Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Chautauqua Journal – Part III (Day 3—August 5, 2008)


Morning: Beating the Heat

On my way out to the Farmers’ Market near the front gate to pick up fruit for the next few days, I inhaled deeply. The air felt so much better than it did in the New York area. Temperatures were supposed to climb no higher than 79 degrees for the day. The atmosphere, with its early morning crispness and promise of later warmth, felt more like early May than mid-summer. I loved it.

My luck with the weather seemed to be holding. The night before I arrived, a wicked storm—an offshoot of the same one that bedeviled me in New Jersey at the onset of my trip—came through here, splitting a tree on Waugh, only a block away from where I was staying. I missed that, as well as—at least so far—unbearable heat and humidity.

On at least three prior vacations up here, I stayed in inns with no air conditioning, only ceiling fans. Since I happened to be several flights up each time, the heat rose, making sleep a difficult proposition at best. Worse than that, as an asthmatic who had recently put on weight, I felt breathing to be harder. (Thank God I’ve lost 50 pounds since then!) Though I enjoyed the camaraderie of those inns, the heat made it a necessity to book a room with air conditioning from then on.

Ironically, my vacation last year, in the first year I had air conditioning, coincided with the coolest period of the summer up to that point. The week before that, however, the temperatures had risen into the 90s. You just never know around here—it’s best to be prepared for anything.

Compared with the houses I stayed previously, the one I was in last year was not particularly friendly. However, this time, Carey Cottage Inn combined the personal atmosphere I like with the physical comfort I require.

New Faces on the Green?

Are the demographics of Chautauqua changing—or is it just my imagination? On Bestor Plaza (see the accompanying photo), as I was heading out to pick up The Chautauqua Daily, I could have sworn I saw more younger people—not so much children, but teens and adults younger than myself. In contrast to years past, there seemed to be fewer elderly people in wheelchairs or electric go-carts and more twenty- and thirty-somethings jogging or on bikes. Likewise, I even saw a few African-American faces—still not many, but, it seemed to me, somewhat more than I recall in my earlier visits here.

The issue is important, not just for Chautauqua’s long-range prospects for growth and survival but even for its heart and soul today. It impressed me at the welcoming tea at the Carey Cottage Inn two days ago how many visitors were not just returnees, but habitual ones. Many of these are middle-aged or even older. The only way I can square this with what I had just seen on Bestor Plaza was that the newer faces might be encountering this place for the first time.

But back to the returnees. What accounts for that still-sizable senior citizen component? Several factors, I think, all of which the institution is probably weighing carefully—or, at least, I hope they are:
* Senior citizens enjoy the
largest disposable income of any population group. Carey Cottage Inn provides some of the more affordable accommodations on the grounds. But couples in the family-formation years would find Chautauqua a far harder vacation to finance. I’m amused by a line from the 1969 Elvis Presley movie The Trouble With Girls in which he plays the manager of a traveling Chautauqua troupe from the 1920s (the only reason, I strongly believe, that anyone on these grounds would be even slightly interested in that flick). “Everyone can afford Chautauqua,” the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll says on the screen. Would that it were still so!

* Chautauqua appeals especially to anyone who enjoys reading and the arts. Of course, the long-term decline in readers has worried the publishing industry for years, and, I think, is one reason why public librarians have to some extent shifted their focus from books to media over the last two decades or so. As for the Internet—well, just check out this Atlantic Monthly article, “
Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Thanks to my friend Brian for reminding me about this piece, by the way.) Art forms such as opera and classical music—you can even broaden it to the performing arts in general—are also in peril, and these are the genres that Chautauqua does so well. (The situation is not helped when people such as Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, urges that the tax code be modified so that the rich give to the genuinely needy rather than the arts.)

* The spiritual ethos most present at Chautauqua is that of mainline Protestantism—Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, etc. But as
Joseph Bottum shows, over the last three decades most of the various sects in this movement have been declining in membership. I can’t even imagine megachurches, with their sheer massiveness, in the Victorian-era structures of Chautauqua—yet this is precisely the movement that is swelling the most in American religious life.

Afternoon: Elvis, Dolly, Calories and Catholic House


The issue of age came to the fore again at 3:15 pm, when Catholic House, like the other Chautauqua denominations, held its social hour. As I turned toward the parlor, ten to fifteen men and women were sitting in chairs holding sheet music, lifting their voices, first to “Hello, Dolly,” then to “Side by Side.” The average age of these singers ranged from two to three decades older than myself. I began to think about the Hall of Christ, a most unlikely showcase for a screening of The Trouble With Girls followed by an Elvis look-alike contest. It sounded like it could be fun, and certainly, with the rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, more age appropriate for me.

Within less than 30 seconds, I began, to my dismay, to reconsider that proposition. It wasn’t only that the faces in Catholic House were warm and welcoming, as they had been on the two or three other occasions I’d come here over the years. No, I began to reflect, I recognized these show tunes—heck, I even knew many of the lyrics. I couldn’t say the same for Maroon 5, the Jonas Brothers, or other groups enjoyed by my niece and my three nephews. At 48, I had more in common with these senior citizens than with my younger relatives.

Considering all this, I cast my eye toward a table laden with all kinds of liquid refreshments, and especially homemade cakes and candies—in such variety and profusion that they could not all be consumed within the “social hour.” Moreover, they seriously strained my friend Steve Irolla’s factoid that “it’s a scientifically proven fact that calories on vacation don’t count.”

After several minutes of circling the table and loading my plate, I struck up a conversation with a schoolteacher who, like myself, is of Irish-American descent, explaining my passion for Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby that inspired this blog’s title. She told me that, though she was able to teach Gatsby to her rural students when she started teaching 30 years ago, it was no longer possible now—despite its relative brevity, the novel is “just too dense” for them these days, she said.

Like most of the population here, she leaned decidedly toward progressive stances on politics and religion. As a young woman, she recalled, she had been furious with Cardinal Cooke of New York for not speaking out against the Vietnam War. She stopped going to Mass for awhile, and these days found the Church’s refusal to ordain women an ongoing strain on her revived faith.

When I asked about the attitude of other denominations here to Catholicism, she told me that, except for a couple of scattered complaints from one or two denominations several years ago, the house had been welcomed by the community. Clearly Chautauqua prides itself on its tolerance, so much so that it has also voted affirmatively to increase the Jewish and Moslem presence on the grounds with enhanced facilities.

I wondered, though, if there might not be some limits to this sense of openness. I told her about a concert I’d attended several years ago, in which an African-American gospel group performed. The group’s vocal harmonies were uncommonly tight, and the singers—all male, incidentally—sang with enthusiasm and style. It must have been all the more disconcerting, then, when they saw so many members of the audience rushing for the exits. “They were not Chautauqua,” a woman staying at my house explained the next day, trying to sum up the inadequacies of the group that led so many listeners to bail out. That, of course, prompted an inevitable question that I stifled—if that group was “not Chautauqua,” in what way did they not fit?

So my initial suspicion had been correct—those who left early did so for no reason related to musical skill. So many white faces left at that point that some wags, had they seen it, would undoubtedly have referred to this as “white flight.” And it’s not that the institution is unaware of the racial imbalance here—a year and a half ago, after all, the board of trustees approved a resolution noting that racial diversity was “more limited than desired” and vowed to increase “the representation of African Americans and other racial minorities at Chautauqua.” (How they would do so, of course, remains at issue.)

So, why did so many whites leave this concert filled with African-American singers, musicians and songs? I can pinpoint almost the exact point in which this occurred—it was during a song called, “Miracle Worker.” In the lectures I’d attended at Chautauqua, the realm of the “miracle” did not exist. Everything in the prevailing Protestant atmosphere depended on rationality as the yardstick for truth. God as a “Miracle Worker”? Only in, at best, the most vaguely symbolic manner.

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