A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

21 March 1999 - Utopian Music Rooms

I seem to have to keep following up on previous week's entries. The celebrity death that got zero attention was Richard Kiley's on March 5th. Given the success of Man of La Mancha (in which he played Don Quixote) and Kismet (he was the Caliph, singing "Stranger in Paradise" which is a justifiably well known song, though I have to admit to mixed feelings about the musical because I can't listen to Borodin without mentally adding lyrics), as well as having been in several lesser musicals (e.g. No Strings), I'd certainly consider him at least as significant in the entertainment world as Dusty Springfield.

Nashville was reasonably pleasant, despite nonoptimal weather. I'll eventually write about it on my travel pages (though it may take a while) so I won't say much here about actual tourism. I visited the Tennessee State Museum, Cheekwood Botanical Gardens, the Shaker Museum in South Union, Kentucky, the Nashville Toy Museum and did a self-guided walking tour of downtown (actually the year-round Volksmarch event) which included the capitol, Bicentennial mall and the Ryman auditorium. I had a good meal (and an excellent glass of porter) at a brewpub and a hearty hotpot at a Korean restaurant and managed to avoid anything resembling a grit. I wouldn't add Nashville to my top 5 list of American cities, but it was certainly worth a weekend.

For those who are now wondering what my top 5 list of American cities is, here you go:

Boston
Charleston, South Carolina
Traverse City, Michigan
Providence, Rhode Island
New York City

Note that there are lots of places I've never been to, though I can't imagine living somewhere that is deeply inland. Providence is the most inland of those cities and I am fond of it largely because I've never known more than one person there at a time, so I associate it with a getaway from all the social obligations of visiting New York and Boston. Traverse City is inland in one sense, but Lake Michigan is huge and it's a short drive to some serious sand dunes and it's just a fabulously beautiful part of the country.

While I was at South Union, I bought a small pamphlet about touring 19th century utopian settlements. I'd been to two other Shaker communities (Hancock, Massachusetts - though that was too long ago for me to remember much about it - and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky) and I've also visited the Moravian community of Old Salem, North Carolina. I'm fascinated by the whole idea of communal living, while I have absolutely no desire to pursue it. I'm probably too set in my ways, having lived alone for roughly 16 years now. But there is an obvious advantage to pooling resources so you can have things as a group that no individual could afford.

Which reminded me of something I hadn't thought about in years. In 8th grade art class, one project we had involved architecture. We spent several weeks designing houses. It was a project I enjoyed immensely and it got me started on an obsession with drawing floor plans. Pretty much all through high school I filled notebooks with layouts for a whole complex that I envisioned as being both a school and a community. The actual living quarters were spare, almost monastic, with simple individual rooms for each occupant. I don't think I even bothered to include private bathrooms. But the recreational facilities were lavish. The library was huge, of course, and sometimes I went through the effort of arranging and labeling individual bookcases in the drawing. I also had this idea about separating activities more than most people would. So, for example, the gym had entire separate facilities for each sport, so you need never be unable to play badminton because the boys were playing basketball. There was also a huge music building with separate practice rooms for each instrument. I can't imagine now why I designed it that way, but that was how it was for the four or five years that this was part of my life.

I think this whole thing may have also been tied into a series of stories I made up that had started with my imaginary friend, Princess Ilona, and that I may have been drawing the school that Princess Ilona went to. She could play any musical instrument ever created but it must have been awfully inconvenient to have to go to another room if she was more in the mood for the oboe than for the double bass. On the other hand, it was probably convenient to know she never had to schlep the double bass around.

The notebooks that I filled those years are long gone, discarded with diaries and letters from those years. All of it thrown out roughly when I finished college, in the vain belief that I had changed enough that I could separate myself from the past. I still draw floor plans from time to time but now I merely dream about my dream house and don't imagine that I will save the world by having a room dedicated to the viola. At the moment, I would happily settle for three bedrooms - one for me, one for guests and one for my books. Is it horribly antisocial if I put the accordion and the didgeridoo in the guest room?