Tag Archives: Cooperstown

NY Mysteries Aug.16, 2019

 A friend and I went to the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown. The six hour drive was tiresome even though my friend is a superb driver. On the way we stopped at various auction houses.

 

Cooperstown is both upscale and down home. We stayed in a homey motel on the Otsego Lake. It’s the sort of place people return to, having been there with their parents. You can stay in the motel or in a cottage. We chose a large motel room. Its back door opened onto a lawn and then down to the lake. It’s very quiet.

The Baseball Museum was delightful, not crowded but filled with baseball enthusiasts. The Fenimore Art Museum was spacious and has a superb collection of American Indian Art and American Folk Art. Herb Ritts: The Rock Portraits has terrific photos and videos of the glamorous eighties and nineties.

 

At Glimmerglass’s main theater  we saw a matinee performance of Showboat. Too long, a meandering plot. 

 

The next day we saw The Ghosts of Versailles, music by John Corigliano, libretto by William M. Hoffman. For me, it was a delightful surprise.  

 

 

RIP Paul Findley

Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder. 

Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a  dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie. 

Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed ? His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School?  Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook? 

New York City / Portland Blog – July-11 – July 16

I’m in Portland, Oregon to visit friends, to get to know this charming city better and to attend the 8th Northwest Book Festival on July 30. It’s held in Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland’s living room. I will be selling copies of The Lemrow Mystery and announcing the upcoming sequel, Graphic Lessons.

Flyer for the Northwest Book Festival
Flyer for the Northwest Book Festival

For my sins I used Airbnb to rent a place that was probably a converted garage with a curious shed called a moon house. Being a New Yorker, I thought the term, moon house, was a touch of quaint Portlandia and didn’t pay the attention to it I should have. It’s an outhouse. Since we don’t have outhouses in NYC, you can imagine my surprise and dismay when I inspected the moon house which is attached to the owners’ house – plumbing, you know. It’s about twenty paces across a crab grass garden. The moon house is a tiny space with a tiny toilet, a tinier sink and a shower that shouts defunct summer camp. The ex-garage or the garden house, as the owner call it, is a dismal room that conjures up the film Psycho, not the Bates motel (if only) but the house on the hill where mom lived. It reeks of solitary confinement and has no running water. For that refinement, you have to go to the moon house. I give the owners full marks for their sense of humor. The wifi password for the ex-garage is goldenroom. They are also superb trick photographers.

Last Friday I was in Cooperstown, N. Y. attending the Glimmerglass production of Sweeney Todd, staying in a wonderful 1950’s motel and having grits and shrimp by the Otsego lake. This week I’m on the west coast, near the Columbia and having green lipped mussels. Somebody’s got to do it.

West coast green lipped mussels
West coast green lipped mussels
East coast grits and shrimp
East coast grits and shrimp