Month: May 2005

  • Make Way for Music

    It’s not easy to get your hands on a twenty-one-key embaire xylophone from Uganda; to acquire hers, Nichole Smaglick sacrificed a chicken. Through this act, she demonstrated her reverence for both the instrument and the Busoga tribe, giving thanks to and blessing its xylophone-playing ancestors. “When playing the embaire with the group in Uganda, I…

  • See How Far You Get

    The sun was out and it didn’t look like it would ever rain. Sopha’s mama was coming toward them, her black umbrella up over her head. She held it high, so it looked like she was reaching up her white hand to hold onto the raggedy wing of a crow. In the other hand, bright…

  • Church and State

    Every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. during the legislative session, Chaplain Dan Hall hosts a two-hour prayer meeting. It is held around a long wooden table in Room 118 of the State Capitol building, just around the corner from the governor’s office. Attendance varies, averaging about twenty people who know Hall from his work as…

  • The Man in the Chair

    Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather have retired, Ted Koppel’s on his way out at Nightline, and Peter Jennings’s future is uncertain due to his health. As many have opined over the past couple of months, the era of the mighty network anchor appears to be coming to an end. Viewers suffering withdrawal from their favorite…

  • Letters to the Editor

    LETTER OF THE MONTH The Rake expresses surprise [The Broken Clock, May] that for the last forty-seven years, Playboy Magazine has neglected to include “best Jazz Musician” in its music poll. Yet I’m sure I’m not the only reader old enough to remember when the Playboy music poll was exclusively a jazz poll. Jim Hall…

  • A Passion of Patience

    Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself…