My mind is a sponge! (as opposed to spongy).. After the Thursday night lecture on Oyster
Restoration we kept going with two more..
The First Lecture (or second depending…)
Friday night was the first in this year’s series of free lectures (sponsored by my old employer) at Sotterley Plantation. Turns out it is the 8th year! In my community relations position, I was able to fund the first one, and they have grown in popularity over the years. I am gratified that the company continues to support them. If you haven’t had the chance to go, you should. Sotterley has managed to find an amazing array of speakers, mostly historically related but not always.
So, back to the subject at hand. This presentation was by two members of the
Archival Recovery Team from the National Archives, and it was entitled: “A Conspiracy to Steal History.. The Theft of
America’s National Treasures”. Of
course MFO was extremely interested.
Turns out there were two people; Barry Landau and Jason Savedoff who
managed to steal over 10,000 (!) original historical items, including
hand written documents by FDR, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and many
more. They sold them for personal gain
over many years, but neither became fabulously rich, and in fact Landau is now residing
in jail for seven years as of last year.
I am not sure of their motive, actually. They were finally discovered to
be actually stealing documents by an employee from the Maryland Historical
Society. Both of the speakers were
involved in the investigation and gave a fascinating account of the eventual
apprehension. The thieves had special
clothing with pockets for the documents, Landau’s apartment was found to contain
thousands of documents, which contained a pretty elaborate cataloging system.
Their technique was to go to various institutions (like Yale, and the Library of Congress) and ingratiate themselves over a period
of time, passing themselves off as legitimate researchers and “presidential historians”. Not quite. They established sort of personal relationships with
clerks and so on to
the point where they were often left alone with the documents they checked out. Then they stuffed their pockets. Mr. Yockelson also threw a couple of
brickbats at the institutional employees for not being more careful and letting
their (perceived) association with the thieves play a part.
Anyway, my point here is that it was a great program
presented by intelligent, dedicated people, and a very informative
evening. Okay, that’s one lecture.
The Second “And now for something completely different” (the readership may
know where this quote originated).
Saturday
night we went down to “the College” to hear the 7th Annual Twain
Lecture. The speaker was “John Hodgman: Author, Actor, Humorist, and Correspondent on the “Daily Show”. Now if you are too young to recognize the
Monty Python phrase above, I am apparently too old to know who the speaker
was. Never heard of him, even in his
many roles. Author? Nope, Actor?, nope,
nope, nope, and what is the “Daily Show”.
I guess it is bviously different than the Today Show which I am familiar
with (but don’t watch anymore).
The program was held in the Athletic Building on the campus,
and we had decided to arrive early enough to get a parking spot and maybe a good
seat. Pretty much yes on the parking
spot, but definitely not on the seat. We
ended up in the “bleachers” in order to see the stage. You may remember that
MFO is an extremely harsh critic of seats, not only in restaurants, but in
other venues as well. These were dubbed
“possibly the worst I’ve ever sat on”. They were plastic with some flexibility
enabling them to poke you in bad places, and were too narrow for our anatomy
and liking. I think the “too old”
comment applies here as well; as most of the students around us didn’t seem to
mind (and after all, they were bleachers).
We arrived early enough (shortly after seven for a half past program)
that we were treated to a full half hour (plus more) of the music from “The
Rusty Spurs”. You would be correct if
you guessed they were a country music band.
They were a group of three: a female vocalist who also strummed a
mandolin continuously, a male guitarist, and the third a male who was only a dedicated
harmonica player (at least while we watched).
I guess you could say they were a cover band (“I heeer thuhh traaaain
a’cummmmin”) for many of the classic country songs. Given the seats, I guess I was kind of in a of
negative frame of mind at that point, but the singer seemed to have a range of
about half an octave..
Anyway, about ten minutes late (and forty grueling minutes
in those seats) Prof. Ben Click finally appeared, joined in with the band as
did the speaker before the Spurs retired.
Mr. Click then introduced Mr. Hodgman who started off by reading the
various Osprey signs on the walls of the gym, and how the Maryland flag might
induce epileptic fits or something to that effect.
He seemed to be quite popular with the “college kids” who
appeared to know full well who he was and were quite enthusiastic over his
appearance. Mr. Hodgman talked about a
lot of things, not many of which had anything to do with Mark Twain, but
covered what jobs he has had, did a shtick about impersonating himself, and
stuff like that. A lot of his things
were kind of inside jokes between him and the college audience who got
them. For instance he kept talking about
“420” the meaning of which escaped me and only after getting home did I learn
it had something to do with a legal decision and marijuana. Toward the end he did talk about Mark Twain
some, showed a clip of a Twain impersonator in a “planet of the apes” head
piece, and often disparaged Hal Holbrook. He
did say that Samuel Clemens probably started standup comedy which I think might
be fair.
And while all this may sound negative (which, in rereading it, is
a fair assessment) I will say that it was an “interesting” evening. It was not what I had expected (or hoped
for), but then Mark Twain was all about shaking up the status quo, an
iconoclast, and not afraid to speak about unpopular subjects. So in that respect I suppose the Twain
Lecture lived up to that heritage. It is
good to be exposed to unfamiliar topics, so maybe I’ll go find out when the
Daily Show is broadcast. The younger
generation seemed to enjoy his performance.
And they were in no way at all
DFD
ps thanks to all who thought the oyster piece was informative. I thought so too.. working on a second edition (a tease....)
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