Stage. I worked out a route that kept me on streets that had very little traffic.

Eventually I discovered a delightful dirt track that surrounded a golf course in Memorial Park. I drove there every chance that I got. A loop around the track was a little less than three miles. I usually did two loops. There is no chance that I would ever move to Texas. However, if I did, it would be to Houston, and the primary motive would be to gain access to this track every day.

The people: I was quite surprised by the LinkedIn pages of the people with whom I worked at Stage. We had not done much work for the company after 2008 or so. Consequently, I really had no idea who was still working there after that. I discovered that many of them remained at Stage Stores quite a long time after I last saw them or talked with them.

TSI’s initial contact, Brenda, departed in 1998. I don’t know why she left Stage so soon after we did the installation. There might be a story there. I don’t recall ever hearing her name mentioned again.

I have many memories of Floyd. He was definitely a family man. He was always cheerful and business-minded. He always ate lunch at his desk. His office was not very large, but it had two doors, which he kept open. Some people used his office as a shortcut to get from one part of the marketing department to another. I was surprised when he and Toni seemed to switch jobs after Karen arrived. That was never explained to me. Floyd was employed by Stage Stores until 2011.

I was acquainted with Karen from her days at Foley’s. When she arrived at Stage, she made it clear to me that one of her top priorities was for the department to make better use of AdDept. A Republican, she assured all of us in January of 2001 that George W. Bush “will not be that bad.” After his two incredibly stupid wars and an economy that totally tanked while he and his cronies watched helplessly, most historian vehemently disagree.

Karen was, to my amazement, an avid biker—not mountain bikes, Harleys. She and her husband rode up to the big gathering in Sturgis, SD, at least once. I have always told people that if you saw me on a motorcycle, you can be certain that I will also be smoking a cigarette and showing off my piercings and tattoos.

Karen worked at Stage until 2013, twice as long as her stint at Foley’s. Her LinkedIn page lists no jobs after she left Stage Stores.

I remember that Hugo drove a Saturn—as did I during that period. His, however, was a coupe. If I had known that Saturn sold two-door cars, I would have bought one. Hugo stayed until 2017.

I did not really have much personal contact with Joanne, aside from that one meeting that they asked me to attend in 2001. I do remember that on one occasion I overheard Renee accosting her in the hallway. Renee said, quite loudly, “Joanne, I need a raise!” If Joanne replied, I did not hear the answer. Joanne left Stage Stores in 2012.

Toni apparently never left Stage Stores. The more that I worked with her the more that I respected her.

When I met Deidre I asked her if she was related to Diana Prince. She did not know whom I was talking about. I guess not everyone was a fan of Wonder Woman on TV and in the comic books.

I think that Deidre was our main contact when I showed the A^xN¹² system to the department in 2003 or 2004. They enthusiastically endorsed it and used it until they outsourced the buying of newspaper space to an outside company. Deidre left Stage in 2011.

Epilogue: I think that our last major dealings with Stage were the implementation of A^xN and the Peebles project. Nevertheless, they were still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

Unlike most retailers Stage Stores continued to expand in the twenty-teens by acquiring other chains. In 2017 Stage acquired the assets of the Gordman’s chain of department stores and quickly converted all of them to sell off-priced items. This worked so well that they began to convert most of their other stores to the same format. In the November 2019-February 2020 quarter sales were up 19 percent¹⁴.

Then the pandemic struck and Stage Stores was stuck with a lot of debt and 738 stores that could not be expected to generate any revenue in the immediate future. The price of the company’s stock plummeted. In May of 2020 Stage entered Chapter 11 again, and in August it announced that it was liquidating all of its holdings.

1. For some reason SRI insisted on a new contract every year. We had contracts with all of our AdDept clients, but all of the others were open-ended.

2. There is also an unrelated chain of department stores with the Bealls moniker that is based in Florida. My unsuccessful pitch to that company is detailed here.

3. Years after TSI was closed SRI moved to an office building at 2425 West Loop South. I tried to use Google Maps to find the Main Street building with which I was so familiar, but I failed. I think that it must have been demolished.

4. Brenda’s LinkedIn page is here. I had trouble remember her last name. I sent an email to Floyd Smith asking if he knew it. He replied, “Sure. She is also on Facebook..” Confused, I asked again. Floyd wrote, “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that spell check changed it last time.”

5. The Media Management Plus product was renamed SmartPlus. I think that this may have happened when the company was purchased by Arbitron, the rating service. On the Internet I found a very detailed description of what SmartPlus did. It is posted here.

6. Floyd’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Hugo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

8. In 1997 I was only 49. I was shocked that year to learn that Toni Young, who was younger than I was, had a grandchild who was by no means an infant. Her LinkedIn page is here.

9. I found no LinkedIn page for Renee Mottu. Her Facebook page is here. I was surprised to discover that it contained even less than mine does.

10. A great deal more has been written about the AdDept installation at Foley’s. The account is posted here.

11. Joanne Swartz’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

12. Deidre Prince’s LinkedIn page is here.

13. A^xN was the name that I gave to TSI’s Internet program for management of insertion orders that AdDept users sent to newspapers. Its system design is explicated here. The marketing history is described here. Stage’s use of the system was one of the main reason that the number of subscribing newspapers grew so large—at one point over four hundred!

14. The Philadelphia Inquirer picked up this story from the Washington Post and posted it here.

1985-1999 The Lisellas

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Mike

Jamie and her family in New England Continue reading →

Until I was almost forty years old I did not have much of a relationship with my sister Jamie¹. I remember being quite disappointed when I learned that the sibling that I knew was coming turned out to be a girl. I was in second grade at the time. The girls whom I knew there were all hopelessly stupid. THEY PLAYED HOP-SCOTCH AND PAT-A-CAKE AT RECESS!! I had no use for them at all.

I was nearly seven and a half years older than Jamie, and that half year was significant. I was a freshman in high school when Jamie was in first grade. I had graduated from college before she started high school. During her high school years I was in the Army and then working halfway across the country. We went to different kindergartens (both public), different grade schools (both parochial), different high schools (hers parochial, mine Jesuit), and different colleges (hers a small Benedictine near home, mine a huge state university over seven hundred miles away.

The Kinks on Shindig in 1965. Jamie was 9; I was 16.

So, the only times that we were together were before and after school and during the summers. I remember watching bits of Captain Kangaroo with Jamie before school and some TV shows in the evenings. Batman and Shindig in the evenings. We sat on the floor of the family room watching the tube while mom worked and dad lay on the couch reading a magazine or newspaper punctuated by an occasional “Mmm hmm”. However, I often withdrew to my bedroom to read or work on a project or to the basement to shoot pool and listen to records.

The time between returning from school and supper time was precious to me. I spent very little of it in the house. I either stayed after school to take part in some activity or came home, set down my books somewhere, and dashed back outside to play with my friends. I felt the same way about the summer. If I wasn’t earning money mowing lawns, I was probably out of the house.

So, I never really developed a close relationship with Jamie. We had no great family crises to create bonds of shared suffering. We also did not do that much together as a family. The whole immediate family went on summer vacations (as described here) together, but my only clear recollection of any interaction with Jamie on these trips was when I became very upset that our parents “could not find” the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She tried to calm me down, which was nice (but ineffective).

SSG Barry Sadler would not have approved of our dance.

We did have a few moments. Perhaps the best was when we invented a dance to perform during the hit song “The Ballad of the Green Berets”. There were not many games that we could play together. War was no fun; Jamie always won Inspired by Sheepshead, I invented a gambling game called “Sevens and fives” and revealed the rules to her one at a time as they came up. I enjoyed that. Of course, I gave her back the money that she lost. Well, most of it.

I also remember spending an afternoon or two helping to teach Jamie how to drive my brand new Datsun in an empty parking lot. This must have been in 1972 after my own stint of heroically defending New Mexico against peace-crazed Ghandiists. Barry was two ranks higher than I was, but I never went to prison.

It was not anything about Jamie’s personality that made me limit our time together. I just enjoyed being with my friends and being by myself a lot more than being with family.

Maybe I was not a very good big brother. Decades later Jamie told me that she had been bullied (or worse) when she was on the way to kindergarten at a public school. I would have been in the eighth grade. If I had known about this, I would probably have tried to enforce the Law of the Jungle (“If you so much as touch my sister, I will …”). I would have, too. I was at least two years older than anyone at her school, and kids who attended public schools were presumably heathens. Also, I knew some moves. I watched a lot of wrestling in the eighth grade.

I don’t know how I missed this. Maybe I was just oblivious; I often am.

Jamie and I had similar senses of humor, and we were both rather tall and quite thin, but those were almost the only things that we had in common. She was always the cute one. When she was little, she had blonde hair that she evidently got from a relative that I had never met and her mother’s dark eyes. She was also a much better athlete and was tremendously more sociable than I was. I did better in school, and I was almost never in trouble.

This is Jamie on her prom night. I was long gone by then.

From 1966, when Jamie was ten and I had left for college, through 1985 I had minimal contact with Jamie. She made a mysterious visit to our apartment in Plymouth (described here), and Sue and I visited her and her husband, Mark Mapes², once in Iowa (described here).

Other than that, we might have talked on the telephone a few times, but that was it. Why didn’t I call her? It did not occur to me. I didn’t call anyone. I have always hated talking on the telephone, and in those days long-distance calls were expensive.

In late 1985 Jamie was living in the Chicago area with her two daughters, Cadie³ and Kelly⁴. How they got there is a long story, and I am ignorant of most of the details. Cadie was, by my calculation, eight years old, and Kelly was a couple of years younger. Jamie was working at O’Hare airport for American Airlines. There she met Joe Lisella Jr.⁵, a fellow employee. I think that they got married in 1985. Jamie has told me a few stories about the travails of working in baggage claim. She may have had other responsibilities there, too.

In 1985 the newlyweds moved to an apartment in Simsbury, CT. For a time both Joe and Jamie worked for American Airlines at Bradley Field in Windsor Locks, CT. Their family grew rather rapidly. Gina⁶ was born in 1988, Anne⁷ in 1989, and Joey⁸ (Joseph III) in 1991.

During the fourteen years that Jamie lived in New England I worked at least seventy hours per week. Sue and I found time to visit Jamie and Joe a few times in Simsbury. I remember that we ate supper with them at least once at Antonio’s Restaurant near their apartment.

Joe and I played golf together quite a few times, first at a course in Southwick, MA, called Edgewood and then, after they had moved to a house in West Springfield, at East Mountain Country Club in Westfield, MA.

I had a good time, but I still took golf too seriously to have many enjoyable conversations with Joe. Another problem was that we both sliced the ball. He was, however, left-handed. His ball was therefore usually in the rough to the left. Mine was usually pretty far to the right. Talking is, of course, discouraged on the greens and tees.

Joe’s brother played with us a few times. I have forgotten his name. Jamie was a very good golfer when she was a teenager, but she never played with Joe and me. It never occurred to ask her why not.

We always played very early in the morning. I sometimes stopped at McDonald’s on the way to the Lisellas’ house and bought Sausage Biscuit with Egg sandwiches for them. Once I evidently messed up about whether we were scheduled to play. They were sleeping in. Someone with bleary eyes came to the door. I apologized when the situation was explained to me, left the McDonald’s bag for them, and drove back home.

At left is a satellite view of the Lisellas’ house on Lancaster Ave. in West Springfield. In the nineties a basketball goal occupied the space where the big white truck in the photo is.

When we visited the Lisellas’ house, there was often a half-court basketball game there. I declined to participate. My skills at basketball were limited to running, jumping, disabling opponents with my sharp joints, and drawing fouls. My jumping days were behind me, running was of no value in a half-court game, and my other abilities were under-appreciated.

The most memorable of these game was the one in which my dad, who at the time was at least pushing seventy, tried to play. He lost his balance, fell down, and broke his arm. He had to be rushed to the emergency room.

The only photo that I could find of Joe Lisella is this one from 1973 on Gina’s sixth birthday.

The menu at the Lisella house was usually hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. Joe had a Weber “kettle” grill, and he used a lot of charcoal. I never asked him about this, but I have never understood how anyone could control the temperature of one of these grills. I have always strongly preferred the ones that allow either the fire pit or the grill to be raised and lowered.

Joe watched a lot of sports on television. In fact the TV always seemed to be on in their house, and it was always set to a sports broadcast. His favorite teams were the Red Sox, the Green Bay Packers, and Notre Dame. I am not sure which team he rooted for in basketball.

When I was at their house I spent most of my time playing with the kids. Jamie always seemed to be cooking, cleaning, or collapsed from exhaustion. Occasionally she took a break for a cigarette.

I did not talk much with Jamie. On the sidelines at the kids’ soccer games she would sometimes keep me apprised of the their progress. I seldom had much to contribute to these conversations. In those days TSI was definitely the focus of my life. Unless I could think of an amusing story, I did not say much.

I clearly remember doing one thing with Jamie. She had somehow scored some tickets for a WWE wrestling card at the Hartford Civic Center, and she invited me. This must have been in 1990. I think that Gina and Anne were there. I am not sure whether the other girls or Sue attended. The girls were really into it. They cheered and booed at all the right places.

The only match that I remember at all was between André the Giant⁹ and Jake the Snake Roberts¹⁰. Although André was way past his prime, he was still enormous and powerful. He could probably have defeated Jake from his hospital bed. However, every move he made seemed to cause him pain, and his back was bent over at a 45° angle when he lumbered from one place to another.He even had difficulty entering the ring. I found the performance rather sad, but I enjoyed the experience of being with the kids.

I marveled at how different this experience was from the other match that the high-school version of me had seen in person. It is described here. In the match in Hartford there was a lot of flash, but very little in the way of wrestling. Vince McMahon had not yet admitted that his events were scripted, but 90 percent of the people over five in the arena could predict the outcome (barring disqualification) of every match. It was kind of like a circus with trained over-developed humans.

In the fall of (I think) 1986 or 1987 Sue and I drove Cadie and Kelly to the Catskill Game Farm¹¹, a private zoo in New York state. This had always been one of our favorite day trips, and it was more fun with the kids. Fall was the best time to go there. The weather was ideal. The deer were in rut, and the cries of the stags could be heard all over the park.

We spent a fair amount of time in the petting area of the park, which was loaded with immature animals that had been handled by humans since birth. That did not in any way mean that they were tame. I had never noticed this in previous visits, but they formed a herd of six or seven species and walked around the petting area as a group.

An priceless trading card from her soccer days autographed by Kelly.

Kelly had been petting one of the fawns, and she did not notice a baby donkey behind her pitching forward on its front legs and aiming a two-legged kick at her back side. Fortunately, the hooves missed by an inch or two.

I also remember feeding the giraffes. The girls got a figurative kick out of that.

I attended at least one of Cadie’s softball games. I don’t remember too much about it. She was not a star. She was more of an intellectual than an athlete. More than anything else she has always been very artistic. I seem to recall that she studied art at Hampshire College for one year. I don’t know what happened after that.

For my mom’s seventieth birthday in October of 1995 Cadie flew with me to Kansas City. I gave a little speech to a gathering of my parents’ friends about my relationship with my mom. I am sure that my mom, who was already experiencing some dementia, appreciated that we both came. However, it was obvious that Cadie was uncomfortable throughout the entire trip.

My dad took Cadie with him on his trip to Ireland. They both enjoyed the trip, but my impression was that their personalities did not blend too well. No blood was spilled.

My most vivid memory of Kelly is from the day that she helped plant flowers around a tiny pine tree in our yard on Hamilton Court. The tree, which is now more than thirty feet high, was only a little taller than Kelly at the time.

Kelly was a good soccer player. I remember watching her in at least one game. She was a defender. I don’t know too much about soccer, but the other team never came close to scoring. Her team’s goalie need not have attended.

Kelly had trouble with math in high school. Jamie once asked me if I would be available to help her with it. I said that I would, but I never heard about this again.

Sue and I were invited to attend Kelly’s graduation at the horse show building at the Big E in Agawam. We went, but I don’t remember any details except that I was surprised that the students were mostly wearing casual garments (even shorts) under their graduation gowns. I also recall at the subsequent get-together at the Lisellas’ house. Gina and her classmates humiliated me on the basketball court.

Kelly left West Springfield shortly after finishing high school. I knew that she moved to a western state, but I did not know what she was doing there. I haven’t had any contact with her since then.

This is the oldest photo that I could find of Anne and Gina. If I had waited much longer to ask them to pose with me, I would not have been able to lift them.

I tried to see Gina and Anne as often as I could. One weekend day they stayed with us for a few hours in Enfield. They were delighted to discover that we lived right behind a school that had monkey bars and other athletic equipment.

I usually bought the kids some kind of board game at Christmas. When I was at the Lisellas’ house in West Springfield, I spent most of my time on the floor. In retrospect I wonder if the games were a good idea. Some of them had a lot of pieces.

I bought a Foosball table for them one Christmas. I probably should have asked if it was OK to do so. They seemed to enjoy playing it that day, but I noticed the next time that we went to their house that it was on the front porch and positioned so that it could not possibly be used. If I had been considerate enough to ask ahead of time, Joe or Jamie might have mentioned that there was no possible place to keep it.

This is the West Side girls’ soccer team for 1997. Anne is on the far right in the front row. Gina is second from the right in the back row.

In the team photo for 1998 Anne is second from the right in the front row. Gina is in the middle of the back row.

Sue took this excellent photo of Gina, Anne, Joey, and snow.

I watched Gina and Anne play soccer several times. Anne was a fast runner, but Gina made up for lack of speed with determination and grit. No one ever called Anne gritty. In fact, no one ever called her Anne either. It was always Annie, Princess, or Prinnie.

I also watched Gina play basketball once. The opposing team had one player who was much better that everyone else. Gina’s coach assigned her to guard her even though Gina gave up several inches to her. Gina hung tough with her throughout the game. Unfortunately, it was not enough. The West Siders came up short.

I bought three tickets for the Connecticut Opera’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford. I made plans for them to attend with me. I was convinced that they had agreed to go, but somehow the plans got messed up. I ended up sitting between two empty seats for the evening. I should have called to confirm, but …

I have one memory of Gina as a teenager. She was on the computer with three or four chat windows open with her friends. She could move among them very rapidly. I was impressed.

My parents came up to visit the Lisellas occasionally. They stayed at the Howard Johnson’s on Route 5. I remember that the first time that Anne saw me beside my mom, she blurted out, “You two have the same hair!” I don’t think that she realized until I told her that her grandma was my mother.

From the time that Joey was old enough to walk, or maybe even before that, he was consumed with sports. He liked all sports, and he was quite good at them. Some of his peers caught up with him later, but I doubt that there was a more athletic four-year-old in all of New England than Joey Lisella.

Joey and I played one-on-one tackle football in the living and dining room when he was a toddler. As soon as I entered the house, he grabbed onto one of my legs and tried to bring me down. Then he picked up the football and tried to burst past me. He could not have known that that his opponent starred in 1961 as the wingback/defensive back of the Queen of the Holy Rosary Rockets, as documented here.

On August 6, 1995, Jamie brought Joey to a party at Betty Slanetz’s house in Enfield. He carried a Whiffle ball and a plastic bat around with him all afternoon. I volunteered to pitch to him. He was batting right handed. I stood about ten or fifteen feet away and threw the ball underhand to him. Rather than swing, he took his left hand off the bat, caught the pitch one-handed, threw it back, and announced, “Overhand!” My recollection, which may be faulty, is that he hit every pitch that he swung at. I was duly impressed. He was four years and zero days old.

I saw Joey play soccer several times. The first time he was on a mixed team. He was too young to play legally, or at least that was what Jamie told me. He was certainly the shortest participant on either team, but he was positioned as the striker on his team. After he scored his fourth goal in just a few minutes, the umpires (!) overruled the coach’s assignment and made him play defense for the rest of the game. The final score was 4-0.

I don’t remember this game. It is hard to believe that Anne is only two years older than Joey.

The last soccer game that I recall involved Joey’s high school team. Joey was still one of the smallest players, but he was still quite good. He did not dominate this game the way that he dominated as a youngster, but he was a force to be reckoned with.

I had the same impression the only time that I watched him play high school basketball game. His lack of size was a serious detriment in this game, but he was a good ball-handler and shooter, and he played tight, aggressive defense.

During these years Joey (and just about everyone else his age) was obsessed with sneakers. I am not sure how many he pairs he had, just for basketball.

Joey and I shared one great adventure. In the summer of 1998 (I think that it was) I drive him in my Saturn to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Sue and I also made this trip during most summers to attend operas at the Glimmerglass Festival.

It was a long drive. By the time that we reached our destination it was time for lunch. We stopped at the Doubleday Cafe because I knew from experience that it would be a waste of time to try to find a better place. Cooperstown is not known for its cuisine.

I had never been to the Hall, and I was a little bit disappointed. I think that Joey enjoyed it, however, and I definitely enjoyed the time with him.

On the way home I think that we stopped at Friendly’s near Albany. I have a vague recollection of a misadventure in the process, but I cannot recall the details.

Jamie arranged for a party in August of 1994 for our dad’s 70th birthday at Simsbury 1820 House. The celebration got off to a terrible start. When my dad went to sit down by the table, his chair collapsed beneath him, and he fell onto the floor. He wasn’t badly hurt, but Jamie was infuriated. She later told me that she had refused to pay the bill.

I tried something that was too clever by half. I asked a question of Anne that I thought that she could answer and a slightly more difficult one of Gina that I thought that she could answer. After the second failure, Anne rebuked me, “Uncle Mike, we’re just kids!”

So, I set that aside and instead led everyone in a rendition of my dad’s favorite song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”¹² I am sure that that buoyed everyone’s spirits.

In 2000 Joe drove Gina, Anne, and Joey to Kansas City for my dad’s seventy-sixth birthday. Sue and I were already there.Here is what I wrote in my notes about the occasion:

We had a good time on my dad’s birthday. I brought a wrestling card game that Sue gave me for my birthday. I played it twice with Gina, Annie, and Joey. They all enjoyed it. When Gina beat Joey in the first game, he got angry, accused her of cheating, made a mad dash at her and started pulling her hair. She just laughed, and Joe broke it up.
We went to an Italian restaurant for supper. It wasn’t very good, but Annie lit up as I have never seen her do. She was animated and talkative.

I continued to drive to Massachusetts to watch the kid’s play on sports teams after Jamie left (described here). Sue and I even went to Joe’s wedding with Jenna. It was a rather strange event, held on a boat, as I recall. Joe’s father was wearing shorts and buying everyone drinks. The highlight for me was when Jenna, Gina, and Anne sang along with “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

When my dad died in 2011 he left $18,000 to each of Jamie’s five kids. I administered the will and sent the checks to them.

In 2012, give or take a year or two, Sue and I drove up to have supper with Gina in a town north of Springfield. We tried to arrange a second get-together a few times, but it never seemed to work out.

1. I think that in 2021 Jamie still resides in Birmingham, AL. I am not sure what she is doing there. Her Facebook page is here. I am embarrassed to say that I could locate only one photo of Jamie in all of our junk.

2. All indications are that Mark Mapes lives in Davenport, IA.

3. Cadie Mapes still seems to live in Massachusetts, but I am not sure where. Her business website is here.

4. Kelly Mapes went off on her own at an early age. If I had to guess, I would say that she probably lives in Tucson in 2021.

5. Joe Lisella still lives in West Springfield. He works for McDonald’s. His LinkedIn page is here.

6. In 2021 Gina Lisella lives in the Westfield, MA, area. Her LinkedIn page is here. I think that she recently bought a new house.

7. Anne Lisella lives in San Antonio, TX. She is a nurse. Her LinkedIn page is here.

8. Joey Lisella lives somewhere in the Boston area. His LinkedIn page is here. I follow him on Twitter. He posts about nothing but sports.

9. André René Roussimoff died in January of 1991.

10. In 2021 Aurelian Smith, Jr., is retired from playing Jake the Snake Roberts, but I bet that he would listen to offers.

11. The Catskill Game Farm closed in 2006. It is now reopened as a historic tourist attraction in which one can camp or stay in a Bed and Breakfast inside the compound of the old zoo. The website is here.

12. My dad was tone-deaf. He was—bar none—the worst singer that I have ever heard. He agreed with Pope Pius X that Gregorian Chant was the best music ever produced by man. He could remember some of the words of songs, but the melody he produced bore no resemblance to the original.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Saturn

1969-? A Taste for Opera

2006-2014 Learning Italian Part 2: On My Own

1997-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Stage Stores

1985-1999 The Lisellas