All Good Gifts*

Those of you who have been following this blog know that I'm a pretty decent home cook, and that I participate in the Free Library of Philadelphia Cookbook Club.  We've been meeting online for the last couple of months, thanks to ZOOM, and as I listened to my fellow club participants describe their struggles to get even basic food items, I posted this to Facebook:

"I don't want to sound preachy or act like "look at me, I'm virtuous and good", but I'm beginning to regret posting pictures of what I'm cooking and baking during the current crisis. I know that we have a lot of extra time on our hands, and it's fun to post our culinary creations here and other places, but I have Philadelphia friends, as well as a lot of former students, who are continuing to have issues with access to food and essentials.

Those of you who live in greater Philadelphia know that the big grocery chains aren't too plentiful in many of Philadelphia's poorer neighborhoods. On the other hand, I have Redner's, ShopRite, McCaffrey's, Costco, Sam's Club, BJ's, Wegmans, Giant, Acme, Lidl, Aldi, Weis, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Walmart, not to mention some large independents, all within a fifteen minute drive of my home. I'm pretty sure I could take SEPTA to all of them, too.

I haven't been in their shoes, thanks in part to our daughter who has gone shopping for us, Giant Foods opening an hour earlier for seniors and people whose family members are affected, and an employer who has deemed us essential so that we could work from home. We're in good shape, relatively speaking; my wife works for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and just returned to work (no, the retail locations aren't open, but they're helping to fulfill online orders). We're blessed to the point that we've been able to help neighbors and friends who aren't in our position--not a lot, mind you, but we do what we can.

Getting back to the point: many of you know that I participate in Cookbook Club, a program at the Free Library of Philadelphia. We actually met online this month (thanks, Zoom), and as more and more of the native Philadelphians participating in Club expressed difficulty in getting even basic items, I felt more and more uncomfortable about posting pictures of what I was cooking, so--I will not be posting food pics for the duration. I don't want to be responsible for adding to people's misery. I will continue to help our neighbors, take care of my family, and pray for our political leaders that they make wise, responsible decisions regarding the public health issues of our time."

I wrote this a month ago, and I hope and pray that your food situation is better than what it was then. Till we meet again, take care of those closest to you, be they family or friends, and don't be afraid to not only seek out opportunities to help others, but to seek out help when YOU need it, and gratefully and humbly accept it.

*--from Godspell, by Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak, 1971.

Porgy and Bess: A Review

Last Saturday I took advantage of the Metropolitan Opera's brilliant marketing strategy designed to bring live opera to folks outside of New York City. For just $28 and change, I found myself sitting in a seat in my local multiplex waiting for David Robertson to begin conducting "Gershwin's Porgy and Bess". The broadcast started just after 1 pm, and began by panning the audience arriving in their seats in the Metropolitan Opera House.

People were, for the most part, dressed to the nines for early afternoon; not many attendees wearing jeans or Giants jerseys.  This being an opera about Black people from the Gulla culture (South Carolina and the Georgia Sea Islands), I expected to see more African-American people, but didn't see many.

A member of management whose name escapes me came out on stage, and announced to the crowd that the man playing Porgy was singing with a "very bad cold" (you wouldn't have known it) and was going to soldier through it rather than cancel. The overture started, and I thought, "Oh, this will be good."--and musically, I was certainly not disappointed.

Individual performances were strong, especially Met veteran Denyce Graves, who played Carla, the matriarch of Catfish Row, and Angel Blue, the well-meaning but ultimately easily-swayed Bess. Men in the cast also played their roles well, and all the hit tunes with which we've become so familiar over the years were given their due. This production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is the only production of this opera that I've seen, so I don't have anything with which to compare it.

But:

1) The HUGE, rotating, skeletal set piece that served as the Catfish Row neighborhood frankly took up too much room on stage.

2) As a result, the already too-large chorus was crowded into the front third of the stage, leaving too little room for the dancers.

3) The more I watched, the more Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) reminded me of another piece of that period--Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1928), with highly stylized dancing, outlandish characters that veered dangerously into the gray area of caricature, and a script that treated the male characters as deeply flawed and the female characters as virtuous and noble, except for Bess, who was led astray by two men--Crown, and Sportin' Life, with whom she left Catfish Row for New York City, presumably to be pimped out by Sportin' Life.