Next Sunday, walk a mile in COTS’ shoes

Imagine you’re eighteen years old and beginning your freshman year of college in northern Vermont. You’re from a small town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is your first time away from home. Your parents divorced when you were six, and your mom remarried. Your father moved to Vermont and you saw him less and less over the next decade. As a part of your campus orientation, you’ve volunteered to work with the homeless. It’s the very end of August. On your second day with your fellow freshmen and a few upper class leaders, you are in a building that has been converted into single-room occupancy apartments for formerly homeless women and men. While some of the students are cooking for the residents, you’re playing a board game with others in the common room. When you look up, there – coming through the door – is your father. One of the residents. Someone who had been, quite clearly, homeless.

This is precisely what happened to Nicole Marshall, 25. Marshall was an incoming freshman at Saint Michael’s College in August 2005 when she was volunteering at St. John’s Hall, one of the buildings in downtown Burlington that the Committee on Temporary Shelter has converted into permanent housing for the homeless. There is a stigma to homelessness, and so Nicole had not yet told her new acquaintances that her father – who she had not seen in over three years – might be a COTS client.

The father and daughter reconciled almost casually, as if they saw each other regularly. Still, one of the student leaders was so she moved that she left the room crying. “But the thing that really touched me,” Nicole recalled, “was seeing the volunteers interacting with the men and women who lived at St. John’s, including my dad. Up until then, I hadn’t heard a lot of people say nice things about my father, but all these people who knew him were telling me how much they liked him and how funny and helpful he was.”

Nicole’s father has been battling alcoholism and mental illness most of her life. All too often, alcoholism and mental illness go hand-in-hand, and the result is the sort of event cascade that leads to homelessness. Other causes? Unemployment. A lack of affordable housing. Drug abuse. A health crisis. At the moment, there is a chasm-like divide between the rich and the poor in this country. Last September, the Census Bureau reported that over 46 million Americans were living below the poverty line, including one out of four children. Burlington is not exempt. In October, COTS counted 141 homeless schoolchildren in Chittenden County.

Nicole continued to assist COTS while she was a student, and created a special volunteer program further linking Saint Michael’s with the family shelter. As part of the “Family Friends” program, students provide childcare at the shelter and take the children on field trips.

She graduated from Saint Michael’s in 2009 and now works for COTS, dividing her time between the family shelter and the main office, where she works as a development assistant and volunteer coordinator. Next Sunday is the annual COTS Walk, which has meant the last few weeks have been among the busiest in her short professional life. The walk is an annual three-mile tour around Burlington, with participants visiting the shelters and seeing firsthand the services that COTS offers the homeless daily. The walk is also a critical fundraiser, with upwards of 1,500 people making the trek, and thousands more pledging their support.

“COTS really values every person and every person’s life,” Nicole says, a reality people can witness on the COTS Walk.

Nicole’s father still lives in a COTS apartment and his life remains an ongoing struggle with addiction and mental illness. The fact is, he has had good seasons and bad ones. But he’s not alone. When he wants help, he has it – from COTS and, now, from his daughter.

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It’s easy to join the COTS Walk. Register at www.cotsonline.org . Questions? Call Nicole at (802) 540-3084, ext. 207.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 29, 2012. Chris’s forthcoming novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17.)

Retiring the penny makes good sense

Recently Canada announced that beginning this fall, the nation will no longer mint or distribute pennies. This would have been a much bigger story in the world, had there not been rumors – quickly squashed – that Lindsay Lohan had gotten in a catfight in a night club.

The United States, never one to play second fiddle in North America, except when it comes to ice hockey, curling, and French, cannot help but wonder whether the same fate should befall our penny. After all, it costs more to make a penny than it’s worth, and it’s only a matter of time before “road rage” is replaced by “mini-mart rage.” Trust me: Someday someone is going to go postal because a very nice elementary school student or senior citizen is holding up the line by counting out 59 pennies. (If you suspect that “someone” is my coy way of distancing myself from my own inner jerk, you would be right.)

I asked readers whether the United States should eliminate our one-cent coin, too. Here is what they said.

• Elizabeth Pitney Seidler: “I am so over the penny. It’s an annoyance that collects dust in the car and the laundry room. Counting and stacking them is a pain – though the penny is a great way to pay off your ex-husband if money is owed.”
• Roxanne Tastula Loughlin: “Would I have to have a nickel loafers or a dime’s worth of thoughts? Would Mr. Pennypacker have to change his name? What would be the fate of my lucky penny?”
• Jennifer Recker: “My three little girls would miss the penny. My three-year-old found two pennies at the park yesterday and thought she had hit the jackpot!”
• Louise Shipley: “The mall water fountains would probably see a decrease in revenue. When my daughter was younger, she would throw pennies on the ground so that lucky youngsters would find them and it would make them happy. I’m not sure I’d be thrilled if she’d wanted to throw nickels and dimes.”
• Matthew Wood: “‘Pennies from Heaven,’ Chris. ‘Pennies from Heaven.’”
• Frank A. Mason: “The song, ‘Nickels from Heaven,’ just doesn’t sound right.”
• Kristin Yager Watson: “The only way I would miss them would be if prices went way down and we could actually buy something with them!”
• Kari Grunberg: “See a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. We can’t lose the penny!”
• Suzan Castor: “I’d miss it. As a small child, to find a penny on a sidewalk or in a pile of melting snow was like winning the lottery. Taking them to school on banking day; putting the occasional penny on the railroad tracks where it ended up bigger than a silver dollar; using your pencil eraser on an old penny to make it look shiny and new; examining every penny for the elusive and potentially ‘valuable’ wheat penny. The copper color stands out from the silver coins. Why must we replace or throw away all that’s old and loved and works perfectly well for the shiniest and newest?”
• Rachel Sunshine: “As a mother of two young children, I have recently instituted a penny reward system. While this may seem trivial to most, my children have really begun to value what it means to do a task and be rewarded. For each task that they complete, they are given a penny. It is a coin that represents a value of ‘one’ for that task. When teaching lessons about money, this simple little coin for me is worth more than one cent.”
• Jody Chamberlin: “How would we honor Lincoln?”

Indeed, how would we honor Lincoln? Perhaps the five-dollar bill, the monument, and the village in which I live are not enough? (Oh, wait. Lincoln, Vermont is named after Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War general.)

My two cents? Let’s lace up our skates, pop a Molson, and follow Canada.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 22, 2012. The paperback of Chris’s most recent novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives this Tuesday, April 24.)

Pulitzer committee and jury options — plenty of options

So, the Pulitzer committee chose not to select a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Baffling.

Disturbing.

Insulting.

Here are just a few of the novels from 2011 that I would have been happy to see win:

The Tiger’s Wife

Swamplandia

The Leftovers

The Art of Fielding

11/22/63

The Marriage Plot

State of Wonder

IQ 84.

And that’s just off the top of my head. Really: Book publishing needs a Pulitzer — especially right now!

‘Titanic’ movie just the tip of the iceberg

By now, it may seem to you as if we have been commemorating the centennial of the Titanic’s epic sinking for, well, a hundred years. Perhaps you feel like Kate Winslet does when she hears Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

“Actually, I do feel like throwing up,” Winslet – a.k.a., Rose DeWitt Bukater in James Cameron’s 1997 movie – told MTV News. MTV, of course, is the third most trusted news source in the world, after TMZ and Perez Hilton.

Anyhow, it was exactly one-hundred years today, April 15, 1912, that the massive ocean liner disappeared beneath the frigid waters 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland. As I confessed last week, I am a serious Titanic geek. This week alone I have seen the re-release of Cameron’s movie in 3-D, Lyric Theatre’s presentation of the musical at the Flynn Center, and spent way too much time watching clips of Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 movie, “A Night to Remember,” on Youtube. I do not feel like throwing up when I hear “My Heart Will Go On” – though I do roll my eyes when the Kate Winslet character in Cameron’s movie says about the Picasso “finger paintings” she has purchased, “They’re fascinating. It’s like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.”

And I have found myself staring at the small paper program that was passed out at the memorial service seven years ago for Betsey Rice Lovejoy Schaefer. Betsey was my wife’s great aunt and she died in late 2004 at the age of 103. One hundred years ago today, she was an eleven-year-old girl on the deck of the RMS Carpathia, watching as the shell-shocked survivors of the Titanic huddled on the decks. The Carpathia was the transatlantic passenger ship that arrived at the approximate site of the Titanic sinking about four in the morning on April 15 and picked up the roughly 700 passengers and crew who survived the iceberg.

This is, obviously, a pretty tenuous connection I have to the maritime tragedy. I married a woman whose great aunt happened to have been on the rescue vessel. But history is like that. It is how all of us are reminded as people that often we are separated by far fewer than six degrees. I feel the same way when I look at old black and white photographs of my uncle, a paratrooper, who jumped both in the Normandy invasion and Operation Market Garden in 1944. I get the same sense of how we are always living in history when I come across photos of another of my uncles – and, again, a soldier – who happened to escort Marilyn Monroe when she was entertaining the troops in Korea in 1954.

My wife’s and my daughter, Grace, had just turned four when Cameron’s “Titanic” was released, and she would not see it for years. My parents had allowed me to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” when I was a little boy, and for months afterward I would dive under the nearest table whenever my older brother would sidle up behind me and call out, “Caw! Caw!” I had learned a valuable lesson. Nevertheless, my daughter was one of at least three or four girls in her small preschool who spent that winter and spring insisting that her middle name was Rose. That was how pervasive the movie – and the “Titanic” story – was. When my wife’s great aunt wrote Grace a short note explaining her link to the real Titanic, for weeks Grace was a minor celebrity among her friends.

Incidentally, Great Aunt Betsey would last a lot longer than the Carpathia: The ship would be torpedoed and sink in the summer of 1918. Unlike the Titanic, almost everyone would survive, which perhaps may explain why no one remembers it. The Carpathia had plenty of lifeboats.

In any case, as we commemorate the centennial of the Titanic tragedy, it is important to recall the 1,500 souls who perished on April 15, 1912 and their place in history. After all, just like Betsey Rice Lovejoy Schaefer, none of them – none of us – is really a footnote.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 15, 2012. Chris’s new novel, ‘The Sandcastle Girls,’ arrives on July 17.)

More reasons why I love libraries — in honor of National Library Week

Below is a link to a Q and A I did with Random House in honor of National Library Week. There are a half-dozen questions.

Here is one.

RH LIBRARY: If you were a character in a book who would you be?

CHRIS BOHJALIAN: Well, I would want that person to be alive and happy at the end of the story, so that immediately eliminates a lot of my favorite characters from novels. I really don’t want to end up dead in my swimming pool a la Jay Gatsby or burned beyond recognition a la the English Patient. And it might be nice to be young. And, perhaps, to have learned something in the course of my story – to have grown as a person.

So, I am going to pick the ten-year-old narrator of Patrick Dennis’s hilarious and underappreciated 1964 tale of one Manhattan family’s near implosion – and Mom and Dad’s near divorce – “The Joyous Season.” The novel is narrated by the family’s acerbic, insightful, and precocious ten-year-old son, Kerry (which, he tells us, “is short for Kerrington, for cripes sake”). Imagine Holden Caulfield with a sense of humor.

I first read the book when I was in sixth grade, and I’ve re-read it three or four times since. It has never disappointed me – and neither has Kerry.

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To read the entire Q and A, click here:

http://randomhouselibrary.com/2012/04/12/national-library-week-celebration-day-5-chris-bohjalian-stops-by-our-blog/

Raise the Titanic? Vermont’s Lyric Theatre will sink it first.

Last month in an article in “Smithsonian Magazine,” writer Andrew Wilson speculated that “Titanic” is the third most widely recognized word in the world – trailing only “God” and “Coca-Cola.” (And you thought it was going to be “Facebook” or “Fruit Ninja.”) Indeed, the 1912 maritime disaster has a titanic place in our hearts.

There are a variety of reasons for this, of which James Cameron is either one or 1.8 billion – the latter number being the worldwide gross sales for his 1997 movie, “Titanic.” That number, incidentally, does not include revenue for last week’s 3-D re-release.

And while I can be as jaded and cynical as the next person, I will readily admit that I am transfixed, haunted, and moved by the Titanic saga. The tale has it all: Hubris, heroism, class warfare, and a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship tips almost vertical before breaking in half and slipping into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. It’s a riveting story. . .and a true one.

For those of you who have been in sensory deprivation tanks, this week marks the centennial of the tragedy. The ship set sail on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, hit an iceberg late at night on the 14^th, and sank in the early hours of the 15^th. Just over 1,500 people perished; less than half that many survived.

Of all the ways the story has been told, among the most poignant is Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Tony Award-winning musical, “Titanic.” Why? Well, partly because the characters in the musical are based on the real people who lived and died on the ship. Lyric Theatre is presenting it this week at Burlington, Vermont’s Flynn Center and I’m looking forward to the production immensely.

Moreover, because I am such a Titanic geek (pun intended), I went to the Lyric warehouse in Williston to learn how you sink a ship on stage that in reality was 882 feet long and 175 feet high.

The answer? I’m not going to tell you. That’s stage magic.

But I will tell you this. Doug Viehmann and Tim Henderson, the set designer and the set construction chair respectively, have created something wondrous that left me a little staggered. And dizzy. It begins with a porthole that is 24 feet high and 50 feet across, and is pieced together from nine massive flats. The ship itself has a bridge that is 14 feet off the stage, with the crow’s nest higher still. The Flynn’s main curtain normally rests 20 feet above the stage; for this show, it has been raised to 23 feet.

And in the final moments of the musical, you will see the ship rise up and out of the water, with the passengers and crew clawing desperately up a steeply pitched deck that is about to disappear beneath the waves. “The last few minutes of the show are an emotional roller-coaster,” Viehmann told me. “There will be confusion and terror and panic.”

Viehmann and Henderson, like all Lyric cast and crew, are volunteers. Viehmann is an architect and Henderson is a software engineer. They both stress that the musical is a far cry from Cameron’s movie, emphasizing that the tale they are helping to bring to the Flynn focuses on the actual passengers and crew. And their stories were so wrenching that the musical doesn’t need to have the fictional Jack and Rose steaming up a Renault below deck or the search for a fictional blue diamond.

“The cast is in tears when they’re rehearsing the show,” Peter Brownell told me. Brownell, a retired educator, financial analyst, and (yes) former mayor of Burlington, is one of the volunteers building the ship that will set sail this coming Thursday. “They’re going through whole boxes of Kleenex every night.”

Will the audience need Kleenex too? We’ll see. But this is “Titanic.” It is – in a word – epic. And the emotions it triggers are as big as that boat.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 8, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17. Read all about it on goodreads here.)

Village Peeple descend upon Middlebury, Vermont

Sometimes great art demands brutality, and so Leigh Boglioli, 13, savaged her Peeps. Leigh, a 13-year-old seventh-grader from East Middlebury, Vermont, began by slicing single ears off of select rabbit Peeps and glued them on to other ones, creating mutated, three-eared Peep bunnies. She beheaded other pink bunny Peeps, reattaching their little pink heads onto other little green bunny bodies. The result? Mutated multi-color Peeps. And she bought any chick Peeps she could find with deformed eyes. Then, in the midst of this small world of Picasso Peeps, she built a model of a nuclear power plant cooling tower out of cardboard and aluminum foil – and placed a Band-Aid across one wall.

The result? A Peeps diorama Leigh christened, “New Wildlife Discovered in Vernon, Vermont.” Vernon, of course, is the site of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, still operating despite the expiration last month of its 40-year license. “I worry about Vermont Yankee,” Leigh said. “It’s run its course.”

Leigh’s Peeps statement is one 24 Peeps dioramas you can see through Thursday at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury. It’s a part of the Center’s first ever “Peeps Show:” Dioramas made from the iconic marshmallow and sugar candy. The inspiration behind the show is operations manager, Sarah Stahl, who is a big fan of the “Washington Post’s” decade-old Peeps diorama contest. She said it was a natural for Middlebury, given the Folklife Center’s tradition of hosting an annual gingerbread house competition in December.

Indeed, some of the artists who are a part of the “Peeps Show” are experienced gingerbread house architects, such as New Haven’s Grace Tolles, 7. As if it were a gingerbread house, almost all of her Peeps diorama is edible. Inspired by a Caribbean cruise she took in January with her mom and dad, she called her diorama “Tiki Peepi,” and it features Peeps surfboarding on a sea made of vanilla frosting colored blue, with other Peeps sunbathing on a graham cracker beach. Even the boombox in the sand is edible: It’s a piece of chewing gum.

Ann Demong, a Folklife Center board member and a retired educator, loves the idea of working with Peeps: “I’m amazed at all the ideas people came up with. Peeps are a form we see all the time, and then here you see them completely re-imagined.” Demong, like many of us, is also a little dazzled by how large a Peep gets in the microwave. She created a Peeps can-can and mini Moulin Rouge stage for her diorama.

And while a lot of the dioramas were built around puns – including a terrific Peeps chess set by 10-year-old Ryan Gladstone titled “Chick Mate” – there were many that depended only on the chicks and bunnies…and available Barbie Doll clothing. Exhibit A would be seventh-grader Jenna Baginsky’s “Peeps Fashion Show,” a meticulously rendered (and illuminated) catwalk and crowd. “It wins the best use of Barbie Doll halter tops, bar none,” the Folklife Center’s Sarah Stahl told me.

Other ones that were mighty impressive? The staff and residents of the Helen Porter Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center created the “Helen Porter Peeps Square Dance,” with most of the Peeps in miniature wheelchairs and walkers. Eileen and Krystian Gombosi built an elegant “Princess and the Peep.” And Grace Tolles’s dad, Doug, focused on Easter with a recreation of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

Doug’s version, “The Last Peeper,” has a bit of a Dan Brown “Da Vinci Code” edge to it. “Which one is Judas?” he asked me at the opening.

His “Last Peeper” won’t last as long as da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” of course. Peeps go stale fast. Or they’re eaten. (Or, often, they’re eaten when they’re stale. Many Peeps aficionados prefer them a little crisp.) But as Picasso said, “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.” He was, I am quite sure, talking about Peeps.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 1, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” arrives on July 17.)