So we beat on…

 

By Temple Ligon

 

This Saturday night at the Koger Center is the opera La Boheme, possibly the world’s favorite of all time. Set in Paris in early 1830 – before the uprising of the same year – in the Left Bank, poor young intellectuals struggle with their underfunded lives. As such, it’s a great opera for young people.

Ten high school kids at the John de la Howe school in McCormick, S. C. were ready to come down and take their seats inside the Koger Center to see La Boheme, all sponsored by generous Columbians.

But the ice storm of this past Wednesday night moved the school administration to call on the kids’ parents and guardians to get them home and keep them through the weekend under the awareness that almost all ice storms up there knock out the electric power, leaving the school compound without power and thereby light and heat. A real mess resulted in the last ice storm, I understand.

The school has been trying to acquire an industrial strength electric power generator to meet the school’s needs in such an emergency. Maybe next year.

The decision was made, then, to run everybody home and drop the idea of attending La Boheme this time around. By not showing up at the opera, the kids at John de la Howe became single-purpose philanthropists. They had already helped the Columbia high schoolers at Westwood and Richland Northeast score tickets to the performance of La Boheme, but now more could be helped.

So the kids at John de la Howe need a new weekend trip for the ten or so who couldn’t make it to the Koger Center this Saturday. Atlanta comes to mind.

The John de la Howe grounds near McCormick are closer to Columbia than to Atlanta, but not by much. Atlanta offers a lot, a whole lot for kids. A Sunday day trip to Atlanta could be a full day, albeit a long day. I recommend the same ten opera fans get into the Fox Theater on Peachtree in Midtown at 1:00 Sunday afternoon for a performance of the musical Pippin, which I saw on Broadway just last September. I thought it was a great show, and I was especially impressed with the gymnastics, a treat I didn’t expect to enhance the drama and the music.

My thinking includes a McCormick departure in time for brunch on the 73^rd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel at the rotating Sun Dial Restaurant. Then take seats in the Fox Theater for Pippin, and take a quick walk-through of the High Museum of Art. The zoo and the aquarium are real possibilities for their Sunday schedule. And yes, all this calls for enough money to buy brunch and tickets all around, but it really shouldn’t cost any more than what was proposed for the La Boheme trip this Saturday. Problem is, the generosity of the kids at John de la Howe costs them about a thousand dollars’ worth of tickets, money that could go to good use in Atlanta.

So now the challenge: Raise a few bucks to augment what’s left after this weekend. Solution: Have a cocktail reception on May 1, Friday, a.k.a. May Day at my place, 2225 Terrace Way.

May Day doesn’t get much attention in the U. S. A., not as much as it did when the baby boomers danced the May Pole sixty years ago. In Europe, though, May Day is a full celebration. Down through the ages across Europe, May Day has been associated with fun, revelry, and perhaps most important of all, fertility – and that’s fertility of the livestock and the soil as well as the people.

Puritan Oliver Cromwell in England in the mid-17C almost stamped it out before the throne could be restored in 1660 under Charles II. Then May Day returned along with theater and dancing and drinking. Charleston was founded in 1670 directly under Charles II. Thank God for Charles II.

The countries still most associated with May Day festivities include Great Britain, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Sweden. In the Untited States, the Seven Sisters – the really good women’s colleges in the Northeast, now mostly integrated – used to play up May Day in a big way. Bryn Mawr still does.

As 17C English poet Herrick put it:

“There’s not a budding boy, or girl, this day,

But is got up, and gone to bring in May.”

So do take this as fair warning. We’re having a May Day, a real May Day on Friday, May 1. We’ll voluntarily cover all the costs – champagne and such besides entertainment – so the $25 tickets for admission can go in full to the kids at John de la Howe and their Atlanta day trip.

Somehow I see a May Pole dance and other such physical interpretations of the occasion by one of our three ballet companies in Columbia, fully appreciating our wealth of dance talent.

We’ll need at least a hundred guests to make this worth our while. As far as the guests are concerned, we’ll impose a dress code and declare a Gatsby theme, which means mostly white outfits for both men and women.

To set the tone, take another look at the beginning of Chapter III in The Great Gatsby:

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”