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Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Well, after some soul searching and some numbers crunching, yesterday Mrs. Robbo gave official notice that she will be retiring from classroom teaching at St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method at the end of this semester. (She plans to go on with her tutoring gig, at least for the immediate future.) She’s been there for thirty years, and Ol’ Robbo still doesn’t know how she’s done it: I couldn’t stick thirty minutes with a classroom full of elementary kids, however bright and talented, to say nothing of having to deal with their parents. But she’s finally had enough, and I don’t blame her at all.
Between this and the Gels all graduating and making their future arrangements, Ol’ Robbo is becoming aware of a sense of great tectonic shift, as if one era of Life is closing and another is opening. I can’t yet say quite what I think about it, only that it’s happening and I’m along for the ride whether I want to be or not. ****
** Ol’ Robbo really isn’t a David Bowie fan but this song became the unofficial theme musick of my rowing team back in the day at the People’s Glorious Soviet of Middletown, CT., playing almost constantly (it seemed) during winter team workouts. As a result, it’s still never that far below the surface with me and quickly bubbles up where apropos, as I believe friends of the decanter will agree is the case here.
**** Ol’ Robbo himself will continue to soldier on in his wage slavery, prolly at least for another five or six years. However, the fact that I can even dimly see my own retirement on the horizon now only contributes to this sense.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Sitting out on the Port Swiller Manor porch as dusk fell at the end of a lovely day last evening, Ol’ Robbo got an unexpected little treat: The high school senior next door decided to come out on his back porch to practice his viola. I say practice, but it was really more of a rehearsal, as instead of scales and arpeggios, and the like, he went right the way through a piece, into which he’d evidently put in considerable prior work. Given the time of year, I supposed his school’s spring concert is coming up very shortly.
Although I didn’t recognize the piece, it was evident to me that it was not a solo, nor was it likely symphonic. Based on the way it seemed to mark time between bouts of intense engagement, I surmised it was probably some sort of chamber piece. It was obviously from the later Romantic Era, and from some of the figures and cadences, Ol’ Robbo would have been willing to put a fiver on Dvorak as the likely composer. (I didn’t yell across to enquire, as I did not wish to discombobulate the boy. I mean to ask his mother the next time I run into her on the sidewalk.)
The kid was quite good – a bright, confident tone, pretty solid mastery of the more pyrotechnical passages, snappy correction when he began here and there to drift off the note. As I say, you could tell he’d put a lot of work into his performance. Interesting that he chose the viola, as it’s not exactly a high-profile instrument. Mozart was a great champion of it, though, appreciating all the nifty interior parts that it typically covers, and I can certainly see that myself. That said, I believe there’s a whole broad category of musick-nerd jokes devoted specifically to viola players.
All in all, Ol’ Robbo felt great contentment staring out into the gloaming, a glass of wine at his side, and the mellow notes of the viola floating across the way. Much better than the kid who lives farther over in the neighborhood and plays the trumpet. I’ve walked past his house now and again when he was practicing and he (I assume “he” but what do I know?) seems a typical marching band hack. God help his parents and siblings (and neighbors)!
Greetings, my fellow port swillers and Happy St. George’s Day!
Ol’ Robbo doesn’t really have anything to say about the day this year: I just wanted an excuse to fly the English flag and think about the Good Old Days. (Is that not what this place has always been about, after all?)
Speaking of which, it’s also Shakespeare’s Birthday (460th, I believe). To give you an idea how far things have slid, my very own eldest niece, who, like Ol’ Robbo, was a lit major in college, thinks the Bard is boring and irrelevant. Kids these days.
Ne’er mind. Thinking about Ol’ Will’s day, I’ve had Cole Porter running through my head:
The girls today in society go for classical poetry,
So to win their hearts one must quote with ease,
Aeschylus and Euripides.
One must know Homer, and believe me, eau
Sophocles, also Sappho-ho.
Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope,
Dainty Debbies will call you a dope!
But the poet of them all,
Who will start ’em simply ravin,’
Is the poet people call
The Bard of Stratford on Avon.
Chorus: Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow!
Just declaim a few lines from Othella,
And they’ll think you’re a hell of a fella.
If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er,
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer.
If she fights when her clothes you are mussing,
What are clothes? Much ado about nussing!
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Chorus]
With the wife of the British ambassida,
Try a crack out of “Troilus and Cressida”.
If she says she won’t buy it or like it
Make her tike it, what’s more As You Like It!
If she says your behavior is heinous,
Kick her right in the Coriolanus!
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Chorus]
If you can’t be a ham and do Hamlet
They will not give a damn or a damlet.
Just recite an occasional sonnet
And your lap’ll have honey upon it.
When your baby is pleading for pleasure,
Let her sample you Measure for Measure!
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And they’ll all kow-tow – Forsooth!
And they’ll all kow-tow.
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Chorus]
Better mention “The Merchant of Venice”
When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace.
In her virtue, at first, she defends—well
Just remind her that “All’s Well Tat Ends Well”!
And if still she won’t give you a bonus,
You know what Venus did to Adonis!
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And they’ll all kow-tow – Thinkist thou?
And they’ll all kow-tow – Odds bodkin!s
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Chorus]
If your girl is a Washington Heights dream,
Treat the kid to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
If she then wants an all-by-herself night,
Let her rest ev’ry ‘leventh or “Twelfth Night”.
If because of your heat she gets huffy,
Simply play on and “Lay on, Macduffy!”
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And they’ll always kow-tow – Forsooth!
And they’ll always kow-tow – Thinkist thou?
And they’ll always kow-tow – We trou’!
And they’ll always kow-tow.
Ol’ Robbo is sure that this is all double-plus ungood wrong-think, but I don’t care and will lift my glass anyway. Cheers!
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
You may or may not have read the nooz this week about the doings at National Public Radio: how a senior editor was canned for daring to suggest that lockstep leftism has overrun the place (he was shocked, shocked that gambling was taking place in this establishment); and how the new head poohbah is a whackadoodle Maoist who cheerfully, even enthusiastically, endorses censorship of wrong-think. (She thinks the 1st Amendment is problematic.)
Meh, this is hardly a sudden sea-change, but has been coming on for a very long time.
Ol’ Robbo has been listening to NPR-affiliated stations for thirty-five years. Back in the 90’s, the liberal slant was pretty obvious, but I could still listen to, say, Morning Edition and All Things Considered without being outraged. I’d say the first signs of their going more hardline appeared during the Bush/Gore fight, and it gradually ramped up during the eight years of Dubya. But what really started to make Ol’ Robbo’s blood pressure jump was the pandering cover NPR always gave to Obama: The difference between what they told me was going on and what I actually saw with my own two eyes became, well, breathtaking. The more recent slide into full-on insanity over the terms of Trump and the current resident has merely accelerated the pace, not changed the direction. And so, here we are.
Of course, Ol’ Robbo listens to his local station only for the classical musick, to which it devotes almost all of its airtime. When it runs its five-minute top-o-the-hour NPR nooz headlines during the morning and evening commute, I derive great satisfaction from hitting the off button and saying, “Aw, shaddap!!”
To be perfectly honest, however, NPR literally may have saved Ol’ Robbo’s life once. I was driving from school in Virginia to my parents’ place in South Carolina. I’d left in the middle of the night and round about dawn was in the neighborhood of Columbia. At that point, I started getting very sleepy and really should have pulled over but didn’t. Fortunately, I had picked up the local NPR affiliate on my radio, and just before I completely dozed off at the wheel, the Morning Edition theme musick came on. Having been conditioned to wake up to that every morning for several years, I suddenly got a jolt of adrenaline, found my second wind, and carried on down to my folks’ house safely. So there’s that.
I still think the place is evil. They’re just starting to say the quiet part out loud now. What was that joke Peej O’Rourke once wrote? Communists worship Satan. Socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad people. And liberals think we should all go to hell because it’s warm there in the winters.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Yes, the taxman cometh. Given that there hasn’t been any connection between federal income and outlays for years; that deficit spending has reached staggeringly obscene levels; and that Uncle just prints his own funny-money anyway, Ol’ Robbo can only conclude that the sole remaining function of the income tax is punitive. It’s simply a stick with which to beat the middle-class kulaks and to remind us who’s in charge.
Hmmph! As you might gather, Ol’ Robbo got whanged pretty durn hard this year.
One particularly irksome aspect of it: Mrs. R has been working a tutoring side-gig this year to help us get over the final hurdle of the Gels’ educational expenses. She’s quite a popular teacher and has been much in demand. Back in the day, this would have been a strictly cash biznay, and Ol’ Robbo would not have hesitated for an instant to accidentally-on purpose forget to report it on his returns. Now? It’s all electronic transfers with their attendant fingerprints. (Plus, it doesn’t help that one of Mrs. R’s clients is somewhere fairly high up in the IRS bureaucracy.) So I durnst risk the memory loss. The result? Not only does that extra income get zapped at the highest rate, Mrs. R also has to pay self-employment taxes on it! When all the smoke cleared, we realized it really isn’t worth it for her to expend all that extra time and effort for so little additional gain. Thanks, Uncle!
*** I still believe this is their best album. Funny, Ol’ Robbo never thought he’d live to see a downright backlash against the Beatles, but it seems to have become fashionable of late to pooh-pooh them and everything they achieved. You kids can get off my lawn, now.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Regular friends of the decanter will know that Ol’ Robbo enjoys cooking, a legacy handed down to me by both the Mothe and the Old Gentleman.** Over the years, I have managed to build up a modest but competent repertoire of dishes, if I may say so, particularly given the limitations of the Port Swiller Manor kitchen, which is little better than a glorified galley. (The place was built in the early 70’s when home-cooking generally meant simply opening up a package and heating its contents, and, due both to our other additions and the geography of the demesne, there literally is no place for a gerrrr-may expansion and upgrade.)
One thing Ol’ Robbo had never tried before was eggs Benedict, even though I am muchly fond of them. It wasn’t the Hollandaise that daunted me: I now can do a homemade Hollandaise with the best of them. No, it was the biznay of poaching eggs. For some inexplicable reason, Ol’ Robbo had got it into his noggin that this was a complicated process involving exotic gadgets and fraught with potential for catastrophe. In any event, I’d never tried it before.
Until yesterday. Looking myself squarely in the face, I said, “Self, stop being a wuss and just do it. If you screw up, all you have is a bit of nasty egg soup.” Thus, I boiled the water, reduced it to a simmer, added a dash of vinegar, and gently shlooped the eggs into the pot using a measuring cup. Four minutes later and there I was.
Easy.
Peas-y.
Now you might be thinking mountains and molehills, and perhaps you are right. But Ol’ Robbo would point out that it took Johannes Brahms many years to nerve himself up to finally unleash his first symphony on the public. We each have our hurdles, and large or small, getting over them is gratifying and deserves some recognition.
And so, forward. Eldest Gel is also extremely fond of the eggs Benedict, but Ol’ Robbo isn’t going to tell her he’s learned how to make ’em. Instead, I’m going to wait till she gets home from school and surprise her one day.
** In fact, the Old Boy put together a loose-leaf book of his favorite recipes (almost all of them Italian), which I very often use. Over the years, I have annotated his work based on my own experiences, and I also use his book as a physical depository for other recipes I have discovered in various places, sticking loose leaves into its pages. Youngest has been after me for some time to produce a revised edition myself, incorporating clean versions of my annotations as well as converting my hand-scribbled chicken-scratch to readable inkjet font. In fact, there is much to be said for this idea, especially as all three Gels have shown an interest in cooking themselves.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
We had just finished chanting the Credo at Mass today when a woman two pews in front of me turned slowly about and made eye contact with me. A moment later, she had gathered up her things and moved to another seat. Possibly a mere coincidence but the circumstantial evidence seems to argue pretty strongly otherwise.
Look, Ol’ Robbo has never set himself up as another Sinatra but c’mon, man, I’m not that bad! And even if I am, wouldn’t the charitable thing be to simply turn the other ear?
Being the neurotic that I am, it’s now going to take weeks of mumbling before I can regain the nerve to put any volume at all into my delivery.
Sheesh!
Greetings, my fellow port swillers and Happy Birthday to Young Frederick!
When Ol’ Robbo actually does remember Leap Day, he almost invariably thinks back to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, and specifically to the Pirate King’s Chant explaining the paradox of Frederick’s birthday today:
For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.
Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,
That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays,
you’re only five,
and a little bit over!
That right there is some very clever writing and makes me smile whenever it wanders across my braims, especially in the somber, ecclesiastic intonations of the King in the old Doyle-Carte Company production which is Ol’ Robbo’s gold standard.
It is, of course, very shortly after they’ve had a laugh over this that the Pirate King points out to Frederick he had been apprenticed to the pirate band until he reached not his twenty-first year but in fact his twenty-first birthday and that rather than being released from his bond that day as they’d all at first thought, he actually had rather a lot of time left to go. (If Ol’ Robbo may insert a little gratuitous legal advice here: Always read teh contract carefully!)***
Later, Frederick tells his grief-stricken fiancée Mabel that he won’t reach his twenty-first birthday until the year 1940. If my math is right, that would make today his forty-second.  Salute!
*** Were I in private practice, I would of course instead advise that you pay me a lot of money to read the contract carefully for you.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Today’s TLM Mass*** setting at Ol’ Robbo’s church was by one Roger Petrich (1938-2022). This surprised me, as our Scola director usually serves up settings of a 16th or 17th century vintage. I dunno what got into him this week.
The musick wasn’t actually awful, but it wasn’t at all to Ol’ Robbo’s taste. I favor crisp counterpoint. This was something closer to what I’ve always called a river of sound. It was built on Gregorian Chant but then got gooshy and unfocused as it developed. Most distracting. I found myself smiling, nonetheless, because I’d bet a lot of money that Middle Gel would have liked it. Indeed, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if she hasn’t sung some Petrich at some point in her own career and enjoyed it. This was very much her sort of thing. (If you’re reading this, M.G., feel free to comment!)
This diversity of musickal tastes is a running joke between us of long standing now, by the bye. Of course, Ol’ Robbo is just an armchair dilatant, while Middle Gel is a professional chorister, so I can’t possibly win such an argument if it comes down to articulated words, but I know what I like and if that makes me a cow, viz. Wilde or Shaw or whoever said it, so be it.
*** Father was in a foul mood, you could tell, and gave us a humdinger of a Lenten homily. Word got out this week that the Cathedral of Austin’s two-year period of being allowed to perform the Traditional Latin Mass is not going to be renewed, why he doesn’t know or isn’t saying. Gawd knows that that means for us. Our own Bishop seems very sympathetic to the TLM but there are other powers at work. Ol’ Robbo continues to be stupefied that the Vatican is picking such a mean and petty fight.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
I can’t link it, but I see over at Insty’s this morning an article reporting the death of Prof. Peter Schickele. That legendary anchor of the Musicology Department of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople and champion of the works of P.D.Q. Bach was 88. God rest.
I used to own most of the P.D.Q. Bach albums and saw Schickele in concert a couple times. I’d be hard-pressed to name my favorite bits, but certain the grand oratorio “The Seasonings” and the “1712 Overture” are up there. I always thought his “Missa Hilarious” of dubious taste, but I suppose it is no more irreverent than some of the “real” liturgical musick I’ve heard from time to time.
Middle Gel’s high school choir once did the P.D.Q. Christmas carol “Good King Kong Looked Out”, complete with kazoos. The Gel didn’t think much of the choice, mostly on the grounds that the audience wouldn’t have the faintest idea what it was all about and the choir would look silly. I’m not saying she was wrong, but I enjoyed it myself, nonetheless.
Schickele was, of course, a legitimate composer in his own right and also a fantastically gifted teacher. Ol’ Robbo used to listen to his “Schickele Mix” radio program faithfully and could learn more from it in half an hour than he could reading any number of theory books.
A glass of wine in his honor.
The Port Stands At Your Elbow 
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