Once Upon a Time in Fairhope

September 13, 2007


Edward J. Kearney, Sam Guncler in I Hate Hamlet

One of the prospects that enticed me to move back to Fairhope from New York in 1988 was that I could start another theatre company, as I had in Switzerland with the American community group we called the Little Theatre of Geneva. Fairhope seemed a good location for the first Equity theater in the southern part of the state, due to the huge success of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, first in Anniston and then in Montgomery, where it sat, and still does, in the middle of a 40-acre tract of land and a physical plant that cost something like $50 million.

If people from Fairhope would drive nearly three hours to see Shakespeare, I reckoned, would they not go across town to see a little Neil Simon, Noel Coward or Tennessee Williams? The Grand Hotel offered us space in the loft of their golf club, and I used the sale of a little scrap of land as seed money to create my theatre.

I named the company the Jubilee Fish Theatre, in an attempt to be, as I stated in the flyer, "imaginative, innovative -- and fun!" My husband tried his best to talk me out of the name, but the locals enjoyed it. Someone from Fairhope (perhaps me) will explain to you sometime what is meant by jubilee fish, but anyway I liked saying we were the only company in the world with that name. It definitely wasn't pretentious, and it definitely set us apart.

The first season consisted of four plays: A.R. Gurney's The Middle Ages, The Price, by Arthur Miller, The Deadly Game, and Somerset Maugham's The Circle. I scouted Montgomery for some of my first actors, including the dynamic young man named John Preston, who went on to become a favorite at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, playing, among other roles, an unforgettable Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. I made contact with Lewis Chambers, a New York agent who sent some of his stable of actors to me, and we worked for years together, with him supplying me with appropriate members of the actors' union for my plays.

We did such new plays like Beth Henley's The Miss Firecracker Contest, pictured here with Jed Dickson, Martina Vidmar, backed by a cast of onlookers including Carter Inskeep, Sarah Benz Phillips, Mary Margaret Thomas (mostly hidden), and Tina Hightower. At the end of that production one of my regular audience members took me aside and asked plaintively, "Why do you keep doing these comedies that are so sad?"

It was kind of a trademark at Jubilee Fish Theatre, comedies that had some sadness, or serious plays that had some laughs. I had to keep the casts small because of the space in that loft, and I never made a cent at my chosen profession, but kept pouring my own money in to keep it going. At the end of nine years I was losing about as much as I did on that first event that launched the company. My daughter was in New York City and pregnant with my first grandson. The theatre no longer seemed a viable profession, at least not for me.

So I moved on, and have now boxed all the memorabilia I can find into cartons for packing. In researching this, I found I had kept alarmingly little, and vital bits of information about my casts and my seasons seem to have been discarded over time, and over the recent purge of papers as I pack up to move. You can't keep everything, but there are moments in one's own once-upon-a-time when remnants of past projects will light up your heart. Just thinking about the days of Jubilee Fish Theatre make me a little happy, like a comedy tinged with sad moments.

Worth Repeating: A New Day

August 9, 2007

This, a post from June of last year, which I called "A New Day Dawning":

I just got to thinking...what if this were 100 years ago? This house wouldn't be built yet -- it went up in 1916 -- Marietta Johnson's school was not yet a reality -- it was to begin in the fall of 1907 -- the unpaved streets were full of chickens, goats and other livestock -- and there weren't many trees, since the area had been timbered out in recent years.

A scraggly little town, built on the Utopian dream of a few who had relocated from Iowa just 12 years before, Fairhope palpitated with possibilities. But it was probably a warm morning, the first day of summer, 1906, no hope of turning on the air conditioning later in the day, and no idea of where the fair hopes of the original colonists would take the town in its first century.

As I write, the sun has come up and there is a little puff of a pink cloud turning orange against the blue sky. It could have been that kind of dawn a hundred years ago, with sound effects of the cackle of the occasional chicken and bleat of a goat. I can hear an owl myself -- maybe his ancestor was here.

Marietta Johnson was a frequent visitor at this time. She and her husband, a farmer, had bought a pecan farm in Mississippi, and they discovered Fairhope through Socialist friends in St. Paul. They had begun visiting Fairhope in the winter of 1896, and she had become fast friends with Lydia Comings, who urged her to move here and start the school she dreamed of. Mrs. Johnson studied the writings of Rousseau, Frederich Froebel, and the work of her contemporaries, John Dewey, C. Hanford Henderson and Nathan Oppenheim. These latter names are those leaders who were creating the study of early childhood development, and advocated redesigning the school to suit the nature and needs of the child rather than trying to force the child to conform to an arbitrary mold defined by a group of adults. Mrs. Johnson, a lifelong teacher, saw the simple elegance of this notion and advocated nothing less than a retrenching of the whole educational system to make it operate this way. She thought she could achieve this by starting a school based upon that principle. It would be a year more of talking (and she was superb at that) to make her dream of such a school a reality.

The town had a library with books donated by the former bohemian Marie Howland. Mrs. Howland was now a settled old lady in her sixties, having sown her wild oats in the 19th Century among the free thinkers, social reformers, and feminists in New York and in France in a commune that purported to be the wave of the future, with one large house encompassing many families but no kitchen. She left reformist colony in Mexico disenchanted with its Puritan strain which scowled on her tendency to bathe nude in the sea for the revolutionary Single Tax enclave in Fairhope.

There was already a Fairhope Courier, then published weekly and sent around the world to proselytize for the Utopian colony, and Marie Howland had a regular column in it. Her feminist leanings would make her quite at home in Fairhope, where women always had the vote (on local issues) and, according to Paul Gaston in his little book Women of Fair Hope, she stands out in Fairhope history "for her advocacy of cooperative living, kitchenless homes, and scientific child-rearing as means of liberating women from household drudgery and male exploitation." She was to become a great friend to Marietta Johnson.

A hundred years ago there would be no cars driving by. What was at one time the Gaston Motor Company at that time was a livery and harness shop. It is now a trendy restaurant. There have been so many transmutations of the "uptown" area that it is pointless to make note of them now. There was a bluff park, a municipal pier, a grassy knoll just to the east of the bluff, always called "Knoll Park." Knoll Park stands hardly changed, although I have noted a sign on the park's perimeter in recent weeks indicating some rearrangement of the natural landscape is imminent.

There is a genuine log cabin on the other side of Bay View Street (once more felicitously "Bay View Avenue") from me that was built in 1900. That would have been there, among the stumps, stubble and trees of 100 years ago. It is for sale, and will surely be torn down.

As it was 100 years ago, a new day is dawning. There is good news from the Marietta Johnson School, new board members eager to take on the task of helping turn the school back to what it once was, and an increase in enrollment. The local potter now on the Board, graduated from our school promises to be very helpful in helping restructure our Arts and Crafts department. Another is a City Councilman. Another is a relative newcomer whose wife is a Fairho, (see Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree for a definition of that one) and who has taught woodshop and stagecraft and is one of the general all around artisans the like of which used to help out at the school all the time.

I wake up full of ideas, plans, and half-finished grant proposals. I am going to spend the afternoon taking care of things at the Marietta Johnson Museum -- which always affords the opportunity for a little personal research, and is welcome respite in a beloved old Fairhope building that feels like home. Good things will come of all this.

That's essentially what I wrote a year ago, with the updates of a mention of the work beginning on the untouched old Knoll Park, and a link to my webpage for a definition of "Fairho," which is to be found in my book. The fact is there have been many changes in Fairhope in the last year. The new library is completed and functioning, to mixed reviews -- Walmart is up and running with a lot of I-told-you-so's -- and many more McMansions dot the landscape as the developers have scooped away the quaint cottages one by one.

But you can't change history, and I still like to think about it. It will be rewritten over and over to eliminate all vestige of the reformers and dreamers who made the town prosper in its early days. The time for reform is gone, and those who believed in it are too. I am witnessing the plowing under of the heritage they left, and others will reap the tasteless harvest.

A New Day Dawning

June 21

I just got to thinking...what if this were 100 years ago? This house wouldn't be built yet -- it went up in 1916 -- Marietta Johnson's school was not yet a reality -- it was to begin in the fall of 1907 -- the unpaved streets were full of chickens, goats and other livestock -- and there weren't many trees, since the area had been timbered out in recent years.

A scraggly little town, built on the dream of a few who had relocated from Iowa just 12 years before, Fairhope palpitated with possibilities. But it was probably a warm morning, the first day of summer, 1906, no hope of turning on the air conditioning later in the day, and no idea of where the fair hopes of the original colonists would take the town in its first century.

As I write, the sun has come up and there is a little puff of a pink cloud turning orange against the blue sky. It could have been that kind of dawn a hundred years ago, with sound effects of the cackle of the occasional chicken and bleat of a goat. I can hear an owl myself -- maybe his ancestor was here.

Marietta Johnson was a frequent visitor at this time. She and her husband, a farmer, had bought a pecan farm in Mississippi, and they discovered Fairhope through Socialist friends in St. Paul. They had begun visiting Fairhope in the winter of 1896, and she had become fast friends with Lydia Comings, who urged her to move here and start the school she dreamed of. Mrs. Johnson studied the writings of Rousseau, Frederich Froebel, and the work of her contemporaries, John Dewey, C. Hanford Henderson and Nathan Oppenheim. These latter names are those leaders who were creating the study of early childhood development, and advocated redesigning the school to suit the nature and needs of the child rather than trying to force the child to conform to an arbitrary mold defined by a group of adults. Mrs. Johnson, a lifelong teacher, saw the simple elegance of this notion and advocated nothing less than a retrenching of the whole educational system to make it operate this way. She thought she could achieve this by starting a school based upon that principle. It would be a year more of talking (and she was superb at that) to make her dream of such a school a reality.

The town had a library with books donated by the former bohemian Marie Howland. Mrs. Howland was now a settled old lady in her sixties, having sown her wild oats in the 19th Century among the free thinkers, social reformers, and feminists in New York and in France in a commune that purported to be the wave of the future, with one large house encompassing many families but no kitchen. She left reformist colony in Mexico disenchanted with its Puritan strain which scowled on her tendency to bathe nude in the sea for the revolutionary Single Tax enclave in Fairhope.

There was already a Fairhope Courier, then published weekly and sent around the world to proselytize for the Utopian colony, and Marie Howland had a regular column in it. Her feminist leanings would make her quite at home in Fairhope, where women always had the vote (on local issues) and, according to Paul Gaston in his little book Women of Fair Hope, she stands out in Fairhope history "for her advocacy of cooperative living, kitchenless homes, and scientific child-rearing as means of liberating women from household drudgery and male exploitation." She was to become a great friend to Marietta Johnson.

A hundred years ago there would be no cars driving by. What was at one time the Gaston Motor Company at that time was a livery and harness shop. It is now a trendy restaurant. There have been so many transmutations of the "uptown" area that it is pointless to make note of them now. There was a bluff park, a municipal pier, a grassy knoll just to the east of the bluff, always called "Knoll Park," it stands hardly changed.

There is a genuine log cabin on the other side of Bay View Street (once more felicitously "Bay View Avenue") from me that was built in 1900. That would have been there, among the stumps, stubble and trees of 100 years ago. It is for sale, and will surely be torn down.

As it was 100 years ago, a new day is dawning. There is good news from the Marietta Johnson School, new board members eager to take on the task of helping turn the school back to what it once was. One is the local potter who graduated from our school and will be very helpful in helping restructure our Arts and Crafts department. Another is a City Councilman. Another is a relative newcomer whose wife is a Fairho, and who has taught woodshop and stagecraft and is one of the general all around artisans the like of which used to help out at the school all the time.

I wake up full of ideas, plans, and half-finished grant proposals. I am going to spend the afternoon taking care of things at the Marietta Johnson Museum -- which always affords the opportunity for a little personal research, and is welcome respite in a beloved old Fairhope building that feels like home. Good things will come of all this.

Artists and Fair Hope

October 22

Yesterday's post re-ignited a discussion of the meaning of art, and the information coming from a reader in Sweden should at least inform the discussion.

To broaden the discussion to an art I have a little more knowledge about, I am reprinting the following. It is a reprint of a post I wrote in the height of our discussion of the theatre, when a certain commenter had said that all the women in Tennessee Williams' plays were psychopaths, pure and simple. I tried to weave this into a definition of this blog, of Fairhope and fair hope, and the application of an education in Fairhope on an appreciation of all the arts.

Paul Gaston wrote a book years ago, which I'm sure is still available, called Women of Fair Hope. Its title gave me the idea for the name for this blog. In the book he dealt with the lives of a few women from Fairhope's early days who would be standouts in any locale, in any generation: Nancy Lewis, the former slave from whom the land for the Single Tax Colony was purchased, Marie Howland, the unconventional intellectual who became the town's first librarian, and Marietta Johnson, who was to found an extraordinary Progressive school. His book does much to define the women of Fairhope by these role models. Howland in particular had such a colorful story that readers of today have trouble believing it is not fiction -- and that she actually lived in Fairhope.

In The Butterfly Tree, Bob Bell describes a character that always struck me as generic-Southern rather than "Fairhope." There was a remotely tragic look about Miss Billy, as though she had lost something and wouldn't know when she found it, if she found it. Her eyes were that pale lavender color that made you think of crushed sweet peas. Ladies like this abound in Southern literature. We can read about them in early Truman Capote, in Carson McCullers, in Tennessee Williams. But in reality they were a rarity in Fairhope. To give him credit, Bob Bell's portrait of Winifred Duncan as Miss Claverly does deal with another type of woman altogether. My argument with Bob was that he saw Claverly as an aberration and I knew Winifred Duncan (the very real woman upon whom the character Miss Claverly was based) as a force to be reckoned with among the women of Fairhope of the 'fifties.

I am grateful that, although in the South, Fairhope is not really of the South. Because it was founded by those people from Des Moines, and because it was the kind of little intellectual enclave that attracted nonconformists, to live in Fairhope is not like living in any other place on earth. Those dewy, sweetpea-eyed ladies who exist in other southern U.S. locales are not at home in Fairhope. In Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree I add to Bob's portrait of Miss Duncan the likes of Gretchen Riggs, Verda Horne, Anna Braune and Emma Schramm, who built a house supported by tall pine trees in the woods just off the main street. None of these women was a delicate fading flower or what you would think of as a Southern lady. They were women of Fairhope.

Are Tennessee Williams' women Southern ladies or not? His writing covered such an astonishing range of experiences that the question hardly seems pertinent to anything. I once heard Williams, late in life, railing at some critic who said his women were all "drag queens." "I never wrote a play about drag queens in my life," he said, "and if I wrote about drag queens, they would be drag queens. The women I write about are real women."

A comment here said all the women in his plays are psychopaths. This is an unfathomable interpretation to me. Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, whom the commenter particularly hated, is a well-written, full human being, with goals, humor, personality, and a certain tragic outlook. She is not a victim, except of her own mistakes. She works for a living. The audience is meant to see her as a whole, sympathetic figure doing exactly the wrong thing all the time. She wants the best for her children although she has no idea what it is. She has a son who is a poet and a daughter who is an emotional cripple. Williams wrote, "Her life is a paranoia, but she is not paranoid." Williams' mother said, "I can't see anything about me in that character." My own mother said she disliked the play because she couldn't help but identify with the mother.

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Maggie is a Southern belle who happens to be in love with the wrong guy. There are themes in that play that fold back on themselves in unexpected ways. The homosexual conflicts of Brick and the clever manipulation of the frustrated Maggie against the backdrop of the towering character of Big Daddy make a riveting play -- about real people who might be seen as exotic if one were not raised in the American South.

Anyone who thinks Blanche DuBois is a psychopath hasn't seen or studied the play. She is deluded, yes, afraid of losing her youth and beauty, the only currency she has ever had. Raised to be a classic lady, she is in conflict about her sexual nature, and the only way she sees to resolve that conflict is to split herself in two -- the virgin and the whore -- and to live in the state of denial that is very often a Southern way of life. The inevitable confrontation with reality in the guise of Stanley Kowalski is too much for her fragile hold on sanity, which brings the audience to its own realization of the duality of the nature of man. Excuse me, maybe that should be the nature of Woman. Southern woman, at that.

In Fairhope I saw little of this. My parents, however, were more Southern than Fairhope, and the family I was exposed to had traces of the kind of offbeat reality that pervades the region. My first husband was from a very repressed Alabama town and family; he felt much more kin to the characters of Tennessee Williams than I did.

But what a gold mine those plays were for a young actress. And how lucky I was to have had enough Southern orientation, overlaid with the realistic intellectualism of Fairhope, to "get" the meaning, and to have the opportunity to play some of those roles.

The Past, the Truth, and Fair Hope

March 14, 2007

The following was posted about a year ago, including comments that were made to my post called "Imagine Fairhope."

There are always lots of versions of the truth – his, hers, and then what actually happened (which nobody knows). While nobody has come out with accusing me of coloring the truth (“facts”?) deliberately, it has been observed that my own memories may be subjective.

A friend who felt I was coloring the truth with my own brush in that earlier post made this comment:

One of the details in the picture you have of old Fairhope -- perhaps the most significant detail of all -- is that the picture has in it a different you.

I don't mean by this that there's necessarily something wrong with the new you, but that it would not be unusual for a person to look with longing eyes upon the times of their youth. I know when I think of old Fairhope, it contains nothing but my impressions, and because my impressions were among the most enjoyable of my life (there must be a better word than "enjoyable"), it is natural that I would tend to project that joy upon the whole of the scenery.

I recall a certain young lady who seemed to run through life looking for mudholes to splash through with bare feet, laughing, waving to anyone in eyeshot, urging them to join her in her frolics. Was there actually such a scene? I doubt it, but it is nevertheless real, just as real as if it had actually happened, or were happening right now.

Call it "nostalgia," or a "lost dream," but do not make the mistake of believing it's not real. The world of our dreams enlivens and deepens the world of our senses, here-and-now. Without our "nostalgic" remembrances, life would unfold almost two-dimensionally, like the still frames of a motion picture shown one-by-one, their subtleties robbed of life by the absence of time.

We're not in this world. We're in all the worlds we have ever lived. Your delight in the world of now is made what it is as much by the world of then as by any of the trappings of the "new Fairhope." Decades from now, this will be the "old Fairhope" for those of the newbies whose lives are enriched by what the town is today.

To the writer of that, I must add, I was that nymphet splashing in the puddles. Though a beguiling picture, I have no memory of ever having been remotely like that – but, as he says, his memory is real and may have provided a crucial lynchpin for his life. I know I could not rob that if I tried. I shall not attempt to do so.

My picture of old Fairhope, however, is more than a longing for my own youth. I had a testy relationship with Fairhope when I was a kid, because I lived in Montrose. The Marietta Johnson School was a high point in my life, and the characters of Fairhope shaped my young life, but I never considered life to be idyllic (until recent years, perhaps) nor did I have a problem of over-romanticizing the adults I came in contact with in old Fairhope. I have vivid memories of many of them, but those are probably selective too. I was happy then, but certainly less happy than I was to be in succeeding locales in succeeding decades.

It was not until I returned to Fairhope, rather by default, at the age of 48, that I did some research about its history, worked at the Marietta Johnson Museum, and was reminded of the reality of what Fairhope had once stood for. By the 1990’s, that reality was clearly eroding, and by now it is all but gone. I have stood by as long as I could. Something more must be said.

In 2001, my book Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree revealed some of my memories. Its elegant, nostalgic tone was the work of my collaborator, the late and wonderful Bob Bell. When corresponding with Bob, I, too, could be transported to heights of literary fantasy that underscores that book. By the time it was published, I began to feel almost guilty about overstating the magic of Fairhope as we pictured it. Oh, it was true – but it was only partly true. To learn more about that book, visit my website or better yet, buy the book. As I said, I was not 100 per cent happy with the picture of Fairhope that it presented, but I will always be proud of that little volume.

So I went to work on what I hoped would be a more factual, hard-nosed book about Fairhope’s character. This is the book for which I can’t find a publisher, not surprisingly. Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree dealt with memory and went where memory took us. When We Had the Sky is based on research and interviews, with some chapters of speculation on the reality of present-day Fairhope. It may languish in my file cabinet, unpublished, until it turns to dust; at least, it will probably never find a publisher. However, I plan to run off a couple of copies and leave them at the Marietta Johnson Museum and perhaps the new Fairhope Museum. Someone someday will be interested in it.

The truth about Fairhope is like all truth: It is many things. There are people all over the world with their hearts thumping for their version of the girl splashing in mud puddles. There are university professors who have built their careers examining the finer points of the Single Tax Experiment as practiced in Fairhope. There are scholars and educators who owe their lives to the work of Marietta Johnson.

Then there is Fairhope itself, pulling out of an economic sleep by joining the modern world of commerce and all but leaving its heritage behind. It is on the verge of even more growth, and can be expected to be a great deal more like all the small cities of this country, a little classier perhaps, a lot more expensive, and a lot more pretentious. But it will never the be Fairhope its founders had hoped for.

Life isn't always fair, but there is always a possibility of good as change comes. What's certain is that the past is not going to return.

A School in Utopia

February 12, 2007

In a recent column called “Yesterday’s News” in the Mobile Press-Register, Marietta Johnson was quoted from an article that ran in 1932, stating that her school, The School of Organic Education, in Fairhope, provided “a Utopia for children.”

Beautiful words conjuring up an image of an idyllic setting of outdoor activies, sunshiny mornings of play woven into academic studies, and a joy in school as part of life for a child. On the other hand, the image conjured up might be different depending on one’s vision. One man’s Utopia is another man’s boredom, and one man’s idea of the love of learning may actually differ from that of the visionary Mrs. Johnson. She always maintained that her approach to education was as simple as life itself, but over the years it has been subject to interpretation, and has been misunderstood and mishandled as often as not.

The definition of this vision is especially difficult one hundred years later. The idealistic sentiments of the early 1900’s are a distant memory. Fairhope itself, founded as a Utopian colony and surely referenced in Mrs. Johnson’s remarks to the newspaper, is no longer what it was intended to be. People who move to Fairhope see only a pretty, upscale little town by the water’s edge. They are not inspired by the Henry George notion of real estate affordable to all; in fact, they hope to build something classy that will render them rich when they decide to sell. There is nothing unique in Fairhope any more, nor Utopian. It is a “nice” little town, like many others except for the parkland on the beach, which in any other town would have been developed years ago and would today be cluttered with the type of eyesores that infect most towns of similar size and location. Even though it was the Single Tax Corp. that preserved the very greenspaces that set Fairhope apart even today, all the talk of Fairhope’s artistic and Utopian heritage is just so many words now.

We have seen many wars, political conflicts, and social upheavals since the death of Marietta Johnson in 1938. We might say that mankind has changed. Her dreams of balance and authenticity for the lives of children have been undermined over the years as the education system, determined to compete in the world, ignored the basis of her form of education: The growth of the child. Over the years, the education Establishment saw artistic courses as “frills,” and more than ever, children were asked to put aside the business of childhood and behave as adults told them to with little regard to their particular phase of development.

The 1960’s brought a new consciousness to the land. Love, peace and flowers were everywhere. There was something beautiful in this presumed innocence, but it came to very little in the long run. Those baby boomers embraced the thought that they were the hope of the world, and they certainly were for a time. But their time too has passed.

Now ever so many who discover Mrs. Johnson’s little school see it as an extension of their own vision of love, peace and flowers – none of which was ever built into the educational theory Mrs. Johnson had designed. Utopia, perhaps – a world where children would be happy as they were learning – but a school all the same. Classes out of doors would emphasize the answers to children’s questions about nature, and stimulate further study right through the high school years, when they would read about biology from books and practice experiments with living things. In Organic Education, children’s curiosity is encouraged, and satisfied; yet all along they are being instructed in the many disciplines they need for their life in the larger world.

The school produced happy students, and still does. However, many of these children have parents who are troubled, insecure, and unable in the long run to trust this or any other school to do its job. Parents are less mature than they were in Marietta Johnson’s day. They seek to control every aspect of their children’s lives.

Why do they find solace in the ever-restrictive public school system? Simply because they feel they must. Those who choose to withdraw their children from our school may see their child, who was thriving, become unhappy trying to conform to the many rules and restrictions in their school life. The tragic thing is when these parents blame the child, as does the public school system itself, so rigid in its demands for conformity. In the Marietta Johnson School, the child is seen as precious and his individuality is respected. It is a Utopian vision for a pedestrian world.

A decade or so ago, a scholar wrote her doctorate dissertation based on research she did on the Fairhope school. A copy of Janet McGrath's work, appropriately titled A School for Utopia, is kept in the Marietta Johnson Museum in the old Bell Building, once a part of the Organic School. McGrath maintained that Mrs. Johnson's vision was a perfect fit for the Utopian Fairhope of the past, and that the school had adapted to the times and now was an all but forgotten symbol of a long-abandoned idealism of the town itself. An inspiring treatise, this dissertation contains interviews with all the graduates of the school McGrath could find, and gives a beautifully accurate picture of both old Fairhope and the philosophy and practice of the school.

As Fairhope grows, inevitably the Marietta Johnson School will grow again. There will always be parents who are willing to commit to a certain amount of risk in order to provide the best for their children, whether or not it is the conventional or predictable choice. And these parents will see that the real risk is in enrolling their child in other schools where creativity is discouraged and all progress is based upon test scores rather than the development of the child himself.

It is the risk of nothing less than the future of civilization.

Maybe It Isn't Just About Fairhope

October 26

When I first sat at the table signing copies of the original edition of Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, I was under the impression that I had written a book about Fairhope, sure, but one with broader appeal than that. There were tourist books about Fairhope already in 2001; books on where to eat and why to move to the toney bayside village. I thought I had written kind of a shorter Lake Wobegone Days with a Single Tax slant, a picture of a unique place with a personality that would appeal to people who really had no sense of different ways of looking at things.

In Fairhope, by far the most compelling chapters seemed to be those written by Bob Bell, my collaborator who had enjoyed a lifelong love affair with his own memories of the town in the 1940's and 50's. When people urged me to write a second book, I felt it should be gutsier, grittier; in short, it should tell of some of the iconoclasts who had changed their lives by moving to early Fairhope or changed early Fairhope by moving to it with their maverick ways intact.

Publishers, when I worked to get a reprint done after the initial 1,000 copies of Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree sold out, told me they felt it was a book that would have only local appeal, and they said the same thing about When We Had the Sky, the second book. It has a certain amount of charm, they said, but the world really doesn't need to know about Fairhope.

Recently I sold a copy to Dan Spiro, author of an excellent new novel called The Creed Room, and writer of a blog called The Empathic Rationalist, which is linked to this one. He has never laid eyes on Fairhope, and I'll venture to say had never heard of it before I wrote him about my book. He liked MMATBT and offered to write a review of it for Amazon.com, as two of my friends, including one who identifies himself as John Sweden when he comments on this blog, had done before him.

Imagine the little thrill I felt when greeted with a copy of his review this morning in the email box:

Butterfly trees, the authors tell us, refer to a species of plant that "attract butterflies, which alight upon them, sometimes all at once, creating a visual spectacle that is very pleasing to the human spirit." Notice the word choice: not that these trees are pleasing to the eyes, but that they are pleasing to the spirit. That is precisely how I would describe this book. For those, like me, who share its authors' values, we can't help but find this book and the town that it describes to be spiritually uplifting.

Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree is a beautiful portrait of a place. In this portrait we find a group of people, all of whom beat to their own eccentric drummers, who somehow come together like butterflies on a tree and light up their environment with love, encouragement, and mutual respect. I was particularly taken by the description of the School of Organic Education, which is the antithesis of the modern status-conscious, teach-to-the-test, mind-numbing school that has come to dominate our society in the era of No Child Left Behind. It is clear that the Organic school depicted in this book didn't need slogans to demonstrate its commitment to universal education. But nor did it need to stress test scores. Its faculty were the types who care about creativity, and who value learning for its own sake and wish to inspire students to do the same. The result, no doubt, is a community of lifelong learners -- not mere grade-grubbing pre-professionals.

I could criticize this book by saying that its initial chapters didn't fully grab my interest. But I've never been to Fairhope, nor any town remotely like it, and hail from one of the most self-obsessed, workaholic cultures in the world (the legal world of Washington, D.C.). So perhaps it simply took my mind's eye a bit of time to adjust to the portrait of a utopian town. Once the story turned to the Organic school and some of the more colorful characters who populated the town, I was entranced for the remainder of the book. At that point, you see, I realized what the authors were trying to communicate: if we want our lives to be clothed in beauty -- both as individuals and as a community -- we can find incredible guidance from the people of Fairhope and the philosophy embraced through its institutions.

Non-conformity, collegiality, creativity, playfulness, intellectuality, spirituality -- these are the values of Fairhope. Can they become the values of a community, not of hundreds or thousands, but of millions? Of billions? These are the questions I found myself asking. That's what a true utopian asks.

Take that, you provincial citizens of the rest of Alabama, you who think Fairhope is just a little upscale shopping center with pretentions to Art. Fairhope as it once was was a lesson for you all.

Revisiting a Good Review

November 24

When I first sat at the table signing copies of the original edition of Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, I was under the impression that I had written a book about Fairhope, sure, but one with broader appeal than that. There were tourist books about Fairhope already in 2001; books on where to eat and why to move to the toney bayside village. I thought I had written kind of a shorter Lake Wobegone Days with a Single Tax slant, a picture of a unique place with a personality that would appeal to people who really had no sense of different ways of looking at things.

In Fairhope, by far the most compelling chapters seemed to be those written by Bob Bell, my collaborator who had enjoyed a lifelong love affair with his own memories of the town in the 1940's and 50's. When people urged me to write a second book, I felt it should be gutsier, grittier; in short, it should tell of some of the iconoclasts who had changed their lives by moving to early Fairhope or changed early Fairhope by moving to it with their maverick ways intact.

Publishers, when I worked to get a reprint done after the initial 1,000 copies of Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree sold out, told me they felt it was a book that would have only local appeal, and they said the same thing about When We Had the Sky, the second book. It has a certain amount of charm, they said, but the world really doesn't need to know about Fairhope.

Recently I sold a copy to Dan Spiro, author of an excellent new novel called The Creed Room, and writer of a blog called The Empathic Rationalist, which is linked to this one. He has never laid eyes on Fairhope, and I'll venture to say had never heard of it before I wrote him about my book. He liked MMATBT and offered to write a review of it for Amazon.com, as two of my friends, including one who identifies himself as John Sweden when he comments on this blog, had done before him.

Imagine the little thrill I felt when greeted with a copy of his review this morning in the email box:

Butterfly trees, the authors tell us, refer to a species of plant that "attract butterflies, which alight upon them, sometimes all at once, creating a visual spectacle that is very pleasing to the human spirit." Notice the word choice: not that these trees are pleasing to the eyes, but that they are pleasing to the spirit. That is precisely how I would describe this book. For those, like me, who share its authors' values, we can't help but find this book and the town that it describes to be spiritually uplifting.

Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree is a beautiful portrait of a place. In this portrait we find a group of people, all of whom beat to their own eccentric drummers, who somehow come together like butterflies on a tree and light up their environment with love, encouragement, and mutual respect. I was particularly taken by the description of the School of Organic Education, which is the antithesis of the modern status-conscious, teach-to-the-test, mind-numbing school that has come to dominate our society in the era of No Child Left Behind. It is clear that the Organic school depicted in this book didn't need slogans to demonstrate its commitment to universal education. But nor did it need to stress test scores. Its faculty were the types who care about creativity, and who value learning for its own sake and wish to inspire students to do the same. The result, no doubt, is a community of lifelong learners -- not mere grade-grubbing pre-professionals.

I could criticize this book by saying that its initial chapters didn't fully grab my interest. But I've never been to Fairhope, nor any town remotely like it, and hail from one of the most self-obsessed, workaholic cultures in the world (the legal world of Washington, D.C.). So perhaps it simply took my mind's eye a bit of time to adjust to the portrait of a utopian town. Once the story turned to the Organic school and some of the more colorful characters who populated the town, I was entranced for the remainder of the book. At that point, you see, I realized what the authors were trying to communicate: if we want our lives to be clothed in beauty -- both as individuals and as a community -- we can find incredible guidance from the people of Fairhope and the philosophy embraced through its institutions.

Non-conformity, collegiality, creativity, playfulness, intellectuality, spirituality -- these are the values of Fairhope. Can they become the values of a community, not of hundreds or thousands, but of millions? Of billions? These are the questions I found myself asking. That's what a true utopian asks.

Take that, you provincial citizens of the rest of Alabama, you who think Fairhope is just a little upscale shopping center with pretentions to Art. Fairhope as it once was was a lesson for you all.

Revisiting a Butterfly Tree

January 24, 2007

When I first sat at the table signing copies of the original edition of Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, I was under the impression that I had written a book about Fairhope, sure, but one with broader appeal than that. There were tourist books about Fairhope already in 2001; books on where to eat and why to move to the toney bayside village. I thought I had written kind of a shorter Lake Wobegone Days with a Single Tax slant, a picture of a unique place with a personality that would appeal to people who really had no sense of different ways of looking at things.

In Fairhope, by far the most compelling chapters seemed to be those written by Bob Bell, my collaborator who had enjoyed a lifelong love affair with his own memories of the town in the 1940's and 50's. When people urged me to write a second book, I felt it should be gutsier, grittier; in short, it should tell of some of the iconoclasts who had changed their lives by moving to early Fairhope or changed early Fairhope by moving to it with their maverick ways intact.

Publishers, when I worked to get a reprint done after the initial 1,000 copies of Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree sold out, told me they felt it was a book that would have only local appeal, and they said the same thing about The Fair Hope of Heaven, the second book. It has a certain amount of charm, they said, but the world really doesn't need to know about Fairhope.

Recently I sold a copy to Dan Spiro, author of an excellent new novel called The Creed Room, and writer of a blog called The Empathic Rationalist, which is linked to this one. He has never laid eyes on Fairhope, and I'll venture to say had never heard of it before I wrote him about my book. He liked MMATBT and offered to write a review of it for Amazon.com, as two of my friends, including one who identifies himself as John Sweden when he comments on this blog, had done before him.

Imagine the little thrill I felt when greeted with a copy of his review this morning in the email box:

Butterfly trees, the authors tell us, refer to a species of plant that "attract butterflies, which alight upon them, sometimes all at once, creating a visual spectacle that is very pleasing to the human spirit." Notice the word choice: not that these trees are pleasing to the eyes, but that they are pleasing to the spirit. That is precisely how I would describe this book. For those, like me, who share its authors' values, we can't help but find this book and the town that it describes to be spiritually uplifting.

Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree is a beautiful portrait of a place. In this portrait we find a group of people, all of whom beat to their own eccentric drummers, who somehow come together like butterflies on a tree and light up their environment with love, encouragement, and mutual respect. I was particularly taken by the description of the School of Organic Education, which is the antithesis of the modern status-conscious, teach-to-the-test, mind-numbing school that has come to dominate our society in the era of No Child Left Behind. It is clear that the Organic school depicted in this book didn't need slogans to demonstrate its commitment to universal education. But nor did it need to stress test scores. Its faculty were the types who care about creativity, and who value learning for its own sake and wish to inspire students to do the same. The result, no doubt, is a community of lifelong learners -- not mere grade-grubbing pre-professionals.

I could criticize this book by saying that its initial chapters didn't fully grab my interest. But I've never been to Fairhope, nor any town remotely like it, and hail from one of the most self-obsessed, workaholic cultures in the world (the legal world of Washington, D.C.). So perhaps it simply took my mind's eye a bit of time to adjust to the portrait of a utopian town. Once the story turned to the Organic school and some of the more colorful characters who populated the town, I was entranced for the remainder of the book. At that point, you see, I realized what the authors were trying to communicate: if we want our lives to be clothed in beauty -- both as individuals and as a community -- we can find incredible guidance from the people of Fairhope and the philosophy embraced through its institutions.

Non-conformity, collegiality, creativity, playfulness, intellectuality, spirituality -- these are the values of Fairhope. Can they become the values of a community, not of hundreds or thousands, but of millions? Of billions? These are the questions I found myself asking. That's what a true utopian asks.

Take that, you provincial citizens of the rest of Alabama, you who think Fairhope is just a little upscale shopping center with pretentions to Art. Fairhope as it once was was a lesson for you all.

Progress

July 15, 2007

When does the Fairhope Walmart open? Ah, that is the question.

About ten years ago I was on the Fairhope Historic Preservation Committee. I've mentioned this before on the blog.

Our purpose in those days was to celebrate the history of Fairhope and preserve its look of early 20th Century America. We created a tour of homes, showcasing the cottages that once exemplified Fairhope's early days. We saw change coming, but all the new people professed to love the little bungalows and the charm of the patchwork nature of the streetscapes. Some of us remembered the days when all the streets were not paved and children played in the gulleys in their many spare hours.

We found the preservation of the houses and old buildings themselves a hard sell with the business community of Fairhope, so we vowed to elect a mayor who was sensitive to Fairhope's past and try to get a few of our own members on the city council.

This did come to pass in the mid 1990's. A long-term Comprehensive City Plan was devised with the help of consultants, and a historic preservation ordinance was presented to the mayor who promised to help us get it passed. It was in the Comprehensive Plan that the city would be zoned to encourage neighborhood stores and no "big-box" stores would be built within the city limits. All this was considered a coup for our side, creating a small town of walkers, getting exercise in the fresh air and not impinged upon by the dreaded Wal-Marts and other chains. Ultimately all these good intentions came to naught.

The Historic Preservation Ordinance was cast into the wastebin as soon as the mayor heard a few objections. Cottages were demolished and replaced by very large, very expensive homes, almost all designed by the same local architectural firm, and all looking very much alike -- way too big for the lots on which they sat, very imposing and designed (totally unlike the Fairhope equalizing philosophy) to impress the neighbors and the world at large.

By the time the new Walmart was announced, just outside the city limits, a few people, maybe as many as a hundred, picketed with homemade signs announcing "No Walmart in Fairhope" and a great deal of media coverage accompanied them. Technically they didn't have a leg to stand on since the Walmart was not actually "in" Fairhope. A Sam's Club was on the way up in nearby Loxley, and another Walmart is slated to be built in Robertsdale, which will certainly meet with a warmer reception than the one here.

The most hits I get on this blog these days come from the search words "When does Fairhope Walmart open?" I can report that I don't know exactly when it will open. It hasn't been in the newspapers (or on television) yet. But I've been out to the site to snap the photo above, which shows the building completed and a lot of activity therein.

I am not against this development any more than I am "for" it. I don't much like Walmart, and don't frequent the one in nearby Daphne, but I have no doubt this one will have a lot of traffic and that most locals will be pleased to have it so convenient. It's not one of my causes, as historic preservation was. It's just a fact of life. And it will be a fact of Fairhope life any day now.

Spring in Fairhope, 1922

This is an excerpt from the novel That Was Tomorrow, which takes place in Fairhope in 1921-22. It centers around the bohemian community of Fairhope of those days, particularly the teachers at the School of Organic Education. The protagonists all moved to the town as disciples of Marietta Johnson, who was a world-famous proponent of the progressive education movement, and had founded her school as a demonstration of that educational theory. "The Sieve" is the nickname the two young women, Amelia and Avery, have for the cottage they are renting, which has a very leaky roof.

It was still March, but Fairhope was already in the full bloom of spring. Days were sunny, the sky was light blue with little puffs of clouds here and there, and flowers opened their faces on footpaths, roadsides, and in the trees. The first blossoms had appeared as splashes of mauve on redbud trees, but the neighboring dogwoods, with their layered branches now shelves for their white four-leaf blooms, completed the look of lacy color dotting the town.
Years before, the locals had gathered in a civic group to plant azalea bushes around the perimeter of Knoll park. At at this time of year the big, raggedly uneven bushes came into bloom all at once, as if blanketed in pink. Color was accented by large azaleas in white, and there were shades of pink that bloomed in sequence, finishing with the stylish deep, almost red shade known as “Pride of Mobile.”
A wisteria vine, planted on a magnolia tree adjacent to the school’s library, broke into a profusion of lavendar blossoms which exuded a heady sweet fragrance into the breeze. The vine actually connected two trees, and would one day grow big enough to climb on; already it provided a seat between the trees, and the flowers opened with a sweet, springtime smell that would be unforgettable to generations of school children.
Although the temperature usually hovered in the low 80s, humidity was not so high as usual, and it felt at if one could inhale spring itself. The air had a lightness to it that seemed to transfer to the mood of people.
More and more often, Jim Holloway was a visitor to The Sieve. As his romantic relationship with Avery grew more intense, Amelia was more comfortable avoiding the intimate vision of them together, leaving the place to them to go to watch the sunset on the pier, then take a walk around town, sometimes with a book, sometimes taking a notebook to write down ideas for class projects. Some evenings she spent at The Gables, talking with Capt. Cross, who could answer many questions, particularly about history. He recommended books to her, and lent her his copy of Tolstoy’s short stories.
This night, when Amelia came into the parlor at The Gables, Idella Cross presented with an envelope, with her name on it, in Maxwell Taylor’s unmistakable handwriting.
“Mr. Taylor asked me to give this to you,” she said.
“Max? How strange!” Amelia said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t think strange,” Mrs. Cross said simply, and walked away, into the kitchen.
“My Dear Amelia,” read the letter. “I must talk to you. Please meet me at the northeast corner of Knoll Park, Magnolia and Bayview, at 8 P.M. Maxwell Taylor.”
Amelia was somewhat anxious reading this. There could be some bad news that Max wanted to reveal, or some personal situation. Perhaps he was going to be called away for a family emergency, or perhaps he was in some sort of trouble at the school. It was half an hour before the appointed time and there was nothing for Amelia to do but bide her time at The Gables until then.
Capt. Cross was working on a Mozart sonata on the piano, and she had a Rousseau book to read about the nature and needs of the child. She chose her favorite chair in The Gables’ main room, a threadbare old carpet rocker which had the smell of years of musty dust to it. All the same, the book was hardly relaxing, and Capt. Cross’ struggle with Mozart did little to ease her tension.
It was hardly a five-minute walk to the spot designated by Max’s missive. He would be coming from the cottage at Bancroft and Pine Street where he rented a room. She decided to walk down Fairhope Avenue to the Knoll Park corner. It was dark now, a night not unlike when she and Max walked this way to Marie Howland’s, when she got her first look at the little town illuminated by Southern moonlight.
Max was standing near a dogwood tree at the edge of the park. When she got close enough, he said, “Good to see you.”
“Hello, Max.”
What was he going to tell her? Tree frogs were deafening for a moment.
“I see you got my letter,” he said, with a smile curling one corner of his mouth.
There are people, she thought, whose faces are simply not designed for smiling. He fixed her with his eyes, although they seemed to be trembling in a strange and inexplicable way. All she knew to do was look back at him firmly, hoping a steady gaze would relieve the anxiety he seemed to be feeling.
“Yes, although the postal service might be disappointed at the loss of revenue.”
I never thought of that.”
Again there was silence but for the frogs.
“I thought this would be a nice place to meet.”
“And so it is. The night reminds me of our first meeting, walking Marie Howland home.”
He nodded, and clearly began to think about that night.
“This is different,” he said after a pause. “That was before I loved you.”
“Oh, Max!”
“Now let me speak.”
She took a breath and nodded.
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. It was not something I was seeking. ‘It’ found me instead. I’m kind of a solitary fellow, pretty much independent and I’ve always been happy with that—depends upon what you mean by happy, I guess. I was content with it; I didn’t expect more—this damned town—”
“Maybe it’s all these flowers,” she said.
“Flowers and springtime, is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, let me tell you something then. It’s not flowers and springtime! It’s—it’s a wistful scarecrow at Halloween, a pair of eyes glowing in the reflection of firelight, the music of a laugh at a folk tale. It’s delicate hands comforting a weeping child, and feet skipping with children to a tune for a pageant.”
He was warming up now.
It’s camellias and roses for Christmas on a warm day. It’s sunsets on the pier. It’s ‘A Long Long Trail A-Winding.’ It’s the accidental grasp of a hand doing an English country dance. It’s the scent of pine and wisteria in the breeze. It’s this damn, irresistible crazy quilt of a town—but most of all it’s you, my beautiful Amelia. Oh, dear God, let me say that at last. My beautiful Amelia. Okay.” He took a breath, then he launched into an imitation of Ethel Barrymore. “That’s all there is.”
“There isn’t any more?” Amelia picked up on the imitation, which was current in the day, lines in a play the actress had spoken years before. Maxwell at his best was all about the theatre.
“No?” he said, making it a question, imploring her to take it as more than he had said.
“That’s a great deal, Maxwell.”
“Yes. It’s profound. Not so deep as a well, maybe, nor so broad as a church
door—”
“Now you’re quoting.”
“Well, at least I quote from the best.”
“I liked when you were being original.”
“You did?” Now he looked at her, hopeful for the first moment.
“It’s like being in a play.”
“There are times when life is,” Max said. Now he was staring at her, trying to fathom her soul.
“This is new to me,” she said. She was not sure how to capture in words the confusion of feeling that swept over her. But she knew she had to say something.
“Dear Max.”
He stepped over to her and put his arms around her. Amelia did not resist. She knew he was going to kiss her and she would not resist.
The world of sunsets and wisteria blossoms and firelight and folk tales came crashing about her as she responded to his gentle, long kiss. There was a crescendo of tree frogs when he stepped back at last and looked into her face, still with his arms around her. She was unsteady on her feet. Caught in the moment, she could not speak. Her mind was flooded with conflicting thoughts and she felt stirrings and tingling throughout her body that she had never felt before.
All at once Max was laughing.
“You dropped your books,” he said. He picked them up from the patch of grass.“Ah, Tolstoy!” he said, looking at the top book. “How appropriate!”
“Can you blame me?” she said. “About dropping them I mean, not about the books. I feel—a little foolish.”
“Ah no, not foolish, I hope. I did my best—”
“I didn’t mean that. You did very well.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“I think you are more accustomed to being in plays than I,” she said.
“You know this isn’t a play.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s real life.”
“Please, Max,” Amelia said. “This is going to take me some time.”
“Oh, ‘please,’ yourself,” he said. “Do not think so much. Do not make this a problem.
I kissed you in the park, I said some things. You liked it.”
“Yes.”
“I shall walk you home now,” he said. “And then I’ll dance all the way to my own humble abode. Then tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s the one one-word question to which there is no answer,” said Max.
The two walked up Bayview, through the big old oak trees, both of them moved by the moon as it shone through the Spanish moss. He held her hand.
“Avery and Jim are at The Sieve,” she told him.
“That’s good, I think. They are at The Sieve, and you and I are walking down the street. Life goes on.”
She wasn’t sure if Maxwell understood the significance of Jim being with Avery.
“They are a couple.”
“Well, yes, I had hopes. Jim has had his eye on her for months, even before the
departure of the volatile Sarah.”
“I hadn’t seen that,” Amelia said.
He said nothing.
“I shall drop you at the door,” Max said. “I don’t know that I’m able to take any more excitement tonight.”
She turned to him as they reached the door and he leaned down and kissed her cheek.
“Promise me,” he said, “that you won’t think too much.”
“Not an easy promise to keep,” she said.
“Sure it is. If your mind races, just insert thoughts about Tolstoy and Rousseau.”
“And Marietta Johnson?”
“Well, Marietta Johnson too—but I think the distant gods are more comforting than those close to home.”
As she climbed the stairs, Amelia heard his voice in her head, repeating, “Tomorrow is the one-word question to which there is no answer,” and she felt the memory of the kiss suffuse her body with tingling hope.
When she got into her bed a few minutes later, she had not noticed whether or not Jim was still in the house. She wrapped her arms around her spare pillow and wished for her old teddy bear.

That Was Tomorrow is available at amazon.com., Barnes & Noble.com, iBooks, and from my website.

Houses I Have Owned

February 20, 2010

Driving back to my little cottage this morning I noticed that I was not only taking the long route, the scenic route, I was destined to pass three houses that I had owned when I lived in Fairhope. I looped around the long end of Bayview Street, once named Bayview Avenue (a name more melodious, and rhyming to boot), passed the curve, and saw the little creole cottage I once occupied with my late husband Jim Adshead. The once small one-storey has grown over the years and now looks rather imposing from the street, but still says "old Fairhope" with its situation on the lot and the oaks surrounding it. Then I crossed Fairhope Avenue, drove over the filled-in gully where the street replaced what had once been a little footbridge, and on my right was the beautiful bungalow where I last lived in Fairhope, the house I called "The Captain's House," because it had been built by Capt. Roberts, one of the bay boat pilots from Fairhope's early days. I've written much about the captain's house on this blog--using the little search window you can find many descriptions of it. Much of my heart is in both those houses.As I neared my rental, three houses away as a matter of fact, I came upon the house I once owned on the corner of Liberty and Pine Crest. Small and compact, this is a little 1950's cottage, like so many in the "fruit and nut" district (so named because of the preponderance of streets named for fruits and nuts), that doesn't look like much outside but has a lot of charm once you cross its threshold.

All these houses have been extensively remodeled since the days I lived in them. They look spruce and bright, and beckon the passersby to come in for a visit. In many ways I wish I could do just that, but I also know that my time in each of them has passed and I am off on another journey. Happy houses. Beautiful day.

The Fair Hope of Heaven--Reviews Trickle in

February 9, 2009

Reviews for my new book The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia have begun to trickle in on amazon.com

See for yourself:

Some dreams are realistic, some are utopian. I would almost put in the latter category my dream of someday writing a book with the exquisite timing of this one. One day, we find ourselves living in the very prototype of an advanced capitalist society; a few months later, Newsweek adorns its cover with the inscription, “We Are All Socialists Now.” And indeed, that "S" word is now on everyone's lips. But when you read Mary Lois Timbes’ newest work on Fairhope, Alabama, you might not use the word socialist quite so glibly. This is a charming, breezy read about a town founded roughly a century ago on the belief in the idea of Henry George, who believed that land is the only commodity that should be taxed at all, and all citizens should share equitably in the fruits of those taxes.
Yet, as Ms. Timbes tell us, Fairhope was not socialist. It was, in fact, the model of an individualistic society in the sense of celebrating the diversity and accepting the eccentricities of its residents—the kind of characters who typically would be ostracized in small towns and lost in big ones.

Reading about Fairhope would be a delightful experience at any time, but it is especially valuable now, when we are all questioning some of the assumptions upon which our social and economic thinking has been based. Get ready to experience a place where you probably wished you could live, but never imagined existed. You?ll revel in the outstanding accomplishments of its residents of yesteryear and wonder why its current residents haven't been interested in returning the town to the glories of its past. Perhaps after reading this book, they just might.
This was written by Washington D.C. attorney, blogger and author Dan Spiro.

Dr. Paul M. Gaston, author of a number of books about Fairhope, writes:
With insight and sensitivity, Mary Lois Timbes recalls and reveals the Fairhope utopian colony as it once was and has become. The biographical sketches of some of the colony's unique characters will delight those who knew them and attract those who meet them here for the first time.

This from Perdita Buchan, a writer and teacher of writing, whose own book Utopia, New Jersey, inspired me to get back to writing this, my latest opus:
The Fair Hope of Heaven is a charming evocation of the town on Mobile Bay that began as a utopian experiment - and of the many unusual and appealing characters who made it their home from its beginning in 1894 to the present. Eccentric they may have been, but they lived lives valuable to themselves and the community. And it is valuable to have them remembered.


I'm told by John Sledge that there will be a review of the book in the Mobile Press-Register as well. If you want to find out about the book first hand, it's for sale in Fairhope's Page and Palette bookstore.

The Phone Whisperers

August 8, 2007

I rented a movie called Zodiac over the weekend, and it took me back to the 1970's. Someone in the newspaper office flashed a page of political cartoons at our hero -- there were caricatures of Richard Nixon on the page. The movie was full of scenes of people making urgent phone calls from phone booths.

And every once in a while a big clunky phone actually rang -- you remember, "Ring? Ring? Ring?" and when its receiver was picked up and listened to there there was nothing but heavy breathing coming from the other side.

Everything about this movie was pretty close to authentic. Without being maddeningly precious about it, costume and set-wise, people looked pretty much like they once did. (Now that I think about it, I didn't see any men in sideburns or bell bottoms, but going that far would be jarring today.) It's an intense little thriller about a real situation in San Francisco when serial killers were still in the shadows and even the term was not yet in general use.

There are excellent performances. I always admire Robert Downey (and of course my mind always goes to how much I hope he's really past his addiction). In this one his portrayal of an addict with a wasted life is chillingly spot-on. One scene in the newsroom when he is functioning but literally falling-down-drunk is especially well done.

Jake Gillenhahl gives an engrossing performance as the newspaper cartoonist who gets drawn into the murder trail because of his fascination with codes and puzzles, and hangs on to his detective work long after all else have shelved the whole deal. He seems to have the case solved by the end of the film, but there is no real conclusion.

Zodiac is not a chick flick. Not to say that a woman wouldn't enjoy this movie -- I was totally taken in by it -- but there are only a few female characters in it as sort of wallpaper, worrying about their men. The actresses are as good as the actors, and I would say I loved the first-date scene; but this is a movie about men doing police work, on the fringe of the old newspaper world. There is a faint smell of booze, cigarettes and sweat about it. There isn't much light to find your way around. But it captures a real situation in a real time and place and presents us with a constellation of good actors doing their jobs.

Mark Ruffalo plays the police detective who is said to have been the man the movie Bullitt -- there's one to see again! -- was based upon. Brian Cox does a wonderful turn as attorney Marvin Belli, who has the one laugh line in the movie. And the odd Charles Fleischer will scare your socks off. The film's lead suspect is well defined by an actor I never saw before, John Carroll Lynch.

All through the film I was reminded of the little technological advances that have subtly changed our everyday lives, and for some reason when the hero starts getting phone calls with heavy breathing, I remembered how prevalent those "breather" calls used to be. Why isn't anybody breathing heavy on the phone any more? Even 19 years ago, when I first moved back to Fairhope, people were still getting those calls. I got one at my old house on North Bayview. Now I have "Caller ID" which tells me at least the phone number -- or "Unknown Number, Unknown Caller," before I pick up the phone.

Think of all the advances in police work -- phone records, even DNA -- that have made this kind of movie a quaint period piece. And eliminated all those obscene phone calls.

The Day That Was

February 13, 2007

Don't think of this as the day before Valentine's Day, think of it as the day after yesterday, I say to myself. What is all this new fuss over Valentine's Day anyhow? It's a nice holiday, particularly if you like roses and chocolate, or are in the business of manufacturing or selling either one, but if you're an ordinary civilian with nobody to pressure to buy stuff for you, it's not much of a day. And it can even be a downer.

So I'll focus on yesterday rather than tomorrow, before today really starts.

I began by posting a rather revealing commentary on arsenic on school grounds, responding to somebody from Georgia who found this site last week using the search engine words "fairhope alabama arsenic school." I decided to lay that story to rest once and for all by telling the true version of it.

Then I got an email from a sympathetic friend who said I should say nothing about the story at this time, certainly not on the Internet, but I had written it so carefully I was loath to part with my blogpost for the day. However, the mechanism for checking traffic on the blog was down and I couldn't tell if I'd had two hits or two hundred, where they came from, and whether they might be from someone who would want to use this arsenic post against me in some way I might not be able to anticipate. As the day wore one I began to become a little anxious, and by late afternoon I went on and deleted it.

Some of you got to read it. Here's your chance to weigh in -- should I re-post at some point or was I simply beating a dead horse? Was it a valid topic for a blog? Did it shed any light on the controversy that raged in Fairhope four years ago? Am I simply adding fuel to the flame intended to destroy a precious part of Fairhope life?

It's gone now, but resides somewhere on my hard drive and I can easily post it again if there is demand.

The mail in the early afternoon brought a rejection letter from the agent to whom I'd submitted my latest manuscript. A bummer, but not a huge surprise. The letter was nice and said that this particular agency did not feel personally passionate about the book but that I should not in any way consider that a comment on the quality of my work. Okay, I'll try to manage that. The manuscript was not returned, and as I pondered why that might be I came upon the last sentence of the letter, "We have discreetly recycled your materials."

Discreetly recycled??? What will bert bananas say about that? Visions of these attractive female executives at a shredder, discreetly recycling, leap into my imagination. It's not a pretty picture. I think I'd rather have the ms. back, complete with smudged fingerprints and coffee stains on it. I think I'd rather have it back even if it's still pristine and crisp, as if nobody had even looked at it.

I have a nephew who is a professional writer and jazz critic, with a few books to his credit, who promised to submit the book to his agent if the first one doesn't work out. If that doesn't happen I'll just start another book, I guess.

Or maybe I'll get back to daily blogging.