19 Nov 99 - Landsdowne St.
Well, that was as close as I expect to get to the Mayor of Boston or the Globe society page. Arlene & I, along with Newton art and music teachers and a lot of the school system administration and their SOs, and probably a lot of the Boston area's anti-AIDS activists, went to a 50th birthday party for one of the Hat Sisters last night on Landsdowne Street in Boston. Several rock clubs are on that street. It's a happening place at night. It's between Fenway Park and the Mass Pike, with nobody living on the next block, an ideal spot for loud music. We picked up Carolyn and Bill, plus another art teacher who wanted a ride, and parked in a lot at the beginning of Landsdowne. Fenway Park is a brick cliff on the opposite side of the street. Looking up you can see the netting at the top of the famous left field wall. Farther along the street you look up at the zigzag underside of the bleachers.
We went past a couple of rock clubs and tried the door with the name on the invitation, but a kid standing nearby said, “Michael's birthday party? Over there” (one door back the way we had come.) A woman at the door said, “We'll be surprising him from the balcony. There are packs of glitter upstairs.” so we went on up. I had to crack up, going up the dimly lit, mylar confetti covered stairs of a Kenmore Square nightclub. This is so typical of how I spend my weekend evenings! [not]
The Hat Sisters are apparently well known in the Boston and Provincetown gay communities as very active supporters of AIDS events. When the two of them show up, in huge, outrageous hats, a party is complete. The art teachers weren't sure how to react when they found out, eight or ten years ago, that one of their administrators was a Hat Sister. Over the years there have been enough photos in the Globe “Party Lines” column that they figure anyone who really cares knows by now, but there are probably a handful of parents who would be upset. When the superintendent of schools comes to a party like this, you figure it's cool.
I went outside on the balcony over Landsdowne Street and got a handful of glitter confetti. Pretty soon the guest of honor hove in sight, and a shower of glitter filled the air along the length of the balcony. Michael looked appropriately surprised, though it's hard to believe he didn't know -- how secret can you keep a party that big?
Let's see - great food: besides broccoli & cauliflower florets and pepper strips there were long wedges of daikon and pinkish rounds of some other root I couldn't identify. Crackers and cheese, chips and dips, classy sandwiches on small multigrain rolls, egg rolls, and in pita wraps. The hot hors d’oeuvres verged on incredible: scallion pancakes with smoked salmon, lobster quesadillas, coconut curried shrimp. The crowd pretty much stuck to its original structure, Newton schools near the stairs and balcony, gay bar in the middle, Newton schools in the inside room where the disco mirror ball had colored lights shining on it over the empty dance floor. I was hanging out with the art and music teachers, as you would expect. I got to give a big hug to Bette, a benefits administrator with the school personnel department. Either Arlene or I went over to her office each month with a health insurance COBRA check for Anne from the time Anne graduated from college until she got her own insurance, and she's about the pleasantest person I've interacted with regularly.
The main event was a little speech by Mayor Menino. He's a very unpreposessing, regular guy, and seemed totally comfortable saying things like, “Something terrible happened to Michael at our Community Services dinner last year. A woman was wearing the same dress he was.” Besides an official city proclamation he presented, naturally, a hat. It was about 18 inches across at the bottom and two feet high, conical, entirely covered in white feathers and gold bows, with a gilt-edged styrofoam 50 on top, pretty silly but entirely appropriate. Tim, Hat Sister #2, said he was overwhelmed by the turnout. He had mailed out about 300 invitations and thought maybe 150 people would show up. It looked to me like close to 400, maybe more, over the course of the evening.
Working our way back to the car, past the rock club next door that was just disgorging the audience for the early show and past the white stretch limos coming down the street, Arlene said, “That was about as surrealistic an evening as I've spent in a long time.”
In other news, in the morning I stopped at Bullough's Pond to check the ducks. Even from a moving car you could tell that the small ones were indeed ruddies, with that big white patch on the side of the face. I went over the dam and parked on the street parallel to Walnut on the far side of the pond, and walked back with my new small binoculars, then walked along the side of the pond, close to the water. There seemed to be one bufflehead out there, away from all the other ducks. I walked down toward the skater's warming shed and access ramp. The bufflehead was diving just off the end of the concrete ramp. I've never been close enough to a bufflehead before to see the iridescent purples and greens on the head and neck. There are enough ducks with that coloring that I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I don't know if the binoculars are good or just new and the optics are clean, but either way I was happy with them.
Also, Newton is really finishing up the street construction. Commonwealth Ave, near Centre Street, has its finish coat of pavement and bright reflective striping.
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