We hugged for the first time in almost three months! What a strange feeling, to finally have physical contact with this guy that I talk to three times a day and share all of my thoughts with.
It was lunch time, but before we could do anything else, we had to get out of the airport and out of Boston.
I know, I know. Boston is great, but I found a really affordable hotel up the coast about an hour in the town of Danvers. The best price around. Based on the price, it has got to be a scary place, right? It gets scarier. Danvers is the town right next to the famed …Salem Massachusetts! Oh, and there was a major toxic chemical spill a few years back too. Anyway…
First we picked up the rental car. When Nick made the reservation online, he signed up for an economy car. We imagined getting a little hatchback or something. They gave us an electric-blue Mustang. Not so bad! TIP: if you are going to rent a car, reserve it online far in advance, Nick got our car for just $12 a day.
Here is a picture—with our not-as-seedy-as-it-looks hotel in the background.
I find myself again in Salem Massachusetts. Aunt Barbara and Uncle Doug took me here during our Boston to New Hampshire trip when I was twelve years old. Which makes my last visit THIRTEEN years ago!! (cue sinister laughter) The town looks quite a bit different than I remember, although it is clear from the historical buildings that nothing has changed here. I did remember the Hawthorne Hotel where we stayed so many years ago, the ol’ Crow Haven authentic witch shop, and I remember other bits and pieces like the wax museum.
For those who don’t know, Salem Massachusetts is the port town famous for their witch hangings of 1692.
Nick and I used our hotel Wi-Fi to find someplace to have a nice dinner and check out which tourist attractions were must-sees for we twenty-somethings in this haunted town. We found just the thing, a ghost tour that we could do that night. It sounds REALLY scary. The write up got us pretty spooked, and Nick and I wondered at each other if we should even do it. What if we really saw ghosts or something worse?
We had a great seafood dinner at the Hawthorne hotel of all places. The waiter joked about Nick’s Minnesota accent and the three of us started a sarcastic dialog that lasted our entire meal. He was really funny. And I gained a new piece of vocabulary— Mass-holes.
After dinner, Nick and I walked down the dark street where we found a small huddle of tourists waiting for their adventure ghost tour. The tour guide was a thirty something man with a blonde ponytail, dressed in a sort of hybrid of costumes—colonial pilgrim with a French cape. Um, judging by this guy’s get-up, I don’t think we are going to see any ghosts.
He talked constantly, leading us around town and stopping literally every five steps. Can you imagine the comedy of that scene? There was a group of ten people following him, through dark streets, and he would stop every five steps. It takes some time to slow down a group even that size, and it resulted in frequent bumps into ones neighbors.
This tour guide, who come to think of it never gave us his name, was clearly an avid historian. He told us about author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dealings with the town, with the settling of the village, the history of six-feet-under burial, and all sorts of good stuff. I won't list all the facts here for the sake of your time. The tour included three hours worth of information (not the promised 75 minutes).
There might have been some spirits up in the old witch house,
or in the old graveyard we went through,
or in the old house that the game Clue was named for,
or in the 300 year old jail we stopped near,
or in the field where Giles Corey was pressed to death during the witch trials. This was an amazing way to tour the town and the next day, Nick and I revisited all of the highlights from the tour and did some more inspection of our own.
We also toured the witch dungeon, a tourist attraction accompanied by a reenacted trial whose script was taken from the city court records. What a sad history. Revisiting it, though, reminds us what a powerful combination Fear and Ignorance can be in a time of economic depression. None of the women were “witches”, of course. Far from it, all of them were church-going women from a very conservative tradition (Puritans). When put to trial and pled guilty, they would be spared their life, but exiled from the church and forced off their land. If they were honest and pled innocent, they were hung as liars and witches.
We went to the witch trial memorial honoring the 23 people who died during the hysteria. We visited the Crow Haven witch shop, a retail shop run by a “real witch” as advertised.
This is one of the things I most vividly remember from my first visit to Salem, for what reason I know not.
We also went back to the graveyard we visited the night before, which cemented a growing fascination of mine (remember I visited one for some time on Easter).
We saw a grave as old as 1680, which is just 50 years after the ship sailed here from England. These New England cemeteries are captivating (is that the wrong word in this context?).
We made the drive to Northampton along the Mass pike that evening. Can’t say I remember the details of the night; I suppose I introduced April and Nick, and rented a movie.
The next day, I gave Nick the abbreviated tour of Northampton before we drove into back into Boston that night. We returned to the Boston metro area because I had a conference for work. I like the sound of that “I had a conference for work”. Sounds incredibly important.
The hostels were booked, and the hotels in Boston were far too expensive to stay in for another two nights. So I looked up Boston folks on Couchsurfing.com. Turns out the founders of the Couchsurfing online network are in Boston, and we found them! Jesse and Erin live in Somerville, which is right next to Cambridge (home of Harvard University), and only six miles away from Brookline where my conference was.
Getting to the suburb of Somerville was a chore. Street signs are an endangered species in Eastern Mass and road names change with no warning. Streets in the Boston metro, as a friend of mine out here describes, are on no kind of a grid system and "must have been based on the paths that cows walked through fields". Hee hee. I can laugh now. It took us an hour and a half to get from the freeway exit to our hosts’ apartment. We didn’t have a GPS or a map, only printed instructions from Google Maps.
Jesse and Erin were very nice, but not exactly what we were expecting from the founders of Couchsurfing. They were pretty introverted. After two hours of sitting in their living room watching sitcoms with them, I asked, “So you guys started Couchsurfing, eh? That is so neat.”
“Well, I helped with the website and all the mail comes here,” Jesse explained, “But my brother is the one who came up with the idea.”
And of course, he is traveling somewhere.
At about midnight, they finally turned in and we moved the coffee table to inflate the air mattress. Turned off the fish tank light above our heads and went to sleep.
Nick drove me to the conference in the morning. A 6.5 mile journey that took one hour to complete— no wrong turns this time, just really bad traffic. Nick bummed around town on his own for the day, but being weighed down with a car, didn’t make it to many downtown tourist hotspots.
The organization, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, was holding their annual Summit, and this year’s topic was the Sexualization of Childhood. When I found out about a month ago, I knew I could not miss it. I emailed the executive director of the organization, who happens to be friends with MEF’s Marketing Director, and I slid in to registration on a last minute full ride scholarship. I am so grateful. I learned so much from that conference, did some great networking and saw the most amazing speakers, like Jean Kilbourne and Diane Levin, who are just finishing up their new book called, “So Sexy So Soon”.
I also heard Gail Dines speak: “So You Thought Child Pornography was Illegal: How the Porn Industry Sexualizes Children and Encourages Child Sexual Abuse” whose PowerPoint lecture was the most graphic and moving, as you might imagine. She is the author of “Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality”
Another favorite of mine was Joe Kelly, who started the organization Dads & Daughters in Duluth Minnesota. His plenary was titled “The Impact of Pseudo-Sexualization on Boys, and Why Men Need to Challenge It”
Workshops I attended:
“Using the Power of the Media for Positive Change”
Amy Jussel of Shaping Youth
Alice Aspen March of The Attention Factor
“How to Teach Youth about their Consumer Culture”
Tim Kasser, Knox College, author of “High Price of Materialism”
Velma LaPoint, Howard University
Garland Waller, Boston University
“The Impact of Sexualization on Classroom Culture, Teaching and Learning… and What to Do About It”
Put on by Diane Levin, author of “So Sexy So Soon” and other books
I haven’t had a chance to review and type my notes from the conference, which I am looking forward to; when I do I am sure I will be fired up all over again. It was such an amazing experience to be in a room full of movers and shakers for this cause that has been calling me for years.
I became aware of this issue on my own, and have been feeling pretty lonely and sometimes questioning whether I was just nuts to think the way I do. But I found this community of intellectuals and activists who feel the same way. This is very empowering for me. The content of the plenary and workshops will take me the next year to fully digest. I won’t bother trying to divulge it here, but be sure that it will influence my work on the issue.
Oo! I got a picture with Jean Kilbourne!! Hee hee. She is author of many books, and has done a handful of documentary lectures with MEF. Her work is what brought me out here to MEF. Kendra, my boss, introduced me to Kilbourne as we were entering the conference room. I touched Jean’s shoulder and said something star-struck like, “Your work is a really big deal to me” It came out much cheesier though. I could see she was moved, but too busy to respond with anything else but a smile. She was about to speak in front of the group of 300 or so.
So yeah, the next day I got a picture with her (had to be on a bad hair day, right?), and I asked, “So what do you do with the anger? I mean, the images I see in the media make me so angry sometimes, I assume it must do the same to you. How do you manage the emotion to be an effective speaker?”
“Well, I suppose we all have our own ways of dealing with that in our personal lives. Remember when I started speaking about these issues [in the early 1980s] lots of people assumed that feminists were angry people. I learned to use humor to disarm people.”
And she does. She has this remarkable ability to talk about this intense topic and critique media images by humorously pointing out the absurdity of it all.
I am not sure how funny I could bother trying to be, a poorly delivered joke is a deadly thing. But it is good advice to walk away with.
Nick and I stayed with Jesse and Erin for two nights because the conference ran Friday and Saturday. On our second night with them we took them out for dinner and afterward they took us to their friends’ place for wine and a Red Sox game. It was fun, despite my despise for professional sports.
After the conference on Saturday evening, my brain was completely fried from the material and poor Nick was fed up with entertaining himself alone and trying to navigate roads in a strange city. So we drove straight to Northampton on the Mass pike.
For the most part, the rest of the week has been pretty mellow. I have been showing Nick my life here, and enjoying the freedom that a car affords.
We made sure to attend the Pedal People potluck on Monday night. The group has become increasingly important to me, and Nick was just as moved as I was by these peoples’ generosity and unique style. Walking back to my apartment after the potluck, Nick commented, “That was the first time that I told someone I was a police office and the response wasn’t a sarcastic ‘bet you have some great stories.’”
Rod Snelling graced Nick with an unsolicited tutorial on how to play guitar; there was some debate on the value, or lack there of, of viewing the world through the lens of your gender or race; and around 9:00pm select people gathered round the piano to sing Karma Police. Sigh. I do enjoy potlucks.
Nick and drove up through the Berkshires, a tour my mother and I took. We stopped in Shelburne Falls and stretched our legs. Found a former railroad bridge converted into a garden path.
I do love roadtrips-- had to stop and take some silly pictures.
When we reached the western point of Massachusetts, we turned north into Vermont. What beautiful country!
We found ourselves a local brewery before heading back home.
I will cut off the blog post now, as it is awfully long. I have a great story to tell from visiting the orchard I wrote the book for, but I will save that for next post. Thanks for reading.
1 comments:
jean kilbourne? did she do the film killing us softly? she looks familiar...
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