Maine Leisure: Screen & Page

ON THE BIG SCREEN—WOMAN POWER

(the wrap.com)

It’s hard to accept how sexist the sailing world was in 1990.  The Maiden, a new documentary, is a graphic account of skipper Tracy Edwards and her all female crew’s performance in the Whitbread Round the World Race. In the past women just didn’t compete there or at that level; or, if they were on one of the race boats it was to be the cook, how Tracy spent her first race.  Tracy is one determined individual, and she was determined to obtain a boat, hire a crew and strive to win the race.  

All twelve crewmembers were women and, despite the fact that all the male journalists (and probably the other skippers) expected that the Maiden crew wouldn’t complete that first leg, they did in first place!  And then they did it again in the second leg.  Although the film starts out slowly, it’s gripping with harrowing scenes of high seas and high winds.  What makes it even more enjoyable is that the crewmembers were interviewed in the making of the film so you see them on board and you get to see and hear their reflections today about their feelings at the time and the whole experience.

Kudos to our local non-profit Harbor Theater for screening this! They have done an admirable job bringing first run films and classics to the Boothbay Harbor community.

ENJOYABLE NOVELS

The Oysterville Sewing Circle by Susan Wiggs

Susan Wiggs (ala.org)

It was just happenstance that the novel I picked up after reading No Visible Bruises about domestic violence was also about battered women.  Susan Wiggs writes very good popular fiction.  Her characters are believable and sympathetic and she treats their issues with warmth and understanding.  In this case, fashion designer Caroline both loses her job in New York and simultaneously finds herself in charge of two small children.  She has a rude awakening about the domestic abuse suffered by her friend Angelique.  Returning home to Washington State, Caroline must find a new career and deal with the children while she seeks to learn more about domestic violence.  This is a novel that educates the reader without ever being preachy.  (~JWFarrington)

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

Linda Holmes (www.npr.org)

Holmes is a pop culture critic for NPR and this is her first novel. It’s sweet with a happy ending.  But then, like most romances, you know that everything will work out eventually.  Evvie Drake is a young widow who didn’t much like her husband before he died unexpectedly, but no one knows that, and she feels guilty about it.  Dean is a major league baseball player, a pitcher who’s got a case of the yips and is unable to pitch.  Evvie agrees to rent him the apartment in her house and thus begins an unusual friendship. 

Holmes creates two likable characters, each with plenty of mental baggage, and also pulls off a wonderfully enriching friendship between Evvie and her divorced friend and weekly breakfast mate, Andy.  If you like baseball and are intrigued by offbeat individuals, this is a good end-of-summer read. (~JWFarrington)

ON THE SMALL SCREEN—Footnote on Borgen

Cast of Borgen (oldaintdead.com)

The Chief Penguin and I just finished binge watching the last episode of Season 3, the final Borgen.  And I’m in serious withdrawal.  This Danish political series about a female prime minister is topnotch drama, some of the best television I’ve seen in recent years!  The third season flags a bit in the beginning, but then re-gains its focus. And the last episode brings everything to closure, possibly too neatly, but with a twist.

The acting is superb, the story is meaty, and the main characters have messy and fascinating personal lives.  It’s as much about the people as the politics.  There are politicians and their spin-doctors (Denmark has eight parties vying for power) and TV reporters scrounging for stories and better ratings than their competition.  Intense and gripping. I lived with these folks!

As critic Andrew Romano points out, “every public decision on Borgen has private consequences, and vice versa, which is something Hollywood usually ignores and real politicians, operatives, and journalists have to hide. Finally getting to see these secret repercussions spool out and spill over isn’t just spellbinding. It’s comforting, too.” (dailybeast.com)

Watching, I also felt as if I acquired a bit of Danish.  Borgen is available on Apple TV. The first episode is free and then, if you’re hooked, it’s $24.99 for a season.  Highly recommended!

Note: Text and header photo ©JWFarrington. Header was taken at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

Maine Time: Jaunting Around

JAUNTING TO WATERVILLE

We know a few folks who’ve worked at or graduated from Colby College, but had never visited the campus. It’s located about ten minutes from downtown Waterville on Mayflower Hill—a pleasant spread of green dotted with red brick buildings and athletic fields.  A guard at another museum (which will remain nameless) told us that the best art museum in Maine, “its Louvre,” is the art museum here, which prompted this visit. 

Founded in 1959 and housed in a contemporary building with two levels and five wings, the Colby College Museum of Art has a wonderful collection focusing primarily on American art from all periods with some pieces from Europe and Asia.

Whimsical seating

The entrance hall includes some fanciful shrub seating while the lobby area is airy and light-filled with splashy red chairs.   The young woman at the reception desk was most welcoming and helpful.

Photo in Theaster Gates collection

We spent time looking at some of the thousands of photographs from Ebony magazine in Theaster Gates:  Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories and then marveled at the intricately worked baskets and the colorful paintings which are part of an exhibit of arts and crafts of the First Nations People of Maine and Maritime Canada.  

Fancy Basket, 1997 by Peter Neptune

The exhibit is titled, Wiwenikan:  the beauty we carry, and includes works from the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki that collectively are known as the Wabanaki. 

I also particularly enjoyed some of the contemporary paintings and sculpture in the permanent collection including two works by Maya Lin, with whom we spent some time in our San Francisco years.   Lin’s works are small in scale, one made all of straight pins, and better appreciated up close in person.

Burning House, Night, Vertical, 2007 by Lois Dodd
Untitled, 2010 by Anish Kapoor
The Hostess, c. 1928 by Ellie Nadelman

This is a first-rate museum and well worth a visit. For us, it was only about an hour and half’s drive from the coast.  Admission is free to both the campus community and the general public.

To cap off our tour, on the recommendation of the museum staff, we drove downtown, easily found a place to park in a large free lot, and then had a most satisfying lunch at the Last Unicorn Restaurant.  

The Chief Penguin and I both selected one of the lunch-sized chicken entrees which came with a small green salad and basmati rice.  Salads and sandwiches were also on offer with seating inside or outdoors at umbrella tables.

Note: Text ©JWFarrington and all photos by JWFarrington. Header photo is a birch and cedar bark canoe in the Colby museum.

Maine Time: Jaunting & Reading

JAUNT TO BIDDEFORD

Earlier this week, we headed south of Portland to visit friends on the outskirts of Biddeford.  This is a part of Maine we had not seen before, and we were struck by its quiet beauty.  Their house sits above Hills Beach bordered by rock with a view toward Basket Island.  There are homes there and the owners can drive their cars over the sand at low tide—quite amazing.  It being low tide we walked along the sand to the edge of the island.  

Lunch was at a general store cum deli counter near Biddeford Pool where we ordered salmon salad, pokes, and fish tacos.  Opting for a picnic table on the grass, we had a view of the placid water on this gloriously warm blue-sky day.

Later, Jill gave us a personal tour of downtown Biddeford.   An historic textile town (former home of Pepperell), Biddeford is having a bit of a renaissance with a weekly farmers’ market, a cozy café/used bookstore, live music on the street, weekday tours of the mill, and a selection of appealing restaurants and shops.  Definitely worth a return visit!

Mural in downtown Biddeford

SUMMER READING

The Guest Book by Sarah Blake

This is one of the best books I’ve read this summer.  Set mostly in Maine, it is not a simple read, and I puzzled over some of the family relationships (there are Evelyns in two generations, e.g.).  Initially, I found Blake’s prose choppy, with no smooth rhythm, but then I got into her groove. She excels at creating the atmosphere around Crockett’s Island and the hold the island with its big frame house, white, faded and worn, has on this, the third generation of upper crust cousins.  Especially Evie.  She is the principal character in the present day, a middle-aged academic, married to Paul, a Jew, and mother to teenager Seth.  

Evie and her cousins need to make a decision whether to sell or keep the island and house since the trust money for its upkeep is close to running out.  Grandfather Owen Milton and his wife Kitty bought the island decades ago.  The Miltons took great pride in being Miltons, being successful in business, and living life according to a certain set of mostly unwritten rules.  They were at the top of the societal heap and both proud of it and complacent.  In their world, one associated with members of one’s own class, one’s children attended only the best schools, and, of course, they married the right people.  

Joan, Evie’s recently deceased mother, had one dying wish— to be buried at the island, but not in the graveyard, instead by the picnic area.  Evie is unsettled since she doesn’t know why there, and she encounters objections from her cousins.  She is an historian whose life work has been uncovering the truths in letters, diaries and archives.  But, she feels she knows little about her mother who lived life in the shadows, not fully present to her.  

Author Sarah Blake (bookbub.com)

The novel is layered, replete with family secrets, and moves back and forth in time, mainly between the 1930’s, 1959, and the present day.  In the 30’s, Grandfather Owen has business dealings in Germany; in 1959, a pre-wedding gathering on the island ominously brings together family members with two outsiders; and in the present, Evie wrestles with a recurring dream about her mother, and with why she herself feels so tied to keeping the island and having nothing change.  

Issues of race, religion, and class surface in the characters of Len Levy, who works for Owen Milton, and Reg Pauling, a black man who is Len’s friend and former Harvard classmate.  How these two men intersect with the Miltons and how, together and separately, Len and Reg challenge various family members to examine their beliefs and actions make for a novel that I will ponder for some time to come.  Highly recommended!  For more about what shaped the work, check out this interview with Sarah Blake.  (~JWFarrington)

No Visible Bruises:  What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

This is a heavy book about an issue, really a crime, which is often misunderstood and occasionally overlooked.  Known familiarly as domestic violence, this author believes it should more appropriately be called something like  “intimate-partner violence” or “intimate-partner terrorism.”  The statistics on the number of incidents worldwide are staggering, and Snyder presents several case histories that ended in a woman’s death.  Death despite restraining orders, time in a shelter, interactions with the police, and the like.  For beat cops, domestic disputes have too frequently been viewed as nuisance calls rather than criminal behavior.  Added to that, women victims too often recant their testimony due to fear of greater consequences.

Snyder discusses a new tool called the Dangerousness Scale which, if used and heeded, can predict which women are likely to be killed by their partners.  One of the strongest predictors of death is if a woman has been strangled by her partner.  Violence against a woman escalates in a repeating pattern as her partner works to isolate her from family and friends and to strictly control both her behavior and her movements.  When there are children involved, the woman’s incentive to return to an unsafe home environment is largely because of fear of what the man might do to the children.  

Author Snyder (amazon.com)

Fortunately, there is room for hope with new research and with the creation of programs for violent men that educate them about the toxic aspects of their masculinity and prompt them to change their actions. Snyder’s book has added depth thanks to the innumerable hours of interviews she conducted with battered women and their families and with abusers; these interviews form the basis for the case histories.

 Recommended reading, but not for the beach.  For a short piece about the crux of the issue, see this Atlantic article by Snyder.  (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header photo shows Basket Island. All text ©JWFarrington; unattributed photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

Maine Moments

COASTAL MAINE BOTANICAL GARDENS

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is ten years old, and it keeps getting better each year.  We visit on our own and also bring all of our guests. Our granddaughters are especially fond of the play house where there are kitchen appliances, a cupboard, and a small table and chairs where you can serve tea and cupcakes.  Also a draw are the two old fashioned water pumps, a laundry tub with a washboard, a rowboat to climb into, the puppet theater, and a sandbox.  

Steve Tobin sculpture

For adults, the scent garden is always worth wandering. And there’s also an outdoor art exhibit, “Unearthed,” a series of towering root sculptures by Pennsylvania artist Steve Tobin. The sculptures are made of metal and placed throughout the grounds. Some are realistic colors (brown and black) while others are bright such as a mustard yellow one and a glossy white one. The sculptures will be on view into 2020.  A few years ago Lehigh University presented an outdoor exhibit of Tobin’s impressively large “Termite Hills” sculptures.

MAKING MEMORIES

Our son and daughter-in-law and two granddaughters were here for the week.  E is a poised seven and F an active three, the age at which most kids form lasting memories.  The Chief Penguin and I very much enjoy their annual visits to Maine and know that even when we’re gone, they will have Maine memories. 

 Memories of making blueberry pancakes with Grandma, of sampling Grandpa’s muffins, of visiting the botanical gardens, of clambering on the rocks at Molly’s Point for sea glass, shells, and smooth stones, of checking out the books and toys at Sherman’s, and memories of riding the narrow gauge train at Railway Village and more.   

E is a voracious reader and quickly devours chapter books.  F is at the “why?” stage and is a fan of trains and motion.  Together the girls and I read umpteen stories, played with Josie and Rosie, their dolls, and colored and created with construction paper using an assortment of pencils, pens, and crayons.  

There was no set schedule and the mornings flowed from a leisurely breakfast, to a walk in the yard or games on the deck, followed by an afternoon outing, and then dinner, be it pizza with friends and their grandkids, hot dogs and lobster rolls on the deck at Cozy’s, or comfort food here at Grandma and Grandpa’s.  It was about as perfect a week as could be!

RECENT READING

America’s Reluctant Prince:  The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr. by Steven Gillon

Much has been written about JFK Jr. and the Kennedys in the twenty years since his tragic death in 1999.  One might wonder why we need yet another tome, and this one is a tome.  Gillon was the graduate assistant in an undergraduate course Kennedy took at Harvard.  Only a few years older than John, he became a friend and the two got together occasionally over the years.  John sought out Gillon’s advice and writing suggestions when he was editing George magazine.  While John was alive, Gillon respected and protected his privacy; now he feels comfortable sharing his perspective and his knowledge of the challenges John faced as a Kennedy, the standard bearer after his father’s death.  

What was most interesting to me was the account of Kennedy’s years founding and creating George and struggling to make it a truly viable proposition.  There is new information on his wife Carolyn’s inability to adjust to being trailed by the press, her volatile behavior, and her drug use, all of which made a marriage fraught with tension more tumultuous.  It is in this context of daunting issues at work, difficulties at home, and the prolonged dying of his closest friend (his cousin Anthony), that John Jr. takes off on that fateful flight.  The book is overly detailed and, sometimes tedious, but I found myself modifying and enlarging my view of this Kennedy.  (~JWFarrington)

Note: Photos and text ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved). Header photo taken at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.