I didn’t invite my father on our family vacation. But there he was anyway, everywhere I went, front and center, pointing, explaining, reminiscing, sharing, reflecting, the way he never did in life. During our two-week stay in Sicily, my father, who died 18 years ago, never left my side.
Read MoreFor months, I imagined what freedom, post-pandemic, would feel like. For many more months, I couldn’t imagine freedom at all. When lockdown began 13 months ago and we were all shut inside, confined to our homes, wiping down groceries that were delivered, disinfecting the mail, scrubbing our hands every five minutes, peering at the world through closed windows, all of us prisoners of something we could not see, I thought: I never imagined this. I never anticipated a virus that would change our lives.
Read MoreI moved into the house I have lived in for nearly half a century kicking and screaming. Not physically, of course. But in my head I was railing. I did not want to move from the small, two-bedroom ranch that was my husband’s and my first home. I loved everything about that house — the kitchen cabinets we painted yellow a few months before our wedding, the living room with its 1970s green, wall-to-wall carpet (which I loved to vacuum), the family room my Uncle Frank fashioned from our one-car garage when I was newly pregnant and making plans to turn our TV room into a nursery…
Read MoreThe picture is like the moment it captured. There is nothing special about it. No one is dressed up and fancy. No one’s hair is styled. No one is intentionally posed, and there’s no warm light softening the background or making the images pop…
Read MoreI am escaping the present. I didn’t mean to leave the here and now. But, really, the here and now is not such a fun place to be. So why stay?
I was on Facebook sipping my morning coffee, scrolling through reposted news stories, reading the comments of people I don’t know (Why do I do this?), getting more and more annoyed, a too typical morning, when up popped a post with a slightly blurred photo of the Randolph Movie Theater, the one that was on North Main Street in the 1950s. And just like that, the present was gone and I was at that old theater, the box office right in front of me, my best friend Rosemary beside me…
Read MoreJuly arrives this week. July. Impossible. March April May June That’s how long we have spent inside obeying the rules. Having our groceries delivered. Washing doorknobs. Disinfecting counters and floors and packages. Staying 6 feet apart from anyone not under our roof. Staying 6 feet apart even from the people we love…
Read MoreMy family teases me about how much I love Davis Farmland. I visited for the first time in 2009 and…
Read MoreMy Aunt Lorraine was in her 50s when she and her husband decided to take a road trip across the country. It was a long time ago and I don't remember their exact route, but when she returned home I asked, "Of all the places you've been, what was your favorite?" And she said, over coffee at her kitchen table, "Stoughton. There's no place…
Read MoreMy father took pictures of everything. I have dozens of black-and-white prints labeled "European Campaign — General Eisenhower 1942-1945," and hundreds of slides he took later, after the war, after I was born, which he showed for years in our parlor on a big white sheet, until one day when he bought a real screen. He gave me his photos long before he died. I scanned them into my computer and it's where they live now, at my fingertips, pictures of people and places long, long gone. But just a few clicks, and they fill up my screen.
Read MoreThe pictures are ordinary. There's Lucy in front of Cinderella's castle. There's Lucy on the Dumbo ride. There's Lucy standing next to Prince Charming.
These are shots that everyone takes. "Stop. Look at me. Say 'cheese!' "
Read MoreThe Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
I took my granddaughter Lucy to Wheelock Family Theatre's production of ``Annie'' last Sunday. Forty minutes from my house, and I'd never been there before. I'd never been to Riverside Theatre Works in Hyde Park, either, which is just 15 minutes from my door, until my daughter Julie became managing director there, two years ago.
How had I overlooked these places? I used to take my children to plays on the South Shore and in Boston. Why didn't I know about these other places?
What amazed me about Wheelock's production of ``Annie'' is what always amazes me about live performances: They never go out of style. A good story is always a good story, and what worked in ancient Greece - Give `em the old, razzle dazzle - still works all these centuries later. Good acting, good singing, good dancing, and an audience is mesmerized.
Lucy is 7 and definitely a good audience. She is obsessed with ``Annie.'' She knows the words to every song. She has the CD. She's seen the movie a million times.
Still, I wondered how a simple stage ``Annie'' would compete with the loud, bold, overly dramatic, over-the-top movie version, which she loves.
It did not compete. It stood on its own. Real people on a real stage talking and laughing and singing and dancing, plus a real dog playing Sandy brought the house down.
The children in the audience, like all kids today, have access to TVs and DVD players and computers. Instant entertainment is at their fingertips. So this very old-fashioned, intermission-in-the-middle humble fare should not have wowed them.
But it did. A medium as old as knights and chariots still works its magic.
Wheelock Family Theatre and Riverside Theatre Works and the Turtle Lane Playhouse and Boston Playwrights' Theatre, all small theaters, are all celebrating their 30th seasons. This is a testament not just to entrepreneurship and ingenuity, but to the hard work of many.
It is also a tribute to the medium itself, because we can get from Netflix and On Demand almost everything that these theaters offer. We can order ``Scrooge, the Musical'' and ``Godspell'' and ``A Child's Christmas in Wales.'' Plus we can listen to any kind of music any time we want. No one needs to go out to be entertained.
But still we do. Because what we don't get from film or recorded sound is the experience of seeing and hearing something performed live.
A live performance is like an apple plucked from a tree. It can be fresh and delicious, and if you take a second apple from the same tree, it may be fresh and delicious, too. But not identical. It's not ever the same.
It can be bitter, too. Or mealy. Or wormy. No guarantees.
Movies, TV, radio, the rest of our entertainment is far more predictable. It comes packaged. It's apples cut up and processed and sealed and sold in cellophane. It's applesauce in little cups. Not bad. Sometimes good. But never unique.
It's a struggle to lure people off their couches and out of their homes when it's cold and dark. But if you're sick of Charlie Sheen, consider this: Riverside Theatre Works is presenting ``Scrooge: The Musical'' Dec. 10 to 19. ``Annie'' will be featured at Wheelock Family Theatre until Nov 21. Turtle Lane Playhouse is hosting ``Godspell'' Nov. 26 through Dec. 30. And Boston Playwrights' Theatre ``Two Wives in India'' will run until Nov 21.
Then consider this song from ``Avenue Q.''
``There is life outside your apartment.
I know it's hard to conceive.
But there's life outside your apartment.
And you're only gonna see if you leave.''
We wore dresses - my grandmother, my mother, and I. My grandmother's was frilly and swirled when she walked. My mother's was light brown, a color she seldom wore but wore well. And mine was turquoise with puff sleeves, a cinched waist, and a white mock-apron top, which I thought was very Heidi-like.
I was into Heidi back then.
Read MoreBLACK HILLS, S.D. - You'd think that we'd know his name. You'd think if a man from Boston, born on Harrison Avenue, orphaned at the age of 1, beaten and abused his whole childhood, grew up and did something great something no one else has ever done we'd have at least heard of him. You'd think that conceiving and working for 35 years on the biggest sculpture in the world, bigger than the pyramids in Egypt, would be a shoo-in to fame.
Read MoreThe house I grew up in has changed hands again. I saw the new owner standing in the yard as a friend and I drove past. I do this sometimes, drive by to look and to remember. My father paid $ 10,000 for this house in 1954. The new owner paid $ 280,000. But the house isn't just more expensive. It's changed in many ways. It's bigger. One of the owners built on and up. And because of this, the yard is smaller. The trellis is gone, along with the rose bushes my mother planted and coaxed to grow. And the sprawling, silvery spidery things that lined the front walk have disappeared, as have the shrubs that separated our yard from the neighbor's, my mother's rock garden and the green awnings she scrimped and saved for.
Read MoreI hadn't been back in more than two years to the place that feeds my soul. I went to other places and I thought, this is fine. I don't need one particular plot of earth where the sea meets the sky and I meet God. I found God in people and in landscapes: on my walks with the dog, in my small garden. And I convinced myself that this was enough. I thought I had become wiser. God is everywhere, I said. All I had to do was look and I would see.
Read MoreIt started with Great Woods. I mean the Tweeter Center. I dialed information to get the number, heard "Welcome to Verizon" and thought, not just that Verizon sounds like an antibiotic (Erythromycin? Tetracycline? Verizon?), but what's with all these companies changing their names?
Read MoreI never lived in Codman Square yet in every sense of the phrase, I grew up there. I was 11 and in the seventh grade, a commuter student at St. Mark's in Dorchester and as lonely as I would ever be. That's when I discovered the square and the library that overlooked it. Every day when the neighborhood kids went home to lunch and the other commuters ate their waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches in the gloomy auditorium, I walked up the hill past Girl's Latin to the Codman Square library.
Read MoreThe child was 3, maybe 4, and walking hand in hand with his mother down Charles Street on a beautiful August day. Boston Common was to his left, the Public Garden to his right, The Four Seasons Hotel ahead and the State House behind. The sky was blue, the sun bright and every tree in the city was in bloom. The people were in bloom, too, little kids, big kids, tourists and natives, colorful in their shorts and baseball hats, suits and sundresses. The streets teemed with cars and trucks, bikes and bikers, busses and trolleys and in the distance, there were even more buildings and people and things. It was a page right out of "Where's Waldo."
Read MoreIt's late July and time, it seems, for tourist-bashing. Last week in this paper, Joe Sciacca got all a-flutter over the Old Town Trolley and Beantown Trolley and the new Duck Tours, which he says are the reason you can't get from point A to point B anywhere in this city. Congestion and gridlock are the fault of trolleys and "lard butts from Nebraska," don't you know?
This week, in Boston's other major daily, columnist Patricia Smith wrote that tourists "clog the Artery, babble over maps in restaurants, snap endless pictures of sunbleached gravestones" (why this would bother anyone puzzles me), and continues on to bemoan their "maddening practice of standing directly in the middle of a downtown sidewalk at 5 p.m., their heads upturned and mouths open, gazing reverently at 'Look, another old building!' while juggling camcorder, bottles of Evian, and several hot squiggling children." Huh?
Read MoreNEW YORK - I awaken to sirens these days and horns blaring and scrapes and thuds, trucks picking up or dropping off something. City sounds, foreign sounds to me.
There's an air-conditioner in the bedroom, but we sleep with it off and the window open. Closed, this place is hermetically sealed. We could be anywhere - in a barn, in a bubble.
I want to remember where I am: New York City.
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