MetroArts/Thirteen

TWO THREE THREE THREE THREE THREE TH vidare THOH THijuu You The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science bridges the arts and sciences for people of all ages and cultures to foster learning and to preserve the past for the future. It started over 80 years ago with the bequest of a portrait and a clamshell.

Deeded to the town of Greenwich, along with its substantial property, to house a natural history, historical and art museum for the use and benefit of the public, the permanent collection grew to include artists of the local Costco school. In fact, for a decade and a half, the Bruce Museum was the center of American impressionism. Several of these painters had studied with Monet, a G-Verny, an artist like Child Passim, Delmar Livingston-McCray, Meena Ockman and Leonard Ockman, took advantage of the picturesque landscape and the proximity to New York. Diaramas and a Native American collection serve as an ongoing legacy of early curators who value the natural sciences and community involvement. Hello, I'm Hollister Sturgis, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut. Welcome to Metro Arts 13. Before our first program tonight, I'd like to tell you a little about some of the summer workshops the Bruce will be offering for children and teachers at Greenwich's Points Seaside Center.

They include naturalist programs and exploration of the ecosystem of Long Island Sound. We also have a hands-on science project for high school students called the Eagle Pond Research Project. Teenagers learn how to collect and analyze water samples and do real research on the water and in the lab. The nearby Connecticut River was the lifeblood of our emerging nation. Its waters powered the industries that manufactured arms for the revolution, transported material to the troops of the Civil War and brought wealth to the young United States. From its headwaters in the mountains of New Hampshire to the habitat of its estuary in Connecticut, its 410 miles flow past quaint Vermont villages and the industrial cities of Massachusetts that were the Silicon Valley of yesterday. The Connecticut River, a journey through time, tells the stories of the people who drew their livelihoods and dreams from the river. Let's watch.

High on Mount Prospect, overlooking Canada and the mountains of New Hampshire and Maine, a small lake nestles in pristine pines, the clear stream that flows from it begins the Connecticut River. As it winds its way, gathering the water from the mountains, it forms a series of lakes.

From first lake in New Hampshire, the river begins its 410 mile journey, gently curving through the farmlands of Vermont and New Hampshire, twisting itself in an oxbow around fertile fields and Massachusetts. Mandering past the towns that have diverted its water for power and industry, the Connecticut River flows past the cities that its waters helped build, Springfield, Hartford, and pours its waters into Long Island Sound. Its flow has carved this landscape as surely as it has carved the stories of people who have traveled on its waters. The Algonquin peoples called the river Quinnitucket, meaning long tidal river. They fished the river's clear waters following the seasons and the game along its backs. They trapped beaver for furs. The river was the heart of their lab.

Europeans begin an age of exploration. Ship captains, traders, and scoundrels are eager to cross the Atlantic in search of wealth in the new world. In 1614, the Dutch financed the voyage of Adrian Block. Adrian Block was an explorer and a cartographer. In the unrest, Adrian Block sailed all along the coast of Long Island Sound, all the way around Cape Cod, literally exploring and entering every single bay in cove, looking for a great river that would take him inland and be able to trade with the inland tribes as well as the coastal people. He thus became the first European to enter the Connecticut River. Block names the River Verge, meaning fresh water. He sails as far as present day Middletown, where he finds a Native American settlement and proceeds to South Windsor, where he trades for beaver pelts with the Podung tribe. He then sails to the head of tidewater at the rapids now called Enfield Falls. Their block turns around and heads back toward the sound.

As they cross to the new world, what they find in northern America is huge amounts of lumber, huge amounts of resources. And just as importantly, they find the peoples that are living here, the Native American tribes, certainly in the New England area, that are not just friendly but anxious to trade as well. The Dutch come to trade, but the English begin to settle in the valley. By 1635, a large group migrates overland from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and creates settlements in Windsor, Weathersfield and Hartford. The settlers barely survive the first recorded hurricane in 1635, and the bitter winter that follows. Over the passage of only 20 years, the English really have such a greater population in the Connecticut River Valley, that they believe it is a waste, that how can the Dutch lay claim to a land that they are not using, and that it is a sin against God, to lay claim to land that you are not reaping the benefits of. The English build impoundments to protect their settlements from the fierce attacks of the Pequots. The Pequots tolerate the Dutch traders, but they hate the English settlers, and are determined to drive them from the valley.

In 1636, Captain John Mason raises an English force, and with the help of the Algonquins, attacks and burns the main Pequot encampment near Mystic, killing more than 600 men, women and children. The Pequots are broken and scattered. On the same lands that had been cleared and farmed by the river tribes, the settlers begin to plant. The lands that today produce corn, tobacco and squash, provided the same abundant crops for the colonists. Windsor farmers harvest the first tobacco crop in 1640. Ferries cross the river at Windsor and Weathersfield, loaded with bales of hay, animals and produce. Soon the rich bottomlands yield a surplus, and farmers look for ways to trade their excess produce. The first vessels that were built for the West Indies trade were small loops and schooners, single and two-masted vessels. The practice was to carry a mixed cargo of agricultural produce below, and then on deck to carry live animals.

There was a great need in the islands for oxen to carry to haul the heavy cane carts for horses to run the sugar presses and to man the plantations. And then for live animals that could be eaten at table, the trick was to make it economical. You didn't want a vessel that was so large that it took you too long to gather a cargo, and then it would take you an equally long time to sell it once you got to the islands, and you needed to be able to afford to fill a vessel on the return voyage. So the West Indies trade really worked for the Connecticut Valley, where the economy was kind of thin. Along the river shores, towns grow up around shipbuilding and trade with the West Indies. In 1756, the customs house for the West Indies trade is in Middletown.

With a population of more than 5,000, it is the largest and wealthiest town in the state. Shipbuilders and merchants erect large homes, filling them with furniture and other goods from England. Investors begin to spread the risk of a voyage to the West Indies among several vessels, thereby creating the first insurance. Cargo on Connecticut ships frequently includes black slaves. One of the most legendary West Indies traders was Venture Smith. He was born in Guinea in 1728, the son of a king. Captured by slave traders, he was shipped to Barbados to work in the sugarcane fields. However, the captain of the ship developed a liking for him, and took him to had him Connecticut instead. My connection to Venture Smith started when my grandfather married a Florence Smith, who was a sixth generation descendant of Venture.

And he used to tell my cousin's stories about Venture, like he used to swim across the river, because it might have been faster than to take the ferry. Things that he used to do to save money, the chopping of wood, the fishing, trapping yields. He did all those things just to try to save money, and fortunately it was successful for him and it worked out, because he was able to purchase his freedom and the freedom of his wife and kids. And to be able to obtain ships, the businesses that he had, and 100 acres of land, is phenomenal for an African American to be able to accomplish those things so long ago. I try to tell my boys that they have roots here that go very deep and try to incorporate into their lives the significance of history. English settlers from Connecticut begin to migrate up the Connecticut River, building forts at Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Wallpole, and Charlestown.

As they push into new territory, the English are frequently attacked by the French in their allies, native tribes of the Upper Valley. In 1747, Fort No. 4 at Charlestown, New Hampshire, is the farthest outpost of the English in the Upper Valley. The French and the Abanaki attack the fort, captain Finneas Stevens and 50 men defend the settlement, refusing to surrender. Craig, let me co-eyed, Omba, and the palcer of the Omba. My name is Waxfar. The French say call us the Abanaki. We call ourselves the Omba, which means the people. We have come down to drive the English when this fort they built here. For many years, this has been our land. The Pena cook and the Kawasaki and the Kalki and Mrs. Kwa live here. They're all brothers together. And now these English try to take this land from us. They built a fort without our permission. So we have come to show them that they cannot stay here.

The French say have come to ask us to fight with them to drive these people away. We will show them where we live and where we fight. If need be the way we die. We will show them that we are Omba. This is our land. Two weeks and we're already under attack. It seems from savages from the Canadian borders. We've noticed that there's Indians and some French regular troops and French militia. They're telling us now that there are 700 strong, but we've been besieged by them for about two days now and by their firepower. It doesn't seem like there's much more than maybe a hundred. They've now asked us for terms. They would like to let us go in peace. They will bring us to Canada and we can carry off what possessions we have here. And they'll end up burning the fort down. I brought that to the men and they would rather stay and fight for their homes. In the 20th century the motivation for these types of historical reenactments on our part at least is education. These people here in Charlestown live on the very soil that the French and Indian War was fought on. This is sacred ground to us anyway. And to them we want them to understand the history of where they live.

In 1761, Jared Ingersol, a tax collector for the Crown, cuts 81 giant white pines in the forests of New Hampshire. He drives them down the Connecticut River to Weathersfield, completing the first recorded log drive on the river. By law throughout the colonies, the British take the largest and best timber for shipbuilding. That practice and the Stamp Act, a tax placed on the colonies to pay for the French and Indian Wars, infuriates the colonists. When Ingersol arrives in Weathersfield, a mob threatens him. The Stamp Act is repealed. However, other taxes and restrictions are imposed. The angry colonists ban together and refuse to import British goods. The American revolution begins.

We tend to think of it today as a foregone conclusion. Of course you don't want a king. Of course you want democracy. But it wasn't nearly so easy a decision. We look at this Ragtag bunch of colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard. With at this point, no desire to create a strong central government. Yet how do they intend to fight and defeat the strongest naval power in the world at that time? Winning a war against the strongest navy in the world will take all the craftsmanship and cunning the colonists can muster. On an island in the lower Connecticut River, David Bushnell, a patriot from Westbrook, develops the first mine and an innovative way of delivering it. David Bushnell invented the first operating submarine. It was a one-man submarine called the American Turtle. He was so worried about the word of the secret weapon seeping to British ears. He built it at night in a hut on the Connecticut River. It was first used against the British in New York Harbor in 1776. Unfortunately, the pilot of the submarine, Ezra Lee, is discovered by the British in the attempt of attaching the mine.

The British chased him in New York Harbor. All that Ezra Lee had to move was one propeller that you would crank from the inside. He would crank away as fast as he can but the British were gaining on him. He therefore released the mine, and one hour later, an enormous explosion occurred when the bomb blew up. It did not blow up any British ships. However, it did convince the British to move a little farther out of New York Harbor. The new Americans begin to use the water of the river and its tributaries to power small mills and factories. The Revolution and the War of 1812 convinced them that they need to depend less on British manufactured goods. As the industry using the river's power grows, so does the need for transportation. There is cross between the towns lining the river banks. The first bridge over the river is built in 1785 by Enoch Hale in Bellow's Falls.

He had a mortgage on the bridge in Boston, and there wasn't too many ways you could ship money in those days. The sun was there, so he told him you should take the money and you'll get the Boston. You'll get two days to get there. I took stagecoach, but anyway, he got the cane and thinking about his wife, so he stopped to see her, and one thing led to another, and he never did get the Boston, and the bank four closed on the bridge, and it started to loss the bridge because he was dilly-dally and in keen. In 1815, a covered bridge is constructed across the river at Hartford. Flat boats filled with produce travel up and down the river, and canals are built to move boats around falls and rapids. The Connecticut River was the nation's first major river that was improved for transportation. We think of the Erie Canal across the state of New York, which really did open up the interior of the country.

But before that, for 25, 30 years before that, that movement was already taking place on the Connecticut River. Here in Bellows Falls was the first canal company chartered in the country. They started work in 1792 at the same time that other communities up and down the river were starting to build canals. This also happened at a time when steamboats were being invented and being brought to use on the rivers. On the river between Fairly Vermont and Orford, New Hampshire, Samuel Mori, a mill operator, lumberman, and inventor, launches a new invention, the steamboat in 1792. Mori's boat is accrued a fair along dugout with a paddle wheel attached to the bow. To the amazement of all who watch, the steamboat starts to move up river at five miles an hour. Mori receives a patent on his steam engine, signed by George Washington.

Hoping to secure financing for his new invention, Mori shows Robert Livingston, Chancellor of New York, his plans. Livingston shares Mori's plans with Robert Fulton, who bases the Claremont on Mori's design. In New York, Fulton and Livingston start the first commercial steamboat line. Mori is often heard cursing Robert Fulton. Last his belly, he stole my patent. On the lower river, the first direct steamboat service begins between Hartford and Middletown. There was a boat to Giuliana that was on the river around 1815, 1816 that came over from the Hudson River. And the man who really got the steamboats going was William C. Redfield. And he formed the Connecticut River steamboat company, and that's when it began.

Up and down the river, passengers board steamboats. Their captains become expert in avoiding the shifting sandbars that make navigating the river from Hartford to Essex, and through the mouth at Old Seybrooke, treacherous. We no longer had to wait for wind and tide. You can now start looking at travel for pleasure. Take the steamboat from your Connecticut River Valley town. Take it to New York, spend the day shopping, and take the overnight boat back as well. So we really had a century that propelled us into the modern era. On the east bank of the river in East Hadam stands the Good Speed Opera House, built by one of the transportation magnets of the Connecticut River, William Good Speed. His shipyard built schooners and trade ships.

Taking advantage of the new era of transportation and leisure, Good Speed has his shipbuilders construct an opera house six stories high. And then build the steamboats to transport both his audience and the players to performances at his magnificent opera house. The pride of his steamboat fleet, the side wheeler State of New York, is reproduced on the back of the stage curtain for the opera house's grand opening in 1877. Ironically, in 1881, the State of New York hits a snag and sinks in front of the opera house. Good Speed appears on the balcony with a speaker trumpet and invites all onboard the sinking vessel to attend the performance free of charge. By 1848, railroad tracks are being laid across New England. The iron horse will transport goods to inland towns without the limitations and delays of the canal boat.

The era of the river as the primary avenue of inland transportation is over. The canal companies never were really financially stable. But what the canals did do was harness the source of the river to make possible the next phase of commercial development in the river, which was the growth of industries such as textile manufacturing and paper manufacturing, which used the waters of the canals in the industrial process. So, as transportation infrastructure, the canals were useful for about 30 to 50 years. But as sort of the mojo of the industrial revolution in the Connecticut River Valley, they were the primary source. Holyoke is the first planned industrial complex in the United States. In 1840, George Ewing makes a proposal to the company he works for, the Fairbank Scale Company, and also the Boston Associates, the textile barons of the day.

Ewing's plan includes the construction of a dam across the river and the establishment of canals that will power textile mills. The dam, when it was constructed in 1848, was an attempt to harness a river that was a little over a thousand feet wide, and it had never been done in the history of the world. They needed manpower, and a strange thing here it was, Ireland Parish, when all this was starting, and the Ireland data famine was in full swing, and the Irish were coming to America for a new start, and there was a new star form here in Holyoke. The power company needed manpower to build the dam and dig the canals, and the Irish left Ireland and came to Ireland Parish. French Canadians, Poles, and Germans follow the Irish to Holyoke, where they hand dig the dam and canal system.

In 1848, immigrants construct what is then the largest wooden dam in the world. As reported to investors by the newly invented telegraph, 10 a.m. Gates just closed, water filling behind dam. 12 noon, dam leaking badly. 2 p.m., stones of the bulkhead giving way to pressure. 3.20 p.m., your old dams gone to hell by way of Willamandset. The investors are undeterred and rebuild the dam with stone. By building the dam and putting in a canal system that measured four and a half miles along three levels, with natural gravity flow down to the river, they had the power source that they needed to become the Queen of American manufacturing cities in 1881. We also were for many years the paper city of the world,

and the water power itself being the dam and the canal system was the finest water power in the world. There was no equal to it anywhere. Four and a half miles of area to build manufacturing plants with a source of water. It was just an amazing feat. Parsons paper company was the first mill on the canal. The three things that you need to make a paper mill or water power and raw material. And in Hoyoke at the time the deal was that if you built your mill in Hoyoke, they would give you the bricks for free. So Mr. Parsons applied for a spot on the canal because he saw a cheap power with the canal system. It was going to be a textile town, so we saw a lot of cheaper raw material because most paper was made out of cotton back then. And he saw a lot of water. 80% of the people in a mill back then were women.

They're in sorting bags, in sorting paper. Actually very few men were in paper mills back then. Women from New England's poverty farms and women fleeing the potato famine in Ireland are among the first women to join the workforce. The first immigrant group that worked in paper was the Irish. Most of them were women. Most of them were uneducated. And worked in the mills from four in the morning till six at night. And their whole life seemed to revolve around the mills. Today Parsons paper mill still makes fine quality paper from rags using the power of the river. The system that was built 150 years ago, this canal system still generates electricity for the city. There's still a lot of power here. On the upper river, loggers push farther north to fill the pines that will build the cities of Springfield, Hartford, Boston and New York.

In 1868, 20 million feet of timber are cut into Hampshire and driven down the river. The log drives down the Connecticut are some of the longest in the world. The journey is hazardous. Logs jam behind bridges and islands. And many men slip and fall beneath the towering jams. The biggest problem is when the logs get tangled up and make it with the color jam. Trying to clear these out was dangerous. The only way you can do it is try to just keep picking away with your cat dog. Or trying to get dynamite where it will perhaps break a few logs but loosen up the thing and get it flowing again. Because when these jams started moving again, if you had people just downriver working on the low side, trying to get that key log out that's causing the jam. If everything all of a sudden starts coming, you've got 15, 20, 50 feet high pile of jangle logs all start to come towards you. And there were a number of people who were killed lost when those jams broke.

This was one of those colorful periods in the river's history. Colorful in terms of the sort of characters that are as close to the characters of the Wild West that we have in the Connecticut River Valley. The log runners who would float the logs down the river and keep them from getting jammed up and would wear the log spikes on their shoes and come into the taverns on Friday night and get hauled out on Monday morning. The daring of the loggers inspires many tales and myths. Along the river in the north country, most folks know about George Van Dyke. You may have heard of George Van Dyke, he was the big baron of lumbering up in the Connecticut Valley. He bought a hundred acre lot and he paid $100 for that. That's where the story goes. And he hired a lug and crew and built a camp and he cut a million feet of logs. Which he drove down the Connecticut River and down to Lancaster where he had contracted with a sawmill to Sarge Longbrook. He got down there and named on bankrupt.

Well, he made arrangements with receiver to put some of his lug and crew which he made into a sawmill crew. So he operated the sawmill. At the same time, while he was selling that out, the price of lumber jumped up dramatically. And by the time it got off, we had where they had started out with one million-board feet of logs. He ended up with at least two million-board feet of lumber and the price had gone up $3, which is a tremendous sum and a little fashion dollars. And he was on his way to become a millionaire. Van Dyke, he started out working in the lumber camp. Then days it was all chopping. He chopped all the trees down. He hadn't got around to getting the crosscut saw. His only trouble, he loved to pay the stock market. And I think they said he went flat, busted about three times. He lost everything he had and then he started over again. He'd take a job, cut a bunch of trees somewhere and run and drive and get money back. In 1908, Van Dyke drives 53 million-feet of logs down the river to Turner's Falls Dam.

He watches from his new Stevens-Durier automobile, as his riverman pushed the logs through the slush in the dam. Van Dyke tells Shorty Hodgston, his longtime chauffeur, to drive out onto the extreme edge of a 70-foot precipice so they can get a better look. As the men start to leave, the cliff crumbles into the river and the car falls to the bare rocks below. Both men die before nightfall. When the war ended, the economic things changed a little bit. So the last drive was in 1949 and the last wood was hauled out the river in the early summer of 1950. And I was actually in charge of that last drive. So that's my total deep involvement in river driving there. The rest was more or less as a help I hear in there and a listener of tall tales. The Garland Mill is one of the oldest operating sawmills in New England. It is built in 1860 by Evan Garland, a carpenter in Lancaster, New Hampshire.

By 1875, Garland expands his operation to manufacture furniture, advertising bedsteads in inequality, kitchen and loafers chairs, bureaus, sinks, and other furniture. The original sawing was accomplished by the old pit saw, two men on a saw, you know, sawing up and down one guy below one guy above. It was very slow and laborious. When they developed motive power, they put a motor to that and then that saw could go up and down without the two men. It just would go up and down, but it was still very, very slow. And that type of sawing was basically what they had available in the industry until the 1840s, when the shaker women in Western Massachusetts developed the circular saw blade. And that just revolutionized everything. It made sawing so much faster and so much easier that the major building blocks that we use today, the 204s, 206, what are called dimension lumber, could be sawing easily and inexpensively.

The sawmill itself really enjoyed its heyday in the 1870s. There was such a need for lumber in the developing northeast cities that they just cut everything that they could and they moved northward from Connecticut through Massachusetts through southern New Hampshire and finally up into northern New Hampshire. And by 1875 or so, this was quite a going operation. This sawmill and the ones near by it were cutting as fast and furious as they could and shipping everything by rail down to the big cities, the springfields and the woosters and the Bostons, where this tremendous building boom was going on. And as such, they were able to basically strip the entire northeast in a period of only several generations. The Connecticut River Valley has a dual history. One part of the history is using the natural resources, using them up in some cases in a very hasty way and then noting the consequences.

And there was a man in Woodstock, the George Perkins Marsh, and he wrote a book in 1864 called Men in Nature. And in the book, he assessed agricultural practices, logging practices in terms of their impact on water quality and soil quality. This was a book that has been called the Cornerstone of the American Conservation Movement. It really was the first time that Americans took stock of how they were using natural resources. The other part of the story is the development of the river as part of the Industrial Revolution. Windsor refers to itself as the birthplace of Vermont because the Constitution was signed here in 1777. I also like to think of Windsor being the birthplace of precision manufacturing. The building that were in, the original Kendall Robbins and Lawrence Armory, machine shop built in 1846, is really where precision machine tools were developed and most important interchangeability, the ability to manufacture, mass produce identical interchangeable parts.

It certainly was, for many years, touted in history books and so on, that Eli Whitney was the first to achieve interchangeability. More recent scholarly research has shown that he didn't actually pull it off. He was a very good self promoter and in order to continue being paid by the government, he was very, very late in delivering his guns. He was constantly telling them that we're almost at that point where I'll be able to deliver these guns with interchangeable parts. And I've achieved it with a small run and that sort of line. The truth of the matter is that the machine tools available to him when he was producing his muskets under contract with the government simply weren't sophisticated enough to be able to mass produce identical parts. The technology finally came together with his firm Robbins and Lawrence. They got a contract from the government to manufacture 10,000 model 1841 Mississippi rifles.

The requirement again was for interchangeable parts. Faced with that contract, Robbins and Lawrence began to design and manufacture their own precision machine tools. Mr. Stone was hired to work with Mr. Lawrence and develop the first turret lathe. On Mr. Howe was hired, he focused on milling machines and made incredible improvements to the milling machines technology. By Golly, when they brought all of these machines together, opened this building in 1846, was considered the most technologically advanced armory in the world. They produced the guns way ahead of the government schedule and in the process made the first product of the world where every component was interchangeable. The technology for interchangeable parts quickly spreads to other armories supplying weapons to the Union during the Civil War. Colts armory and sharp rifle manufacturing company in Hartford and the Springfield armory are kept busy by the demands of the war. After the Civil War, the arms industry declines. Much of the equipment and many of the factories are converted to other uses.

Sewing machine manufacturing in an armory was typical of a phenomena at the end of the Civil War where you had armories with no demand for guns quickly converting to begin to make consumer products. Consumer products and quantity made possible by the machine tool. So you have armories making typewriters, sewing machines, bicycles, all sorts of new products. In 1869 William Russell arrives and bellows falls by train. He looks at the boarded over and dilapidated canals and the few small mills. And what he had in mind was manufacturing paper from wood pulp. It's something that had not been accomplished commercially, successfully in the United States at that point.

Early paper was made from rags. He knew that upriver from here were the forests of Northern Vermont and New Hampshire and he knew the gravity could assist him in bringing those logs down to a paper mill if he could find a way to make this work. Russell starts work in 1869. By 1872 he is selling newsprint to the Boston Herald. The era of the long log is over and the river fills with four foot pulp lumber to feed the paper mills. It really caught on in bellows falls in particular. His company was joined by several others and in 1898 the international paper company was formed and it was a consortium of forest property owners and mill owners to create one entity which would own the trees and own the production to make the paper. William Russell was elected as first president in 1898. He died in 1899 so he didn't really survive long into the international paper company.

But in that sense bellows falls is the birthplace of the international paper company. By the 1900s the railroads had become the primary way of moving goods and products. However a few boatyards remain. The Gildersleaf boatyard in Portland founded in 1741 operates until 1930. One of the wonderful stories I think is of the Gildersleaf family. They settled in Portland, Connecticut across the river from Middletown there at the Great Bend and over the course of about 150 years had a wonderful tradition of shipbuilding that changed really to meet the needs of not only the enterprise but really of the nation. They built certainly West Indian traders in the early period. They built warships for the War of 1812.

They built the schooners that carried the brownstone industry that got organized really after the American Revolution. The largest brownstone quarries in the country are just south of their shipyard and so that was always a trade that supplied contracts for them. During the Civil War they built one of the U.S. Navy's gunboats, the Cayuga. She led the van in the Battle of Mobile Bay. They went to building steamboats in the Post Civil War period in that yard and during the First World War they built two big supply ships, the Badahatchi and the Anaconda. 3,000 ton vessels, the Connecticut River had to be dredged 15 feet from Portland to Sabre to get them out of the river. Connecticut and the Connecticut Valley changed and the businesses here and the needs for capital changed as well and the shipbuilding dwindled away. Like shipbuilding the steamboat era on the Connecticut River comes to an end. The city of Hartford and the Middletown are aged inefficient and expensive to operate.

The Great Depression seals their doom. The railroads hasten the decline of steamboats but their actual demise now comes about because of automobiles and new highways. The City of Hartford's voyage on October 31st, 1931 is the last steamboat trip on the river. The Rocky Hill ferry which began operation in 1655 still crosses the river but the ferry now carries cars. The covered wood bridges that accommodated horse and buggy are inadequate for the modern automobile. New bridges are built. Many win awards for their beauty and architectural design. As towns and cities expand along the river's flood plains the danger from flooding grows.

It can be cruel and deceptive, kicking up its heels in sudden dramatic fury. Striking fear into the hearts of a rugged people. For there are times of flood. Flood that rips its way through the main streets of a river town leaving six feet of water where shoppers once crowded the thoroughfare. This is the killer flood making us shambles out of happy home, swelling a forgotten trickle to a raging taunt carrying away the highways of man. It makes man wonder if he should ever build another bridge. It makes him wonder a lot of things. Can we ever have real flood control? 1927 flood is the largest runoff I know and that day I remember vividly I was a kid in school. You see 1927 I'd have been 15 years old and school was let out. We were told we went down the mining of course and shortly thereafter told to go home. Well 15 years old fam kid I didn't go home and I guess none of the rest of them probably did.

We went down see what was going on and the bridges in Liverpool were all washed out except two and that put the fear of God in people relative to what they call flood control. That was our biggest flood and it did tremendous damage. There were a lot of people killed. The destruction of the 1927 flood is not limited to Vermont and New Hampshire in whole yoke more than 14 feet of water crashes over the dam streets flood and the water surges on towards Springfield and Hartford causing death and destruction. In 1936 the river floods again. The raging torrent drowns the farmlands of Massachusetts and the town of Hadley. The waters of the rivers have merged streets and shops in downtown Hartford. Residents of Middletown must travel by boat and make shift raft. Flooding devastates towns along the river again in 1955. Officials and citizens groups call for flood control projects.

Flood control is especially urgent. We cannot afford another disaster like that of 1955. Fully aware of this are the electric light and power companies that serve the communities in all four Connecticut Valley states. We started in 1909 building the Vernon Dam on the Connecticut River. It was one of the first in the country where we sent power long distances. It was an experiment so to speak and it worked out rather well. Then during the power company started constructing the Bellos Falls Dam just north of that. Then a little further north about 40 miles we have the Wilder Dam. And then up here we have a series of three dams. Maggendos come referred in more. Finally the Connecticut is the most completely developed river in the country from the standpoint of water power. If you look at hydroelectric that contributes about 5% of the total power that new in the power company generates.

Of course more dam we're at right now is the largest dam in the world because of the fact that it can back up water approximately 11 miles. And the volume storage in this reservoir can ensure a continuous flow of water down the Connecticut. When the hydroelectric facilities were built the question arose what municipalities and what states would tax them. And we were talking big money for these little towns. So Vermont and New Hampshire started fighting as to who owned the river. And the case law went all the way back to colonial times to Benning Wentwood's grants. And he granted lands across the Connecticut River into Vermont because Vermont didn't exist then. Vermont was not one of the original 13 colonies and no one was sure where the border between New York and New Hampshire was. So Wentworth went ahead and granted what they called the New Hampshire grants.

They sort of marched up the river and every six miles made a town on both sides of the river. So you have twin towns all the way up the Connecticut River from Charleston, New Hampshire through Havenville, New Hampshire basically. And it was never anything to fight about. Anyway the battle went all the way to the US Supreme Court and it was decided I believe in 1933. A lot of people don't realize that the Connecticut River as it goes along the border of New Hampshire and Vermont is entirely in New Hampshire. As the dams rise the fisheries decline. Salmon and shad can no longer get to their spawning grounds in the upper river. Raw sewage from towns and waste from industry are dumped into the river. People who love the river and remember its grand past form citizens groups to protest the destruction of the river and demand legislation to clean it up. In 1956 the President of the Connecticut River Watershed Council makes a journey from the river's source to Long Island Sound.

This fourth lake of the Connecticut River sold and visited by man is the fountainhead of the stream. Here we were 2,551 feet above Long Island Sound and 500 feet above third lake. Between us and Long Island Sound lay one of the hardest working rivers in the United States. And to be sure the purity of the river water has suffered from civilized uses. The expedition filled jugs and brought them downstream to show the purity of the water where the river begins. It came in handy when we preached the council's gospel of pollution control. A nearby town empties all of its raw sewage into this stream. We may exaggerate somewhat but certainly the gas mass helped us get through some trying mileage in this section of the Connecticut. A board steamboat, the river queen, only one on the Connecticut.

We arrived at the Brattleboro landing, unfortunately located directly over an open sewer. Below turners falls we made another test of the quality of the river water. Our amateur findings verified for us at least the judgment of the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission that these waters belong in class D or unfit for any type of recreational use. Lieutenant Governor John Dempsey representing Governor Abraham Ribacan, 30 distinguished Connecticut State officials, council members and friends boarded the shellfish with us. Because of pressure from citizens groups, Connecticut becomes one of the first states to pass strong clean water legislation. Soon after the federal government follows suit and the federal clean water bill passes. The Connecticut River today is probably as clean as it's been in 150 years, maybe more. So in many ways, through federal legislation and state legislation, but mostly federal,

the major waterways of this country are vastly improved today than what they were. A, Ribacan and my father going back even earlier played a very important role in establishing the Connecticut River Gateway in a sense which protected a good part of the river from the mouth of the Connecticut River, and old Saebrook all the way up to around East Hadam from the kind of overdevelopment that occurred on the banks of so many of our rivers, a back during periods of rapid expansion. And so a lot of that protection that you see along that river, the people who travel the river, was done because some people were far-sighted enough to say we shouldn't let this overdevelop too quickly. We're going to lose this river or lose the value of it. And so that much has happened as well, and today, of course, this tremendous enthusiasm all along this river about the designation of being potentially one of the 10 heritage rivers in the country. As the decades pass, people begin to see not only a working river, but also a place of solace and beauty. In 1920, Dartmouth students formed what is now the oldest Kamu Club on the river.

They named their organization the Legid Kamu Club after the famous explorer, John Legid. Legid was one of Dartmouth's most famous characters. The students were very much fascinated with the fact that he cut down one of these enormously tall pine trees, hollowed it out, fashioned it into a dug-out canoe. And in the spring of 1773, left Dartmouth never to return and sailed down the Connecticut River as far as Hartford. In honor of Legid's trip to the sea, students have made an annual canoe trip from Hanover, New Hampshire to Long Island Sound since 1920. I first became a member of the Kamu Club in 1936, so that's 61 years here on the river. Before that, I guess the Connecticut River started in my blood, because so many of my ancestors were founders of Connecticut towns down at the foot of the river. And I have had the links of the river myself quite a few times.

It's a natural experience, it's an adventure, it's a rather thrilling thing to experience the history and the scenery of the river. The trip to the sea goes from Hanover to where the river lets out at the ocean in Long Island Sound. And it's funny, I take the trip a lot by car because I go down on the one to go home, but seeing the same sights along the river was a totally different experience. It comes naturally to me and I take it for granted that other people can see what a wonderful experience it is to paddle on a historic river. Hartford was once a thriving river port, but for the past 50 years, the city has been cut off from the river by flood control dikes and the highway. Today, riverfront recapture works to reconnect the people of Hartford to the beauty and pleasures their river can supply. 150 years ago, Hartford was a very active port city. There were 26 warfs at the end of state street. People arrived by boat, cargo arrived by boat.

They'd get off the docks and walk right up from the river's edge, right up state street to the old state house. The river was the city's front door. When riverfront recapture was created back in 1981, from downtown Hartford you couldn't see the river, you couldn't get to the river, you might as well not have had a river here. We're really trying to open up the river and make it part of the community. We're building a plaza over R-91 that will come from the Phoenix building over R-91 to the riverfront. And descending off that plaza will be grassy terraces that will create amphitheater seating for about 2,000 people. We'll have a stage there. We're building a bulkhead along the riverfront so that we can bring excursion boats and water taxis right into downtown Hartford. The interesting thing from a historical perspective is that's the exact same location where those 26 warfs were located 150 years ago. That's how people arrived in Hartford. And it was the city's front door 150 years ago and it will be the city's front door again.

The history of America is written through the history of her rivers. The Connecticut River is the Great River, it is the backbone of New England. The river flows through space but it also flows through time, through architectural history or through social history. We see how the past has flown to us. But I don't think you can have that thought without also picturing yourself standing in the flow and understanding that time is flowing through you as well. Now we are creating our own stories on the river. May our journey through time be reflected in the river's shining waters. Someday when the flowers are blue and still someday when the grass is still green, my role in waters will round the bend and flow into the open sea. So here's to the rainbow that's following me here. And here's to the friends that I know. And here's to the song that's within me now.

I will sing it where I go. River, take me along in your sunshine. Sing me your song every morning. They had winding and free. You roll and open. You change and call me. Let you and me river run down to the sea. River, take me along in your sunshine. Sing me your song every morning. They had winding and free. You roll and open. You change and call me. Let you and me river run down to the sea. Sing me your song every morning.

Sing me your song every morning. You're watching Metro Arts 13.

Welcome back to Metro Arts 13. I'm Hollister Sturgis, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science. Our next program, Theatre Talk, features an in-depth discussion of the current theatre season with host Susan Haskins and Michael Reedle. Let's watch Theatre Talk. This is Theatre Talk. I'm Susan Haskins. The Tony Race has begun and we have a very appropriate guest this evening here to introduce him, my co-host Michael Reedle of the New York Post. Jed Bernstein is the president of the League of American Theoders and producers. He has revitalized that organization and so doing has become a power player on Broadway. Jed, welcome to Theatre Talk.

In your capacity as president of the League, you also administer the Tony Awards, create the Tony Award Show. We just had the nominations now but there's still a lot of talk about what the format of this year's Tony Telecast is going to look like. There's no host yet with Rosie O'Donnell having pulled out. And there's a lot of concern among Broadway producers that because the show has not come together yet, the ratings are going to be very disappointing this year. What's the status of the award show? Well, I think that the award show is more or less on schedule. We made the decision a month or six weeks ago to go with a multiple host format that there was no sense in inviting the inevitable comparisons with Rosie on the last couple of years. And in other words, anyone stepped in to replace her if the ratings were bad would take the blame for that. Pairs of hosts to take care of different segments, much like the Golden Globes are done where you have a couple do 15 or 20 minutes, maybe a couple of awards, introducing entertainment segments, etc. And we're in the process of booking those people now. Rosie, as I think you reported, has said that she will appear. So we're delighted about that that she will hand out a couple of awards. Kevin Spacey is said he'll be on Jason Robard's said he'll be on.

Really? Because he's not been well, Jason Robard. Well, he just came back from California. He's been working on a movie and his plan is to be with us. But don't you also don't need for CBS to jack up these ratings. People maybe like Gwyneth Paltrow or Nicole Kidman, some of the younger, more higher profile stars. Any chance of getting them to become involved in the show? Well, we hope so. I mean, those are two names that obviously we're talking to because they both have a theater connection in one way or another. Gwyneth, of course, with her family. And she's going to be doing a play this summer up in Massachusetts and Nicole having scored such a big hit on Broadway this year with Blue Room. So that's exactly the way we're thinking. And the difficulty is just to get people tied down to make the commitment to that particular day. And I would think that over the next 10 days we will have much more news. Were you frustrated that Nicole Kidman wasn't nominated and therefore was less likely to appear? Well, you know, Susan, everybody has their theory of the year that Dustin Hoffman was snubbed, which was a great, egregious situation.

He did appear on the Tony Telecast. The year Julie Andrews was snubbed or the cast of Victor Victoria was snubbed, she chose not to. So whether Nicole will be with us or not, we certainly will invite her and we'll pay her car fare. But I think though a deeper problem for the Tony's this year, as opposed to not having a host yet, is the fact that we don't have any really strong new musicals. And Broadway was exciting last year, not just because Rosie O'Dowell was going to host the Tony's, but because you had the Lion King and Ragtime and Cabaret and enormous shows that attracted worldwide attention and made Broadway seem important. Is it a problem for the Tony's for the industry that we have avoid where good musicals should be? Well, I think that obviously the more visible the entertainment, one of the things the Tony suffer from every year and unlike the Oscars is that by and large, most of America has not seen the people who are nominated. And you know, you watch the Oscars, you've seen them movies, you have a rooting interest in how it's going to turn out.

In the case of the Tony's, because the shows in most cases have not gone on tour yet, a relatively limited number of people have seen them. So we've always tried to depend on the impact value of whatever entertainment there's going to be, whether it's from the individual shows or from related material that other guest stars or whoever it might be might do. So go back to the Smoky Joes, Cafe Year, which is certainly a show no be it ever heard of, but that opening is now sort of legendary in Tony history of those four guys on the street outside the theater. I think that show and they that show and turn it around. I think that we probably would all agree that Civil War, which certainly got, you know, crushed by all the critics, will probably do a great four minutes of television because they have music that is very adaptable to that medium, big voices, big actors that will probably make a very strong impact. Which is why the footloos producers must be crying in their beer today because they were not nominated for best musicals so they're going to be deprived of that four minutes. And so that this being an industry award show, you would try to include some of the people who were who were shot out in some way.

I think in this case, given the four nominees for best musical and the four nominees for best revival, six of them are still running. The seventh is parade and in the case of parade, you have the two leads who were nominated. So I think it would be great if we could get them to come and perform. And then the eighth is on the town, which certainly again would be easily performable by one or two of those leads if they want to exert to song from that. Although on the town was not nominated, so one of the snub leads. Oh, you're right, that would be one of them. She's your crib sheet. Pleasure to be on your shirt. Annie gets your God is there. Here you go, we hear Joey. So what am I missing as the eighth? Little me. Yeah, right. Which with Martin Short is, again, exerptable as a number. So if we have, you know, seven or eight available shows that are amongst the nominees available to perform, then I think the chances of going outside that group are pretty small. But let me ask you in your position, Jen, surely the producers of Footloose must try to lobby you or something just to, you know, throw us a bone, give us something to be on the show. Have you had those calls, Jen?

Well, I think I had a long day of phone calls on a number of topics from the aggrieved. I didn't actually have any conversations today with anybody about being on the telecast. I think we've distracted them by not announcing the hosts, so they're more concerned about that. But I think with the exception of one year I can remember and re-sremember, we really have focused on, you know, nominated material. And I think, although it's frustrating, people have gotten used to that. The strength this season is really in the plays. Any, you're discussing any ways of getting the plays on the show? Well, you know, we have a discussion every year, and I don't know that we have solved the crack the code. It's a very tough thing, yeah. It's very hard. Last year, we tried to do those little excerpts with John Legosamo and the woman Anna Manna-Han from Beauty Queen. We have talked about having dramatic stars, such as a James Earl Jones kind of person or Paul Newman kind of person, present either quotes or material or scenic dramatic descriptions. And we will continue to work on it because, as you say, certainly making the plays, the leading stars, many of whom are very visible,

part of the show is very, very important because it's been so much a part of the fabric of the season. No, that's where the excitement really is. And also, too, I mean, there's this debate that always comes up about the Tony Awards. Is it a promotional and marketing tool or is it something that should preserve the integrity of its awards in the American theater? It seems to me, though, that it can be both. Well, it can be, Michael. I mean, it's... And if you have plays on the show, then you're showing the integrity of the American theater. I mean, I think that the, you know, the real answer is, look, it's a television show. It is not, I remember, in my very first press conference when I got hired. Four years ago, somebody asked me, maybe it was even you, asked me a question about the Tony's. And I said, the problem with the Tony's, and this was speaking as a theater fan, is that it tries to be, you know, on the one hand, a little community party that's very inside. And, you know, and on the other hand, it wants to be a mass promotional television event. It has to decide what it wants to do. It doesn't mean it ignores the other side,

but you have to be really good at one thing or another to give yourself some focus. And I think that everybody has acknowledged that this is a television show, and we have 8, 9, 10 million households watching this thing, and that, you know, inside New York theater moments are not going to work as well as something with broader appeal. Now, I produced this television program, and I have to confess that if I didn't have some idea in my mind, who might be the guest in a month, I'd be really nervous. How do you stay so cool not really having any nails out? I had hair three months ago. It was black. It was black, and I had a lot more of it. It's like one way or the other on June 7th, the Tony's will be open. Well, we're available. I've been going around. I've been going around. Well, you know, Isabelle and I are doing the first three awards. You can be on the PBS segment. Listen, I'm actually kind of excited because without the, they tell me that, you know, in Tony history,

there have been other shows with sort of non-hosts. There was the famous Bonnie Franklin sit in the box show. Yes, I remember that. The Alex Cohn here. There have been other shows with no host, but this is the first one sort of that I've been involved in. And it frees you up to do certain things in terms of involving more people in saying, you know, instead of that rather stiff moment where you do get somebody like a Dustin Hoffman, let's say, to come out and, you know, read four names and either make a rather stupid joke or, you know, a little bit of repertoire today, if you couldn't get Dustin to come out and wouldn't it be wonderful if he came out with... With Brian Denny. For example, you can really enjoy him for five minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes, which I think is a treat for the audience, both in the theater and the viewers' phone. Now, one of the things that people most comment on the Tony Awards, though, is that when the way the band cuts off... Oh, the band doesn't do that anymore. It's not our show. They did that one year about three years ago. So those days are over. No more.

Because the thing we all know is that 11 o'clock CBS is going to cut off those Tony Awards. That's right. I don't know why I want to, but still, the objection, the biggest criticism I hear is that they cut off those... No, I think it's true on all awards show, but it's now most sort of the greatest on the Oscars, I think, is with the music. But you guys answer me this question. You're a journalist. You have theater community folk who, presumably, have access to the greatest and most glib writers in the world. Yes, 75% of the speeches are complete snooze. That's right. That's true. And I guess I respect the idea that it's bad luck if people worry about that. But I mean, think about it. We remember the little girl from Secret Garden who cried. Well, that was not exactly a glib speech. She just cried. Right. And thank your agent, which was really very sweet. Before her parents explained her, that you never thank your agent. And then we had last year, I thought several rather classy speeches in Tasha Richardson had obviously planned out what she was going to say if she won, and made sure she thanked all the people and didn't read a list.

That was one thing that was great about Rosie. When she had, we started this thing with her, which we will continue this year, of having a tea for all the nominees. Where she tells them, please. This is how you should do your speech, and this is, you know, say the thank yous later, and don't, you know. So I think we're trying to make progress, and with the wonderful innovation of PBS picking up the first hour, that really has opened up the two hours so people can talk. Funnily enough, we in the old show, when you tried stuff 21 awards into the two hours, an acceptance speech could be 45 seconds. That's what you needed to do to make it work. Now, when we don't have a time limit that we worry about, on average, they run about a minute 10. So it's really only another 25 seconds, maybe 30 seconds. And given that on the CBS show that's 12 awards, that's another six minutes, that's certainly something we can handle, and we can let people talk to their hearts content. Jen, we have a few, just a few minutes left, but I wanted to sort of allow you to turn the question on me again. Curious, you deal with the theater press a lot in your capacity at the league. What is your feeling about the kind of press coverage that Broadway gets now about the critical community now, you know, the reporters who cover it on a daily basis? And whether or not there is now more interest nationally and internationally from the press's point of view on what's going on on Broadway?

I think there's a lot more interest. We see it just to talk about the non-New York press for a second. We see it from the out of town press and from the international press. There's a whole sort of international press community now that is interested in the theater, which we... Mainly British right now, because of all the British plays. British, but no, from odd places, you know, I don't mean odd. I mean, places you wouldn't expect. Japan, South America. Is this because of the tourist market? Now, New York is a destination for them. Is this because of the tourist market? I think it's because Broadway is really returning to become mainstream entertainment, popular entertainment, the way it was in the 30s and 40s and 50s. And it's very American. It's an American icon. I think as far as the New York press goes, you have a funny dichotomy. I think we have folks like yourself who are so aggressive and so prolific in terms of covering the business side. That that's something we haven't enjoyed in years in this market. And that's, I can say that, a huge bonus. And obviously, you know, you don't always write what I tell you, but you do most of the times. That's right. That's right. And sometimes that might give you a little craze.

But you're right about it in a spicy way because you care about it. And it makes it seem important when you are writing aggressively about it. Funnily enough, the critics, per se, the official critics, I think they're, and I've said this before, that their power, if you will, has waned. That you have shows that are marketing so aggressively now and trying to find other ways to get their messages across, get the information out there. That the power of the New York Times or the power of a single outlet to close a show has been diminished. More so for musicals, I think, been plays, but, you know, in both cases. And that's a healthy trend. There are two things I would want. On the one hand, I'd want more writing generally because if we return again to the good old days of 30 critics, 30 daily newspapers in New York where you have a diversity of opinion, that would be great. In lieu of that, or in addition to that, I think if producers keep their eye on the bull in terms of getting information out, maybe I'd want to go to see the weir, if I knew what it was about, if I knew something about the background of the play, if I had a chance to sample it in some way. So, you know, I think all these things are positive things, but the business coverage of Broadway has gotten sexier, has gotten more interesting.

In fact, I feel that in the mainstream papers, like the Post and the News and Now and the Times, stories that once would have only been in variety, business stories, are what we write about it. Just as the business of Hollywood has become interesting for. Now sometimes I get to complain that we're sort of like sports writers covering who's up and who's down at the box office, but you know, that's what gives it some drama and some tension. I know the story that you did a couple weeks ago about the salary thing. Now that, you know, that aggravates the press. What Broadway stars are making? But I love that. I love that. I mean, how many stories are there about, you know, Bruce Willis gets $21 million in this and that? Right. And look, I, you know, it's easy for me to say, because you didn't talk about how much the salary. You're a salary. You wouldn't rent your jambalette, it's $50,000 a week. That helps make it accessible, and that's a battle that Broadway always has to fight. How do we make sure we are not elitist, and people can plug into this experience in a welcoming way? No, I'm available for a consultation. Oh, no, you have no price.

The thing is, though, I do can buy consulting in public and just put in my columns, right? Jed Bernstein from the League of American Theaters and Producers. We wish you luck with the Tony Awards. We'll be watching. Thank you. Thanks for being our guest tonight on theater talk. So Michael, the Tony nominations have just been announced, and we've got to discuss them here with us. David Lev-Gowitz, the editor of Playbill Online. David, welcome. Thanks. All right. What were the notable omissions this morning at the Tony nominations? What were you surprised didn't get in? Well, I don't think there were any extraordinarily bad or great omissions, but I think David Hare has to be looking his wounds, because the three plays he had during the season, the Adelaroza, the Blue Room, and Amy's View all got skunked for best playing nomination, whereas I think some people might have been surprised, Martin McDonnell, as long as some West got in there. I think that surprised a lot of people, actually, that that play got in. It's sort of the follow-up to the beauty queen of Linen.

Well, everybody, the major print critics, all raved about it, except the times, which I think there's the one factor that... The times raved about the weir, which did... Yeah, but I must say, I think it's a testament to the continuing decrease of the power of the times, that the Tony nominators, who used to take their cue often from what Frank Rich said about plays, seemed to be paying no attention to Ben Brantlee, at all. Brantlee Loved the Weir, didn't get nominated, and Brantlee in the Times built up Le Deleria into what was supposed to be this big, gigantic, Broadway star, and she was not nominated... In which, in which... The hitiest submission in my book, I have to say, I think, that Overlooking Le Del Arri, I think she was too radical for the nominators, they didn't get it, and that's a shame, because she was a standout. She was too shrily loud. I know. I mean, the millennials have tastes. Well, they've been putting Mary Testa. I mean, I was totally sure that they allowed. That was a real slap at Leah Delerie by the way to put in Mary Testa and not Leah Delerie. And I just think it was, Testa's great, but I think it was cowardice on the part of the nominators. We move on. Well, a wingman, a cowardice.

Well, I think that they found, I don't, I think that people found her shrewd because she was in her own words, a big dike, and they weren't ready for that. I just think it, and that, that was a, Oh, come on, Ethel Merman, it was a big dike, and they nominated her all the time. Now we get to different types of big dikes. We're different, we're different, we're different. And Rose and Donald, you know, has been the host of the Tony Awards show. Now, never you mind about Rose and Donald. That's a, oh, shit. I don't think that's the personal life. It's her personal life. All right, let's go on. Oh, yes, all we're doing. Making the co-host nervous. Footloose was left out wonderfully, joyfully. Praise God, of the musical category. Do you think that that hurts that show, not being able to have its two minutes on the Tony Awards? I think it could possibly hurt the touring possibilities of the show. I want to get those musical numbers out there to America. But who knows, the way the Tony's might run, they may still get a segment to do their thing, which, you know, award-no-a-word. It's not the kind of show that needs one. No, same thing with something like Gertrude's Fascinating Rhythm. It may close because it might not have the audience to go for it.

But I can't imagine it's terrible. That's what it will close. I don't think it's so terrible, but oh, boy. But I don't think it was counting on awards to get it going. It needs the work of mouth, it needs the advertising, it needs the marketing poll, not the critics say, the Tony's say, go see this. Now with the nominations out, what do you think is the most interesting race shaping up? What's the one we're all going to be writing and talking about? I don't know how interesting it is because it's been obvious since the season began, Danny H. versus. Spacey. Danny from Death of the Salesman. Kevin Spacey from The Ice Man Cometh. Right, yeah. The interesting thing is that because there has been somewhat of a Spacey backlash because it was so hyped and some of the reviews were so big, such big rames. And then they came back and said, wait a minute, these kind of men, these kind of men all the way through and performance starts really, excitingly and interestingly, doesn't really go anywhere except get faster. All right, I'm throwing my personal feelings to somebody.

Harold Hill and not Hickie. On some level, yeah. After four and a half hours, it kind of want to be devastated, not just well, it's over. So I think there may be some momentum swinging away from him. It's going to be interesting. I would hazard a guess that what you're going to see happen is that the award for Best Actor in a Play will go to Denny Heath, but the award for Best Revival of a Play will go to The Ice Man Cometh. Probably deserved. That is a huge, difficult show to mount with all those characters, all that. And it's also once in a lifetime show. I mean, our generation will never see an Ice Man Cometh on Broadway. What does an oversight not to nominate anybody from that cast? Well, this was interesting. The reason, it wasn't that they didn't want to nominate them, but there are only four slots in the acting categories. And there have been a wealth of performances. There's been a wealth of performances this year on Broadway. And in fact, one of the actors, Tim Pickett Smith from The Ice Man, come off tied with Kevin Anderson in the supporting actor category. And on a second ballot, Kevin Anderson won by one vote. So in fact, some of the nominators told me

they wished that they had the power to expand the number of nominations from four to five in a number of categories so that they could get more of these fine actors in. Yeah. I didn't use to. I was looking for an old Tony book, and I would see occasionally five people in an interesting category about this round a little more, but now they're, yeah. What do you think about the snub of Nicole Kidman for Best Actor? She's not in the mix. Was she ever really in the mix, though? I think she brought a tremendous amount of attention to that show, obviously, and people were surprised. I think she was good. She was, what? What she so terrific, what she's so memorable. I mean, Anna Freel is much more present in my mind now as both a beautiful woman and a performer. Anna Freel from Closer. Oh, sorry, from Closer, yes. But to me, the most stunning performances in the New York State in New York were Kevin and Shelfon in WIT and Edie Falco in Side Man. And neither of them were eligible. Right. That's the thing they tried with WIT, but you really can't. There's going to be this whole, there always is a bruha. Why can't off-board way really special of being eligible? And there always give 100 zillion reasons.

Some of them are very logical. Why, it's quite impossible to do that. On the subject of the Tony Award for Best Play, Side Man has been struggling at the box office, losing a good deal of money each week. Do you think that the nomination or receive for Best Play is going to help it? It's a strong contender to win. It may well walk away with the award. But do you sometimes think that, David, that producers have this mindset that nominations are a lifeline and can save them? When we see time and time again, that in fact, you get a nomination, it often doesn't mean very much of the box office. Well, I think Side Man first was a good shot at the top prize, which even then, this has been playing a year, not to mention the off-board way, where it played down there. So the people in New York who have wanted to see it have seen it once or twice. And it's not a tourist show. Maybe if it wins the Tony, it could be a tourist show and carry through the summer. I mean, they're running about 39% box office right now. You can't do that. Well, what they need is they need a star. They need to win the Tony, and they need to put a star in that play for the summer.

And that's how they could probably keep it going. We should say that the man who won the most, who got the most Tony nominations this year, is fugitive producer, Garfter Binsky, who is parade, and Fossy, and who will be accepting his award from the sing-sing benedictory. If he, I spoke to his, one of his press people up in Canada today, and they said, you know, Garfter's very sad. He would like to have been there to share in the joy of his creators of these shows. And I said, if he'd been here, they would have put handcuffs on him, because he wanted for securities fraud. But what does the say about Garfter Binsky? I mean, you know, he may be a criminal, as the people run live and say he is, but parade and Fossy are the big winners today. Well, what it says is a very sad thing. I was not a fan of Fossy, but I am a bit of a fan of parade, and was certainly a showboat, and some of the other things that he did. And there was only one person who was doing things on that magnitude, of that scope, balancing art,

and the bigness and beauty that used to be Broadway. And he was it. What he had to do to accomplish that, turned out to be... I think of jail time. All right, we got that. It's good. David Malkowitz from Playville Online. Thanks for being our guest tonight on YouTube. Thank you so much. So let's close now with the top-nominated show, nine nominations for Garfter Binsky's Parade. I will never understand how all the world is judged you when I was known how lucky I was to be. I will never understand how I kept growing crazy just when there till you came home to me. Now look at me.

Now that you're finally here with me now that I know I was right to wait and everyone else was so wrong for so long. All the wasted time. All the million hours he is on top of him. Still too proud to cry. All the days gone by to feel that I don't satisfy and I've never knew anything at all. Theater Talk is made possible in part by the Free Recall Foundation, the Harvard Foundation, and public funds from New York State Council on the Arts, the State Agency. Playville Online is the official website of Theater Talk

and the home of the Playville Club, providing exciting opportunities for Theater lovers. We welcome your questions or comments for Theater Talk. Thank you and good night. You're watching Metro Arts 13. You

Come to the end. Oh, boy, it's amazing how many stars there are. You know what's really amazing, Clell, is that recent discoveries within the Orion Nebula, then trade us to the area of the whole other solar system, predate in our own course, the same creation, the chances of our not being alone. Oh, save. Welcome back to Metro Arch 13.

I'm Hollister Sturgis, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science. Next in our program, Literati, featuring one-on-one conversations with some of the most notable authors, playwrights, and poets of our day. In tonight's episode, Ariel Dorfman talks with New York-based novelist Paul Oster. Major funding for Literati was provided by World Affairs Television Productions and by the Algonquin Hotel, site of the historic Algonquin Roundtable. Welcome to Literati.

I'm Philip Claire, and I'll be your presenter for the course of this season. Over the next few months, we'll be introducing you to some of the great literary figures of North America. Let's join two of them right now. Welcome to Literati. I'm Ariel Dorfman, and today I have someone who I've never met before, but in fact, I've met him many, many times because I have been reading his work for many years, and this is Paul Oster. I think one of the most original and unique voices in the United States and perhaps in the world today, and welcome to Literati. Thank you. Glad to be here. Well, I'm very glad you are with us, and I'm glad to meet you too. Thank you. It's great. I'm hoping that we will be able to have a serious conversation, which we'll go on next week, and perhaps we could start simply by reading us a piece of Mr. Vertego, the first page of it, which is your newest novel. Right. And I will just plunge in. This is page one. Well, not plunge in because it's about flying, right, but. I was 12 years old the first time I walked on water.

The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I'm not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight. Master Yehudi found me when I was nine, an orphan boy begging nickels on the streets of St. Louis. And he worked with me steadily for three years before he let me show my stuff in public. That was in 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, the precise year when night began to fall on the world forever. I kept it up until a few days before the October crash, and what I did was greater than anything those two gents could have dreamed of. I did what no American had done before me, what no one has ever done since. Master Yehudi chose me because I was the smallest, the dirtiest, the most abject. You're no better than an animal, he said, a piece of human nothingness. That was the first sentence he spoke to me. And even though 68 years have passed since that night, it's as if I can still hear the

words coming from the master's mouth, you're no better than an animal. If you stay where you are, you'll be dead before winter is out. If you come with me, I'll teach you how to fly. Ain't nobody can fly, Mr. I said, that's what birds do, and I sure as hell ain't no bird. You know nothing, Master Yehudi said. You know nothing because you are nothing. If I haven't taught you to fly by your 13th birthday, you can chop off my head with an axe. I'll put it in writing if you like. If I fail to deliver on my promise, my fate will be in your hands. Well, I don't think that we're being unfair with your present readers and your future readers by saying that Walt does learn how to fly. Yes, he does not cut off Master Yehudi's head, though something terrible does happen to Master Yehudi, and that we will not tell him. No.

No. Now, the first thing I draw my attention is, what a great opening line, could you repeat that opening line? Well, I was 12 years old the first time I walked on water. The first time I walked on water. You also happen to have extraordinary first lines, I would say absolutely all your books. Well, it's something I think a great deal about, and I can't really begin the book until there is a first line. And that first line, I hope in every case just about contains the entire book, that the spirit of the book is there, the central idea of the book is there, and it immediately will yank the reader into the imaginary world that I'm proposing for them to enter. So, do you ever change that first line? Once I've got it, once I'm happy with it, I don't change it. It takes often a lot of work, and I do, yes, what I mean is, you write a first line and then you keep on going and then you go back and you rewrite the first line until it's the right one. Really not.

In fact, I... Do you incubate? Yes. Usually a book lives with me for years before I actually sit down and write it. And the first sentence is part of preparing myself for the project. It's not as though everything is mapped out, and there are surprises every day when one is working on a novel. But the general tone, the arc of the story, the vibrations that I'm trying to create or trying to live with, are with me before I start. That takes years. So basically, you let chance take you to that first line, but you work very hard to get there. Yes, that's a good way to put it. Right. The reason I'm asking you this is because my own experience as a writer is that when I find that first line, all I have to do is follow it. In other words, what I have to do is explore why this first line is the perfect first line and go deeper and deeper into it, is that what happens to you? I think so.

There have been books that I've written that I grouped with for years. Moon Palace is a good example of a book I published a number of years ago. I lived with that book for 15 years before I was able to write it. I had written many pages and drafts of chapters that I had eventually thrown away. And it was only until I found the first sentence that the book truly became possible. And once I had it, I was able to go through. Because that defines the voice also. And certainly one of the unique things about you, I mean, I'm just saying things that other critics have said, is that you have very special, very specific voices. We could say there's sort of a Paul Orster voice, which is almost immediately recognizable, let's say. Possibly. So not to contradict you, but I have felt, and this is looking back and retrospect over what I've done in the eight novels, I think, that I've written, that nevertheless, even though the prose is mine, and obviously I have certain limitations as a writer, certain

territory that I inhabit, that the tonality of each book has really been determined by the protagonist. Sometimes it's a third-person narration, sometimes it's a first-person narration. But nevertheless, the kind of language that's used and the kinds of sentences that I'm writing are all emanating out of the personality and the character of that person who is the center of the story. That is the finding of the voice. But I find interesting, and with this, I think we can go into Mr. Vertigo, is that somehow the previous books, all of them, have a certain, let us say, a certain tone to them, which make them inhabit one realm. And the voice of Mr. Vertigo, that voice that we just heard, is somehow different. I'm also going to point out the same similarities as we continue to talk today. But there is a very striking difference between this child speaking, where he's speaking

from, and many of the other protagonists that you have looked at. And I don't think that this is a radical departure, but there is something different. Would you care to comment on that? Well, yes, I'd be happy to. Yes, there is a different tone, and Walt is, I think, for the first time in my life of writing books, a protagonist who comes from the streets. He is not an educated person. So first of all, he sounds different from the other people I've written about. His, the language of this book, is a combination somehow of street slang and what might, one might call a biblical tone. Yes. It's both. There's a kind of a labradiction in spite of all the slang that's going on in this book. So it is not a realistic prose. Not at all.

Not at all. Thank God or thank Walt. I just wanted to come to that point that you do not write realistic prose in the typical sense, just because it has to be jazzy. It is not realistic. Not at all. No, it's really elaborate. It's an invented language. And I think for the first time, this book approaches what I would call mythology. I think some of my previous books have inhabited the realm of fable, which is quite different from mythology. Did you make a different theme? Well, mythology, in the sense that you don't know who Master Yuhudi is and you never really learn who he is. There are a few little hints and that's it. The characters are defined by what they do. You either accept it or don't. You believe it or you don't. Just the way in Greek mythology, the gods act in often crazy ways. You have to accept it. This is what they do. There's no underlying psychology. I mean, it's before psychology or after psychology. And I think all my other books have been very concerned with psychology in that very precise

way. Another difference that I think that this book has from all my other books is that all the other protagonists of my books have concentrated their efforts on trying to be good. This has really been the main very moral or anguish by morality, but seeking some kind of philosophical, spiritual, religious, whatever foundation to form their lives. They might take crazy risks to make these discoveries and do stupid things. But they always feel that they have a reason for doing what they do. And the object is to be a good human being in this very chaotic and often bad world around us. On the other hand, around the edges of the stories that I've written, there have always been other kinds of books, other kinds of characters whose object in the world is not particularly to be good.

But like most people, to make as much money as they can, to be famous, to have a good time, to enjoy their bodies, to be extreme, and to possess others. And to possess others. I'm thinking particularly of a character like Potsy in the music of Chance, who's the gambler. He represents a different kind of person from Nash, who's the central figure. And Mr. Vertigo, it's as if one of these peripheral characters has suddenly taken center stage and is telling the story. So there's a difference. But it's not as though Walt is not the kind of character it could have existed in another one of my books. He just wouldn't have been in the center. And could it be that you came to work with one of these peripheral characters because in your previous novel, Leviathan, the person who is, in some sense, the central character blows himself up along with the Statue of Liberty in a way? Well, I think, or at least the replica of Statues of Liberty.

I had been living with Mr. Vertigo as an idea for a long time. But it was always very vague. Leviathan, I mean, to talk about that verse, it was a very hard book for me to write. It was so low to the ground. It was so close to being, for me, in any case, a traditional novel in the sense that I was writing about certain kinds of things that take place in many other novels, marriages, divorces, people at parties, friendships. These are things that Suicide, but that I have not really dealt with in my previous books. Most of my characters have been quite alone. Yes. And they're there as ideas. And most of them are people who have whose wives have died, whose children have died. I mean, terrible things have happened to them in some way. Before the story is started, right? Yes. You reach them towards the end when they're on the edge, and then Mr. Ooster pushes them a little bit further, and you say, can you push them further, and you keep on doing it,

which is interesting. Well, which is interesting. In any case, after Leviathan, I was exhausted by doing that, and I had to get off the ground. I had to start to fly. I wanted to do something really crazy. And I think every book of writer writes is finally a response to the previous book. And you want to do something different. But once again, you did something very different in the sense that the tone is very different. The main character is very different. This is a pick arrest novel in a great measure, and it's interesting that, in a sense, you're going back to pre-Servantes, right? I mean, because you've written so much about all of that, so Adventist seems to be a very major figure for you, right? Every novel comes out of Dunkey Hookley. I agree. Absolutely. He tackled every question, I think, that every novelist in the past 300 years has tackled in that one great book. Could you go on about that a bit more? I mean, how would you take one of your novels and relate it to the Quixote?

Well, in one of my books, City of Glass, I really talk about them. You do explicitly. And you talk about Siddha Mithib and in Hill, who is the author, right? The translator, the author. It's Dunkey Hookley is a book that deals with itself as an artifact, as a fiction. And it also, in a way, is a postmodern book already, because it's dealing with old forms. I mean, he's taking chivalric romances and turning them into something different, which is what contemporary writers are doing all the time. But I wonder where the postmodernist is a good term for him or for you. The reason is because I really do think that this obsession with the moral, with the ethical, the idea that there is some hidden order in the world that we can only find it is in some sense, I think, the opposite of these shimmering surfaces that have no meaning. And I really think, especially in your last two books, but before as well, I don't find this sense of people who are not, or just in it, to enjoy the world on the contrary. It seems to be people who are trying to find a sense of some way through the labyrinth

by believing in their instincts and working with the representations of themselves as well. I don't think of myself as a postmodernist. Whatever that means. I mean, it's a very vague term, and people have even called me post-postmodernist, whatever that means. But maybe you agree, something. I hope so. I think of myself as a classical writer, really a traditional storyteller in some way. Let me go to Mr. Vergo in a relation to that, because when you say your traditional storyteller, you've always said that you need stories to survive, that we need this for our time and for other times. But this is a story told by somebody very different, with the sort of populist pastiche fight voice. I mean, once I get contrived voice, could you tell me about how you researched that, researched it in the sense of how you thought about that voice, how you came to it? Maybe this is shocking to you, but there was no research. No, no, I'm glad. I found Walt talking through it. There was this voice inside me.

Well, that's not shocking to me at all. Yeah, on the contrary. You researched your own soul. That's where the books come from. And I never have sat down ever and said, I want to write a book about something. I would like to make a story about, I don't know, post-industrial capitalism in the late 20th century, and how it affects human behavior in the family. I mean, I just don't know. I mean, I just don't know. They find me. Absolutely. I think that's... I get cornered by an idea. Often I don't even want to look at it or think about it. And if the idea keeps assaulting me, keeps backing me into that corner, after a while, I just have to start fighting my way out and start wrestling with this thing that's confronted me. Now Walt, though he is an illiterate child and a street smart child and one who will levitate. But the same time as a child who speaks about, at the end of the book, as writing a salvation, he says, this book rescued my life. So wouldn't you say that he also is in some way, he has become the author of his own life

by writing it? I mean, isn't writing essential to him? Oh, absolutely. I mean, he, at a very old age, has decided to sit down and compose this book, which is the story of his life. And I think he's come to a point, he's lost everybody and everything that has ever really meant anything to him. And now is the time to do this. And I think it keeps him going. He also has lost fundamentally, perhaps the worst loss of all is the loss of the father. This is the father, Master Yehudi, who is his father, right? And in fact, he can't even call him Yehudi, right? No. It's a call of man allowed to. Or Master Yehudi, right? Yes. So there's an awe of that. I've worked before on the idea of the double, or if somebody who above us, or beyond us, with some sort of major talent that we lack, somehow has found a path that we cannot follow. It's a very deep idea, an idea which goes back to Poe and Dostoyevsky and Bornechis, etc. I'd like to elaborate on that, and I'd like to come back to Master Yehudi.

This idea of somebody who is manipulating our life or who is an example to us that we follow into the blindness. You've done that in all your books, I think. Well. So a godlike figure. Well, godlike figure or an intellectual-friendly friend, I suppose. In this case, I don't think you have something like Sancho, I mean, that's what I mean. Yes. It's like a burning question mark to us, that other human being. Yes. Well, I think, for example, in that book, it's the narrators lack of belief in themselves that allows him to let Fantraugh fill him. And I think the whole progress of the book is how he tries to get this other self out of him. The other person is a double of us, is a mirror of us, right? Yes. He's part of us. That's why he's calling to us, right? Right. Definitely. Definitely. In the case of Master Yehudi and Walt, though, this is very definitely a father-son relationship, a master-disciple relationship.

And Walt resists a great deal in the beginning. And Master Yehudi's first task really is to break his spirits. And I think it does it fairly effectively. Pretty terrifying, one fact. Yes. But Walt, in a way, after a while, begins to see that the master does love him, and he's doing this to bring out his talents. And he's proved right. I mean, his faith in Walt is justified. Walt does want to show them him as well. Yes, yes. Now, to go from here to perhaps a more personal thing, this seems to me, I may be wrong, but it seems to me the first time since the invention of solitude, right? Solitude of things? I'm sorry. I forgot the name. Invention of solitude. Invention of solitude, exactly. Where you work on this deep relationship between father and son. It would seem as if the other books since then have been about brothers. I mean, brothers in the sense of twins. Yes.

That's not a novel, of course. That's a prose book that is actually based on real events. I understand. But it is a meditation on, in fact, two sets of fathers, son, relationships, right? Yes. Which are very different from this master Yuhudi and Walt relationships. Yes. So, I mean, if you don't want to answer this sort of question, I just found it very interesting that you started out. You've written about the fact that that first book, that book, which was not invented and yet somehow you meditate in a very inventive way, creative way, you speak about Jonah and the whale. And I mean, lots of different things. That that should, many, many years later, finally, you come back to the father's son relationship at a certain moment in your life. Yeah. Well, I would say, too, in a book like Moon Palace, Fathers and Sons are dealt with the rather. So, there are fungles and grandfather's and in rather profound ways, if comical, I hope. Thinking back to this origins of Mr. Vertigo, something was unburied for me.

And this is a very interesting thing. And I think one of the reasons why the idea of flying is so attractive to me. Why I've been so drawn to it. And I've noticed that in many of my books, there have been people who have fallen. And a bloom falls through the window in the country of last things. Barber falls into a grave and breaks his bag. Leviathan sacks falls from a fire escape. Why was this? Why was this? And then suddenly this desire to write a book about someone who can get off the ground. When I was about 10 years old, my father fell off the roof of a building. He was working in Jersey City, where he worked, and fixing a roof, and he fell. He slipped. And just in the same way as sacks in Leviathan was saved by a clothesline that broke his fall.

My father's fall was broken by this clothesline. He was okay. He got up without any damage, a few little bumps and bruises, and that was it. I think for the rest of my childhood, after I was told this story, I walked around with an image of my father falling through the air, as if falling from the sky. And it probably went into a very deep, dark place inside me, and has been coming out in these fictional ways in my books. I think there's a connection there. But the same time, this act of levitation. I mean, I find this fascinating. Let me just say that. But I think this act of levitation is a wonderful, liberating one. It's also a very dangerous one, right? I mean, to levitate in a country where this has turned into entertainment and amusement for the rest, it turned, bitter vertigo is also a political allegory about what happens to the innocence of America, let's say. Yes, yes, and exactly. And what happens to talent, too, or creativity in this country?

Everything turns into business and money. And it's a subject that interests me a great deal. And Master Yehudi, while being a sage in many ways and able to see deep into the hearts of people and things, is out to make a lot of money, too. And I think that's part of what appeals to me about him, because he's not simply pure. He's not Spinoza cut a drift in the American Midwest. He's an American immigrant who wants to get ahead in the world, by the same terms that other people in America want to get ahead with him. And so does Walt, right? So does Walt, very definitely. But there are limits to how much you can levitate for others, right? I mean, not only the fact that when Walt becomes, comes to puberty, he can't because the headaches are too large, but that's very symbolic of the innocence of America, levitating and yet at the same time sort of falling.

Well, if you want to say that, that's fun. That's good. Well, it's fair, you know, everybody has their own. I just saw a sort of sense of that. And also, because this is such a huckleberry thin-like narrative in a way, it's also a picker-esque. Now, towards the end of the book, after they can no longer, he can no longer fly, they head off for Hollywood. Yes. Now, you haven't headed exactly for Hollywood, but you have had one film done, which is a music of chance, and then you're just completed smoke, as I understand it, with wank, and then you've been involved with another one. How was the music of chance? What did you feel about doing a film of that? Well, you see, I really wasn't involved in that. I gave the rights to be that. So you appeared. Yes. I'll explain it. In ending, which is not yours. Right. In fact, Phillip Haas, the director, liked the book very much, and wanted to turn it into a film, I met him through a very close friend, and we got along very well. His ideas about the book seemed to me very intelligent and interesting, and I said,

fine, go ahead, see what you can do. I'm really not a purist. I'm curious to see what people can do about retelling stories in another form or medium. You yourself are somebody who borrows constantly, and you're a plagiarist in a way. Absolutely. I mean, we are, right? Otherwise, we were not born in the last moment. Well, please. So he wrote the script and directed the film, and I gave him really a free hand to interpret the book in any way he wanted. It's a reading of the book. It's not the book. I did the book. I wrote it already. As he said, the only faithful adaptation of a novel is to take the book and film each page. Otherwise, you're going to go in a different direction. I think the movie captures the spirit of the book to a certain degree. The ending in the book is ambiguous, and I said, if you have another reading of the ending, fine.

Do what you feel you have to do. It was his work. The fact that I am part of this ending just came about by chance. They called me up. They were filming. They had to do the scene in a few days, and it said, the person we had hired to drive this Jeep fell through. We don't have the role, and it suddenly occurred to us that you should do it. And I had 10 seconds to decide, and I said, oh, well, what the hell, I'll do it. And then I did it, and I'm sorry, I did. You find that you should not be a character in your own film, what's that? I know. That doesn't bother me. It was just very hard. I'm a terrible actor. I had never done it before, and I never going to do it again. It was hard. Well, when we come back next week, we'll talk about your other Swadi Zant Hollywood experiences. We can talk about a bit about mine, you know, and we'll go back and forth. We'll talk a bit more about Mr. Vertigo and a bit more about your other work. And thank you so much. This is Literati. Thank you for being with us, and I'm sure you'll be interested in finding out what other

projects Paul Oster has got next week when you join us. I'm Ariel Dwarfman. Thank you. Thanks for having joined us on this edition of Literati. I hope you've enjoyed the authors we've presented to you today. Be sure to join us again next week. Until then, be well. After your funding for Literati was provided by World Affairs Television Productions, and by the Algonquin Hotel, site of the historic Algonquin Roundtable. Metro Arts 13 will return after this important message. Look around, and you will see the future.

In the hands of those who are just starting to explore. In the eyes of those just beginning to wonder. Some will take dreams we've yet to have, and make them come true. Others will answer questions we haven't begun to ask. Of course we have no way of finding the next Edison, or the next Ellington, Austin, or Van Gogh. Not until they've discovered their own special talent, their own unique voice. So we do our best. And one of the things we do is give them a place where they can find that gift for themselves, with the children's programming of public television. Perhaps the finest minds in history are here now. Where they go tomorrow is entirely up to us. I am Nipsey Russell, and I am really keen to give you a shout and tell you about Metro Arts 13.

This six hour day cable art service is in your area now. Where? It depends on where you live. In most areas, it's on the Metro Learning Channel Monday through Saturday. But on Sundays, it lights up your set on Metro Guide. Metro Arts 13. The treat is rare, but the treat is there. All you gotta do is find out where. You could find it serendipitously. That's our program for tonight. I'm very pleased to tell you that tomorrow night Metro Arts 13 will be presenting a special lineup in honor of our expanded viewing audience. We will be on at a special time too, from 6 p.m. to midnight on all metropolitan area cable vision and time Warner systems. Please join me as we present the best of a week's programming on the arts in one night. It's a triple feature. See you then. I'm Hollister Sturgis, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut. Good night.