Headlines become real after you have traveled.
I took this photograph in the spring of 1999. To me, it always embodied the spirit of the Nepalese people I met. These scrappy people can hold their own against any lion. This square may be destroyed now, but this spirit will carry them through.
This is the bronze head of the Roman emperor Augustus with eyes of glass and stone.
He ruled until 14 AD. This was made around the same time, probably in Alexandria, but this was found buried in the Sudan. It was part of a larger statue once. When Meroitic tribesmen raided that part of Roman Africa, the statue of their oppressor was decapitated and the head was buried under a pathway as a symbolic act—the victors tread over him daily.
That act of destruction is exactly what enabled the head to be preserved until now. Now it’s a star attraction in Room 70 of London’s British Museum.
I have been in London for the past few weeks updating my Frommer’s guide for the 2016 edition. I come a few times a year, but for this trip, I brought a Jawbone. I wanted to know just how much I’m walking each day as I do my rounds.
14,000 steps and 7.12 miles. 18,000 steps and 9.25 miles. 18,400 steps and 9.31 miles. 24,000 steps and 12.2 miles.
The thing about guidebooks is you have to both cover the old—to notate how it’s changed and if it’s still worthwhile—as much as the new, and that requires discovery. Both require constant motion. That includes a new hotel every night or, at most, every two nights. I’ve become a master of packing, especially as it pertains to public transit.
There are times it gets lonely. But there are even more times when I take a look around and I feel so grateful for what I am allowed to do that I have to think about something else quickly, before I get misty.
Having a life in which you’re always learning something, in which stimulations is constantly around the corner, is now a habit with me. I don’t know if I could live any other way now.
Even if at times it can leave me exhausted at the end of every day.
Apple preserves, picnics, and Christian Supremacy: The Indiana Klan’s call for fellowship in 1923 (Credit: Indiana Historical Society)
There is no route to the present except through the past.
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In 1851, Indiana’s Constitution banned black people and half-black people from moving there. Any white person caught helping a black person move there was fined as much as $500.
In the 1920s, between one-third and one-fourth of Indiana-born white men were enrolled in the Ku Klux Klan. The Indiana Klan was the largest and most energetic in the country, and more than 118,000 members were brought in between 1922 and 1924. It was sold as a Christian organization, whitewashed as a “populist” movement. One scholar from the University of California calculated that some 350,000 Indianans joined. If you weren’t in the Klan, you were not considered to be the cream of the community. There were even Klan-associated groups for women and children.
Indiana also hosted the single largest Klan meeting in history at Melfalfa Park in Kokomo, held in honor of America’s founding on July 4, 1923. One of its main purposes was to collect money for a hospital for Klan members—so they wouldn’t have to be treated by Catholics.
Members of the Indiana Klan were largely educated, middle-class Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ. No Catholics, no Jews, no blacks.
The Klan in Indiana wasn’t just about segregation. It undertook what it saw as a moral crusade against un-Christian behavior, fighting for the abolition of alcohol and the shuttering of stores on the Sabbath.
The Klan’s control of elected officials was attained not in the South, but in Indiana. With such strong numbers, the Klan was able to sweep the legislature with Republican and elect its candidate for governor, Ed Jackson. It marched, burned crosses, published the Indianapolis-based The Fiery Cross, and boycotted businesses with which it disagreed. It was all in the name of Protestant Christianity and American patriotism.
Seems a nice fellow: D. C. Stephenson led the Indiana Klan in the name of Christ
The man who engineered the Indiana Klan’s rise, coal bond salesman David Curtis Stephenson, became Grand Dragon. In 1925, at the height of his power, he savagely raped and orally attacked Madge Oberholtzer, who ran a literacy program and whom he met at Gov. Jackson’s inaugural ball. “He chewed her like a cannibal,” says one modern historian Wyn Craig Wade. Disfigured and distraught, Oberholtzer swallowed poison, but she had her vengeance. On her deathbed, she issued a statement telling everyone what Stephenson had done.
He wasn’t worried. “I am the law in Indiana,” he scoffed. But when the governor turned his back on him, Stephenson unleashed details about the bribery that ran Indiana’s Klan politics. Oberholtzer died, possibly of human bites, Stephenson was sent to prison for three decades, and the glorious Christian leadership of the Klan crumbled in shame.
The seeds of hatred and violence that Indiana had sown would bear strange fruit for years to come. In 1930, black teenagers Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were murdered by an Indiana crowd in Marion, and the image of their hanged corpses is one of the most indelible images of lynching, an icon of American horror.
In 1995, a contractor in Noblesville cracked open an old trunk and discovered a list of Klan members from the 1920s. Everyone on the list was dead by then, but out of respect for their families, the names were suppressed and their identities were swept under the rug. The children who were raised by the Klan members were spared the reminder or the knowledge.
Millions of children who grew up in Indiana in the 1920s, the grandparents of Indianans today, were raised by Klan members.
Last year, residents in Winchester, Indiana, reported seeing flyers drumming up membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
Indiana’s Klan anti-communism propaganda could be mistaken for something a modern Indiana governor might think—if it weren’t signed by the Klan. (Credit: Indiana Historical Society)
Indiana’s history is, in a word, sordid.
Its past record of “religious freedom” movements should burn in memory.
As a travel writer and editor, I now will not cover Indiana. I won’t subject my readers to potential discrimination.
Sweet Main Street America: Kokomo, Indiana, where the world’s largest Klan meeting was held in 1923: 200,000 people. (Credit: OZinOH/Flickr)
Its Playbill in the 1990s, when I worked there.
The Fantasticks is closing in New York City. For good this time.
It’s not hard to have a personal relationship with a show that has been playing more or less consistently for 55 years—a lot of people were involved in presenting it over these nearly six decades. In the 1990s, I was one of them. I served as a sub assistant stage manager when it was playing at its original theatre, the Sullivan Street Playhouse.
I manually ran the lights using a slider control board that would have been considered low-tech even for a junior high prom. Every night, I preformed a ballet with the cast using only my fingers. I was hidden up in a booth and could only see through a tiny window, but my hands played a role in the pace of the show and the way I flicked my cues colored to the evening’s mood. I felt like one of the performers. My fingers still know many of the cues whenever I hear the music, and I still get a little misty when I hear its closing chords.
The toilets stank, the theatre had the mildewy atmosphere of the horse barn it used to be, but the show was cheap to produce—a stick, a sheet, a paper moon, a trick trunk, some colored confetti that it was my job to sweep up—so there were weekday nights that the cast outnumbered the audience. It did better with tourists over the weekends, and that way it plodded along like a zombie until it found itself deep into its AARP years.
While I was subbing there, a fresh-off-the-bus Oklahoma actress named Kristin Chenoweth was cast as the lead ingenue of Luisa. It was her first New York show, and her offbeat comic timing blew everyone away—or almost everyone. Although her memoir tells a different tale, the rumor around the Playhouse was that she was sacked by one of the authors for being too weird. I won’t say which writer did it since I got the story second-hand, but it’s not hard to imagine that her quirkiness might have taken some old-fashioned types aback at first.
This was Kristin Chenoweth then (with her Matt, Richard Roland).
“He said she was the worst Luisa he have ever seen,” went the grapevine gossip. She was gone before some of us could say goodbye. I came in one night and asked why a new girl was on and Jim, the stage manager, told me the story while my mouth fell open.
Everyone in the cast and crew was appalled because we loved her and she was a joy to work with. She wasn’t terrible. She was a revelation beyond her years, hilarious, and the lyrical power of her voice could make the equipment tremble, or maybe it was the rickety lumber that held everything together. We were depressed that anyone would have the poor judgment to fire a talent so singular. Her book doesn’t mention the story as I heard it, but it doesn’t matter much now: She did just fine in the end, which makes me happy. I’m happy how she was too generous to drag her old boss through the mud in her memoir over a blip in her ascendance—she allows other people to tell the tales. And it’s inspiring how she didn’t allow the letdown of her first big New York job to deter her from trying again. She kept going.
So did the show. The press generally pretends that the current production at the Snapple Theatre Center is the original, but it isn’t. The original one closed in 2002 after nearly 42 years at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, which was subsequently torn down, and four years later an identical production re-opened at the Snapple. At nine years, even the run of the revival was impressive, made possible in part by its no-budget production costs.
(In between, a horrible 1995 film version was shot, then wisely shelved for five years, then released with far less embarrassment than it deserved; it was execrable and contained none of the charm that made the stage show work.
The show closes on May 3rd, its 55th anniversary on the dot. It will have racked up 20,672 performances—enough to make its original investors—or at this point, more likely their descendants—enough profit to buy second homes.
You could write a book about the long history of The Fantasticks, and in fact, several people have. I covered its history for the back page of Entertainment Weekly in 1997 (I got to ask Robert Goulet about his experiences in it, and he issued one of my favorite quotes of all time: “Honestly, I worked my bananas off!”). You can read that article here.
A few years ago, upon the show’s half-century mark, I interviewed a few of these lucky investors on the stage of The Fantasticks for Aol. Donald C. Farber, whom you’ll meet, was a close friend of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr—and his literary agent. I had to restrain myself from asking about the writer.Now around 90, he just released a memoir about Vonnegut, I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life.
Here’s the video. They’ve since made another 5 years’ worth of cash.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icKH_v6p-w4[/tube]
Here’s a delightful anecdote: A Civil War soldier had his leg amputated, and while he recovered in the hospital, he carved this pin for his sweetheart out of his own leg bone. Who’s this lucky gal Lizzie, you ask? Well, we will never know, because he died of infection before he could tell the nurses. One of them kept it.
You can find this unhygienic yet heartwarming artifact at the Atlanta History Center—if you’re paying attention and scrutinizing the cases the way I do.
Will a part of your leg bone be in a museum case in 150 years? Be my sweetheart and it could come true.
This painting cost £10 million, which was recently raised by 10,000 donations that ranged £1 to £20,000. Until now, it was hidden away in private hands, a half-ignored trophy for the rich, for 400 years. £10 million was the bounty to rescue it from the manor house, as it were. I wonder what the owner did with the cash that was raised from those of far more modest means.
It’s Van Dyck’s self-portrait, from the late 1630s. Now the world’s most expensive selfie is one of its oldest.
You can find it at the National Portrait Gallery in London once it completes its three-year victory lap of Britain’s public galleries.
Me in St. Petersburg. This fabulousness was bankrolled by work.
Anyone with a laptop and fingers can now transmit their adventures in a new genre of humbebrag lit that can alternately inspire and inflame.
But here’s the elephant in the chat room: Some travelers have more resources than you.
Seems to me we have made great strides in using the Web to plumb new cultures, previously hidden facts, and other realities. Bloggers reveal every angle about themselves, no matter how personal.
Except one. Of your favorite bloggers, or of your favorite writers in the travel section, who talks openly about how they’re funding their public displays of inspection?
There are steadily tweeting travelers who are quick to count the countries they have seen and flout their upgrades and elite status, but who confesses the origin of the dollars that made it all happen?
I’m not talking about sponsored trips. I don’t have much objection to freebies (provided, in my opinion, they don’t ensure gushing press—although without an organization to oversee their ethics, who’s to say which bloggers speak true). Although the reverse alchemic combination of travel’s high expense and publications’ low editorial budgets has made professional travel writing a pursuit best suited to rich people, that is not to say there’s anything faulty with the discoveries that come out of well-funded trips.
I just wish I knew now and then. Because one of the essential tenets of emotionally resonant writing is that I can put myself in the shoes of the person I’m reading.
We all want to visit Yap and Bhutan, and it’s very nice to see that Instagram shot from that Grenada all-inclusive, but be honest: Do I really stand a chance of seeing it, too?
That’s why there is two kinds of travel coverage. One is what I call wish book: You read it to peer through a portal and to dream you are there, too. The other is service journalism. Sometimes, they’re combined, but usually, the service information is relegated to parentheses or a sidebar. The most detailed service journalism outlets are gradually going out of business in favor of gossipy click fodder, which seems to indicate that increasingly, readers would rather dream than do.
But how many times have you read something and wondered how on earth the writer was able to swing it?
Money is the blind spot in most travel coverage, and the system is set up that way. I have been pitched by publications whose editors told me never to mention costs—as if readers don’t care. Talk of money is often considered rude, a transgression against the reader or worse, against advertisers.
As Western society metastasizes into class inequality, this money question matters.
The forces that want you to drop a bankroll are more powerful than the ones that want you to have a spiritual connection that costs nothing. It’s more seductive to paint romantic images of self-actualization and sensual indulgence than it is to hammer out vulgar discussions of practicality.
Writers go into molecular detail about food, a vital resource, so why not go into detail about the peculiar pressures that limited monetary resources put on a traveling soul? Has travel writing become so presentational, so stage-managed, that the realities of the person delivering their reflections is no longer expected to be present in the work? The best actors bring their whole selves to the role, but travel writers stage little productions in which the destination, not themselves, is the only star being exposed.
Perhaps resources should more often be a natural part of the narrative, partly to build trust and rapport with the reader, but also partly because if they’re not mentioned, I’m going to wonder. Is this just a playboy bragging about his conquest? Is this a form of condescension—that they are the adventurer but I am only a lowly reader?
Some of the greatest historical travelers — Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin — were able to go places because they were rich or had patrons, but their audience usually knew it. Ulysses S. Grant took a post-presidential worldwide trip so epic that it contributed to his bankruptcy and required him to provide for his family by selling his memoirs.
Being wealthy didn’t take anything away from their wisdom. It’s not an ethical accusation. But knowing my favorite blogger makes it happen because they have a trust fund would, inversely, make me feel less left behind—because I’d know how they got a head start.
Even Anthony Trollope knew this. As he wrote in Travelling Sketches, when it comes to voyagers, “to do all that can be done for the money is the one great object which he has ever in view.”
I didn’t write this. It’s a by a man named Jordan Anderson, who with one letter achieved more for blistering satire than an entire bookshelf of Hitchens or Vidal. It’s a blast of sarcasm so well-contained it could give you goose bumps. I love it.
It’s a simple setup. Former slave owner Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson returned to his farm after the Civil War and found, like so all the other farmers in the devastated South, that everything was destroyed, his livestock was dead, and his 32 pieces of human “property” had gained independence and made hasty use of it.
The clueless P. H. Anderson, like so many Southern farmers, had no Plan B if he lost the war. Without slaves to make the economy run, the South was a ravaged backwater. All he could think to do was write his former prize slave, Jordan, who had decamped to Ohio.
Jordan received the plea, and he sat down to dictate his response to a friend. This friend, gigglingly named Valentine, instantly recognized the brilliance of the answer—few letters by former slaves to their masters were so slyly chastising—and so he gave a copy of the Cleveland newspaper, which published it. It became a national sensation. I can only imagine what Colonel P. H. Anderson did with the original.
Different versions of the letter bear various spellings of the writer’s name, which at the time was new to pen and ink. Until he was a Freedman, Jordan’s name was never recorded in the slave schedule—just his gender and age. He was about 40 when he wrote this, the prime of his life having been spent in bondage, and his name being both borrowed and new.
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson — and the children — Milly, Jane, and Grundy — go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve — and die, if it come to that — than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
The letter was reprinted across the country.
Jordan Anderson spent the second half of his life in Dayton and died in 1907. Today, Big Spring, Tennessee, where he was kept, is a ghost town near Lebanon, southwest of Nashville.
Jordan’s letter is taught in history books. Colonel Anderson had to sell the estate for far less than it was worth just to get out of debt, and died just two years later at age 44.
I love when small, throwaway moments become big history. Did you do something today that might accidentally illuminate an age?
Sally is Under There: Nollendorfplatz, Shöneberg, Berlin, in 1946
The current revival of Cabaret on Broadway is a perfect copy of the revival that opened in 1998. Back then, a mostly unknown actor named Alan Cumming instantly made his career by emerging from darkness to play the Emcee, and Natasha Richardson was his Sally Bowles. The show played in a ruined theatre, the Henry Miller’s, and as directed by Sam Mendes, was suffused with the sleazy, perverted atmosphere of a country slumming before the dawn of certain destruction.
Now it’s back. Same old sleaze, same old impending doom. Alan Cumming seems not to have gained a pound in 16 years. The script is still brilliant, the songs unimpeachable.
If you had hit me on the head during intermission in March, 1998, and I had woken up for the second act last week, I may not have noticed the difference.
Yet the way we receive the show in 2015 is completely different. Because Berlin is different. We are different.
Cabaret is basically a two-and-a-half-hour suicide note by its characters. Sally Bowles would rather dissolve in gin, Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz want to hide. Fraulein Kost wants to screw and salute her captors. The Emcee wants to get high and hump things. In a subtle bit of cultural arrogance, only the American seems to see the truth. Like him, the audience knows they’re doomed because we knew Berlin was doomed.
At least, audiences used to know that. No one under 30 remembers the Berlin Wall when it stood. In fact, no one under 30 thinks Berlin is a bad place to be anymore. No use mourning Berlin when you’d love to live there yourself.
A while ago, I wrote about how audiences of 1949 interpreted South Pacific in a different way than we do today because they perceived so many things that were going unsaid. Cabaret is the same way.
Cabaret was devastating when it premiered in 1966. The Wall was just a few years old and the city was known for its ignoble rubble and for being the nerve center for Hell. It was interminably lost. That original production catered to post-Eisenhower sensibilities—the hairstyles were kewpie beehive, the sexuality muffled, the menace of racism flattened into innuendo—but for people who had lived through the cataclysm, it was horrifying to watch characters blithely booze and drink as the architects of the Final Solution crept in.
She’s really good. Like spectacular good. But ‘Cabaret’ is now more about the changing stars, and the original star used to be that faded starlet Berlin
Cabaret‘s main characters live on Nollendorfplatz. They talk about it throughout the show. Past audiences would have known that by 1945, Nollendorfplatz would be blasted to oblivion, so when Fraulein Schenider says she’s going to hang on to her boarding house for security, the audience of years past knew she’d be a refugee very soon. Today, Nollendorfplatz just a name. In Berlin, it’s wholly rebuilt, trendy, and a center of Berlin’s all-night gay culture.
When we sat in the theatre watching Cabaret in 1998, we had a faint sense of all that had been lost, though not nearly as much as our parents did in 1966. In 1998, the Wall was only 9 years down. There was still a sense of wasted decades, of a teetering security, of an unknown future. Berlin wasn’t a sure thing.
Today, though, although the show is identical, this generation doesn’t see Berlin’s position in the world as worth a kyrie. It’s the party center of Europe, the place everyone wants to be, where art and sex are embraced and understood. In fact, it’s a lot like Berlin in the 1920s again. Why cry? Things bounce back. Life really is a you-know-what.
Even Berlin has erased what was so terrifying about Berlin, as I discovered when I tried to find remnants of its Wall on a recent trip.
Cabaret is now mostly about something else. It’s about celebrity. The Emcee was once a sinewy, shadowy figure, a slithering androgynous question mark who seduced those around him into a vortex of capitulation.
Now he’s a rascal! Alan Cumming is an eccentric pro, like Zero Mostel with a meth look. His appearances on the stage elicit not malaise borne of historical context but appreciative giggles. At one point, he asks an audience member what they think of his “1920s spaceman costume.” He’s less Emcee than Puck, a goth drinking buddy, a Will Rogers with glittery nipples. His Sally Bowles is filled by a rotating roster of capable young movie actresses testing their mettle, and people come to see how well they handle the songs. With the specter of a raped Berlin no longer the ghost in the room, Cabaret is now as much about modern American box office stars as it is about the warnings of societal complacency.
That’s how it goes. The show has always been a starmaker. Joel Grey was a nobody, too, when he created the Emcee. He became a star, too, playing him for two decades, but I’ll bet he didn’t give the ball game scores to the audience in between numbers, as I half expected Cumming to do.
Life is a you-know-what, old chum
You could argue that the Cabaret of today still presents stronger stakes for its Jewish character, Herr Schultz (Danny Burstein) than it does for its Christian and heterosexual characters. Many of us have forgotten about Berlin The Lost City, but few of us forget what happened to the Jews.
When, at the end, director Sam Mendes visually references the Holocaust, the audience sobers up a little, but that’s a modern embellishment, a dutiful coda. It’s worth noting that Joe Masteroff’s book never mentions the Holocaust. Instead, it runs on foreboding and depends on us to supply the context. Which may be why Mendes needed to remind us of the Holocaust at all—Berlin’s too cool to feel sorry for anymore.
This revival of Cabaret is closing after a year. The prior revival lasted nearly six years. Alan Cumming can be seen each week on The Good Wife. There’s a deeper, more worrying point to make about our memory of history, but I won’t make it. Berlin’s a blast. Why cry?