Mark Howell's - "Soundings"
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Soundings

Saint Patrick (born c. 387, died 493) was not Irish. His parents were well-to-do Christians of Roman ancestry and he was probably born in Scotland.

Captured by Irish slavers when he was 16 or so, Patrick worked as a herder in Ireland until he escaped six years later and reunited with his family. He later wrote that his faith grew in captivity; he returned to Ireland as an ordained bishop.

Credited with banishing snakes from Ireland, it is likely that post-glacial Ireland had no snakes. The legend could be a reference to the Druid's serpent symbol or to adherents of the Pelagian heresy who were symbolized as serpents.

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Brassica oleracea, or cabbage, has been found in pots dating back to 4,000 BC in China.

Around 600 BC, nomadic Celts spread the cruciferous vegetable throughout Europe and it became a staple in Ireland.

Cabbage, related to mustard, is considered a prosperity charm.

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Randy Roberts' "Not the Boy Next Door" performance at the Cabaret theater at Tennessee Williams tonight, March 14, has been postponed. His accompanist, Jim Rice, has injured his left hand.

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Hallie Ephron is the third of the four famous writing Ephron sisters, Nora, Delia and Amy. She loves them, she told Soundings. "Oh yes! And being loved by them."

Hallie is in Key West to join her friend and colleague, Roberta Isleib, at a Friends of the Library appearance on Monday, March 15, and to lead a writing retreat at The Studios of Key West, both events located at the Armory building, 600 White St.

Hallie has written a series of mystery novels -- "Amnesia," "Addiction," "Delusion," "Obsessed" and "Guilt" -- with co-author Donald Davidoff under the name "G. H. Ephron." Her first book on her own, "Never Tell a Lie," has been optioned for film and translated into eight languages already.

"A mystery opens with a question you don't understand," she told us last week from her home near Boston, explaining the depth-psychology of grabbing the attention. "What's going on is what drives the reader." There is, in fact, no murder in "Never Tell a Lie," but it is a puzzle and there are plenty of twists and turns.

Hallie is also the author of "Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel" and has written a couple of books about books. She loves to read and her favorites include the mystery "cosies" of Agatha Christie, the Oxford and Cambridge novels of P. D. James and the "wonderful" Scot mystagogue Val McDermid, who is "dark. The Scottish write dark. They invented it." She likes the Americans, too, reminding us of the Raymond Chandler quote, that he took mystery "out of the Venetian vase and put it in the alley."

Now about these sisters. All four of them are the daughters of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, famous in their time as screenwriters. Nora, 68, is the eldest. She wrote the screenplays for "Silkwood," "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle," and most recently she wrote and directed "Julie and Julia." (She was also married to Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, of whom she wrote in "Heartburn," made into a movie with JackNicholson and Meryl Streep, that he was "capable of making love to a Venetian blind."

Delia, 65, wrote the scripts for "You've Got Mail" and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" and wrote "Teenage Romance: Or, How to Die of Embarrassment."

Amy, 57, produced the movie, "A Little Princess" and has written six books including the best-selling "One Sunday Morning."

"We're all writing and well published," reports Hallie, born in March, 1948. She said she waited for years to have a go herself; there were "careers and decades" before she was "old enough and confident" to start writing fiction.

Monday's Friends of the Library event is at 6 p.m. and is free. For details on the writing retreat, contact 296-0458.

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Roberta Isleib is a clinical psychologist and mystery writer from Connecticut who winters with her husband in Key West. She joins her friend Hallie Ephron at the two events mentioned above.

Her advice to a wannabe mystery writer is "more suspects," she told Soundings last week. Her own first novel was "short on them," she admits, so it didn't make it. Since then she has succeeded with the Cassie Burdett golf-mystery series and the Rebecca Butterman advice-column mysteries.

She first visited Key West four years ago and each season since she has spent longer here. There's "every kind of person in Key West, all mixed together." As a practising therapist and novelist, "everyone is game" for her fiction, she says. "Anyone I meet around town!"

She regrets that it's so tough for writers to get published these days. "And literary agents have such short attention spans." Roberta gets to discuss this and other aspects of writing with Hallie at the Friends of the Key West Library event at The Studios at 6 p.m. Monday.

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Of the 700 or so births every year in Monroe County, between 50 and 60 of them are to teen girls. These births are assumed to be unplanned. But mothers in distress today are not limited to teenagers. Nowadays it is planned families that find themselves flat out of luck with nowhere to turn.

Florida Keys Healthy Start Coalition is here to help all women of childbearing age. Funded by the Health Dept., its small staff of nurses, support workers and a social worker provide home visits, counseling, nutrition and education in breast-feeding and infant care. (Plus the 30 percent of the total time spent with any client that must be devoted to Medicaid and other insurance issues.)

There is also a translator for Spanish and Creole. "We cover the main three languages in the county," says Arianna Nesbitt, who heads up Healthy Start. Herself a birthing labor coach, she knows the details. "Every dollar spent on a baby born healthy is worth $6 in the long run," she told Soundings. "An unhealthy baby can cost $5 million over a lifetime."

At the Tennessee Williams Cabaret Theater on Friday, March 19, at 8 p.m., is the fourth annual Woman's Hope Concert, produced by the Key West Woman's Club to raise money for local nonprofits. This year the recipient of 100 percent of the concert's proceeds is Healthy Start. Headlining the show are Kathleen Peace, Libby York, Melody Cooper, Kim Gordon, Christine Cordone, Maj Johnson, Melissa Tausche, Lenore Troia, Cindy Lu and Mimi McDonald as Sarah Palin. Box office is at 296-1520.

Healthy Start can be reached at 745-2030.

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On this day in 1922, Jack Mack, co-founder of the truck manufacturer that bears his name, died when his car collided with a trolley in Pennsylvania.

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"The Founding Fathers crafted a Constitution and adopted a Bill of Rights to guarantee the fundamental rights of the American people, not corporations. Corporations are different from individual citizens. They do not have the same rights, morals or motivations. They cannot vote. They are legal constructs designed to conduct commerce, nothing more.

"When the conservative activist majority on the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as individual citizens to spend as much as they like to influence the political process, they ran roughshod over long-standing precedent and effectively redrafted our well-established campaign finance laws.

"At the core of the First Amendment is the right of individual citizens to speak and to be heard in the political process. I call upon you to forward this message to your friends and family to continue building awareness about the grave implications of this wrongly decided case and the importance of closing the floodgates of corporate spending in American elections." -- Patrick Leahy, U.S. Senator.

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"Most humans are said to be composed of 90 percent water, but for those of us who grew up on the Gulf of Mexico, I think the other 10 percent must be shrimp," says Jimmy Buffett in praise of his friends, the Rudloes, who have just published a book about their "voyage to the land of pink crustaceans."

"I for one," writes Buffett, "am happy to be aboard for that voyage."

Jack and Anne Rudloe, up in Panacea where they feed their own sharks at Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory with their son Cypress, have just published "Shrimp, the Endless Quest for Pink Gold."

It has received jacket quotes from biologist

E. O. Wilson and the novelist Randy Wayne White.

Winston Groom, author of "Forrest Gump" has written the foreword.

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American History magazine records that Richard Nixon bankrolled his first congressional campaign with poker winnings he amassed while in the Army.

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The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum hosts a free lecture on "The Rise and Fall of the Key West Turtle Industry" on March 16 at 7:30 p.m., inside the former turtle cannery building at 200 Margaret St.

Corey Malcom, director of archaeology at the museum, will discuss the city's relationship with sea turtles and the turtle business from 1822 through 1971.

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Former Sugarloaf resident Barbara Ehrenreich has written a book, "Bright Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," claiming that looking on the bright side makes little difference in the long run and can possibly do harm.

Another new book by Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, supports Ehrenreich's thesis. In "Positivity," Frederickson posits that "positive thinking can sometimes lead to positive emotion, but it won't always. My research shows that insincere positive emotions -- telling yourself 'I feel good' when you don't -- is toxic and actually more harmful than negative emotions."

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"As a writer myself," writes Sheri L. Lohr, publisher of SeaStory Press, "I have decided it's time to create a venue for all local writers to connect with their potential readers."

Welcome to the Key West Authors' Book Fair, which opens in the garden at Heritage House in lieu of the Robert Frost Poetry Festival, April 9 - 10, on the Friday and Saturday preceding the Sunday poetry awards event (which continue this year).

"Refreshments and a chance to indulge in all things bookish," says Sheri.

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Keys historian John Viele has some lovely things to say about Joanna Schmida's forthcoming "The Woman at the Light," a novel about a Key West lighthouse keeper's wife who must save herself and her five children when her husband goes missing at sea.

"Forbidden love, passion, greed, revenge and murder ... Joanna knows how to stop your heart on page one and pull your heart strings on the next. Along the way she weaves in a suspenseful mystery with a surprise ending.

"I could not put the book down and neither will you."

We can't wait. Stay tuned.

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An alert reader reveals that the HAL-is-IBM-shifted-left-one-character story [Soundings, March 3] was debunked by both director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke in chapter 16 of Clarke's book about the making of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey:"

"HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer ... About once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution ... As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence."

(Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, anyone?)

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Quote for the Week:

"We must tend to firewood just as though it was real."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

(We'll explain it next week -- Ed.)