Down River – April 23, 2015
High Marks for “Fun Home”:
Someone contact Mayor Kline. Beech Creek just might need a signal light at the corner of Route 150 and Maple Avenue.
Next to that turnoff by the bridge that goes to Orviston, this one likely will be seeing heavy duty traffic over the next year or so, given the superlative reviews out earlier this week for the official Broadway opening of “Fun Home,” the much acclaimed musical based on the graphic memoir of Beech Creek native Alison Bechdel.
If you’re all about Beech Creek and the Bechdel memoir, you know that the Fun Home in the title is the former Bechdel funeral parlor along the borough’s main street, the building where Bechdel and her two brothers spent their formative years assisting to some degree their late father Bruce in his undertaking business. And just down nearby Maple Avenue was the Victorian mansion where the Bechdel family resided.
Monday was the official Broadway opening and within hours the critics were all but unanimous in their praise:
New York Daily News: “moves you to your foundation; be prepared to wipe away tears.”
Chicago Tribune: “gorgeously wrought; emotional powerhouse.”
Variety: “New! Fresh! Original!”
And Ben Brantley from the New York Times, who had raved about “Fun Home” when it first hit New York in an off-Broadway presentation in 2013, was equally effusive in his praise this time around.
The radio background here tells me to share with you what Brantley had to say about one number in the musical, that a song performed by actors portraying the three Bechdel children, what Brantley called “a show-stopping casket-riding commercial for Bruce’s funeral home that the Bechdel children whip up while hanging out in the mortuary.”
Having seen the show off Broadway, I can tell you had we had that commercial back in the 1970s, it would have been a staple on WBPZ. The number is so well done that an effort will be made to see if permission can be obtained to put the song up on “therecord-online.com.” We’ll get to work on that.
If you’re into real honest to goodness theater, it doesn’t get any better than Broadway. And if you want a most original, thought-provoking link to Clinton County and a troubled family which resided here some 30 or 40 years ago, Broadway is the place and “Fun Home” is the musical.
Well Played, City Council:
Transparency is an in-vogue word in politics these days, everybody, politicians and media alike, support the concept but not all subscribe to that tenant.
So here is a Down River salute to Lock Haven City Council for its handling of the replacement process for filling an empty council chair.
The city has seen fit to release to the public those who have applied for the slot and to schedule a public hearing as part of a May council meeting as council moves to fill the vacancy. The three applicants will be interviewed by council right there in council chambers, nothing behind closed doors.
It can’t get any more transparent than that.
The city has its occasional critics (where has he been lately?) but no one should be upset with how the city is going about filling a seat.
Contrast the Lock Haven action with the way the Lycoming County Commissioners and court system handled the replacement process when one of the sitting commissioners, Jeff Wheeland, was elected to the state House last November.
According to a recent article in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette, more than 30 Lycoming County residents applied to fill the commissioner vacancy. But their names have never been released, other than that of Jeff Rauff who was appointed by Lycoming County Court in December to fill the Wheeland vacancy.
The Sun-Gazette said that Lycoming judges considered the candidates behind closed doors and the paper is pursuing a right-to-know action to find out who they were. The paper quoted Terry Mutchler, former head of the state Office of Open Records who decried the Lycoming action. “You can’t get a public job through a secret action process. That’s a very dangerous situation. You run the risk of having a crowning instead of an election or an appointment, and you run the risk of having a limited number of people deciding very, very powerful positions in secret.”
Meanwhile the Williamsport newspaper is better than three months into its continuing effort to find out who the commissioner applicants were. We wish the Bill-town daily good luck in its effort towards transparency.
They Were Empty:
A sharp-eyed area resident who lives near the Norfolk-Southern line through Clinton County recently reported seeing oil tanker cars traveling the rails through the county from south to north.
We went to our railroad mole to determine if these cars might be laden with the kind of volatile crude involved in fiery crashes we’ve heard about in recent months.
Here’s what we learned: these tanker cars at some point had carried oil from the Bakkens of North Dakota to the Northeast, but not by way of our county. Those that came through Clinton County had been emptied and were on their way to New York state for storage. That’s what we were told.
