Mitch maps the rehearsal room - October 17 and 18, 2010.

As I was researching town postcards, I found this wonderful postcard of the Wichita Banjo Band. Based on their outfits and the quality of the photograph, I’m guessing that it was taken sometime in the 1970s. I look at it and I wonder: when did popular demand for a Wichita Banjo Band Postcard result in this photo being taken? Perhaps they did one every year, and sold them at concerts? I think there is something heroic about the Wichita Banjo Band, and this image has given me a new research topic: Postcard Heroes.  

Interstates and Circulation Compared

“The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly designed by its infrastructure.  (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.)”  - about physicist Geoffrey West from “A Physicist Solves the City” by Jonah Lehrer, in The New York Times Magazine, December 19, 2010.

Check out more of the city-body connection in the “It’s Alive” section of Radiolab’s Cities episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/its-alive/.

Each year, I gain a little more insight into the world of ritual that surrounds the Holiday season. My own understanding of The Season was embedded at a young age with Bible stories, Christmas pageants, and family Christmas dinners. While I have no concrete memory of performing in a Nativity play, I’m sure I was an excellent second shepherd. I do, however, have a memory of lighting the Advent candle; my brother read the Bible passage and I lit the candle. Starting on the fourth Sunday before December 25, Advent is a time of expectant waiting and preparation.

The preparations are the traditions. The little rituals built into the decorating and satiating. The joy of stockings and ornaments hung. Baking, cooking and making - the season is filled with traditions of cookies, treats and turkeys (ham, goose, tofurky, and the ever-enjoyed going out for Chinese food for Christmas dinner).

Recently, I traveled to Minnesota to partake in the Christmas rituals as practiced by my family. To accommodate various members, it happens in the weeks before Christmas. There was the Layton Family dinner (my mom’s dad), where we partook in the traditional fruit-cup (a variety of canned fruits in a cup drowned with 7-Up). If you are lucky, you get two maraschino cherries. The Sister’s Christmas (aunts, uncles & cousins) comes next. It included the caroling but had a new twist - Bloody Marys. The Fern & Ed Christmas is now just the Ed Christmas (Dad’s dad). With Fern passing on more than two years ago, it is here that I see the most change in tradition. No more rice pudding or Jell-o on top of lettuce. There is still a carol or two, but the dinner is now a meal at Perkins. The Mattsons’ Christmas is the most intimate. This year I handed off the Santa hat to my almost-three-year-old nephew. He found and delivered the presents from under the tree with joy and ease, beginning a tradition that may last him many, many an Christmas.

We all know traditions change. They morph and sometimes stop altogether. But by stopping or continuing, each lends to the marking of time. The milestones of an era, a family, a person’s life. These joyous rituals help us to break up the day and connect the year. We are able to see the patterns and the moments. We reflect. The rituals allow us to prepare for and partake in moments of peace.

Happy Holiday Traditions!

-Mitch

Beertown Song Devising (Ivania Stack, Jessica Lefkow and Cory Ryan Frank on vocals, Mitch Mattson on vocals and guitar).

Beertown Song Devising (Rachel Grossman (vocals), Jon Reynolds (ukulele, vocals), Lorraine Ressegger (vocals), J. Argyl Plath (piano), Max Freedman (vocals, tambourine), Colin K. Bills (vocals))

Beertown Song Devising (Colin K. Bills on vocals, Max Freedman on piano)

I was asked to talk about my aversion to the holidays and to many of the group activities (caroling, gift giving, parties, etc.) that come along with this season. I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings of discomfort, but now, as I sit here in front of my computer, attempting to write something that will be enjoyable to you, our loyal blog reader, I am at a loss for words. So what if I don’t like certain rituals? It is clear that many people find great joy in these activities and celebrations. Isn’t that enough? And you know: it is. Regardless of my own dislike and the memories that these occasions tend to stir up for me, I would never want to deprive others of the happiness that they seem to derive from the annual festivities. And I think somewhere in this acceptance of what it means to those I care about is the means to slowly coming around to enjoying the season myself.

-Jeremy

This year, my family’s big Hanukkah celebration included the requisite latkes, applesauce, and sour cream, my aunt’s homemade challah, my dad’s blintz casserole, and a gift exchange. It also took place at 10 o’clock in the morning on the Saturday after Thanksgiving - about a week before Hanukkah actually began - and the main course was scrambled eggs. We kibitzed, we ate, we took pictures, and we opened presents - but we didn’t light candles, and we didn’t say prayers.

This somewhat nontraditional gathering was necessitated by the simple practicality that there was only one weekend when my cousins and I could all be in the same place. Still, it was a little strange. We did most of the important stuff, and we were together, which is what really matters, right? But the casual abandonment of some basic rituals I grew up with left me a little unsatisfied. It’s not like my family has ever been “religious,” per se, but religious rituals can signify a whole lot more than just the fulfillment of some centuries-old contract with an unseen God.

I’m twenty-two years old - the baby of the Beertown crew. I first moved away from home a little over four years ago, and this year I moved even further, to take a job I barely understood in a city where I hardly knew anyone. My parents are living apart from each other while my mom goes to graduate school, my grandmother just moved out of the condo she had lived in for thirty years and into an assisted living facility, and about a week ago my dog had to be put down. Not lighting Hanukkah candles may seem like a pretty insignificant change in the scheme of things, yet I know if I had done it, even on my own, it would have been a comfort. 

What role do rituals play in your life? What are the rituals of the community you grew up in, and how do you carry those rituals with you even as you leave that community behind?

-Max

I have a virtual stickie note on my laptop of performance ideas. It has been there for years. It’s not long — maybe 5 or 6 things. A few things get added or subtracted each year. Some things are actually realized and created, which is the best part of having a theatre company. A few things have stuck for a long time.  The longest one has been there since 1995. I’m going to do that one—I think it’s coming soon even. It’s an odd little albatross I carry. It will probably be my masterpiece if I ever make it.

But Winesburg, Ohio arrived on the list relatively recently. It is a book I had forgotten about. Every once in a while I browse the Project Gutenberg site to see what books I can download for free. Winesburg showed up on the available list one day and I was immediately drawn to it.  I first read it in my mid-twenties and loved it and then didn’t think about it again. That happened a lot in graduate school. I was reading so many things at that time and non-theatre books were very low priority.  In my twenties I think I reveled in Sherwood Anderson’s scathing exposure of the secrets of small town life. Growing up in the quintessential New England small town felt suffocating and restrictive and here was this anti-Our Town that wasn’t this drab grey picture of my hometown. I was drawn to the anti-anything at that time though. The structure of the book fascinates me the most. All of these disconnected stories and characters reveal common threads and land on the character of George Willard. Looking out at his town, he sees, “as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.”

So I read Winesburg, Ohio again about a year ago. Re-reading books in a later phase of life always brings that fascinating new perspective. Now, of course, I look back fondly on quaint community life and long for that same feeling of belonging that is so hard to find in this city. Now, the book reminds me of my history (now that I have one) and how I create my history or the myth of myself. So in this initial work for ”Beertown,” we have landed on this question: where and what is the overlap between the myth of self and the myth of place? Each myth is inextricably tied to the other.

This struggle of a small town girl living in a big city has been with me most of my life. In this summer’s dog & pony dc show, ”Separated at Birth,” we investigated what it means to find a connection in this city. We are always hoping to find something current, alive and tangible. “Beertown” is more about the past. It’s still about connections, but about how we connect with the ghosts of where we are from, and how that creates who we are now.

-Wyckham