Quite the amazing second major trip of summer 2023 was my sojourn through southern Minnesota, Iowa, a slim part of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and on to Texas, where I tarried particularly in Dallas and Houston.
This trip began on 27 July with a drive to Winona for my second foray to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. On the way back from our trip through the upper Midwest, New York City, Washington, D. C., the Appalachian countryside, and Cincinnati, Barbara and I attended the performance of As You Like It, Shakespeare’s delightful rendering of romance and reconciliation in Arden Forrest. My trip on 27 July was for attendance at the performance of The Winter's Tale, the production of which was magnificent, uniformly well-acted and superbly staged. Neither tragedy in the technical sense, nor comedy in dominant style, the play is an absolutely enthralling duality of wrenching sorrow and comedic delight. More than The Tempest, which intersperses serious situations with comedy, The Winer’s Tale is front-loaded with the pathos resulting from Leontes's rash jealousy, the middle acts are heavily comedic, then the last act is full of mystery, revelation, redemption, and a bevy of romantic pairings.
A Winter’s Tale is a fine dramatic offering from the Bard, seemingly the next to last (the last was The Tempest) that Shakespeare wrote by himself, one therefore of the 37 that the great dramatist wrote indisputably alone. Similarly to Othello and King Lear, the plot turns on a rash outburst that proves fatal to the protagonist and others. The outburst in this case issues from Leontes (king of Sicilia), aimed at his childhood friend Polixenes (king of Bohemia) and Leontes’s wife, Hermione, upon the wholly unwarranted suspicion that the two have had an affair and that (although the arithmetic could not support the claim by my calculation) Polixenes is the father of the child to which Hermione gives birth after the outburst. The play has a surprising revelation at the end of the play, and the ending wraps up mostly in a spirit of forgiveness and redemption, although two key fatalities occur due to Leontes’s rashness. Given that description, you may have noted that A Winter’s Tale at the, which has a great deal of humor (more than the comic relief episodes of the Bard’s tragedies), does not fit neatly into the categories of histories, tragedies, and comedies.
Great River Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Doug Scholtz-Carlson directed this play and presided over some very informative and engaging discussion with this first-rate cast.
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On I went to Greenwood District/Tulsa,, very much thriving and featuring the very creatively conceived and sophisticated Greenwood Rising Historical Center, with informative videos, high-tech holograms, many illustrative physical items from carefully accessed archives, and a room for group processing of post-visit emotions and thoughts.
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I departed Greenwood at mid-afternoon, arriving in Dallas at 6:30 on Saturday (29 July). I was off the next morning (Sunday, 30 July) for East Dallas Christian Church and then a two-hour conversational lunch with one of those women who lives the ethic of the love of Jesus active in the world. The EDCC service, with the interim pastor away at a summer seminar, was held in a communal room in the basement, consisting of the usual communion and hymns, but with rotating group discussion instead of a sermon. Those who advocate for more participatory service over the more traditional pastoral sermon would have approved.
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Time in Dallas during that week of Sunday, 30 July through Thursday, 3 August, was spent in multiple visits with friends from relationships forged over the course of the last fifty years, including especially my days at Southern Methodist University (SMU, 1969-1973) and those years from annual cycles of the new millennium caring for my parents.
During my stay in Dallas, I visited with the assistant chaplain during my SMU days and his wife. Though suffering from scoliosis and mostly confined to a wheel chair, this great friend and mentor has rebounded substantially from his struggles that I observed one year ago, after he had taken a fall that aggravated existing problems and caused mental disorientation. The good reverend’s wife, herself an activist over the years for social change and an advocate for liberal religious and social causes, though, has regressed; she suffers from a variety of late-life maladies, has trouble swallowing, and mostly receives moisture from spongy swabs. My opportunity to visit with her was a great blessing: Her condition is not likely to support life too much longer.
A friend with whom I connect while my mom lived at the residential facility Forum at Park Lane from 2007 through 2017 has recovered remarkably from one year ago, and very dramatically from her respiratory struggles and hematological issues of two summers ago. She is delightfully sweet, thoroughly so during our two and one-half hours of conversation.
The search is on for the position of Executive Director at a school serving students with economic challenges in East Dallas, at a time when the organization is undergoing certain changes. The current Executive Director, with whom I connected on the strength of similar interests in the education of youth at the urban core, launched the school for infants and toddlers through grade three in 1978. We met, as we often do, at a vegetarian restaurant run by Hindu followers of Krishna, whose spacious patio affords an excellent setting for personal and familial updates and reviewing issues pertinent to K-12 education.
Another friendship founded on my experience at SMU took me to the South Dallas suburban extension of Cedar Hill to visit a friend of lo these many years and his wife. I found his health improving and his observations to indicate excellent mental acuity after a scary fall down a set of steps triggered a post-polio syndrome response. This matter of substantial recovery of health was for me brought transcendent joy.
Friday (4 August) I was off to celebrate Houston, with a Parisian chicken preparation and other items, including cake, that I had readied for my best friend from those treasured SMU days, in honor of his birthday number seventy-two; inasmuch as Barack Obama’s birthday also occurs on 4 August, we always note that cyclical occurrence for a mighty fine president.
On Saturday (5 August) I drove back to Minnesota in anticipation of bestowing my wisdom on the MPS Bd. Ed. on Tuesday, 8 August.
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The human connections that I made during this trek to Texas and places in between were heartening, the quality of interactions of which humanity can always use more in a crazy world that awaits the bettering of which we are capable.
And all of these experiences, together with reading done while on trip, adds to the store of knowledge that I convey to my students In the New Salem Educational Initiative. In such manner must all educators increase student knowledge bases; in such manner shall we mitigate the craziness of the world and achieve that betterment of which we are capable.
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