Cape Crusaders

Hello. Last week I went to Cape Cod with Kate and her parents, and the following things happened.

1) John Waters, director of Hairspray and Cecil B. DeMented and Pink Flamingos and many other strange movies that I haven't actually ever seen, bicycled past me in a navy blue suit and sneakers. This was in Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, which is famous for its artists and writers and large gay population (the three groups being by no means mutually exclusive). There was a film festival going on, and this is probably why John Waters was riding his bike through town. At least I assume it was his bike.

2) If it was his bike, he may well have purchased it from an old friend of mine who runs a few bike shops on the Cape and whom we visited one afternoon in the rain. This is Peter, whom some of you remember from our grad school days. He left the program about six years ago, and, judging from the current economic climate, this was a very wise move indeed. He now owns three bike shops, a house, a wife, and a baby named Jebediah. He was happy and warm and he gave us t-shirts. I love Peter.

3) If John Waters were to ride his bike (or someone else's bike) south out of Provincetown to North Truro, he would pass - or, if he's smart, stop by - the Susan Baker Memorial Museum. Susan Baker is an old friend of Kate's parents, and she lives in her memorial museum with her husband, Keith, and a one-eyed basset hound who sometimes wets the floors. She makes papier mache sculptures of dogs and ticks and other animals, chapbooks and book-books about dogs and ticks and childbirth and things, and paintings of European cities and Cape Cod and other places. They're really quite remarkable, the paintings, and you can see what appear to be watercolor interpretations of them here. I should also point out that Susan and Keith's son, Ellery, is currently biking with a friend from Vladivostok, Russia, to Porto, Portugal - a distance of about 10,000 miles (I'd like to see John Waters do that!). They've become quite the media sensation in Russia and are hoping to meet Vladimir Putin. You can follow their adventures here. I forgot to ask Peter if he's the one who sold them their bikes, but I think he probably is.



4) Have you ever been to a tea dance? Well I have. A tea dance, according to the bouncer standing outside the club advertising the tea dance, is a take-off on the British high tea, but instead of finger food they have, um, something else. He offered us a free peek inside - this was mid-afternoon, and the club was thumping out some glittery techno tunes into the placid P'town air - and we took him up on his offer. It was a bit disappointing, actually: no tea, no dancing, just a few clusters of people standing around on the deck overlooking the harbor. But it was a pleasant enough deck, and I'll happily go to another tea dance there if I'm ever invited.

5) There were custard rolls and sweet-potato pastries and Portuguese sweet breads and maybe one or two servings of french toast. Oh, and cinnamon rolls - one buttermilk, one regular.

6) There were also gallery openings (Kate's parents, having lived in P'town back in the 1970s, are friends with many of the artists in the area - including one woman who once shared gallery space with Norman Mailer's fourth wife!) and lovely meals and picnics on the beach and a B&B proprietor who was very, very proud of his extensive VHS (VHS!) video collection and was thrilled to have a librarian (that'd be Kate) to whom he could explain his cataloguing procedure, which relied heavily on multicolored circular stickers. Said proprietor also had a marked fondness for Abraham Lincoln, elephants, and things with ruffles.

7) Photographs were taken.