Tag: 250213

History and song

Guy Davis returns to Flying Goose

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

History through song and storytelling imbues the performance of Guy Davis. His 2024 album, The Legend of Sugarbelly, was inspired by a woman murdered in Georgia during the early 20th century, a tale Davis’s uncle would share every time he visited. Though the victim’s name was a mystery, everyone was aware of her killer’s identity.

“I knew the story by heart, it was like a ceremony between my uncle and I,” Davis said by phone recently. “Not only did my whole family know this man, that same man at one point was assigned by the Ku Klux Klan to kill my grandfather, because he was a Black man. I’ll just say that my grandfather’s death at his hands never did take place; a lot of mitigating circumstances that had to do with family looking out for each other, that kind of thing.”

The Legend of Sugarbelly began as a song and later became a play that debuted at Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J., in 2022. Davis will draw from the work at an upcoming New London show, and do a monologue from the theatrical version.

“That uncle who used to tell me the story, he died the day I finished writing the play,” Davis noted poignantly.

The son of actors and civil rights leaders Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Davis grew up with people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Pointier stopping by his home.

“I remember my dad introducing me to Malcolm X and having to reach way up and him having to reach way down to shake my hand,” he said. Meeting boxer Joe Louis at a Harlem fair housing protest was another favorite memory.

Davis found music at a Vermont summer camp run by John Seeger, Pete’s brother, where he learned banjo, later adding six- and 12-string guitar to his repertoire. He grew so dedicated to banjo that one day on a hike that stopped at an estate auction, he bid all his money on an armless rocking chair. “I was 25 cents short, but then the guy running the auction looked at me and said, ‘Here, I’ll give you the quarter.’”

It was perfect for practicing, which the camp counselors let him do during rest time.

“They allowed me to take my rocking chair, sit it outside the cabin with my banjo, and just sit, rock and play,” he said. “I wasn’t any good … but I was trying to learn that basic baton stroke that Pete does.”

He’d meet the legendary folksinger a few years later, after seeing him in concert on a camp day trip. “I came home and I found Pete Seeger standing in my living room,” Davis recalled. “I didn’t know he knew my folks. He asked me a couple of questions, and then over the years, I got to go up to his cabin and meet his daughters…. His door always seemed to be open for the rest of his life to me. I was very grateful.”

In his 20s, Davis began playing with Seeger. “Pete made the mistake of never chasing anyone off the stage who came up to sing with him,” he said. “A bunch of us would just follow him around, and when he went on stage, we’d … back him up. If his guitar or banjo was on the floor of the stage while we sang, he seemed to not mind if I picked one of them up.”

Seeger figured prominently in the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and Davis was asked to comment on Edward Norton’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the man he’d grown to call “Uncle Pete” — along with his wife, “Aunt Toshi” — as the interview wound down.

He enjoyed it, Davis began. “He captured something of Pete, and I can’t quite explain what it was, but there’s a sense of humility, a sense of decency, a sense of being a helping hand,” he said, then added his take on the film’s subject. “As far as Timothee Chalamet is concerned; after seeing the movie, I think I knew less about Bob Dylan after than I did before.”

Guy Davis

When: Thursday, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Flying Goose Pub, 40 Andover Road, New London
Tickets: $30, call 526-6899 to reserve

Featured Photo: Guy Davis. Courtesy photo.

September 5 (PG-13)

The ABC Sports crew covers a terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in West Germany in September 5, a swift, tense re-creation of the historical event.

These Olympics are at the dawn of live-via-satellite coverage, we are told, with all the news networks sharing windows on one satellite. Working with a six-hour time difference between Munich and the east coast of the U.S., the ABC sports crew put together packages of sports as well as live sporting events broadcasts. These share screen time with stories from ABC News, such as on-site Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) interviewing David Berger (Rony Herman), an American-born Israeli weightlifter, about competing in Germany as the country tries to separate new West Germany from its Nazi past. Then, early, Munich time, in the morning on Sept. 5, the TV crew hears gunfire. They scramble to send out staff and with the help of translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch) they put together that shots were fired in the Olympic Village and that Israeli athletes have been taken hostage. ABC Sports head Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) demands that the story stay with Sports, and not New York-based ABC News, and works with Geoffrey (John Magaro) to feed as much news and live footage as possible to on-air anchor Jim McKay (shown here in the real-world footage). They build the live coverage capacity as they’re airing it — sending Peter Jennings to a neighboring Olympic Village dorm building to report what he’s seeing in the Israeli rooms and pushing a studio camera out onto the lawn to get live shots of the building and the terrorists who occasionally step onto the balcony. Even the word “terrorists” becomes something of a spur-of-the-moment addition to the coverage, according to the movie — Peter Jennings uses “Palestinian guerillas,” guessing before there’s confirmation that the group Black September may be involved. Roone decides to go with terrorists, which is how the German police refer to the hostage-takers.

As they maneuver cameras and solder telephone wires to get Peter’s reports live on air, the team, in particular Roone, are laser-focused on the “how” of what they’re doing, only slowly realizing that, for example, Olympic village rooms have TVs that receive the ABC broadcast. Thus, they realize, does their ability to offer live coverage outstrip the inexperienced German police’s ability to take that coverage into account with their own plans to attempt to rescue the hostages.

September 5 is a tight retelling of the roughly day-long stand-off mostly focused on how the Sports crew is both watching history and making history for how they are telling the story and how it sets the template for future news coverage. There is no “we’re doing it for the ratings” mustache twirler here, it is just kind of a story of people trying to make the right decisions based on the limited information they have and the sometimes at-odds desires to get the story (and get it first) and not to cause harm. While the movie has solid performances all around, I can see why it is the movie’s no-slack-in-the-rope story that garnered the movie its one Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Nosferatu (R)

A young couple are terrorized, in different ways, by the demonic Count Orlok in Nosferatu, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu that is full of vibes.

Like, this film looks creepy-beautiful — even the scenes of, say, a coffin full of rats have a kind of grotesque loveliness. This movie reminded me a lot of Maria (which is on Netflix), its nomination-mate in the Best Cinematography category of this year’s Oscars (Nosferatu also got nods for costume design, hair and make up and production design — again, all praise for the look of the thing). Both Nosferatu and Maria (Angelina Jolie’s biopic of Maria Callas) are beautiful to look at and cast a spell that puts you in the art-book-worthy worlds they create. But I fell asleep multiple times during Maria, and Nosferatu crept along in a way that eventually stopped building tension and just had me wishing we’d get to the vampire factory already.

Newly married goofus Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to Transylvania for a document signing with Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård, looking like a living corpse) that even in the 19th century feels like it should have been an email. Melancholy-afflicted Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), his wife, afraid at home, is wrapped up in foreboding, with moments of mania and what seems like possession. Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), Thomas’s boss, maneuvers for Orlock to, I guess, drain the life out of Thomas so Orlock can come and be with Ellen, who he first seduced years ago somehow. The movie hits all the beats, looks great doing it, but doesn’t push beyond. I feel like, with the plague, the dread of a mysterious plague ship, the inability of science (such as it is) to help Thomas or Ellen, the movie had all kinds of places to dig into something more, to make this story terrifying and relevant. Instead, the “innovation” here seems to be a few boobs shots. C+ Available for rent and in theaters.

Back in Action (PG-13)

Mild-mannered suburban parents are actually former super spies in Back in Action, a one-notch-above-average older-kid family comedy.

Matt (Jamie Foxx) and Emily (Cameron Diaz) were once fighting dudes on airplanes but now they are parents to sassy teen Alice (McKenna Roberts) and computer kid Leo (Rylan Jackson), who both just think their parents are standard-issue uncool Olds. But then Matt and Emily catch 14-year-old Alice and her fake ID at a club and when club muscleheads try to give them some trouble Alice is shocked to watch her parents lay waste to the thick-necked bros. Also shocked is Chuck (Kyle Chandler), Matt and Emily’s old boss who thought they were dead before their “Boomers fighting” video goes viral. If he can find them, so can all the various baddies who might be looking for them, he says right before he’s shot on their front porch. Thus must Matt and Emily grab their kids and go on the run to find a hidden MacGuffin item that they think might buy them some protection. Matt hid the item at the home of Emily’s mom — former MI6 agent Ginny (Glenn Close), with whom Emily has always had a difficult relationship.

This movie is not as cute-fun as the various Spy Kids movies that have done this general “secret spy parents” concept but more fun than the Mark Wahlberg movie (2023’s The Family Plan) that did this on Apple TV+. It is a perfectly cromulent movie for families in the PG-13 range, with fun-enough “parents are lame” and “teens, ugh” jokes, that benefits from the natural charisma of Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz even if their couple chemistry never really ticks above “sure, whatever.” It does, however, serve as a good reminder that it’s enjoyable to see Cameron Diaz in movies. B- Streaming on Netflix.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

Sonic and his increasing number of friends take on another angry hedgehog-thing in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

In the second movie, Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz) added Tails (voice of Colleen O’Shaunghnessy) and, spoiler I guess, eventually Knuckles (voice of Idris Elba) to his found family, which also includes humans Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie Wachowski (Tika Sumpter). Now they will all be tasked with taking on Shadow (voice of Keanu Reeves), another hedgehog-or-whatever treated shadily by the humans who harbors all sorts of grudges. He is working with Professor Robotnik (Jim Carrey), grandfather to Dr. Robotnik (also Carrey), to build a weapon and enact vengeance, yada yada. Mostly, this movie is Carrey physical comedy, cartoon character sassy jokes and occasional battles. I was neither particularly delighted nor demoralized by all of this while my kids seemed to have fun and I suspect that is kinda the point. The deeper into Sonic lore we go, the more it is about the world of characters and their doo-dads and magical gem things and, sorry, Sonic, Marvel has already used up all that space in my brain. I care less than I did back in the first Sonic when we were more about the Sonic-James relationship. But for the youngs, this mythology stuff seemed great — particularly in the credits scenes that they reacted to with a “Captain Marvel’s pager!” level of excitement to the appearance of a new character. So, like B- for the “kid entertainment for your dollar” ranking? In theaters and available for rent or purchase.

Featured Image: September 5

The Music Roundup 25/02/13

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

• Shake it: A group of Boston area musicians with a love for funk, Booty Vortex play an early Valentine’s Day show at a romantic spot. Break out the dancing shoes and get out to get down for an evening of throwback dance music from bands like Earth, Wind & Fire and Wild Cherry. Along with winery selections will be a full bar with themed cocktails, beer and non-alcoholic drinks. Thursday, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $40 at labellewinerey.com.

• Dy-no-mite: Before he hit it big playing J.J. on the ’70s sitcom Good Times, Jimmie Walker worked as a standup comic at Black Panther gatherings in Harlem and toured with Motown revues. Friday, Feb. 14, 6 p.m., Newfound Lake Inn, 1030 Mayhew Turnpike, Bridgewater, $25 and up at eventbrite.com.

• Song man: After his band Ghost of Paul Revere parted ways in 2022, Griffin William Sherry began a solo career; his first record, Hundred Mile Wilderness, dropped last fall. Recorded in Nashville with an engineer who’s worked with Sierra Hull and Brandi Carlile, the album’s title is a reference to the stretch of the Appalachian Trail that passes through Sherry’s home state of Maine. Saturday, Feb. 15, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $33 at palacetheatre.org.

• Light show: Beginning with the landmark album Dark Side of the Moon, Floydian Trip recreates Pink Floyd’s touring years before Roger Waters and David Gilmour began feuding. The tribute act combed through countless audio and video clips culled between 1973 and 1981 for an authentic concert experience that includes lights, projections, lasers and a very convincing psychedelic sound. Sunday, Feb. 16, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $40 at tupelohall.com.

• Plus one: Spontaneity defines the live experience of Session Americana, a musical collective begun over a decade ago that draws from the rich Boston Americana community. For an upcoming show, they’re joined by singer, songwriter and fiddle player Eleanor Buckland, who got her start with the trio Lula Wiles. She recently accompanied the group on a tour of Europe. Sunday, Feb. 16, 8 p.m., Word Barn Meadow, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter, $28 at portsmouthnhtickets.com.

The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison


The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison (Dutton, 368 pages)

A 70-year marriage is unfathomable to most. After all, approximately half of all marriages end in divorce (not a myth, according to a recent Forbes article), and, logistically, you’d have to marry young and you’d both have to live beyond the average life expectancy to hit that 70-year mark. But if a marriage were to endure for 70 years — how?

The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison sheds some light on this as it follows Abe and Ruth Winter’s journey from college-age courting (very reluctantly on Ruth’s part) to 90th birthdays and end-of-life planning.

The book gets off to a slow start as Abe unenthusiastically allows his family to celebrate his 90th birthday. Evison does the reader no favors by naming dozens of characters up front: the Winters’ living children — Anne, Kyle and Maddie — plus their significant others and their kids and their kids and their pets, plus family friends.

It seems trivial to point this out now that I’ve finished the book and mostly enjoyed it, but the fact is that it almost made me put it down and not pick it up again — too many people to try to remember, plus dialogue that makes their grown children sound like teenagers, which adds to the confusion around who’s who. Meanwhile, Abe is lamenting that he’s still alive, making for a depressing start.

But get past the beginning and you’ll find the answers to that “how” question, laid out by Evison in shifting perspectives between Ruth and Abe, and shifting timelines between present day and various impactful years in their marriage.

The answers, it seems, are resilience, patience, perseverance and tolerance, a recipe of big words mixed with steadfast love.

From the moment they meet in college, it’s clear that Abe and Ruth are very different people, and Ruth does her best to avoid him at all costs. But Abe is enamored by her spirit and free will and eventually wears her down. They date, and before she can graduate Ruth gets pregnant. They get married, and Ruth is suddenly a stay-at-home mom with little use for her books of poetry and lofty ideals.

Ruth is not unhappy, but she isn’t exactly happy either. And so Abe, without Ruth’s knowledge, accepts a job and buys a farmhouse on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride away from the hustle and bustle of Seattle and not exactly the kind of life Ruth thought she’d be living when she was deep into her studies of the liberal arts. But Abe is convinced she will love life on the farm, where she can garden and raise chickens and take care of the kids. She’s mad, really mad, at his presumptuousness but ultimately acquiesces, and another chapter of their life together begins.

Ruth does like living on the farm, as it turns out, at least for a while. But as Abe focuses on his growing business and ensuring his family is financially set, Ruth has moments of restlessness. Keep in mind that we’re exploring 70 years of life together, so of course life doesn’t always go smoothly. They experience a number of situations that could have ended another couple: Abe’s unilateral decision to move the family, the tragic loss of a child, a brief infidelity (Ruth), an even briefer exploration of sexuality (also Ruth), absentee parenting (Abe) and differing political views (Ruth’s views being “pseudocommunist malarkey” and “unreasonable optimism,” as far as Abe is concerned).

And through it all, Evison keeps bringing us back to present day, where they squabble like the old married couple they are.

“‘Minor inconvenience?’” Abe says to Ruth about the CPAP machine she insists he use. “‘You try strapping that contraption on! Every time I open my mouth, I’m like a human leaf blower.’

‘One of these mornings, you’re just not gonna wake up, you know?’

“Good,’ he said. ‘Then I won’t have to hear about it anymore.’”

They can joke at times, but they also have to face some harsh truths about old age. Ruth thinks, at one point while worrying about Abe falling in the driveway, “Everything was a high-risk proposition after eighty. To rage against the dying of the light sometimes meant shoveling the walkway or driving after dark.” (I love how Evison deftly references Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” here, subtly showing that Ruth’s love of poetry never fully dies.)

And, as Ruth undergoes an invasive procedure to save her life, she questions whether it’s worth it to keep fighting. “While she wasn’t without use, the world was hardly dependent on her participation.”

But Abe is not ready to try life without her, and his 90th-birthday thoughts of preparing for death turn into a steadfast need to be Ruth’s caretaker, despite their children’s misgivings. He drives through snow on city roads that terrify him to be with her at the hospital, and, with the deepest sense of love and commitment, brings her back to their farmhouse and tries his best to take care of her.

Like Abe and Ruth, I’m glad I made it past the beginning of their story. The Heart of Winter reminded me that love can last even through the darkest of times if your heart is in it. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison

Album Reviews 25/02/13

EST Gee, I Ain’t Feeling You (Bonus Edition) (Interscope Records)

This 30-year-old Louisville, Kentucky-born rapper lost a good number of fans after trying actual singing on for size for a couple of albums or so, but his return to straight spitting in this one does go pretty hard, aiming for the same intensity as 2021’s Bigger Than Life or Death. Of course, “intensity” isn’t an attribute that’s usually applied to him, what with his mumbly, disjointed style; he’s been dubbed a “less coherent Rich Homie Quan” among other things, but I was captivated enough by opener “Free Rico” and its woofer-rattling, from-the-mountaintop kettle-drum beat to get past the pedestrian trap undergirding that serves as its base. “The Streets” winds and roils in hypnotic, serpentine fashion, evincing casual excitement and an endless supply of oxygen, instantly lending the record grower potential rather than evoking some texted-in flavor-of-the-week exercise. “Do My Own Stunts” is the underground stoner-a-thon, for those who live for that kind of thing. A —Eric W. Saeger

Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (ATO Records)

In In-Case-You-Missed-It news, this album didn’t hit my radar until just now, so you have my sincere apologies if you’re already deeply familiar with it. I’m literally a year late on it, but in my defense the angle here is that on Saturday, March 8, they’ll be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., and besides, at the rate indie bands come and go in the endless flux of our no-attention-span zeitgeist, it’s worth mentioning. This Chicago duo, claiming to be inspired by such acts as Minski and such, are, as some have noted, remindful of Radiohead and Arcade Fire, but there’s a wild-horses feel to these frightwiggy tunes; they incorporate some of the decent things (few though they were) about Aughts-indie bands like New Young Pony Club and Los Campesinos, for one thing the amateurish group-singalong sound that was a staple at Bowery Ballroom shows and later refined by Arcade Fire. The overall effect is like being subjected to a cult initiation; you want to learn the lyrics because the melodies sound so bloody important, a rare thing these days. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

• Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate, and even to those who haven’t dated or even talked to another human being since the 1990s (good choice)! It is another two months before the South Korea-originated “Black Valentine’s Day,” when people who celebrate being “happily single” take themselves out to dinner and a movie and then go home to descend into madness in front of reruns of Classic Concentration on the Buzzr channel, as opposed to us totally happily married people who spend most of our time living like Fred Flintstone, half-watching Match Game ’78 while trying to figure out how to hide ridiculously impulsive Amazon purchases from our spouses, do you guys even know how much money buying a 20-pack of button-cell batteries for kitty laser pointers can save you in the long run? But I digress, someone stop me, the record companies are gearing up for a long year of releasing albums and trying to figure out a way to out-sell Chappell Roan, who won the Best New Artist Grammy award the other week for such things as dressing up like Carol Kane in Scrooged, giving attitude to random people with cameras, and of course her masterstroke, adding gravelly Ed Banger beats to microwaved Madonna oatmeal and summarily dispatching a battalion of record company mafiosi to pressure low-information writers from Nylon and such to proclaim her marginally listenable album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to be the greatest thing since Reese’s Cups. This too shall pass, as you know (by the way, are Zola Jesus and Poppy still relevant, someone please tweet at me), but in the meantime we have albums to discuss, new ones that are coming out on Valentine’s Day, let’s get it over with. First things first, speaking of Buzzr, guess who’s got an album coming out on Friday? None other than Richard Dawson! But wait, it’s not that Richard Dawson, the creepy touchy-grabby British dude from Family Feud, it’s a different one, some British folkie whose voice sounds like a drunk Basset hound! Nothing normal is going on here, this man has been using a literally broken guitar as his go-to instrument for years, he just likes the sound of it. His trip has been described as “the folkie version of Captain Beefheart’s approach to blues music.” In other words it’s completely horrible, but our pals at Domino Records are releasing this monstrosity nevertheless, so I’m compelled to listen to it, so I am. OK I’m not anymore, it sounds like the Unabomber singing a love song to his first-grade teacher on a wooden Fisher Price guitar from 1959. If you honestly love this I hate you.

• Usually when I hear the term “space rock” I start barfing uncontrollably, figuring I’m about to hear something that sounds like Spacemen 3 or a Loot Crate version of Pink Floyd, but British band Doves are pretty awesome: They actually sound kind of like Elbow! Constellations For The Lonely, their new one, features the tune “Renegade”; it’s psychedelic, yes, but singer Jimi Goodwin’s voice is seriously neat.

• Oh, great, notoriously awful singer Neil Young has once again found some old tapes in his goat barn and made an album out of them. Oceanside Countryside was recorded in 1977 but never released until now; it features “Field of Opportunity,” a fiddle-driven bluegrass jam that’s OK if you like bad singing with your bluegrass.

• Finally we have Sleepless Empire, the latest LP from Italian goth-metal spazzers Lacuna Coil. The song “Gravity” is doomy and epic, of course, less so when the Cookie Monster-voiced dude is doing the singing, more so when the hot chick singer is trying to sound like an America’s Got Talent contestant. It’s fine for what it is. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: EST Gee, I Ain’t Feeling You (Bonus Edition) (Interscope Records) & Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (ATO Records)

Drinks with John Fladd

Trinidad Sour

It’s easy to fall into a rut.

Ruts are comforting. They provide predictability and structure in a chaotic world with too many unwelcome surprises.

So it’s easy — for me, at any rate — to fall back on simple utility cocktails, made from three ingredients; four if you count ice. Some sort of spirit, something sour, and something sweet — this is the basic structure of a daiquiri, a gimlet, a margarita or a sour.

But a rut — no matter how comforting — can close you off from new possibilities. In this case, the mind-expanding novelty is using Angostura bitters as the main alcohol. Normally bitters are used — extremely sparingly — bring a bitter flavor to help balance out an otherwise sweet drink. Most of them, though, are suspended in a base that averages around 45 percent alcohol, or 90 proof. So, there is no reason why you couldn’t drink them in more substantial amounts.

1½ ounces Angostura bitters – you will probably want to use a knife to pry off the plastic cap that limits you to a dash of bitters at a time, or you’ll spend the next 15 minutes shaking your wrist to fill a jigger

½ ounce rye whiskey

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

1 ounce orgeat – this is a sweet almond syrup, usually used in tropical drink; here it is used to balance out the bitter herbiness from the bitters

Combine all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake it. At this point, you know how to do this.

Strain into a coupé or Nick & Nora glass.

Ask your digital assistant to play “Pressure Drop” by Toots and the Maytals.

Spend the next two and a half cocktails trying to identify what it is you’re tasting.

Probably the least useful word to describe this particular drink is “delicious.” It is actually delicious in fact — that’s not the issue. There’s a sweet, sherry-like, almost raisiny flavor that isn’t actually all that much like raisins or sherry. There’s a sweetness in the front end, but a bitter aftertaste that is nothing like dark chocolate or anything else you would call “bittersweet.” There are herbal notes from the Angostura — but not mint or rosemary, or any herb that you’re probably familiar with. You can try reading the label, but the Angostura Co. has kept their ingredients secret for over 200 years with the kind of secrecy usually reserved for nuclear codes.

So what are we left with?

Bittersweet fruitiness with herbs and the tiniest bit of rye in the background. This is the kind of cocktail you would drink with — OK, I don’t know what the day-to-day life of a monastic abbot is, but if he gets any vacation time and were to take a holiday in the Caribbean, this is what he would drink, wearing sandals, and a tropical shirt covered with pictures of little monks on it.

He would have checked into the hotel under the name Costello — a tiny, private joke that would make him smile to himself. The staff would greet him with fondness, and he would greet them by name in return.

At the bar by the pool, the bar manager would tap the young woman on duty on the shoulder and send her to wait on other customers, while he would mix this cocktail without needing to be told.

“Long flight?” he’d ask the abbot. “You look like you could use this.”

“Bless you, Leo,” the abbot would say, with a look of relieved fondness on his face. “You, sir, are a saint.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Leo would say.

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