Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

* OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***



The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival honors new American plays that provide dynamic performance opportunities for college-aged actors.
The festival endeavors both to recognize playwrights for their outstanding work and to provide a resource for universities across the country to identify dynamic plays with robust roles for college-aged actors for production at their institutions. The festival features both a full-length and short play division.

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The Eric H. Weinberger Award for Emerging Librettists is a juried cash and production grant given annually to support the early work and career of a deserving musical theatre librettist. It commemorates the life and work of playwright/librettist Eric H. Weinberger (1950-2017), who was a Drama Desk Award nominee for Best Book of a Musical (Wanda’s World), and the playwright/librettist of Class Mothers ’68, which earned Pricilla Lopez a Drama Desk Award nomination. 

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Sundog Theatre in NYC is seeking one-act plays for “Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry 2022”
Sundog Theatre’s 20th annual presentation of new and original, one-act plays about our favorite boats, the Staten Island Ferries.
Since it is our 20th anniversary, the themes are “celebration” or “anniversary”.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** BASED ON A TRUE STORY ***

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, has put more distance between the theater and the monologist Mike Daisey, who was found to have fabricated details in his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which just finished a hugely successful run at the Public.

In remarks offered Thursday night before a panel discussion on the fallout from the revelations, Mr. Eustis was more critical of Mr. Daisey than he had been after the radio show “This American Life” first disclosed that incidents recounted in the stage production, about Apple’s labor practices in China, had been invented or embellished. The radio show had run a lengthy excerpt of “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” only to retract it after discovering the inaccuracies.

“We would not have called it nonfiction had we known that incidents described in the piece were fabricated,” Mr. Eustis said, reading a statement. “We didn’t know, and the result was that our audience was misled. The piece had a powerful, positive impact on the world, and we are proud of that. But that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of honoring our contract with our audience.”

More...

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The musical only barely targets Thomas Jefferson as a "slaver," but most of the real life-characters in the story, including George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, and the Schuyler family, also were. It's unclear if Hamilton was too; the evidence is scant. But according to historian Michelle DuRoss, the politician's grandson alleged that Hamilton owned one or more enslaved people, referencing a purchase in the politician's expense book. And as Gordon-Reed said before, he helped his in-laws, namely Angelica Schuyler and her husband, purchase enslaved people.

Whether Hamilton was a slave owner or not, Miranda understands that the statesman was "complicit in the system" of slavery, despite his vocal stances against it. "[Slavery] is in the third line of our show. It's a system in which every character in our show is complicit in some way or another," the composer and actor told NPR's Fresh Air podcast last week.

More...


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Saegert attended a performance of The King and I, along with nine other descendants of Leonowens, including a great-great-great-great-granddaughter, at the Princess of Wales Theatre on Sunday.

Leonowens’ memoirs inspired a novel, which then inspired the films and musical that popularized the story. A dive into the actual facts of her life, however, reveals many things outside of this well-known narrative.

“While the musical is a treat in terms of the musicality and the songs, it really is a small portion of Anna,” Saegert said.

Leonowens, Saegert said, was born in Bombay, India, not Wales as she had said during her life, and is thought to have had Indian heritage on one side of her family.

“She was Eurasian, and after becoming a widow with two children, she faked it that she was a Brit, from England,” Saegert said. Her husband had died some years before she accepted the job in Thailand.

“The fact that she was not a Brit but a Eurasian is not something that in today’s world would be thought of as a limitation. In Victorian times it most certainly (was).”

More...

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Kaufman goes deep in Quills, but in the end he may stand back from the abyss, too. He’s a bit too much of the civil libertarian to do full justice to Sade, who, for all his preening decadence here, is never depicted in the full measure of his atrociousness. Sade catalogued and exulted in practically every perversion imaginable, but the words we hear spoken from his works are for the most part weak derivatives of the real thing; likewise Sade’s monstrous crimes, while alluded to, are not emphasized. These crimes, which included the torture and mutilation of young women, with possible intent to murder, were at least as responsible for getting Sade repeatedly locked up as anything he wrote.

Quills is one of the few really good American movies of the year, and it’s bursting with intellectual energy and standout performances and good old-fashioned Grand Guignol theatrics. But for all its attention to ambiguity, it’s also pushing a rather neat formulation: In order to know virtue, we must know vice. The film is offered up to us as a kind of curative. But since Sade’s vice has been adulterated by the filmmakers, our ensuing knowledge of virtue is a bit too easily won.

More...

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Shakespeare is notorious for rewriting history to fit his dramatic needs. Combining characters, omitting important events, and making up iconic scenes in the hopes of boosting the drama of the story all work together to create plays more founded in fiction than fact. For instance, Henry VI Part One contains one of literature’s most iconic and exciting scenes— the plucking of red and white roses, initiating the start of the infamous War of the Roses. It’s a tense, striking scene that sparks the brutal wars of the next few plays. It’s because of this famous scene that we call the conflict the War of the Roses. So what makes this scene really amazing is that it probably never happened.

There is absolutely no evidence that either side ever plucked colored roses during an argument. On the contrary, the Yorkist white rose and the Lancastrian red were heraldic badges worn by either side. Shakespeare’s political flower-picking was really only a metaphor for the noblemen siding with their closest kinsmen. Before Shakespeare, no one thought much of the red and white roses. They were just pieces of the heraldry, nothing more.

More...

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We feel increasing, wrenching desperation watching this story of coercive confinement, although more and more frustrated with Cosson as an interviewer. He asks questions, but they are of the extremely basic kind. Perhaps he was being understandably gentle with his friend’s mom, but interviews are interviews, and a play is a play—and too much in Dana H. is simply left unasked and unanswered, such as where was Hnath in all this?

He was a New York University student at the time, and the play does not make clear if he knew about his mother’s kidnapping. Indeed, it doesn’t make clear if law enforcement knew and was trying to find her. It seems odd that Higginbotham was kidnapped and essentially left her life for five months, and no family or authorities attempted anything to return her to safety. (The Daily Beast sent a list of questions to the play’s spokesperson for Hnath and received no response.)

More...


***
Mike Daisey has been a monologuist for more than 20 years. Not continuously — though it has sometimes felt like it.

So his disappearance from the stage during quarantine was an especially vivid marker of the pandemic’s devastating effect on live theater. Likewise, his re-emergence in a new show, which popped up on Friday night like a bud in early spring, signifies the beginning of a long-hoped-for renewal.

But what will that renewal be like?

On the evidence of the 90-minute monologue Daisey performed in front of an actual audience at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, it will be — at least at first — a hasty and hazy affair with redeeming glints of brilliance.

The haste is to be expected: Daisey was eager to be the first actor back onstage on the first day permitted by new state regulations. That was Friday, when plays, concerts and other performances were allowed to resume at reduced capacity, with the audience masked and distanced. At the 99-seat Kraine, that meant a sellout crowd of 22; to accommodate others — in all, 565 tickets were sold — the show, produced by Daisey and Frigid New York, was also livestreamed.

More...

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Anthropomorphism

  

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities.



Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather.



Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals.

A Professor's Song

 A Professor's Song

By John Berryman

(. . .rabid or dog-dull.) Let me tell you how

The Eighteenth Century couplet ended. Now

Tell me. Troll me the sources of that Song---

Assigned last week---by Blake. Come, come along,

Gentleman. (Fidget and huddle, do. Squint soon.)

I want to end these fellows all by noon.

 

'That deep romantic chasm'---an early use;

The word is from the French, by our abuse

Fished out a bit. (Red all your eyes. O when?)

'A poet is a man speaking to men':

But I am then a poet, am I not?---

Ha ha. The radiator, please. Well, what?

 

Alive now---no---Blake would have written prose,

But movement following movement crisply flows,

So much the better, better the much so,

As burbleth Mozart. Twelve. The class can go.

Until I meet you, then, in Upper Hell

Convulsed, foaming immortal blood: farewell.

 



There you go!


 

Don't believe the media hype that we Americans are a nasty mean people

 4 men push elderly woman in broken scooter home in pouring rain

Lending a helping hand will always be appreciated.

Four young men learned that firsthand after they received praise for escorting a retirement home resident back to her residence when her scooter broke down in the middle of a storm.

Katty Castro, a public relations representative at the Florida Living Independent Community in Seminole County, Florida, witnessed the kind act and snapped pictures of the group who valiantly pushed the resident’s scooter to her planned destination.

"Since this is a very quiet neighborhood I was surprised to hear a commotion, laughs and four gentlemen pushing one of my lady residents under a heavy storm in Florida," Castro told Fox News. "They were pushing her up the big slope toward her residence. These heroes were so focused on helping regardless of the inclement weather and they were even covering her with an umbrella, which showed more compassion on their part."

Castro said she went on to thank the men "for their kindness and asked them for a group picture" when they were done with their task and shared the moment with her community on Nextdoor – a hyperlocal social networking app where people can share what’s going on in their neighborhood.

Initially, Castro thought the helpful team of four were local teens from the high school next door, but she later learned the men were employees of Rebounderz Adventure Parks.

The men were passing through the area after a hard day’s work, but noticed the woman just when they were about to turn onto an eight-lane highway.

"[We] noticed the woman was clearly experiencing a malfunction with her mobile scooter," said JohnMorgan Massa, a corporate general manager at Rebounderz Adventure Parks, in an interview with Fox News.

 

"We were tired, dirty and wanted to get back to the hotel; but, knew without a doubt that regardless of our long day, it certainly wasn't worse than the day this lady was having. She literally had a plastic bag on her head to keep her hair dry," he added. "We knew we couldn't leave her in the rain, in the middle of the road, frantically trying to get her scooter to work again."

Massa and his colleagues reportedly made a three-quarter-mile trek as they carefully pushed the resident while she remained on her scooter, according to Castro.

"Those scooters are heavy, add the resident’s weight, her groceries and collapsing tires, the sum is a whole workout. But, I am proud of their sacrifice," Castro said.

Massa said helping the resident was a no-brainer.

"We just wanted her to get home safely," he explained. "We never expected recognition, just helping a fellow member of our community."

When it comes down to the viral attention they’re receiving, Massa said he and his team "could have never expected this" and hope that people feel encouraged to help their neighbors when duty calls.

"Holding a door, smiling, picking up someone’s spilled groceries, reaching for an item on the top shelf in the grocery store; and, yes, helping someone whose electric wheelchair broke down in the rain are things almost anyone can do," Massa told Fox News.

Castro also hopes this moment inspires others to step up when times get tough, even "when the environment is rough."

"As a mom of teenagers I want my children to grow up like these 'modern heroes,’ to make a difference each day no matter the environment," Castro said. "In these rough COVID times, let’s demonstrate compassion to one another."

Cortney Moore is a Digital Associate Writer/Producer for Fox Business. Follow her on Twitter at @CortneyMoore716.

 






Word origins, Mark Pembrooke on Tik Tok











 

Interesting


 

In 1887, pioneering journalist Nellie Bly, (Elizabeth Jane Cochran) had herself committed to a New York asylum for 10 days to expose the horrific conditions the patients were subjected to.

 

Burdened with theater and arts reporting, Bly talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the New York World and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island, now named Roosevelt Island.

 It was not an easy task for Bly to be admitted to the Asylum: she first decided to check herself into a boarding house called Temporary Homes for Females. She stayed up all night to give herself the wide-eyed look of a disturbed woman and began making accusations that the other boarders were insane. Bly told the assistant matron: "There are so many crazy people about, and one can never tell what they will do."

She refused to go to bed and eventually scared so many of the other boarders that the police were called to take her to the nearby courthouse. Once examined by a police officer, a judge, and a doctor, Bly was taken to Blackwell's Island.

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced the deplorable conditions firsthand. After ten days, the asylum released Bly at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation, prompted the asylum to implement reforms, and brought her lasting fame. She had a significant impact on American culture and shed light on the experiences of marginalized women beyond the bounds of the asylum as she ushered in the era of stunt girl journalism.

In 1893, Bly used the celebrity status she had gained from her asylum reporting skills to schedule an exclusive interview with the allegedly insane serial killer Lizzie Halliday.

Biographer Brooke Kroeger stated that:  Her two-part series in October 1887 was a sensation, effectively launching the decade of “stunt” or “detective” reporting, a clear precursor to investigative journalism and one of Joseph Pulitzer’s innovations that helped give “New Journalism” of the 1880s and 1890s its moniker. The employment of “stunt girls” has often been dismissed as a circulation-boosting gimmick of the sensationalist press. However, the genre also provided women with their first collective opportunity to demonstrate that, as a class, they had the skills necessary for the highest level of general reporting. The stunt girls, with Bly as their prototype, were the first women to enter the journalistic mainstream in the twentieth century.

 



The other day I saw a young man fix a rubber mat that was twisted in a door way, he said to me "Someone could trip on that and get hurt"


 

A few years ago I took to feeding the crow family in my yard (This is not one of them) and its become a complete and interesting delight.


 

OV Wright

Singer Overton Vertis "O. V." Wright is generally regarded as a blues artist by African-American fans in the Deep South; he is also regarded as one of Southern soul's most authoritative and individual artists. Wright's hits were much more popular in the deep South. Suffering from a lifelong drug problem, Wright was jailed on narcotics offenses during the mid-1970s, and, despite a new recording contract with Hi Records that led to a series of new album releases, commercial success did not follow his release from incarceration. Wright continued to battle drug addiction in the last years of his life, and in 1980, he died from a heart attack in Mobile, Alabama, at the age of 41











 

The Iceman Cometh

 

 Eugene O’Neill delayed taking The Iceman Cometh to Broadway for 7 years (fearing that it would be rejected) before finally relenting and opening the production on 9 Oct. 1946. 22-year-old Marlon Brando was offered the part of Don Parritt, but turned it down as he thought the play was “ineptly written and poorly constructed.”

The Broadway production was a success and ran for 136 performances.




Here are five great pieces of advice for your people.


Let it go…..its difficult to do, at least it is for me….but let it go, yesterday is gone. You can’t go back and change it, so let it go.

 Time heals everything. I’m old now and I know this to be very true. So give it time. You’ll get there, but give it time.

 The ONLY person you should try better than is the person you were yesterday.

 Stay calm…another one that’s difficult for my Celtic soul to deal with….but stay calm, no matter what it is, stay calm.

 Your happiness is on you. You’re in charge of that, no one or no thing rules over your happiness.

 Smile, I assure you, the result you get in return will amaze you.



I dig this, thought you would too.....


 

Turn a blind eye


 

Your numbers up.


 

Agatha Christie's mystery

Agatha Christie with her first husband, Archie Christie. Following the breakdown of their marriage, Christie mysteriously disappeared for 11 days, which became a national news story.

 

Billy Holiday


Billie Holiday from a 1944 performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, where she shared the stage with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

 




Music


 

Scion

  

Scion comes from Anglo-French cioun, meaning "offspring" or "new growth of a plant." When it first sprouted in English, it referred to a plant's shoot; the word was then applied to portions of a plant that have been grafted. The figurative meaning, "descendant," blossomed later, with particular reference to those who were descendants of notable families.




Cavalier means "having or showing no concern for important or serious matters."

  

The adjective cavalier comes from a noun referring to a gentleman or knight who is trained in arms and horsemanship. The noun traces back to Latin caballārius, meaning "horseback rider" or "groom." It is also used for "a swaggering fellow," and English Puritans used it disdainfully to their adversaries, the swashbuckling royalist followers of Charles I, who sported longish hair and swords. Their use undoubtedly contributed to the adjective's reference to a rather unbecoming quality.



Minor White


 Minor White in his Jackson Street studio loft in San Francisco, Unknown Photographer, c. 1951.

 

Minor Martin White (July 9, 1908 – June 24, 1976) was a photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator who combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies.

 White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people, and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow.

 He helped start, and for many years was editor of, the photography magazine Aperture.

White was greatly influenced by Stieglitz's concept of "equivalence," which White interpreted as allowing photographs to represent more than their subject matter. He wrote "when a photograph functions as an Equivalent, the photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and simultaneously a spontaneous symbol. (A 'spontaneous symbol' is one which develops automatically to fill the need of the moment. A photograph of the bark of a tree, for example, may suddenly touch off a corresponding feeling of roughness of character within an individual.)"

 In his later life he often made photographs of rocks, surf, wood and other natural objects that were isolated from their context, so that they became abstract forms. He intended these to be interpreted by the viewer as something more than what they actually present. According to White, "When a photographer presents us with what to him is an Equivalent, he is telling us in effect, 'I had a feeling about something and here is my metaphor of that feeling.'...What really happened is that he recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself."

While rocks were photographed, the subject of the sequence is not rocks; while symbols seem to appear, they are barely pointers to significance. The meaning appears in the mood they raise in the beholder; and the flow of the sequence eddies in the river of his associations as he passes from picture to picture. The rocks are only the objects upon which the significance is spread like sheets on the ground to dry.

In the mid-1940s White began to articulate a philosophy about the importance of how his photographs are presented to the viewer. He was influenced initially by Stieglitz, who in his teaching emphasized that photographs shown in a structured content may support each other and may create a total statement that is more complex and meaningful that the individual images by themselves. When White began working as a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 he became friends with Nancy Newhall, who was organizing a retrospective of Edward Weston's photographs for the museum. Newhall had a gift for creating highly distinct groupings of images, and White said later that her installation of the Weston exhibit was a

Two iterations of Power Spot (1970). White flipped the negative vertically between the first and the second version.

Later, as he became more interested in anthropology and myth, he began to experiment with how individual images influenced a viewer by how they were presented. In a work he called Totemic Sequence, composed of 10 photographs, he included the same image as both the opening and the closing picture. The last picture is the first picture turned upside down. White felt that this change illustrated the simultaneous reality and unreality in a photograph. The title he gave to the first image was "Power Spot."

 







 

Lower East Side, NYC, Photo by Andreas Feininger, 1940.j


 

Keep going...


 

Here's words and explanantion for ya...

 

Intransigent comes from Spanish intransigente, meaning "uncompromising." Its root is transigir ("to compromise"), which is related to Latin transigere ("to come to an agreement"). The French have a similar verb, transiger, which also means "to compromise." Transigent as an opposite of intransigent has yet to become recognized as an acceptable word in the English language.



 Pilcrow: Apparently an alteration of the word paragraph, with r changing into l and remodeled along the more familiar words pill and crow. Earliest documented use: 1440.

In the beginning, a piece of writing was one big amorphous chunk of text: no punctuation, no upper/lowercase, no spaces. Writing real estate was expensive, whether tablets, skins, or papyrus. With time punctuation marks entered the language. A pilcrow signified a change in topic, even though the text still flowed without any visual breaks.

Eventually, actual paragraph breaks were employed and the pilcrow sat at the beginning of the paragraph, often embellished in red color. When printing came along, the hand embellishment of the pilcrow disappeared though the space marked for it remained at the beginning of the paragraph as an indent.

The pilcrow took a well-earned retirement and is no longer used.



 Originally, mettle was simply a variant spelling of the word metal (which dates to at least the 13th century), and it was used in all of the same senses as its metallic relative. Over time, however, mettle came to be used mainly in figurative senses referring to the quality of someone's character. It eventually became a distinct English word in its own right, losing its literal sense altogether. Metal remained a term primarily used for those hard, shiny substances such as steel or iron, but it also acquired a figurative use. Today, both words can mean "vigor and strength of spirit or temperament," but only metal is used of metallic substances.


Joe Arridy: Another reason to get rid of the death penalty.

 



Joe Arridy: Another reason to get rid of the death penalty.

Joe Arridy was born in 1915 in Pueblo, Colorado, to illiterate Syrian parents who did not speak English. Arridy was slow to develop, and when he did speak, he couldn’t speak in complete sentences. The idiot local elementary school principal told his parents to keep him at home. The child was eventually placed, at the age of 10, into the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he lived on and off until becoming a young adult. Both in his neighborhood and at the school, he was often mistreated and beaten by his peers. He left the school and hopped on freight railcars to leave the city, ending up at the age of 21 in the railyards of Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1936.

On August 26, 1936, Arridy was arrested for vagrancy after being caught wandering around the railyards. At the time, the county sheriff, George Carroll, was searching for suspects in what was called the Drain murder case in Pueblo Colorado, where Joe Arridy had suddenly leaped on a train.

The Drain attack was a horrific crime. On August 14, 1936, two girls of the Drain family were attacked while sleeping at home in Pueblo. Both 15-year-old Dorothy and her 12-year-old sister Barbara Drain were bludgeoned with what was believed to be a hatchet. Dorothy was also raped; she died from the hatchet attack, while Barbara survived but barely.

When Joe Arridy told a cop that he had left from Pueblo the day after the Drain attack, he was pulled out of his cell for extensive questioning about the rape/murder.   Sheriff Carroll said that Arridy immediately confessed to the crime. Yet, when Carroll contacted the Pueblo police chief Arthur Grady about Arridy, he learned that they had already arrested a man considered the prime suspect: Frank Aguilar, a laborer from Mexico. Aguilar had worked for the father of the Drain girls and been fired shortly before the attack. An ax head was recovered from Aguilar's home.

 But Sheriff Carroll claimed that Arridy told him several times he had "been with a man named Frank" at the crime scene.(That statement appears to be false, in other words, a lie by Carroll, but at this point, it can’t be proven.)

However, Aguilar….who barely spoke English…. later confessed to the crime and told police he had never seen or met Arridy, whose first language was Syrian.  Furthermore, there was no physical evidence against him. Barbara Drain had testified that Aguilar had been present at the attack, but not Arridy. She could identify Aguilar because he had worked for her father. Regardless, Arridy was transported to Pueblo and confessed again. But it’s important to know that studies since that time have shown that persons of limited mental capacity are more vulnerable to coercion during interrogation and have a higher frequency of making false confessions.

When the case was finally taken to trial, Arridy's lawyer pled insanity to spare his client's life. Arridy was ruled to be sane, while acknowledged by three state psychiatrists to be so mentally limited as to be classified as an "imbecile", a medical term at the time. They said he had an IQ of 46, and the mind of a six-year-old and that he was "incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, and therefore, would be unable to perform any action with a criminal intent".

It didn’t matter. Joe Arridy was convicted based on his false confession. Aguilar was also convicted of the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1937 and went to his death, denying Arridy was involved in the case.

Joe Arridy was sentenced to death as well. Attorney Gail L. Ireland, later the Colorado Attorney General, took on Arridy’s case as defense counsel, Pro Bono, after his conviction and sentencing.

While Ireland won delays of Arridy's execution, he was unable to get his conviction overturned or commutation of his sentence. Ireland also petitioned the Supreme Court of Colorado, writing, "Believe me when I say that if he is gassed, it will take a long time for the state of Colorado to live down the disgrace". The Court denied the petition by a single vote.

While held on death row during the appeals process, Arridy played with a toy train, given to him by prison warden Roy Best. The warden said that Arridy was "the happiest prisoner on death row".  And that he was liked and treated well by both the prisoners and guards alike.

Although Ireland gained nine stays of his execution, Arridy was finally ordered to be executed in late 1939.

He ordered ice cream for his last meal.

Warden Best said, "He probably didn't even know he was about to die, all he did was happily sit and play with a toy train I had given him" and that when Best questioned Joe about his impending execution, he showed "blank bewilderment".

When Best told him that he was about to die in the gas chamber, Joe replied to him with a broad smile "No, no, Joe won't die." Inside the chamber, he became nervous and Best held his hand and reassured him.

Not one member of Joe’s family came to witness the execution.

Almost 70 years after Joe Arridy’s execution, a group, called Friends of Joe Arridy, came to the attention of Attorney David A. Martinez, who prepared a 400-page petition for a pardon from Governor Bill Ritter. Terri Bradt, the granddaughter of Attorney Gail L. Ireland, also became involved in the pardon issue.

In 2011 Joe Arridy received a full and unconditional posthumous pardon by Governor Bill Ritter. In June 2007, there was a dedication of a tombstone commissioned by the supporters to grant Joe a full pardon,  for his grave at a Cemetery near the state prison. (Prisoner are buried without markers)

Joe Arridy's death, the US Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to apply the death penalty to convicted persons who are mentally disabled.

The Hobo's poet

 

A Sailor's Life

Oh, a sailor hasn't much to brag —

An oilskin suit and a dunnage bag.

But, howsoever humble he be,

By the Living God, he has the sea!

 

The long, white leagues and the foam of it,

And the heart to make a home of it,

On a ship that kicks up waves behind

Through the blazing days and tempests blind.

 

Oh, a sailor hasn't much to love —

But he has the huge, blue sky above

The everlasting waves around,

That wash with an eternal sound.

 

So bury me, when I come to die,

Where the full-sailed, heeling clippers ply;

Give up the last cold body of me,

To the only home that I have — the sea!

 

 Harry Hibbard Kemp dubbed himself the “The Hobo’s poet” leaving one to assume his works were roughhewn and simple. But they weren’t. Far from it. His poems were overly complicated and overly polished, and, if the truth be known, not very good at all.  Critics of his day said Kemp was mostly all talk and little talent. Still, during his very long career, Kemp was the favorite of the literary bohemian crowd.

Move ahead to 1910, when Upton Sinclair and his wife Meta, said to be a woman who dripped of sensuality,  built a house in the single-tax village of Arden, Delaware. A year later, Sinclair invited Kemp to camp on the couple's land. (A bedding fit for a “hobo’s poet) Sadly,  Meta swooned for Kemp and left her husband for the poet, all leading to a nasty divorce. (Prior to Kemp, Meta had  an affair with John Armistead Collier, a theology student from Memphis; they had a son together named Ben.)

But Meta, a noted neurotic, wasn’t the Hobo type. She was descended from one of the First Families of Virginia, and had high ambitions for herself and dropped Kemp as quickly as she had picked him up.

Sinclair blossomed with his next wife Mary Craig Kimbrough, another woman from the American elite who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis.

Kemp (and Meta) faded into oblivion. He became a regular denizen of Greenwich Village in New York City and Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he was associated with the Provincetown Players. (There is a street named for him, Harry Kemp Way, in Provincetown.) He died on Cape Cod in 1960.

 


 

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